(I.e. it's not a universal ad blocker that lets you avoid ads on Youtube.)

The Firefox webpage itself doesn't oversell the feature as "ad-free internet" so not sure why writing a misleading title for HN was necessary.

[1] https://scroll.com/sites

(Edit to also mention Scroll doesn't have some popular news sites such as NYT, Washington Post, WSJ, etc -- probably because getting a fraction of $4.99/month is not enough money for them and it competes with their direct digital subscriptions.)

In all seriousness, I seem to remember that there was a practice of testing for viability using very similar means – basically, are people interested enough to click through, then collect emails.

So perhaps this is a path to demonstrate viability by questionnaire.

>Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

But I'm not going to nitpick this thread's title. If "Ad-free internet" is the best representation for HN readers because Mozilla itself used it, that's fine too.

I enjoy reading the WSJ Opinion section, but last time I looked at the price, it was way too high to justify based on the number of articles I read.

Well, isn't the the same thing in the end? Both you and the person you want to pay need to have ths same platform? If someone uses chrome, won't they need to go and "find" the site using Firefox to pay.

What you want is to be able to pay for something once you've found it? I get that, and it's a slightly different model than patreon, but in the end it is the same problem: micropayments are expensive and currently require someone to batch them.

The bigger problem is that requires another shared middle man that some people may not like fot whatever reason.

They define buzzfeed as center-left.

You are definitely in a tiny minority if that's actually the case.

1) it’s based on page views where ads are rendered. So ad-blocked users aren’t in the denominator.

2) most of that revenue is driven by clicks, not ad views. So users like me, that rarely click on ads, ever, probably earn publishers about 50cents/cpm.

True but for the past 5 years or so they have been interested in making more money not better products.

Edit: I appreciate the downvotes, as though answering this question with honesty is undesirable behavior. Keep up the good work /r/svwebdev!

I work in ad technology for a publisher. We put in a lot of effort to make the tech fast, lightweight and secure for our visitors - we hate bad ads too. We screen our partners, use whitelists and monitor what JS is running on the site.

This being said - things sometimes slip through the cracks. Somebody with a browser-based 0-day will pay huge CPMs to insert their ad and own thousands of machines. We can't prevent this - if you have any ideas on how, I'd love to hear it.

Can you define often? It seems quite rare actually for a malware to be distributed online without user intervention, with the recent Firefox 0-day being one of theses cases and only touched a small proportion of people.

The web is quite secure already and sure ads network is a good vector but so is Hacker News, Reddit and Facebook, which nobody cares about (have you ever not clicked on a link on any of theses platforms and looked at the URL first?).

I seriously hate that argument of security, it's just wrong.

That's not theoretical (like your "but HN could deliver malware, too), that's reality.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You means the popup that force you to force-close your iPhone browser app? I already answered that:

> That's seems more like a browser issue [...] I don't consider that malware to have to close an application, just like I don't consider a malware a link that rick roll me (which still force me to close a tab ;) unless I want to stay on Youtube).

I did get theses kinds of ads on some sketchy website on my Android phone, I can't do back but closing the tab is alright.

To me closing an annoying tab isn't much of a malware. If none of my information were at risk, that's not a malware.

> If you don't believe me, google for it. There have been plenty of articles about ad networks as malware services.

You do this after I even mentioned this happening all the time.

> Each time I ask someone that does it for "security purpose", when they don't answer by "do your own research" (which I always try when they say that even if it's absurd to have nothing to defends yourself), the best example they always have is either link to some report with stats that doesn't define malware, or the Forbes case of when one of their ad was a fake Java update. If that's malware, then here we go, HN now serve malware too: Click on that URL to update Java: https://forbes.com

I'll google with you then: ad network malware

Result 1:

> Hackers Abuse Google Ad Network To Spread Malware That Mines Cryptocurrency > https://www.forbes.com/sites/leemathews/2018/01/26/hackers-a...

You may not want cryptominers in your ads, but that's not really a malware again, your information are safe. There's nothing dangerous there.

Result 2: > Malvertising - Wikipedia > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising

It does contains an interesting history, which push toward my theory.

> advertisements telling them their systems were infected and trying to trick them into installing rogue security software > drive-by download

So theses malware get installed if you download it and run it voluntarily...

> The attack infected users' machines with the ransomware, ‘Cryptowall’, a type of malware that extorts money from users by encrypting their data and placing a ransom of up to $1000 in bitcoins, to be paid in 7 days, to decrypt the data.

That's an interesting case, but doesn't mentions how the payload was delivered, could be drive-by download like always.

> In 2014 there were major malvertising campaigns on the DoubleClick and Zedo ad networks. [...] As in previous attacks the cybercrime involved Cryptowall as the malware infection. This spate of malvertising was believed to have brought over $1 million of ransom money in by infecting over 600,000 computers.

That one is not directly interesting because the source say that:

>through aggressive distribution using a variety of tactics that included spam emails with malicious links or attachments, drive-by-download attacks from sites infected with exploit kits and through installations by other malware programs already running on compromised computers

Again, either by running it directly voluntarily, or by other malware already running....

However after more research from this case, I found another article [0], which said that:

> now millions of computers have likely been exposed to Zemot, although only those with outdated antivirus protection were actually infected.

So an actual case of infection! Caused by outdated antivirus though and worse than that:

> Zemot is focused on computers running Windows XP,

For something in 2014... Windows XP stopped being supported at all in April 2014. Don't use an outdated system...

I would go into each result, but they are mostly definitions and I already lost enough time. The last result of the page is interesting and probably the first case that I see.

> Malicious code hidden in advert images cost ad networks $1.13bn this year > https://www.zdnet.com/article/malicious-code-hidden-in-adver...

> "In this instance, the malicious code was an auto-redirect to a phishing site targeting US users."

So that's interesting, usually I wouldn't call phishing a malware mostly because you should always check the URL, but in this case considering it was doing it on the website itself, I would consider it as essentially one. First case I found! Adblock would then make sense on website where you put personal information. I hope browsers/ad-network will fix this auto-redirect issue quick though.

> I find your behaviour here very dishonest, and for me it's EOD.

What's dishonest about my behaviour?

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/19/6537511/google-ad-network...