Google cracks down on VPN based adblockers(community.blokada.org) |
Google cracks down on VPN based adblockers(community.blokada.org) |
Even better news than third party app stores, sideloading. No gatekeepers required at all.
In this comment I’m going to explain why the problem is not just ads.
What are ads? Advertizing, or marketing, is a common means of monetizing content.
Here are the top three reasons ads are used on websites:
1. Monetization
2. Tracking users
3. Malware distribution
Want to know more about how ads track users? Read on.
As a guy growing up in rural Wyoming, ads weren’t something that ever really bothered me. Sure there was the occasional billboard and sure television had a lot of commercials breaks, but I was used to it. The idea of using an ad blocker on my television set never occurred to me. I remember this one time when my uncle was moving house and he needed some help and I helped him move the packing crates into the truck and the crates had the logo and name of the shipping company stencilled on the side, and it never bothered me, although that was in fact an ad.
Experts agree that the following method is great for dealing with ads:
First, make sure what you are looking at is an ad. You can often tell by the little x in the corner of the ad. If you click this, you will be able to close the ad and maybe even give some feedback about why you didn’t like the ad. Top tip: always fill this in to let the ad vendor know how to improve the ad for next time.
But take care! This next tip is really important.
If you don’t hit the little x exactly on target, you will be taken to the website of the ad. If you didn’t want the ad in the first place, this is surely something to avoid!
Here are 17 resolutions for dealing with accidentally visiting a website you didn’t want to visit:
1. Try restarting your phone, laptop or PC.
2. Close the browser window. Click here for help on how to accomplish this task.
3. Try clicking the back button on your browser.
4. Write to the FCC if the website caused you distress.
5. Take a walk. Besides being good exercise, the problem may have resolved itself by the time you return.
6. Hit refresh on your browser. If you didn’t like the website first time round, you know what they say? Try, try again!
7. Go to the URL bar on your browser and type in a different address. Don’t forget to hit the Enter key. Try the following helpful URLs from our trusted partners:
8. Raise a ticket with Apple support.
9. Install Google Chrome.
10. Re-install Google Chrome.
11. Contact your ISP. My top tip? Threaten to cancel unless they can resolve your issue completely right away!
12. Close all open windows and applications and wait 30 seconds.
13. Clear your cookies and web browsing history.
14. …
Show more.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/93ypke/the-nsa-and-cia-use-a...
This is a statement and argument that can and is used against any form of user control over their devices, user customization, or general computing.
Unfortunately, at least in the tech world it seems to be a great success. We now have walled gardens and unskippable updates. The next step, "trusted computing" (which is ultimately using a whitelist to forbid the usage of certain software), is already halfway here.
Facebook comes to mind: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=onavo
This is so brazen they don’t even care
Link: https://adguard-dns.io
Install Firefox Focus, it istalls Content Blocker which you then enable in Safari settings. Plus Ka-Block!. These two together do the trick.
1Blocker¹ does it. It’s the “Firewall” section of the iOS app.
I already have issues with Tailscale and NextDNS, I doubt this will make it any easier.
The usual VPN and DNS solutions also work fine.
I use Firefox Focus as the ad block extension, and it works relatively well.
Okay. Those are essentially malware anyway. As long as uBlock Origin is not affected I see no problem with Google "cracking down" on anything.
It's pretty sad to see Google stoop so low. Back in the day they used to win because of the innovation, best products and openness. Now they can't build anything new and just trying to squeeze every last penny from what they already have.
I use DNS66, which I got from the F-Droid open source app store.
It works very well and blocks ads and trackers on websites and apps.
> Google claims to be cracking down on apps that are using the VPN service to track user data
Also Google
https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2019/01/31/google-apple-deve...
How do Googlers here defend this posture?
b) I wasn't even aware blockada was functional on the play store. Been using it on FDroid. So nothing changes for me.
c) Blockada without VPN is a fantastic tool. It works well. And 98% of the time app ads are blocked.
I personally run a MITM proxy on my network which all traffic goes through. IMHO the security concerns are overblown and largely come from companies like Google trying to stop people doing things like this. They are only securing their profits, nothing more and nothing less.
These changes aim to improve the ads experience, tighten security and limit misinformation according to the company.
The truth is probably closer to "increase the number of ads you see, secure you from getting around that, and limit the proliferation of anything but their official propaganda."
Yes, according to the company. But improving the ad experience for google, not for the user. What Orwellian doublespeak!
- monetization strategy involves affiliate marketing and the sale of ad analytics data
- shows advertisements of its own to users
I don't understand why people are surprised about this.
I had no idea, in that case I will try it also. I use this a lot on my desktop.
Most people don’t.
Most people who use anything for iOS tend to use things like:
- 1Blocker - super full featured, including custom script and css rules. business model is paid software, not ‘acceptable ads’ paying them for placement or third parties paying for your data
- AdGuard Pro - Similar to 1Blocker, less custom config friendly
- https://nextdns.io/ - pihole type blocker with unlimited configurations, custom rules, and analytics, native hooks for devices
- https://adguard-dns.io/ - similar DNS[1] service to nextdns.io with ability to upload your own rules based configurations
- Firefox Focus if using that ecosystem
- Brave if using that ecosystem
- iCab Mobile if wanting a super configurable browser with filter rules and longest history as indie browser for iOS
Folks also use ancillary quieters such as:
- Hiya - call / sms blocking
- Hushed - throwaway numbers for spam SMS
- - -
1. Note that the AdGuard public DNS server including custom DNS filtering rules has just (26 August 2022) gone open source: https://adguard.com/en/blog/adguard-dns-2-0-goes-open-source...
In my case, I browse a limited number of web sites that offer no ads (or a minimum amount). The moment I visit a web site with tons of ads, I just close it immediately and just ignore my original intention of visiting that website (e.g., this happens sometimes in HN: people link websites of newspapers, but I don't last in them more than 2 seconds)
There was a time where you could just close the tab if it was that bad, but now pretty much all websites are like this so there's no choice.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/cre...
Initial content blocker support came with iOS 9 in 2015. They only work in Safari, maybe also other browsers (not sure though).
It’s by the makers of kagi.
I mainly browse the web on my PC or laptop at home, which has a browser-integrated adblocker + PiHole.
When I need a browser while on the go, I usually just use it to google things and for some quick lookups the experience is "okay", longer and more in-depth web surfing will be deferred to my home PC using the "tabs from other devices" functionality
Benchmarked on reach plc websites. If I open one in Chrome it actually freezes it up
As I write this, I just realized why I have a pleasant browsing experience: unless I am searching for tech info, I don’t do much browsing except for a few favorite sites.
Whole house ad blocking and my iPhone is pretty much consistently attached to my home VPN to take advantage of the ad blocking.
There’s some small pain points with using public wifi with login screens, enough so that I haven’t had my wife use it yet but I dig it.
iOS also has system-wide DNS ad blocking via DNS-over-HTTPS profiles, without needing any apps or on-device VPN hacks, and that works for all networks/cellular seamlessly.
I can't get everyone on adblockers for all their devices so this is worth it to me. Of course, I also setup basic content blockers where I can as well.
Having a choice in web browsers along with emulators and real file system access were major reasons why I'll never go back to iPad.
Nearly spotless experience, costs me 10 bucks a year. And everyone at home is protected.
there's your problem right there.
I recall reading that despite the internet being faster, actual website performance has never really improved meaningfully. Whatever speed gains we've achieved have simply been eaten by larger and more complex tracking scripts.
Google themselves are a significant contributor to this problem, for many websites, Google's scripts are the core source of slowness.
I don't think it's unreasonable for users to want to reclaim their browsing experience (and bandwidth). In the sample comparison below we can see savings as high as 90% of data and speed boosts of ~1500% - it's insanity.
>In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal-use led to the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries. He argued that, contrary to common intuition, technological progress could not be relied upon to reduce fuel consumption.
Which is a criticism, it seems, for any system that values resource attribution over efficiency.
Of course there was flash to deal with rhen too.
Now back when we had 56K Modems was when it really was unusable!
I don't how sites think i want to read an article and warxh a totally unrelated video at the same time.
I'm really starting to miss old style magazines lately.
Click bait and fake headlines about the next iphone have ruinwd the web.
Still, going back to the main subject. Clearly, it seems google decided that most people do not care enough to actually make decisions to make browsing not painful. I hate this cat and mouse game. It is getting to the point where I really think legal solution is the only one. All techs need to be brought to heel. Hard.
In google's defense, it is not just them. The entire ecosystem is broken. When I try to use my bank's website and I use unprotected chromium, it takes extra minute to load everything up on a page. I am running an equivalent of a supercomputer from 90s and I am stunned at the lazy design. If I try to limit it, it stutters and blocks me at every opportunity. And it is one of the national banks in US. Admittedly, some banks do get it mostly right ( kudos to Discover, Chase and Capital ), but I started going to the branch again and each time they ask me if I used their app/website, I say no and tell them why ( which is usually followed by a survey, which I dutifully fill up... mebbe something will finally filter through ).
This combination of Firefox+uBlock and NextDNS+Private DNS makes Android a pleasurable experience.
If your browser supports adblock (eg on Android use Firefox or Kiwi) then disable DNS filtering for the browser (ie override the system level filtering) by using browser privacy settings to choose an unfiltered DoH provider like Cloudflare.
I've noticed most of the recent android based handled scanner we got at office refuse to even use our dhcp provided dns including to resolve local address (forcing us to use IP instead of dns for our internal warehouse apps) and complain about "no internet" because 8.8.8.8 is not open.
It's open source as well.
I try not to use apps where there's a website equivalent, but I also repackaged a couple of them that I like to rid them of the ads, using apktool.
My mobile experience is blissfully ad-free. It's a delight and I would never go back to the default experience.
Unsure if there's been a development since then.
The original policy is documented here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220818100735/https://support.g...
What the post misses is Google has exceptions for:
- Parental control and enterprise management apps.
- App usage tracking.
- Device security apps (for example, anti-virus, mobile device management, firewall).
- Network related tools (for example, remote access).
- Web browsing apps.
- Carrier apps that require the use of VPN functionality to provide telephony or connectivity services.
The part where manipulation of ad-based monetization isn't allowed has always been there in one form or another.
A firewall can also be used to firewall ads/trackers though, and so it remains to be seen what Google makes of such apps (there are plenty!) come November (supposed deadline for compliance). Blokada v5 (and below), otoh, isn't a firewall, but a UDP-only DNS client.
It's definitely worth the $2/month price for Pro though.
I've used Netguard off F-Droid before, it's really nice when you turn on the filter: https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard/blob/master/ADBLOCKING.md.
edit: the app is still maintained & the dev is still active on the Netguard thread, although there was a prior issue with google where he had stopped development
https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/app-6-0-netguard-no-root-...
From what I can tell, non-nonsense opensource utilities are simply undiscoverable on the app store.
Been using this for years, though I don't often use ad-serving apps anyhow, so it's mostly just a second layer of defence behind firefox/u-block (and noscript, to be honest, but I understand not everyone wants to deal with that.)
I'm shocked when browsing web on different devices. I always recommend to at least install uBlock Origin to users of those devices. Most of them never heard about ad-blocking and they are very, very happy with new web browsing experience. 99% of theme do not want go back. 1% don't care.
BTW, I'm using Brave because of having u-block origin, and I recommend it. Needed to change the default chrome widget for a brave widget, and lost the chrome sync. Other than that, works as a charm.
There's probably other ways.
See also nextdns.io for a turnkey alternative.
Blokada Plus is a VPN optimized to work flawlessly with Blokada. You get one of the strongest encryptions with minimal impact on battery life and speed. Together with the battle-tested content blocking functionality of Blokada, the VPN gives you a peace of mind knowing that your private activity stays private. Even on public WiFi, no-one will be able to see what you’re doing or steal your sensitive information like bank details. Websites you visit will not be able to reveal your real location. https://archive.is/xyVSn
- Strongest encryption? From when I read the code, they back-up private-key without armour (plain-text).
- Battle-tested content blocking? Blokada v5 and below has leaked DNS over TCP since its inception (v6+ is closed source).
- Peace of mind? https://www-computerbase-de.translate.goog/forum/threads/mob...
- The less I say about protecting bank details, 'private activity', location... the better.
Disclosure: I have been accused by Blokada of spreading FUD before: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/8536
> Manifest V3 is part of a shift in the philosophy behind how we approach end-user security and privacy.
it requrires you to declaratively specify what to block in advance, so it's going to be pretty easy to write some logic that can't be declaratively specified
I suspect killing the adblockers is the entire reason behind it
Having said that, Kiwi Browser on Android still seems safe. You probably have a different browser anyway, now that Chrome has most of the features and featureflags removed.
Tech giants will turn this example around and say "look we need more walled-gardens to protect users". But in reality, as soon as they open the floodgates, there will be solutions that can do the same without giving away more control to Google/Apple. The narrative has to change, and the first step is to give device owners full control.
Play Store has more and more restrictions each month...but it may be a good thing? because people is now discovering the alternate stores and the advantages of them.
I suggest everybody to give it a spin
I know that ads are used to pay content creator on the web but I don't see why I should see ads on the home screen of a TV I fully paid.
If they are going to start blocking apps that do adblocking on-device that sounds like an abuse of power and a HUGE conflict of interest with Google running the Play Store AND being owned by an advertising company.
If that means I need to switch banks, that's OK.
I see NetGuard was mentioned in a comment, but if you have Graphene you can just install an app and never let it call home via the App Info permission menu. I do it for Google Camera and Snapseed, the few non FOSS apps on my phone.
Most Chinese OEMs (OnePlus, Oppo, Vivo, Realme, Xiaomi, Motorola, Lenovo, Acer) ship with per-app wifi/mobile firewall option too.
https://adguard.com/en/blog/adguard-dns-2-0-goes-open-source...
It's not good or great or perfect, but the downside of the demise of ads, tracking, ad networks on the web would be a more information impoverished society any way you slice it.
I don't think any of my staple websites would be around if all we could rely on was their charity, and frankly that's not the internet I want to force on people. I want the people who enrich my life to be able to dedicate their time/energy to that end.
There are workarounds of course, but I am becoming tired of the cat and mouse game, in fact, I am tired of smartphones altogether. Unless things change, my current phone is probably the last rooted phone I will use as a daily driver, sadly, the last "high end" phone too.
since you say this, I assume you are in the EU or UK? I've heard that several EU banks offer a second 2FA method besides the app, such as hardware code generator[1]. In the UK, banks are actually required by the regulator to offer at least one method that doesn't require a mobile phone [2].
You could tell your bank "I can't use a smartphone" and they will probably be able to assist you (or, worst case scenario, you could find a bank that can)
[1] https://www.unicreditbank.hu/en/individual/banking/electroni...
[2] https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/7793...
I recently had to upgrade my phone, and oh boy is is annoying to get root working with Google Pay and my banking app. It still works, but it took me a few hours(!).
I'm seriously considering switching to iOS for my next phone.
Just curious what do folks think of AdGuard. I’ve seen that come up on Reddit but looking at their website it doesn’t look trustworthy and I couldn’t find info about what they actually track.
I'm not sure why you found their site untrustworthy, but, I've used it for years and I'm a huge fan.
Anyway though, AdGuard on iOS is a VPN and I find it unreliable, on macOS it works great.
The mobile web experience could almost be described as life changing when all of the bullshit is removed.
if not, is there some mechanism in place that can reduce worries around software supply chain attacks on a privileged piece of software like this?
I guess it's mostly attributed to the website handling accessibility wrong, but using the web is more important to me I guess.
> Here are some examples of common violations: Unexpected ads that appear ... during the beginning of a content segment (for example, after a user has clicked on a button, and before the action intended by the button click has taken effect). These ads are unexpected for users, as users expect to ... engage in content instead.
??? isn't this like... incredibly and blatantly anti-competitive considering that their own app (Youtube), which they still offer on said store, does this?
On-device filtering was never allowed. For as long as I can remember, it has always been against Play Store terms of use. That part isn't new at all.
Though, it could very well be that Google may come down with stringent / permanent bans on VPN-based apps starting November (they, notoriously, only allow two violations before permanently banning a developer account; in some instances, developers have gotten two strikes at once, leaving them unable to appeal).
It may be less emotionally rewarding, but in many areas
- many places advertisements violate various rules and on notification local authorities (or other entity) is likely to take action. For example in Poland ads (except political ones, politicians exempted themself again) cannot be ever placed on bridges, lamp posts, traffic signs, guard rails etc. Every single one placed there is illegal and road maintainers remove them once notified.
- local authorities may be allowed to pass laws banning or limiting their presence (Kraków, Poland recently outlawed large part of billboards within city)
Also, removing some of ads may be perfectly legal or with penalties so low that eliminating them is not legally risky.
It's silly I know, but I get a tiny amount of satisfaction from not letting them advertise to me.
(Sadly, google shut down Vanced, but you can still find it if you go looking and ReVanced is coming along nicely.)
As in Black Mirror's 15 Million Merits.
Will you pay money for the content you consume?
You can’t outrun the incentive alignment. Nobody can. Case in point - Apple is shifting hard into the ad space after laying low and crafting a premium brand.
The money is just too good.
If anything, I've seen more and more services where paying is just for "premium features," of which getting away from ads isn't one of them. Spotify is a key example - if you pay for premium you don't get ads interrupting music, but you still see their bundled advertisements on the home screen of the app, you get content suggested to you in a way that is very advertiser-centric, etc.
I think we should maybe split off the discussion of "how will these businesses get paid the way ads get paid" from "ads are bad and we should get rid of them." Frankly, I don't care if advertising as a business tanks and that takes other businesses with it. The externalities of surveillance capitalism are pretty shitty, and I'm fairly confident there are other ways for people to be productive within the economy that don't involve the invasive nature of today's advertising ecosystem.
I use open source stuff when I can, and similarly, I contribute to the projects when I can. This seems to be the only legitimate way to avoid ads.
I wish companies would offer the opportunity to pay what you want to remove ads. People with adblock are probably more likely to pay for it, because anyone not running ads is probably not bothered by them anyway. And people running adblock are unmonetisable. So a little bit of money is better than no money.
Advertising is popular on the web for historical reasons. Content delivery advanced much faster than payment, so for ~20 years ads were the easiest way for many sites to pay the bills. Nobody was sure what else to do.
But that's no longer the case. Soft paywalls have been around for circa a decade, so selling subscriptions while letting your content self-market is viable. Content creators also have plenty of direct revenue options. Patreon is doing something like $2 billion/year in revenue for creators. Twitch became a huge platform without ads, just allowing direct cash transfers from fans to creators. And that's not even counting the ~$50 billion/year now spent on streaming and VOD in the US.
On the other side of it, per-ad revenue has been falling for decades. I helped start a content site and keep in touch with people in that area. The reason so many ad-supported sites look like absolute shit is that to make any money, you keep needing to up the amount of ads you run, making them more and more annoying to overcome learned ad blindness. So advertising is slowly strangling itself, leading to lots of people using ad-blockers, and counter-ad-blocker technology becoming widespread. What sane person would start an ad-funded content business today?
A world-wide web with little or no advertising is not only plausible, it looks like that's where we're headed.
Suppose someone develops a product that you would love and would make your life better; how do you think you should find out about it?
In the 2020s, the web is nearing a level of criticality to a functioning society as the neighborhoods, towns, cities we access it from. Those physical properties are heavily regulated and with good reason.
Word of mouth, basically. Or searching for something that I need.
What I hate most about advertising is it just shoves everything in people's faces and makes people think they need this and that. I find myself somewhat immune to ads (as much as one can be I guess), maybe I just programmed myself to ignore them growing up in early internet days. But it's so obvious the large effect that ads can have on most people.
I find out about new and cool stuff generally from peoples comments on sites like here, reddit etc. If you have a good product, word of mouth is generally pretty damn good. Or coming across something from searches for a specific need.
I just can't think about anything that I needed and found out from a standard advertisement in like.. any recent memory. Maybe I'm the outlier here.. obviously ads must work well enough but I hate them with a passion.
I felt assaulted. There is no reasonable justification or purpose for this that takes into account basic human empathy. Granted this might be different from ads that do just make you aware of a product. But this reasoning is looking more and more like justification rather than purpose.
I just moved to a new laptop. I haven’t installed ad blockers yet. But interestingly, I seem to have got out of the habit of using the obnoxious ad supported sites. Probably because they became too low quality. I hadn’t even realized my ad blockers weren’t installed until this thread.
Not to say that the service they provide isn't useful. It's obviously more economical to operate media platforms at scale, and obviously most content creators don't have the technical ability to do it themselves.
When you look at say, podcasts for instance, you have this giant shared wealth of free content and you can pick a number of creators to support depending on your budget. You usually get extra episodes or perks as an incentive for doing so. Imagine if, instead of paying YouTube X dollars or watching Y ads and letting them choose out how to spread that money around, you pay the people you actually watch and the platform vendors, who ought to be the least important and most replaceable factor in this transaction, gets the cut they actually deserve.
Before they were ruined by copyright trolls, streaming services like Netflix demonstrated that charging everyone a reasonable amount of money for access to the entire park was a viable business model.
hmm... you do know this is the reason companies like Google + Meta make lots of money, right?
I know you don't like ads but... a lot of people obviously are ok with them (otherwise businesses wouldn't find it worth it to advertise on those platforms, in hopes of capturing customers/increasing sales)
I am not sure why it would be reason for ads.
Would be even more stupid to try after writing this post though.
Sadly, it doesn't work on IG.
But I have blocked a few meme sites, and now I'm doing less mindless scrolling.
How do you deal with that? Are you just not going to buy a plane ticket on the airline’s website just ‘cause?
> Why this list?
> Where most other blocklists go for the "block ads/trackers and when something breaks it's up to the user to figure out what to whitelist"-approach ..
>
> This list prioritizes functionality over blocking.
>
> Thís is the list to use at home, at work or at your (grand-)parents place.
> Users report it "passes the girlfriend-test" ;)
I used to run more strict lists and then whitelist domains or temporarily disable blocking, but I have to say I switched to oisd only and now I'm seeing maybe 0.5% more ads without having to go through that hassle, which is a fine compromise for me.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/more-than-1000-android-apps...
Similarly, their TVs are known as probably the single most obnoxious devices on the market right now, and are always in the news for finding some new and obnoxious way to push more ads or more intrusive ways to spy on you in general.
Everyone always asks this about Apple but really it's never seemed more relevant than with Samsung: why are you purchasing hardware from a company that very very obviously does not respect you as a customer? Aren't there any other android vendors you could patronize instead?
(to be fair, if you aren't interested in budget hardware, and you won't buy a chinese phone, I suppose that list isn't all that long. you have... google and sony, I guess?)
This is the only way to fix the ecosystem.
(Although the best solution would probably be to ditch Samsung crap)
Another way how to block ads on data is using OpenVPN to connect data through you home router that has ad-blocking. But it is limited by upload speed of home network connection and battery drain of your smartphone is worse with active OpenVPN.
There are alternatives, but most other solutions will end up costing more in electricity costs. Especially problematic in say Europe right now.
I also hear great things about TailScale, will also try that (soon I'll be "forced" off my fiber/fixed-ip connection).
Even though the name implies you need to run it on a raspberry pi, that's not true.
I'm out of the loop, is there a rpi shortage?
Chips in general are still experiencing supply chain issues too, so this is unlikely to change.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/production-and-supply-chain...
I also use PiHole from a docker container on the same server that's running wireguard.
The position is usually something along the lines of:
- They ignore the incredibly invasive tracking/profiling/security risks involved with downloading and running malicious third-party unvetted ad code
- It's stealing if you block ads
- Micropayments/subscriptions just don't work well enough
It is better than nothing but a world apart from a proper ad blocker and more or less insufficient for modern adtech.
It's easy to use when most OS can have default DNS over DoT/H that can also block non browser apps or even OS itself from connecting to tracking domains.
Chromium based browsers seem to ignore OS default DNS servers unless instructed to use the system default.
When that day comes, I'll be very tempted to have a crack at modding it myself, if nothing else springs up to replace it.
Why would I want to disable DNS filtering? What advantage does that give?
UBo is great but does use a small amount of CPU whereas DNS filtering won't use any on my phone - its all on the DNS server. I'd rather filter out as much as possible with DNS filtering and then clean it up with UBo cosmetic filtering and more precise blocking.
Not only that but with SponsorBlock (integrated in Vanced) you can even automatically skip promotional parts of the videos, intros, outros. The experience is excellent.
[0] https://backstage.1blocker.com/how-to-block-youtube-ads-in-s...
You can remove quite a lot of laptop and still keep a working machine (all you need is the power supply and the motherboard, really) but there's no quick and easy way to do it, you'd have to design a custom case and everything. You'd also need a laptop that will just power on without keyboard, screen, and other peripherals connected, which is not necessarily a given.
Maybe if someone designs a modular enough 3D printed case design for common laptop motherboards so that you can create your own laptop server easily. In a few years, when USB C is available in cheap, old, second-hand laptops, I imagine you can build quite the home lab cluster with old laptop motherboards if you can design decent cases for them.
The hosts make money through ads, the content creators don't. We could have donation-funded versions of these just like we have Wikipedia.
print books were published by publishers who sell physical copies and run ads, tours and stuff.
yet pretty much every modern published book (within reason) is freely available to any person who is able to get a library card. similarly those people could use the computers to access archive.org and browse all online content.
how is that not free?
i'm not even going to get into equivocating "reddit" and "best information on the internet"
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/saf...
But I also ave Traefik in the same docker-compose file for DNS and certs :) (currently still wrestling with the ports and certs for stuff within my lan though.)
1. Root your phone 2. Install Adaway and update hosts 3. Unroot your phone.
It just takes a system restart to unroot. Then all banking apps work fine. If I need root again, I can just flash Magisc zip file again. Easy enough.
But nowadays just setting up adguard's DNS in Android's private DNS settings is enough to get Adaway like effect without root.
Just walk up to the counter and say "I'll have number whatever"
There should be nothing wrong with just bring good at what you do and not seeking endless expansion (and yes, I know, it's actually dangerous because you're vulnerable to predation in that position).
On the contrary, a lot of (offline) companies are deciding that diversification is bad and they should divest everything outside of one core business. Be it ThyssenKrupp, Alsthom, Bombardier, GE, Phillips, take your pick.
However many web companies choose to diversify. Why not? It helps them retain and gain users, and protects them against heavy hitting competitors (FAANG can copy your business model and features quite quick). E.g. take someone like Snapchat - their features were copied by competitors and they had no differentiator, so they floundered. A Telegram or Signal was little differentiation bar potential diversification, which is why both tried some crypto crap.
It baffles me that Mozilla had/has multiple offices located in some of the most expensive real estate markets in the world. Not just in those markets, but in the very-most expensive parts of said markets.
For example, in Boston they're dead center downtown, for no explicable reason other than the prestige.
It feels like a kid who received 5 games for Christmas and doesn't know what to do.
At least when one signs up for e.g. Hulu you're forced to realize different rates include different things. With Windows most don't even realize they had a choice.
It does lead to the question why people are fine buying a PC then having ads but again I'm not sure many really understand (or necessarily care) about the difference between ads in the start menu or ads in something like the browser, it's all just "the computer" and ads have just always been a part of a computer for most so what's to make them expect otherwise.
Good luck replacing the web with request/response markdown. I would figure at the least something that could serve Wikipedia would be a bare minimum.
That said this case isn't much of a moral mystery. YouTube offers a reasonable paid plan, most people just prefer ads.
First being that there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism so that makes things difficult.
Second, “voting with your wallet” is pointless, you’re much better off voting with your votes and ad blockers if you want to see real change. If anything by your logic buying YouTube Premium is worse ethically since you’re directly supporting a company that makes money on unethical ads. Giving them more money won’t make ads go away.
And to that, third, demanding self-flagellation to prove that one is sincere in their beliefs is puritanical nonsense. You are absolutely allowed to both buy Nike shoes and fight for legislation that forbids them from treating their factory workers poorly.
I'm not quite sure I follow how opting for the business model one doesn't find unethical is supporting unethical business models. It may not be attacking the business model they find unethical but that's a different claim. Unless of course we allow any connection with a service to taint the entire lot in which case I can again see how someone with those views would have problems with pretty much any service anywhere.
As for the conversation on shoes when you have a basic need sure, don't let people's ability to source needs get in the way of people bettering their working conditions. After all they don't really have a choice in forgoing either. That's not really relevant to people's desires to consume entertainment services though. Particularly when people are given their own agency on deciding what is the right way to fund it already or even to be able to not consume the want should there be nowhere to do so. In the end it may come down to whether you think it should be alright for people to operate on different morals than you so long as their choice is mostly limited to impacting them or if there is only one true set of morals everyone must be forced to follow by law.
RPi 3B+ has sometimes problem with stability because of higher power consumption.
Official power supply of RPi is 2,6A if I remember correctly, so 3,5 is not even possible?
Btw, many routers support sleep mode. It is not necessary to run router/connected RPi 24/7.
At 300mA, that's 1.5W of power.
Maximum current draw on a pi4 is 3A (~15W), but that's purely a power supply input limitation. You only get close to that with a ton of peripherals and heavy load on the Pi.
Also, physical properties are heavily regulated partially because there is a limited amount of physical space for them.
Regarding regulation, physical spade is definitely one part of it. But the public is also generally against nuisances, including too many advertisements. It’s an imperfect analogy, but not too far off.
If one is unwilling to pay for a service but still use it one needs to realize some other form of monetization will be required.
YouTube is getting more heavy-handed as time goes on, but one reason for this is that they were operating at a loss for so long, and in doing so provided extra utility that we might take for granted.
GP comment mentioned Netflix, but that is in fact a good example of what I mean. They started to struggle because competitors moved into the space. Unlike YouTube, they did not have an unassailable position. Unlike Spotify, they did not have a market that allowed sharing catalogues across platforms.
In a sense, what we interpreted as Netflix showing a viable business model was rather Netflix showing early mover advantage on borrowed time. Having an ecosystem with multiple mediocre services such as what streaming is becoming now would not necessarily have been in the advantage of videographers if it had happened to video-sharing platforms. It would almost certainly have lead to a smaller and less engaged overall audience.
1Blocker/AdGuard/etc use two mechanisms:
1) declarative blocking - where you can specify rules to allow/deny requests matching a certain pattern. Those rules need to be declared in advance, you can't do matching at runtime using custom code.
2) they inject a bit of JS into the page to try and tamper with malicious scripts that can't be touched by the declarative blocking. This is error-prone and potentially slow, and is not guaranteed to be bulletproof as the injected code runs with the same privileges as the malicious code. I could see potential race conditions where the malicious code manages to run and exfiltrate sensitive data before the blocking code has a chance of defusing it.
The second approach is a horrible hack that only exists because extensions no longer have full control over the browser's networking, under the excuse of "security".
> Granted this might be different from ads that do just make you aware of a product. But this reasoning is looking more and more like justification rather than purpose.
I have no problem with promoting a product, as long as it takes into account basic human empathy. But I guess if your bank account is directly correlated with product sales, you kind of forget about that.
My original comment was arguing that even if a lot of advertising today is bad, that doesn’t mean we should get rid of all advertising. I don’t understand what your response has to do with that. Were you just agreeing with me?
There's Nebula for some creators and Patreon for others, but not everyone has an ad free way to watch them. Also Patreon can really begin to add up.
And yeah there's that extension that can skip sponsored segments but that's blocking ads, not paying to avoid them.
Also, while not an ad blocker, Hush helps reclaim a bit of sanity regarding all these nagging GRPR/cookies "privacy" popups.
From what I know, it never will as long as Apple only allows shitty request inspection with allow/deny result. It just cannot work nowhere near as well as uBlock Origin.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/saf...
Adguard’s blocking is quite potent I.e. YouTube ads don’t play
Basically at a high level it's like what DNT should have been i.e "as a default don't track me since I'm not giving consent"
Can you imagine ATT or Amazon or whatever company website as a slightly fancier markdown file?
The only people that would do it are blogger types.
People don't browse, they app.
On Android you can simply install an alternate YT client, boom, job's done. Works on Android TV also.
On iOS, the content blocker lists in Safari can block YT ads, but there's no way to block them in Google's YouTube app unless you jailbreak and install a modified app. So just watch YT in Safari.
It's worth it to avoid all the bullshit blogspam, even without the ATK rating and reviews (which are super useful on their own as well).
Update: On first impression that does not seem to have worked.
I also find it annoying that I lose access to my entire Firefox ecosystem on my computer and phone since the focus of the app is actually on anonymous browsing versus blocking ads. If I send tabs to my iPad they still open up in regular Firefox. Firefox Focus only slightly makes the web useable, while giving up most of the browser conveniences.
Can you give an example of a website that breaks with an adblocker? (Please describe what breaks as well. Otherwise I might not notice it.)
Now that I think about it, if a site wants people to disable adblocking, they should make valid contents disappear instead of begging for it with a popup.
Vangaurd's login page doesn't work with adblock (completely doesn't show it)
Don't have other examples off top of my head
For the ones you mentioned, Vanguard seems to have a lot of different login pages, but every one I found actually rendered - although some were white for so slow I wondered if they would fail. But not trying Uhaul because obviously I don't want to make a transaction.
All the big names quietly or publicly abandoned their efforts to fully migrate to React Native, focusing only on the most simple use-cases/views if they do keep it around. Even with the smartest people working on it, it's tough to keep React Native performant.
It's just that most apps people use are pretty much the same as their respective websites. All of FAAMG's websites work as perfectly fine replacement to the apps, even better, IMHO, when you get rid of the ads apparatus.
Enable the uBlock "annoyances" filters to staunch the tide of popups.
You are right about all the rest.
You don't /need/ them if you only have essential cookies:
> At GitHub, we want to protect developer privacy, and we find cookie banners quite irritating, so we decided to look for a solution. After a brief search, we found one: just don’t use any non-essential cookies. Pretty simple, really.
"only"? No, they are here because you use non-essential cookies AND regulation says you must ask visitors about them.
There is no need for pop ups under the gdpr. If you are handling personal information, giving cookies etc which aren’t required (E.g to sign in), then ask at the point of signing in/up. Otherwise you don’t need to set cookies, you might want to, to track and monetise your visitors, but that’s different.
There are many cases where what publications consider "essential" for their business do not match what the EU has decided is "essential".
Heck, when GDPR was first proposed most publishers assumed advertising would be allowed under "essential" business uses since they can't provide content if they don't get paid. Clarification on this only came a couple of months before GDPR enforcement started, causing a bit of a scramble for publishers and advertisers.
EU Directive 2009/136/EC
Tracking cookies are not mandatory. You are not obligated to present cookie banner: you can simply drop nonessential cookies.
I believe they are a protest by largely US-owned companies against regulation, designed to annoy internet users and turn them against regulation.
Even if this is true, it's something that should have been expected by EU legislators. Their beliefs seem to be that companies are acting in bad faith by secretly tracking users and misusing the information that they gather (basically true), and also that if they impose vague rules that companies need to get consent for tracking then they'll act in good faith and give users clear and convenient ways of opting out (ha ha ha).
You can't skip the sponsored segment if literally 100% of the video has HelloFresh boxes in the background, or if an important part of the video happens while the creator coincidentally eats a bowl of Keto cereal.
Or what about those LinusTechTip videos where Intel gives them $5k to build a dream system for an employee (Intel based, of course). I find those entertaining but they're really just 20 minute long Intel advertisements.
Videos don't have nipples around, or else they would get flagged, right? Do the same for unmarked ads. This is of course a handwavy way to propose a solution... the idea is that something could be done to improve the ad-free experience of viewers who pay. Otherwise, they'd better remain using the latest published version of Vanced, which even integrated SponsorBlock (again, pirates offering a better user experience!)
I have a little-used gmail account that I registered a few years ago, as my original gmail became completely overrun with spam and I switched to Fastmail.
I added a credit card to the account and tried to pay for Youtube Premium and was immediately flagged for suspicious activity. To reactivate my account, Google wants me to verify my identity with photos of goverment ID and a full KYC-style form.
No thanks. I signed up for https://nebula.app/ instead - they were able to process my payment on the first attempt.
A potential problem they're trying to prevent might be where money launderers use google accounts to funnel YT Premium money to specific channels via watch time (since Premium pays out a lot more, and pay per minute watched[0]).
It applies to the legislatures of member states, which I believe doesn't yet include the USA.
Perhaps the clause you are thinking of is this one:
"(33) Customers should be informed of their rights with respect to the use of their personal information in subscriber directories and in particular of the purpose or purposes of such directories, as well as their right, free of charge, not to be included in a public subscriber directory, as provided for in Directive 2002/58/EC"
That directive doesn't call for a mist of popups to flash before your eyes before you can read content. It could easily be satisfied by a menu option that allows you to set your preferences. The mist of popups is caused by a bunch of angry data traders who don't care how much they annoy their users.
Incidentally, citing a directive from 2009 is a bit anachronistic: that directive is overridden by the GDPR.
If you want to track unique users, well, you're not supposed to unless the users opt in (not avoid opting out!), and you have to accept that at least a part won't - the society and law has decided such desires are not legitimate unless the data subjects themselves want that.
Those are legitimate cookies for which you don’t need to ask an authorization.
> How are you supposed to count unique users that visit your site?
https://plausible.io/blog/google-analytics-cookies#how-can-p...
> These are legitimate questions a publisher may want to know to improve their site, but are not allowed under GDPR without a specific notice and opt-out.
Why would the publisher’s questions be legitimate and the user’s right not to be tracked no? You can still answer those questions but you need to ask for permission. A physical store owner has also a lot of questions but they’re not allowed to follow you everywhere in the store and in the street.
> Heck, when GDPR was first proposed most publishers assumed advertising would be allowed under "essential" business uses since they can't provide content if they don't get paid.
That’s a really weird reasoning. Should drug dealers be exempted from police controls because their activity is essential for their income and so for their life? Earning money is necessary, but there are multiple ways to do so.
You're not supposed to A/B test at all. Users are not test subjects.
> How are you supposed to count unique users that visit your site? How are you supposed to figure out why most users bounce?
You're not supposed to. You simply aren't entitled to any of that information.
> These are legitimate questions a publisher may want to know to improve their site
It doesn't matter how "legitimate" it is or how much money it costs publishers. The attempt to learn these facts requires collecting identifying information and that is harmful to us.
The least you can do is ask permission.
> There are many cases where what publications consider "essential" for their business do not match what the EU has decided is "essential".
That's by design. Nobody really cares what an industry that's being regulated thinks. Obviously adtech considers it "essential" to collect as much personal data as humanly possible.
What matters is what society thinks and we think sites work just fine with all the tracking disabled.
> publishers assumed advertising would be allowed under "essential" business uses
Advertising is allowed. It's just the abusive adtech model of targeted advertising that requires consent. Nothing stops people from signing a deal with some brand and serving static images or something. As long as it's not surveillance capitalism it's fine.
If I look at the changes implemented by local telecommunications companies, local banks, local supermarket loyalty programs, local pizza delivery chains, local real estate brokers, etc - these types of businesses had all kinds of widespread shenanigans before GDPR, but now they overwhelmingly have acted in good faith, and have given users clear and convenient ways of opting out (because, really, they didn't have a choice). Like, we don't see EU phone carriers selling location data to advertisers the way they do in USA - now that is a significant thing compared to some blog putting on a cookie.
For most companies, the transition has happened reasonably well - it's just that a few (but large and highly visible) global companies are holding out because of political reasons preventing enforcement - mostly stemming the fact that Ireland's DPA is currently permitted to unilaterally shield them from the rest of EU and has motivation to do it because it's financially beneficial for Ireland to have Facebook/Google/etc have their EU domicile be in Ireland.
It has been - the regulation explicitly outlaws such malicious pseudo-compliance. The problem is that GDPR enforcement has been severely lacking, so malicious actors are allowed to run free.
Which makes Firefox the obviously better mobile browser, Chrome seems like a pretty strong case of defaults' power. Tho gotta add the "Google Search Fixer" select addon because they sure doesn't want you to get summary cards, financial charts and other goodies if you use a competitor browser.
Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and co without the ads circus. Duolingo without daily activity limit for some reason.
[0] https://github.com/mozilla/readability/#isprobablyreaderable...
If I have to wait for all the ads and banners and fonts to load anyway, most of the benefits of reader mode are removed.
“Most people” don’t have a clue what any of those things are.
The only non-tech people I know who have any of what you mentioned only have it because I installed it for them.
> Most people who use anything for iOS tend to use
OP cited U-Block Origin and Firefox, so I’m replying to them as a persona, the sort of person that would use something, with things that can help them.
The broader point is to share a clue.
The key thing that most people in tech don't appear to grok very easily is that the overwhelming majority of web services like search engines, social media, ad-driven news websites, etc are all things that users place practically zero value on. People accept ads because they're a way of paying for things without really thinking about it. If you start asking users for actual money they suddenly decide that all these services represent no value and they'll live without them.
The end of online advertising is an existential threat for a massive part of the tech industry. If that cash cow ends there would be a huge reduction in money for devs, and a massive flood of devs on to the market. Economics 101 should tell you how bad that would be for most HN readers.
Maybe we should ask users for money because the alternative has become some kafkaesque hellscape where people think it's totally normal to have a dozen ad trackers when attempting to buy shoes. These trackers have an enormous costs and maybe their externalities should be taxed and regulated.
Maybe by the end of the century we will slowly realize that online advertising is the "lead" paint that was rightfully eradicated.
Imagine a world where the only content that survives is the one that people value enough to pay for.
What a wonderful catastrophic disruptive event that would be. Imagine no more SEO spam which are essentially devoid of information. These which are already so plentiful and sophisticated that they are threatening the core value of online search. No more vacuous blogspam, low-quality trash "newspapers" that only survive because they trick people into giving them a few morsels of attention.
Imagine a human-curated web.
Somewhere, somebody is saying, "Maybe we shouldn't sell drugs to children?" And somebody else is saying, "Won't somebody think of the wages for chemists?"
One leads to the other easily. For example taking advertising money for television commercials or magazine adds leads to "Native Ads". Native ads are sort of like product placement except that it's pretending to be a news story or whatever.
Like when people on CNBC or CNN start talking about Taco Bell menu items or new type of drug that might fight cholesterol. That's paid-for propaganda that is pretending to be television news.
Pretty soon you have a entire industry based on not telling the truth about drugs or food or other products they buy because that will piss off their advertisers.
This is the basis of the modern web. It's not a good thing even though it makes a lot of people a lot of money.
That's as may be, but little of value would be lost IMHO.
Well, except by those supporting (in a myriad of ways) the cesspit of advertising online and elsewhere.
I'm sure many will disagree with my assessment, but advertising as it's done today is invasive, obnoxious and alarmingly ubiquitous.
I'm not sure what a better model is, but this is not the way.
N.B: Advertising paid for my food, clothing, housing, etc. for the first 18 years of my life. And a couple years later for another five years as well.
> If you start asking users for actual money they suddenly decide that all these services represent no value and they'll live without them.
So what you're saying is if we use ad blocking technology to kill off the advertising business model, we can also kill off social media and its addictive algorithms, clickbaiting sites that generate and monetize outrage and numerous other cancers on society that the advertisers enable.
Ad blocking is now a moral imperative.
Ads are keeping the whole IT industry as a hostage. Even Startpage, the last ad-free search engine I used to use (and one of the oldest on the market), has recently been purchased by an ads company. They've put their filthy hands everywhere, innovation today only happens if it benefits ads revenue, and most of the bleeding edge innovation in AI comes to solve the problem "how can I maximize the odds that users will click on an ad I put in front of their eyes?". What's worse, a lot of development time nowadays is spent either to develop new ways to block ads, or new ways to evade those blockers, instead of focusing engineering resources on things that are actually useful to society.
Ads are a curse to the industry and they have to die. And I really don't give a fuck if it will cause developer wages to go down. They'll go down only in companies that have relied only on ads and data surveillance to build their revenue, and I've always stayed away from those. Developers will have a chance of moving to companies that can pay them better and have more sustainable business models, once Google and Facebook will no longer be the coolest kids in town. Two decades down the line, and not only we haven't yet figured out a better way to make money through the Web, but the ads industry HAS BECOME the Web. We need a fucking reboot and we need it now.
At some point people will start to understand that they need to either pay for services, or host them themselves, and maybe they'll be more selective on what they use and who they send their data to. If I want service A, I pay for service A (like things work in every other industry), or I run it on my own server. I don't rely on someone who allegedly provides me service A for free, just to scoop out as much data about me as possible and resell it to opaque 3rd-parties so they can place more targeted ads in front of my eyes that I'm more likely to click. How the hell did we end up so tangled up in this grotesque and creepy shit that now we are unable even of conceiving an IT industry that doesn't rely on ads?
If the ad-supported model fell apart, people would eventual change their understanding of the value of those services. They'd probably pay a decent amount for it.
But its a race to the bottom since someone will always offer ad-supported. It'll take an outside force (like ad-blocks by default or bans by governments) to actually kill off the ad-supported industry.
Good. Things would be rough for many of us here but it is the better outcome for wider humanity. Advertising and adtech normalise abusive psychological manipulation.
I wonder if that’s the truth or if it’s this way because there are free alternatives.
If one search engine starts charging a monthly fee, users will just go to another one that pays for itself with ads and data.
But if the prevalent model for search engines is monthly subscription, then people will start paying for it and the value for the user won’t be 0 anymore.
Why would you pay for ice cream from the ice cream stand if you can get it for free next door for the “cost” of them keeping track of how often you come to the stand and what flavors you like, and selling that info to others?
I think there's chicken and egg problem here -- users aren't going to use micropayments until there's a widely used micropayments platform that is also privacy protecting. I have no desire in using a micropayments platform that's really a cross-platform analytics engine that's even more invasive than Google since they can positively identify me through my payment method.
I have no problem paying for content, but don't want to pay through intrusive ad views, and don't to use a micropayments platform that tracks all of my browsing throughout the web.
Well, the problem is that there are no rules, morals, or code of conduit telling when it's too much, except for users leaving. In theory. However, unfortunately, most users adapt very easily to being thrown at their face more and more advertising every day, so we can't count on them. Just look at what advertising became since the late 90s until today: the number of ads and wasted bandwidth/storage/cpu cycles employed to send and show them grows every damn day, why should I think it's going to stop? For a while we thought that flashing banners were the root of all evil, but what about short articles ridiculously split in multiple pages so that they can show more ads at each 5 sentences ..er.. page change? Or articles altered (possibly by AI) so that they use like 3 times the necessary words so they become longer and can be split like the above? Or unskippable ads during videos, user profiling that is becoming so dangerously close to digital surveillance, etc. Just no thanks.
I wouldn't mind opening my adblockers if sites kept advertising to a reasonable minimum in which I can get some information about where to purchase a product I'm interested in: actually I want good non invasive advertising, but every time I tried to do that I quickly had to get back in disgust and set them tight closed again for almost all sites, save for the very few ones that still do the right thing: what once was a short blacklist transitioned over time to a nearly empty whitelist.
I have no trust in the system anymore. Until the day there are well defined and enforced rules, it will always keep choosing what brings more profits, that is, more and more advertising. Not holding my breath for that day.
Also, I think the current economic system would need some heavy modifications to adapt it to micropayments on a large scale for every service one could access to. What would be the expenses of a micropayments system that, say, charged one cent for daily usage of every now free or ad supported service out there? (Google, blogs, social media, etc). I mean, that would produce a huge number of extremely low value transactions; are we sure it wouldn't cost more than the profits it should produce?
Then why did we build them? This seems like a massive waste of effort.
Please cite sources backing up your original claim.
There was a short period where it seemed like it would happen - context aware ads, links and affiliate products, each page was served different ads or none at all, with no privacy stuff it could also be very effetive.
Alas general ads won, and they do make more money for the platforms since they can show the same ads for stuff you have already bought/installed.
You say that like it's a bad thing. If an industry relies on the abuse of their "customers" for survival, that industry needs to go.
Or, more likely, change their business model to be less abusive.
Google et al in adspace winning is mankind losing. Not hugely, but its clearly there. But the amount of mental gymnastics elite devs have to go through every day to keep feeling OK about their jobs just because of huge paycheck or working on 'cool' problems' is staggering (ignoring how screwing fellow human beings isn't cool in any way for now).
A little sidenote - not an expert on psychology, but it seems to me practically every human being, including psychopathic mass murderers have this desperate desire to feel OK with their actions, the need to justify them so they are at peace with themselves. If I kill, I follow the word of god. If I burn jews and minorities alive in concentration camps, I am just following orders and doing it for greater good of my nation. If I work in amoral company, 1 man doesn't matter anyway, there are tons of others that would happily pick up the job, and look at what open source and cool free apps we give to the world for this little cost of privacy and annoyment. Or I just do it so my kids have better starting position, I am great parent and that s above anything else. Whatever the mental tool, always aiming for the same destination.
Unable to profit from online advertising, what do "tech" companies do next. Are there any other commercial uses for surveillance and data collection.
But OP was talking about U-Block Origin so they’re not in that 95%.
Customized adblocking DNS servers?
This is definitely striking me as one of those "why didn't I think of that" and "why don't we already have a lot of this?" Any ideas? Seems like you could go wild with this and do something like "Tor"ify, or "torrentify" or dare I say "blockchain" it?
Someone can probably school me on why this is harder than it sounds.
This reads like a hint at AdBlock Plus, not uBlock. Or did I miss some controversy there?
GP’s comment was asking about normal people who browse the internet without adblockers on any device.
Citation needed.
You probably meant "Most people I know".
What I'm talking about is publicly usable adblocking DNS servers. As in instead of me at home having to install anything, just (probably clear a cache or something) and change all my DNS servers to a public reachable-by-anyone DNS server. No installation.
They do also have their own paid DNS service, but I haven't attempted to use it. Might be a way to deal with mobile better.
I would not pay $0.50 for any walled garden social media account; I don't even have any with them being free. They are just too intrusive and too limited.
Far more likely ISPs will start providing search engines included in the cost of that service. Old ISPs like AOL and CompuServe did this in the past. Social media will never be something people have to pay for because we've already seen that people will create their own forums for free so we'd just go back to that. Hell, back in the day people paid for additional phone lines and hardware to host their own BBS which users accessed for free and that cost the sysop a hell of a lot more than webhosting these days.
Or that the creators value enough to create for free.
The OG Yahoo! was ahead of its time?
Your business problems aren't our concern. If you're financing your business by stealing personal information from users and selling it to data brokers, then you're a crook. Crooks tend to have high hosting expenses.
The only website that you know I use is this one. Are you saying that you run HN? I do not think you are that person.
If that's not the site you're referring to, I'm rather curious to know what site it is that you run, that's had 100m users since 2004(!), that can correlate a site user with this HN user. Will you tell, please?
And yes, your expenses aren't our problem. Don't run a website if you can't pay for it.
I don't have much sympathy for your predicament. Perhaps the market has a better use for your hosting facility than pumping out ads and tracking scripts.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/targeted-ads-offer-little-...
The ad networks get a lot more for tracking based ads, and the advertisers supposedly get more conversions (though targeting fraud is a real, well-documented thing).
If following the requirements of society makes your business unprofitable, too bad, having a business is optional, following the requirements of society is not.
Correct. I've only run a handful of websites in my life, but not one of them has ever served ads.
She wouldn't mind losing her job if it meant that income taxes went away.
You do need a reasonable upload speed to do this, though. Otherwise I guess you could use an "always free" VM at Oracle or something.
And when people _are_ shopping around, they search for things like "best vpn providers 2022" and then go to that article and look at the breakdown. People don't click on B unless they're already sold on it, and search placement just isn't doing it for people anymore because the ad results have just been so bad for so long all trust is gone.
The modern populace has become completely innoculated against the effectiveness of search ads imo. Most people don't even see those results they have mental blinders and scroll down a bit.
The point is that advertising won't end until the formula of additional_ad_driven_revenue > ad_costs becomes false. And we're a long ways away from that given how inordinately expensive advertising is relative to the costs incurred by the companies selling the advertising. And each time that equilibrium price goes lower, the potential market of advertisers who may purchase ads grows.
This logic suggests that, if anything, advertising will get even worse as ad revenues decline. Go low enough and we'll be right back to square one with Google Ads promoting big dick pills and viagra. That's to say nothing of the fact that as revenues decline, both Google and advertisers will be looking for ever more insidious and forceful ways to make you watch and make you consume. Imagine, for instance, the countless dystopias things like Google Nest could enable - if such products ever managed to gain widespread adoption.
Which coincidentally a number of VPN "review" sites were purchased and the lists "updated" to recommend a certain owner that I'm fairly certain at this point is a honeypot.
https://restoreprivacy.com/kape-technologies-owns-expressvpn...
https://www.techradar.com/news/pc-mag-owner-j2-global-buys-s...
Kape Technologies was formerly known as Crossrider before it was acquired by Teddy Sagi, an Israeli billionaire that has spent time in jail for insider trading. Crossrider itself never had that great a reputation itself, what with their primary product being a development platform through which they were frequently used by third parties to invade ad platforms to serve up malware.
The reports an dynamic modifications to rule sets are a big advantage of pi hole. Sure, you can do it with dnsmasq conf files and logs, but the web UI has a lot of niceties.
https://hub.docker.com/r/pihole/pihole/
I used synology's docker app. I had to enter the port numbers into their web GUI manually.
I run a PiHole in the cloud so I can PiHole my phone without exposing my home network at all.
EDIT: On my phone, I do use Firefox with uBlock Origin, but the PiHole blocks ads that aren't in the browser, or use an app's browser view.