Technology

It's not about blocking ads for me, that's a happy side-effect, it's about owning your computing and taking the necessary protection against tracking. Before "ad blockers" existed I spent a lot of time manually configuring my browser to block websites from connecting me to unnecessary, potentially intrusive third party servers, after all it's my browser and my internet connection. Now uBlock Origin does that for me, it's not an ad blocker, it's a wide spectrum content blocker and the user should have the final say on what they connect to. I think we should stop calling them ad blockers.

If we could figure out how to block ads on TV we might actually still bother posting for cable again. I'm the mean time, fuck 'em, they're too rich as it is.

Besides the trackers and malware, ads can be categorised as a flaw in technology. A kind of software parasite that uses a computer's resources without providing any additional functionality to the user.

I actually like how people are again on the wave of understanding that anarchism is right even if you've voluntarily consented to hierarchy. And other similar things.

Sometimes you need to break rules. Entropy and life are more important.

Good. Hopefully the advertisers will realize that it's not profitable to advertise online anymore, and then we'll be left the hell alone.

When I was about five years old, my parents were shopping for a car. When the radio said Brand X Dealer was the best place to buy a car, I was so excited to tell them what I'd just learned.

I haven't forgiven advertising since.

And I'm one or them. Every time I turn it off things become legitimately unusable.

Sites are lazy and greedy. They throw dozens and dozens of 3rd party javascripts into their headers, that punish and annoy people for not using an ad blocker - they slow the site down, bloat the memory, consume energy, track the user and festoon the page with garbage. As soon as people hear that an ad blocker is a thing, then of course they leap at the chance of using one.

It would be straightforward for sites to insert ads into their content - make the ad urls, images and links indistinguishable from actual content. i.e. serve them up from the same domain, from non predictable paths and use html structure where ads and content are intermingled. Even if an adblocker wanted to block the ads, there are no patterns that work and every single site would require different rules. But that requires effort. I suppose we should be glad that sites don't do it.

Psychology has revealed that the ability to direct attention to and process stimulus is limited, and that it's more limited in the most vulnerable members of society, including those with autism and those with too much stress.

Stimulus engineered to capture attention must therefore be treated by the law as a form of violence.

Oh no. 🎻

Ads on websites are deals the sitemaker made with themselves. The internet is free.

Well no one ever had to sell me on how nice a fire smells.

“And Scott Messer, founder of publishing adtech consultancy Messer Media, added: “Dark traffic is unlike anything we have seen before. It’s demonetising publisher content at scale without user consent. 

“Publishers already face an existential-level threat in the face of AI reducing referral traffic. This is another slice that publishers cannot afford to lose.””

https://youtu.be/ZTt-kfPvRks

mostly desktop, android phone is mostly unusable with ads. use 'privacy badger', 'ublock origin', 'umatrix'.

I still whitelist sites with sensible, unobtrusive ads. Axios for instance, which are mostly 1st party. But that’s increasingly the exception.

I had to rip APNews out when Google Ads tried to serve me malware.