Not the GP you are asking, but I do not use an ad blocker because I predominantly use Safari as my browser. I would absolutely love one, but after Apple made all those API changes years back, I gave up trying to find one that works well and is privacy friendly.
The changes Apple made were to increase privacy. Content blockers that have access to the page have no network access. A separate process that does can only update the blocking rules.
Apple gobbles personal data too and processes it and sells it etc. They are simply rather better at looking ... friendly. They really are very good at that.
Where is Apple tracking your usage across the web? This data is sold to who? These are big claims.
Disclosure: I work at Apple, and have seen zero evidence of anything but trying to make things continuously more secure and private. This in fact makes my job (machine learning) much harder because I don’t have user datasets to leverage.
What data and how do you know? This seems to be a popular talking point, but I’ve yet to see evidence. It doesn’t make that much sense to frame Apple’s privacy stance as similar to Google’s or Facebook’s. Apple isn’t an ad business, and Google and Facebook are, plain and simple.
I don’t work for Apple, and I don’t use an Apple laptop or desktop, but I don’t buy this Apple is as bad as businesses that are primarily built on ad revenue and are actively eroding privacy. I’m sure they’re not perfect, but I feel like Apple is relatively serious about privacy, making real changes that generally protect consumers, and setting a better example than many big tech companies. Are you sure they don't look better because they really are better?
It does? I see constant complaints online from iPhone users asking how to, for instance, block ads on YouTube, only to be told "buy an Android and install Firefox" because ad-blockers on iOS don't seem to do this.
Are you talking about the browser or the YouTube app? Most iOS users watching YouTube use the YouTube app, not the Safari App, so they’re obviously asking how to block ads because the app isn’t a browser, not because Safari doesn’t allow ad blockers.
I'm talking about the browser. On Android, you can install Firefox + uBO and watch YouTube without ads. You can also install another handy extension so you can turn off the screen and the video won't pause, so you can listen to music on YouTube that way. You can't do this stuff in the official YT app.
You’re making assumptions. There’s lots of reasons Apple might want to make their own browser to go with their own OSes, and protecting their users from Google is one of them. Controlling their own software and hardware stack is another, and Apple is famous for this. Another one is providing better user and developer experiences. Better user experience is very debatable, since as an ex web developer, I’m aware of some of the ways Safari sucks and fails to meet standards or behave like other browsers, at least as of five years ago. Standards support is better now. Safari was the first browser to have 60fps scrolling, and developing iOS and web apps with Safari dev tools is the only option, that’s not something Chrome or Firefox do for you.
If their own browser that they force on everyone doesn't support ad-blockers, and they don't add ad-blocking to that browser themselves, then I don't see the difference: they're preventing users from blocking ads, and in effect forcing ads on their users. Their justifications are irrelevant.
Even Google (the biggest ad-tech company) isn't that bad: they obviously don't make an ad-blocker themselves, and they've worked against ad-blockers in the Android Chrome browser, but they don't do anything to stop users from installing an alternative browser which supports ad-blocking. You can install Firefox directly from the Google Play store. (Note that the same is not true for ad-blocking alternative YouTube clients like ReVanced or SmartTube, but you can't use those on iOS either of course. And even here, while Google won't allow them in the Play store, you can simply install them directly from the .apk files, something you can't do on iOS.)
By preventing users from exercising choice, Apple has taken on responsibility for them not being able to avoid ads.
As already mentioned in this thread, Safari does allow ad blockers, your premise is false. And even if they didn’t, there’s an absolutely massive difference between not being able to block ads and being the company both selling the ads and the browser that is engineering away your privacy.
Safari does take active steps to prevent tracking that Chrome does not. Apple has not actively worked against ad blockers the way Google has. And Apple also allows you to install a different browser on iOS, Google doesn’t get any gold stars for not preventing third party browsers on Android.
Google has a conflict of interest between your privacy and their primary source of revenue. That’s not true for Apple. Google isn’t that bad?!? Hahahaha BTW you moved the goal posts, the claim you were implicitly defending was that Apple was collecting and selling private data themselves. Nothing in this thread so far backs up that claim.
>As already mentioned in this thread, Safari does allow ad blockers
Does it? Then why do all the iOS users complain about having to watch YouTube ads? Sounds like it doesn't allow good ad-blockers.
>And even if they didn’t, there’s an absolutely massive difference between not being able to block ads and being the company both selling the ads and the browser that is engineering away your privacy.
This is completely wrong. If (for the sake of argument) iOS definitely didn't allow ad-blocking, then that makes them worse than Google, and it does mean they are "actively working against ad-blockers". If they weren't working against them (in this scenario), they wouldn't disallow them.
>And Apple also allows you to install a different browser on iOS
No, it doesn't. It only allows re-skins of Safari.
>Google doesn’t get any gold stars for not preventing third party browsers on Android.
Yes it does. Let me know when I can side-load an open-source ad-blocking YouTube viewer app on iOS, or even just installing the browser of my choice (not a re-skin).
>Google has a conflict of interest between your privacy and their primary source of revenue.
Sure, but they also allow you freedom with Android devices, and that's something you'll never get with Apple.
> the claim you were implicitly defending was that Apple was collecting and selling private data themselves.
I never defended that particular claim. I only made my own tangential claims.
This is irrelevant, you’re confusing the engine and the browser. Chrome on WebKit is not a re-skin of Safari, it’s a Google browser, and it’s Google’s choice to not support ublock Origin on iOS, but nice try. Plus you missed the news that non-WebKit engines are now allowed in the EU and it’s only a matter of time before it spreads.
Google has announced their intention to stop serving YouTube content to anyone using an ad Blocker. Maybe soon you’ll see first hand how misguided and silly your argument against Apple is.
> Does it? Then why do all the iOS users complain…
Weird, it seems like we just had this conversation. That question was asked and answered. Did the fact that Apple does allow ad blockers, and the difference between the YouTube app and the browser not make sense the first time we talked about it?
BTW, the first Google autocomplete response I get for “how to block youtube ads on” is “Android”. That is evidence that more Android users complain about YouTube ads than iOS users.
P.S. who puts the ads on YouTube that you’re complaining about and makes them hard to skip or block? Oh, right, Google.
I don't think Apple (or Google, Microsoft, …) sells your data. Or can you point me to the website where I can buy user data from them?
What I would admit is that Apple is maybe not as motivated to protect your data from unintentional leaking. Without user data, Google would be almost nothing. So they have to be extremely careful to maintain the trust of their users. For Apple (or Microsoft) their business is still sizeable enough with out user data.
AdGuard is pretty good when it comes to Safari, and has a way to convert uBlock-style rules into the Safari blocking framework (well at least as much as it can), so you can use Easylist/etc.
I find the ecosystem integration and cohesion to be the most compelling reason. Everything "just works." Apple keychain is good enough that I stopped using other password managers and works great with Safari, Messages.app and Mail.app integrate well with Safari, AppleScript works well with Safari, etc..
I do have other browsers, but I only use them for specific needs. Like I keep some version of a Chrome-based browser around solely for if I need to Chromecast something. Other wise, I do not enjoy using third party browsers like Chrome, Firefox, etc., which I use at work all day.
Safari's web developer tools are not my favorite compared to other browsers, so I try not to develop much with Safari other than testing.
Do you ever make a purchase due to having seen an ad, ideally by clicking on the ad? If not, then in some sense you're still getting something without paying for it. (You're paying with your time, but that's not valuable to anyone unless it ultimately results in paying with money.) But better to screw the people pushing ads than the content creators!
I personally have a long list of products not to buy. If you somehow repeat the same ad and I remember your product, I stop buying said product. If youre wasting your money on spamming ads, your product sure as shit isnt better than competitors', since they waste less on ads, more on product.
I dont use ad blockers, they make it harder for me to find out who has the poorer product.
Wow, that sounds like a ton of work. I think a better idea is to use an ad-blocker, but run a program in the background that downloads the ads (or maybe just samples them, to save bandwidth and resources), processes them to find brand names, and then stores these brand names in a database so you can find their relative frequency and assign a score to each. Then you can just query the db when you want to buy something to find that brand's acceptability score.
I would say not very often, but yes, very recently even. I've been researching new backpacking gear this summer, looking on sites that are known to me, so I've been seeing lots of ads for that type of stuff naturally.
One store kept popping up that I was not familiar with. So I clicked eventually, and did some online searching about the company to make sure they are legit.
Turns out they are a local independent store. I've made two purchases from them since, and price compared against them for other purchases. Their ads are more likely to catch my eye in the future now.
> I've been researching new backpacking gear this summer, looking on sites that are known to me, so I've been seeing lots of ads for that type of stuff naturally.
After the first scandal about one adblocker being bought out, and letting by Google ads, I tried the next one in the list, then kept hearing about the issues, and then I realized, I am better off just not visiting sites that:
A) Want me to pay to view a one-off article
B) Want me to not see any of their content cause its ad infested.
To be fair, if Firefox's Reader Mode doesn't suffice as a bypass, then I really don't bother coming back.
I used to, I don't even bother with any of that. If I really need to I maybe bust out reader mode on Firefox, but very rarely.
Especially at work most sites I visit aren't ad infested hellscapes, like StackOverflow and its relatives are not ad infested, neither is wikipedia, etc.
Good question, if I can't read the article whatsoever, then that's my time to leave. I don't mind ads, but if they take up all of the content, then its just not worth it. If you trick me with ads as if it were content, like some download sites do, I hate you.
This is one thing I really like about Kagi - I don't have to remember which sites to not use due to ads, I simply add the site to my account-wide block list, and I never see it in search results again.
Just missed the edit window! I'm here to deliver. Two kinds, either will be accepted in the "My Filters" section of the plugin. Edit as desired, the domain is just a recent example.
Eradication/filtering:
##a[href*="eng-leadership.com"]
Shown, but blocked on-access:
||eng-leadership.com^$document
To keep the hacker spirit alive, I leave the reader with an exercise. Consider other approaches or HTML tags. Anchors aren't their only vector, hence the document method.
HN has a 'hide' button that could be leveraged for nicer integration, removing related widgets.
Thank you for sharing, I'm sure people will find this useful. An extension is not very helpful for my needs though. I often use public computers at a local makerspace, and it is much easier for me to scan a QR code to sign in and then close the incognito browser when I'm done than it is for me to carry around my uBlock configuration.
Solving my problem the "hacker way" would essentially be reimplementing Kagi, or hosting a service to do it. I already host Open WebUI and that is really moving along; maybe it can replace my Kagi needs someday, but for now I am pretty happy with continuing to use Kagi.
Again, my ultimate goal really is autonomy. There is still hacker spirit in your approach, fighting the status quo. It has my general support, even if I'm not a customer
I just wanted to remind people to look more nearby/within, too. This isn't a battle won once
Ad-blocking is also about controlling what resources are loaded and executed by your computer. You won't know you were subject to a drive-by 0-day until it's too late and your computer is a botnet or your bank account drains. Not blocking ads also normalizes predatory ad-tech surveillance.
There is a lot more going on beneath the surface of just "annoying ads in my face" which need to be accounted for, since browsers do not ship with effective, granular security controls.
Given the numbers of times I've had to disable ad blocker to fix some janky page I have to use, I don't think installing an ad blocker without explaining or even mentioning it is a friendly act.
Absolutely agree. I often disable my ad blocker/cookie blocker when I'm about to make a big purchase (e.g. airline tickets) in case they interrupt whatever crazy redirect flow the airline and their payment processor have.
I don't think it happened to me, but then I don't venture outside Amazon, Newegg.. major sites that much. But even then.. if they need all those crazy redirects, maybe they don't want my business.
If you ever limit the number of redirects to one in Firefox by using about:config, you'll see that most sites do at least two per page. It makes me wonder how many useless portals there actually are just because people glue together CDNs and add more off-site frameworks like Akamai and Typekit.
I mention it, they usually have no idea what I'm talking about sadly. I don't think ad-tech is a friendly act. Infact, I find it insulting, invasive, and completely violating what they do with the personal data when they sell it 6 ways to sunday, but enough about that.
Usually if I'm on somebody else's computer it's because they need me to fix things for them, or speed things up or 'make it better' which means it's getting adblock. The amount of modals and tricks and things they fall for especially my elderly neighbors or people wanting their business laptops setup especially Windows that have jank ass webpages that have the 'Download' link be some arbitrary .exe for something completely not what they wanted to download put something on their system is crazy.. hell even Youtube is giving people scams.
I just fixed some women's sobriety center's computer for free and their user account had some anti virus secure browser opening 20+ 'browsers' on boot for 'AG' free anti-virus.
Never had an issue with ublock breaking anything important for me. Air travel, hotels, ordering things online, if something says disable my adblocker I close it out and never go to that domain again.
To each their own though. I don't do ads though and will save every soul I can. Ad-tech is cyber terrorism at this point, and I stick to my guns.
It's such a jarring difference when I'm browsing on my phone at home with Pi-Hole vs. when away. So much that it motivated me to set up a split tunnel VPN so all my phone's DNS requests go through my home Pi-Hole regardless of what network it's on.
I used to do this, but lately I just set my phone to use dns.adguard-dns.com as the DNS resolver which gives extremely similar results. It's a Russian operator, but I don't have much of a reason to trust any other DNS operator more.
It's no wonder people have gotten a lot more ignorant and less observant when they have to constantly fight the bombardment of their attention by unwanted distractions.
In that situation of using someone else's device, I've had to move windows half off the screen to be able to concentrate on an article when the ads on the side were constantly distracting me.
Funny how here's HN, a site full of Software Engineers complaining about ad bombardment, and every single one of those ads were programmed by... a software engineer! We (as a profession) are the ones doing this! "Oh, but boss told me to do it!" some will say, as if it's a good excuse. Regardless of which manager told which developer to do it, at the end of the day, a developer typed in the code and pushed it to prod. We're at least partially to blame for what the web has become.
This is completely meaningless. In any population big enough theres going to be a high variance in behaviours, including morality. Expecting all individuals in a huge collective to all behave "good" with little / no inforcement is incredibly naive at best and dangerous at worst.
Not only that, but you're wrong on a technicality too -
> and every single one of those ads were programmed by... a software engineer!
Many ads are designed by creatives and placed and run by dedicated non-software engineering people, including deciding how many are run and their placement (i.e. bombardment or not). Sure engineers programmed the platform, but then you're just blaming the post office for the content of the mail, or the ISP for the content of the internet. What do you expect the software engineers to do? Limit 1 ad per page programatically and then every software engineer on earth must agree to enforce that limit and no matter how much pressure their superiors put on them, everybody holds the line?
This is not a rhetorical question, How do you expect all software engineers to be unified on a single solution to ad bombardment, given the internet is international, driven by market dynamics and capitalism and a non-trivial number of programmers are beholden to tyrannical managers because of their life situation (it can still be a minority, and ad bombardment emerges)?
> This is not a rhetorical question, How do you expect all software engineers to be unified on a single solution to ad bombardment, given the internet is international, driven by market dynamics and capitalism and a non-trivial number of programmers are beholden to tyrannical managers
By developing a consensus that it is not ok to do that type of behavior (bombardment of ads, surveillance capitalism, etc) and changing the culture
I don't understand your point. You say you want to change the culture, and that this has successfully been done in the case of crime, but this is blatantly false: every country has prisons with many criminals in them. In the US in particular (since most HNers probably live there), there are well over 1 million people in custody according to a quick google search, and over 5 million in corrections (so I assume most of those are on parole). Obviously, changing the culture hasn't worked, for there to be so many prisoners, and crimes committed so often that so many police officers are constantly needed. If your "change the culture" thing had worked, you wouldn't need police, or at least not many.
Changing bad behavior by corporations (esp. adtech/advertisers) is likely to be about as successful: it's not going to be done by "changing" the culture, but only by changing the laws, and then enforcing those laws and punishing offenders. Just like a rapist sees nothing wrong with raping a person, or a serial killer sees nothing wrong with murdering many strangers, or a "porch pirate" sees nothing wrong with stealing your Amazon delivery, an ad-tech corporation sees nothing wrong with feeding you psychologically manipulative advertising and blatant malware in search of profit.
> You say you want to change the culture, and that this has successfully been done in the case of crime,
No. They did not. They explicity said "mostly works".
> but this is blatantly false:
Of course it is. You set up a blantantly false strawman. Please don't use obviously piss weak rhetorical tactics, they make you look bad.
> every country has prisons with many criminals
And every country has varying incarceration rates, they are not all equal.
What should be looked at is countries by cultural attitudes towards crime and incarceration rates .. and the harder question of just how innately criminal imprisoned people are in various countries and whether they are just there from systemic features of a culture.
Again, there are no one size fits all answers and people aren't homogenous.
> If your "change the culture" thing had worked, you wouldn't need police, or at least not many.
Who said that police are not part of the culture?
I'm not arguing whether or not we need police, I'm arguing that if we come to a consensus (i.e., we agree that surveillance capitalism, etc, is not ok), then we can stop the problem. That may mean we even criminalize certain behaviors if we believe it is necessary. But the foundation is consensus. So let's do that- I firmly believe that surveillance capitalism and the bombardment of ads is not ok. What about you?
"Every single one of those ads were programmed by... a human! We (as humans) are the ones doing this!"
See? That logic doesn't work so well. "Software engineers" are not a singular entity nor a homogeneous group. To maintain the status quo, it doesn't take more than just a few SWEs willing to implement ads and/or invasive tracking.
How many software engineers here work in defensive cybersecurity? Well, why they do they have jobs? Because of other software engineers who work on the offensive side.
I guess all the cybersecurity engineers should just quit because they're the ones to blame for all the malware...
Similarly, the only reason humans work as police is because humans commit crimes. So humans are really to blame for this problem.
No, it's not bad faith at all. He's trying to use a collective blame argument: "software engineers" as a group are supposedly to blame for adware, in his argument, rather than a small minority of software engineers. It's absolutely no different than blaming all <minority group> for the crimes committed by a few <minority group> members, and paint them all with the same brush.
Just to clarify what I mean is it is a little bit of both: 1. Our profession is collectively allowing this by not having a widely agreed-upon ethical standard for conduct, and 2. (some) Individuals are actively doing it by actually building the bombardment code.
I feel the same way about software for war fighting, which obviously has higher stakes. The profession itself doesn't push back on the ethics of it AND individual practitioners are actively developing death-dealing software.
>1. Our profession is collectively allowing this by not having a widely agreed-upon ethical standard for conduct,
You're acting like the profession has some kind of central authority. It does not. It's like asking for agreed-upon ethical standards for dog walkers; you're not going to get it, because there's nothing resembling a centralized organization, nor any kind of licensing for this profession.
>I feel the same way about software for war fighting,
If you want to eliminate software for war fighting, this is a fool's errand. Weapons for war are absolutely necessary, unless you want to be a victim to some dictator who doesn't agree with your ethical principles. History is full of examples of peaceful people who couldn't withstand an assault by other people who didn't believe in peace. In fact, I'd go so far as to claim that eliminating warfare (and the military apparatus for it: armies and navies etc.) is impossible as long as separate countries exist. Only if we manage to either conquer everyone or get everyone to agree to join a single planetary government can war really be eliminated. And that assumes that hostile aliens won't ever be a problem.
> Our profession is collectively allowing this by not having a widely agreed-upon ethical standard for conduct
Even if there was some centralized group that created an ethical standard for conduct, do you really think that that would escape the influence of software companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. that have a vested interest in advertisement? Or that every software engineer would follow such a standard of conduct?
The idea that Russian and Chinese software engineers working for troll farms, bot farms, government cyberwarfare groups, etc. are going to follow an international ethical standard of conduct is completely laughable.
> It's absolutely no different than blaming all <minority group> for the crimes committed by a few <minority group> members, and paint them all with the same brush.
Members of a minority group, such as race or religion or sexual orientation are generally members of that group by birth, not by choice.
Members of the group 'software engineers' are members of that group by (career) choice.
I've been using Safari on occasion for the past year because it starts up faster. I was too lazy to figure out how to install an ad blocker there and the strangest thing happened. I saw an ad many months later and realized I couldn't remember seeing a single one until that point. I suppose it's because I've become so good at avoiding the types of websites that have ads that maybe I don't even need an ad blocker (I'm extremely opposed to seeing ads that aren't SuperBowl ads). There also aren't that many website I visit. I use GitHub. I watch Netflix and Amazon where I can pay extra to not see ads. I also pay for YouTube Red. I use Kagi which is another place I can pay to not see ads. I also read Hacker News, where I'm always super careful to check that the domain on a link looks like a real person's website (i.e. isn't something like nytimes) before clicking.
All work is pretty much already done by uBlock Origin Lite and AdGuard MV3.
Manifest v3 fucking sucks, and people will probably need to go to system-wide ad blocking such as AdGuard to block ads using all the filters, as v3 limits the number of filters you can use.
I'd like to see society in general become less tolerant of unwanted ads.
The original Google site hit the perfect pitch, where they set a few unobtrusive ones out of the way alongside your results screen. Ironic they pioneered and eventually normalized what is now an epidemic of user-hostile spam all over the web. I feel as a whole we lose a lot more productivity and focus to this than we gain in economic activity.
> Before clicking on an advertisement, check the URL to make sure the site is authentic
Yeah, good luck doing that with all the various tracking links that mask the actual domain. Sometimes I try to click on links from legit account related emails that are blocked by UBO for being part of a tracker/ad network.
I hear this advice from other infosec people constantly, and it's starting to grate. In one breath we tell users "attackers are professionals who are doing this eight hours a day; they're probably going to trick you", and in another we're trying to get users -- who are busy doing their jobs -- to recognize the difference between an I or an l, or maybe go do a domain history lookup to see if businessandsons.com is some new knockoff of businessllc.com, or maybe figure out how to parse whatever the email reputation filter mangled the domain into.
I know perfect is the enemy of good and defense in depth and etc, etc, but this advice just seems crap.
Google has convinced regulatory agencies that they're not responsible for their own complicity with supporting link fraud. I wrote an article about Google's role in enabling link fraud[1], which shows how this is effectively a form of regulatory capture.
Here's a particularly salient critique of these very same FBI recommendations, from my article:
> The FBI suggests “Before clicking on an advertisement, check the URL to make sure the site is authentic. A malicious domain name may be similar to the intended URL but with typos or a misplaced letter.” — this is useless advice in the face of unverified vanity URLs
The new version of Safari to be released this month has made very tentative steps into content blocking, but it's all manual by the user, and there's still been a lot of pushback on the feature by advertisers. I guess Apple may be wary of antitrust concerns.
PSA: Even among tech minded folks, a surprising number of people are still using adblock which is widely known to use sponsored whitelists to allow companies to bypass the filters.
The gold standard which works as an extension in both chrome and Firefox is uBlock Origin, annoyingly not to be confused with uBlock.
Marginally related, I've heard that Brave (which is a chromium fork) is going to maintain support for V2 so uBlock Origin will continue to work on it, but I don't use it personally so take that with a grain of salt.
Not even that. Most of my software engineer colleagues do not use ad blockers at all. They are definitely aware of them, but they don't use them, and they don't bother to use them. Which is surprising.
You would expect that the people who have the ability to write perfect selector rules to block ads and understand how all of this works would be the first to use them. But no.
I've seen this too, and we see it right here on HN every time this discussion comes up. You can even see it on this discussion just above: there's a bunch of people here who just don't want to use them because they want to "support content creators" or whatever. There's even some people here who will tell you you're a bad person for blocking ads.
I must be a strange person because I don’t run any adblocker… if I happen to need to visit an ad stricken site I just toggle on reader mode. Get my info and get out… I never have to worry about clicking on a search result and it doing nothing … but also I rarely visit these ad sites…. For the cookie banners I just inspect and delete the elements when they get in the way…
> I never have to worry about clicking on a search result and it doing nothing
I can't remember the last time I noticed that the ad blocker even existed on my machine. Occasionally some clever site will basically say "if you can see this, we're supported by ads and could use your help" -- but it doesn't break things and I don't see ad links in search results.
I've love to see what happens if ad-networks became legally liable for any scams or malware that they enable.
The counter-argument that they don't need to know their customer/ad and are just dumb-pipes doesn't sit well with me: Them having awareness of ad-content and display-context is ostensibly part of their business model.
P.S.: I don't mean just liable for a part of the damages, although that would be a good start. I mean that if your Aunt Tillie gets served an ad of "Your computer is infected, click here to contact a Microsoft Technican" there should be some negative repercussions for the company, even if your Aunt Tillie is secretly the hacker BakinC00kies and spins up a honeypot.
Recently, my grandmother got herself scammed when trying to pay her bills, because she clicked a Google search ad for a fraudulent website posing as the local gas company. She lost some money and, of course, some of her personal data as well.
When situations like this happen, I mostly place the blame on ad companies. It’s their product, so it should be their responsibility to prevent abuses. But there is scant regulation, and the ad industry itself has little concern for privacy and data protection. Why would it waste money being proactive and effective against malicious ads?
It is nice to see the government recommending ad blockers. However, it bothers me that it is up to us, users and customers, to deal with the negligence of ad companies.
I wonder too, but suing is expensive and demands some time that we don’t have. Yet we did notify the cybercrime team at the police department, so maybe they will do something about it.
If the amount is/was under the small claims court level, that would be a vastly cheaper and easier route to take. Rules vary by state, but I believe generally you cannot select an arbitrary amount lower than the monetary threshold just to use small claims court, but you might be able to argue Google has 50% or some other culpability if that will get the amount under the threshold. IANAL.
Wonder if someone would make a YouTube video talking about using uBlock origin to block YouTube ads, citing FBI's recommendation, see if it gets taken down by violation of YouTube's ToS.
Linus Tech Tips just had a video on using adblockers, as part of their "how to de-Google your life" series, taken down by YT for posting "harmful or dangerous content".
Yeah, better not to install any kind of adblock even as a test. No one else does. You would be alone.
Also, people who use adblock are antisocial.
Also, I'd be mortified if I visited a web page, then the site told me that I cannot continue because I have adblock installed. I wouldn't want that to happen to me even once.
In addition to the threat to children, there's also terrorism to consider. It is frightening to consider that the World Trade Center towers might still be standing were it not for ordinary users who foolishly assumed that nothing really bad could happen if they installed adblock.
When I have a time to unwind and think less sensible thoughts, I can't help but wonder whether anti-fossil fuels movement would try to capitalize on 9/11 if it happened today and not in 2001 by trying to ban use of planes due to amount of fuel used.
"Terrorists use planes. You are not a terrorist, are you?"
Yes, famously the established miliary industrial complex, fiercely anti-fossil fuel.
Never mind the end result of 9/11 was used for... pro fossil fuel reasons. And the entire war fought afterwards was done for, let me just check my notes here... oil. Oh. And we didn't even invade the right country? hm.
Uh, it's more that I had adblock installed and found myself needing to disable it for most websites just to access it.
Adblock ended up being more of a hassle to use than the small handful of sites where it actually worked.
This hasn't been the case for me and I've been using ublock origin for maybe a decade now.
The only sites that break are streaming sites. Which is expected, I mean they need to make their ad money and they sell ad-free tiers.
All except paramount plus, funny enough. Yes, you can get ad-free paramount plus for half the cost if you just use ublock origin! I guess they forgot to put in that little bit of logic.
I have uBO, a pihole, and noscript between me and the web nowadays. I'd say I run into a website that intentionally bricks itself once every 3-6 months.
It's an uncommon practice in my experience, and it's easy to understand why. 90+% of websites nowadays are click farms - their content is totally interchangeable with, if not plagiarized from, hundreds of other sites. The one site that implements an anti-adblocker measure simply gives up a portion of its traffic to another site that doesn't. The far more lucrative strategy is to try to subvert the ad blocker, which many sites actually do.
A lot of this anti-adblock nonsense is also blocked by Ublock Origin nowadays. I can't remember the last time a webpage succeeded in bricking itself intentionally, though I do occasionally get accidental cases where the website is just poorly designed and hangs because of shitty javascript failing to load some tracker links. Usually payment flows. Though it's pretty painless to just disable UBO for a few seconds in those cases. I'd rather have to click that button every now and again than have almost every website be unusable all of the time, but you do you.
No-JS user here. A disturbing trend noticed in the past two months: can't login anymore to some financial/health services sites (bank/insurance/etc) without disabling all of NoScript - no amount of selective enabling of websites satisfies them, and those websites are using known infractors like Adobe.
In other words, there is code in the backend checking that all tracking/-ware has run on the browser, and refusing to let you login unless you let it all run, while none of it is necessary (as evidenced by older versions - and other sites - accepting only the top site being JS-enabled).
"We either track the living shit out of you, or you don't access the essential services you need, even though technically it is not needed."
uBlock Origin has some advanced filter syntax that can sometimes deal with sites like this. It can intercept, modify or replace JavaScript functions, objects, network requests, parsing data, cookies, etc. That being said, writing filters for sites like these is somewhat of a dark art, it usually involves reverse engineering the page's JavaScript to the point where you understand what it's actually sending and checking for to function correctly, then figuring out a way to bypass those checks by selectively modifying the JavaScript's functionality.
Things like this are why I worry a bit about the proliferation of things like WASM, while JavaScript isn't great, it actually gives a great amount of control to the end user, to both see, understand and the ability to actually modify what is running in their browser. With WASM, all of this becomes highly impractical. Instead of a (semi-)readable, modifiable block of interpreted code, with the ability to inspect and modify the state at almost arbitrary points, you just get opaque binary blobs that you basically can't do anything with. As more and more sites switch to using compiled WASM blobs for their logic, it will become increasingly difficult to observe or modify any behavior of these websites as an end user.
Meh, I've noticed this without any blockers at all. I cannot log in to my power company's website from my PC (on any browser) and likewise for Delta Dental on any device. So far I have been able to work around this, but I don't understand how its possible to break login so badly that even unmodified Edge doesn't work and it stays like this for months.
222 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadPOV:
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/iV3js9pd5IE
If you don’t mind, I’m truly curious why you don’t Adblock? There’s no wrong answer here. ;)
I quite like Ka-block
Apple gobbles personal data too and processes it and sells it etc. They are simply rather better at looking ... friendly. They really are very good at that.
Disclosure: I work at Apple, and have seen zero evidence of anything but trying to make things continuously more secure and private. This in fact makes my job (machine learning) much harder because I don’t have user datasets to leverage.
What data and how do you know? This seems to be a popular talking point, but I’ve yet to see evidence. It doesn’t make that much sense to frame Apple’s privacy stance as similar to Google’s or Facebook’s. Apple isn’t an ad business, and Google and Facebook are, plain and simple.
I don’t work for Apple, and I don’t use an Apple laptop or desktop, but I don’t buy this Apple is as bad as businesses that are primarily built on ad revenue and are actively eroding privacy. I’m sure they’re not perfect, but I feel like Apple is relatively serious about privacy, making real changes that generally protect consumers, and setting a better example than many big tech companies. Are you sure they don't look better because they really are better?
Then why do they push their crappy browser on iOS which doesn't allow ad-blockers?
So? That’s true on Android too. If you want to use a browser with an ad-blocker, you can on iOS, just like on Android. What’s your claim again?
Android partisans will answer questions the way Android partisans answer questions I.e. buy Android.
Even Google (the biggest ad-tech company) isn't that bad: they obviously don't make an ad-blocker themselves, and they've worked against ad-blockers in the Android Chrome browser, but they don't do anything to stop users from installing an alternative browser which supports ad-blocking. You can install Firefox directly from the Google Play store. (Note that the same is not true for ad-blocking alternative YouTube clients like ReVanced or SmartTube, but you can't use those on iOS either of course. And even here, while Google won't allow them in the Play store, you can simply install them directly from the .apk files, something you can't do on iOS.)
By preventing users from exercising choice, Apple has taken on responsibility for them not being able to avoid ads.
Safari does take active steps to prevent tracking that Chrome does not. Apple has not actively worked against ad blockers the way Google has. And Apple also allows you to install a different browser on iOS, Google doesn’t get any gold stars for not preventing third party browsers on Android.
Google has a conflict of interest between your privacy and their primary source of revenue. That’s not true for Apple. Google isn’t that bad?!? Hahahaha BTW you moved the goal posts, the claim you were implicitly defending was that Apple was collecting and selling private data themselves. Nothing in this thread so far backs up that claim.
Does it? Then why do all the iOS users complain about having to watch YouTube ads? Sounds like it doesn't allow good ad-blockers.
>And even if they didn’t, there’s an absolutely massive difference between not being able to block ads and being the company both selling the ads and the browser that is engineering away your privacy.
This is completely wrong. If (for the sake of argument) iOS definitely didn't allow ad-blocking, then that makes them worse than Google, and it does mean they are "actively working against ad-blockers". If they weren't working against them (in this scenario), they wouldn't disallow them.
>And Apple also allows you to install a different browser on iOS
No, it doesn't. It only allows re-skins of Safari.
>Google doesn’t get any gold stars for not preventing third party browsers on Android.
Yes it does. Let me know when I can side-load an open-source ad-blocking YouTube viewer app on iOS, or even just installing the browser of my choice (not a re-skin).
>Google has a conflict of interest between your privacy and their primary source of revenue.
Sure, but they also allow you freedom with Android devices, and that's something you'll never get with Apple.
> the claim you were implicitly defending was that Apple was collecting and selling private data themselves.
I never defended that particular claim. I only made my own tangential claims.
This is irrelevant, you’re confusing the engine and the browser. Chrome on WebKit is not a re-skin of Safari, it’s a Google browser, and it’s Google’s choice to not support ublock Origin on iOS, but nice try. Plus you missed the news that non-WebKit engines are now allowed in the EU and it’s only a matter of time before it spreads.
Google has announced their intention to stop serving YouTube content to anyone using an ad Blocker. Maybe soon you’ll see first hand how misguided and silly your argument against Apple is.
> Does it? Then why do all the iOS users complain…
Weird, it seems like we just had this conversation. That question was asked and answered. Did the fact that Apple does allow ad blockers, and the difference between the YouTube app and the browser not make sense the first time we talked about it?
BTW, the first Google autocomplete response I get for “how to block youtube ads on” is “Android”. That is evidence that more Android users complain about YouTube ads than iOS users.
P.S. who puts the ads on YouTube that you’re complaining about and makes them hard to skip or block? Oh, right, Google.
What I would admit is that Apple is maybe not as motivated to protect your data from unintentional leaking. Without user data, Google would be almost nothing. So they have to be extremely careful to maintain the trust of their users. For Apple (or Microsoft) their business is still sizeable enough with out user data.
I do have other browsers, but I only use them for specific needs. Like I keep some version of a Chrome-based browser around solely for if I need to Chromecast something. Other wise, I do not enjoy using third party browsers like Chrome, Firefox, etc., which I use at work all day.
Safari's web developer tools are not my favorite compared to other browsers, so I try not to develop much with Safari other than testing.
I also have a low threshold for obnoxious sites, and will just bail and not return if I get annoyed.
One store kept popping up that I was not familiar with. So I clicked eventually, and did some online searching about the company to make sure they are legit.
Turns out they are a local independent store. I've made two purchases from them since, and price compared against them for other purchases. Their ads are more likely to catch my eye in the future now.
"naturally"
A) Want me to pay to view a one-off article B) Want me to not see any of their content cause its ad infested.
To be fair, if Firefox's Reader Mode doesn't suffice as a bypass, then I really don't bother coming back.
Or do you not use any blockers at all?
Especially at work most sites I visit aren't ad infested hellscapes, like StackOverflow and its relatives are not ad infested, neither is wikipedia, etc.
Yes, you have to write a pattern. It saves you money while not supporting the erosion of autonomy. What's better than free vegetables? Delivery.
I'm away from my computer right now but I'll copy one of mine later/reply with it. The edit window here is unfortunate.
Eradication/filtering:
Shown, but blocked on-access: To keep the hacker spirit alive, I leave the reader with an exercise. Consider other approaches or HTML tags. Anchors aren't their only vector, hence the document method.HN has a 'hide' button that could be leveraged for nicer integration, removing related widgets.
Solving my problem the "hacker way" would essentially be reimplementing Kagi, or hosting a service to do it. I already host Open WebUI and that is really moving along; maybe it can replace my Kagi needs someday, but for now I am pretty happy with continuing to use Kagi.
Again, my ultimate goal really is autonomy. There is still hacker spirit in your approach, fighting the status quo. It has my general support, even if I'm not a customer
I just wanted to remind people to look more nearby/within, too. This isn't a battle won once
That alone is worth the price of admission
There is a lot more going on beneath the surface of just "annoying ads in my face" which need to be accounted for, since browsers do not ship with effective, granular security controls.
Usually if I'm on somebody else's computer it's because they need me to fix things for them, or speed things up or 'make it better' which means it's getting adblock. The amount of modals and tricks and things they fall for especially my elderly neighbors or people wanting their business laptops setup especially Windows that have jank ass webpages that have the 'Download' link be some arbitrary .exe for something completely not what they wanted to download put something on their system is crazy.. hell even Youtube is giving people scams.
I just fixed some women's sobriety center's computer for free and their user account had some anti virus secure browser opening 20+ 'browsers' on boot for 'AG' free anti-virus.
Never had an issue with ublock breaking anything important for me. Air travel, hotels, ordering things online, if something says disable my adblocker I close it out and never go to that domain again.
To each their own though. I don't do ads though and will save every soul I can. Ad-tech is cyber terrorism at this point, and I stick to my guns.
In that situation of using someone else's device, I've had to move windows half off the screen to be able to concentrate on an article when the ads on the side were constantly distracting me.
Not only that, but you're wrong on a technicality too - > and every single one of those ads were programmed by... a software engineer!
Many ads are designed by creatives and placed and run by dedicated non-software engineering people, including deciding how many are run and their placement (i.e. bombardment or not). Sure engineers programmed the platform, but then you're just blaming the post office for the content of the mail, or the ISP for the content of the internet. What do you expect the software engineers to do? Limit 1 ad per page programatically and then every software engineer on earth must agree to enforce that limit and no matter how much pressure their superiors put on them, everybody holds the line?
This is not a rhetorical question, How do you expect all software engineers to be unified on a single solution to ad bombardment, given the internet is international, driven by market dynamics and capitalism and a non-trivial number of programmers are beholden to tyrannical managers because of their life situation (it can still be a minority, and ad bombardment emerges)?
By developing a consensus that it is not ok to do that type of behavior (bombardment of ads, surveillance capitalism, etc) and changing the culture
Changing bad behavior by corporations (esp. adtech/advertisers) is likely to be about as successful: it's not going to be done by "changing" the culture, but only by changing the laws, and then enforcing those laws and punishing offenders. Just like a rapist sees nothing wrong with raping a person, or a serial killer sees nothing wrong with murdering many strangers, or a "porch pirate" sees nothing wrong with stealing your Amazon delivery, an ad-tech corporation sees nothing wrong with feeding you psychologically manipulative advertising and blatant malware in search of profit.
No. They did not. They explicity said "mostly works".
> but this is blatantly false:
Of course it is. You set up a blantantly false strawman. Please don't use obviously piss weak rhetorical tactics, they make you look bad.
> every country has prisons with many criminals
And every country has varying incarceration rates, they are not all equal.
What should be looked at is countries by cultural attitudes towards crime and incarceration rates .. and the harder question of just how innately criminal imprisoned people are in various countries and whether they are just there from systemic features of a culture.
Again, there are no one size fits all answers and people aren't homogenous.
That was my exact point with the previous post blaming "software engineers" for ads.
Who said that police are not part of the culture?
I'm not arguing whether or not we need police, I'm arguing that if we come to a consensus (i.e., we agree that surveillance capitalism, etc, is not ok), then we can stop the problem. That may mean we even criminalize certain behaviors if we believe it is necessary. But the foundation is consensus. So let's do that- I firmly believe that surveillance capitalism and the bombardment of ads is not ok. What about you?
That sounds cool...but such coordinated, idealistic behavior never occurs in human beings.
See? That logic doesn't work so well. "Software engineers" are not a singular entity nor a homogeneous group. To maintain the status quo, it doesn't take more than just a few SWEs willing to implement ads and/or invasive tracking.
The people on this site are a group of humans uniquely equipped to actually speak and interact with the people responsible for this bullshit.
> The people on this site are a group of humans uniquely equipped to actually speak and interact with the people responsible for this bullshit.
There's not any method whatsoever for the people on this site to force all ad software developers to stop developing ad software.
I guess all the cybersecurity engineers should just quit because they're the ones to blame for all the malware...
Similarly, the only reason humans work as police is because humans commit crimes. So humans are really to blame for this problem.
I feel the same way about software for war fighting, which obviously has higher stakes. The profession itself doesn't push back on the ethics of it AND individual practitioners are actively developing death-dealing software.
You're acting like the profession has some kind of central authority. It does not. It's like asking for agreed-upon ethical standards for dog walkers; you're not going to get it, because there's nothing resembling a centralized organization, nor any kind of licensing for this profession.
>I feel the same way about software for war fighting,
If you want to eliminate software for war fighting, this is a fool's errand. Weapons for war are absolutely necessary, unless you want to be a victim to some dictator who doesn't agree with your ethical principles. History is full of examples of peaceful people who couldn't withstand an assault by other people who didn't believe in peace. In fact, I'd go so far as to claim that eliminating warfare (and the military apparatus for it: armies and navies etc.) is impossible as long as separate countries exist. Only if we manage to either conquer everyone or get everyone to agree to join a single planetary government can war really be eliminated. And that assumes that hostile aliens won't ever be a problem.
Even if there was some centralized group that created an ethical standard for conduct, do you really think that that would escape the influence of software companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. that have a vested interest in advertisement? Or that every software engineer would follow such a standard of conduct?
Members of a minority group, such as race or religion or sexual orientation are generally members of that group by birth, not by choice.
Members of the group 'software engineers' are members of that group by (career) choice.
Your key point here is a tautology; it doesn't really lead to any insight.
Or does unlock origin lite cover everything?
I was thinking continent specific ad blockers etc
Manifest v3 fucking sucks, and people will probably need to go to system-wide ad blocking such as AdGuard to block ads using all the filters, as v3 limits the number of filters you can use.
The original Google site hit the perfect pitch, where they set a few unobtrusive ones out of the way alongside your results screen. Ironic they pioneered and eventually normalized what is now an epidemic of user-hostile spam all over the web. I feel as a whole we lose a lot more productivity and focus to this than we gain in economic activity.
For your nostalgia and/or despair, I found a chronological list of screenshots: https://scaledon.com/the-evolution-of-google-ads/
Can someone please explain these two sentences to me?
Yeah, good luck doing that with all the various tracking links that mask the actual domain. Sometimes I try to click on links from legit account related emails that are blocked by UBO for being part of a tracker/ad network.
I know perfect is the enemy of good and defense in depth and etc, etc, but this advice just seems crap.
Here's a particularly salient critique of these very same FBI recommendations, from my article:
> The FBI suggests “Before clicking on an advertisement, check the URL to make sure the site is authentic. A malicious domain name may be similar to the intended URL but with typos or a misplaced letter.” — this is useless advice in the face of unverified vanity URLs
1. https://eligrey.com/blog/link-fraud/
The gold standard which works as an extension in both chrome and Firefox is uBlock Origin, annoyingly not to be confused with uBlock.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin/cjpal...
Also be aware that Google continues to add restrictions to extension permissions such that uBlock Origin may not be as effective as it once was.
You would expect that the people who have the ability to write perfect selector rules to block ads and understand how all of this works would be the first to use them. But no.
I find it baffling too.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/learning-center/using-a...
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/supported-browser...
I can't remember the last time I noticed that the ad blocker even existed on my machine. Occasionally some clever site will basically say "if you can see this, we're supported by ads and could use your help" -- but it doesn't break things and I don't see ad links in search results.
The counter-argument that they don't need to know their customer/ad and are just dumb-pipes doesn't sit well with me: Them having awareness of ad-content and display-context is ostensibly part of their business model.
P.S.: I don't mean just liable for a part of the damages, although that would be a good start. I mean that if your Aunt Tillie gets served an ad of "Your computer is infected, click here to contact a Microsoft Technican" there should be some negative repercussions for the company, even if your Aunt Tillie is secretly the hacker BakinC00kies and spins up a honeypot.
YouTube/hulu/disney+ still cut to ads instead of displaying them around the border of the content.
Carl’s Jr/Brawndo still haven’t purchased the FCC.
We are pretty close though.
They still need to make people actually think that adverts are good
The FBI now recommends using an ad blocker when searching the web:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34916239
734 points | 2 years ago | 430 comments
When situations like this happen, I mostly place the blame on ad companies. It’s their product, so it should be their responsibility to prevent abuses. But there is scant regulation, and the ad industry itself has little concern for privacy and data protection. Why would it waste money being proactive and effective against malicious ads?
It is nice to see the government recommending ad blockers. However, it bothers me that it is up to us, users and customers, to deal with the negligence of ad companies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apdZ7xmytiQ
Also, people who use adblock are antisocial.
Also, I'd be mortified if I visited a web page, then the site told me that I cannot continue because I have adblock installed. I wouldn't want that to happen to me even once.
"Terrorists use planes. You are not a terrorist, are you?"
Never mind the end result of 9/11 was used for... pro fossil fuel reasons. And the entire war fought afterwards was done for, let me just check my notes here... oil. Oh. And we didn't even invade the right country? hm.
I've noticed an increase in sites that do what you describe, but so far I've responded by no longer hanging out on those sites, and that feels OK.
The only sites that break are streaming sites. Which is expected, I mean they need to make their ad money and they sell ad-free tiers.
All except paramount plus, funny enough. Yes, you can get ad-free paramount plus for half the cost if you just use ublock origin! I guess they forgot to put in that little bit of logic.
It's an uncommon practice in my experience, and it's easy to understand why. 90+% of websites nowadays are click farms - their content is totally interchangeable with, if not plagiarized from, hundreds of other sites. The one site that implements an anti-adblocker measure simply gives up a portion of its traffic to another site that doesn't. The far more lucrative strategy is to try to subvert the ad blocker, which many sites actually do.
In other words, there is code in the backend checking that all tracking/-ware has run on the browser, and refusing to let you login unless you let it all run, while none of it is necessary (as evidenced by older versions - and other sites - accepting only the top site being JS-enabled).
"We either track the living shit out of you, or you don't access the essential services you need, even though technically it is not needed."
Things like this are why I worry a bit about the proliferation of things like WASM, while JavaScript isn't great, it actually gives a great amount of control to the end user, to both see, understand and the ability to actually modify what is running in their browser. With WASM, all of this becomes highly impractical. Instead of a (semi-)readable, modifiable block of interpreted code, with the ability to inspect and modify the state at almost arbitrary points, you just get opaque binary blobs that you basically can't do anything with. As more and more sites switch to using compiled WASM blobs for their logic, it will become increasingly difficult to observe or modify any behavior of these websites as an end user.
This may be sadly outdated. Android Chrome and iOS Webkit probably account for majority of traffic nowadays, and neither allows adblock extensions.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/adguard-adblock-privacy/id1047...