The experience is so awful when I browse on my iPad, instead of my Android phone with Firefox+UBlock.
I really don't understand how most people can stand to browse with all the ads. The modern web is so much worse than the pop up ads of the old web.
> The experience is so awful when I browse on my iPad, instead of my Android phone with Firefox+UBlock. I really don't understand how most people can stand to browse with all the ads.
Most people don’t.
Most people who use anything for iOS tend to use things like:
- 1Blocker - super full featured, including custom script and css rules. business model is paid software, not ‘acceptable ads’ paying them for placement or third parties paying for your data
- AdGuard Pro - Similar to 1Blocker, less custom config friendly
- https://nextdns.io/ - pihole type blocker with unlimited configurations, custom rules, and analytics, native hooks for devices
- https://adguard-dns.io/ - similar DNS[1] service to nextdns.io with ability to upload your own rules based configurations
- Firefox Focus if using that ecosystem
- Brave if using that ecosystem
- iCab Mobile if wanting a super configurable browser with filter rules and longest history as indie browser for iOS
You quoted but didn’t reply to the rest of the owl:
> Most people who use anything for iOS tend to use
OP cited U-Block Origin and Firefox, so I’m replying to them as a persona, the sort of person that would use something, with things that can help them.
Developer wages would crash through the floor and all the way down to the centre of the Earth if ad blockers really took off without users also accepting micropayments or subscriptions for web services at the same time. Maybe we should be a little bit glad that the main thing keeping massive amounts of money in tech is accepted by users.
The key thing that most people in tech don't appear to grok very easily is that the overwhelming majority of web services like search engines, social media, ad-driven news websites, etc are all things that users place practically zero value on. People accept ads because they're a way of paying for things without really thinking about it. If you start asking users for actual money they suddenly decide that all these services represent no value and they'll live without them.
The end of online advertising is an existential threat for a massive part of the tech industry. If that cash cow ends there would be a huge reduction in money for devs, and a massive flood of devs on to the market. Economics 101 should tell you how bad that would be for most HN readers.
This is some massive hyperbole and really makes me consider if online advertising should be abolished or massively kneecapped.
Maybe we should ask users for money because the alternative has become some kafkaesque hellscape where people think it's totally normal to have a dozen ad trackers when attempting to buy shoes. These trackers have an enormous costs and maybe their externalities should be taxed and regulated.
Maybe by the end of the century we will slowly realize that online advertising is the "lead" paint that was rightfully eradicated.
I think online advertising as we know it will be essentially dead by the end of the decade. Because most businesses are paying for google ads, you're basically paying a highway toll for the organic traffic you would get for free anyway, and advertisers haven't figured out the ruse. This whole idea that people search for A and are going to be willing to instead click on B if you put it at the top is super overblown -- 99% of the time they still want to and will click on A, they'll just scroll down. Impressions in search don't convert people anymore. This is why people's bounce rates have become worse and worse since the 2010s -- most ad clicks are miss-clicks.
And when people _are_ shopping around, they search for things like "best vpn providers 2022" and then go to that article and look at the breakdown. People don't click on B unless they're already sold on it, and search placement just isn't doing it for people anymore because the ad results have just been so bad for so long all trust is gone.
The modern populace has become completely innoculated against the effectiveness of search ads imo. Most people don't even see those results they have mental blinders and scroll down a bit.
The people spamming bigger dick pills, viagra, and the like back in the day made money, and in some cases quite substantial amounts of it. They did so simply for the fact that even if 99.9999% of people didn't go for it, that 0.00001% was far more than enough to show a healthy profit after 'advertising' costs.
The point is that advertising won't end until the formula of additional_ad_driven_revenue > ad_costs becomes false. And we're a long ways away from that given how inordinately expensive advertising is relative to the costs incurred by the companies selling the advertising. And each time that equilibrium price goes lower, the potential market of advertisers who may purchase ads grows.
This logic suggests that, if anything, advertising will get even worse as ad revenues decline. Go low enough and we'll be right back to square one with Google Ads promoting big dick pills and viagra. That's to say nothing of the fact that as revenues decline, both Google and advertisers will be looking for ever more insidious and forceful ways to make you watch and make you consume. Imagine, for instance, the countless dystopias things like Google Nest could enable - if such products ever managed to gain widespread adoption.
> And when people _are_ shopping around, they search for things like "best vpn providers 2022"
Which coincidentally a number of VPN "review" sites were purchased and the lists "updated" to recommend a certain owner that I'm fairly certain at this point is a honeypot.
Kape Technologies was formerly known as Crossrider before it was acquired by Teddy Sagi, an Israeli billionaire that has spent time in jail for insider trading. Crossrider itself never had that great a reputation itself, what with their primary product being a development platform through which they were frequently used by third parties to invade ad platforms to serve up malware.
Completely right, but my point is it's the review sites / honeypots that move the needle on whether people will choose A over B, not A or B out-bidding each other in Google Ads.
IIRC, there are quite a few review networks set up like that. John Oliver's Drug Rehabilitation episode pointed out that the same thing happened with "independent" reviews of drug rehabs.
Given the choice, your average person will pretty much _always_ choose the option that doesn't involve them handing over money, even if they have plenty of it.
> The key thing that most people in tech don't appear to grok very easily is that the overwhelming majority of web services like search engines, social media, ad-driven news websites, etc are all things that users place practically zero value on. People accept ads because they're a way of paying for things without really thinking about it. If you start asking users for actual money they suddenly decide that all these services represent no value and they'll live without them.
Imagine a world where the only content that survives is the one that people value enough to pay for.
What a wonderful catastrophic disruptive event that would be. Imagine no more SEO spam which are essentially devoid of information. These which are already so plentiful and sophisticated that they are threatening the core value of online search. No more vacuous blogspam, low-quality trash "newspapers" that only survive because they trick people into giving them a few morsels of attention.
Reminds me of the web in the 1990s and early 2000s before owners of sites and services really found ways to monetize every single second and click their users made with ads.
It actually kinda was, Yahoo just kinda got destroyed by going public and endlessly acquiring random tech companies chasing quarterly earnings. But it's core product was actually solid.
"Developer wages would crash through the floor and all the way down to the centre of the Earth if ad blockers really took off without users also accepting micropayments or subscriptions for web services at the same time. Maybe we should be a little bit glad that the main thing keeping massive amounts of money in tech is accepted by users."
Somewhere, somebody is saying, "Maybe we shouldn't sell drugs to children?" And somebody else is saying, "Won't somebody think of the wages for chemists?"
Same argument for simplifying the tax code or even completely abolishing the IRS in favor of collection infrastructures already in place (like sales tax) - but what will happen to the multi-billion dollar tax prep industry?
Advertising is a type of propaganda. One of a myriad of different forms of propaganda.
One leads to the other easily. For example taking advertising money for television commercials or magazine adds leads to "Native Ads". Native ads are sort of like product placement except that it's pretending to be a news story or whatever.
Like when people on CNBC or CNN start talking about Taco Bell menu items or new type of drug that might fight cholesterol. That's paid-for propaganda that is pretending to be television news.
Pretty soon you have a entire industry based on not telling the truth about drugs or food or other products they buy because that will piss off their advertisers.
This is the basis of the modern web. It's not a good thing even though it makes a lot of people a lot of money.
>The end of online advertising is an existential threat for a massive part of the tech industry. If that cash cow ends there would be a huge reduction in money for devs, and a massive flood of devs on to the market. Economics 101 should tell you how bad that would be for most HN readers.
That's as may be, but little of value would be lost IMHO.
Well, except by those supporting (in a myriad of ways) the cesspit of advertising online and elsewhere.
I'm sure many will disagree with my assessment, but advertising as it's done today is invasive, obnoxious and alarmingly ubiquitous.
I'm not sure what a better model is, but this is not the way.
N.B: Advertising paid for my food, clothing, housing, etc. for the first 18 years of my life. And a couple years later for another five years as well.
> social media, ad-driven news websites, etc are all things that users place practically zero value on
> If you start asking users for actual money they suddenly decide that all these services represent no value and they'll live without them.
So what you're saying is if we use ad blocking technology to kill off the advertising business model, we can also kill off social media and its addictive algorithms, clickbaiting sites that generate and monetize outrage and numerous other cancers on society that the advertisers enable.
We don't need to ban anything. We just need to use technology to reduce their returns on investment as much as possible. Make it unprofitable to run ads. Lack of advertiser profits will put an end to social media and its friends.
I'd still have 99.9% of my clients if online advertising went away. Turns out that there are entire sectors of the economy that are not dependent on intrusive ads at all in order to remain solvent.
I'll be the happiest man in this world the day when the ads industry dies in a ball of fire after experiencing the most unspeakable pains conceivable in this universe.
Ads are keeping the whole IT industry as a hostage. Even Startpage, the last ad-free search engine I used to use (and one of the oldest on the market), has recently been purchased by an ads company. They've put their filthy hands everywhere, innovation today only happens if it benefits ads revenue, and most of the bleeding edge innovation in AI comes to solve the problem "how can I maximize the odds that users will click on an ad I put in front of their eyes?". What's worse, a lot of development time nowadays is spent either to develop new ways to block ads, or new ways to evade those blockers, instead of focusing engineering resources on things that are actually useful to society.
Ads are a curse to the industry and they have to die. And I really don't give a fuck if it will cause developer wages to go down. They'll go down only in companies that have relied only on ads and data surveillance to build their revenue, and I've always stayed away from those. Developers will have a chance of moving to companies that can pay them better and have more sustainable business models, once Google and Facebook will no longer be the coolest kids in town. Two decades down the line, and not only we haven't yet figured out a better way to make money through the Web, but the ads industry HAS BECOME the Web. We need a fucking reboot and we need it now.
At some point people will start to understand that they need to either pay for services, or host them themselves, and maybe they'll be more selective on what they use and who they send their data to. If I want service A, I pay for service A (like things work in every other industry), or I run it on my own server. I don't rely on someone who allegedly provides me service A for free, just to scoop out as much data about me as possible and resell it to opaque 3rd-parties so they can place more targeted ads in front of my eyes that I'm more likely to click. How the hell did we end up so tangled up in this grotesque and creepy shit that now we are unable even of conceiving an IT industry that doesn't rely on ads?
A huge part of the reason society values those thing as practically zero is because they've nearly always been provided by companies for free.
If the ad-supported model fell apart, people would eventual change their understanding of the value of those services. They'd probably pay a decent amount for it.
But its a race to the bottom since someone will always offer ad-supported. It'll take an outside force (like ad-blocks by default or bans by governments) to actually kill off the ad-supported industry.
I pay $50/year for email, because it is broadly useful across many vendors, sites, and service providers.
I would not pay $0.50 for any walled garden social media account; I don't even have any with them being free. They are just too intrusive and too limited.
The ad market already died in 2010. Today it's just bots or big players like Google and Facebook. News sites can use placed ads that integrate into the news feed and not easily blocked. Surprisingly I pay for more and more web content. For example video and music streaming, news sites, review sites, sell/buy sites, forum boards, niche content.
>The end of online advertising is an existential threat for a massive part of the tech industry.
Good. Things would be rough for many of us here but it is the better outcome for wider humanity. Advertising and adtech normalise abusive psychological manipulation.
> web services like search engines, social media, ad-driven news websites, etc are all things that users place practically zero value on.
I wonder if that’s the truth or if it’s this way because there are free alternatives.
If one search engine starts charging a monthly fee, users will just go to another one that pays for itself with ads and data.
But if the prevalent model for search engines is monthly subscription, then people will start paying for it and the value for the user won’t be 0 anymore.
Why would you pay for ice cream from the ice cream stand if you can get it for free next door for the “cost” of them keeping track of how often you come to the stand and what flavors you like, and selling that info to others?
> But if the prevalent model for search engines is monthly subscription, then people will start paying for it and the value for the user won’t be 0 anymore.
Far more likely ISPs will start providing search engines included in the cost of that service. Old ISPs like AOL and CompuServe did this in the past. Social media will never be something people have to pay for because we've already seen that people will create their own forums for free so we'd just go back to that.
Hell, back in the day people paid for additional phone lines and hardware to host their own BBS which users accessed for free and that cost the sysop a hell of a lot more than webhosting these days.
without users also accepting micropayments or subscriptions for web services at the same time
I think there's chicken and egg problem here -- users aren't going to use micropayments until there's a widely used micropayments platform that is also privacy protecting. I have no desire in using a micropayments platform that's really a cross-platform analytics engine that's even more invasive than Google since they can positively identify me through my payment method.
I have no problem paying for content, but don't want to pay through intrusive ad views, and don't to use a micropayments platform that tracks all of my browsing throughout the web.
If it's true that users place zero value on most of what the tech industry churns out, then maybe most of what the tech industry churns out really isn't that valuable.
> Developer wages would crash through the floor and all the way down to the centre of the Earth if ad blockers really took off without users also accepting micropayments or subscriptions for web services at the same time.
Well, the problem is that there are no rules, morals, or code of conduit telling when it's too much, except for users leaving. In theory.
However, unfortunately, most users adapt very easily to being thrown at their face more and more advertising every day, so we can't count on them.
Just look at what advertising became since the late 90s until today: the number of ads and wasted bandwidth/storage/cpu cycles employed to send and show them grows every damn day, why should I think it's going to stop? For a while we thought that flashing banners were the root of all evil, but what about short articles ridiculously split in multiple pages so that they can show more ads at each 5 sentences ..er.. page change? Or articles altered (possibly by AI) so that they use like 3 times the necessary words so they become longer and can be split like the above? Or unskippable ads during videos, user profiling that is becoming so dangerously close to digital surveillance, etc. Just no thanks.
I wouldn't mind opening my adblockers if sites kept advertising to a reasonable minimum in which I can get some information about where to purchase a product I'm interested in: actually I want good non invasive advertising, but every time I tried to do that I quickly had to get back in disgust and set them tight closed again for almost all sites, save for the very few ones that still do the right thing: what once was a short blacklist transitioned over time to a nearly empty whitelist.
I have no trust in the system anymore. Until the day there are well defined and enforced rules, it will always keep choosing what brings more profits, that is, more and more advertising. Not holding my breath for that day.
Also, I think the current economic system would need some heavy modifications to adapt it to micropayments on a large scale for every service one could access to. What would be the expenses of a micropayments system that, say, charged one cent for daily usage of every now free or ad supported service out there? (Google, blogs, social media, etc). I mean, that would produce a huge number of extremely low value transactions; are we sure it wouldn't cost more than the profits it should produce?
"The key thing that most people in tech don't appear to grok very easily is that the overwhelming majority of web services like search engines, social media, ad-driven news websites, etc are all things that users place practically zero value on."
Then why did we build them? This seems like a massive waste of effort.
Why does everything have to be something someone would pay for, to keep it from devolving into some of the most disgusting behavior? Why is money always the primary driving factor? Society will remain stuck until we realize that money should not be the driving factor for everything.
You are assuming that most developers work on ad supported websites and couldn't be employed elsewhere resulting in a wage crunch as supply exceeds demand. In fact most developers already work in other endeavors and there aren't enough of them to go around now.
Please cite sources backing up your original claim.
They wouldn't. If anything, they'd go up since people would have to actually use their brains and set up real targeted marketing (even ads) instead of the current "show 20 ads, rake the CPM cash and hope we get some leads, too, YOLO".
There was a short period where it seemed like it would happen - context aware ads, links and affiliate products, each page was served different ads or none at all, with no privacy stuff it could also be very effetive.
Alas general ads won, and they do make more money for the platforms since they can show the same ads for stuff you have already bought/installed.
As someone with focus and attention issues due to dopamine deficiency, I consider advertising to be, in general, quite ableist. Maybe one day mental handicaps will become as respected as physical handicaps. Nobody would consider a business model that abuses wheelchair-bound people, as a key component, as valid.
... and it would still be a great thing for mankind, especially long term.
Google et al in adspace winning is mankind losing. Not hugely, but its clearly there. But the amount of mental gymnastics elite devs have to go through every day to keep feeling OK about their jobs just because of huge paycheck or working on 'cool' problems' is staggering (ignoring how screwing fellow human beings isn't cool in any way for now).
A little sidenote - not an expert on psychology, but it seems to me practically every human being, including psychopathic mass murderers have this desperate desire to feel OK with their actions, the need to justify them so they are at peace with themselves. If I kill, I follow the word of god. If I burn jews and minorities alive in concentration camps, I am just following orders and doing it for greater good of my nation. If I work in amoral company, 1 man doesn't matter anyway, there are tons of others that would happily pick up the job, and look at what open source and cool free apps we give to the world for this little cost of privacy and annoyment. Or I just do it so my kids have better starting position, I am great parent and that s above anything else. Whatever the mental tool, always aiming for the same destination.
Not necessarity. The worst ads are the lowest paying, which is why they are spammed so much in the lowest-quality places. Good ads make their money and don't need 100x the impression count.
The first random source I googled - https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users - asserts that 15% of USA users report using an adblocker on mobile - in contrast to 37% of USA desktop users using an adblocker.
It would be great if threaded conversation was normalized to anchoring on the original context. Using every reply as a partially-yours-partially-new starting point makes the conversations treacherously convoluted until many points are concurrently true; only if you focus on the right parts.
This is definitely striking me as one of those "why didn't I think of that" and "why don't we already have a lot of this?" Any ideas? Seems like you could go wild with this and do something like "Tor"ify, or "torrentify" or dare I say "blockchain" it?
Someone can probably school me on why this is harder than it sounds.
And, Pi-hole is basically just dnsmasq, so you don't actually need a Raspberry Pi and the official Pi-hole software if you already have a Linux box on your home network doing other things. Just configure dnsmasq and you've got Pi-hole's functionality. With custom firmware, your Internet router can host dnsmasq, so you don't even need a separate box (this is what I use).
I run pi hole in an x86 docker container on my NAS. No raspberry pi required, despite the name.
The reports an dynamic modifications to rule sets are a big advantage of pi hole. Sure, you can do it with dnsmasq conf files and logs, but the web UI has a lot of niceties.
What I'm talking about is publicly usable adblocking DNS servers. As in instead of me at home having to install anything, just (probably clear a cache or something) and change all my DNS servers to a public reachable-by-anyone DNS server. No installation.
I use NextDNS but I don't use it for adblock because if it breaks a website (which happens) I need a quick way around it that isn't a DNS change. I suppose I could use another browser that uses DNS over HTTPS via Cloudflare but I've chosen Firefox and uBlock origin. I use NextDNS to block actual websites like Twitter, Reddit and occasionally HN. It is nice to support a company that provides configurable DNS.
NextDNS, which I've been using for over 2 years now, might help in your endeavor. In addition to its stock lists of lookup rules, you are allowed to customize your own blacklists/whitelists.
Thank you for mentioning this. It's so convenient to manage that kind of filtering through a service. Works for all platforms too. I can finally bteak my reddit addiction again.
AdGuard Home is another option along with the PiHole another commented mentioned. I have that running at home forcing all port 53 traffic to it via the firewall. So ads are blocked on all devices on the network. So easy I sometimes forget I have it running and then I browse on mobile away from home and get bombarded with ads and am reminded why I do it.
They do also have their own paid DNS service, but I haven't attempted to use it. Might be a way to deal with mobile better.
For what it's worth, the "sometimes forget I have it running and then I browse on mobile away from home and get bombarded with ads" bothered me enough personally to attempt to smooth it over. Ended up using Tailscale DNS so that every device on my tailnet/VPN benefits. It was painless and has been solid for ~4mo now.
I keep my phone VPN'd to my home network via wireguard 100% of the time, pointing at my AdGuard Home hosts for DNS. This works great, the beauty of wireguard is it reconnects in under a second so it's never annoying.
You do need a reasonable upload speed to do this, though. Otherwise I guess you could use an "always free" VM at Oracle or something.
Yeah, definitely thinking about doing something similar. Was wondering about something like Zero Tier as well. I just don't use my phone all that much away from home, so it hasn't been up on the priority list.
I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_over_HTTPS really made this possible. I recently started using NextDNS and it simply gives you a custom URL to drop in your DNS configs. If we were just doing IP address DNS server lookup you'd have some severe limitations on matching up customers to servers.
It'd not hard and alternative DNS-es were there as long as the DNS itself, for various reasons. There are even commercial variants like OpenDNS. In all these cases, the control is in the hands of the entity maintaining the blocklists. There is no advantage in "torrentifying" (there's no much to hide) or "blockchaining" it.
It's not harder than it sounds! Pi-hole is the most popular one (could it be the most individually self-hosted FLOSS service if we don't count stuff like SSH?) but you have various options and it's not that tricky to roll your own based on dnsmasq or unbound. If you're on openwrt there are two options with Luci web-UI as well.
1Blocker mostly operates by pumping rules into Safari's rules engine, but it also has an App Firewall feature that uses VPN profiles. I've had some compatibility problems with that, but mostly it just blocks 10,000s of requests I didn't want my device to make in the first place.
> I really don't understand how most people can stand to browse with all the ads
In my case, I browse a limited number of web sites that offer no ads (or a minimum amount). The moment I visit a web site with tons of ads, I just close it immediately and just ignore my original intention of visiting that website (e.g., this happens sometimes in HN: people link websites of newspapers, but I don't last in them more than 2 seconds)
That's half of the point of having uBlock Origin. Use the zapper to disappear an element for the session, use the picker to poof them forever. They really work on making their webapps as unbearable as possible, but you can get rid of it to make them webapps great again. Can even add sites/pages as home app icons.
Which makes Firefox the obviously better mobile browser, Chrome seems like a pretty strong case of defaults' power. Tho gotta add the "Google Search Fixer" select addon because they sure doesn't want you to get summary cards, financial charts and other goodies if you use a competitor browser.
Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and co without the ads circus. Duolingo without daily activity limit for some reason.
Another great example lately is Reddit. Reddit's mobile experience had become awful. Every time someone sends me a reddit link and I click on it, I'm taken to Reddit's mobile site, which should function just fine and dandy, but the minute it detects you are there on a mobile browser, it spams you with "Reddit works best in the app!" messages, and won't let you view some subs at all without signing in.
Reddit is a great example of mobile done wrong. Don't be like Reddit.
All the big names quietly or publicly abandoned their efforts to fully migrate to React Native, focusing only on the most simple use-cases/views if they do keep it around. Even with the smartest people working on it, it's tough to keep React Native performant.
Sorry I didn't express that clearly FWIW, didn't mean that literally.
It's just that most apps people use are pretty much the same as their respective websites. All of FAAMG's websites work as perfectly fine replacement to the apps, even better, IMHO, when you get rid of the ads apparatus.
I finally got fed up with ads on youtube and decided to put my money where my mouth is vis-a-vis supporting business models that I want to succeed (paying for content instead of with my eyeballs).
I have a little-used gmail account that I registered a few years ago, as my original gmail became completely overrun with spam and I switched to Fastmail.
I added a credit card to the account and tried to pay for Youtube Premium and was immediately flagged for suspicious activity. To reactivate my account, Google wants me to verify my identity with photos of goverment ID and a full KYC-style form.
No thanks. I signed up for https://nebula.app/ instead - they were able to process my payment on the first attempt.
Chances are they saw the login as fraud given it went unused via years and the first thing that login did was sign up for YT Premium via a credit card.
A potential problem they're trying to prevent might be where money launderers use google accounts to funnel YT Premium money to specific channels via watch time (since Premium pays out a lot more, and pay per minute watched[0]).
I'm sure they have the best intentions but there's literally no way to appeal it. Why can't they verify the credit card the way every other merchant seems to be able to?
There are a couple of ways to block YT ads, but DNS-based adblockers won't do it.
On Android you can simply install an alternate YT client, boom, job's done. Works on Android TV also.
On iOS, the content blocker lists in Safari can block YT ads, but there's no way to block them in Google's YouTube app unless you jailbreak and install a modified app. So just watch YT in Safari.
You can side load YouTube tweaked apps. You’ll have to refresh the app every 7 days without a workaround or dev account but altserver makes it painless after the first time.
If you like to browse recipes on your iPad/iPhone/Android device, the Paprika recipe manager app is really good for this. It adds a share sheet button that will pull the ingredients and instructions out of a page and let you read them easily (or save them to the app). It's wonderful.
Buy a subscription to America's test kitchen. For just ATK it's like $40 for one site or $80 for all of their sites and free shipping from their shop. And that's if you don't use a discount code (and they are always running some kind of a discount). You get access to ATK, Cook's Illustrated, Cook's Country, their app, and again free shipping.
It's worth it to avoid all the bullshit blogspam, even without the ATK rating and reviews (which are super useful on their own as well).
ATK stuff is super high quality. Like you said, probably worth it just to avoid reading the author's life story prior to the recipe on random food blogs.
Even without the ads, you still have multiple cookie popups and banners, floating videos and newsletter notifications to closes before getting to the content. And of course as you scroll down some of those come back (floating videos in particular).
There was a time where you could just close the tab if it was that bad, but now pretty much all websites are like this so there's no choice.
I wonder if there would be a market for something like ublock, but instead of removing the ads, it removes just the content and puts it on an entirely new page - a bit like 'reader mode'. Obviously it would probably need logic for every web page, but that could be croudsourced
Reader mode sometimes doesn't appear for some sites. I am guessing there is a way for sites to disable it with JS or indicate to the browser that they don't want it.
It's a feature of Reader actually. The library they use has a "isProbablyReaderable()" function to determine if a page can be simplified, and their extension uses that to decide if Reader mode should be available or not.
Sometimes Reader mode gets around adblock detectors or other stoppers on normal page loads. It'd be nice to be able to try it regardless of whether Mozilla thinks it would be useful.
Yeah, lots of junk is added today, not just ads. I can't find the link right now but I'm sure I saw a couple years ago (probably linked here) an article showing that over half of the data traffic is either ads or junk that wastes bandwidth, which isn't flat on mobile.
> Well, the cookie popups are only there because of regulation.
You don't /need/ them if you only have essential cookies:
> At GitHub, we want to protect developer privacy, and we find cookie banners quite irritating, so we decided to look for a solution. After a brief search, we found one: just don’t use any non-essential cookies. Pretty simple, really.
There is no need for pop ups under the gdpr. If you are handling personal information, giving cookies etc which aren’t required (E.g to sign in), then ask at the point of signing in/up. Otherwise you don’t need to set cookies, you might want to, to track and monetise your visitors, but that’s different.
How are you supposed to provide a consistent appearance for A/B testing changes without being able to store which group a user is assigned to?
How are you supposed to count unique users that visit your site?
How are you supposed to figure out why most users bounce?
These are legitimate questions a publisher may want to know to improve their site, but are not allowed under GDPR without a specific notice and opt-out.
There are many cases where what publications consider "essential" for their business do not match what the EU has decided is "essential".
Heck, when GDPR was first proposed most publishers assumed advertising would be allowed under "essential" business uses since they can't provide content if they don't get paid. Clarification on this only came a couple of months before GDPR enforcement started, causing a bit of a scramble for publishers and advertisers.
Many such usecases can be achieved by setting a non-personalized cookie, for which you need neither consent nor a popup. You can put a cookie like "has_visited=yes" or "ABtest=B".
If you want to track unique users, well, you're not supposed to unless the users opt in (not avoid opting out!), and you have to accept that at least a part won't - the society and law has decided such desires are not legitimate unless the data subjects themselves want that.
> These are legitimate questions a publisher may want to know to improve their site, but are not allowed under GDPR without a specific notice and opt-out.
Why would the publisher’s questions be legitimate and the user’s right not to be tracked no? You can still answer those questions but you need to ask for permission. A physical store owner has also a lot of questions but they’re not allowed to follow you everywhere in the store and in the street.
> Heck, when GDPR was first proposed most publishers assumed advertising would be allowed under "essential" business uses since they can't provide content if they don't get paid.
That’s a really weird reasoning. Should drug dealers be exempted from police controls because their activity is essential for their income and so for their life? Earning money is necessary, but there are multiple ways to do so.
> How are you supposed to provide a consistent appearance for A/B testing changes without being able to store which group a user is assigned to?
You're not supposed to A/B test at all. Users are not test subjects.
> How are you supposed to count unique users that visit your site? How are you supposed to figure out why most users bounce?
You're not supposed to. You simply aren't entitled to any of that information.
> These are legitimate questions a publisher may want to know to improve their site
It doesn't matter how "legitimate" it is or how much money it costs publishers. The attempt to learn these facts requires collecting identifying information and that is harmful to us.
The least you can do is ask permission.
> There are many cases where what publications consider "essential" for their business do not match what the EU has decided is "essential".
That's by design. Nobody really cares what an industry that's being regulated thinks. Obviously adtech considers it "essential" to collect as much personal data as humanly possible.
What matters is what society thinks and we think sites work just fine with all the tracking disabled.
> publishers assumed advertising would be allowed under "essential" business uses
Advertising is allowed. It's just the abusive adtech model of targeted advertising that requires consent. Nothing stops people from signing a deal with some brand and serving static images or something. As long as it's not surveillance capitalism it's fine.
That is not a "regulation", it is a directive, requiring member states of the EU to implement appropriate legislation.
It applies to the legislatures of member states, which I believe doesn't yet include the USA.
Perhaps the clause you are thinking of is this one:
"(33) Customers should be informed of their rights with respect to the use of their personal information in subscriber directories and in particular of the purpose or purposes of such directories, as well as their right, free of charge, not to be included in a public subscriber directory, as provided for in Directive 2002/58/EC"
That directive doesn't call for a mist of popups to flash before your eyes before you can read content. It could easily be satisfied by a menu option that allows you to set your preferences. The mist of popups is caused by a bunch of angry data traders who don't care how much they annoy their users.
Incidentally, citing a directive from 2009 is a bit anachronistic: that directive is overridden by the GDPR.
The GDPR cookie pop-ups that make navigation on mobile often nearly impossible was a major assault in the remaining open web. The EU bureaucrats that drafted it never created anything constructive in their lives, only regulated. As a result, less and less of the independent web is getting traffic, everything is consolidating in TikTok, Instagram and similar apps
Getting money for running websites is also non-mandatory? Are we going to fund them from the government 5-year plans yet? Our hosting expenses alone are 8k per month.
> Getting money for running websites is also non-mandatory?
Your business problems aren't our concern. If you're financing your business by stealing personal information from users and selling it to data brokers, then you're a crook. Crooks tend to have high hosting expenses.
"Our" as in Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety concern? What do you know about hosting expenses? I have been running a website that you know and use with 100m users since 2004!
> I have been running a website that you know and use with 100m users since 2004
The only website that you know I use is this one. Are you saying that you run HN? I do not think you are that person.
If that's not the site you're referring to, I'm rather curious to know what site it is that you run, that's had 100m users since 2004(!), that can correlate a site user with this HN user. Will you tell, please?
You can serve ads without tracking users across sites/apps to gain revenue. Not to mention other income generating activities such as partnerships, subscriptions, donations, etc.
Fencing stolen car stereos provides a better return than retailing legit electronics. Does that make laws against receiving stolen property an infringement of your freedom to do business?
I don't have much sympathy for your predicament. Perhaps the market has a better use for your hosting facility than pumping out ads and tracking scripts.
The ad networks get a lot more for tracking based ads, and the advertisers supposedly get more conversions (though targeting fraud is a real, well-documented thing).
People have a right to privacy. Your business doesn't have a right to profit. It's that simple.
If following the requirements of society makes your business unprofitable, too bad, having a business is optional, following the requirements of society is not.
Yes, it's not mandatory. In fact, running sites themselves is not mandatory, so if you can't find a way to run a site which respects its users, then I'd argue you should fail. That's the free market at its finest.
They are not GDPR "cookie pop-ups". GDPR does not call for this plague. You don't need to get the users approval for cookies needed for the correct operation of the site.
I believe they are a protest by largely US-owned companies against regulation, designed to annoy internet users and turn them against regulation.
I believe they are a protest by largely US-owned companies against regulation
Even if this is true, it's something that should have been expected by EU legislators. Their beliefs seem to be that companies are acting in bad faith by secretly tracking users and misusing the information that they gather (basically true), and also that if they impose vague rules that companies need to get consent for tracking then they'll act in good faith and give users clear and convenient ways of opting out (ha ha ha).
Much of this brouhaha is about the niche of online businesses, which is the thing that's most visible here on HN, but which really wasn't the primary focus of GDPR which applies to all the businesses in society, the vast majority of which aren't global websites.
If I look at the changes implemented by local telecommunications companies, local banks, local supermarket loyalty programs, local pizza delivery chains, local real estate brokers, etc - these types of businesses had all kinds of widespread shenanigans before GDPR, but now they overwhelmingly have acted in good faith, and have given users clear and convenient ways of opting out (because, really, they didn't have a choice). Like, we don't see EU phone carriers selling location data to advertisers the way they do in USA - now that is a significant thing compared to some blog putting on a cookie.
For most companies, the transition has happened reasonably well - it's just that a few (but large and highly visible) global companies are holding out because of political reasons preventing enforcement - mostly stemming the fact that Ireland's DPA is currently permitted to unilaterally shield them from the rest of EU and has motivation to do it because it's financially beneficial for Ireland to have Facebook/Google/etc have their EU domicile be in Ireland.
> it's something that should have been expected by EU legislators
It has been - the regulation explicitly outlaws such malicious pseudo-compliance. The problem is that GDPR enforcement has been severely lacking, so malicious actors are allowed to run free.
Others already mention adblockers exist for iOS. This is possible because Safari on iOS has support for declarative blocking (the inferior API compared to programmatically deciding what to block).
I confirm. Im seeing no ads on iOS in Safari with ad blocker. Works quite well and browsing experience is good. Should Ad blockers ever be rendered unfunctional I’d simply reduce my browsing to a minimum, I’d never ever stomach a regular browsing experience, it’s maddening, it’s potentially dangerous and not worth the hassle.
I do find the conversations here about ads very interesting. I would assume that some of the people in this forum are actually responsible for what we're literally talking about.
Just installed (enabled under Settings->Safari->Ad blockers) and it doesn't work at all on some sites I tried.
From what I know, it never will as long as Apple only allows shitty request inspection with allow/deny result. It just cannot work nowhere near as well as uBlock Origin.
I'm not privy of the technical details.I don't think it acts on cookies themselves, it merely removes the nagging banners, and in that case the EU-compliant site is supposed not to set any cookie or other tracker since none were explicitly accepted.
Basically at a high level it's like what DNT should have been i.e "as a default don't track me since I'm not giving consent"
In my case, not being able to use Firefox (and therefore all the extensions including ublock) was the main reason (among others) to get rid of my iPhone 12 pro and go back to a modest Android.
What's wrong with Firefox Focus as a Safari content blocker? I barely see ads on my iPhone and websites breaking because I have an ad blocker is more common than seeing ads.
I use Firefox Focus mostly to watch YouTube vids on my iOS tablet, and it is one big ad-infested experience. Just learned I should look at AdGuard and hope that will bring improvement.
Update: On first impression that does not seem to have worked.
The simple way to block YouTube ads on iOS is to pay for YouTube premium - it's unfortunate you can't get SponsorBlock through the regular/legal flow though.
Firefox Focus only seems to block some ads and isn't configurable to block the many ads and web annoyances that get through.
I also find it annoying that I lose access to my entire Firefox ecosystem on my computer and phone since the focus of the app is actually on anonymous browsing versus blocking ads. If I send tabs to my iPad they still open up in regular Firefox. Firefox Focus only slightly makes the web useable, while giving up most of the browser conveniences.
I've never knowingly encountered a website breaking because I have an adblocker, but I've being running adblockers of one sort or another for about as long as there's been ads on the web - so maybe there's just features I don't know I should experience.
Can you give an example of a website that breaks with an adblocker? (Please describe what breaks as well. Otherwise I might not notice it.)
Some local news site's article ranking list somehow becomes empty with adblocking but I care less.
Now that I think about it, if a site wants people to disable adblocking, they should make valid contents disappear instead of begging for it with a popup.
Thanks. We must have different internet usage patterns. I'm using ublock origin, maybe it's just less disruptive. Or maybe GDPR rules make sites in the EU more forgiving of blocked bits.
For the ones you mentioned, Vanguard seems to have a lot of different login pages, but every one I found actually rendered - although some were white for so slow I wondered if they would fail. But not trying Uhaul because obviously I don't want to make a transaction.
Try Orion browser on iOS/iPad. Afaik it’s the only browser that implements web extensions, therefore you can install any native firefox or chrome extension from the store.
Just stumbled upon that yesterday and gave it a try. While I could "install" uBlock Origin, it didn't seem to have any effect and the configuration page for it was completely blank. They also say "Orion even supports some extensions out of the box on iOS, but we have much more to do here" on their page, so I guess it's not there yet.
uBlock has full control over the browser's network access and can run code to determine the outcome of the request.
1Blocker/AdGuard/etc use two mechanisms:
1) declarative blocking - where you can specify rules to allow/deny requests matching a certain pattern. Those rules need to be declared in advance, you can't do matching at runtime using custom code.
2) they inject a bit of JS into the page to try and tamper with malicious scripts that can't be touched by the declarative blocking. This is error-prone and potentially slow, and is not guaranteed to be bulletproof as the injected code runs with the same privileges as the malicious code. I could see potential race conditions where the malicious code manages to run and exfiltrate sensitive data before the blocking code has a chance of defusing it.
The second approach is a horrible hack that only exists because extensions no longer have full control over the browser's networking, under the excuse of "security".
But the workaround of injecting scripts directly within the page doesn't solve the security problem either, while introducing its own problem of less effective ad blocking.
Things got so bad that eventually browser vendors single-handedly put a stop to it. That would never have happened if the people making the pop-up ads also controlled a majority of the browser market.
> I really don't understand how most people can stand to browse with all the ads
I mainly browse the web on my PC or laptop at home, which has a browser-integrated adblocker + PiHole.
When I need a browser while on the go, I usually just use it to google things and for some quick lookups the experience is "okay", longer and more in-depth web surfing will be deferred to my home PC using the "tabs from other devices" functionality
I do most of my web browsing with my iPad, preferring to default to private browsing tabs. Recently with iPadOS 16 beta, I find the Lockdown mode works well for me.
As I write this, I just realized why I have a pleasant browsing experience: unless I am searching for tech info, I don’t do much browsing except for a few favorite sites.
I can also recommend Adguard (mentioned in sibling comments), but also for everyone using Mullvad, their iOS client offers ad/tracker/malware blocking as well (via vpn/dns).
Safari introduced 3rd party ad blocker 7 years ago. If you want to run ad-blocker in 3rd party browser and apps, install and run Adguard Pro from the App Store. That’s been around for at least 5 to 6 years.
HTML level content filtering is built into iOS Safari (so whatever Adblock app you use physically cannot access your browsing data)
iOS also has system-wide DNS ad blocking via DNS-over-HTTPS profiles, without needing any apps or on-device VPN hacks, and that works for all networks/cellular seamlessly.
You can get the same experience by paying Google $10/mo. If you can stomach the cost, you can get this for all your family for $18/mo.
I can't get everyone on adblockers for all their devices so this is worth it to me. Of course, I also setup basic content blockers where I can as well.
I have AdGuard installed for Safari on my phone and it seems to do fine. Also have a pihole on home network (which unfortunately due to the router I can’t block ipv6 traffic but whatever is left going via ipv4 is at least blocked)
The close button is very easy to use and doesn't require additional software (each solution having upgrades/costs/breakage of its own in addition to the browser).
I dont browse on my phone that often. I have a iphone 16 mini and it isnt that fun to browse with. I pretty much only use it when I have to to search something on the go.
iOS blocking is extremely limited and insufficient - it's purely declarative and non-dynamic, and with a hard limit on the actual number of filter rules you can have.
It is better than nothing but a world apart from a proper ad blocker and more or less insufficient for modern adtech.
The future of adblocking seems network based as it can't be bypassed by Google's intention.
It's easy to use when most OS can have default DNS over DoT/H that can also block non browser apps or even OS itself from connecting to tracking domains.
Chromium based browsers seem to ignore OS default DNS servers unless instructed to use the system default.
iOS DNS filtering ad blockers are nice because they work on most apps and have 0 overhead. Unless the app is running first party ad auctions I no longer see any ads on my phone. A true blocker for the browser would definitely be nice, but I'm pretty happy with the current solution.
I install Sanitize since I was struggling to get web sites to work. There was one web site where I couldn’t close the advert to get to the actual site!!
The best part about Adguard is that there is nothing to really get. You just start using the DNS servers and it just works. Some stuff slips through here and there but not for long as the DNS servers catch up on blocking new Ad Serving servers.
Exactly, kind of. It's actually a Chrome that removes the native ads, inserts their own ads they sell as a middle man and a built-in weird crypto currency.
It's incredible how fast websites load with this combination.
I recall reading that despite the internet being faster, actual website performance has never really improved meaningfully. Whatever speed gains we've achieved have simply been eaten by larger and more complex tracking scripts.
Google themselves are a significant contributor to this problem, for many websites, Google's scripts are the core source of slowness.
I don't think it's unreasonable for users to want to reclaim their browsing experience (and bandwidth). In the sample comparison below we can see savings as high as 90% of data and speed boosts of ~1500% - it's insanity.
>In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal-use led to the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries. He argued that, contrary to common intuition, technological progress could not be relied upon to reduce fuel consumption.
Which is a criticism, it seems, for any system that values resource attribution over efficiency.
I very cursory read seems to say yes. The biggest difference I see is that Jevons paradox is paradoxical because of the intent to increase efficiency (eg. make pages load faster, reduce the amount of coal needed, etc).
The jump up to 5mbps down was the last time I felt like upgrading my internet made the web a noticeably better experience, it was incredible to be able to watch videos at an okay quality without pausing for buffering. Everything else has been only incremental improvements that have been eaten up by increasing inefficiency, and my only gains have been higher resolution video streams and faster video game downloads (also offset by massively larger video games...)
It becomes most noticeable for me when my phone can only get 3G or lower. Once upon a time this was enough to pull up a variety of web pages without too much wait, but now it might as well be no connection at all.
Or morphs itself into another Chrome in search of more revenue to support their new corporate lifestyle. I'm more worried about that. Since they made it a corporation with all the usual trimmings like an overpaid CEO they are becoming like all the other big tech. Flirting with big investors, looking at ROIs. All those paths lead the same way and it's away from the user.
It's frustrating that "filling a niche and filling it well" is just anathema these days. Everyone is hustling to become a trillion dollar whatever, and burning customers, money and good will in the process.
There should be nothing wrong with just bring good at what you do and not seeking endless expansion (and yes, I know, it's actually dangerous because you're vulnerable to predation in that position).
> It's frustrating that "filling a niche and filling it well" is just anathema these days
On the contrary, a lot of (offline) companies are deciding that diversification is bad and they should divest everything outside of one core business. Be it ThyssenKrupp, Alsthom, Bombardier, GE, Phillips, take your pick.
However many web companies choose to diversify. Why not? It helps them retain and gain users, and protects them against heavy hitting competitors (FAANG can copy your business model and features quite quick). E.g. take someone like Snapchat - their features were copied by competitors and they had no differentiator, so they floundered. A Telegram or Signal was little differentiation bar potential diversification, which is why both tried some crypto crap.
This really can't be overstated. The CEO's compensation has skyrocketed for years while by every objective measure the Mozilla is struggling if not outright failing at its mission - with a continuously declining market share.
It baffles me that Mozilla had/has multiple offices located in some of the most expensive real estate markets in the world. Not just in those markets, but in the very-most expensive parts of said markets.
For example, in Boston they're dead center downtown, for no explicable reason other than the prestige.
I don't think Mozilla has any office presence in downtown Boston? They used to rent a tiny co-working space there for Boston-based employees to use if they felt like it, but I think they got rid of it well before the pandemic.
Mozilla had more money than they had ever dreamed thanks to Google contract and they failed to realize how to properly utilize it and must be blind spending.
It feels like a kid who received 5 games for Christmas and doesn't know what to do.
>In terms of simplicity, the native content type, “gemtext”, is meant to be loaded in a single request, therefore there are no inline images, no iFrames, fonts, scripts or anything else.
Good luck replacing the web with request/response markdown. I would figure at the least something that could serve Wikipedia would be a bare minimum.
It sounds like that can serve wikipedia, just without inline pictures. In fact, the cursory reading suggests that you can even have pictures if they're not in line. I admit that that's a small step down from the current experience, but it might be worth it.
Yes, that's true. Although in some ways that's not a problem with the technology; companies would hate it in no small part because it limits the anti-user things they can do, which is part of the appeal.
I mainly use Kiwi browser on Android which is Chromium fork with full extension support and DevTools. It is not update very often and I can feel that they are in need of more maintainers but it still works best for me. I stopped using Firefox since they restricted addons and removed about:config
I recently had issues with extensions not working after update in Firefox and I recoiled in horror at how bad the experience is without them. It is ridiculous regular people put up with this ( as in, my wife still uses it AFTER she knows I could just make most of it go away ; it make me question people decision making processes ).
Still, going back to the main subject. Clearly, it seems google decided that most people do not care enough to actually make decisions to make browsing not painful. I hate this cat and mouse game. It is getting to the point where I really think legal solution is the only one. All techs need to be brought to heel. Hard.
In google's defense, it is not just them. The entire ecosystem is broken. When I try to use my bank's website and I use unprotected chromium, it takes extra minute to load everything up on a page. I am running an equivalent of a supercomputer from 90s and I am stunned at the lazy design. If I try to limit it, it stutters and blocks me at every opportunity. And it is one of the national banks in US. Admittedly, some banks do get it mostly right ( kudos to Discover, Chase and Capital ), but I started going to the branch again and each time they ask me if I used their app/website, I say no and tell them why ( which is usually followed by a survey, which I dutifully fill up... mebbe something will finally filter through ).
DNS level filtering is the only choice for system level filtering but is less flexible and harder to manually override false positives than application level filtering like ublock.
If your browser supports adblock (eg on Android use Firefox or Kiwi) then disable DNS filtering for the browser (ie override the system level filtering) by using browser privacy settings to choose an unfiltered DoH provider like Cloudflare.
> If your browser supports adblock then disable DNS filtering for the browser
Why would I want to disable DNS filtering? What advantage does that give?
UBo is great but does use a small amount of CPU whereas DNS filtering won't use any on my phone - its all on the DNS server. I'd rather filter out as much as possible with DNS filtering and then clean it up with UBo cosmetic filtering and more precise blocking.
Is there a way that a vpn could use the dns filtering list to reject any requests to or from ip addresses that resolve to names in the list? Would that simply break everything?
Not only that but with SponsorBlock (integrated in Vanced) you can even automatically skip promotional parts of the videos, intros, outros. The experience is excellent.
1Blocker on iOS has a safari extension that specifically targets YouTube ads [0]. The only caveat is that you need to use Safari and not YouTube’s native app.
Brave filters out those for me pretty well - in fact that's most of what I use it for, FF + UBlock is my default browser on Android, but doesn't do quite as well with Youtube (and then I am using Nextdns via Private DNS for system-wide blocking).
I've noticed most of the recent android based handled scanner we got at office refuse to even use our dhcp provided dns including to resolve local address (forcing us to use IP instead of dns for our internal warehouse apps) and complain about "no internet" because 8.8.8.8 is not open.
On Android, I've become a fan of Kiwi browser - It's a chromium fork that includes the ability to install chrome extensions on mobile. I've been able to keep the same extensions for ublock origin, bypass paywalls, and just read that I do on my desktop chrome environment.
The only downside, and it feels like it's getting larger every year, is speed. You can tell Firefox rendering and js execution is behind on Chromium. On laptops/desktops there is plenty of HW to compensate, but not on phones, is my experience.
by now i consider ublock origin as more than a tool. it's an integral part of the internet. without it the internet is not usable for me. Raymond Hill deserves no less than a Noble prize or something alike for crafting and maintaining it.
uBlock is wonderful and makes my browser feel sane but it doesn't do anything for all the other apps. Blockada blocks ads everywhere on my devices. We must use both.
so if i install a recommended mozilla add-on like ublock origin that has an extreme permission like "access your data for all websites" does that mean that every update to the add-on sees rigorous security review by mozilla before it is pushed?
if not, is there some mechanism in place that can reduce worries around software supply chain attacks on a privileged piece of software like this?
Whenever I try to use Firefox, I always tend to go back to Chrome after a week or so. I'm visually impaired and Firefox just messes up the accessibility on certain (news) websites for me. While on Chrome it's mostly working fine.
I guess it's mostly attributed to the website handling accessibility wrong, but using the web is more important to me I guess.
I just benchmarked chrome, edge, and Firefox on my Google pixel and surprisingly Firefox opens quickest. It's kind of impressive that Firefox beat the chrome despite not being the native browser on Android.
That only covers the browser; many mobile apps have embedded ads too. DNS-based adblocking is system-wide, even if it isn't as effective in the browser as uBO.
That plus noscript. Sure I usually have to spend a few seconds enabling various domains to get content to load (thanks JS!) But honestly it's worth it.
I tend to agree, but for a few years now, Firefox has become an ad delivery vehicle for Mozilla. While not as bad as anywhere else on the web, it seems that Mozilla is working hard to destroy their brand value by pushing notification ads for its VPN service to mobile Firefox users (which is a violation of the Google Play ToS), and by using the firefox-was-upgraded page for VPN spam.
What the post misses is Google has exceptions for:
- Parental control and enterprise management apps.
- App usage tracking.
- Device security apps (for example, anti-virus, mobile device management, firewall).
- Network related tools (for example, remote access).
- Web browsing apps.
- Carrier apps that require the use of VPN functionality to provide telephony or connectivity services.
The part where manipulation of ad-based monetization isn't allowed has always been there in one form or another.
A firewall can also be used to firewall ads/trackers though, and so it remains to be seen what Google makes of such apps (there are plenty!) come November (supposed deadline for compliance). Blokada v5 (and below), otoh, isn't a firewall, but a UDP-only DNS client.
> Ads that appear ... during the beginning of a content segment are not allowed.
> Here are some examples of common violations: Unexpected ads that appear ... during the beginning of a content segment (for example, after a user has clicked on a button, and before the action intended by the button click has taken effect). These ads are unexpected for users, as users expect to ... engage in content instead.
??? isn't this like... incredibly and blatantly anti-competitive considering that their own app (Youtube), which they still offer on said store, does this?
You are glossing over an important word in your quote, "unexpected". YouTube ads maybe unwanted but they aren't unexpected ads. 3rd party apps are allowed to have similar expected ads.
Not entirely, I think they mean ads in games between "new game"/"next level" and the game/level starting. Free games are filled with them. Pre-roll ads in video apps like YouTube are different.
It's funny how generations vacillate between "id pay for this" and "id watch ads if this were free" but neither is actually the correct answer as there seems to just be an a/b switch between the two groups and sentiments regardless of which path is chosen.
You left off an important part of the exception statement. "Exceptions include apps that require a remote server for core functionality such as:" It is followed by the list you posted above. This is completely in line with the original post which states that their prior version which did on device filtering would be banned and their current version which works in conjunction with a remote server to perform the filtering would be allowed.
> This is completely in line with the original post which states that their prior version which did on device filtering would be banned and their current version which works in conjunction with a remote server to perform the filtering would be allowed.
On-device filtering was never allowed. For as long as I can remember, it has always been against Play Store terms of use. That part isn't new at all.
Though, it could very well be that Google may come down with stringent / permanent bans on VPN-based apps starting November (they, notoriously, only allow two violations before permanently banning a developer account; in some instances, developers have gotten two strikes at once, leaving them unable to appeal).
I think having exceptions for that is an extremely severe security flaw. Kudos to you for developing something like this, but honestly even with a solid firewall leveraging VPN I would not trust crapware like Android or iOS with anything substantial. We have reached ridiculous levels of paternalism from pretty crappy companies.
I categorically reject ads. I want them completely abolished. I will do everything that's in my power to get them out of my machines. If I had just a little bit more courage I would go out at night with cans of spray paint and deface billboards.
> If I had just a little bit more courage I would go out at night with cans of spray paint and deface billboards.
It may be less emotionally rewarding, but in many areas
- many places advertisements violate various rules and on notification local authorities (or other entity) is likely to take action. For example in Poland ads (except political ones, politicians exempted themself again) cannot be ever placed on bridges, lamp posts, traffic signs, guard rails etc. Every single one placed there is illegal and road maintainers remove them once notified.
- local authorities may be allowed to pass laws banning or limiting their presence (Kraków, Poland recently outlawed large part of billboards within city)
Also, removing some of ads may be perfectly legal or with penalties so low that eliminating them is not legally risky.
Just go out and paint, good grief. If you want to minimize liability, get some wheatpaste and a bunch of posters. Graffiti is vandalism, and punishable for higher penalties than 'billposting' which is a $50 ticket. Same effect.
I don't understand this stance. They intentionally degrade the service to make it profitable. Video serving is incredibly expensive and YouTube is no charity. They have a premium tier at a very competitive price so what's the issue?
That's an interesting question. I had been under the impression that they were profitable even before they started doing that, but it would change my calculus if that were true.
With the combination of Firefox, Ublock Origin, and Sponsor Block on desktop, and Vanced on Android, I never see youtube ads. I find it very satisfying.
(Sadly, google shut down Vanced, but you can still find it if you go looking and ReVanced is coming along nicely.)
Technically yes. If you block them through your system volume settings, then YouTube will be none the wiser. If you mute them through YouTube, then they'll probably save that into analytics.
This is not a path forward. The people with the money to pay for the content are the same people with the money to buy the products that advertisers make money by advertising.
You can’t outrun the incentive alignment. Nobody can. Case in point - Apple is shifting hard into the ad space after laying low and crafting a premium brand.
This is Youtube's fault, as they could (should) require video creators to identify the start and end timestamps of sponsor segments, and then their player should just skip those automatically for logged-in, paying subscribers.
While I like this idea in isolation, I think it would just lead to sponsor insertion which is hard to skip. Like product placement in movies.
You can't skip the sponsored segment if literally 100% of the video has HelloFresh boxes in the background, or if an important part of the video happens while the creator coincidentally eats a bowl of Keto cereal.
Or what about those LinusTechTip videos where Intel gives them $5k to build a dream system for an employee (Intel based, of course). I find those entertaining but they're really just 20 minute long Intel advertisements.
You are right, but in essence this is Youtube's platforms, so they can tune the experience of their paying users. If I pay, I shouldn't see ads.
Videos don't have nipples around, or else they would get flagged, right? Do the same for unmarked ads. This is of course a handwavy way to propose a solution... the idea is that something could be done to improve the ad-free experience of viewers who pay. Otherwise, they'd better remain using the latest published version of Vanced, which even integrated SponsorBlock (again, pirates offering a better user experience!)
Video creators do get a higher amount of money per-minute-viewed from YT Premium subscribers than the do from free users with ads. But the sponsorship slots from NordVPN and the like can pay just as much as the video earns in youtube revenue, so youtube would have to pay a lot more.
Incidentally, yes. I get to choose what my computer displays to me and that's non-negotiable however. If that breaks your business model that is 100% a you problem.
I feel like this is somewhat of a false dichotomy - I pay for plenty of content and have a good number of subscriptions, but that doesn't make the ads go away like magic.
If anything, I've seen more and more services where paying is just for "premium features," of which getting away from ads isn't one of them. Spotify is a key example - if you pay for premium you don't get ads interrupting music, but you still see their bundled advertisements on the home screen of the app, you get content suggested to you in a way that is very advertiser-centric, etc.
I think we should maybe split off the discussion of "how will these businesses get paid the way ads get paid" from "ads are bad and we should get rid of them." Frankly, I don't care if advertising as a business tanks and that takes other businesses with it. The externalities of surveillance capitalism are pretty shitty, and I'm fairly confident there are other ways for people to be productive within the economy that don't involve the invasive nature of today's advertising ecosystem.
I pay for several subscription services, yet they always want more and more of my data. Whatever I give, it's never enough, they want to have their cake and eat it too.
I use open source stuff when I can, and similarly, I contribute to the projects when I can. This seems to be the only legitimate way to avoid ads.
Most of the content I consume is produced for free without any expectation of payment. My friends don't get paid for posting pictures on Instagram. However, Meta still sees the need to inject an ad between every two posts and greedily extract value from its users.
For sure. I don't like the experience. I don't like the ethos of "let's manipulate people so we can fill our pockets." I hate how they distort markets. And I absolutely despise that we waste hundreds of billions of dollars per year in the US alone on them. Advertising is an arms race, one that we could end, turning all that brainpower to something that actually helps people.
That is quite unrealistic though. You either need to pay up or put up with the consequences of wanting a free service, such as dealing with the never ending battle of blocking ads.
I wish companies would offer the opportunity to pay what you want to remove ads. People with adblock are probably more likely to pay for it, because anyone not running ads is probably not bothered by them anyway. And people running adblock are unmonetisable. So a little bit of money is better than no money.
Microsoft littered its frickin operating system with ads. Something you (officially at least) are expected to pay full price for. It boggles the mind that people continue to accept this treatment.
I'd be willing to bet most Windows users probably haven't even thought about Windows costing money - somewhere in the high 90 percent range. For the last 13 years upgrades have been free and new purchases have the price built in. The only exceptions are those that actually know about other operating systems and look for the option to buy without or people that do custom builds.
At least when one signs up for e.g. Hulu you're forced to realize different rates include different things. With Windows most don't even realize they had a choice.
It does lead to the question why people are fine buying a PC then having ads but again I'm not sure many really understand (or necessarily care) about the difference between ads in the start menu or ads in something like the browser, it's all just "the computer" and ads have just always been a part of a computer for most so what's to make them expect otherwise.
Advertising is popular on the web for historical reasons. Content delivery advanced much faster than payment, so for ~20 years ads were the easiest way for many sites to pay the bills. Nobody was sure what else to do.
But that's no longer the case. Soft paywalls have been around for circa a decade, so selling subscriptions while letting your content self-market is viable. Content creators also have plenty of direct revenue options. Patreon is doing something like $2 billion/year in revenue for creators. Twitch became a huge platform without ads, just allowing direct cash transfers from fans to creators. And that's not even counting the ~$50 billion/year now spent on streaming and VOD in the US.
On the other side of it, per-ad revenue has been falling for decades. I helped start a content site and keep in touch with people in that area. The reason so many ad-supported sites look like absolute shit is that to make any money, you keep needing to up the amount of ads you run, making them more and more annoying to overcome learned ad blindness. So advertising is slowly strangling itself, leading to lots of people using ad-blockers, and counter-ad-blocker technology becoming widespread. What sane person would start an ad-funded content business today?
A world-wide web with little or no advertising is not only plausible, it looks like that's where we're headed.
I believe marketplaces could/would form, acting as aggregators for sellers to list and promote their goods, and for consumers to go shopping.
In the 2020s, the web is nearing a level of criticality to a functioning society as the neighborhoods, towns, cities we access it from. Those physical properties are heavily regulated and with good reason.
On the first point, I’m referring to a new kind of marketplace. Essentially something made explicitly to address the problem you mentioned. A generic marketplace that enables the discovery of new products/markets is conceivable.
Regarding regulation, physical spade is definitely one part of it. But the public is also generally against nuisances, including too many advertisements. It’s an imperfect analogy, but not too far off.
Word of mouth, basically. Or searching for something that I need.
What I hate most about advertising is it just shoves everything in people's faces and makes people think they need this and that. I find myself somewhat immune to ads (as much as one can be I guess), maybe I just programmed myself to ignore them growing up in early internet days. But it's so obvious the large effect that ads can have on most people.
I find out about new and cool stuff generally from peoples comments on sites like here, reddit etc. If you have a good product, word of mouth is generally pretty damn good. Or coming across something from searches for a specific need.
I just can't think about anything that I needed and found out from a standard advertisement in like.. any recent memory. Maybe I'm the outlier here.. obviously ads must work well enough but I hate them with a passion.
Word of mouth requires someone to learn about a product initially. Also, searching for something you ‘need’ presupposes that you know there is a product that addresses a need. You would never find improvements to things that you didn’t realize could be improved.
The other day in the middle of reading an article a green border popped up around the entire page, blocking the beginning and ending of most sentences. At the bottom of the page was an advertisement for a Sonic burger.
I felt assaulted. There is no reasonable justification or purpose for this that takes into account basic human empathy. Granted this might be different from ads that do just make you aware of a product. But this reasoning is looking more and more like justification rather than purpose.
I don’t think pointing out useless and intrusive advertising is the same as saying there should be no advertising at all. We can even agree that ALL current advertising is awful and should be abolished, but agree some form of promoting your product should be available.
> Granted this might be different from ads that do just make you aware of a product. But this reasoning is looking more and more like justification rather than purpose.
I have no problem with promoting a product, as long as it takes into account basic human empathy. But I guess if your bank account is directly correlated with product sales, you kind of forget about that.
Telling me I can’t read is not a very charitable response. I can read fine, I was assuming you were trying to respond to my original comment, where the very first thing I write is “I agree a lot of advertising is awful”.
My original comment was arguing that even if a lot of advertising today is bad, that doesn’t mean we should get rid of all advertising. I don’t understand what your response has to do with that. Were you just agreeing with me?
I don't really have a stance on 'abolish all advertising'. I'm just pointing out that in practice, "promoting a product" is rarely the only effect of an advertisement, and having discussions about ads in the context of benign promotion isn't acknowledging that reality.
I just moved to a new laptop. I haven’t installed ad blockers yet. But interestingly, I seem to have got out of the habit of using the obnoxious ad supported sites. Probably because they became too low quality. I hadn’t even realized my ad blockers weren’t installed until this thread.
There would not be a problem if we had better smartphone OS in the first place. Apple and Google both locked down the environments as hard as they could. This is the result of that and it will never be a fight that you can win if you don't have complete control about your device.
I don't really care about their bottom line. They're the middle-men. Virtual landlords. They're there to squeeze the lemon.
Not to say that the service they provide isn't useful. It's obviously more economical to operate media platforms at scale, and obviously most content creators don't have the technical ability to do it themselves.
When you look at say, podcasts for instance, you have this giant shared wealth of free content and you can pick a number of creators to support depending on your budget. You usually get extra episodes or perks as an incentive for doing so. Imagine if, instead of paying YouTube X dollars or watching Y ads and letting them choose out how to spread that money around, you pay the people you actually watch and the platform vendors, who ought to be the least important and most replaceable factor in this transaction, gets the cut they actually deserve.
Before they were ruined by copyright trolls, streaming services like Netflix demonstrated that charging everyone a reasonable amount of money for access to the entire park was a viable business model.
YouTube sounds replaceable or unimportant in an ethical sense but in a practical sense it's certainly not that simple from the POV of someone trying to build an audience for their videography or even the audience itself.
Total chicken and egg scenario. That's often the case with monopolies. However, to my knowledge Youtube doesn't force its content creators into exclusivity deals (like, say, Amazon with Kindle Direct) so there may be some leeway there seeing as posting your content on another platform isn't a major risk.
I don't have a definite view on this, but my intuition tells me that there is more to it than just the monopoly effect. If YouTube had developed with additional competitors, it might not necessarily have lead to a better market/space for videographers since having a single platform has its own advantages for the development of the medium/culture/etc.
YouTube is getting more heavy-handed as time goes on, but one reason for this is that they were operating at a loss for so long, and in doing so provided extra utility that we might take for granted.
GP comment mentioned Netflix, but that is in fact a good example of what I mean. They started to struggle because competitors moved into the space. Unlike YouTube, they did not have an unassailable position. Unlike Spotify, they did not have a market that allowed sharing catalogues across platforms.
In a sense, what we interpreted as Netflix showing a viable business model was rather Netflix showing early mover advantage on borrowed time. Having an ecosystem with multiple mediocre services such as what streaming is becoming now would not necessarily have been in the advantage of videographers if it had happened to video-sharing platforms. It would almost certainly have lead to a smaller and less engaged overall audience.
I think the only real response is that isn't my problem to figure out. I'm sure you could come up with 10 highly unethical or outright illegal monetization methods off the top of your head, and the argument against them isn't "well here's an alternative" but instead "these are bad and shouldn't be done full stop." And this is how people view ads, it's a values based judgement rather than a utilitarian one.
A values based judgement goes both ways though - you shouldn't be using such a service in the first place if you knowingly can't conceive of an ethical way for it to operate. And that's a fair stance but few seem to actually care about values based judgement enough to actually stop using the services.
That said this case isn't much of a moral mystery. YouTube offers a reasonable paid plan, most people just prefer ads.
Oh trust me I can conceive many ethical ways businesses could operate without ads. I think what you mean is that you shouldn’t use a service you know is unethical. But there are problems with that as a general rule.
First being that there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism so that makes things difficult.
Second, “voting with your wallet” is pointless, you’re much better off voting with your votes and ad blockers if you want to see real change. If anything by your logic buying YouTube Premium is worse ethically since you’re directly supporting a company that makes money on unethical ads. Giving them more money won’t make ads go away.
And to that, third, demanding self-flagellation to prove that one is sincere in their beliefs is puritanical nonsense. You are absolutely allowed to both buy Nike shoes and fight for legislation that forbids them from treating their factory workers poorly.
I'm not going to comment on capitalism as a whole or the like as that seems neither here nor there for this thread but I can see how someone with those views would have problems with pretty much any service anywhere in the current environment.
I'm not quite sure I follow how opting for the business model one doesn't find unethical is supporting unethical business models. It may not be attacking the business model they find unethical but that's a different claim. Unless of course we allow any connection with a service to taint the entire lot in which case I can again see how someone with those views would have problems with pretty much any service anywhere.
As for the conversation on shoes when you have a basic need sure, don't let people's ability to source needs get in the way of people bettering their working conditions. After all they don't really have a choice in forgoing either. That's not really relevant to people's desires to consume entertainment services though. Particularly when people are given their own agency on deciding what is the right way to fund it already or even to be able to not consume the want should there be nowhere to do so. In the end it may come down to whether you think it should be alright for people to operate on different morals than you so long as their choice is mostly limited to impacting them or if there is only one true set of morals everyone must be forced to follow by law.
And they have, as a consumer you can choose ads or Premium. Some want neither, so out of curiosity I'm asking, how do they see things if not those two options?
I have no idea how they see things, I'm not telepathic. I'm in the "want neither" camp; I put up with whatever I can't filter. The kind of stuff I look for on YT often doesn't seem to be monetized.
Prepare for a world of ad-free paid subscriptions to everything Google Maps and Youtube. Everything free becomes Netflix, if every advertiser signs up.
hmm... you do know this is the reason companies like Google + Meta make lots of money, right?
I know you don't like ads but... a lot of people obviously are ok with them (otherwise businesses wouldn't find it worth it to advertise on those platforms, in hopes of capturing customers/increasing sales)
I just don't think you're living in reality emotionally/mentally. I'm not saying you need to let advertisers tracking everything you do but to pretend that mobile phone advertising/web based advertising should cease to exist for everybody is a little extreme.
There's a "prepare, Jesus is coming" ad next to my workplace. It honestly looks like a grift. That sort of thing is NOT normal at all where I live. I'm honestly tempted.
Would be even more stupid to try after writing this post though.
They're not going away, point. If they get you acclimated to paying subscription fees they will then try to get you acclimated to paying subscription fees AND seeing ads. Have you watched a UFC pay-per-view event recently?
We should regulate or straight up outlaw it just like any other unchecked negative externality. I don't care if it makes you money. I don't care if poisoning the waterways makes you money either.
I started using NextDNS years ago and it's been a blessing. Blocks almost every ad on a DNS level on mobile devices, and on PC I still augment it with uBlock Origin. Per-device logs also let me debug connectivity if something breaks, and it's great for mapping local device names without mDNS debugging or some dnsmasq resolver lying around.
I did the same and I must say it has been a breeze to use. I even configured my own list for my family member's devices and am still not reaching the free-tier quota.
I even unplugged my PiHole because this was much simpler.
I was happily on the free tier for a while until I switched to iPhone, then suddenly just my iPhone ran though 150k queries (compared to a Pixel). But if you're on Android, Google TV, etc. you should be comfortably fine within the free tier.
It's definitely worth the $2/month price for Pro though.
I think DNS-based blocking will eventually be less effective over time. It shouldn't be difficult to host ads on the main domain, modern distributed reverse proxies are very fast. So they will probably soon just stop using ad-only domains and host everything on the main one.
There is a blocklist with the explicit goal to not break sites (at the expense of sometimes being tracked or seeing an ad): https://oisd.nl/
> Why this list?
> Where most other blocklists go for the "block ads/trackers and when something breaks it's up to the user to figure out what to whitelist"-approach ..
>
> This list prioritizes functionality over blocking.
>
> Thís is the list to use at home, at work or at your (grand-)parents place.
> Users report it "passes the girlfriend-test" ;)
I used to run more strict lists and then whitelist domains or temporarily disable blocking, but I have to say I switched to oisd only and now I'm seeing maybe 0.5% more ads without having to go through that hassle, which is a fine compromise for me.
Turning off affiliate blocking fixed 99% of those, and the rest I just manually add to my allowlist. It’s not many but if that doesn’t fix quickly then I just switch it off for a minute.
It is/was fantastic and an essential application for android. It is the first app I install before letting a new android phone connect to the internet.
edit: the app is still maintained & the dev is still active on the Netguard thread, although there was a prior issue with google where he had stopped development
Been using this for years, though I don't often use ad-serving apps anyhow, so it's mostly just a second layer of defence behind firefox/u-block (and noscript, to be honest, but I understand not everyone wants to deal with that.)
Pi-hole in home network, AdAway on all smartphones, uBlock Origin an all Firefox browsers.
I'm shocked when browsing web on different devices. I always recommend to at least install uBlock Origin to users of those devices. Most of them never heard about ad-blocking and they are very, very happy with new web browsing experience. 99% of theme do not want go back. 1% don't care.
I noticed sometime last year Samsung put out an update for my Tablet that overrode my DNS delivered by DHCP and used Google's DNS directly. It was immediately obvious due to the amount of ads I haven't seen for years at this point due to running a pihole. Most of the solutions either involve software VPNs in the device to restore function or rooting it. Its terrible that any device would ignore and have no way to use the network settings as provided by the gateway.
Google gets all the flak but frankly Samsung has been the point of the spear for years on adtech shit - they were one of the companies caught mining application logs from other applications to bypass permissions that you denied them, causing Google to have to go back and implement iOS-style application sandboxing.
Similarly, their TVs are known as probably the single most obnoxious devices on the market right now, and are always in the news for finding some new and obnoxious way to push more ads or more intrusive ways to spy on you in general.
Everyone always asks this about Apple but really it's never seemed more relevant than with Samsung: why are you purchasing hardware from a company that very very obviously does not respect you as a customer? Aren't there any other android vendors you could patronize instead?
(to be fair, if you aren't interested in budget hardware, and you won't buy a chinese phone, I suppose that list isn't all that long. you have... google and sony, I guess?)
DNS, proxy and cert settings should be exposed to the user without question. And if apps bypass it and do things like cert pinning they need to be banned off the stores.
AdAway is main reason, why I root android devices. It block ads in all apps and browsers even on data, without VPN.
Another way how to block ads on data is using OpenVPN to connect data through you home router that has ad-blocking. But it is limited by upload speed of home network connection and battery drain of your smartphone is worse with active OpenVPN.
I use OpenVPN/Wireguard to setup split-tunnel VPN, only route DNS traffic to Pi-hole at home network. Although my connection may be leaked, I thought it's faster since 5G is faster than my home network upload speed.
But your speed in device connected to OpenVPN/Wireguard is limited by upload speed of you home connection. Not by data connection speed on client device.
Yeah, So I use split-tunnel. For example only route 192.168.1.0/24 via VPN, then set 192.168.1.10 as DNS server. Therefore I can use pi-hole at home and other traffic are routed by 5G directly.
Original title is about "Google cracks down on VPN based adblockers". Changing "VPN Adblockers" to "Android Adblockers" is misleading, at least.
BTW, I'm using Brave because of having u-block origin, and I recommend it. Needed to change the default chrome widget for a brave widget, and lost the chrome sync. Other than that, works as a charm.
For all the love I have for Blockada I'm not going to send my traffic through their cloud. I wonder if I can run something like PiHole on a VPS somewhere so that I can protect my devices both when I'm at home on WiFi and when I'm outside on 4G. I'll investigate but does anybody already experienced such a setup?
They are known to be hyperbolic on their forums. Ex A:
Blokada Plus is a VPN optimized to work flawlessly with Blokada. You get one of the strongest encryptions with minimal impact on battery life and speed. Together with the battle-tested content blocking functionality of Blokada, the VPN gives you a peace of mind knowing that your private activity stays private. Even on public WiFi, no-one will be able to see what you’re doing or steal your sensitive information like bank details. Websites you visit will not be able to reveal your real location.https://archive.is/xyVSn
- Strongest encryption? From when I read the code, they back-up private-key without armour (plain-text).
- Battle-tested content blocking? Blokada v5 and below has leaked DNS over TCP since its inception (v6+ is closed source).
I had to laugh at the no one can see what you are doing claim. How do these scammers route the traffic if they can’t see what websites you are visiting! Of course these guys can see what websites you are visiting if they want to
Right, it's both. It's from the "blog" section of their forum, where they are talking about their product, and promoting their cloud service. A promo is an ad by definition.
I feel like they're just dying to figure out a way to get rid of extensions on desktop as well. Soon enough they'll figure out a way to rationalize them away.
> Manifest V3 is part of a shift in the philosophy behind how we approach end-user security and privacy.
it requrires you to declaratively specify what to block in advance, so it's going to be pretty easy to write some logic that can't be declaratively specified
I suspect killing the adblockers is the entire reason behind it
With Firefoxes market share continuously declining, and AFAICT no real indication they're going to be able to turn things around, I fear it's only a matter of time before they pull an Edge/Opera and turn into another Chromium reskin to cut costs.
What Firefox needs is to be spun out of Mozilla, to get competent management and a way to directly donate to FF without also ending up sponsoring all of their pet projects.
No doubt open source "firefox" will continue to exists, even if it mean bugfixes only. I plan to use that (Haven't used non-Firefox on Android ever, except by mistake/deception).
The internet is basically unusable on a phone without an adblocker. This is a bad move from Google and will be on a lot of people's minds when they're thinking about their next flagship. "Hmm, an Android? Ah but Google's #1 goal is to make sure you're staring at terrible internet ads at all times..."
Having said that, Kiwi Browser on Android still seems safe. You probably have a different browser anyway, now that Chrome has most of the features and featureflags removed.
I had my son on an amazon android tablet the other weekend. Internet access disabled using parental controls. And by the end of that weekend, the tabs that I found opened on the default browser was crazy. All from clicking ads in various apps, auto-play videos, and what not. Ads for viagra, credit cards, home loan applications, other loans, mobile subscription content, etc. Luckily internet access was off so none of them loaded, but I could still see all the failed open tabs.
Tech giants will turn this example around and say "look we need more walled-gardens to protect users". But in reality, as soon as they open the floodgates, there will be solutions that can do the same without giving away more control to Google/Apple. The narrative has to change, and the first step is to give device owners full control.
Assuming you're in the US, if this is really happening, you need to take screenshots of the inappropriate ads, document the experience and send it to your congressman and senator. Go to the local office and speak with the staffers. They need to see and hear from their constituents having this awful experience for there to be any change.
Play Store has more and more restrictions each month...but it may be a good thing? because people is now discovering the alternate stores and the advantages of them.
That's my solution but it's bulky and consumes more power than it really needs to. The beauty of using the raspberry pi for these use cases is its small footprint and low power consumption.
You can remove quite a lot of laptop and still keep a working machine (all you need is the power supply and the motherboard, really) but there's no quick and easy way to do it, you'd have to design a custom case and everything. You'd also need a laptop that will just power on without keyboard, screen, and other peripherals connected, which is not necessarily a given.
Maybe if someone designs a modular enough 3D printed case design for common laptop motherboards so that you can create your own laptop server easily. In a few years, when USB C is available in cheap, old, second-hand laptops, I imagine you can build quite the home lab cluster with old laptop motherboards if you can design decent cases for them.
Most PiHole users aren't, either. You insert an SD card into a Raspberry Pi or similar, and it boots. Some people sell preimaged SD cards, some sell prebuilt devices - I've seen both on eBay.
Wouldn't this be more evidence that Google shouldn't be running the Play Store?
If they are going to start blocking apps that do adblocking on-device that sounds like an abuse of power and a HUGE conflict of interest with Google running the Play Store AND being owned by an advertising company.
If you already have an always-on computer (NAS, router, etc), installing it there is likely to increase your electric bill less than running a raspberry pi.
I use RPi 3B because of lower power consumption than 3B+, 4B... It is around 300mA. I connect power cable to USB from router that has 500mA output. It works great.
RPi 3B+ has sometimes problem with stability because of higher power consumption.
Official power supply of RPi is 2,6A if I remember correctly, so 3,5 is not even possible?
Btw, many routers support sleep mode. It is not necessary to run router/connected RPi 24/7.
Maximum current draw on a pi4 is 3A (~15W), but that's purely a power supply input limitation. You only get close to that with a ton of peripherals and heavy load on the Pi.
I use wireguard + adguard home. Both docker containers (in a docker-compose.yaml), easy to set adguard as the dns resolver for any wireguard connection. It runs from my basement.
I also hear great things about TailScale, will also try that (soon I'll be "forced" off my fiber/fixed-ip connection).
Seconded. Yeah, I've been using PiHole in a Docker container and accessing it over persistent Wireguard tunel for some time. It's been great. That and access to all of my services without them being exposed to the outside world.
Indeed, I hear that some people even run in on their EdgeRouterX (Debian afaik) for example.
But I also ave Traefik in the same docker-compose file for DNS and certs :) (currently still wrestling with the ports and certs for stuff within my lan though.)
I was shopping for 2 8GB models a few months ago. There is / was a shortage and some shops / resellers charge 200-300% above list price. Highest I’ve seen was 350€. This was the German market, but from what I heard it doesn’t seem to look a lot better globally.
Kinda the same way that there was a GPU shortage up until recently. You can go out and order an rPi now and it will get delivered within a week, but the markup is insane. It's basically impossible to find any Pi hardware at MSRP.
Chips in general are still experiencing supply chain issues too, so this is unlikely to change.
I use adaway which simply replace the /etc/hosts file, but requires root. I consider a phone a paperweight if I cannot have root on it, but I realize this might be different for other users.
What are you going to do once Google makes TEE-based bootloader unlock checking a mandatory part of SafetyNet? Right now, I'm in the same camp as you, and I don't have a good answer to that myself.
It's a lot more than just banking apps. It's also McDonald's, Netflix, Snapchat, Pokemon Go, Super Mario Run, etc. Will you just stop using all of them too?
I've never used any of those apps. But McDonald's particularly? I know those other apps are popular, but who actually installs the app for a fast food restaurant? I thought this was something these companies wasted money on because they wanted to feel techy and trendy, I didn't think anybody actually fell for it though.
Just walk up to the counter and say "I'll have number whatever"
I have unlocked bootloader (without actually rooting the phone) and McDonald's app is the only one refusing to work - i guess their coupons need more "security" than a banking app
I don't have a single one of those apps. I've got _one_ app I install occasionally that doesn't work on my rooted phone (cvs/caremark) and it doesn't work unrooted (or with safetynet fix applied) either--it lets me try to log in, then tells me to use blue shield instead (which works just fine rooted).
GrapheneOS has "Network" as a permission you can disable per app like any other permission. This is such an obvious and purposeful omission in stock Android's permission model.
I see NetGuard was mentioned in a comment, but if you have Graphene you can just install an app and never let it call home via the App Info permission menu. I do it for Google Camera and Snapseed, the few non FOSS apps on my phone.
Some extremely privileged takes in here which don't consider a basic truth today: the ad supported web allows information to be accessible to a vast number of relatively poor people who would rather spend their limited discretionary income on something other than online content.
It's not good or great or perfect, but the downside of the demise of ads, tracking, ad networks on the web would be a more information impoverished society any way you slice it.
I don't think I agree with that. Not even Stack Overflow nor Reddit are free in this context since they make money through ads.
I don't think any of my staple websites would be around if all we could rely on was their charity, and frankly that's not the internet I want to force on people. I want the people who enrich my life to be able to dedicate their time/energy to that end.
do you think archive.org is immoral/unethical then..?
print books were published by publishers who sell physical copies and run ads, tours and stuff.
yet pretty much every modern published book (within reason) is freely available to any person who is able to get a library card. similarly those people could use the computers to access archive.org and browse all online content.
how is that not free?
i'm not even going to get into equivocating "reddit" and "best information on the internet"
Same, but it is more and more annoying to root your phone with all these banking apps blocking rooted phones. And now, with the new security standards (which are good), banks insist on having you install their proprietary app just to authorize payments (which is annoying). I am not talking about Google Pay here (which I can do without).
There are workarounds of course, but I am becoming tired of the cat and mouse game, in fact, I am tired of smartphones altogether. Unless things change, my current phone is probably the last rooted phone I will use as a daily driver, sadly, the last "high end" phone too.
> with the new security standards (which are good), banks insist on having you install their proprietary app
since you say this, I assume you are in the EU or UK? I've heard that several EU banks offer a second 2FA method besides the app, such as hardware code generator[1]. In the UK, banks are actually required by the regulator to offer at least one method that doesn't require a mobile phone [2].
You could tell your bank "I can't use a smartphone" and they will probably be able to assist you (or, worst case scenario, you could find a bank that can)
I recently had to upgrade my phone, and oh boy is is annoying to get root working with Google Pay and my banking app. It still works, but it took me a few hours(!).
I'm seriously considering switching to iOS for my next phone.
Uhh what exactly is Google cracking down on if Blokada has always been distributed as an apk precisely because Google has never allowed this sort of thing on Google Play?
Thank you for all the NextDNS recommendations. I’ve been looking for something to help block adds that isn’t a VPN on iOS.
Just curious what do folks think of AdGuard. I’ve seen that come up on Reddit but looking at their website it doesn’t look trustworthy and I couldn’t find info about what they actually track.
The great thing about Adguard for Safari is that you don't need to trust them. They load a blacklist that the OS can read and then blocks accordingly. Compared to extensions on Chrome which can see everything you do.
Adguard adblocker for Android works also with an internal device only "VPN" and is not on the Play Store for a while (because of problems with Google Play Store rules). They are amazing and if you use an Android browser without internal adblocking (which I still think is better) such a VPN adblocker is a must for Android devices. I only had to whitelist a few applications like e.g. Google Photos. Have been using the app for some years and it's actively maintained.
I have had a very good experience with 1Blocker so far. Not quite ublock origin but close enough that I almost never notice a difference from my daily desktop use. There is another extension called Vinegar that strips out YouTube ads, but unfortunately it only works with Safari on iOS and not Firefox (even though both are using the same core engine) so I need to remember to bounce over to Safari when watching YouTube vids.
Vinegar works with Safari on macOS too. I love it, switches YouTube over to the native video player, strips all the recommendations and other crap and only plays the video
In my experience the biggest problem with VPN-based adblocking is the battery drain when the signal is poor. I regularly spend time in a well-insulated room and forgetting to turn my VPN off has a very noticeable impact at the end of the day. Which is a shame, because Chrome is a hell of a lot snappier than Firefox Android.
> However, these policy changes also apply to apps that use the service to filter traffic locally on the device. Apps such as Blokada v5 and Duck Duck Go. Specifically the policy does not allow for “Manipulating ads that can impact apps monetization”.
I use Bromite (Chromium fork + ad block) on Android.
It's pretty sad to see Google stoop so low. Back in the day they used to win because of the innovation, best products and openness. Now they can't build anything new and just trying to squeeze every last penny from what they already have.
I don't use ad blockers, I only block trackers. So if you want me to see your adds better not try to track me. If your site complaints about it, then I don't see any reason to use it.
I've been using pihole on my home server for a while. Exposed as a DNS over a Wireguard VPN. And all of my clients are connected to that VPN. I haven't seen a single ad on any of my devices in a couple of years, regardless of where I connect, and I don't even need a browser extension or an external VPN service that Google can easily block.
Sounds like the game of ambiguity. They 'crack down' on the malware while simultaneously hurting Blockada and the other legitimate software/services that protect you from Google's own surveillance. Google wins, everybody else loses.
At least you can still "sideload", i.e. download the software straight from the source and install it that way, the way software used to be distributed before this walled-garden dystopia started...
I personally run a MITM proxy on my network which all traffic goes through. IMHO the security concerns are overblown and largely come from companies like Google trying to stop people doing things like this. They are only securing their profits, nothing more and nothing less.
These changes aim to improve the ads experience, tighten security and limit misinformation according to the company.
The truth is probably closer to "increase the number of ads you see, secure you from getting around that, and limit the proliferation of anything but their official propaganda."
Wouldn’t favour the growth of alternative app stores? Upcoming European legislation is forcing eve Apple to allow third party stores on iPhones. I doubt Google would get away much longer with those practices.
In this comment I’m going to explain why the problem is not just ads.
What are ads? Advertizing, or marketing, is a common means of monetizing content.
Here are the top three reasons ads are used on websites:
1. Monetization
2. Tracking users
3. Malware distribution
Want to know more about how ads track users? Read on.
As a guy growing up in rural Wyoming, ads weren’t something that ever really bothered me. Sure there was the occasional billboard and sure television had a lot of commercials breaks, but I was used to it. The idea of using an ad blocker on my television set never occurred to me. I remember this one time when my uncle was moving house and he needed some help and I helped him move the packing crates into the truck and the crates had the logo and name of the shipping company stencilled on the side, and it never bothered me, although that was in fact an ad.
Experts agree that the following method is great for dealing with ads:
First, make sure what you are looking at is an ad. You can often tell by the little x in the corner of the ad. If you click this, you will be able to close the ad and maybe even give some feedback about why you didn’t like the ad. Top tip: always fill this in to let the ad vendor know how to improve the ad for next time.
But take care! This next tip is really important.
If you don’t hit the little x exactly on target, you will be taken to the website of the ad. If you didn’t want the ad in the first place, this is surely something to avoid!
Here are 17 resolutions for dealing with accidentally visiting a website you didn’t want to visit:
1. Try restarting your phone, laptop or PC.
2. Close the browser window. Click here for help on how to accomplish this task.
3. Try clicking the back button on your browser.
4. Write to the FCC if the website caused you distress.
5. Take a walk. Besides being good exercise, the problem may have resolved itself by the time you return.
6. Hit refresh on your browser. If you didn’t like the website first time round, you know what they say? Try, try again!
7. Go to the URL bar on your browser and type in a different address. Don’t forget to hit the Enter key. Try the following helpful URLs from our trusted partners:
The only reason people are resorting to vpn for adblocking is because Android Chrome and the OS otherwise doesn't allow for ad blocking any other way through...
"But security!" has been the "won't somebody please think of the children" of the technology world for a long time. The end goal, intentional or not, is the same: restricting freedoms (or, on a shorter term, ignore valid criticism).
Unfortunately, at least in the tech world it seems to be a great success. We now have walled gardens and unskippable updates. The next step, "trusted computing" (which is ultimately using a whitelist to forbid the usage of certain software), is already halfway here.
