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I agree with both of those principals, but I continue to run an ad filtering proxy on my home network. I don't do this because ads annoy me (of course they do,

by mdip 13y ago

I agree with both of those principals, but I continue to run an ad filtering proxy on my home network. I don't do this because ads annoy me (of course they do, but for the above reasons, it feels wrong). I do this because a few years ago, certain less technical members of my family received a nasty bit of malware/rootkit combo delivered -- as best I could discern -- via a song lyric look up site. Another laptop picked up malware around the same time, though its source was more difficult to discern. In addition, about this same time, Microsoft and Google's ad networks were found to have some Flash ads that were malicious. After spending a few hours reloading laptops (with the offending individual being my first experiment with Ubuntu on a non-technical user's PC), I got fed up and installed a proxy. My computers all have local firewalls and anti-virus, but I'm sure nobody's surprised that they were still infected. I wonder, is the state of these ad networks improved at all? Are there advertisement blocking tools that just target ads that have the greatest probability of being exploits (flash, java, smaller ad networks)?

ljoshua 13y ago
Out of curiosity, how did the experience go for the non-technical Ubuntu user? Did it work out well?
- mdip 13y ago
  I ended up switching to openSuSE because she was having a difficult time remembering how to connect to our network shares and I didn't have the spare time to sort out what it took to get Active Directory membership working. After the switch, though, we never went back. This was 4 or 5 years ago, and she's now my ex- (unrelated to software choices), but for what she used it for -- e-mail, basic document creation, YouTube (Flash at the time), music organization (I believe we used SongBird? ... whatever it was, she was happy with it), and (at the time) a SageTV client. Aside from having to learn what did what, where (which was pretty minimal, she was already using OpenOffice on Windows, and Firefox was Firefox, SageTV was SageTV, most things were familiar), it was great. She figured out, on her own, how to customize the background and some of the other user settings. And I had fun from time to time connecting via SSH and making a song or two play when I knew she had to be cheered up. She thought that was a little creepy, but hey.

by mdip 13y ago

ljoshua 13y ago

Out of curiosity, how did the experience go for the non-technical Ubuntu user? Did it work out well?

mdip 13y ago
I ended up switching to openSuSE because she was having a difficult time remembering how to connect to our network shares and I didn't have the spare time to sort out what it took to get Active Directory membership working. After the switch, though, we never went back. This was 4 or 5 years ago, and she's now my ex- (unrelated to software choices), but for what she used it for -- e-mail, basic document creation, YouTube (Flash at the time), music organization (I believe we used SongBird? ... whatever it was, she was happy with it), and (at the time) a SageTV client. Aside from having to learn what did what, where (which was pretty minimal, she was already using OpenOffice on Windows, and Firefox was Firefox, SageTV was SageTV, most things were familiar), it was great. She figured out, on her own, how to customize the background and some of the other user settings. And I had fun from time to time connecting via SSH and making a song or two play when I knew she had to be cheered up. She thought that was a little creepy, but hey.