21 ms·

“This is why I use ad blockers and a pi-hole server”

810 points by slater 7y ago

kmos 7y ago
I use AdGuard - https://adguard.com/ https://adguard.com/
Tepix 7y ago
The amount of tracking is mindboggling. With advertisers switching to 1st party cookies it will get harder to avoid tracking, unfortunately.
- Polylactic_acid 7y ago
  The cat and mouse games will continue until legal action is taken. Before loading any tracking at all the user should be shown a Yes/no option.
  - pndy 7y ago
    If legal action would be taken, shouldn't browser have the controls regarding tracking preference? Setting up each page (provided that 'No' would still load page in either full or stripped-down variant) on each devices owned and/or reapplying choices whenever browser cache is cleared would be frustrating. Maybe DNT should return as respected feature within browser and user choice shouldn't affect the access to the content but only its form.
    - toper-centage 7y ago
      Exactly. That's how we ended up with the terrible cookie warnings. The funny thing is that GDPR has language about respecting the DNT but no one cares.
      - tristador 7y ago
        Is there a good example of a large company that blatantly ignores DNT? I'd guess its hard to know as a lot of the tracking could be server side only.
    - kube-system 7y ago
      DNT is counterproductive from a technical perspective. The more bits of entropy you give trackers, the easier you are to track.
      - fauigerzigerk 7y ago
        If DNT was legally binding, they wouldn't be allowed to use that additional bit of entropy. But I would prefer a PTM (please track me) header with legally binding semantics.
        kube-system 7y ago
        Those who abuse it the most will just move to a jurisdiction where it is allowed. Or they'll do it anyway, since many of the worst threats on the internet are already criminal. On the internet, technical solutions > legal solutions.
        fauigerzigerk 7y ago
        There are clearly some things that are economically viable as a criminal enterprise, but I don't think tracking people for ad targeting purposes is one of those things. Tracking only pays if you can track a huge number of people and sell ads to a huge number of advertisers. The profit per tracked user is too small to pay for running a criminal enterprise. Moving to a different jurisdiction is impossible as your customers (the advertisers) and the sites/apps where ads are placed would still be breaking the law.
        kube-system 7y ago
        > There are clearly some things that are economically viable as a criminal enterprise, but I don't think tracking people for ad targeting purposes is one of those things. True, most illicit ads tend to be non-targeted. But some criminals do things like blackmail, fraud, espionage, etc. using tracking data. > Moving to a different jurisdiction is impossible as your customers (the advertisers) and the sites/apps where ads are placed would still be breaking the law. That all depends on the specific business model, business partners, and their presence. Regardless, what I describe is not conjecture, many companies are shuffling around data to avoid GDPR rather than comply. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/19/facebook-moves-15bn-users-out-of-reach-of-new-european-privacy-law https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/19/facebook-... A different company without a physical presence or business partner in the jurisdiction in question, might have little to no incentive to follow the law. In the end, even if companies are breaking the law, or even if they are fined, your data won't be protected unless they actually change their behavior as a result. Calculated non-compliance is a commonplace strategy for corporate legal compliance.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    That didn't work out so well for the EU's cookie law. We need a different solution I think.
    - dmitriid 7y ago
      I think it worked wonders with GDPR which exposed all this pus. Unfortunately, there EU has been too slow acting on it. Only British Airways has been slapped with a significant fine so far.
      - taurath 7y ago
        GDPR opt out rate is well well under 1%.
        kelnos 7y ago
        What does that even mean? GDPR requires companies to request that people opt in to information gathering.
        martin_a 7y ago
        And in reality, as long as no fear-mongering fines are handed out, companies will try to bypass it. There would be ways to get control over this, but law is slow.
        kevsim 7y ago
        IANAL, but this is not entirely true. Under GDPR data can be used by claiming "legitimate interest" [0]. In the case of legitimate interest, the user needs to opt-out rather than opt-in. 0: https://www.gdpreu.org/the-regulation/key-concepts/legitimate-interest/ https://www.gdpreu.org/the-regulation/key-concepts/legitimat...
        leni536 7y ago
        I rarely see opt in GDPR popups, it's typically "accept tracking" or "more options...", the latter seemingly sending you down an infinite rabbit hole. Well, now that I think about it, this might count as opt in, but this is definitely a dark pattern.
  - dmitriid 7y ago
    One acronym: GDPR It's also one of the reasons why people have become so acutely aware of the problem. When the umpteenth site asks you to consent to over 200 ad providers/trackers, there's clearly something wrong.
  - ewidar 7y ago
    Actually from what I can see, checking US websites from Paris gives much less requests. Compare the request map for CNN from - Dulles, VA: 511 requests https://requestmap.herokuapp.com/render/200123_JH_ed7b9b27dfdc2ad99109ede306579482 https://requestmap.herokuapp.com/render/200123_JH_ed7b9b27df... - Paris, France: 77 requests https://requestmap.herokuapp.com/render/200123_87_39fdca38ac0919d45e5e950d816e29bc https://requestmap.herokuapp.com/render/200123_87_39fdca38ac... I don't know if it's for sure because of the cookies/gdpr law, but there is a clear difference, and that's a big win in my opinion.
- BaitBlock 7y ago
  I'm working on a browser extension called Baitblock: https://baitblock.app/ https://baitblock.app/ It also deals with 1st party cookie tracking. It clears cookie/storage on every page load as long as it detects that you're not logged in to the website (still buggy) using machine learning (NLP). The next minor version (under development) will also allow you to block websites/domains from appearing from google search results, facebook feed, twitter feed and basically the entire internet. It also blocks cookie/gdpr banners on websites. (Signup on mobile does not work for now) You can also add summaries/TL;DR for any link on the internet (right click) so others dont have to click.
  - severine 7y ago
    Looks great, will try on Firefox when ready!
  - contravariant 7y ago
    For people that are fine with a manual whitelist there's also Cookie Autodelete: https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete. It removes all cookies when you navigate away from a website after a (customizeable) grace period. Usually this works fine, you just need to be careful when you tell it to erase cookies when the domain changes (rather than when the tab closes), some 2-step sign in procedures need the cookies from the original webpage to work.
    - Kaiyou 7y ago
      Which doesn't save you from banners stretching around 50% of a given site urging you to accept their cookie policy.
  - wayoutthere 7y ago
    I want a browser that allows first-party cookies, but auto-expires them if I don't visit the domain for an hour. It should also only allow one level of requests (i.e. if a site requests a resource, that resource cannot request additional resources from other domains). The latter part won't prevent bad behavior, but it will force that behavior to be proxied -- which carries technical, financial and legal implications that will cause companies to be more careful about their downstream redirects.
- pedro_hab 7y ago
  I'm very curious on how 1st party cookies will be used for tracking. How can they connect one website's cookies to another's? All I can think of is fingerprinting, but afaik you can't really be sure "who's that" since fingerprinting filters people out, and isn't good enough to target a single individual. I guess they can improve it, but there are ways to work around it too, it will probably be easier to fix fingerprinting than blocking 3rd party cookies. Its seems that if 1st party cookies were as good they would have switched to it by now.
- tbyehl 7y ago
  PiHole and the browser-based blockers are working to apply filtering to CNAMEs. https://pi-hole.net/2020/01/19/announcing-a-beta-test-of-pi-hole-5-0/ https://pi-hole.net/2020/01/19/announcing-a-beta-test-of-pi-...
mikestew 7y ago
Five million domains in the block lists? I need to upgrade my paltry list of 125K. Maybe that’s why NYT ads still get through at my house.
- starky 7y ago
  The interesting thing to me is that despite having 5M domains in their blocklist, they only have 8.2% of requests blocked. My dashboard currently says 36% of requests are blocked while having 125k blocked domains.
  - moviuro 7y ago
    I'm interested to see where you get your lists!... mine[0] is about 51k domains, and I don't see ads. [0] https://git.sr.ht/~moviuro/moviuro.bin/tree/master/lie-to-me https://git.sr.ht/~moviuro/moviuro.bin/tree/master/lie-to-me
  - _Wintermute 7y ago
    You might want to check if it's Firefox, VSCode or some other telemetry that's getting blocked. I had a similar percentage blocked until I disabled those apps phoning home.
    - Moru 7y ago
      Yeah, on our Pi-hole 45% of the blocked domains are only four domains. Three Microsoft at about 35% and one Google at 10%. But we also have uBlock on everything that accesses internet so that lowers the amount of google lookups.
  - bubersson 7y ago
    pi-hole shows blocked DNS requests, it doesn't show the the number of the AJAX/Static request your browser tried to make, which is going to be quite larger and that may match your 36%.
- slenk 7y ago
  The developers of pihole (at least some) don't use anything but the defaults
rbritton 7y ago
Reference for what the different colors mean: https://simonhearne.com/2015/find-third-party-assets/ https://simonhearne.com/2015/find-third-party-assets/
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
trimmedarticle 7y ago
https://beta.trimread.com https://beta.trimread.com
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
gav 7y ago
Until sites can monetize content in other ways, they will have to be ad-supported, which to be useful to advertisers, involve tracking. People are simply not willing to pay: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1219911533070897153 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1219911533070897153
- rzmnzm 7y ago
  Isn't nytimes behind a paywall already?
- dmitriid 7y ago
  For thousands of years people were able to advertise and sell stuff without tracking.
  - ramraj07 7y ago
    That's because they couldn't track then. You could just put an ad in the paper and hope your demographic sees it
    - rzzzt 7y ago
      That feels recursive. They didn't track because they couldn't, but now they do because they can?
      - sbmthakur 7y ago
        Humans have always been experimental and some of us have never hesitated to use shady practices to increase profits. For instance, back in the day empires tried their best to restrict foreign products in their territory, no matter how much inferior their own products were.
    - philwelch 7y ago
      And if tracking was regulated or blocked, they wouldn't be able to do it anymore.
  - 7y ago
gigatexal 7y ago
How do I get his block list
allovernow 7y ago
Can someone please explain what the request map is showing? Is that tracking data being exported multiple hops? What do the circle areas represent?
- joeframbach 7y ago
  Without actually digging into it, I would assume that nytimes loads js assets from a third party, that's the direct nodes from the center. The size of the more is the size of the js asset. That third party then injects yet another script onto the page. The next connected nodes represent these scripts and their size. And so on and so forth. These scripts ensure to the advertiser that their ad is actually being shown. The advertiser doesn't trust the hosting page to correctly display their ad, so the ad injects their own tracking script. That tracking script injects their dependencies. Thus this madness.
- epse 7y ago
  Every blob on the map is a loaded resource and an line connects every resource with whatever pointed to it. The reason you can get a tree is because of things like iframes that can then themselves request other resources. It might also be some 3rd party javascript requesting other third party resources.
- paulio 7y ago
  This is obvious but I had Firefox containers & Decentraleyes enabled. This makes comparing the results to the output of the DevTools Network tab a little difficult. Turn off all the protection to see the issues in the DevTools Network tab.
jasondclinton 7y ago
This isn't any better on the NYTimes mobile site. Everyone should be running Firefox for Android with uBlock extension enabled. Bonus: it reduces the network traffic so dramatically, it's like getting a new phone.
- Osiris 7y ago
  I use Firefox Focus. It's great for things like reading news articles because there no tabs. Just one page at a time. It has built-in tracker blocking but doesn't support extensions like ublock.
  - bradfa 7y ago
    Normal Firefox for iOS with "Strict" setting enabled in the "Tracking Protection" section of Firefox's in-app settings menu reduces nytimes.com advertisements on the front page for me to basically 0. In my experience, it's just as good as Firefox Focus for blocking trackers and ads.
    - ViViDboarder 7y ago
      I use both on iOS. I generally open in Focus because it actually tends to be stricter. I find that if I open something in Focus I can, from there open in Firefox if blocking is too strict and sometimes it works. Another plus to using Focus, if a site is completely broken, I can just disable all blocking and not worry much about it because nothing gets persisted when I leave and blocking is automatically re-enabled the next time around. Same workflow is pretty much possible without it, but it does make ephemeral browsing a bit easier.
- jshevek 7y ago
  I prefer using a browser on Android that has integrated ad blocking with no extension needed. As with ad blocking extensions, browsing becomes lightening fast.
  - Nux 7y ago
thrwer234334 7y ago
Alas, a DNS server is no match for what India's public telco BSNL does viz. to directly inject redirects non-HTTPs webpages. https://internetfreedom.in/venom-venom-venom-bsnl-engaging-in-code-injections/ https://internetfreedom.in/venom-venom-venom-bsnl-engaging-i...
- tra3 7y ago
  I believe one of the major US telcos used to do this too. Just another reason to wrap everything in SSL. Super easy (and free) with lets encrypt.
  - philsnow 7y ago
    Belkin did something similar once upon a time https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/11/07/help_my_belkin_router/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/11/07/help_my_belkin_rout... To this day I avoid Belkin products because of that, even power strips.
Terretta 7y ago
Shout out to nextdns.io, they run a global pi-hole grid. OK, it’s better, but conceptually. ”Block ads, trackers and malicious websites on all your devices. Get in-depth analytics about your Internet traffic. Protect your privacy and bypass censorship. Shield your kids.” All you do is point your DNS at it. (Or let one of their apps point DNS for you.) But I really like the ethos: ”NextDNS was founded in May 2019 in Delaware, USA by two French founders Romain Cointepas and Olivier Poitrey. Olivier has been working on Internet infrastructures for the last 20 years. In 2005, he founded Dailymotion, the largest video sharing service after Youtube and the most popular European website in the world at the time. He is currently Director of Engineering at Netflix, working on Open Connect, Netflix's home CDN also known as the CDN moving about 30% of the total US Internet traffic. Romain and Olivier closely worked for years at Dailymotion on many different projects. Romain ended up leading the mobile & TV department.” ”We are true supporters of the net neutrality and Internet privacy. We believe that un-encrypted DNS resolvers operated by ISPs are detrimental to those two principals. Alternative solutions like Google DNS or Cloudflare DNS are great, but we think more actors need to step up and provide alternative services to avoid centralization of powers.” In ~8 months it’s gotten mom proof while also being something I can recommend to techos. For me, it’s been more reliable than the enterprise Zscalar DNS filtering, and more configurable than other filters, particularly in allowing ad blocking and custom block lists and white lists along a rich set of built-ins. I’m at 7% blocked out of 4 million queries in last couple months. Ads & Trackers 256,212 Facebook 7,150 Spotify 1,245 Messenger 1,027 Snapchat 938 Twitter 916 I should note that I don’t use Facebook, Spotify, Messenger, Snapchat, or Twitter.
- choeger 7y ago
  That all sounds great, but what is their business model? How do I pay them for their service?
  - kevsim 7y ago
    It's $2/month for unlimited requests, apparently: https://nextdns.io/pricing https://nextdns.io/pricing
ipsum2 7y ago
For uBlock Origin, you should block 3rd party scripts, frames and 1st party scripts on NYTimes. It also has the unintended benefit of getting around the paywall.
Iv 7y ago
Going in a big for-profit news paywall thingie that require I shut down anonymous browsing or ad blocking is to me the mental equivalent of picking up an unindentified pile of trash in the street. You know you'll have to wash hands afterwards. Really, I think people will realize at one time that there is no way around simply forbidding advertisements to make internet sane again. If 10% of the ingenuity spent in the ad/tracking system went towards microtransactions, instead of having to swim through a sewer of ads on any website, we would be rewarding each other with micro-dollars for insightful comments and giving 5% of it to the host.
- prox 7y ago
  I think the big problem is choice. I have no choice but to accept ads on every blippin’ website (if I use a vanilla browser setup) and be tracked. The choice is taken away from me/us and thats the core of the problem. The early internet was way more diverse in content, less converged, and one reason for that is there was no/less incessant need yet to ‘grab eyeballs’ and push for clicks. That www hasn’t fully gone, but its just burried under the tons and tons of marketing fluff. Both content provider and user have become the poorer because of it.
- cryptonym 7y ago
  Greedy people deceiving users... I hardly see micro-transaction as a solution. Just like ad/tracking, we would be rewarding big corps and click baiters, not each other.
  - Iv 7y ago
    Pay for content you liked, don't pay for content you don't. How do you propose deception to work in that case?
mikedilger 7y ago
I can't see this post because my pi-hole server blocks twitter [1]. But I bet it's just grand. [1] Actually, not just to be cheeky.
ginko 7y ago
Small tangential rant: Ever since an iOS update last year Firefox (well, the Firefox-branded Safari browser for iOS) doesn't block ads for me anymore. I really noticed that my mobile data usage spiked since then. There's all these adblocker apps in the app store, but they seem rather scummy and the few I've tried don't appear to be working with Firefox anyways. It's ridiculous considering Apple is declaring itself the champion of privacy. I might really have to rethink if I get another iphone next time I'm buying a smart phone. Not that Android isn't equally terrible for different reasons..
- zeta0134 7y ago
  FOSS Android really isn't that bad, and probably the main thing stopping me from switching to iOS is that Firefox for Android has basically full extension support. uBlock Origin's UI is just slightly wonky since it's designed for the desktop browser, but it works great and stuff doesn't really seem to slio through. It's great to be kinda in control, even if it's not perfect.
- lorenzhs 7y ago
  Uh, what? Content Blockers on iOS aren't scummy, they can't track you because all they do is provide filter lists to the OS, which then runs them against your browser traffic. They work just fine in Firefox. Firefox Focus provides its tracking protection list as a Safari Content Blocker, which is nice. Other than that, I use AdGuard because it's free and lets you choose which filter lists to use. You have to enable content blockers in Settings → Safari → Content Blockers. Just downloading the app without following the instructions is not enough.
  - ginko 7y ago
    >AdGuard I'm sorry, but a closed-source ad blocker offered by a for-profit company and offering a pro version seems scummy to me.
    - lorenzhs 7y ago
      I'm sorry, but that's nonsense. AdGuard doesn't have any scummy stuff like "acceptable ads", they make money by providing a fully functional free ad-blocker and selling a version that has more features. That's as un-scummy as it gets. (I have no relation to them. I use the free version. It does everything I want.) By the way, you can get the source code at https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardForiOS https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardForiOS. There's also a list of open-source content blockers at https://old.reddit.com/comments/btlwda/ https://old.reddit.com/comments/btlwda/, some of them are non-commercial.
Jaruzel 7y ago
I did www.dailymail.co.uk: https://twitter.com/Jaruzel/status/1220262127958659073 https://twitter.com/Jaruzel/status/1220262127958659073 I think it's worth someone collating all these together into a website-of-shame.
- aberforth123 7y ago
  I could make this list better? https://webtest.app/worst.html https://webtest.app/worst.html
  - efa 7y ago
    380 cookies! Good lord.
  - efreak 7y ago
    If this is your website, please make the table header sticky, so it stays in view as you scroll down. Having to scroll up to check it is a bit annoying. Also, another column for Firefox (with it's default tracker blocking enabled) would probably be useful. The advanced metrics page should also have a css media query for screen size; either split the table rows into a list or set a min-width on the table as a whole. On my phone, the first column has only 1-3 characters per line, and other columns seem to only show part of the contents (even the 0 is only half-visible).
3xblah 7y ago
For those who prefer json to ads, trackers and bloat, below is a script to fetch NYT by section in human-readable jsonp. #! /bin/sh case $1 in world |w*) x=world # shortcut: w ;;us |u*) x=us # shortcut: u ;;politics |p*) x=politics # shortcut: p ;;nyregion |n*) x=nyregion # shortcut: n ;;business |bu*) x=business # shortcut: bu ;;opinion |o*) x=opinion # shortcut: o ;;technology |te*) x=technology # shortcut: te ;;science |sc*) x=science # shortcut: sc ;;health |h*) x=health # shortcut: h ;;sports |sp*) x=sports # shortcut: sp ;;arts |a*) x=arts # shortcut: a ;;books |bo*) x=books # shortcut: bo ;;style |st*) x=style # shortcut: st ;;food |f*) x=food # shortcut: f ;;travel |tr*) x=travel # shortcut: tr ;;magazine |m*) x=magazine # shortcut: m ;;t-magazine |t-*) x=t-magazine # shortcut: t- ;;realestate |r*) x=realestate # shortcut: r ;;*) echo usage: $0 section exec sed -n '/x=/!d;s/.*x=//;/sed/!p' $0 esac curl -s https://static01.nyt.com/services/json/sectionfronts/$x/index.jsonp Example: Make simple page of titles, article urls and captions, where above script is named "nyt". nyt tr | sed '/\"headline\": \"/{s//<p>/;s/\".*/<\/p>/;p};/\"full\": \"/{s//<p>/;s/..$/<\/p>/;p};/\"link\": \"/{s///;s/ *//;s/\".*//;s|.*|<a href=&>&</a>|;p}' > travel.html firefox travel.html Only need one domain for viewing in graphical browser -- static01.nyt.com -- articles and images look great, at least on desktop Can block everything else
- hkt 7y ago
  ..do they not just do RSS? That's genius though, and I love it. You're clearly very dedicated to both the NYT and privacy.
  - burkaman 7y ago
    They do, they have topic-specific RSS feeds that work great for me. Example: http://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Science.xml http://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Science.xml
    - 3xblah 7y ago
      UTF-8 complexity
Santosh83 7y ago
I run uBlock for the sake of not getting bogged down by resource heavy ads/cryptominers and to mitigate the threat of malware, not so much tracking. I would assume most major ad companies have already vastly improved fingerprinting and will be able to track unique devices despite all conventional trackers being blocked. Add to that how more and more sites require you to be signed in to be functionally useful that ad tracker blocking is becoming less useful as time goes on. In any case ad personalisation does work with me as I never click on any ad, personalised or not.
- HenryBemis 7y ago
  If you are using Firefox, they have started the war against browser fingerprinting: https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/how-to-block-fingerprinting-with-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/how-to-block-fingerprinting... So, with a strong hosts file, a blocker/noscript/privacy badger we are in a better place. It is always a cat and mouse game though.. My go-to for HOSTS is: https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
  - vic-traill 7y ago
    I've been using the MVPS HOSTS file [0] on Windows for a long time. I don't know if it is maintained any better than any other curated HOSTS files, but its been around for 20 years. I've just confirmed that it is still a Filter Lists option in uBlock Origin. The web page sure gets points for being state-of-the-art circa 1998. At least there's no Blink tags. :) [0] http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm
    - HenryBemis 7y ago
      My "objection" with having some things ONLY on the browser, is that there are other applications that speak with the internet (e.g. Windows Telemetry). I didn't see anyone mentioning this, a very useful site for Browsers' filters: https://filterlists.com/ https://filterlists.com/
  - yellow_lead 7y ago
chewz 7y ago
DNSCloak is dnscrypt-proxy client for iPhone. Choose your own dnscrypt provider, manage your own black- and whitelist. [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dnscloak-secure-dns-client/id1452162351 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dnscloak-secure-dns-client/id1...
- sergimansilla 7y ago
  Looks great, but it's suspicious that is free. What's their business model?
  - chewz 7y ago
    Free software is suspicious? I cannot endorse the app but it is made by dnscrypt-proxy enthusiasts. Had been removed from AppStore and brought back thanks to support of German incubator https://techcultivation.org/#overview https://techcultivation.org/#overview https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy/issues/42#issuecomment-464354580 https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy/issues/42#issueco... https://github.com/s-s/dnscloak https://github.com/s-s/dnscloak
- newscracker 7y ago
  That’s quite interesting. I’ve used DNS Cloak in the past, but I’ve never tried the blacklists or whitelists. How would one get started with it? I mean, from what sources would one populate it and how?
  - chewz 7y ago
    Go to advanced options. You can generate your own list and load as a file on iPhone, you can also set forwarding and cloaking. But I think it is more practical for your personal fine tuning of DNS behavior. For larger lists it is easier to point to a DNS servers that already has some block lists on. Personally I point to my personal doh/dnscrypt server which is refreshing blacklists twice a day with cron job.
mkup 7y ago
Let's draw similar graph for Windows 10
hans1729 7y ago
What really grinds my gears: they do the same thing when you're a paying subscriber. I'm with the nyt for two years now, and I can vividly remember seeing the first ad that was displayed despite me being logged in. How is that okay?! And btw: I wanted to cancel my subscription afterwards, but apparently you can't do that via web from the EU (or not for my subscription type?) - so I need to cancel on the phone, during american business hours. I appreciate the times for their journalism, but their business practice with respect to selling their customers data is beyond inacceptable. I'm already paying you money, get your act together please...
- kolp 7y ago
  Financial Times do the same thing. About €60 a month for a subscription and they still insist on putting ads in the app. I estimate that the ads only generate a miniscule amount of revenue, yet it really detracts from the user experience.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    The ads for paying users are probably worth a lot more than for non paying users.
    - tomatocracy 7y ago
      For the FT specifically, I get the impression that a pretty large portion of subscriptions are corporate/paid for by employers so I'm not sure how true that really is.
      - lotsofpulp 7y ago
        The companies paying for a FT subscription for their employees are going to have well compensated employees, hence valuable eyeballs for advertisers.
        JohnFen 7y ago
Havoc 7y ago
Sweet tool. Almost more interesting than the actual post
mrarjen 7y ago
Ads have gotten to the point I'm once again getting the feeling I'm on IE with 80% of the page blocked by toolbars. But this time it's ads and video's blocking any content I want to consume. Blockers are a valuable thing to simply be able to read or watch anything on most sites now a days. I also happily pay for proper media, but not when you complicate this by blocking parts of this action with ads to begin with.
threedots 7y ago
I think they would benefit from a more dumbed down FAQ/set up. For context I'm at the upper end of non technical people in some respects (I write pandas queries everyday etc) but know nothing about DNS and this lost me pretty quickly. I'm still not sure whether this should be used in addition to or instead of ublock (which is what I use now). The setup page is also a bit intimidating given I don't understand what 99% of the things on it are.
- nebulous1 7y ago
  You should keep using uBlock, but Pi-hole will also block traffic from sources other than your uBlock enabled browser. Your mobile, for instance. Where did the setup lose you? I would say you just got unlucky with a specific term or concept you aren't aware of.
aberforth123 7y ago
Loading New York Times on Brave vs uBlock Origin vs Chrome on Webtest.app: https://webtest.app/?url=https://nytimes.com https://webtest.app/?url=https://nytimes.com
- slenk 7y ago
  Heh. Brave downloads 10Mb less of data but still takes just as long to render
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tyingq 7y ago
I imagine the ad industry will kill DNS based ad blocking sooner or later. It's just too much of a cat and mouse game to have only the hostname/IP and a blacklist as your defense.
dwnvoted2hell 7y ago
You could just stop reading the NY Times. They've gotten enough wrong that they shouldn't be the newspaper of record any longer. I'm a little partial to the LA Times - during the elections as I recall, they had less lean one way or the other.
- swebs 7y ago
  NPR also has a great text version that's free of tracking. https://text.npr.org https://text.npr.org Unfortunately, the original version of their site has tracking requests out the wazoo.
whoopdedo 7y ago
The reason I block ads is because I was served a fake full-window "virus" warning while visiting ESPN.com.
ronjouch 7y ago
Also, if you own a router able to run OpenWrt ( https://openwrt.org/supported_devices https://openwrt.org/supported_devices ), you have access to several packages providing the same technical solution as a pi-hole (DNS-based blocking). As far as I know, the most common and maintained is https://github.com/openwrt/packages/tree/master/net/adblock/files https://github.com/openwrt/packages/tree/master/net/adblock/... . It's easy to install, full-featured, ships with lots of lists to pick from, auto-updates lists, doesn't need an additional device, and you will benefit from router features shipped as part of OpenWrt and probably unavailable in your router's proprietary firmware. Much recommended. If that sounds attractive and it sounds like a good opportunity to change your crumbling unpatched router, the question "what's today's good cheap router running OpenWrt without trouble?" is frequently answered by https://www.reddit.com/r/openwrt/ https://www.reddit.com/r/openwrt/ :) .
- Grimm665 7y ago
  Pfsense as well, with Pfblocker (https://www.linuxincluded.com/block-ads-malvertising-on-pfsense-using-pfblockerng-dnsbl/ https://www.linuxincluded.com/block-ads-malvertising-on-pfse...)
- qntty 7y ago
  Is it worth switching from AdvancedTomato to OpenWrt?
  - ronjouch 7y ago
    I don't know.
TheCabin 7y ago
What exactly do we actually see here? (I am surprised because there are vertices not connected to the origin, how were these detected?)
peterwwillis 7y ago
Why do any of these people care about internet ads tracking them? Are they bored? Yes, random corporations and political groups are compiling personal dossiers about you. What is it you fear? That they'll be successful at selling you something? That "ominous entity" will do "bad thing" because they know "that thing about you that everyone else you know already knows" ? If you have a real reason for serious concern for your safety, I get that. If you're just afraid of people knowing things about you, yikes.
ouid 7y ago
Is there a categorical difference between advertising and fake news?
komali2 7y ago
Is pihole any different from just having a fatass hosts file?
- tra3 7y ago
  That's basically what it is. Advantages: - the list is community generated - you can disable it temporarily - there's a nice UI - you can protect all devices on your network Disadvantages: - gotta run it somehow (appliance, container, etc). Another thing to manage. Overall it's been a net positive. The amount of filtering that happens on my home network is staggering.
- hart_russell 7y ago
  Yes and no: Yes that's it's mechanism essentially. No in that it provides a nice user interface for automatically updating your blocklist, specifying which DNS to point to and how to encrypt your queries, you can temporarily disable the blocking (which you sometimes need to do), etc etc
- jrace 7y ago
  Essentially...yes. But it allows you to point all devices in your network to one "fatass hosts file" instead of maintaining them on each device. You do not need a raspberry pi to run pihole, it can be on a VM also.
freediver 7y ago
This has to be a highlight of the discussion https://twitter.com/paulcalvano/status/1000094415485132801/photo/1 https://twitter.com/paulcalvano/status/1000094415485132801/p...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- mindslight 7y ago
  Look at all that "innovation" being stifled...
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    It explains why there's so much fear-mongering and misinformation regarding the GDPR and how they're trying to make users hate it (by using non-compliant and annoying by design "consent" prompts). There are literally billions being invested in all that cancer called adtech/martech that's been made illegal by the GDPR.
- npsimons 7y ago
  JFC! Maybe if they didn't whore themselves out, they wouldn't need the money they're whoring themselves out for because their hosting and web dev costs would go way the fuck down.
alkonaut 7y ago
I have quite a raspberrys around now but they seem kind of flimsy and unreliable. When you really need your "server" to just work for 5 or 10 years in a closet without worrying about it, you'd want something that isn't fed by a 5V transformer that is prone to dying once a year. I'd happily pay $100 or even $200 for an "industrial" raspberry(-compatible) device. Something in a sturdy case with a reliable power supply. I’m a bit reluctant to add another one to my closet as a 24/7 server until I find a solution to the reliability issue. I don’t want to run a proper big server because of the electricity cost either. I want something under 15W, preferably passive, with high reliability.
- htfu 7y ago
  Proper USB power supplies don't just randomly die once a year, that's utter lunacy. And what exactly is stopping you from getting any 5V power source or even just rigging up an old PSU with a 10W resistor on the 12V rail and splicing the 5V onto a USB cord? This is a non-issue. Edit: wrote this before your edit, but still stands. If there's anything to worry about reliability-wise in that timeframe it's SD card corruption, but there's plenty ways around that, whether by limiting writes or using other media. Edit 2: hostile tone not intended, just perplexing seeing something almost akin to concern trolling done in this manner.
  - alkonaut 7y ago
    I just don’t like tinkering. I want what you describe but I what to pay with money, not time. Simply a raspberry with a good case, a good psu researched and tested by someone else. They aren’t that easy to find. The market for those of us who are happy to pay $50 for a case and $50 for a psu to house a $30 computer is slim I suppose. But the pi does have a bit of a dual personality problem where it is made cheap enough to be a toy or hobby thing but people often want to run them unattended for years. I’m not trolling I’m genuinely looking for advice on more recommended psu’s, cases, raspberry clones etc that don’t require any modding and still makes a 5 year uptime server from a pi.
    - htfu 7y ago
satyrnein 7y ago
How does this compare to using something like Segment (or your own server) to proxy the information to the 3rd party analytics tools? Seems better from a performance perspective. With the 3rd party cookie changes going on, is it equivalent from a tracking perspective? It also seems "unblockable". So is that the future?
mataug 7y ago
I do not condone the practice of selling out user data, but what can traditional print journalism do to stay profitable ? Print readership is down, online subscriptions aren't bringing in enough revenue, people want their news for free. So someone's gotta pay for this ? Maybe bundles are a good way to encourage people to subscribe and pay for quality journalism ?
- svnpenn 7y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22126084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22126084
- npsimons 7y ago
  We need to pay better attention. Things like The Correspondant come along (https://thecorrespondent.com/ https://thecorrespondent.com/), and they're lucky if they succeed. I threw some money at them specifically because of the problems of today's news (ads and bad journalism). I wouldn't entirely be opposed to microtransactions, and I already send money to people on Patreon. ETA: I pay probably half a dozen services to eschew ads. I've been paying Consumer Reports for years for online access. I feel that if you can't figure out a way to make money without screwing over your customers (with ads or invasion of privacy), your business deserves to die in a fire, the sooner the better.
fnord77 7y ago
correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't a site easily defeat a pihole by return a page with links to ad assets that have IP addresses rather than hostnames? Resolve the hostnames on the server and simply substitute them in the links/scripts/assets
- GreenJelloShot 7y ago
  Yes, they could defeat the pihole by hard coding IPs, but that would cause a whole range of other headaches and would most likely not be worth doing.
  - MattSayar 7y ago
    Yeah that sounds like a configuration maintenance nightmare for the relatively minuscule population of pi-hole owners.
    - fnord77 7y ago
      Just resolve the IPs of the links as the page is being served.
talkingtab 7y ago
Are there open source tools that do the same thing as the website requestmap.webperf.tools? Follow all the links etc?
chubot 7y ago
Is an ad blocker alone not enough? What's the difference between that an a "pi-hole server"? Ah I see it's for mobile, because you can't install ad blockers there? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi-hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi-hole Yeah I imagine it must save incredible amounts of bandwidth.
- Night_Thastus 7y ago
  Ad-blockers (like uBlock Origin) and pi-hole operate on two different levels. The ad-blocker prevents your browser from ever requesting data (like the ads) from the place they come from in the first place. Pi-hole on the other end works with DNS, or the Domain Name System. You set it up so your router sends all DNS traffic to the pi-hole, which will then drop any traffic that has a domain name it has blacklisted. So it only kicks in if something on your network actually requested something from one of those blacklisted domains. It comes with many domains already included, but more can be added fairly easily and large user-made lists and regexs exist to expand it. Ad-blockers can be used on mobile versions of browsers (like Firefox for Android) but for people using mobile apps (like the Youtube app) having a pihole is a lifesaver.
  - chubot 7y ago
    Yes that makes sense, mobile apps need it! Funny I wrote a node.js HTTP proxy like 5 years ago to run all my browsing sessions through. I downloaded a text file of ad domains, probably from adblock itself. So yeah the benefit is that you don't have to configure each browser. Well it was an HTTP proxy and not DNS, so it did require some extra configuration on the client. But you don't have to install an extension at least. But I stopped using it because it was a pain to administer and I didn't spend much time making the code solid. But I will look into pi-hole -- didn't know about it!
nkrisc 7y ago
I use an adblocker in my browser and a pi-hole as well. I hate ad networks and it's been a long time since I've been redirected to a site letting me know I've won a free iPad. But some sites do advertising right and my blockers are useless against them, and I'm OK with that. Take, for example, this site (and here's the owner writing about ad-blocking): https://css-tricks.com/discussion-around-ad-blocking/ https://css-tricks.com/discussion-around-ad-blocking/ (2015) Their ads are all first-party content inserted into the page. It's not even an iframe. Just divs and svgs like the rest of the page with an anchor tag that links to the sponsor. It even looks kind of nice and fits cleanly with the site. And most importantly, to me as a visitor, a link to a sponsored site is not going to redirect me to a scam the moment I land on css-tricks.com, because they at least always control what's on their own pages.
hi41 7y ago
I looked at the graph on Twitter but did not understand what it signifies. Can someone please explain.

810 points by slater 7y ago

kmos 7y ago

I use AdGuard - https://adguard.com/ https://adguard.com/

The amount of tracking is mindboggling. With advertisers switching to 1st party cookies it will get harder to avoid tracking, unfortunately.

Polylactic_acid 7y ago
The cat and mouse games will continue until legal action is taken. Before loading any tracking at all the user should be shown a Yes/no option.
- pndy 7y ago
  If legal action would be taken, shouldn't browser have the controls regarding tracking preference? Setting up each page (provided that 'No' would still load page in either full or stripped-down variant) on each devices owned and/or reapplying choices whenever browser cache is cleared would be frustrating. Maybe DNT should return as respected feature within browser and user choice shouldn't affect the access to the content but only its form.
  - toper-centage 7y ago
    Exactly. That's how we ended up with the terrible cookie warnings. The funny thing is that GDPR has language about respecting the DNT but no one cares.
    - tristador 7y ago
      Is there a good example of a large company that blatantly ignores DNT? I'd guess its hard to know as a lot of the tracking could be server side only.
  - kube-system 7y ago
    DNT is counterproductive from a technical perspective. The more bits of entropy you give trackers, the easier you are to track.
    - fauigerzigerk 7y ago
      If DNT was legally binding, they wouldn't be allowed to use that additional bit of entropy. But I would prefer a PTM (please track me) header with legally binding semantics.
      - kube-system 7y ago
        Those who abuse it the most will just move to a jurisdiction where it is allowed. Or they'll do it anyway, since many of the worst threats on the internet are already criminal. On the internet, technical solutions > legal solutions.
        fauigerzigerk 7y ago
        There are clearly some things that are economically viable as a criminal enterprise, but I don't think tracking people for ad targeting purposes is one of those things. Tracking only pays if you can track a huge number of people and sell ads to a huge number of advertisers. The profit per tracked user is too small to pay for running a criminal enterprise. Moving to a different jurisdiction is impossible as your customers (the advertisers) and the sites/apps where ads are placed would still be breaking the law.
        kube-system 7y ago
        > There are clearly some things that are economically viable as a criminal enterprise, but I don't think tracking people for ad targeting purposes is one of those things. True, most illicit ads tend to be non-targeted. But some criminals do things like blackmail, fraud, espionage, etc. using tracking data. > Moving to a different jurisdiction is impossible as your customers (the advertisers) and the sites/apps where ads are placed would still be breaking the law. That all depends on the specific business model, business partners, and their presence. Regardless, what I describe is not conjecture, many companies are shuffling around data to avoid GDPR rather than comply. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/19/facebook-moves-15bn-users-out-of-reach-of-new-european-privacy-law https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/19/facebook-... A different company without a physical presence or business partner in the jurisdiction in question, might have little to no incentive to follow the law. In the end, even if companies are breaking the law, or even if they are fined, your data won't be protected unless they actually change their behavior as a result. Calculated non-compliance is a commonplace strategy for corporate legal compliance.
- adrianN 7y ago
  That didn't work out so well for the EU's cookie law. We need a different solution I think.
  - dmitriid 7y ago
    I think it worked wonders with GDPR which exposed all this pus. Unfortunately, there EU has been too slow acting on it. Only British Airways has been slapped with a significant fine so far.
    - taurath 7y ago
      GDPR opt out rate is well well under 1%.
      - kelnos 7y ago
        What does that even mean? GDPR requires companies to request that people opt in to information gathering.
        martin_a 7y ago
        And in reality, as long as no fear-mongering fines are handed out, companies will try to bypass it. There would be ways to get control over this, but law is slow.
        kevsim 7y ago
        IANAL, but this is not entirely true. Under GDPR data can be used by claiming "legitimate interest" [0]. In the case of legitimate interest, the user needs to opt-out rather than opt-in. 0: https://www.gdpreu.org/the-regulation/key-concepts/legitimate-interest/ https://www.gdpreu.org/the-regulation/key-concepts/legitimat...
        leni536 7y ago
        I rarely see opt in GDPR popups, it's typically "accept tracking" or "more options...", the latter seemingly sending you down an infinite rabbit hole. Well, now that I think about it, this might count as opt in, but this is definitely a dark pattern.
- dmitriid 7y ago
  One acronym: GDPR It's also one of the reasons why people have become so acutely aware of the problem. When the umpteenth site asks you to consent to over 200 ad providers/trackers, there's clearly something wrong.
- ewidar 7y ago
  Actually from what I can see, checking US websites from Paris gives much less requests. Compare the request map for CNN from - Dulles, VA: 511 requests https://requestmap.herokuapp.com/render/200123_JH_ed7b9b27dfdc2ad99109ede306579482 https://requestmap.herokuapp.com/render/200123_JH_ed7b9b27df... - Paris, France: 77 requests https://requestmap.herokuapp.com/render/200123_87_39fdca38ac0919d45e5e950d816e29bc https://requestmap.herokuapp.com/render/200123_87_39fdca38ac... I don't know if it's for sure because of the cookies/gdpr law, but there is a clear difference, and that's a big win in my opinion.
BaitBlock 7y ago
I'm working on a browser extension called Baitblock: https://baitblock.app/ https://baitblock.app/ It also deals with 1st party cookie tracking. It clears cookie/storage on every page load as long as it detects that you're not logged in to the website (still buggy) using machine learning (NLP). The next minor version (under development) will also allow you to block websites/domains from appearing from google search results, facebook feed, twitter feed and basically the entire internet. It also blocks cookie/gdpr banners on websites. (Signup on mobile does not work for now) You can also add summaries/TL;DR for any link on the internet (right click) so others dont have to click.
- severine 7y ago
  Looks great, will try on Firefox when ready!
- contravariant 7y ago
  For people that are fine with a manual whitelist there's also Cookie Autodelete: https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete. It removes all cookies when you navigate away from a website after a (customizeable) grace period. Usually this works fine, you just need to be careful when you tell it to erase cookies when the domain changes (rather than when the tab closes), some 2-step sign in procedures need the cookies from the original webpage to work.
  - Kaiyou 7y ago
    Which doesn't save you from banners stretching around 50% of a given site urging you to accept their cookie policy.
- wayoutthere 7y ago
  I want a browser that allows first-party cookies, but auto-expires them if I don't visit the domain for an hour. It should also only allow one level of requests (i.e. if a site requests a resource, that resource cannot request additional resources from other domains). The latter part won't prevent bad behavior, but it will force that behavior to be proxied -- which carries technical, financial and legal implications that will cause companies to be more careful about their downstream redirects.
pedro_hab 7y ago
I'm very curious on how 1st party cookies will be used for tracking. How can they connect one website's cookies to another's? All I can think of is fingerprinting, but afaik you can't really be sure "who's that" since fingerprinting filters people out, and isn't good enough to target a single individual. I guess they can improve it, but there are ways to work around it too, it will probably be easier to fix fingerprinting than blocking 3rd party cookies. Its seems that if 1st party cookies were as good they would have switched to it by now.
tbyehl 7y ago
PiHole and the browser-based blockers are working to apply filtering to CNAMEs. https://pi-hole.net/2020/01/19/announcing-a-beta-test-of-pi-hole-5-0/ https://pi-hole.net/2020/01/19/announcing-a-beta-test-of-pi-...

mikestew 7y ago

Five million domains in the block lists? I need to upgrade my paltry list of 125K. Maybe that’s why NYT ads still get through at my house.

starky 7y ago
The interesting thing to me is that despite having 5M domains in their blocklist, they only have 8.2% of requests blocked. My dashboard currently says 36% of requests are blocked while having 125k blocked domains.
- moviuro 7y ago
  I'm interested to see where you get your lists!... mine[0] is about 51k domains, and I don't see ads. [0] https://git.sr.ht/~moviuro/moviuro.bin/tree/master/lie-to-me https://git.sr.ht/~moviuro/moviuro.bin/tree/master/lie-to-me
- _Wintermute 7y ago
  You might want to check if it's Firefox, VSCode or some other telemetry that's getting blocked. I had a similar percentage blocked until I disabled those apps phoning home.
  - Moru 7y ago
    Yeah, on our Pi-hole 45% of the blocked domains are only four domains. Three Microsoft at about 35% and one Google at 10%. But we also have uBlock on everything that accesses internet so that lowers the amount of google lookups.
- bubersson 7y ago
  pi-hole shows blocked DNS requests, it doesn't show the the number of the AJAX/Static request your browser tried to make, which is going to be quite larger and that may match your 36%.
slenk 7y ago
The developers of pihole (at least some) don't use anything but the defaults

rbritton 7y ago

Reference for what the different colors mean: https://simonhearne.com/2015/find-third-party-assets/ https://simonhearne.com/2015/find-third-party-assets/

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

trimmedarticle 7y ago

https://beta.trimread.com https://beta.trimread.com

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

gav 7y ago

Until sites can monetize content in other ways, they will have to be ad-supported, which to be useful to advertisers, involve tracking. People are simply not willing to pay: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1219911533070897153 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1219911533070897153

rzmnzm 7y ago
Isn't nytimes behind a paywall already?
dmitriid 7y ago
For thousands of years people were able to advertise and sell stuff without tracking.
- ramraj07 7y ago
  That's because they couldn't track then. You could just put an ad in the paper and hope your demographic sees it
  - rzzzt 7y ago
    That feels recursive. They didn't track because they couldn't, but now they do because they can?
    - sbmthakur 7y ago
      Humans have always been experimental and some of us have never hesitated to use shady practices to increase profits. For instance, back in the day empires tried their best to restrict foreign products in their territory, no matter how much inferior their own products were.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    And if tracking was regulated or blocked, they wouldn't be able to do it anymore.
- 7y ago

gigatexal 7y ago

How do I get his block list

allovernow 7y ago

Can someone please explain what the request map is showing? Is that tracking data being exported multiple hops? What do the circle areas represent?

joeframbach 7y ago
Without actually digging into it, I would assume that nytimes loads js assets from a third party, that's the direct nodes from the center. The size of the more is the size of the js asset. That third party then injects yet another script onto the page. The next connected nodes represent these scripts and their size. And so on and so forth. These scripts ensure to the advertiser that their ad is actually being shown. The advertiser doesn't trust the hosting page to correctly display their ad, so the ad injects their own tracking script. That tracking script injects their dependencies. Thus this madness.
epse 7y ago
Every blob on the map is a loaded resource and an line connects every resource with whatever pointed to it. The reason you can get a tree is because of things like iframes that can then themselves request other resources. It might also be some 3rd party javascript requesting other third party resources.
paulio 7y ago
This is obvious but I had Firefox containers & Decentraleyes enabled. This makes comparing the results to the output of the DevTools Network tab a little difficult. Turn off all the protection to see the issues in the DevTools Network tab.

jasondclinton 7y ago

This isn't any better on the NYTimes mobile site. Everyone should be running Firefox for Android with uBlock extension enabled. Bonus: it reduces the network traffic so dramatically, it's like getting a new phone.

Osiris 7y ago
I use Firefox Focus. It's great for things like reading news articles because there no tabs. Just one page at a time. It has built-in tracker blocking but doesn't support extensions like ublock.
- bradfa 7y ago
  Normal Firefox for iOS with "Strict" setting enabled in the "Tracking Protection" section of Firefox's in-app settings menu reduces nytimes.com advertisements on the front page for me to basically 0. In my experience, it's just as good as Firefox Focus for blocking trackers and ads.
  - ViViDboarder 7y ago
    I use both on iOS. I generally open in Focus because it actually tends to be stricter. I find that if I open something in Focus I can, from there open in Firefox if blocking is too strict and sometimes it works. Another plus to using Focus, if a site is completely broken, I can just disable all blocking and not worry much about it because nothing gets persisted when I leave and blocking is automatically re-enabled the next time around. Same workflow is pretty much possible without it, but it does make ephemeral browsing a bit easier.
jshevek 7y ago
I prefer using a browser on Android that has integrated ad blocking with no extension needed. As with ad blocking extensions, browsing becomes lightening fast.
- Nux 7y ago

thrwer234334 7y ago

Alas, a DNS server is no match for what India's public telco BSNL does viz. to directly inject redirects non-HTTPs webpages. https://internetfreedom.in/venom-venom-venom-bsnl-engaging-in-code-injections/ https://internetfreedom.in/venom-venom-venom-bsnl-engaging-i...

tra3 7y ago
I believe one of the major US telcos used to do this too. Just another reason to wrap everything in SSL. Super easy (and free) with lets encrypt.
- philsnow 7y ago
  Belkin did something similar once upon a time https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/11/07/help_my_belkin_router/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/11/07/help_my_belkin_rout... To this day I avoid Belkin products because of that, even power strips.

Terretta 7y ago

Shout out to nextdns.io, they run a global pi-hole grid. OK, it’s better, but conceptually. ”Block ads, trackers and malicious websites on all your devices. Get in-depth analytics about your Internet traffic. Protect your privacy and bypass censorship. Shield your kids.” All you do is point your DNS at it. (Or let one of their apps point DNS for you.) But I really like the ethos: ”NextDNS was founded in May 2019 in Delaware, USA by two French founders Romain Cointepas and Olivier Poitrey. Olivier has been working on Internet infrastructures for the last 20 years. In 2005, he founded Dailymotion, the largest video sharing service after Youtube and the most popular European website in the world at the time. He is currently Director of Engineering at Netflix, working on Open Connect, Netflix's home CDN also known as the CDN moving about 30% of the total US Internet traffic. Romain and Olivier closely worked for years at Dailymotion on many different projects. Romain ended up leading the mobile & TV department.” ”We are true supporters of the net neutrality and Internet privacy. We believe that un-encrypted DNS resolvers operated by ISPs are detrimental to those two principals. Alternative solutions like Google DNS or Cloudflare DNS are great, but we think more actors need to step up and provide alternative services to avoid centralization of powers.” In ~8 months it’s gotten mom proof while also being something I can recommend to techos. For me, it’s been more reliable than the enterprise Zscalar DNS filtering, and more configurable than other filters, particularly in allowing ad blocking and custom block lists and white lists along a rich set of built-ins. I’m at 7% blocked out of 4 million queries in last couple months. Ads & Trackers 256,212 Facebook 7,150 Spotify 1,245 Messenger 1,027 Snapchat 938 Twitter 916 I should note that I don’t use Facebook, Spotify, Messenger, Snapchat, or Twitter.

choeger 7y ago
That all sounds great, but what is their business model? How do I pay them for their service?
- kevsim 7y ago
  It's $2/month for unlimited requests, apparently: https://nextdns.io/pricing https://nextdns.io/pricing

ipsum2 7y ago

For uBlock Origin, you should block 3rd party scripts, frames and 1st party scripts on NYTimes. It also has the unintended benefit of getting around the paywall.

Iv 7y ago

Going in a big for-profit news paywall thingie that require I shut down anonymous browsing or ad blocking is to me the mental equivalent of picking up an unindentified pile of trash in the street. You know you'll have to wash hands afterwards. Really, I think people will realize at one time that there is no way around simply forbidding advertisements to make internet sane again. If 10% of the ingenuity spent in the ad/tracking system went towards microtransactions, instead of having to swim through a sewer of ads on any website, we would be rewarding each other with micro-dollars for insightful comments and giving 5% of it to the host.

prox 7y ago
I think the big problem is choice. I have no choice but to accept ads on every blippin’ website (if I use a vanilla browser setup) and be tracked. The choice is taken away from me/us and thats the core of the problem. The early internet was way more diverse in content, less converged, and one reason for that is there was no/less incessant need yet to ‘grab eyeballs’ and push for clicks. That www hasn’t fully gone, but its just burried under the tons and tons of marketing fluff. Both content provider and user have become the poorer because of it.
cryptonym 7y ago
Greedy people deceiving users... I hardly see micro-transaction as a solution. Just like ad/tracking, we would be rewarding big corps and click baiters, not each other.
- Iv 7y ago
  Pay for content you liked, don't pay for content you don't. How do you propose deception to work in that case?

mikedilger 7y ago

I can't see this post because my pi-hole server blocks twitter [1]. But I bet it's just grand. [1] Actually, not just to be cheeky.

ginko 7y ago

Small tangential rant: Ever since an iOS update last year Firefox (well, the Firefox-branded Safari browser for iOS) doesn't block ads for me anymore. I really noticed that my mobile data usage spiked since then. There's all these adblocker apps in the app store, but they seem rather scummy and the few I've tried don't appear to be working with Firefox anyways. It's ridiculous considering Apple is declaring itself the champion of privacy. I might really have to rethink if I get another iphone next time I'm buying a smart phone. Not that Android isn't equally terrible for different reasons..

zeta0134 7y ago
FOSS Android really isn't that bad, and probably the main thing stopping me from switching to iOS is that Firefox for Android has basically full extension support. uBlock Origin's UI is just slightly wonky since it's designed for the desktop browser, but it works great and stuff doesn't really seem to slio through. It's great to be kinda in control, even if it's not perfect.
lorenzhs 7y ago
Uh, what? Content Blockers on iOS aren't scummy, they can't track you because all they do is provide filter lists to the OS, which then runs them against your browser traffic. They work just fine in Firefox. Firefox Focus provides its tracking protection list as a Safari Content Blocker, which is nice. Other than that, I use AdGuard because it's free and lets you choose which filter lists to use. You have to enable content blockers in Settings → Safari → Content Blockers. Just downloading the app without following the instructions is not enough.
- ginko 7y ago
  >AdGuard I'm sorry, but a closed-source ad blocker offered by a for-profit company and offering a pro version seems scummy to me.
  - lorenzhs 7y ago
    I'm sorry, but that's nonsense. AdGuard doesn't have any scummy stuff like "acceptable ads", they make money by providing a fully functional free ad-blocker and selling a version that has more features. That's as un-scummy as it gets. (I have no relation to them. I use the free version. It does everything I want.) By the way, you can get the source code at https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardForiOS https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardForiOS. There's also a list of open-source content blockers at https://old.reddit.com/comments/btlwda/ https://old.reddit.com/comments/btlwda/, some of them are non-commercial.

Jaruzel 7y ago

I did www.dailymail.co.uk: https://twitter.com/Jaruzel/status/1220262127958659073 https://twitter.com/Jaruzel/status/1220262127958659073 I think it's worth someone collating all these together into a website-of-shame.

aberforth123 7y ago
I could make this list better? https://webtest.app/worst.html https://webtest.app/worst.html
- efa 7y ago
  380 cookies! Good lord.
- efreak 7y ago
  If this is your website, please make the table header sticky, so it stays in view as you scroll down. Having to scroll up to check it is a bit annoying. Also, another column for Firefox (with it's default tracker blocking enabled) would probably be useful. The advanced metrics page should also have a css media query for screen size; either split the table rows into a list or set a min-width on the table as a whole. On my phone, the first column has only 1-3 characters per line, and other columns seem to only show part of the contents (even the 0 is only half-visible).

3xblah 7y ago

For those who prefer json to ads, trackers and bloat, below is a script to fetch NYT by section in human-readable jsonp. #! /bin/sh case $1 in world |w*) x=world # shortcut: w ;;us |u*) x=us # shortcut: u ;;politics |p*) x=politics # shortcut: p ;;nyregion |n*) x=nyregion # shortcut: n ;;business |bu*) x=business # shortcut: bu ;;opinion |o*) x=opinion # shortcut: o ;;technology |te*) x=technology # shortcut: te ;;science |sc*) x=science # shortcut: sc ;;health |h*) x=health # shortcut: h ;;sports |sp*) x=sports # shortcut: sp ;;arts |a*) x=arts # shortcut: a ;;books |bo*) x=books # shortcut: bo ;;style |st*) x=style # shortcut: st ;;food |f*) x=food # shortcut: f ;;travel |tr*) x=travel # shortcut: tr ;;magazine |m*) x=magazine # shortcut: m ;;t-magazine |t-*) x=t-magazine # shortcut: t- ;;realestate |r*) x=realestate # shortcut: r ;;*) echo usage: $0 section exec sed -n '/x=/!d;s/.*x=//;/sed/!p' $0 esac curl -s https://static01.nyt.com/services/json/sectionfronts/$x/index.jsonp Example: Make simple page of titles, article urls and captions, where above script is named "nyt". nyt tr | sed '/\"headline\": \"/{s//<p>/;s/\".*/<\/p>/;p};/\"full\": \"/{s//<p>/;s/..$/<\/p>/;p};/\"link\": \"/{s///;s/ *//;s/\".*//;s|.*|<a href=&>&</a>|;p}' > travel.html firefox travel.html Only need one domain for viewing in graphical browser -- static01.nyt.com -- articles and images look great, at least on desktop Can block everything else

hkt 7y ago
..do they not just do RSS? That's genius though, and I love it. You're clearly very dedicated to both the NYT and privacy.
- burkaman 7y ago
  They do, they have topic-specific RSS feeds that work great for me. Example: http://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Science.xml http://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Science.xml
  - 3xblah 7y ago
    UTF-8 complexity

Santosh83 7y ago

I run uBlock for the sake of not getting bogged down by resource heavy ads/cryptominers and to mitigate the threat of malware, not so much tracking. I would assume most major ad companies have already vastly improved fingerprinting and will be able to track unique devices despite all conventional trackers being blocked. Add to that how more and more sites require you to be signed in to be functionally useful that ad tracker blocking is becoming less useful as time goes on. In any case ad personalisation does work with me as I never click on any ad, personalised or not.

HenryBemis 7y ago
If you are using Firefox, they have started the war against browser fingerprinting: https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/how-to-block-fingerprinting-with-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/how-to-block-fingerprinting... So, with a strong hosts file, a blocker/noscript/privacy badger we are in a better place. It is always a cat and mouse game though.. My go-to for HOSTS is: https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
- vic-traill 7y ago
  I've been using the MVPS HOSTS file [0] on Windows for a long time. I don't know if it is maintained any better than any other curated HOSTS files, but its been around for 20 years. I've just confirmed that it is still a Filter Lists option in uBlock Origin. The web page sure gets points for being state-of-the-art circa 1998. At least there's no Blink tags. :) [0] http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm
  - HenryBemis 7y ago
    My "objection" with having some things ONLY on the browser, is that there are other applications that speak with the internet (e.g. Windows Telemetry). I didn't see anyone mentioning this, a very useful site for Browsers' filters: https://filterlists.com/ https://filterlists.com/
- yellow_lead 7y ago

chewz 7y ago

DNSCloak is dnscrypt-proxy client for iPhone. Choose your own dnscrypt provider, manage your own black- and whitelist. [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dnscloak-secure-dns-client/id1452162351 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dnscloak-secure-dns-client/id1...

sergimansilla 7y ago
Looks great, but it's suspicious that is free. What's their business model?
- chewz 7y ago
  Free software is suspicious? I cannot endorse the app but it is made by dnscrypt-proxy enthusiasts. Had been removed from AppStore and brought back thanks to support of German incubator https://techcultivation.org/#overview https://techcultivation.org/#overview https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy/issues/42#issuecomment-464354580 https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy/issues/42#issueco... https://github.com/s-s/dnscloak https://github.com/s-s/dnscloak
newscracker 7y ago
That’s quite interesting. I’ve used DNS Cloak in the past, but I’ve never tried the blacklists or whitelists. How would one get started with it? I mean, from what sources would one populate it and how?
- chewz 7y ago
  Go to advanced options. You can generate your own list and load as a file on iPhone, you can also set forwarding and cloaking. But I think it is more practical for your personal fine tuning of DNS behavior. For larger lists it is easier to point to a DNS servers that already has some block lists on. Personally I point to my personal doh/dnscrypt server which is refreshing blacklists twice a day with cron job.

mkup 7y ago

Let's draw similar graph for Windows 10

hans1729 7y ago

What really grinds my gears: they do the same thing when you're a paying subscriber. I'm with the nyt for two years now, and I can vividly remember seeing the first ad that was displayed despite me being logged in. How is that okay?! And btw: I wanted to cancel my subscription afterwards, but apparently you can't do that via web from the EU (or not for my subscription type?) - so I need to cancel on the phone, during american business hours. I appreciate the times for their journalism, but their business practice with respect to selling their customers data is beyond inacceptable. I'm already paying you money, get your act together please...

kolp 7y ago
Financial Times do the same thing. About €60 a month for a subscription and they still insist on putting ads in the app. I estimate that the ads only generate a miniscule amount of revenue, yet it really detracts from the user experience.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  The ads for paying users are probably worth a lot more than for non paying users.
  - tomatocracy 7y ago
    For the FT specifically, I get the impression that a pretty large portion of subscriptions are corporate/paid for by employers so I'm not sure how true that really is.
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      The companies paying for a FT subscription for their employees are going to have well compensated employees, hence valuable eyeballs for advertisers.
      - JohnFen 7y ago

Havoc 7y ago

Sweet tool. Almost more interesting than the actual post

mrarjen 7y ago

Ads have gotten to the point I'm once again getting the feeling I'm on IE with 80% of the page blocked by toolbars. But this time it's ads and video's blocking any content I want to consume. Blockers are a valuable thing to simply be able to read or watch anything on most sites now a days. I also happily pay for proper media, but not when you complicate this by blocking parts of this action with ads to begin with.

threedots 7y ago

I think they would benefit from a more dumbed down FAQ/set up. For context I'm at the upper end of non technical people in some respects (I write pandas queries everyday etc) but know nothing about DNS and this lost me pretty quickly. I'm still not sure whether this should be used in addition to or instead of ublock (which is what I use now). The setup page is also a bit intimidating given I don't understand what 99% of the things on it are.

nebulous1 7y ago
You should keep using uBlock, but Pi-hole will also block traffic from sources other than your uBlock enabled browser. Your mobile, for instance. Where did the setup lose you? I would say you just got unlucky with a specific term or concept you aren't aware of.

aberforth123 7y ago

Loading New York Times on Brave vs uBlock Origin vs Chrome on Webtest.app: https://webtest.app/?url=https://nytimes.com https://webtest.app/?url=https://nytimes.com

slenk 7y ago
Heh. Brave downloads 10Mb less of data but still takes just as long to render

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

tyingq 7y ago

I imagine the ad industry will kill DNS based ad blocking sooner or later. It's just too much of a cat and mouse game to have only the hostname/IP and a blacklist as your defense.

dwnvoted2hell 7y ago

You could just stop reading the NY Times. They've gotten enough wrong that they shouldn't be the newspaper of record any longer. I'm a little partial to the LA Times - during the elections as I recall, they had less lean one way or the other.

swebs 7y ago
NPR also has a great text version that's free of tracking. https://text.npr.org https://text.npr.org Unfortunately, the original version of their site has tracking requests out the wazoo.

whoopdedo 7y ago

The reason I block ads is because I was served a fake full-window "virus" warning while visiting ESPN.com.

ronjouch 7y ago

Also, if you own a router able to run OpenWrt ( https://openwrt.org/supported_devices https://openwrt.org/supported_devices ), you have access to several packages providing the same technical solution as a pi-hole (DNS-based blocking). As far as I know, the most common and maintained is https://github.com/openwrt/packages/tree/master/net/adblock/files https://github.com/openwrt/packages/tree/master/net/adblock/... . It's easy to install, full-featured, ships with lots of lists to pick from, auto-updates lists, doesn't need an additional device, and you will benefit from router features shipped as part of OpenWrt and probably unavailable in your router's proprietary firmware. Much recommended. If that sounds attractive and it sounds like a good opportunity to change your crumbling unpatched router, the question "what's today's good cheap router running OpenWrt without trouble?" is frequently answered by https://www.reddit.com/r/openwrt/ https://www.reddit.com/r/openwrt/ :) .

Grimm665 7y ago
Pfsense as well, with Pfblocker (https://www.linuxincluded.com/block-ads-malvertising-on-pfsense-using-pfblockerng-dnsbl/ https://www.linuxincluded.com/block-ads-malvertising-on-pfse...)
qntty 7y ago
Is it worth switching from AdvancedTomato to OpenWrt?
- ronjouch 7y ago
  I don't know.

TheCabin 7y ago

What exactly do we actually see here? (I am surprised because there are vertices not connected to the origin, how were these detected?)

peterwwillis 7y ago

Why do any of these people care about internet ads tracking them? Are they bored? Yes, random corporations and political groups are compiling personal dossiers about you. What is it you fear? That they'll be successful at selling you something? That "ominous entity" will do "bad thing" because they know "that thing about you that everyone else you know already knows" ? If you have a real reason for serious concern for your safety, I get that. If you're just afraid of people knowing things about you, yikes.

ouid 7y ago

Is there a categorical difference between advertising and fake news?

komali2 7y ago

Is pihole any different from just having a fatass hosts file?

tra3 7y ago
That's basically what it is. Advantages: - the list is community generated - you can disable it temporarily - there's a nice UI - you can protect all devices on your network Disadvantages: - gotta run it somehow (appliance, container, etc). Another thing to manage. Overall it's been a net positive. The amount of filtering that happens on my home network is staggering.
hart_russell 7y ago
Yes and no: Yes that's it's mechanism essentially. No in that it provides a nice user interface for automatically updating your blocklist, specifying which DNS to point to and how to encrypt your queries, you can temporarily disable the blocking (which you sometimes need to do), etc etc
jrace 7y ago
Essentially...yes. But it allows you to point all devices in your network to one "fatass hosts file" instead of maintaining them on each device. You do not need a raspberry pi to run pihole, it can be on a VM also.

freediver 7y ago

This has to be a highlight of the discussion https://twitter.com/paulcalvano/status/1000094415485132801/photo/1 https://twitter.com/paulcalvano/status/1000094415485132801/p...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mindslight 7y ago
Look at all that "innovation" being stifled...
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  It explains why there's so much fear-mongering and misinformation regarding the GDPR and how they're trying to make users hate it (by using non-compliant and annoying by design "consent" prompts). There are literally billions being invested in all that cancer called adtech/martech that's been made illegal by the GDPR.
npsimons 7y ago
JFC! Maybe if they didn't whore themselves out, they wouldn't need the money they're whoring themselves out for because their hosting and web dev costs would go way the fuck down.

alkonaut 7y ago

I have quite a raspberrys around now but they seem kind of flimsy and unreliable. When you really need your "server" to just work for 5 or 10 years in a closet without worrying about it, you'd want something that isn't fed by a 5V transformer that is prone to dying once a year. I'd happily pay $100 or even $200 for an "industrial" raspberry(-compatible) device. Something in a sturdy case with a reliable power supply. I’m a bit reluctant to add another one to my closet as a 24/7 server until I find a solution to the reliability issue. I don’t want to run a proper big server because of the electricity cost either. I want something under 15W, preferably passive, with high reliability.

htfu 7y ago
Proper USB power supplies don't just randomly die once a year, that's utter lunacy. And what exactly is stopping you from getting any 5V power source or even just rigging up an old PSU with a 10W resistor on the 12V rail and splicing the 5V onto a USB cord? This is a non-issue. Edit: wrote this before your edit, but still stands. If there's anything to worry about reliability-wise in that timeframe it's SD card corruption, but there's plenty ways around that, whether by limiting writes or using other media. Edit 2: hostile tone not intended, just perplexing seeing something almost akin to concern trolling done in this manner.
- alkonaut 7y ago
  I just don’t like tinkering. I want what you describe but I what to pay with money, not time. Simply a raspberry with a good case, a good psu researched and tested by someone else. They aren’t that easy to find. The market for those of us who are happy to pay $50 for a case and $50 for a psu to house a $30 computer is slim I suppose. But the pi does have a bit of a dual personality problem where it is made cheap enough to be a toy or hobby thing but people often want to run them unattended for years. I’m not trolling I’m genuinely looking for advice on more recommended psu’s, cases, raspberry clones etc that don’t require any modding and still makes a 5 year uptime server from a pi.
  - htfu 7y ago

satyrnein 7y ago

How does this compare to using something like Segment (or your own server) to proxy the information to the 3rd party analytics tools? Seems better from a performance perspective. With the 3rd party cookie changes going on, is it equivalent from a tracking perspective? It also seems "unblockable". So is that the future?

mataug 7y ago

I do not condone the practice of selling out user data, but what can traditional print journalism do to stay profitable ? Print readership is down, online subscriptions aren't bringing in enough revenue, people want their news for free. So someone's gotta pay for this ? Maybe bundles are a good way to encourage people to subscribe and pay for quality journalism ?

svnpenn 7y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22126084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22126084
npsimons 7y ago
We need to pay better attention. Things like The Correspondant come along (https://thecorrespondent.com/ https://thecorrespondent.com/), and they're lucky if they succeed. I threw some money at them specifically because of the problems of today's news (ads and bad journalism). I wouldn't entirely be opposed to microtransactions, and I already send money to people on Patreon. ETA: I pay probably half a dozen services to eschew ads. I've been paying Consumer Reports for years for online access. I feel that if you can't figure out a way to make money without screwing over your customers (with ads or invasion of privacy), your business deserves to die in a fire, the sooner the better.

fnord77 7y ago

correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't a site easily defeat a pihole by return a page with links to ad assets that have IP addresses rather than hostnames? Resolve the hostnames on the server and simply substitute them in the links/scripts/assets

GreenJelloShot 7y ago
Yes, they could defeat the pihole by hard coding IPs, but that would cause a whole range of other headaches and would most likely not be worth doing.
- MattSayar 7y ago
  Yeah that sounds like a configuration maintenance nightmare for the relatively minuscule population of pi-hole owners.
  - fnord77 7y ago
    Just resolve the IPs of the links as the page is being served.

talkingtab 7y ago

Are there open source tools that do the same thing as the website requestmap.webperf.tools? Follow all the links etc?

chubot 7y ago

Is an ad blocker alone not enough? What's the difference between that an a "pi-hole server"? Ah I see it's for mobile, because you can't install ad blockers there? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi-hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi-hole Yeah I imagine it must save incredible amounts of bandwidth.

Night_Thastus 7y ago
Ad-blockers (like uBlock Origin) and pi-hole operate on two different levels. The ad-blocker prevents your browser from ever requesting data (like the ads) from the place they come from in the first place. Pi-hole on the other end works with DNS, or the Domain Name System. You set it up so your router sends all DNS traffic to the pi-hole, which will then drop any traffic that has a domain name it has blacklisted. So it only kicks in if something on your network actually requested something from one of those blacklisted domains. It comes with many domains already included, but more can be added fairly easily and large user-made lists and regexs exist to expand it. Ad-blockers can be used on mobile versions of browsers (like Firefox for Android) but for people using mobile apps (like the Youtube app) having a pihole is a lifesaver.
- chubot 7y ago
  Yes that makes sense, mobile apps need it! Funny I wrote a node.js HTTP proxy like 5 years ago to run all my browsing sessions through. I downloaded a text file of ad domains, probably from adblock itself. So yeah the benefit is that you don't have to configure each browser. Well it was an HTTP proxy and not DNS, so it did require some extra configuration on the client. But you don't have to install an extension at least. But I stopped using it because it was a pain to administer and I didn't spend much time making the code solid. But I will look into pi-hole -- didn't know about it!

nkrisc 7y ago

I use an adblocker in my browser and a pi-hole as well. I hate ad networks and it's been a long time since I've been redirected to a site letting me know I've won a free iPad. But some sites do advertising right and my blockers are useless against them, and I'm OK with that. Take, for example, this site (and here's the owner writing about ad-blocking): https://css-tricks.com/discussion-around-ad-blocking/ https://css-tricks.com/discussion-around-ad-blocking/ (2015) Their ads are all first-party content inserted into the page. It's not even an iframe. Just divs and svgs like the rest of the page with an anchor tag that links to the sponsor. It even looks kind of nice and fits cleanly with the site. And most importantly, to me as a visitor, a link to a sponsored site is not going to redirect me to a scam the moment I land on css-tricks.com, because they at least always control what's on their own pages.

hi41 7y ago

I looked at the graph on Twitter but did not understand what it signifies. Can someone please explain.