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These advertising networks are destroying web performance. Most of these "Supercookies" are optimizations to improve performance. By abusing them, advertisers h
by ogre_codes 6y ago
These advertising networks are destroying web performance. Most of these "Supercookies" are optimizations to improve performance. By abusing them, advertisers have turned what should be a great performance tool into a liability. I know FF suggests this won't significantly affect most websites performance, but web advertising and trackers are already responsible for a huge chunk of performance issues already.
Of course we'll have the inevitable guy pop in here and talk up how awesome web tracking is because it helps sites monetize better, but that's all bullshit. At this point, all the advertising profits are sucked out of the web by Facebook and Google. The rest of the industry, including publishers are just struggling to get by while two trillion dollar behemoths throw them scraps.
- warent 6y agoI run a network ad-block dns (pihole) and consistently 25-33% of all my network traffic is blocked as ads. It's much more than I ever imagined. Now I'm used to a different internet, when I'm using internet off the network it's like WTF is this?
- ogre_codes 6y agoI just have a decent set of ad blockers and the experience is similar. Unfortunately, it often results in weird experiences or I get sites which don't work at all if you have ad blocking.
- Average_ 6y agoWell that's interesting. For me 99.5% of websites work perfectly using ublock origin. The only .5% remaining are websites that actively refuse to serve any kind of adblock users, not because it breaks functionality on their site. I don't think I can recall having visited a single website that would have features break unintentionally because of ublock in the past few years.
- vianneychevalie 6y agoCan't agree with you, Dynamics 365 is one of them (it's shit but I've implemented it at work). EDF (French main electricity provider) also breaks for me. That's one example from a big company, and one example with a big user base.
- ev1 6y agoIt depends on how many privacy lists you have added, probably. Normal display ads all being blocked is generally fine 99% of the time, but if you care about not being permanently tracked across the internet then there are a couple more domains you have to add - except some sites make it mandatory that those invasive fingerprinting scripts and port scanners run and report back a session, otherwise you're refused login or banned.
- ogre_codes 6y agoI don't think my experience is vastly different from yours. I do get some sites where pop-overs or cookie notifications are blocked but it's not clear and you just can't scroll. I could turn off those blocker settings, but the notifications are annoying enough it's worth it.
- letitbeirie 6y agoThe Denver Post just lost my business over this. They have one of those things that scrambles all the words for any user with the audacity to not want to see video+audio ads while reading their newspaper. Is it their content to do what they want with? Sure. Does the same logic apply to the $9 I used to give them each month? You're damn right.
- ogre_codes 6y agoHard agree. If I'm paying for content, I'd accept a small number of discrete advertising. Video advertising on a text/ photo site pisses me off in general and if I was paying for it? No chance I'd let that fly.
- pradn 6y agoQuestion about pihole: is it possible to turn off blocking for a website? Do you have to log into the pihole web interface to do that? I often go to websites where some crucial functionality is blocked by my adblocker (ublock origin), where I have to turn it off for that site.
- guilhermetk 6y agoYes, you can do that via whitelist/blacklist: https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/misc/whitelist-blacklist/ https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/misc/whitelist-blacklist/
- secondcoming 6y agoallowlist/denylist
- tsujp 6y agoYou and everyone else who exhibit this are reading into things that don't exist. Language has context, words are part of language and so therefore words have context too.
- pkulak 6y agoExactly. And using white/black as synonyms for good/bad may be creating context (connotations, really) that we don't want. It would be fine if we hadn't already overloaded those words to refer to people... but, here we are. In the context we've created. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- cgriswald 6y agoThe original poster used the terms used by the technology. The best choices for changing this terminology would be to write a treatise for HN consumption (to reach the community at large) or to contact the authors of the technology that use this terminology (to fix the origin in this case). Sniping a 'random internet poster' is just lazy trolling.
- pkulak 6y agoI run Pi-Hole on my network as well; it's wonderful. I'm terrified that it will stop working soon though, as companies start to use their own DNS servers, which I've heard is happening.
- JKCalhoun 6y agoInteresting. I would think though that the move to their own DNS servers could extend to their own ads as well — that is, cutting out the middle man that is Google/etc. I'm all for news sites, for example, hoisting ads if I knew they were getting the money from those ads, knew the ads were actually coming from their site.
- pkulak 6y agoSorry, I didn't mean their _own_ servers, I just meant hard-coding 8.8.8.8 into the DNS settings, for example. I wonder if you could hijack those requests at your router and send them back to your Pi-Hole? But then they just switch to DNS over TLS...
- varenc 6y agoI just have my network block outgoing DNS queries that aren’t from the gateway. But you’re so right that DoH is going to throw a wrench in this.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- letitbeirie 6y agoIf an ad can use DoH to sidestep a firewall, so can an employee. If Google and Facebook were cunning (and nefarious, but that much is presumed), they would be aggressively developing a product that solves this problem for corporate networks, but at an enormous cost. Otherwise, when corporate networks solve this (and they will), home users who hate ads will just follow whatever pattern they settle on.
- JKCalhoun 6y ago25-33% of requests? Or is this a percentage of bytes? Because I wonder what percentage of bandwidth (in terms of bytes) trackers/banners/ads account for. Need to set up a pi-hole ... just too many other projects....
- cptskippy 6y agoPi-Hole is a DNS solution so it's just blocking DNS lookups. Mine is currently blocking 43.9% of all DNS requests.
- Fiahil 6y agoIt's a percent of DNS requests. It might be quite difficult to see what percentage of bytes it translate to, since HTTP requests aren't actually sent. My pihole is showing 18.7%-23% of requests blocked :)
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoI set it up recently. It's about as much effort as buying and setting up a new laptop with ubuntu if you get a kit. I'd imagined it as a project beforehand, but in reality it's super easy and trivial (assuming you're comfortable using linux and ssh at a noob level).
- warent 6y agoYep same. I'm a mere web developer that mostly works on Mac. Getting Pihole setup only took me like an afternoon after having an RPi sitting around doing nothing for months. They make it really easy, just follow the instructions. Also I'm lucky enough that my router has a friendly interface where it's easy to set the router DNS to pihole.
- mstade 6y agoHow would you measure bytes if the requests are blocked?
- dylan604 6y agoSome people are good at thinking a process through to the end. Others are not and ask questions at the first unknown. It's a large part of why I'm not a teacher.
- xeonoex 6y agoPi-Hole/NextDNS also blocks adds in most apps. I used NextDNS (which has a limit on the free tier), and recently switched to pihole running on my home server. I also use ZeroTier to connect to my server directly even when I am not on my local network to still use it as the DNS server. Works great.
- StavrosK 6y agoI paid them, $20/yr is quite good and I can add my parents' house, my in-laws' house, etc on the same plan and manage them all centrally.
- rndomsrmn 6y agoYou can get even better coverage with the NoTracking lists (dnsmasq/unbound or dnscrypt-proxy) https://github.com/notracking/hosts-blocklists https://github.com/notracking/hosts-blocklists They focus not only on tracking but also malware prevention, where possible via dns filtering. Pi-Hole still does not properly support wildcard filtering, only via regex but that is not really efficient (requires tons of resources).
- dheera 6y agoI added this to my /etc/hosts https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts What is the advantage of having DNS on a separate device other than that it provides ad blocking for multiple devices?
- varenc 6y agoThat’s the main benefit. But also you can have more flexible block patterns. I run DNSCrypt-Proxy and my block lists can have wildcards. With /etc/hosts you have to enumerate each origin. It can also do things like IP blocking where if any domain resolves to a known ad network IP, then that request is blocked. But mainly, DNSCrypt-proxy encrypts all my outgoing queries and round robins them across resolvers. (Also hi dheera!)
- rodgerd 6y agoMine was that high, until I ditched all the family Android devices. It's now around 2-3%. It's quite an extraordinary difference.
- mstade 6y agoI use NextDNS for this, it's brilliant. (I'm not affiliated with them in any way, just a happy customer.)
- jeanofthedead 6y agoSame. I got tired of Pihole breaking for one reason or another (although I certainly adore the project). NextDNS works extremely well, provides a native app for every device, runs on my router, and is dead simple to maintain.
- mstade 6y agoHear hear. The only problem I’ve had was when I set it up on my router and my IKEA smart lights stopped responding after some 30 min or so. Turns out the gateway phones home and those calls were blocked, so for some reason or another the gateway just stopped responding to commands. Restarting it or resetting the network made it fly again, but only for the set time before it phoned home again. I was very disappointed by that, after having read some article here on HN arguing that IKEA had actually done IoT sort of right. Oh well. Obviously not a NextDNS specific issue, it’d happen with anything that blocks the call, but just putting it out there for the next sucker that tries to google why their IKEA gateway suddenly stops responding.
- karakanb 6y agoWould you mind sharing the blocklists you use? I have gotten to a ratio like that, but I have noticed that it was causing more issues with regular websites for my guests, so I removed many of the custom ones. I'd like to try some others if you have suggestions.
- warent 6y ago[i] Target: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/hosts [] Status: Retrieval successful [i] Received 59896 domains [i] Target: https://mirror1.malwaredomains.com/files/justdomains [] Status: Not found [] List download failed: using previously cached list [i] Received 26854 domains [i] Target: https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_tracking.txt [] Status: No changes detected [i] Received 34 domains [i] Target: https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_ad.txt [] Status: No changes detected [i] Received 2701 domains [i] Target: https://dbl.oisd.nl/ [] Status: Retrieval successful [i] Received 1167690 domains [i] Target: https://phishing.army/download/phishing_army_blocklist_extended.txt [] Status: Retrieval successful [i] Received 21379 domains [i] Target: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/deathbybandaid/piholeparser/master/Subscribable-Lists/ParsedBlacklists/AakList.txt [] Status: Retrieval successful [i] Received 5 domains [i] Target: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/deathbybandaid/piholeparser/master/Subscribable-Lists/ParsedBlacklists/Prebake-Obtrusive.txt [] Status: Retrieval successful [i] Received 3 domains [i] Target: https://gitlab.com/quidsup/notrack-blocklists/raw/master/notrack-blocklist.txt [] Status: Retrieval successful [i] Received 14724 domains [i] Target: https://gitlab.com/quidsup/notrack-blocklists/raw/master/notrack-malware.txt [] Status: Retrieval successful [i] Received 412 domains [i] Target: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hectorm/hmirror/master/data/adaway.org/list.txt [] Status: Retrieval successful [i] Received 9182 domains [i] Target: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hectorm/hmirror/master/data/disconnect.me-ad/list.txt [] Status: Retrieval successful [i] Received 2701 domains [i] Target: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/notracking/hosts-blocklists/master/hostnames.txt [] Status: Retrieval successful [i] Received 209608 domains
- ycombinete 6y agoWould Pihole affect latency in online games?
- mixmastamyk 6y agoI use the noscript extension that uses a scripting whitelist. Bit of a pain at first, but pretty soon your browser will be flying. No extra hardware needed. Kid's computer has dnsmasq as a similar solution.
- andreasha 6y agoNoticed that some apps on iOS spammed the DNS server if they couldn't connect to their ad networks which should affect battery negatively.
- wejick 6y agoMy issue with pihole or any other DNS adblocker is I can't whitelist some website that I love. As evil as ada network, but I still want my favorite site to get some revenue.
- McDyver 6y agoMaybe your favourite site would welcome a direct contribution, instead of an ad click
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kristofferR 6y agoA much more significant performance issue with web tracking is usually the absurd amount of JS loaded. It's almost impressive how they manage to load so much crap. Just visit a site like mediaite.com, the list of trackers is damn long.
- ogre_codes 6y agoYup. The really frustrating thing about this bit is that because it disables optimizations, it potentially impacts sites where they don't actually use tracking.
- sanxiyn 6y agoNote that this particular change does not apply to non-third-party resources. That's why performance impact is minimal.
- Jestar342 6y agoFor more than a decade I've been campaigning (to any of my employers that utilise adverts on their platform) to drop adverts with the primary factor being that of performance for page load. The last time I looked, adverts were adding an additional ~35% load time to the page. Anywhere from 5% to _60%_ (!!) of vistors were navigating away before page load completed (Varied depending on company/product of course) and a staggering 80+% of those vistors would have had a full page load if the adverts were not there.
- yummypaint 6y agoI often wonder incredulously whether developers responsible for particular sites really comprehend how bad performance has gotten. Browsing threads like this on HN makes it clear that they are probably well aware, but have no choice in the matter. In a way that's even more depressing because only a tiny minority of people are happy with the arrangement.
- hinkley 6y ago
- makecheck 6y agoModern ad networks are essentially the “fax machine flyers” of old: someone you don’t know using your resources and your time, denying you use of your own resources temporarily, to send you something you don’t want. Except now it’s like every “normal” fax page includes 15,000 flyers.
- andai 6y agoSome pages don't let you "Reject All" cookies, you have to uncheck them one by one, and there's literally hundreds of ad networks listed. It's spooky, I tell ya!
- grishka 6y agoUse your browser settings to block third-party cookies altogether. And, better yet, install uBlock Origin and never see an ad again.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- boogies 6y agoDoesn’t Google grant itself first-party status by redirecting you through an advertisement domain? µBlock definitely is the king of ad blocking extensions — only the fork AdNauseam (https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/) can compete, and that’s by both blocking ads and fighting back with obfuscating click simulation.
- CameronNemo 6y agoHmm. I think it would be better if the extension clicked randomly rather than clicked on all ads. That would cause the numbers to be much harder to interpret, and ad agencies or departments would have a much harder time measuring their efficacy or justifying their existence.
- 6y ago
- nixpulvis 6y agoThis is akin to the whole class of CPU vulnerabilities we've seen (Spectre/Meltdown/CacheOut/...) where performance optimizations are at odds with security.
- ogre_codes 6y agoIt is remarkably similar. If it weren't for the assholes trying to steal from us, our whole computing experience would be faster.
- kmeisthax 6y agoI'm going to be inevitable in the opposite direction: I don't think cross-domain requests were actually saving that much bandwidth. The common use case I could think of that would be JavaScript CDNs. The problem with that is that JS libraries update frequently - even something really common like jQuery has hundreds of releases, all of which get their own separately-cached URL. So the chance of two sites using the same jQuery version is low. Keep in mind that public JS CDN URLs are rarely refreshed, too - it's more of an indicator of when the site was developed rather than the latest version the site was tested with. So you could hit hundreds of sites and not get a cross-domain cache hit. Even if you did share a URL with another site, the benefit is low compared to what you can do with same-domain requests. Most sites should be served with HTTP 2 already, which means even unoptimized sites should still load decently fast as requests aren't as expensive as they used to. You can get almost all of the same bandwidth benefits from a cross-domain cache by just making sure your own resources are being cached for a long time.
- ogre_codes 6y agoMozilla ran the numbers and it's not a huge penalty. It's just frustrating that it's one more optimization that is getting turned off. And makes the internet just a tiny bit worse as a result. It's like death by a thousand cuts.
- ericholscher 6y agoWe're trying to build an ad network that doesn't track users: https://www.ethicalads.io/ https://www.ethicalads.io/ We talked a little bit about how these ads still work, even without tracking you. You might be losing 10-15% of revenue, but if you never had that revenue to start with, you don't miss it: https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2018/04/ethical-advertising-works/ https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2018/04/ethical-advertising-w... I think the real secret is just to not become dependent on the additive revenue. All businesses forgo additional revenue based on ethics and regulation, and I don't understand why that's such a odd thing to do with advertising.
- ogre_codes 6y agoPresumably if your adverts don't do tracking, they don't need to slow page loads down the way current advertising does either which should be a big plus. Fundamentally serving an advert should be a light process adding only a tiny amount of overhead to the site.
- ericholscher 6y agoYea, we are planning to do a blog post on it, but the total overhead is in the 10's of KB. Just a single JS file, and an image. All open source: https://github.com/readthedocs/ethical-ad-client https://github.com/readthedocs/ethical-ad-client
- franklampard 6y agoI totally read it as ethical lads.
- tilolebo 6y agoAnd I read your comment as "ethical ads" and was wondering what I got wrong from the GP comment, ahah.
- msl 6y agoThese are some of the only ads I see online these days (on Read the Docs, mostly). I don't use ad blockers, but I do use tracker blockers, and those block pretty much all ads, for obvious reasons. Not these ones, though. And that's how it's supposed to go.
- na85 6y ago>but web advertising and trackers are already responsible for a huge chunk of performance issues already. Indeed. The brave move would be to firefox to include built-in adblock, but I don't think Mozilla has the cojones. >Of course we'll have the inevitable guy pop in here and talk up how awesome web tracking is because it helps sites monetize better, but that's all bullshit. I think if adblocker usage became widespread we would in fact see the death of a lot of websites, but to be perfectly honest I kinda want that to happen because advertising is cancer.
- nudpiedo 6y agoBlocking ads and installing some sort of cookie auto-accepter/deleter[1] is the best and mopst optimization saver which you can have without disabling javascript. [1] https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/ https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/
- aembleton 6y agoOr just add the filter list [1] to uBlock Origin 1. https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/abp/ https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/abp/
- baby 6y agoSecurity in general is a performance and usability killer. If “attackers” were not a thing your internet would be much much faster, hell your smartphone wouldn’t need to encrypt itself or paying in a shop wouldn’t need a chip & pin. What I’m saying is that a lot of applications have many attackers in their threat models, but advertisers have so far been out of scope.
- DrBazza 6y agoIn many parts of the world, data still costs, and it annoys me that if you pay for 10Gb a month, the sites you surf to are a few kb, and then up pop the ads which are Mbs and steal your data allowance. You're actually paying for ads you don't want.
- the_jeremy 6y agoBrowsers need to own tracking, and it's clear that Firefox and Safari agree. I don't object to (silent, low resource, banner) ads, even targeted ones, as long as the targeted ads aren't building a comprehensive profile of me. I think my ideal would be telling my browser a list of a couple interest areas (prosumer tech, sci-fi, dog peripherals) that the website could target on to serve ads. They'd get targeted ads, I'd get privacy, and I'd get ads that actually match things I care about.
- ngold 6y agoWith data caps you are paying to be advertised to.
- stiray 6y agoDue to cache abuse I have all caching disabled on firefox and this is a nice move (even if I will continue to use it without cache). Anyway one more thing that I can observe on Ubuntu 20.04. Firefox has become noticeably faster. I dont know if this is due to the fact that is not from ubuntu repositories or some serious optimizations were made. "On Linux, the WebRender compositing engine is enabled by default for the GNOME desktop environment session with Wayland. In the previous release, WebRender support was activated for GNOME in the X11 environment. The use of WebRender on Linux is still limited to AMD and Intel graphics cards, as there are unresolved problems when working on systems with the proprietary NVIDIA driver and the free Noveau driver." (Fax machine enthusiasts, please stop abusing the thread and move to Ask HN or something)
- monopoledance 6y agoAdvertising destroys everything. If something is based on ad revenue, it goes to shit ultimately. The latest casualty was podcasts. It's revolting. Ad-based businesses need to be boycotted until this disease is in lasting remission.
- ogre_codes 6y ago> The latest casualty was podcasts. It's revolting. Hmm? Yes, there are adverts on all the podcasts I listen to. Many of my favorites offer members only ad-free versions. Usually I suffer through the ad supported versions because the adverts are easy enough to skip. Some podcasts have too many adverts or annoyingly inserted advertising. Those are pretty 1 and done. No point listening to them. IMO the (current) podcast market is a good example of how we can enjoy content and know the producers are compensated without having to deal with obtrusive marketing crap. It is getting clear some podcasting is getting sucked into things like Spotify, but there is still enough good content I don't think it's a problem.
- monopoledance 6y agoI absolutely don't respect having my weir podcast-friendship relationship with the host exploited by fully integrated ad pieces whispered to me in a trusted voice. That. Is. Sick.
- ogre_codes 6y agoI respect that podcasters are spending their time and effort putting together a program which I enjoy. The price I pay for that is listening to them talk about some product I don't give a shit about for a few seconds until I can hit the skip button. To me, there is a clear cut deal with no deceit. Do you feel people should volunteer their time gratis to entertain you? What Hacker News does with adverts slipped into the newsfeed is essentially the same as what podcasters do.
- monopoledance 6y ago