10 ms·

Show HN: Let's encourage ad blocking

92 points by k1m 11y ago

rahimnathwani 11y ago
I visited the site from an iOS device with Purify installed and enabled for 'Ads and Tracking'. The site told me It didn't detect an ad blocker.
- k1m 11y ago
  Thanks for the report. I can't find the filter list for Purify, but I think it's the same developer who took over uBlock (not Origin). We're relying on a rule in the Easy List filter set which blocks loading of anything called ads.css. Perhaps this rule does not exist in Purify. I'll make a note to test. If anyone knows the filters Purify uses, I'd love to take a look. We also test for 'acceptable' ads getting through based on a rule in Adblock Plus, and warn against it.
ricardolopes 11y ago
I'm simply using Ghostery to block any ad trackers and other scripts. Which this site tells me it's apparently not enough.
- k1m 11y ago
  Thanks. We'll test Ghostery and try to fix this.
  - jboynyc 11y ago
    While you're at it, it doesn't appear to work with Disconnect.me either.
    - k1m 11y ago
      Thanks, will take a look at that too. Pretty sure they publish their filter lists, so should be easy to make sure it's covered.
  - clort 11y ago
    Perhaps the same here - ghostery, noscript and adblockplus installed, and the page says no ad blocking detected! Actually, I'm hoping that this is a success rather than a failure because the next phase of anti-ad blocking is them needing to detect that I'm blocking ads. I, however, don't really want them to be able to detect that..
    - k1m 11y ago
      Hmmm, are you by any chance using a filter list other than Easy List in adblockplus?
      - clort 11y ago
        Yes, I don't have EasyList ticked
IvanK_net 11y ago
There are no good adblockers today. Most of current "adblockers" remove DIV element just because it has id="ad", without analyzing if there is any advertisement inside it. Simply stupid. And since many "adblockers" are not open-source, you never know what it is doing. Software may perform censorship of the world wide web, depending on what investors tell the programmers to do. Imagine the investor is Apple. They can make adblocker remove the the results containing "android" from your google search. I think such scenario is quite possible in the future, if users blindly trust "adblockers".
- mtrn 11y ago
  They might not be perfect, but my uBlock says 611,492 or 8% blocked requests, which still helps.
  - majewsky 11y ago
    What uBlock displays is merely a lower bound. Many ad scripts, when loaded, will make further requests. But with uBlock, they're never loaded, so uBlock can't count the requests that were never tried.
- k1m 11y ago
  Does happen, but not such a big problem for me. I'd argue that developers/designers should be testing with ad blockers enabled.
  - Jgrubb 11y ago
    Unless you work for a site that's ad supported, then it's the other way around unfortunately.
- r3bl 11y ago
  > And since many "adblockers" are not open-source, you never know what it is doing. Hmm, not entirely sure about this. * Adblock Plus: https://adblockplus.org/en/contribute-code https://adblockplus.org/en/contribute-code * uBlock: https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/ublock https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/ublock * Adblock (the original one, without the "Plus"): http://code.getadblock.com/ http://code.getadblock.com/ I could go on and on, but I would argue that these three are the most popular ones.
MindTooth 11y ago
Any approved blocker for iOS yet?
Coding_Cat 11y ago
I visited it on Firefox mobile and it correctly detected that I didn't have adblock (as I tend to only read HN and technical blogs on my phone), but the link send me to uBlock Origin's Github page. While uBlock is a nice blocker, if the goal is to encourage adblocking I think it would be better to directly link to the extension for whichever browser is being used as I do not think there is much overlap between "Knows how to use Github" and "Doesn't know what an adblocker is".
- k1m 11y ago
  Absolutely. Just wanted to get some feedback on this in its current state. Agree that it should detect user's browser/device and suggest an appropriate blocker. I wish uBlock Origin had a nice install page I could point to that would do that kind of detection itself. All I could find at this point was the Github page.
  - a_imho 11y ago
    >> it should detect user's browser/device For me it would just take away from the service, if you want to detect what I'm running, you are only a little better than advertisers. I understand, it is for the 'greater good' from your pov, but this way the means impairs the cause.
    - k1m 11y ago
      Are you serious? Basic browser/device detection to suggest a suitable ad blocker is not really the same as the tracking carried out by big ad networks. I don't see the similarity to be honest.
      - a_imho 11y ago
        I'm very serious [1]. It is not at all basic for me. I can't find the discussion from a couple of days earlier, but afair it basically said wsj let the google crawler indexing their articles, while simultaneously blocking users by detecting their device. http://blog.erratasec.com/2012/11/you-are-committing-crime-right-now.html http://blog.erratasec.com/2012/11/you-are-committing-crime-r...
Kiro 11y ago
The "Why?" text didn't convince me at all, so... why? I'm serious. I don't mind ads and I don't mind being tracked. On the contrary I've found interesting products on banners, mostly due to retargeting. Since this site's purpose is to encourage people not using adblock to use it I don't think "don't use it then" is sufficient here.
- adrianN 11y ago
  Ad networks have been known to distribute malware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising#History.5B10.5D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising#History.5B10.5D
  - tobltobs 11y ago
    Websites have been known to distribute malware.
    - majewsky 11y ago
      True, but hacking an ad network to distribute malware has a much better Return On Investment since it will distribute your malware from potentially thousands of websites, instead of just one. The same reason why exploits for Windows and Windows software are more common than for other desktop operating systems.
    - parenthephobia 11y ago
      When I visit cnn.com without ad-blocking, I receive content from 41 different domains: with ad-blocking it's 7. So without ad-blocking I am putting my faith in the operators of 7 domains that none of their servers have been compromised to serve up malware. Most of those domains don't operate as a service that intentionally lets fourth-parties serve up arbitrary content. With ad-blocking I have to trust that 41 domains, some of which will be serving up fourth-party content without curation, will not serve up malware. I don't even know ahead of time whose servers I'll be visiting, so I can't try to estimate how much risk I'm exposed to.
      - 11y ago
a_imho 11y ago
Similar discussion from a day ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11215801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11215801 Encouraging adblocking is harmful and discriminating against advertisers. A more appropriate term is content blocking. Indeed, why not to see some static ads and just disable tracking?
- lentil_soup 11y ago
  I don't get the "harmful and discriminating against advertisers" part. Advertisers are forcing me to pay attention to something I don't want or need to pay attention to, why do I have to cater for them?
  - a_imho 11y ago
    I feel you have to be politically correct about these things, because there might be ground for a lawsuit based on the loss of advertisers. It might sound stupid, but that is definitely something I could imagine they come up with.
    - majewsky 11y ago
      Good thing I'm not in the US. :)
- zdkl 11y ago
  Because they didn't give me the option. Seriously I'd like to be as diplomat as you, but they've taken obnoxious and shady so far my reaction to ads is now 'default deny'. And I'll lose no sleep discriminating against the advertisers.
- marssaxman 11y ago
  Because I don't want to see static ads either? Being harmful to and discriminating against advertisers is kind of the point. Why should I put up with their harassment? It's my computer, I'll do what I want with it, and if that includes refusing to download and display a bunch of crap some advertiser wishes they could trick me into viewing, well, it's my choice to refuse to download that crap.
agopaul 11y ago
I don't get it. A big part of the web is paid by ads. Lots of websites rely on (non-invasive) ads to sustain themselves and provide content to anyone for free. It's safe to say that the whole web sustains on ads (think about google, FB). I know that sometimes there are too many ads on certain web pages, but that is no excuse to ban them all. Yes, ads are also used to distribute malware but, come on, it's 2016 and you should have uninstalled both Flash and the Java plugin in your browser a while ago.
- Touche 11y ago
  It's mostly about tracking for me.
- a_imho 11y ago
  Flash is a red herring here. Yes, we argue about the too many. And for lots of people that is 1. I pretty much feel this movement is just a reaction to a very nasty practice, and every advertising company deserves what it gets. Ad supported != free, sorry and Google and FB != the whole web.
  - agopaul 11y ago
    I'll admit that "the whole web" was an exaggeration, but I'm trying to make a point. Nearly every website that I browse is sustained by ads. Yeah, the adv industry is a nasty one, but still this movement is not providing a viable (any?) alternative option to finance the web.
    - a_imho 11y ago
      I don't think the ball is in the customers court hereto come up with solutions, but some alternatives might be 1. donations like patreon, flattr, paypal etc. 2. pushed down on people throat a different way e.g. build into your monthly internet bill (the same way as piracy 'damages' were included in CD and DVD prices) 3. maybe just let those parts die edit: 4. I really did enjoy South Park sponsored content
    - sp332 11y ago
accommodavid 11y ago
I'm using Dan Pollock's hosts file method[1] which is detected by Wired and Forbes, but not this site. [1]: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
- k1m 11y ago
  Thank you. You're right, pure host-based blocking is not currently detected by the site. We'll try to include that too. At the moment we're relying on a rule in Easy List - https://easylist.adblockplus.org/en/ https://easylist.adblockplus.org/en/ - it's used by Adblock Plus, uBlock, AdGuard and a probably others. But we need to take into account other methods/blockers that don't rely on this list.
  - majewsky 11y ago
    My two layers of blocking are also not detected. Layer 1: Similar to what @accommodavid has, my router uses several lists of ad-server domains to block requests to them. The list URLs are at https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/blob/963eacfe0537a7abddf30441c754c67ca1e40965/gravity.sh#L9-L16 https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/blob/963eacfe0537a7abddf3... Layer 2: My browser has uMatrix. It is set up to only allow a) first-party requests of any kind, and b) third-party requests for images and CSS. (So on your site, the JS from ajax.googleapis.com is blocked.)
ethana 11y ago
Do you really have to load jquery for a couple of lines that could be done in pure js? I run a local proxy to redirect hosted libraries like jquery. Google could and probably tracks where everyone's been on the web when loading their hosted libraries. Pretty much bypass adblockers altogether.
- k1m 11y ago
  Agree. We'll remove jQuery dependence and move remote JS/CSS files to the same server.
- skoczymroczny 11y ago
  How come? Shouldn't the browser cache the jquery library and very rarely do a connection to Google CDN?
  - dspillett 11y ago
    It isn't just the network load. If you are on a small device the RAM use is not entirely insignificant. The CPU load too, though I think the use of animation/video in adverts is more of a problem in that respect than the overhead of using jQuery instead of modern DOM APIs directly. Even just considering network load, you need to be careful about the cache control headers that you send to ensure that all common browsers will cache content (see http://blog.httpwatch.com/2011/01/28/top-7-myths-about-https/ http://blog.httpwatch.com/2011/01/28/top-7-myths-about-https... amongst other references) and you have to be careful not to accidentally indicate that it is OK to cache something sensitive (which is why some servers send blanked "don't cache" headers for HTTPS responses unless explicitly ordered otherwise, it is the safest default).
- propogandist 11y ago
  >I run a local proxy to redirect hosted libraries like jquery. how to do this?
anexprogrammer 11y ago
Hmm. I'm conflicted. I am very much against tracking, and ads that track retarget and abuse me, so am very restrictive in terms of what I let near my browser. I'd also be very happy to see ads on many sites (eg Stackoverflow style - respectful ads) if I could trust them not to track, retarget or drop malware. That implies either an ad network that's restricted to static pngs (and that they've developed trust), or going back to publisher hosting. I think, there's the germ of a great idea here. But, rather than pushing people at uBlock (which is my preferred blocker) I'd try and educate on tracking and ad network abuse, then link out to several newbie friendly, zero effort options (that probably implies adblock and others). Why not uBlock? It's a LONG way from newbie friendly, but chances are that's your audience because they don't have a blocker already. Educate to get some pushback against tracking and crapware ads, like was done to kill ie6 long ago. If I gave uBlock to my mum's generation (generalisation) or neighbour I'd be fielding quite a lot more tech support calls. :p
- k1m 11y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. Do you really think uBlock Origin is so different from other blockers in terms of usability? I don't see how. It relies on essentially the same set of filter lists that others like Adblock Plus use, but without selling out to big ad networks. I love that they don't give in to acceptable ads - I think that's a very murky area for ad blockers to be involved in.
  - anexprogrammer 11y ago
    The icons are non-obvious apart from on/off, settings icon is hard to find, and when in settings there's no easy mode wizard to keep you away from the list of 50 filters and just recommend easylist or fanboy's + a couple of other recommended defaults. If I gave it to some of the folks I know they'd end up utterly baffled if they ever opened the interface (probably unlikely to be fair :D) EFF's Privacy Badger does a brilliant job of first run wizard and UI for non techies. Adblock first run is 4 or 5 steps and steers away from the techie guts. uBlock just dumps you at the settings that are programmer friendly (far as I remember there's no first run anything). For me and reasonably IT literate folks, uBlock is perfect. It's by far and away the best blocker I'm aware of right now though.
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a2tech 11y ago
I caved to forbes.com demand that I turn off my adblocker yesterday. As soon as the page loaded my browser slowed to a crawl and the content was covered by ads. Chrome was going unresponsive from the page. Needless to say I couldn't close the tab fast enough, and forbes went back on my adblock list.
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- deleted 11y ago
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psynapse 11y ago
Doesn't appear to detect the use of Privacy Badger on Firefox.
- k1m 11y ago
  Thank you. We'll take a look.
tobltobs 11y ago
Let's encourage the monopolisation of the internet.
Ensorceled 11y ago
I've been a hold out on ad blocking. It always seemed a grey area between the evils of psychological manipulation, tracking and increasing cognitive load and the good of paying for content delivery. As it becomes increasingly impossible to live in modern society without the internet and the ad networks become more intrusive and the negative consequences increase, it becomes more and more difficult to full justify the pro-ad stance. This week I got a cold. I'm not sure which social network I mentioned it on or what search I made, but the ads I see everywhere now are for NyQuil. That first NyQuil ad was a real dousing in cold water. This isn't the ad network knowing I'm actively searching the web for a web monitoring product and showing me pingdom ads. The ad network knows I'm sick and what my illness is. I'm actively investigating ad blocking now, enemy mine.
- parenthephobia 11y ago
  > This week I got a cold. I'm not sure which social network I mentioned it on or what search I made, but the ads I see everywhere now are for NyQuil. This isn't the ad network knowing I'm actively searching the web for a web monitoring product and showing me pingdom ads. The ad network knows I'm sick and what my illness is. The ad network knows you searched for, or included in a status update, "cold", or "sneeze" or some other combination of keywords that Proctor & Gamble paid to have associated with NyQuil. Genuine question: Why is this a problem? I prefer to receive adverts that are about something I might actually want. When I've been browsing things on Amazon and then, for some reason, browse without ad-blocking, I start to receive adverts about things I was looking at but didn't purchase. I think that's much better than, say, receiving a page full of obnoxious animated adverts for some Clash of Clans rip-off.
- soared 11y ago
  Well its the same thing. You have an unfulfilled need and did something online to try and solve it, so a company targeted you and are displaying their solution in ads. Illness or any other product, the process doesn't change.
  - Ensorceled 11y ago
    Yes, that's actually the point. What I'm saying is that seemed well and good when it was actually helping me find a product I was looking for. It seems less well and good now that I know it's tracking when I have an illness and selling ads based upon that "demographic". Think about the repercussions if I googling for cancer treatments or HIV infection symptoms and not just cold cures.
terryf 11y ago
For me the simple truth is: I don't care. Let me explain. I use ad-blocker (ghostery) on all the sites with everything blocked, because it makes my browsing experience better and faster. "But! But! How will the authors survive?". The answer is: I don't care. Forbes stopped letting me read their site with ghostery enabled? I don't care. There are a million other free sites to read. So I go there. But.. But Google wouldn't exist without ads??! I don't care - there would be some other search engine that works without ads. Really, I got other things to worry about than some random company/person on the internet making money off of me.
- BenoitP 11y ago
  I think you represent the opinion about 90% of ad-blocking users, me included. Would you care for some side money that you can use for micro-transaction (one click for: paywalls, items in games, rewarding a blog author?) (doing market research here) Would you care enough to make the switch to another ad-blocker? One that pays you to rent your pixels if the ad is deemed fast, non intrusive, non tracking, not attention grabbing, not misleading, for a sufficiently ethical product, etc.
  - terryf 11y ago
    What you're proposing is that if I see some ads, then I get virtual money that I can then forward to someone I deem worthy? In theory, it seems a nice idea. Sharing ad profits from my views with someone who creates good content. Sure. I'm not quite sure I'd care enough, but maybe.
  - parenthephobia 11y ago
    There's a perverse incentive there. If I'm paid to watch adverts, and my love for money outweighs my hatred for adverts, then I'll watch lots of adverts without actually buying anything. That's great for the ad-provider, but not so much for whoever's products are being advertised, as they'll be getting a significantly worse return on their investment. It's actually in their interests for me to block adverts if I won't buy anything that's advertised in them.
- galfarragem 11y ago
andrewaylett 11y ago
One thing about this, is that I don't particularly want an ad-blocker per se: I want a malicious-or-annoying-stuff blocker. So I primarily use Privacy Badger, which dynamically blocks sites that try to track me (and gives me an excuse to rail against sites that tell me I'm running an ad-blocker, because I'm not running an ad-blocker!) and self-destructing cookies to stop first-party tracking on sites I don't trust. The down-side of self-destructing cookies being the EU cookie regulation, which relies on sites setting a cookie to tell me that I have to agree to set cookies, when I've actually configured my browser to do what I want with the cookies anyway. So then I need an ad-blocker set up specifically to block the cookie panels (with https://github.com/r4vi/block-the-eu-cookie-shit-list https://github.com/r4vi/block-the-eu-cookie-shit-list) which requires me to have an ad-blocker installed after all, even if it's not set to block ads...
kardos 11y ago
Blocking all adverts is short sighted. It works at present because the ads are delivered in a pretty obvious manner and it's easy enough to drop the scripts/elements. Blocking everything will become a much harder game once the content producers figure out how to bake ads directly into the content. How are you going to distinguish between an image that's part of the article and an advertising image when they are both served from the content producer's host? Installing an adblocker is a reaction to an overwhelming onslaught of ads. The solution is some sort of compromise between "full on malvertising shitshow" and "eliminate all ad-funded business models".
- shawabawa3 11y ago
  > How are you going to distinguish between an image that's part of the article and an advertising image when they are both served from the content producer's host? That would at least stop 3rd-party ad tracking, and would make ad malware less likely
  - kardos 11y ago
    I doubt that. What I think we'll see is that the content producers will inline the ad-industry adverts & tracking code and send the tracking data back to them. Which amounts to routing the advertising machinery through the content producer's network rather than directly to the client. I don't see where the vetting process will be vastly improved or how it would lead to fewer trackers.
    - parenthephobia 11y ago
      You can't get a tracking code that tracks users across all the sites they visit unless the user gets their tracking from a single site. The best thing the tracking industry _could_ have done is not pair it with stuff you don't want to view like adverts. If tracking was done via jquery hosted on a CDN, it's quite feasible we wouldn't even know it was happening.
      - shawabawa3 11y ago
drdaeman 11y ago
Checked Firefox and Chrome, with uMatrix in a typical configuration that blocks all but first-party requests and external images and CSS by default and a default set of common AD and tracking hostnames blacklisted. "No ad blocking detected" Allowed site do to third-party requests to fetch jQuery. Still says "no ad blocking detected". I guess just testing that /css/ads.css (a first-party resource) fails to load isn't a good measure.
- k1m 11y ago
  Thank you for the report. Yes, we'll include other measures soon. For anyone interested, in our tests with uBlock Origin, Adblock Plus and AdGuard for Android - the default installation (which we assume most people use) - all included the rule which blocks ads.css, even if it's same origin.
Raed667 11y ago
An ad-free-web would mean a inevitable sponsored-content-web. The first was easy to manage. We need to start thinking about Add-ons that can detect sponsored-content.
- k1m 11y ago
  There's AdDetector: http://www.ianww.com/ad-detector/ http://www.ianww.com/ad-detector/
  - Raed667 11y ago
    If I understand well this reads if the page says "sponsored by", I fear the future where this tag is not available.
bobby_9x 11y ago
I've never seen a group so ready and willing to destroy their chances at future success. Ads are pretty much the only way to make a living when you are bootstrapping. These blocks, like all of the other silly things in this community meant to hurt the big, bad, corporations, do nothing but strengthen them. It's an automated way to remove competition. The people with resources and money will survive (as always) and the rest will suffer the consequences of their short-sighted actions. It happened with the music industry over the last two decades (1 million plays on spotify nets you $1000, if you are lucky). I’m glad I have resources: I can get a good deal on labor when these sorts of movements decimate an indusry.
SCAQTony 11y ago
Ad blocking is a rhetorical misnomer. It's not ad blocking, it's malware blocking. I have no problem with ads and would allow to be subjected to them if cookies, trackers, beacons, and privacy invaders were not inserted into my personal property.
jakeogh 11y ago
I like to start on the DNS level https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate
nicerobot 11y ago
If the authors are opposing advertising, why are they advertising their opinions here? These naive opinions are more intrusive to me than many targeted advertisements. To be clear, i'm not opposed to ad blockers. I'm also not opposed to some advertising. I am averse to hypocrisy.
- orbitur 11y ago
  Your argument falls apart when you consider HN is explicitly a place to advertise either ideas or products. And you can show your disdain via the downvote button or you can offer criticism in the form of comments. This is a platform for advertising, whether there's money to be gained or not.
t176 11y ago
Are you objecting to advertising in principle? I don't have anything against advertising as a means of improving sales. We just need to stop talking about 'advertising' and start focusing on 'annoying' and 'tracking'. I object to anything that tracks me and to ads that annoy me while I'm trying to read an article. To be fair, it's not just ads. I hate any form of animation while I'm trying to read. It makes it harder to concentrate. I wish all bloggers (and news sites) would avoid using GIFs and ensure their content rendered fully without JavaScript (vain hope). As far as I'm concerned if adverts are unobtrusive, don't track and have a light download, I'm OK with them. Mostly I'll ignore them (just like I do with TV ads) but at least they provide revenue for bloggers.
NetHuntCRM 11y ago
Whenever I encounter an intrusive add that basically overlays the whole page and send me to some shady site, it goes to the black list. Mistakes happen, so I occasionally review this list, because I care for the revenue of the sites I like. Anyway, today Ad blindness works as good as any ad blocker.

92 points by k1m 11y ago

I visited the site from an iOS device with Purify installed and enabled for 'Ads and Tracking'. The site told me It didn't detect an ad blocker.

k1m 11y ago
Thanks for the report. I can't find the filter list for Purify, but I think it's the same developer who took over uBlock (not Origin). We're relying on a rule in the Easy List filter set which blocks loading of anything called ads.css. Perhaps this rule does not exist in Purify. I'll make a note to test. If anyone knows the filters Purify uses, I'd love to take a look. We also test for 'acceptable' ads getting through based on a rule in Adblock Plus, and warn against it.

ricardolopes 11y ago

I'm simply using Ghostery to block any ad trackers and other scripts. Which this site tells me it's apparently not enough.

k1m 11y ago
Thanks. We'll test Ghostery and try to fix this.
- jboynyc 11y ago
  While you're at it, it doesn't appear to work with Disconnect.me either.
  - k1m 11y ago
    Thanks, will take a look at that too. Pretty sure they publish their filter lists, so should be easy to make sure it's covered.
- clort 11y ago
  Perhaps the same here - ghostery, noscript and adblockplus installed, and the page says no ad blocking detected! Actually, I'm hoping that this is a success rather than a failure because the next phase of anti-ad blocking is them needing to detect that I'm blocking ads. I, however, don't really want them to be able to detect that..
  - k1m 11y ago
    Hmmm, are you by any chance using a filter list other than Easy List in adblockplus?
    - clort 11y ago
      Yes, I don't have EasyList ticked

IvanK_net 11y ago

There are no good adblockers today. Most of current "adblockers" remove DIV element just because it has id="ad", without analyzing if there is any advertisement inside it. Simply stupid. And since many "adblockers" are not open-source, you never know what it is doing. Software may perform censorship of the world wide web, depending on what investors tell the programmers to do. Imagine the investor is Apple. They can make adblocker remove the the results containing "android" from your google search. I think such scenario is quite possible in the future, if users blindly trust "adblockers".

mtrn 11y ago
They might not be perfect, but my uBlock says 611,492 or 8% blocked requests, which still helps.
- majewsky 11y ago
  What uBlock displays is merely a lower bound. Many ad scripts, when loaded, will make further requests. But with uBlock, they're never loaded, so uBlock can't count the requests that were never tried.
k1m 11y ago
Does happen, but not such a big problem for me. I'd argue that developers/designers should be testing with ad blockers enabled.
- Jgrubb 11y ago
  Unless you work for a site that's ad supported, then it's the other way around unfortunately.
r3bl 11y ago
> And since many "adblockers" are not open-source, you never know what it is doing. Hmm, not entirely sure about this. * Adblock Plus: https://adblockplus.org/en/contribute-code https://adblockplus.org/en/contribute-code * uBlock: https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/ublock https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/ublock * Adblock (the original one, without the "Plus"): http://code.getadblock.com/ http://code.getadblock.com/ I could go on and on, but I would argue that these three are the most popular ones.

MindTooth 11y ago

Any approved blocker for iOS yet?

Coding_Cat 11y ago

I visited it on Firefox mobile and it correctly detected that I didn't have adblock (as I tend to only read HN and technical blogs on my phone), but the link send me to uBlock Origin's Github page. While uBlock is a nice blocker, if the goal is to encourage adblocking I think it would be better to directly link to the extension for whichever browser is being used as I do not think there is much overlap between "Knows how to use Github" and "Doesn't know what an adblocker is".

k1m 11y ago
Absolutely. Just wanted to get some feedback on this in its current state. Agree that it should detect user's browser/device and suggest an appropriate blocker. I wish uBlock Origin had a nice install page I could point to that would do that kind of detection itself. All I could find at this point was the Github page.
- a_imho 11y ago
  >> it should detect user's browser/device For me it would just take away from the service, if you want to detect what I'm running, you are only a little better than advertisers. I understand, it is for the 'greater good' from your pov, but this way the means impairs the cause.
  - k1m 11y ago
    Are you serious? Basic browser/device detection to suggest a suitable ad blocker is not really the same as the tracking carried out by big ad networks. I don't see the similarity to be honest.
    - a_imho 11y ago
      I'm very serious [1]. It is not at all basic for me. I can't find the discussion from a couple of days earlier, but afair it basically said wsj let the google crawler indexing their articles, while simultaneously blocking users by detecting their device. http://blog.erratasec.com/2012/11/you-are-committing-crime-right-now.html http://blog.erratasec.com/2012/11/you-are-committing-crime-r...

Kiro 11y ago

The "Why?" text didn't convince me at all, so... why? I'm serious. I don't mind ads and I don't mind being tracked. On the contrary I've found interesting products on banners, mostly due to retargeting. Since this site's purpose is to encourage people not using adblock to use it I don't think "don't use it then" is sufficient here.

adrianN 11y ago
Ad networks have been known to distribute malware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising#History.5B10.5D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising#History.5B10.5D
- tobltobs 11y ago
  Websites have been known to distribute malware.
  - majewsky 11y ago
    True, but hacking an ad network to distribute malware has a much better Return On Investment since it will distribute your malware from potentially thousands of websites, instead of just one. The same reason why exploits for Windows and Windows software are more common than for other desktop operating systems.
  - parenthephobia 11y ago
    When I visit cnn.com without ad-blocking, I receive content from 41 different domains: with ad-blocking it's 7. So without ad-blocking I am putting my faith in the operators of 7 domains that none of their servers have been compromised to serve up malware. Most of those domains don't operate as a service that intentionally lets fourth-parties serve up arbitrary content. With ad-blocking I have to trust that 41 domains, some of which will be serving up fourth-party content without curation, will not serve up malware. I don't even know ahead of time whose servers I'll be visiting, so I can't try to estimate how much risk I'm exposed to.
    - 11y ago

a_imho 11y ago

Similar discussion from a day ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11215801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11215801 Encouraging adblocking is harmful and discriminating against advertisers. A more appropriate term is content blocking. Indeed, why not to see some static ads and just disable tracking?

lentil_soup 11y ago
I don't get the "harmful and discriminating against advertisers" part. Advertisers are forcing me to pay attention to something I don't want or need to pay attention to, why do I have to cater for them?
- a_imho 11y ago
  I feel you have to be politically correct about these things, because there might be ground for a lawsuit based on the loss of advertisers. It might sound stupid, but that is definitely something I could imagine they come up with.
  - majewsky 11y ago
    Good thing I'm not in the US. :)
zdkl 11y ago
Because they didn't give me the option. Seriously I'd like to be as diplomat as you, but they've taken obnoxious and shady so far my reaction to ads is now 'default deny'. And I'll lose no sleep discriminating against the advertisers.
marssaxman 11y ago
Because I don't want to see static ads either? Being harmful to and discriminating against advertisers is kind of the point. Why should I put up with their harassment? It's my computer, I'll do what I want with it, and if that includes refusing to download and display a bunch of crap some advertiser wishes they could trick me into viewing, well, it's my choice to refuse to download that crap.

agopaul 11y ago

I don't get it. A big part of the web is paid by ads. Lots of websites rely on (non-invasive) ads to sustain themselves and provide content to anyone for free. It's safe to say that the whole web sustains on ads (think about google, FB). I know that sometimes there are too many ads on certain web pages, but that is no excuse to ban them all. Yes, ads are also used to distribute malware but, come on, it's 2016 and you should have uninstalled both Flash and the Java plugin in your browser a while ago.

Touche 11y ago
It's mostly about tracking for me.
a_imho 11y ago
Flash is a red herring here. Yes, we argue about the too many. And for lots of people that is 1. I pretty much feel this movement is just a reaction to a very nasty practice, and every advertising company deserves what it gets. Ad supported != free, sorry and Google and FB != the whole web.
- agopaul 11y ago
  I'll admit that "the whole web" was an exaggeration, but I'm trying to make a point. Nearly every website that I browse is sustained by ads. Yeah, the adv industry is a nasty one, but still this movement is not providing a viable (any?) alternative option to finance the web.
  - a_imho 11y ago
    I don't think the ball is in the customers court hereto come up with solutions, but some alternatives might be 1. donations like patreon, flattr, paypal etc. 2. pushed down on people throat a different way e.g. build into your monthly internet bill (the same way as piracy 'damages' were included in CD and DVD prices) 3. maybe just let those parts die edit: 4. I really did enjoy South Park sponsored content
  - sp332 11y ago

accommodavid 11y ago

I'm using Dan Pollock's hosts file method[1] which is detected by Wired and Forbes, but not this site. [1]: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

k1m 11y ago
Thank you. You're right, pure host-based blocking is not currently detected by the site. We'll try to include that too. At the moment we're relying on a rule in Easy List - https://easylist.adblockplus.org/en/ https://easylist.adblockplus.org/en/ - it's used by Adblock Plus, uBlock, AdGuard and a probably others. But we need to take into account other methods/blockers that don't rely on this list.
- majewsky 11y ago
  My two layers of blocking are also not detected. Layer 1: Similar to what @accommodavid has, my router uses several lists of ad-server domains to block requests to them. The list URLs are at https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/blob/963eacfe0537a7abddf30441c754c67ca1e40965/gravity.sh#L9-L16 https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/blob/963eacfe0537a7abddf3... Layer 2: My browser has uMatrix. It is set up to only allow a) first-party requests of any kind, and b) third-party requests for images and CSS. (So on your site, the JS from ajax.googleapis.com is blocked.)

ethana 11y ago

Do you really have to load jquery for a couple of lines that could be done in pure js? I run a local proxy to redirect hosted libraries like jquery. Google could and probably tracks where everyone's been on the web when loading their hosted libraries. Pretty much bypass adblockers altogether.

k1m 11y ago
Agree. We'll remove jQuery dependence and move remote JS/CSS files to the same server.
skoczymroczny 11y ago
How come? Shouldn't the browser cache the jquery library and very rarely do a connection to Google CDN?
- dspillett 11y ago
  It isn't just the network load. If you are on a small device the RAM use is not entirely insignificant. The CPU load too, though I think the use of animation/video in adverts is more of a problem in that respect than the overhead of using jQuery instead of modern DOM APIs directly. Even just considering network load, you need to be careful about the cache control headers that you send to ensure that all common browsers will cache content (see http://blog.httpwatch.com/2011/01/28/top-7-myths-about-https/ http://blog.httpwatch.com/2011/01/28/top-7-myths-about-https... amongst other references) and you have to be careful not to accidentally indicate that it is OK to cache something sensitive (which is why some servers send blanked "don't cache" headers for HTTPS responses unless explicitly ordered otherwise, it is the safest default).
propogandist 11y ago
>I run a local proxy to redirect hosted libraries like jquery. how to do this?

anexprogrammer 11y ago

Hmm. I'm conflicted. I am very much against tracking, and ads that track retarget and abuse me, so am very restrictive in terms of what I let near my browser. I'd also be very happy to see ads on many sites (eg Stackoverflow style - respectful ads) if I could trust them not to track, retarget or drop malware. That implies either an ad network that's restricted to static pngs (and that they've developed trust), or going back to publisher hosting. I think, there's the germ of a great idea here. But, rather than pushing people at uBlock (which is my preferred blocker) I'd try and educate on tracking and ad network abuse, then link out to several newbie friendly, zero effort options (that probably implies adblock and others). Why not uBlock? It's a LONG way from newbie friendly, but chances are that's your audience because they don't have a blocker already. Educate to get some pushback against tracking and crapware ads, like was done to kill ie6 long ago. If I gave uBlock to my mum's generation (generalisation) or neighbour I'd be fielding quite a lot more tech support calls. :p

k1m 11y ago
Thanks for the feedback. Do you really think uBlock Origin is so different from other blockers in terms of usability? I don't see how. It relies on essentially the same set of filter lists that others like Adblock Plus use, but without selling out to big ad networks. I love that they don't give in to acceptable ads - I think that's a very murky area for ad blockers to be involved in.
- anexprogrammer 11y ago
  The icons are non-obvious apart from on/off, settings icon is hard to find, and when in settings there's no easy mode wizard to keep you away from the list of 50 filters and just recommend easylist or fanboy's + a couple of other recommended defaults. If I gave it to some of the folks I know they'd end up utterly baffled if they ever opened the interface (probably unlikely to be fair :D) EFF's Privacy Badger does a brilliant job of first run wizard and UI for non techies. Adblock first run is 4 or 5 steps and steers away from the techie guts. uBlock just dumps you at the settings that are programmer friendly (far as I remember there's no first run anything). For me and reasonably IT literate folks, uBlock is perfect. It's by far and away the best blocker I'm aware of right now though.

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a2tech 11y ago

I caved to forbes.com demand that I turn off my adblocker yesterday. As soon as the page loaded my browser slowed to a crawl and the content was covered by ads. Chrome was going unresponsive from the page. Needless to say I couldn't close the tab fast enough, and forbes went back on my adblock list.

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psynapse 11y ago

Doesn't appear to detect the use of Privacy Badger on Firefox.

k1m 11y ago
Thank you. We'll take a look.

tobltobs 11y ago

Let's encourage the monopolisation of the internet.

Ensorceled 11y ago

I've been a hold out on ad blocking. It always seemed a grey area between the evils of psychological manipulation, tracking and increasing cognitive load and the good of paying for content delivery. As it becomes increasingly impossible to live in modern society without the internet and the ad networks become more intrusive and the negative consequences increase, it becomes more and more difficult to full justify the pro-ad stance. This week I got a cold. I'm not sure which social network I mentioned it on or what search I made, but the ads I see everywhere now are for NyQuil. That first NyQuil ad was a real dousing in cold water. This isn't the ad network knowing I'm actively searching the web for a web monitoring product and showing me pingdom ads. The ad network knows I'm sick and what my illness is. I'm actively investigating ad blocking now, enemy mine.

parenthephobia 11y ago
> This week I got a cold. I'm not sure which social network I mentioned it on or what search I made, but the ads I see everywhere now are for NyQuil. This isn't the ad network knowing I'm actively searching the web for a web monitoring product and showing me pingdom ads. The ad network knows I'm sick and what my illness is. The ad network knows you searched for, or included in a status update, "cold", or "sneeze" or some other combination of keywords that Proctor & Gamble paid to have associated with NyQuil. Genuine question: Why is this a problem? I prefer to receive adverts that are about something I might actually want. When I've been browsing things on Amazon and then, for some reason, browse without ad-blocking, I start to receive adverts about things I was looking at but didn't purchase. I think that's much better than, say, receiving a page full of obnoxious animated adverts for some Clash of Clans rip-off.
soared 11y ago
Well its the same thing. You have an unfulfilled need and did something online to try and solve it, so a company targeted you and are displaying their solution in ads. Illness or any other product, the process doesn't change.
- Ensorceled 11y ago
  Yes, that's actually the point. What I'm saying is that seemed well and good when it was actually helping me find a product I was looking for. It seems less well and good now that I know it's tracking when I have an illness and selling ads based upon that "demographic". Think about the repercussions if I googling for cancer treatments or HIV infection symptoms and not just cold cures.

terryf 11y ago

For me the simple truth is: I don't care. Let me explain. I use ad-blocker (ghostery) on all the sites with everything blocked, because it makes my browsing experience better and faster. "But! But! How will the authors survive?". The answer is: I don't care. Forbes stopped letting me read their site with ghostery enabled? I don't care. There are a million other free sites to read. So I go there. But.. But Google wouldn't exist without ads??! I don't care - there would be some other search engine that works without ads. Really, I got other things to worry about than some random company/person on the internet making money off of me.

BenoitP 11y ago
I think you represent the opinion about 90% of ad-blocking users, me included. Would you care for some side money that you can use for micro-transaction (one click for: paywalls, items in games, rewarding a blog author?) (doing market research here) Would you care enough to make the switch to another ad-blocker? One that pays you to rent your pixels if the ad is deemed fast, non intrusive, non tracking, not attention grabbing, not misleading, for a sufficiently ethical product, etc.
- terryf 11y ago
  What you're proposing is that if I see some ads, then I get virtual money that I can then forward to someone I deem worthy? In theory, it seems a nice idea. Sharing ad profits from my views with someone who creates good content. Sure. I'm not quite sure I'd care enough, but maybe.
- parenthephobia 11y ago
  There's a perverse incentive there. If I'm paid to watch adverts, and my love for money outweighs my hatred for adverts, then I'll watch lots of adverts without actually buying anything. That's great for the ad-provider, but not so much for whoever's products are being advertised, as they'll be getting a significantly worse return on their investment. It's actually in their interests for me to block adverts if I won't buy anything that's advertised in them.
galfarragem 11y ago

andrewaylett 11y ago

One thing about this, is that I don't particularly want an ad-blocker per se: I want a malicious-or-annoying-stuff blocker. So I primarily use Privacy Badger, which dynamically blocks sites that try to track me (and gives me an excuse to rail against sites that tell me I'm running an ad-blocker, because I'm not running an ad-blocker!) and self-destructing cookies to stop first-party tracking on sites I don't trust. The down-side of self-destructing cookies being the EU cookie regulation, which relies on sites setting a cookie to tell me that I have to agree to set cookies, when I've actually configured my browser to do what I want with the cookies anyway. So then I need an ad-blocker set up specifically to block the cookie panels (with https://github.com/r4vi/block-the-eu-cookie-shit-list https://github.com/r4vi/block-the-eu-cookie-shit-list) which requires me to have an ad-blocker installed after all, even if it's not set to block ads...

kardos 11y ago

Blocking all adverts is short sighted. It works at present because the ads are delivered in a pretty obvious manner and it's easy enough to drop the scripts/elements. Blocking everything will become a much harder game once the content producers figure out how to bake ads directly into the content. How are you going to distinguish between an image that's part of the article and an advertising image when they are both served from the content producer's host? Installing an adblocker is a reaction to an overwhelming onslaught of ads. The solution is some sort of compromise between "full on malvertising shitshow" and "eliminate all ad-funded business models".

shawabawa3 11y ago
> How are you going to distinguish between an image that's part of the article and an advertising image when they are both served from the content producer's host? That would at least stop 3rd-party ad tracking, and would make ad malware less likely
- kardos 11y ago
  I doubt that. What I think we'll see is that the content producers will inline the ad-industry adverts & tracking code and send the tracking data back to them. Which amounts to routing the advertising machinery through the content producer's network rather than directly to the client. I don't see where the vetting process will be vastly improved or how it would lead to fewer trackers.
  - parenthephobia 11y ago
    You can't get a tracking code that tracks users across all the sites they visit unless the user gets their tracking from a single site. The best thing the tracking industry _could_ have done is not pair it with stuff you don't want to view like adverts. If tracking was done via jquery hosted on a CDN, it's quite feasible we wouldn't even know it was happening.
    - shawabawa3 11y ago

drdaeman 11y ago

Checked Firefox and Chrome, with uMatrix in a typical configuration that blocks all but first-party requests and external images and CSS by default and a default set of common AD and tracking hostnames blacklisted. "No ad blocking detected" Allowed site do to third-party requests to fetch jQuery. Still says "no ad blocking detected". I guess just testing that /css/ads.css (a first-party resource) fails to load isn't a good measure.

k1m 11y ago
Thank you for the report. Yes, we'll include other measures soon. For anyone interested, in our tests with uBlock Origin, Adblock Plus and AdGuard for Android - the default installation (which we assume most people use) - all included the rule which blocks ads.css, even if it's same origin.

Raed667 11y ago

An ad-free-web would mean a inevitable sponsored-content-web. The first was easy to manage. We need to start thinking about Add-ons that can detect sponsored-content.

k1m 11y ago
There's AdDetector: http://www.ianww.com/ad-detector/ http://www.ianww.com/ad-detector/
- Raed667 11y ago
  If I understand well this reads if the page says "sponsored by", I fear the future where this tag is not available.

bobby_9x 11y ago

I've never seen a group so ready and willing to destroy their chances at future success. Ads are pretty much the only way to make a living when you are bootstrapping. These blocks, like all of the other silly things in this community meant to hurt the big, bad, corporations, do nothing but strengthen them. It's an automated way to remove competition. The people with resources and money will survive (as always) and the rest will suffer the consequences of their short-sighted actions. It happened with the music industry over the last two decades (1 million plays on spotify nets you $1000, if you are lucky). I’m glad I have resources: I can get a good deal on labor when these sorts of movements decimate an indusry.

SCAQTony 11y ago

Ad blocking is a rhetorical misnomer. It's not ad blocking, it's malware blocking. I have no problem with ads and would allow to be subjected to them if cookies, trackers, beacons, and privacy invaders were not inserted into my personal property.

jakeogh 11y ago

I like to start on the DNS level https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate

nicerobot 11y ago

If the authors are opposing advertising, why are they advertising their opinions here? These naive opinions are more intrusive to me than many targeted advertisements. To be clear, i'm not opposed to ad blockers. I'm also not opposed to some advertising. I am averse to hypocrisy.

orbitur 11y ago
Your argument falls apart when you consider HN is explicitly a place to advertise either ideas or products. And you can show your disdain via the downvote button or you can offer criticism in the form of comments. This is a platform for advertising, whether there's money to be gained or not.

t176 11y ago

Are you objecting to advertising in principle? I don't have anything against advertising as a means of improving sales. We just need to stop talking about 'advertising' and start focusing on 'annoying' and 'tracking'. I object to anything that tracks me and to ads that annoy me while I'm trying to read an article. To be fair, it's not just ads. I hate any form of animation while I'm trying to read. It makes it harder to concentrate. I wish all bloggers (and news sites) would avoid using GIFs and ensure their content rendered fully without JavaScript (vain hope). As far as I'm concerned if adverts are unobtrusive, don't track and have a light download, I'm OK with them. Mostly I'll ignore them (just like I do with TV ads) but at least they provide revenue for bloggers.

NetHuntCRM 11y ago

Whenever I encounter an intrusive add that basically overlays the whole page and send me to some shady site, it goes to the black list. Mistakes happen, so I occasionally review this list, because I care for the revenue of the sites I like. Anyway, today Ad blindness works as good as any ad blocker.