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From the article: But, increasingly, I feel less and less like an outsider. It’s not me. It’s people living for and by advertising who are the outsiders. They a

From the article: But, increasingly, I feel less and less like an outsider. It’s not me. It’s people living for and by advertising who are the outsiders. They are the one destroying everything they touch, including the planet. They are the sick psychos and I don’t want them in my life anymore. My thoughts exactly. Like the author, I don't have patience for glossy websites anymore. If a site needs third-party JS to be usable then I'm gone. I won't put up with 15mb downloads just to read some content (Twitter included). The web is not so much splitting in two. We are simply saying "no more" to the exploiters and grifters. Eventually, they will have to learn to eat with the commoners or eat by themselves.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
skydhash 3y ago
I’m moving to Firefox as my main browser, and the amount of sites that break because of me blocking JavaScript (with ublock) is staggering. I can understand SPA being JS only, but simple blogs and other content sites, no.
- sodapopcan 3y ago
  Using NoScript has been pretty eye-opening. I've come to learn that most of the time I'm happy unblock the primary domain. If the site doesn't work I'll look for a clearly-named CDN. If I can't identify one or, worse-yet, there is some kind of cdn.some-domain.com and unblocking that still doesn't make the site work, then I'm out.
  - 8chanAnon 3y ago
    I've stopped using NoScript because it was breaking my own apps. It was fine until Mozilla changed something in Firefox. The problem is that NoScript inserts a lot of JS into the web page and some of that JS gets broken by some sort security lockout. It may be a bug in Firefox and maybe it's been fixed but I wasn't satisfied with NoScript anyway. I'm now using uMatrix. It doesn't insert JS on every active element (just at the top) so it avoids buggy behaviour. The main thing I like about it is that it only blocks cross-origin scripts (NoScript blocks everything by default, including same-site).
    - sodapopcan 3y ago
      Good to know! I have seen how it injects JS into every page but so far it has not messed with my development, but I do use uBlock so I'll look into using it as a NoScript replacement as less the fewer plugins the better. Thanks! I do also use my hosts file for stuff that will never, ever, ever get a pass, like google analytics.
    - UnlockedSecrets 3y ago
      Umatrix has not been maintained since 2021.
      - willywanker 3y ago
        Pale Moon users have a still maintained fork called eMatrix.
      - account42 3y ago
        So?
    - B0073D 3y ago
      I do not understand why this injecting js to block js is a thing. Why is there no way to just tell the browser engine not to execute any js here? if the functionality isn't there in the browser engine, why not?
      - damir 3y ago
        It is - disable JS completely in the browser. I use 2 browsers, one with JS disabled and blocking everything (like 95% of the time), and second one for say "important" stuff like banking, youtube and facebook ;)
- 38 3y ago
  if it helps I have my rules here: https://github.com/1268/blog/blob/main/2023-08/ublock-origin/rules.cfg https://github.com/1268/blog/blob/main/2023-08/ublock-origin...
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  You clearly haven't seen the sites that demand JavaShit just to load JPGs and PNGs that you told the browser to open directly. As in pointing the browser at a JPG or PNG and getting redirected to a page with JavaShit to load that JPG or PNG. Why? Fuck if I know, I don't live in the same universe as whoever wrote and published that literal garbage.
  - c22 3y ago
    I recently got a CD-rom from a hospital containing X-rays of my leg to share with my doctor. Upon finding a computer with a functioning optical drive I was dismayed to discover that the CD-rom contained not 3 simple images of the bones in my leg, but almost 400 megabytes of impenetrable binary data in over 30 nested directories and an .exe called MedicalImageViewer which I was unable to run on the latest version of Windows in my posession (win7) due to missing visual basic related dlls. I was eventually able to run the app on a friend's computer, but finding no in-built option to export the images I was forced to take screen grabs to email to my primary care provider.
    - jeffreygoesto 3y ago
      There are free DICOM viewers you can use. For example https://weasis.org/en/ https://weasis.org/en/.
    - striking 3y ago
      Aside from noting the fact that DICOM exists for a reason, I'll also just vouch for that particular piece of software running acceptably under Wine.
    - anthk 3y ago
      Linux has medical viewers. You can get the Ubuntu Mate 22.04 LTS DVD, install it. Open Synaptic, which is the "advanced graphical package manager", search for "DICOM" in the dialogs and install a good viewer.
    - Dunedan 3y ago
      Guess what your doctor does to look at your X-rays: The chance is high that he'll just execute the .exe file on the CD-Rom too. I've witnessed that already multiple times and always cringe, because of the obvious security implications. It'd be so straight-forward to compromise a doctors office by handing them over a different CD-Rom with malware instead.
- theonlybutlet 3y ago
  Been doing this for a few months too. But recently installed duckduckgo on my android phone and turned on their app tracking protection. The unnecessary requests made by apps I haven't used in months is jaw dropping.
anthk 3y ago
Get Lagrange in PC/Android, head to gemini://gemi.dev, go to The News Waffle and paste the whole URL (whole, as with https://www https://www...) there in the URL input form. It works for sites and for news home pages. It detects RSS feeds, too, putting that option in the first place when you get the rendered page. It can cut down most pages down to 5% and less.
Swizec 3y ago
> I won't put up with 15mb downloads just to read some content Meanwhile my normie friends are sending me TikTok videos of people reading screenshots of Reddit comments posted to Instagram. Regular users absolutely do not care about any of this.
- forgetfreeman 3y ago
  That's a them problem. 30 years ago we knew they'd be trouble if they ever adopted the web en masse and they (and the folks that prey on them) have proven that prediction right at every turn.
  - titzer 3y ago
    I couldn't really process your comment because you rounded up to 30. It got me thinking, there was such a huge gulf between 1993 and 1996, at least for me. 1993: derping DOS on a 386; 1996: Windows 95, Quake, dialup, the Web. The pace of change might seem rapid these days, but the 90s were insane fast.
    - pbohun 3y ago
      Maybe it's just my perception of things, but the changes back then were exciting and usually made things better for users. Today changes makes my user experience worse, with spyware on top. I'm exaggerating a bit, but you get my drift.
    - forgetfreeman 3y ago
      You assume I'm rounding. Multi-line Worldgroup BBS's with shell-to-network services were a thing before AOL opened the floodgates.
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    I mostly agree, but I do think we owe it to the normies to make our part of the web approachable. I don't want to feel like we've fed them to the machine when maybe they wanted out and didn't know how.
kedean 3y ago
More than not having patience for the glossy websites anymore, I find myself trusting them less too. If I visit a company website and it's covered in pictures, big shiny buttons, flashy menus, and those damn "helper" bots, there's a solid chance it hasn't been updated in a few years and won't have any useful information.
dirtyid 3y ago
I just want unified reader mode experience for content oriented sites for consistent experience. I wouldn't mind some sort of AI constantly interpreting browser content in background and split out basic website in the foreground even if it involves wasteful amounts of computation. The way things are going, that's probably how to ensure adblock in the future.
vGPU 3y ago
If a website tells me to disable Adblock to use it, I go somewhere else. The modern web is already too damn heavy. I just built a new PC. I figured 32gb of RAM would be enough for a while. It wasn’t. I now have 96gb of overpriced ddr5 just to be able to basic tasks. I wonder if windows 10 is the culprit? 16gb of ram was more than enough for windows 7 doing the same work.
- esalman 3y ago
  I wonder what kind of basic task would require 96GB of RAM.
  - vGPU 3y ago
    Firefox with a few extensions is an insane memory hog. ThinkorSwim, TD’s brokerage app, will easily get to double digit numbers in 3-4 hours. The thing is, I was using the same exact software, doing the same exact tasks on windows 7 with 16gb of ram and I rarely had issues. Not to mention windows 10 has completely borked my network stack. I can’t get a single WiFi card to work.
    - esalman 3y ago
      That does sound awful. I am longtime Firefox faithful. But I keep extension usage down to minimum- multi account container, ad block for YouTube, leechblock, clear url, zotero and fpl tools (fantasy football) right now. Tbh Firefox rarely bothers me nowadays with resource usage. I am confident I haven't had to restart Firefox since last November. My work laptop is a Lenovo P52 with 32GB of ram and win10. Home laptop is a Lenovo legion with 16GB of ram and win11. I had so many issues with performance in the past that I just trained myself to never keep resource-hogging stuff running in background that I am not actively using. I regularly have zoom and Firefox running while playing MMO games on home laptop. Firefox, SQL server etc. running in background while running multi-core data analysis on work laptop. I never had issues with Firefox, and if there's a memory crash I usually know what caused it. But it is down to hardcore discipline using the machines, and I understand it is not usual patterns for others.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

skydhash 3y ago

I’m moving to Firefox as my main browser, and the amount of sites that break because of me blocking JavaScript (with ublock) is staggering. I can understand SPA being JS only, but simple blogs and other content sites, no.

sodapopcan 3y ago
Using NoScript has been pretty eye-opening. I've come to learn that most of the time I'm happy unblock the primary domain. If the site doesn't work I'll look for a clearly-named CDN. If I can't identify one or, worse-yet, there is some kind of cdn.some-domain.com and unblocking that still doesn't make the site work, then I'm out.
- 8chanAnon 3y ago
  I've stopped using NoScript because it was breaking my own apps. It was fine until Mozilla changed something in Firefox. The problem is that NoScript inserts a lot of JS into the web page and some of that JS gets broken by some sort security lockout. It may be a bug in Firefox and maybe it's been fixed but I wasn't satisfied with NoScript anyway. I'm now using uMatrix. It doesn't insert JS on every active element (just at the top) so it avoids buggy behaviour. The main thing I like about it is that it only blocks cross-origin scripts (NoScript blocks everything by default, including same-site).
  - sodapopcan 3y ago
    Good to know! I have seen how it injects JS into every page but so far it has not messed with my development, but I do use uBlock so I'll look into using it as a NoScript replacement as less the fewer plugins the better. Thanks! I do also use my hosts file for stuff that will never, ever, ever get a pass, like google analytics.
  - UnlockedSecrets 3y ago
    Umatrix has not been maintained since 2021.
    - willywanker 3y ago
      Pale Moon users have a still maintained fork called eMatrix.
    - account42 3y ago
      So?
  - B0073D 3y ago
    I do not understand why this injecting js to block js is a thing. Why is there no way to just tell the browser engine not to execute any js here? if the functionality isn't there in the browser engine, why not?
    - damir 3y ago
      It is - disable JS completely in the browser. I use 2 browsers, one with JS disabled and blocking everything (like 95% of the time), and second one for say "important" stuff like banking, youtube and facebook ;)
38 3y ago
if it helps I have my rules here: https://github.com/1268/blog/blob/main/2023-08/ublock-origin/rules.cfg https://github.com/1268/blog/blob/main/2023-08/ublock-origin...
Dalewyn 3y ago
You clearly haven't seen the sites that demand JavaShit just to load JPGs and PNGs that you told the browser to open directly. As in pointing the browser at a JPG or PNG and getting redirected to a page with JavaShit to load that JPG or PNG. Why? Fuck if I know, I don't live in the same universe as whoever wrote and published that literal garbage.
- c22 3y ago
  I recently got a CD-rom from a hospital containing X-rays of my leg to share with my doctor. Upon finding a computer with a functioning optical drive I was dismayed to discover that the CD-rom contained not 3 simple images of the bones in my leg, but almost 400 megabytes of impenetrable binary data in over 30 nested directories and an .exe called MedicalImageViewer which I was unable to run on the latest version of Windows in my posession (win7) due to missing visual basic related dlls. I was eventually able to run the app on a friend's computer, but finding no in-built option to export the images I was forced to take screen grabs to email to my primary care provider.
  - jeffreygoesto 3y ago
    There are free DICOM viewers you can use. For example https://weasis.org/en/ https://weasis.org/en/.
  - striking 3y ago
    Aside from noting the fact that DICOM exists for a reason, I'll also just vouch for that particular piece of software running acceptably under Wine.
  - anthk 3y ago
    Linux has medical viewers. You can get the Ubuntu Mate 22.04 LTS DVD, install it. Open Synaptic, which is the "advanced graphical package manager", search for "DICOM" in the dialogs and install a good viewer.
  - Dunedan 3y ago
    Guess what your doctor does to look at your X-rays: The chance is high that he'll just execute the .exe file on the CD-Rom too. I've witnessed that already multiple times and always cringe, because of the obvious security implications. It'd be so straight-forward to compromise a doctors office by handing them over a different CD-Rom with malware instead.
theonlybutlet 3y ago
Been doing this for a few months too. But recently installed duckduckgo on my android phone and turned on their app tracking protection. The unnecessary requests made by apps I haven't used in months is jaw dropping.

anthk 3y ago

Get Lagrange in PC/Android, head to gemini://gemi.dev, go to The News Waffle and paste the whole URL (whole, as with https://www https://www...) there in the URL input form. It works for sites and for news home pages. It detects RSS feeds, too, putting that option in the first place when you get the rendered page. It can cut down most pages down to 5% and less.

Swizec 3y ago

> I won't put up with 15mb downloads just to read some content Meanwhile my normie friends are sending me TikTok videos of people reading screenshots of Reddit comments posted to Instagram. Regular users absolutely do not care about any of this.

forgetfreeman 3y ago
That's a them problem. 30 years ago we knew they'd be trouble if they ever adopted the web en masse and they (and the folks that prey on them) have proven that prediction right at every turn.
- titzer 3y ago
  I couldn't really process your comment because you rounded up to 30. It got me thinking, there was such a huge gulf between 1993 and 1996, at least for me. 1993: derping DOS on a 386; 1996: Windows 95, Quake, dialup, the Web. The pace of change might seem rapid these days, but the 90s were insane fast.
  - pbohun 3y ago
    Maybe it's just my perception of things, but the changes back then were exciting and usually made things better for users. Today changes makes my user experience worse, with spyware on top. I'm exaggerating a bit, but you get my drift.
  - forgetfreeman 3y ago
    You assume I'm rounding. Multi-line Worldgroup BBS's with shell-to-network services were a thing before AOL opened the floodgates.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  I mostly agree, but I do think we owe it to the normies to make our part of the web approachable. I don't want to feel like we've fed them to the machine when maybe they wanted out and didn't know how.

kedean 3y ago

More than not having patience for the glossy websites anymore, I find myself trusting them less too. If I visit a company website and it's covered in pictures, big shiny buttons, flashy menus, and those damn "helper" bots, there's a solid chance it hasn't been updated in a few years and won't have any useful information.

dirtyid 3y ago

I just want unified reader mode experience for content oriented sites for consistent experience. I wouldn't mind some sort of AI constantly interpreting browser content in background and split out basic website in the foreground even if it involves wasteful amounts of computation. The way things are going, that's probably how to ensure adblock in the future.

vGPU 3y ago

If a website tells me to disable Adblock to use it, I go somewhere else. The modern web is already too damn heavy. I just built a new PC. I figured 32gb of RAM would be enough for a while. It wasn’t. I now have 96gb of overpriced ddr5 just to be able to basic tasks. I wonder if windows 10 is the culprit? 16gb of ram was more than enough for windows 7 doing the same work.

esalman 3y ago
I wonder what kind of basic task would require 96GB of RAM.
- vGPU 3y ago
  Firefox with a few extensions is an insane memory hog. ThinkorSwim, TD’s brokerage app, will easily get to double digit numbers in 3-4 hours. The thing is, I was using the same exact software, doing the same exact tasks on windows 7 with 16gb of ram and I rarely had issues. Not to mention windows 10 has completely borked my network stack. I can’t get a single WiFi card to work.
  - esalman 3y ago
    That does sound awful. I am longtime Firefox faithful. But I keep extension usage down to minimum- multi account container, ad block for YouTube, leechblock, clear url, zotero and fpl tools (fantasy football) right now. Tbh Firefox rarely bothers me nowadays with resource usage. I am confident I haven't had to restart Firefox since last November. My work laptop is a Lenovo P52 with 32GB of ram and win10. Home laptop is a Lenovo legion with 16GB of ram and win11. I had so many issues with performance in the past that I just trained myself to never keep resource-hogging stuff running in background that I am not actively using. I regularly have zoom and Firefox running while playing MMO games on home laptop. Firefox, SQL server etc. running in background while running multi-core data analysis on work laptop. I never had issues with Firefox, and if there's a memory crash I usually know what caused it. But it is down to hardcore discipline using the machines, and I understand it is not usual patterns for others.