I have been using uBlock Origin and uMatrix together for so long, that I don’t remember when they became permanent must have… uBlock origin sanitizes the site, while uMatrix prevents any surprises since I last visited a site. The more garbage the site is, the more broken it is on my setup.
The way people talk about people who don’t block ads is so funny.
I understand and respect the reasons people choose to use blockers, but ads honestly just aren’t that problematic for me in practice and are easy to avoid and ignore.
Ads have been known to contain drive-by malware. Even if you don’t mind seeing ads (which personally I don’t mind unless they’re very intrusive), an adblocker is important for online safety.
There’s no mention of anything like zero-days in that article. They only mention that it can target all major OSes, with no mention of cutting edge versions also being vulnerable.
Hilariously, the article directly supports my position as well:
The good news for some, at least: it likely poses a minimal threat to most people, considering the multi-million-dollar price tag and other requirements for developing a surveillance campaign using Sherlock
That’s a big part of my whole point. People who don’t do even a modicum of actual thought about a practical threat model for themselves love pretending that ad blocking isn’t primarily just about not wanting to see ads.
If Israel or some other highly capable attacker is coming after you, then fine, you really do need ad blocking. In that case malware in ads is going to be the least of your concerns.
Attacks that cast such a wide net as to be the concern of all web users are necessarily less dangerous because exploits need to be kept secret to avoid being patched.
There’s nothing wrong with taking extra precautions; I’m certainly not saying blocking ads is a bad idea. It’s the apparent confusion that an informed, tech-savvy person might choose not to block ads that makes me laugh.
I also don’t understand it. But now I am wondering if we would not have had those “careless” (indifferent ? ignorant ?) millions of people not blocking ads then Google and others may have started pushing anti-adblock measures years earlier, no ?
My kid discovered that he can hit the "report" button on the YouTube app on the TV to skip the ads immediately. So now every ad gets reported as "inappropriate".
Tip: if you have an Android TV, you can install SmartTube as an alternative, privacy-friendly YouTube client. It has no ads and sponsorblock integration
This is why I refuse to buy a “smart” TV. My old flat screen TV works perfectly fine with a Chromecast with Google TV. I can even use the Chromecast in my projector or any other device with HDMI input to make it smarter than most TV interfaces I have tried.
I do the same, I use kodi on a CoreElec box on my 10 year old dumb TV. It works great, but my issue is it’s going to be extremely difficult to replace my TV when it gets time to upgrade. (Eg, if I want to move to an OLED, or QD panel). Every new TV on the market is a smart TV. It’s getting to the point that you need to buy a very large monitor, rather than a TV, to achieve the same setup.
My cheapo dumb tv died a couple of years back, was a great bit of kit for $400au that gave me 10 years. I’ve got a “smart” tv at the moment which isn’t connected to the internet, and just serves as the display for my Shield TV.
I’d probably consider an LG commercial / signage display as my next device, some old work connections can get me one as a special purchase through their distribution channels it’s just waiting out the current panel dying.
I found out this trick when I eating dinner once at my local library. Oddly, it was a kid came up and saw I was watching YT videos. Showed me the tactic, and now I rely on it lol
On one hand: Ads are gross noise pollution, and people are increasingly unaware of all the noise around them (or the noise they’re generating) largely because they’ve been passively trained to “tune out” ads. Also consumerism.
On the other hand: As long as there are a significant amount of people oblivious to the possibility of adblock, corporate ad mobsters and the other worst people in the world out there will largely leave those of us blocking their ads alone. If everyone ran adblockers, we’d definitely live in a world of WEI… and probably worse. So, maybe all those people are watching ads so that I don’t have to, as the YouTube thumbnails say.
If sites wanted to run ads and host them locally without tracking that would be fine. But since they’re tracking users it’s essential to block them for privacy and security, and if someone isn’t then maybe they don’t understand the level of tracking involved. We need a better name than adblocking.
I’m going to need some sources for that claim or I’m calling bullshit. I have never heard anyone claim that and I have seen absolutely zero evidence suggesting that.
and neither is bad. meta is a questionable choice for privacy cooperation but even in that it makes sure no one, not even meta, can read those match keys
I believe a lot of info I got was from this video but it’s been a while so I’m not too sure: youtu.be/ugnOM2mzgNU
Also yea Firefox sends a lot of telemetry data and stuff, even if you disable the option in the menu. You have to go to the developer mode to remove all of it. Check “hardened Firefox”. If there is an hardened Firefox, then there is a non-hardened Firefox.
And then there are all the contracts and calls to Google’s server, for example for geolocation and stuff
And if you want the ultimate proof, everything is in their privacy policy www.mozilla.org/fr/privacy/firefox/ - just see how much data they collect, use and share, for better or for worse.
after reading the privacy site that doesn’t sound too bad. or at least “tracks you private data and shares it with their business partners” bad which makes it sound like they are literally spying on you.
they do send telemetry data yes, but not your ip or anything that could be used to track against you, they do share some data while using the search function from url bar which is prettt much necessary and that seems to be only the stuff you typed.
most of it seems to just be about sponsored content where they send the amount of clicks and time when those clicks happened so advertisers know some statistics and advertisors get their royalties. firefox does suggest you content based on your browsing history but that happens locally. in no point does you browsing history go outside your computer, which is the most important part to me. they do know what was suggested, but not how it was suggested
so in conclusion, they do send some device information, information about your clicks and where those clicks happened and some other very basic telemetry with no information that could be tracked to you.
of course if one want the ultimate privacy that can be a dealbreaker. but to say that they collect your private data is quite an overstatement imo. I couldn’t give a damn if my browsing is part of some anonymous statistics.
but yeah in a way you’re correct, they do collect data. like almost literally every application does in the modern era
Mozilla’s websites are full of trackers too, and they are largely funded by Google. How can you protect privacy when your biggest customer gains money by tracking? Seems like a clear conflict of interest.
And it’s not a bit of telemetry data, it’s literally your entire computer config, number of tabs open, duration… they claim not to log IPs, but can you really trust them? The point is you’re constantly pinging with your IP to their servers for useless reasons. They literally sell your data by sharing it to their “business partners”.
They also send the url of all files you download to Google by default. Great. That’s privacy!
yeah I can trust them with no ip logging because I live in eu and if that big of a company breaks their own rules it’s going to get noted and addressed
and without the ip you just keep sending quite basic stuff anonymously. nobody is getting tracked by that. it’s just pretty anoymous data which ingludes general stuff like tab count, information about your ROUGH location (ip based, not accurate), hardware, clicks, count of clicks, times page visited etc… so just basic stuff that has literally nothing to do with the actual user. the link to your telemetry ends at the moment they don’t tell the actual stuff that identifies you like your ip. please if you disagree, what part of that data don’t you want to be shared because it has something to do with your privacy? it’s all anonymous.
firefox is an opensource software where literally anyone can view the source code and check themselves what is actually sent. you argument all you want with the “but can youn trust them?” but literally anyone esle except some guy on youtube didn’t feel like complaining about firefox
it’s an opensource software, running with the expenses of a big browser. the fact that you let firefox use your anonymous telemetry for royalties is the least you can do to support browser like that. it is literally your specs, location by city, amount of clicks, where the clicks were, when it happened, and possibly some other stuff that I can’t remember. all which is sent without you ip or other indications? what about those is actualy sacred?
also the sharing with third party service is only current with the current search service so you can choose yourself where you want to give your data in search engines.
and the google ad sevice only gets your ad-id which doesn’t get linked to you if you don’t use other google services in which case this conversation is pointless.
sorry if I missed something I’m high as fuck
But I see no reason for fearmongering or untrust. they are literally OPEN FUCKING SOURCE!
edit: and of course they are doing a lot of businnes with googe it is literally the biggest and easiest advertiser and they need money from somewhere. doesn’t meen they spy on YOU and track YOUR data as your own and sell it with your info slapped on it.
they have 1100 employees to pay for and a LOT of servers for almost 15 million users. think about the costs with the mind that they also have to take profit to grow and get more customers. they cant stay completely still with growth and profits if they want to get more users and servers space. it takes a lot more resources to get as any users as it took in the firefox glory days
Everything they recently added is pure bullshit and useless stuff. Just watch the video I linked, it says everything you want to hear. With all the data shared to their partners, I guess it’s relatively easy to fingerprint you, depending on how they do it. And cmon about the servers, I never go to their website, I only cost money because of the shit ton of data they retrieve. An update ping from time to time and an update twice a month can’t possibly cost 5 million dollars.
They don’t have anything to spend money on, the browser is pretty much full of features. The only thing to do is make it faster and check for security issues.
At least on Brave you can opt out of this bullshit
sorry if I missed something I’m high as fuck
Nice
firefox is an opensource software where literally anyone can view the source code and check themselves what is actually sent. you argument all you want with the “but can youn trust them?” but literally anyone esle except some guy on youtube didn’t feel like complaining about firefox
As if people actually did that. I bet serverside code isn’t open source
Pi-hole is nice for devices that you don’t fully control. But it’s not enough, due to the fundamental limitations of DNS based blocking. If the ads and the content are hosted on the same domain, it can’t do anything.
Also issues with links that get ads on top of them. You can still click them, you’ll get redirected to a blank page (because the ad gets DNS blocked), but with an adblocker you would’ve gone to the non-ad link.
Both cannot be true friend, sorry. Your buddy is either a fake engineer or their main job isn’t IT.
If you really have friends in IT they haven’t used chrome or edge in a while, or their using the scripting bot for weekly progress reports to their boss, and they’re only using it for that…
this is the stupidest comment I have read all week. chromenis fucking INFESTED in IT field. literally almost everyone uses it in my class, I’m a third year student in ict-engineering. literally everyone used it in my last school too, which was also IT related. if you actually believe that you must not really see other IT people outside the linux circles
Chrome has become the baseline to support for every kind of web application out there since every major browser other than firefox and safari is a chrome reskin anyway
You don’t want to start this conversation, it’s a race to absolutism and purity tests at odds with one another. You say Firefox and someone comes in a calls you an idiot because you’re not using a fully FOSS browser or one that is inadequately hardened or one that supports the installation of content-management modules.
The format currently used in adblocker predates uBO by almost a decade so no, but still, maintaining this add-on with how fast and often web browser changes, and keeping it performant must be quite the task.
I think performant is probably the key thing here. There were ad blockers before and there are alternative ones now, but the thing that sets unlock Origin apart is how light weight it is.
The VLC guy turned down what a quick search is telling me was “several tens of millions” to show ads. I can’t even imagine what getting people to drop ublock would be worth.
Though you may be right, I have a feeling that he is facing formidable opposition. That may include anything from social engineering to full on psyops.
Bet he’s had people “happen” to bump into him IRL, and gets pull requests from bad actors that are very subtly trying to take the project in the wrong direction.
What’s “Mordor Intelligence” – is that a real thing, or a parody of the surveillance/‘defense’ industry companies that are coming up with names nicked from LotR? (‘Anduril’, ‘Palantir’)
Your second point is especially interesting, considering the recent xz backdoor. The bad actors manipulated a poor burnt out maintainer for it. In comparison, I’m impressed with gorhill for his perseverance and mental strength. I would like to know how he avoids burn out with such negative influences.
Insightful point. And it does remind me of the corporate purchase of the Don’t care about cookies extension for Firefox (And the Simple Mobile Tools for Android). Luckily it was forked. github.com/…/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies Open source FTW!
🙂 🐧
There is and isn’t one. For the add-on itself, you just need forks and more forks. For the lists it pulls from, those are already decentralized, but you’re constantly going to deal with the issue of only the best are used and only the used are maintained and only the maintained are the best.
In the 1999s-2000s we used WebWasher. It was basically a proxy server which you ran locally on your computer and it had all the filters. You just set up your browser’s network connection to point to WebWasher and it acted as the gateway to the Internet.
If browsers somehow decided to kill all their plugin support, you could still use that to filter your content.
We let somebody pimp it out and now the internet’s just for whoring yourself. Shoulda stopped google from turning the most useful public utility into its bitch, shoulda stopped the telcos from adding obstacles to access (thus hampering innovation), and shoulda stopped letting these idiotic politicians work on behalf of these enshittifying capitalists instead of on behalf of our actual countries, world, and species a long fucking time ago.
Free. Open-source. For users by users. No donations sought.
If you ever want to contribute something, think about the people working hard to maintain the filter lists you are using, which are available to use by all for free.
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