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Remember tools like uBlock Origin and uMatrix. It is moral and ethical to block all ads and scripts from adtech companies. Contributing to ruining their way of

Remember tools like uBlock Origin and uMatrix. It is moral and ethical to block all ads and scripts from adtech companies. Contributing to ruining their way of life is a socially-responsible behavior. Failure to do so results in behaviors like this. You get what you deserve if you don't block ads.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>You get what you deserve if you don't block ads. I was with you until this piece. Not everyone is well educated enough on the nefarious nature of targeted online advertising and the technical processes of blocking them on each platform. In some EU countries we have pretty strict regulations on what ads are allowed, where they're allowed and for what they're allowed, precisely because not everyone can "mentally ignore" them and people can be easily influenced. So you can't just say "well, it's you're own fault you got addicted to opioids/gambling/drinking/smoking, so you get what you deserve", when the whole city is plastered with ads for such accessible addictions. "Got a tooth-ache? Ask your doctor about OxyContin." "Got trouble paying the bills? Get a loan with 500% interest rate from us on the spot." "Wanna look cool? Smoke Bullshit cigars." Usually, the less educated and less well-off people are, the more vulnerable to nefarious and predatory advertising they tend to be, so it's the responsibility of us as a society to take legal steps of ensuring the regulation and blocking of targeted web ads at communal/societal level instead of leaving it to the individuals and the mercy of the "free market".
- thefurdrake 3y ago
  > I was with you until this piece. Not everyone is well educate enough on blocking ads. The statement was directed to the audience, IE HN. I have confidence that everyone on HN is capable of installing those browser plugins and comprehending the complex clusterfuck that is uMatrix. I don't have a solution for the less-technical folks right now. The best I can do is encourage people who ARE capable of responding reasonably to that message to help the people who don't. uBlock Origin is already pretty friendly, but uMatrix is a nightmare.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >The statement was directed to the audience, IE HN. Unclear from your comment who the target audience was, but to me it would be equally inflammatory regardless. The non-tech-savvy users are a way bigger and more vulnerable target than just the HN userbase which is a microscopic minority on global level.
    - thefurdrake 3y ago
      > Unclear from your comment who the target was, but to me it was equally inflammatory, regardless Eh, agreed. Kinda detracts from the point. I've gotten pretty vehement about the topic over the last few years I guess.
    - LMYahooTFY 3y ago
      Equally inflammatory to tell people who should know better that they'll keep getting what they deserve? How is it unclear who the audience is on HN? Encouraging those who can to do is also a component of grassroots change. I don't think it took much charity to interpret their comment as being directed toward HN, and only a little more to imagine how pushing tech people to use/develop/polish ad blocking tools can result in the spread of such things. Seems like you're working hard to be upset.
  - vik0 3y ago
    uBlock can become decently complicated too if you enable "I'm an advanced user" in the settings menu I think it can be made to do the same things as uMatrix with advanced mode (I use medium mode on uBlock) - or am I wrong on this? Ive never used uMatrix before
    - thefurdrake 3y ago
      Honestly, I admit I've never tried to make uBlock behave like uMatrix. A quick look at the UI suggests maybe (?). uMatrix allows me to granularly select types of resources like scripts, iframes, and images from every domain/subdomain on a page, though, and that UI didn't look like it was set up for that to be possible easily. I think I actually started out with uMatrix first so I've mostly relied on it to do most of the heavy lifting.
- 1shooner 3y ago
  The best comparison I can think of is hygiene. Yes, it's a public safety issue that requires a collective solution, but it also requires individuals to understand, and ultimately take responsibility for their own self-care. The shared solutions would never work, or be taken seriously, unless individuals knew "I can't drink dirty water, I need clean water". You also 'get what you deserve' when you drink the untreated water downstream from the village.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- cf141q5325 3y ago
  There are however limits if you dont want a dysfunctional bureaucracy try to micromanage you. You will always have especially vulnerable sections of society (kids, addicts ...), but you still cant treat everyone like that. Especially as wanting something to be fixed doesnt influence how fixable it is. Ads are of course a giant security risk, but its a very profitable one. At best any solution coming through such a bureaucracy will in essence create monopolies that can afford regulatory capture and security theater. This is really "our" problem. If the audience here doesnt find fixes its unrealistic to expect that of regulators. This is a systemic issue caused by the economic structure that cant be fixed by yet another law.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >but its a very profitable one. If everyone blocked ads then it wouldn't be so profitable. The reason it's so profitable is that very few internet users actually have ad-blockers in place.
    - cf141q5325 3y ago
      Your point of this requiring user action matches my point exactly. There is a giant industry here. Any attempt at top down regulation will fail at that and get either regulatory captured or poked holes through for the big players.
      - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        Ad-tech is exclusively big players already anyway: Google & Meta. Let me play you the world's smallest violin for them. And it's not like ad-tech is an important industry that's mandatory for a healthy society like healthcare, energy, transportations, education, environment, agriculture, etc. We can easily survive without them being so wealthy and powerful. We might even be in a happier place with them defanged, even if their shareholders wouldn't.
        cf141q5325 3y ago
- mnw21cam 3y ago
  I agree, but have a simpler argument. Nobody deserves to have their computer compromised - whether they block ads or not is irrelevant. Saying otherwise is victim blaming. It's the same as saying that a woman who walks down the street in attractive clothing deserves to be raped, and society is making some pretty strong statements about that sort of thinking these days.
bt4u 3y ago
[dead]
7373737373 3y ago
If only Firefox & Co had this installed by default... I suppose Mozilla gets a lot of Google money to not let that happen (?)
- kevingadd 3y ago
  Sponsor money aside, if Firefox had a default adblocker you'd probably see many sites block the browser wholesale instead of only blocking people who install ublock
- thefurdrake 3y ago
  I would be annoyed if Firefox included a buncha plugins by default.
donatj 3y ago
I'm not so sure the morality is as black and white as you paint. If someone builds something and wants to be paid for their work, taking it for free against their wishes hardly seems ethical. The purely ethical solution here is just not using sites that have ads if you're opposed.
- thefurdrake 3y ago
  I see this whinging constantly. I don't care. Adtech is a pursuit that has turned into a scientifically-quantified attempt to subvert the executive function of other human beings with the aim of getting them to perform actions they would otherwise not perform. If you can't survive without engaging in amoral psychological manipulation of other human beings, you don't deserve to be paid, and your way of life should collapse. Find a different job. Let's not forget that this article is about adtech being used to distribute malware.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- usea 3y ago
  They're giving it away for free. There's not an implied contract that says you have to look at the ad to see the website. The website is free. They ask you to watch some ads voluntarily. It's not wrong to refuse.
bediger4000 3y ago
You're missing using Firefox and NoScript. Both valid as ad blocking.
- thefurdrake 3y ago
  My reply was not intended to be an all-encompassing list of all possible avenues of resisting adtech's dominance on the internet, and at no point did I imply so. It'd suck if I had to post an entire guide/list every time I mention some tech that helps. Noscript isn't worth having in favor of uMatrix, IMO.
  - bediger4000 3y ago
    I'll give uMatrix a try.
cryptoegorophy 3y ago
Also, either use reliable blocker or pay for one. Don’t use Adblock because even though it doesn’t say it leaks your browsing history it actually does.
- thefurdrake 3y ago
  That's why I mentioned uBlock Origin and uMatrix, yeah.
thn-gap 3y ago
> You get what you deserve if you don't block ads. I hope you do great contributions to the cause if you are already at the point of victim blaming.
- thefurdrake 3y ago
  Mnn, somebody didn't read the rest of the thread! Oops!
- cf141q5325 3y ago
  There is a stupidity component here that i think got lost in the framing. The larger that becomes the more blame is functional to sustain your agency. You shouldnt be doing very stupid stuff, the only point at which that becomes a non issue is if you are unable to do so and require a legal guardian. If you dont want one and keep your agency, be less dumb. This is a functional description not a moral argument. If somebody has to fix it for your, your say in the matter will drastically reduce.
cmcaleer 3y ago
While generally I agree, and I do run an adblocker for safety reasons, I'll also contend that you get what you deserve if you block ads and don't pony up in some other way. It's easy to forget this when every article has a web archive link bypassing a paywall, or you watch YouTube with Sponsorblock, but ultimately someone has to pay the bill at the end of the day. An individual writing an investigative piece over months incurs a lot of expenses, the 10 minute YouTube video you watched probably took many hours or days to produce, the storage and bandwidth cost of the 4K video you watched is not nil. An ideal world would have properly regulated ads on platforms like YouTube and Adwords held to the same standards as some European ad agencies. But since we don't live in an ideal world, pay for a subscription to a newspaper you read a lot. Give someone you enjoy like $5 on Patreon, maybe more if they're not the type to double dip with sponsorship spots AND have a Patreon (personal pet peeve) and immediately unsubscribe, that's worth several thousand ad-supported views depending on their CPM. Like having LTS versions? Donate to the devs or don't be surprised when they burn out[0]. Currently, almost everything you enjoy on the internet is made by other humans. Support them in doing so. [0]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/linux-gives-up-on-6-year-lts-thats-fine-for-pcs-bad-for-android/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/linux-gives-up-on-6-...
- akira2501 3y ago
  > I'll also contend that you get what you deserve if you block ads and don't pony up in some other way. I explicitly reject this idea. What did media do for centuries? They had a brick and mortar sales operation that went out and sold advertisements, took in creative, and than ran those ads inline. For those not big enough to support this, there are agencies that will do the entire thing for you. This idea that we need to allow untrusted third parties to run code on our computer because poor website operators would just have no other way to make money is bogus. This is particularly true for journalists who should be extremely uncomfortable that google has full access to their articles and can manipulate them before they're shown to end users. In an ideal world, people would take and make 100% of the advertising money for themselves, and pennies-on-the-dollar advertising aggregators would have no reason to exist.
  - 3y ago
taway1237 3y ago
>It is moral and ethical to block all ads and scripts from adtech companies. Depends on your moral code, I think? Who made you a moral authority? You don't get a say in what I consider moral. I'm sorry for the aggressive tone of my post, but people telling me what I should think are a pet peeve of mine.
- thefurdrake 3y ago
  > Depends on your moral code, I think? Who made you a moral authority? You don't get a say in what I consider moral. I don't care what you consider moral. If you don't like it, you can do as you please. I would have thought that would have been obvious, since this is the internet and the only control over you I have is through text on the screen. Repeating this is tiresome; take your aggressiveness and peevishness elsewhere, because I'm about as obligated to care about them as you are to consider what I say moral. You're not sorry, so you shouldn't say so, which is a pet peeve of MINE.
- ravenstine 3y ago
  What you are saying is paradoxical. Morality necessarily comes from authority. Otherwise, it's nothing but a preference or a fashion. Everyone may have a different view of morality, but the whole point of morality is objective, if it is to have any comprehensible definition. Hence it is correct to state one's morality with authority if one truly believes it.
  - l33t7332273 3y ago
    > Morality necessarily comes from authority That’s not true at all > Otherwise, it's nothing but a preference or a fashion Morality is definitely a stronger belief than a mere preference, but it’s still subjective. > the whole point of morality is objective, if it is to have any comprehensible definition I don’t understand where you’re coming from here. Morality has nothing to do with objectivity.
- smegger001 3y ago
  If the ads were nothing but a picture/plain text with refer link it might be possible to argue that their payments to the websites are need to fund them and blocking was simply an issue of denying revenue. But this is unvetted third party code that is often malicious and could infect your computer enable identity fraud steal your data, encryption your documents and extort bitcoins to get your family photos back, not to mention the supposedly benign ad tracking code that enables mega corps to stalk you around the web and in some cases track your actually physical location and sell that data at a surprisingly low rate to anyone that asks for it. Sorry but no. Not using a ad blocker on the open web is like not using a condom when hooking up. Sure it may feel better not to but the risk are to high.
ravenstine 3y ago
Exactly. They've had about 30 years to correct course and self-regulate, and not only can the adtech industry not help themselves but companies like The Google have proven that they'll be complicit with the swindle if they can get away with it. If fast-forwarding through ads on your DVR isn't stealing, then neither is using uBlock Origin. In fact, the morality behind web ads means that the right thing to do is to make ads, especially malicious ads, not profitable.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
Users should not need to "block" ads. Imagine if the telephone worked like a "modern" web browser. Dial a number and the phone automatically calls 12 other numbers, chosen by the person at the number dialed, and the 12 other numbers are unknown to the person dialling. Everyone agrees the early internet and web was different. The auto-load resources "feature" was intended, or even Javascript, for a web that was experimental and fun to use. These features are now used almost invariably for commercial purposes. Most of that is surveillance. Without auto-load resources and Javascript, the user dials one number and only connects to one number. Most advertising and tracking stops working. When visiting sites submitted to HN, I'm not using a browser that auto-load resources or runs Javascript, hence there is no need for me to "block" ads; I control what request. People have been expending vast amounts of energy trying to counter "automatic" behaviour of the browser they choose to use. Perhaps the challenge is a new type of "fun". Otherwise, why use a browser that one cannot control. Find an open source browser. Remove the offensive "features". Re-compile. Done. This is exactly what I did with the browser I'm using to type this comment. Not everything that is "popular" is good. Perhaps that's an effect of advertising. Several so-called "tech" companies want the public, including government officials, to believe that advertising dollars are necessary to sustain a useful computer network.^1 Feel free to debate. Everything that is good does not need advertising. UBlockOrigin is one example. By generally all accounts, it's great and, AFAIK, it is not supported by advertising. 1. The truth however is that advertising dollars are only necessary to sustain those companies.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

>You get what you deserve if you don't block ads. I was with you until this piece. Not everyone is well educated enough on the nefarious nature of targeted online advertising and the technical processes of blocking them on each platform. In some EU countries we have pretty strict regulations on what ads are allowed, where they're allowed and for what they're allowed, precisely because not everyone can "mentally ignore" them and people can be easily influenced. So you can't just say "well, it's you're own fault you got addicted to opioids/gambling/drinking/smoking, so you get what you deserve", when the whole city is plastered with ads for such accessible addictions. "Got a tooth-ache? Ask your doctor about OxyContin." "Got trouble paying the bills? Get a loan with 500% interest rate from us on the spot." "Wanna look cool? Smoke Bullshit cigars." Usually, the less educated and less well-off people are, the more vulnerable to nefarious and predatory advertising they tend to be, so it's the responsibility of us as a society to take legal steps of ensuring the regulation and blocking of targeted web ads at communal/societal level instead of leaving it to the individuals and the mercy of the "free market".

thefurdrake 3y ago
> I was with you until this piece. Not everyone is well educate enough on blocking ads. The statement was directed to the audience, IE HN. I have confidence that everyone on HN is capable of installing those browser plugins and comprehending the complex clusterfuck that is uMatrix. I don't have a solution for the less-technical folks right now. The best I can do is encourage people who ARE capable of responding reasonably to that message to help the people who don't. uBlock Origin is already pretty friendly, but uMatrix is a nightmare.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >The statement was directed to the audience, IE HN. Unclear from your comment who the target audience was, but to me it would be equally inflammatory regardless. The non-tech-savvy users are a way bigger and more vulnerable target than just the HN userbase which is a microscopic minority on global level.
  - thefurdrake 3y ago
    > Unclear from your comment who the target was, but to me it was equally inflammatory, regardless Eh, agreed. Kinda detracts from the point. I've gotten pretty vehement about the topic over the last few years I guess.
  - LMYahooTFY 3y ago
    Equally inflammatory to tell people who should know better that they'll keep getting what they deserve? How is it unclear who the audience is on HN? Encouraging those who can to do is also a component of grassroots change. I don't think it took much charity to interpret their comment as being directed toward HN, and only a little more to imagine how pushing tech people to use/develop/polish ad blocking tools can result in the spread of such things. Seems like you're working hard to be upset.
- vik0 3y ago
  uBlock can become decently complicated too if you enable "I'm an advanced user" in the settings menu I think it can be made to do the same things as uMatrix with advanced mode (I use medium mode on uBlock) - or am I wrong on this? Ive never used uMatrix before
  - thefurdrake 3y ago
    Honestly, I admit I've never tried to make uBlock behave like uMatrix. A quick look at the UI suggests maybe (?). uMatrix allows me to granularly select types of resources like scripts, iframes, and images from every domain/subdomain on a page, though, and that UI didn't look like it was set up for that to be possible easily. I think I actually started out with uMatrix first so I've mostly relied on it to do most of the heavy lifting.
1shooner 3y ago
The best comparison I can think of is hygiene. Yes, it's a public safety issue that requires a collective solution, but it also requires individuals to understand, and ultimately take responsibility for their own self-care. The shared solutions would never work, or be taken seriously, unless individuals knew "I can't drink dirty water, I need clean water". You also 'get what you deserve' when you drink the untreated water downstream from the village.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
cf141q5325 3y ago
There are however limits if you dont want a dysfunctional bureaucracy try to micromanage you. You will always have especially vulnerable sections of society (kids, addicts ...), but you still cant treat everyone like that. Especially as wanting something to be fixed doesnt influence how fixable it is. Ads are of course a giant security risk, but its a very profitable one. At best any solution coming through such a bureaucracy will in essence create monopolies that can afford regulatory capture and security theater. This is really "our" problem. If the audience here doesnt find fixes its unrealistic to expect that of regulators. This is a systemic issue caused by the economic structure that cant be fixed by yet another law.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >but its a very profitable one. If everyone blocked ads then it wouldn't be so profitable. The reason it's so profitable is that very few internet users actually have ad-blockers in place.
  - cf141q5325 3y ago
    Your point of this requiring user action matches my point exactly. There is a giant industry here. Any attempt at top down regulation will fail at that and get either regulatory captured or poked holes through for the big players.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      Ad-tech is exclusively big players already anyway: Google & Meta. Let me play you the world's smallest violin for them. And it's not like ad-tech is an important industry that's mandatory for a healthy society like healthcare, energy, transportations, education, environment, agriculture, etc. We can easily survive without them being so wealthy and powerful. We might even be in a happier place with them defanged, even if their shareholders wouldn't.
      - cf141q5325 3y ago
mnw21cam 3y ago
I agree, but have a simpler argument. Nobody deserves to have their computer compromised - whether they block ads or not is irrelevant. Saying otherwise is victim blaming. It's the same as saying that a woman who walks down the street in attractive clothing deserves to be raped, and society is making some pretty strong statements about that sort of thinking these days.

bt4u 3y ago

[dead]

7373737373 3y ago

If only Firefox & Co had this installed by default... I suppose Mozilla gets a lot of Google money to not let that happen (?)

kevingadd 3y ago
Sponsor money aside, if Firefox had a default adblocker you'd probably see many sites block the browser wholesale instead of only blocking people who install ublock
thefurdrake 3y ago
I would be annoyed if Firefox included a buncha plugins by default.

donatj 3y ago

I'm not so sure the morality is as black and white as you paint. If someone builds something and wants to be paid for their work, taking it for free against their wishes hardly seems ethical. The purely ethical solution here is just not using sites that have ads if you're opposed.

thefurdrake 3y ago
I see this whinging constantly. I don't care. Adtech is a pursuit that has turned into a scientifically-quantified attempt to subvert the executive function of other human beings with the aim of getting them to perform actions they would otherwise not perform. If you can't survive without engaging in amoral psychological manipulation of other human beings, you don't deserve to be paid, and your way of life should collapse. Find a different job. Let's not forget that this article is about adtech being used to distribute malware.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
usea 3y ago
They're giving it away for free. There's not an implied contract that says you have to look at the ad to see the website. The website is free. They ask you to watch some ads voluntarily. It's not wrong to refuse.

bediger4000 3y ago

You're missing using Firefox and NoScript. Both valid as ad blocking.

thefurdrake 3y ago
My reply was not intended to be an all-encompassing list of all possible avenues of resisting adtech's dominance on the internet, and at no point did I imply so. It'd suck if I had to post an entire guide/list every time I mention some tech that helps. Noscript isn't worth having in favor of uMatrix, IMO.
- bediger4000 3y ago
  I'll give uMatrix a try.

cryptoegorophy 3y ago

Also, either use reliable blocker or pay for one. Don’t use Adblock because even though it doesn’t say it leaks your browsing history it actually does.

thefurdrake 3y ago
That's why I mentioned uBlock Origin and uMatrix, yeah.

thn-gap 3y ago

> You get what you deserve if you don't block ads. I hope you do great contributions to the cause if you are already at the point of victim blaming.

thefurdrake 3y ago
Mnn, somebody didn't read the rest of the thread! Oops!
cf141q5325 3y ago
There is a stupidity component here that i think got lost in the framing. The larger that becomes the more blame is functional to sustain your agency. You shouldnt be doing very stupid stuff, the only point at which that becomes a non issue is if you are unable to do so and require a legal guardian. If you dont want one and keep your agency, be less dumb. This is a functional description not a moral argument. If somebody has to fix it for your, your say in the matter will drastically reduce.

cmcaleer 3y ago

While generally I agree, and I do run an adblocker for safety reasons, I'll also contend that you get what you deserve if you block ads and don't pony up in some other way. It's easy to forget this when every article has a web archive link bypassing a paywall, or you watch YouTube with Sponsorblock, but ultimately someone has to pay the bill at the end of the day. An individual writing an investigative piece over months incurs a lot of expenses, the 10 minute YouTube video you watched probably took many hours or days to produce, the storage and bandwidth cost of the 4K video you watched is not nil. An ideal world would have properly regulated ads on platforms like YouTube and Adwords held to the same standards as some European ad agencies. But since we don't live in an ideal world, pay for a subscription to a newspaper you read a lot. Give someone you enjoy like $5 on Patreon, maybe more if they're not the type to double dip with sponsorship spots AND have a Patreon (personal pet peeve) and immediately unsubscribe, that's worth several thousand ad-supported views depending on their CPM. Like having LTS versions? Donate to the devs or don't be surprised when they burn out[0]. Currently, almost everything you enjoy on the internet is made by other humans. Support them in doing so. [0]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/linux-gives-up-on-6-year-lts-thats-fine-for-pcs-bad-for-android/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/linux-gives-up-on-6-...

akira2501 3y ago
> I'll also contend that you get what you deserve if you block ads and don't pony up in some other way. I explicitly reject this idea. What did media do for centuries? They had a brick and mortar sales operation that went out and sold advertisements, took in creative, and than ran those ads inline. For those not big enough to support this, there are agencies that will do the entire thing for you. This idea that we need to allow untrusted third parties to run code on our computer because poor website operators would just have no other way to make money is bogus. This is particularly true for journalists who should be extremely uncomfortable that google has full access to their articles and can manipulate them before they're shown to end users. In an ideal world, people would take and make 100% of the advertising money for themselves, and pennies-on-the-dollar advertising aggregators would have no reason to exist.
- 3y ago

taway1237 3y ago

>It is moral and ethical to block all ads and scripts from adtech companies. Depends on your moral code, I think? Who made you a moral authority? You don't get a say in what I consider moral. I'm sorry for the aggressive tone of my post, but people telling me what I should think are a pet peeve of mine.

thefurdrake 3y ago
> Depends on your moral code, I think? Who made you a moral authority? You don't get a say in what I consider moral. I don't care what you consider moral. If you don't like it, you can do as you please. I would have thought that would have been obvious, since this is the internet and the only control over you I have is through text on the screen. Repeating this is tiresome; take your aggressiveness and peevishness elsewhere, because I'm about as obligated to care about them as you are to consider what I say moral. You're not sorry, so you shouldn't say so, which is a pet peeve of MINE.
ravenstine 3y ago
What you are saying is paradoxical. Morality necessarily comes from authority. Otherwise, it's nothing but a preference or a fashion. Everyone may have a different view of morality, but the whole point of morality is objective, if it is to have any comprehensible definition. Hence it is correct to state one's morality with authority if one truly believes it.
- l33t7332273 3y ago
  > Morality necessarily comes from authority That’s not true at all > Otherwise, it's nothing but a preference or a fashion Morality is definitely a stronger belief than a mere preference, but it’s still subjective. > the whole point of morality is objective, if it is to have any comprehensible definition I don’t understand where you’re coming from here. Morality has nothing to do with objectivity.
smegger001 3y ago
If the ads were nothing but a picture/plain text with refer link it might be possible to argue that their payments to the websites are need to fund them and blocking was simply an issue of denying revenue. But this is unvetted third party code that is often malicious and could infect your computer enable identity fraud steal your data, encryption your documents and extort bitcoins to get your family photos back, not to mention the supposedly benign ad tracking code that enables mega corps to stalk you around the web and in some cases track your actually physical location and sell that data at a surprisingly low rate to anyone that asks for it. Sorry but no. Not using a ad blocker on the open web is like not using a condom when hooking up. Sure it may feel better not to but the risk are to high.

ravenstine 3y ago

Exactly. They've had about 30 years to correct course and self-regulate, and not only can the adtech industry not help themselves but companies like The Google have proven that they'll be complicit with the swindle if they can get away with it. If fast-forwarding through ads on your DVR isn't stealing, then neither is using uBlock Origin. In fact, the morality behind web ads means that the right thing to do is to make ads, especially malicious ads, not profitable.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

Users should not need to "block" ads. Imagine if the telephone worked like a "modern" web browser. Dial a number and the phone automatically calls 12 other numbers, chosen by the person at the number dialed, and the 12 other numbers are unknown to the person dialling. Everyone agrees the early internet and web was different. The auto-load resources "feature" was intended, or even Javascript, for a web that was experimental and fun to use. These features are now used almost invariably for commercial purposes. Most of that is surveillance. Without auto-load resources and Javascript, the user dials one number and only connects to one number. Most advertising and tracking stops working. When visiting sites submitted to HN, I'm not using a browser that auto-load resources or runs Javascript, hence there is no need for me to "block" ads; I control what request. People have been expending vast amounts of energy trying to counter "automatic" behaviour of the browser they choose to use. Perhaps the challenge is a new type of "fun". Otherwise, why use a browser that one cannot control. Find an open source browser. Remove the offensive "features". Re-compile. Done. This is exactly what I did with the browser I'm using to type this comment. Not everything that is "popular" is good. Perhaps that's an effect of advertising. Several so-called "tech" companies want the public, including government officials, to believe that advertising dollars are necessary to sustain a useful computer network.^1 Feel free to debate. Everything that is good does not need advertising. UBlockOrigin is one example. By generally all accounts, it's great and, AFAIK, it is not supported by advertising. 1. The truth however is that advertising dollars are only necessary to sustain those companies.