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I use some advanced techniques myself: ublock origin! Seriously though, fuck ads, fuck ad companies, fuck browsers made by ad companies. Each and every one of t

I use some advanced techniques myself: ublock origin! Seriously though, fuck ads, fuck ad companies, fuck browsers made by ad companies. Each and every one of them is actively working to erode your privacy and use your resources.

sheepz 9y ago
What would you consider as the alternative? People are so used to getting news and various services "for free", it's very difficult to get them to pay for it.
- rebuilder 9y ago
  I've been idly wondering if it would be so bad if advertising on the web simply wasn't profitable. Losing search engines seems like the biggest loss to me, and admittedly it's a doozy. But otherwise, it's not immediately obvious to me that the web is better for all the ad-funded content on it in the first place.
  - kasey_junk 9y ago
    I'll miss gmail, gce, chrome, the google security team, etc.
- nwah1 9y ago
  For text, computing resources are cheap enough that it can be entirely non-profit or run by independent bloggers, etc. Wikipedia, blogs, IRC, and sites like HN don't require all that much and could be financed without ads if they chose to be. Video, particularly HD video, absolutely requires ads or subscriptions. Social networks could probably be built atop WebRTC and run in a federated way, more like IRC... but image or video sharing would start to demand significant resources.
- pjc50 9y ago
  Quite a lot of material on the web is only there because of advertising, not because it's any good. Unsurprisingly the "free market" doesn't work very well when everything has a zero cost associated with it. The downside of losing ad-supported media will be ad-sponsored media paying to write the content itself.
  - gaius 9y ago
    Right, if Buzzfeed, Upworthy et al vanished overnight, nothing of value would be lost. The following week they would be completely forgotten.
    - pjc50 9y ago
      Buzzfeed, strangely, is about 1% really good investigative journalism.
- xoa 9y ago
  This has certainly been the "common wisdom" trotted out for a long time now, but it's also always struck me as post-hoc reasoning. There simply has never been a modern industry-wide, concerted effort towards creating and requiring use of an extremely convenient web pay system, despite advances in technology and user sophistication over the last 20 years. If ads simply were no longer economically viable, would users really simply give up on all news and such? Everyone would simply throw in the towel? I'm extremely skeptical. It's not at all hard to think of a lot of different ways that would be enormously convenient and highly transparent to users to have direct pay options. I think they haven't been tried because of the standard technology issues: we're in a local minima and there is enormous inertia with what "everyone uses" already. But that's not at all the same thing as being in an absolute minima, where any change would necessarily be less efficient. Quite the contrary, in tracking flow of money and resources advertising looks to have quite a few unnecessary inefficiencies between user goals and publisher goals. That being the case I see no reason to believe inherently that something better could not be developed if there was sufficient motivation, and an existential threat would certainly be that.
  - ballenf 9y ago
    > industry-wide, concerted effort towards creating and requiring use of an extremely convenient web pay system Without government backing, the system you envisage would ironically be prohibited by antitrust laws. It would be a rather clear example of price-fixing and collusion by competitors. Maybe there's some way to do this through peer pressure or incentives, but I think we've seen that approach fail so often that it's hard to see what could be done differently short of a hardline approach that would trigger regulatory scrutiny.
    - pjc50 9y ago
      I very much doubt it, given the existence of Visa/Mastercard and the various app stores.
- arkh 9y ago
  I think you should also use quotation marks around the word news. Maybe the alternative is: if you don't want to charge for the content you produce or give it for free don't bother producing it. There are huge chances your content is just shit anyway.
- paulie_a 9y ago
  People created content on the internet before there was advertising. So to reiterate the GP's point, fuck ads and fuck ad companies, even the "legitimate" ones are a blight on the landscape and quite frankly scum.
- bjpbakker 9y ago
  > People are so used to getting news and various services "for free" Many people I know (myself included) pay for articles they read on the sources they choose. It's the websites that copy the articles, mix the words a bit and republish that get into trouble and in my experience have the most problems with ad blockers. I don't think that's a bad thing. Like others said here, if nobody wants to pay for your articles you either publish them for free or do something else with your life.
- IntronExon 9y ago
  A vast majority of that content is dog shit. Losing it would mean a net loss of precisely nothing. My favorite sites don’t run ads, and either pay for access (NYT), accept donations, or do it for the love of doing it. I’m happy to lose the endlessly nested clickbait in favor of quality that doesn’t update every 5 seconds.
- y03a 9y ago
  Advertising _without tracking_. Advertising was done that way for all of human history until recently. Take away their ability to run arbitrary code on users machines and the problem is completely solved. There just needs to be an advertising company that steps up to the plate and says: We will get your ads to eyeballs and _we_ will ensure sites are holding up their end of the deal instead of deferring that role to user machines. You won't be able to track users, but you never should have been allowed to do that anyway.
- AlexandrB 9y ago
  This situation is similar to dumping[1]. The only reason people aren't willing to pay for content is that there's always another company willing to give it away for "free" by leveraging ads. The reason that's economical is that all-pervasive tracking inflates the value of ad inventory and allows for a lot of additional "value" to be created even if the visitor doesn't click on an ad. If some of the most abusive adtech practices were flat out illegal paid services could compete again because a profitable, "free" alternative would not be possible. The other form of dumping comes from tech companies operating in the red but surviving on investment dollars. Frankly, this is a result of growing wealth and income inequality that leaves investors with few avenues for growth outside of ad-funded moonshots as consumers aren't able to drive growth like they used to due to flat income. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) Edit: Imagine a world where the average consumer makes $10k more per year, then turns around and spends some of that on online services. You now have a situation where the interests of the user and web service provider are aligned. The user is now the customer, not the product.
iaml 9y ago
The article is about ad companies circumventing adblockers by using autogenerated domain names. Unless you update all of your filters everyday, you are still vulnerable.
- tristor 9y ago
  Doesn’t bother me, I block everything by default and selectively whitelist. At this point in time it’s the only way to be safe.
  - FussyZeus 9y ago
    On my Mac and linux machines I do the regular block but on Windows it's full block all the way, not even so much for the ads but for the fact that so many networks distribute(d) malware. Sorry but your website's business model is an infinitely lower priority than me needing to re-image my Windows install yet again because one of your fellow companies is asleep at the wheel regarding security.
  - kakarot 9y ago
    Is there an easy way to block everything by default with uBO?
    - okanesen 9y ago
      Afaik you can do that with "hard mode" [0]. [0]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-hard-mode https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-hard-m...
      - kakarot 9y ago
        I already use Advanced Mode, but uBO makes no distinction between blocking scripts and cookies, XHR requests, and Media elements. uMatrix does make this distinction, so I'm led to believe uBO doesn't block them at all. That's necessary for me.
    - ballenf 9y ago
HugoDaniel 9y ago
ah! you might want to take a look at [adnauseum] :) [adnauseum]: https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/
- Jack5500 9y ago
  Adnauseum is still a really bad idea. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10611594 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10611594 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13222733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13222733
  - HugoDaniel 9y ago
    Not if your stance is "Seriously though, fuck ads, fuck ad companies, fuck browsers made by ad companies". Which is arguably the correct one to take these days.
    - manigandham 9y ago
      Not really, unless you're about to give up everything Google has created. Advertising is a 12-figure global industry, it takes more nuance than saying "I hate everything".
      - AlexandrB 9y ago
        > Not really, unless you're about to give up everything Google has created. I basically have. DDG + Fastmail + Firefox. Google is not some magic technology elf that makes the web work. And frankly, their products aren't THAT good. Search has been declining in usefulness for years, YouTube is a hot mess that's in the process of demonetizing all the niche content.
      - dingo_bat 9y ago
        I'm ready, where do I sign up so Google gets out of my life completely?
wybiral 9y ago
It's not ads that are the problem. It's JavaScript. Plain text or image ads are fine. They can track passively without JS. The problem is that they're using JS to do all kinds of shady stuff.
- ballenf 9y ago
  I'd argue a more subtle point: JS is fine, it's phoning home with all sorts of personal info siphoned off my PC that is the problem. JS is used to do this usually, but isn't the only way as seen in tracking pixels in JS-less HTML emails.
  - wybiral 9y ago
    True, you can track people using plain old cookies and the likes. But JS can do much more shady things than tracking people.
  - zelos 9y ago
    Exactly. Auto-executing third party code that has network access privileges seems like a massively bad idea, surely? Especially as it's virtually invisible to most users.
  - eadmund 9y ago
    > I'd argue a more subtle point: JS is fine, it's phoning home with all sorts of personal info siphoned off my PC that is the problem. No, I think that this case demonstrates that it's JavaScript which is the ultimate problem: cryptomining is a code-execution problem (although there is a network-access component to it, since the mining code needs to get block information & submit block results somehow). I like to imagine that in a few decades we'll wonder how we ever thought it was a good idea to grant frictionless full-execute privileges to all the code everywhere, but honestly I'm far too pessimistic to believe that we'll ever wake up.
    - wybiral 9y ago
      We got rid of Flash, for the most part. But people seem to be in denial of JS being an issue even though it's been used time and time again to bypass security. Personally, my JS has been disabled since Meltdown/Spectre. There are sites that don't work and some of the big ones that I have more trust in I'll whitelist. But for the most part it stays off.

sheepz 9y ago

What would you consider as the alternative? People are so used to getting news and various services "for free", it's very difficult to get them to pay for it.

rebuilder 9y ago
I've been idly wondering if it would be so bad if advertising on the web simply wasn't profitable. Losing search engines seems like the biggest loss to me, and admittedly it's a doozy. But otherwise, it's not immediately obvious to me that the web is better for all the ad-funded content on it in the first place.
- kasey_junk 9y ago
  I'll miss gmail, gce, chrome, the google security team, etc.
nwah1 9y ago
For text, computing resources are cheap enough that it can be entirely non-profit or run by independent bloggers, etc. Wikipedia, blogs, IRC, and sites like HN don't require all that much and could be financed without ads if they chose to be. Video, particularly HD video, absolutely requires ads or subscriptions. Social networks could probably be built atop WebRTC and run in a federated way, more like IRC... but image or video sharing would start to demand significant resources.
pjc50 9y ago
Quite a lot of material on the web is only there because of advertising, not because it's any good. Unsurprisingly the "free market" doesn't work very well when everything has a zero cost associated with it. The downside of losing ad-supported media will be ad-sponsored media paying to write the content itself.
- gaius 9y ago
  Right, if Buzzfeed, Upworthy et al vanished overnight, nothing of value would be lost. The following week they would be completely forgotten.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    Buzzfeed, strangely, is about 1% really good investigative journalism.
xoa 9y ago
This has certainly been the "common wisdom" trotted out for a long time now, but it's also always struck me as post-hoc reasoning. There simply has never been a modern industry-wide, concerted effort towards creating and requiring use of an extremely convenient web pay system, despite advances in technology and user sophistication over the last 20 years. If ads simply were no longer economically viable, would users really simply give up on all news and such? Everyone would simply throw in the towel? I'm extremely skeptical. It's not at all hard to think of a lot of different ways that would be enormously convenient and highly transparent to users to have direct pay options. I think they haven't been tried because of the standard technology issues: we're in a local minima and there is enormous inertia with what "everyone uses" already. But that's not at all the same thing as being in an absolute minima, where any change would necessarily be less efficient. Quite the contrary, in tracking flow of money and resources advertising looks to have quite a few unnecessary inefficiencies between user goals and publisher goals. That being the case I see no reason to believe inherently that something better could not be developed if there was sufficient motivation, and an existential threat would certainly be that.
- ballenf 9y ago
  > industry-wide, concerted effort towards creating and requiring use of an extremely convenient web pay system Without government backing, the system you envisage would ironically be prohibited by antitrust laws. It would be a rather clear example of price-fixing and collusion by competitors. Maybe there's some way to do this through peer pressure or incentives, but I think we've seen that approach fail so often that it's hard to see what could be done differently short of a hardline approach that would trigger regulatory scrutiny.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    I very much doubt it, given the existence of Visa/Mastercard and the various app stores.
arkh 9y ago
I think you should also use quotation marks around the word news. Maybe the alternative is: if you don't want to charge for the content you produce or give it for free don't bother producing it. There are huge chances your content is just shit anyway.
paulie_a 9y ago
People created content on the internet before there was advertising. So to reiterate the GP's point, fuck ads and fuck ad companies, even the "legitimate" ones are a blight on the landscape and quite frankly scum.
bjpbakker 9y ago
> People are so used to getting news and various services "for free" Many people I know (myself included) pay for articles they read on the sources they choose. It's the websites that copy the articles, mix the words a bit and republish that get into trouble and in my experience have the most problems with ad blockers. I don't think that's a bad thing. Like others said here, if nobody wants to pay for your articles you either publish them for free or do something else with your life.
IntronExon 9y ago
A vast majority of that content is dog shit. Losing it would mean a net loss of precisely nothing. My favorite sites don’t run ads, and either pay for access (NYT), accept donations, or do it for the love of doing it. I’m happy to lose the endlessly nested clickbait in favor of quality that doesn’t update every 5 seconds.
y03a 9y ago
Advertising _without tracking_. Advertising was done that way for all of human history until recently. Take away their ability to run arbitrary code on users machines and the problem is completely solved. There just needs to be an advertising company that steps up to the plate and says: We will get your ads to eyeballs and _we_ will ensure sites are holding up their end of the deal instead of deferring that role to user machines. You won't be able to track users, but you never should have been allowed to do that anyway.
AlexandrB 9y ago
This situation is similar to dumping[1]. The only reason people aren't willing to pay for content is that there's always another company willing to give it away for "free" by leveraging ads. The reason that's economical is that all-pervasive tracking inflates the value of ad inventory and allows for a lot of additional "value" to be created even if the visitor doesn't click on an ad. If some of the most abusive adtech practices were flat out illegal paid services could compete again because a profitable, "free" alternative would not be possible. The other form of dumping comes from tech companies operating in the red but surviving on investment dollars. Frankly, this is a result of growing wealth and income inequality that leaves investors with few avenues for growth outside of ad-funded moonshots as consumers aren't able to drive growth like they used to due to flat income. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) Edit: Imagine a world where the average consumer makes $10k more per year, then turns around and spends some of that on online services. You now have a situation where the interests of the user and web service provider are aligned. The user is now the customer, not the product.

iaml 9y ago

The article is about ad companies circumventing adblockers by using autogenerated domain names. Unless you update all of your filters everyday, you are still vulnerable.

tristor 9y ago
Doesn’t bother me, I block everything by default and selectively whitelist. At this point in time it’s the only way to be safe.
- FussyZeus 9y ago
  On my Mac and linux machines I do the regular block but on Windows it's full block all the way, not even so much for the ads but for the fact that so many networks distribute(d) malware. Sorry but your website's business model is an infinitely lower priority than me needing to re-image my Windows install yet again because one of your fellow companies is asleep at the wheel regarding security.
- kakarot 9y ago
  Is there an easy way to block everything by default with uBO?
  - okanesen 9y ago
    Afaik you can do that with "hard mode" [0]. [0]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-hard-mode https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-hard-m...
    - kakarot 9y ago
      I already use Advanced Mode, but uBO makes no distinction between blocking scripts and cookies, XHR requests, and Media elements. uMatrix does make this distinction, so I'm led to believe uBO doesn't block them at all. That's necessary for me.
  - ballenf 9y ago

HugoDaniel 9y ago

ah! you might want to take a look at [adnauseum] :) [adnauseum]: https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/

Jack5500 9y ago
Adnauseum is still a really bad idea. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10611594 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10611594 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13222733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13222733
- HugoDaniel 9y ago
  Not if your stance is "Seriously though, fuck ads, fuck ad companies, fuck browsers made by ad companies". Which is arguably the correct one to take these days.
  - manigandham 9y ago
    Not really, unless you're about to give up everything Google has created. Advertising is a 12-figure global industry, it takes more nuance than saying "I hate everything".
    - AlexandrB 9y ago
      > Not really, unless you're about to give up everything Google has created. I basically have. DDG + Fastmail + Firefox. Google is not some magic technology elf that makes the web work. And frankly, their products aren't THAT good. Search has been declining in usefulness for years, YouTube is a hot mess that's in the process of demonetizing all the niche content.
    - dingo_bat 9y ago
      I'm ready, where do I sign up so Google gets out of my life completely?

wybiral 9y ago

It's not ads that are the problem. It's JavaScript. Plain text or image ads are fine. They can track passively without JS. The problem is that they're using JS to do all kinds of shady stuff.

ballenf 9y ago
I'd argue a more subtle point: JS is fine, it's phoning home with all sorts of personal info siphoned off my PC that is the problem. JS is used to do this usually, but isn't the only way as seen in tracking pixels in JS-less HTML emails.
- wybiral 9y ago
  True, you can track people using plain old cookies and the likes. But JS can do much more shady things than tracking people.
- zelos 9y ago
  Exactly. Auto-executing third party code that has network access privileges seems like a massively bad idea, surely? Especially as it's virtually invisible to most users.
- eadmund 9y ago
  > I'd argue a more subtle point: JS is fine, it's phoning home with all sorts of personal info siphoned off my PC that is the problem. No, I think that this case demonstrates that it's JavaScript which is the ultimate problem: cryptomining is a code-execution problem (although there is a network-access component to it, since the mining code needs to get block information & submit block results somehow). I like to imagine that in a few decades we'll wonder how we ever thought it was a good idea to grant frictionless full-execute privileges to all the code everywhere, but honestly I'm far too pessimistic to believe that we'll ever wake up.
  - wybiral 9y ago
    We got rid of Flash, for the most part. But people seem to be in denial of JS being an issue even though it's been used time and time again to bypass security. Personally, my JS has been disabled since Meltdown/Spectre. There are sites that don't work and some of the big ones that I have more trust in I'll whitelist. But for the most part it stays off.