Can you imagine the amount of corruptive influences and persuasions he is resisting?
Pretty sure he has them blocked
Though you may be right, I have a feeling that he is facing formidable opposition. That may include anything from social engineering to full on psyops.
Bet he’s had people “happen” to bump into him IRL, and gets pull requests from bad actors that are very subtly trying to take the project in the wrong direction.
Your second point is especially interesting, considering the recent xz backdoor. The bad actors manipulated a poor burnt out maintainer for it. In comparison, I’m impressed with gorhill for his perseverance and mental strength. I would like to know how he avoids burn out with such negative influences.
Dang, for real? Do you have some more details on this?
I think he’s using old school speculative “bet”, not the new Gen Z meaning
Lol, it does read entirely differently in the gen z light… good eye! If you add a comma after “bet”, it completely changes the meaning. Fun
Yeah that’s funny :D
Bet
What’s “Mordor Intelligence” – is that a real thing, or a parody of the surveillance/‘defense’ industry companies that are coming up with names nicked from LotR? (‘Anduril’, ‘Palantir’)
https://www.mordorintelligence.com/ They appear to be a real thing. Though naming yourself after the most evil thing in middle earth is a bit in the nose lol.
Insightful point. And it does remind me of the corporate purchase of the Don’t care about cookies extension for Firefox (And the Simple Mobile Tools for Android). Luckily it was forked. https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies Open source FTW!
🙂 🐧Simple Mobile Tools was forked into “Fossify *” for anyone interested.
There’s a reason uBlock Origin overtook Adblock Plus in popularity.
The VLC guy turned down what a quick search is telling me was “several tens of millions” to show ads. I can’t even imagine what getting people to drop ublock would be worth.
I wouldn’t blame him if he took it, but I greatly respect that he didn’t.
Raymond Hill: “Get behind me, Google.”
I hadn’t even thought about that. Thank you.
What is the decentralised solution?
There is and isn’t one. For the add-on itself, you just need forks and more forks. For the lists it pulls from, those are already decentralized, but you’re constantly going to deal with the issue of only the best are used and only the used are maintained and only the maintained are the best.
And all the volunteers keeping those lists up-to-date.
It’s kinda sad that without Mozilla, Raymond, the NoScript guys and TOR we would lose control over the internet pretty much immediately
Kind of agree. Though there is pi-hole and several others. And there’s i2p, Freenet (now called Hyphanet) and GNUnet, and similar.
Pi-hole is nice for devices that you don’t fully control. But it’s not enough, due to the fundamental limitations of DNS based blocking. If the ads and the content are hosted on the same domain, it can’t do anything.
Also issues with links that get ads on top of them. You can still click them, you’ll get redirected to a blank page (because the ad gets DNS blocked), but with an adblocker you would’ve gone to the non-ad link.
I definitely agree, although really a LOT of non-Linux/(IT) guys use Chrome, some even Edge, if on Windows
IT person…
Uses chrome…
Both cannot be true friend, sorry. Your buddy is either a fake engineer or their main job isn’t IT.
If you really have friends in IT they haven’t used chrome or edge in a while, or their using the scripting bot for weekly progress reports to their boss, and they’re only using it for that…
this is the stupidest comment I have read all week. chromenis fucking INFESTED in IT field. literally almost everyone uses it in my class, I’m a third year student in ict-engineering. literally everyone used it in my last school too, which was also IT related. if you actually believe that you must not really see other IT people outside the linux circles
Chrome has become the baseline to support for every kind of web application out there since every major browser other than firefox and safari is a chrome reskin anyway
You don’t want to start this conversation, it’s a race to absolutism and purity tests at odds with one another. You say Firefox and someone comes in a calls you an idiot because you’re not using a fully FOSS browser or one that is inadequately hardened or one that supports the installation of content-management modules.
Most sane reply, lol.
Who is Raymond? Never heard the name
What about controld for blocking at the dns level?
If only, I know so many people who don’t bother with adblocking at all. I honestly have no idea how they use the Internet without going mad
My kid discovered that he can hit the “report” button on the YouTube app on the TV to skip the ads immediately. So now every ad gets reported as “inappropriate”.
I’m proud of him.
😀 👍
I found out this trick when I eating dinner once at my local library. Oddly, it was a kid came up and saw I was watching YT videos. Showed me the tactic, and now I rely on it lol
I’m of two minds about people not adblocking.
On one hand: Ads are gross noise pollution, and people are increasingly unaware of all the noise around them (or the noise they’re generating) largely because they’ve been passively trained to “tune out” ads. Also consumerism.
On the other hand: As long as there are a significant amount of people oblivious to the possibility of adblock, corporate ad mobsters and the other worst people in the world out there will largely leave those of us blocking their ads alone. If everyone ran adblockers, we’d definitely live in a world of WEI… and probably worse. So, maybe all those people are watching ads so that I don’t have to, as the YouTube thumbnails say.
If sites wanted to run ads and host them locally without tracking that would be fine. But since they’re tracking users it’s essential to block them for privacy and security, and if someone isn’t then maybe they don’t understand the level of tracking involved. We need a better name than adblocking.
I just don’t want to see ads.
Sure, that should be absolutely your choice, it’s your browser.
People just don’t know, I’ve been showing my wife the way little by little and she’s always blown away
I’ve shown a colleague after seeing him browse an horrendous fantasy football website. He couldn’t believe the difference between before and after.
Yeah, it’s shocking to see how many ads they jam in now. I felt so dirty.
I also don’t understand it. But now I am wondering if we would not have had those “careless” (indifferent ? ignorant ?) millions of people not blocking ads then Google and others may have started pushing anti-adblock measures years earlier, no ?
The way people talk about people who don’t block ads is so funny.
I understand and respect the reasons people choose to use blockers, but ads honestly just aren’t that problematic for me in practice and are easy to avoid and ignore.
Ads have been known to contain drive-by malware. Even if you don’t mind seeing ads (which personally I don’t mind unless they’re very intrusive), an adblocker is important for online safety.
Drive-by malware tends not to be zero-days though. I’ve stayed safe for decades just by keeping my software up to date.
There’s no mention of anything like zero-days in that article. They only mention that it can target all major OSes, with no mention of cutting edge versions also being vulnerable.
Hilariously, the article directly supports my position as well:
The good news for some, at least: it likely poses a minimal threat to most people, considering the multi-million-dollar price tag and other requirements for developing a surveillance campaign using Sherlock
That’s a big part of my whole point. People who don’t do even a modicum of actual thought about a practical threat model for themselves love pretending that ad blocking isn’t primarily just about not wanting to see ads.
If Israel or some other highly capable attacker is coming after you, then fine, you really do need ad blocking. In that case malware in ads is going to be the least of your concerns.
Attacks that cast such a wide net as to be the concern of all web users are necessarily less dangerous because exploits need to be kept secret to avoid being patched.
There’s nothing wrong with taking extra precautions; I’m certainly not saying blocking ads is a bad idea. It’s the apparent confusion that an informed, tech-savvy person might choose not to block ads that makes me laugh.
Ads are probably actually not that bad. But to me the massive stalking is unacceptable. So, uBO FTW!
Of course; I’m just a lot more worried about the systemic problems of mass surveillance than any practical risk to me individially.
You never visited the not-sheltered web…
You say with such confidence. Is it so hard to imagine people can defend themselves with means other than ad blocking?
Please tell me what other ways you can block ads other than ignoring them or not visiting the web at all.
Btw: Custom apps (like it was for Reddit) don’t count.
Huh? The point of this discussion is that I don’t need to block them to keep myself safe in sketchy corners of the web.
What would we do without ublock origin
Use vblock ingress!
You would use noBlock origin instead
I love posts like this. You get to discover new stuff 😂
In the 1999s-2000s we used WebWasher. It was basically a proxy server which you ran locally on your computer and it had all the filters. You just set up your browser’s network connection to point to WebWasher and it acted as the gateway to the Internet.
If browsers somehow decided to kill all their plugin support, you could still use that to filter your content.
Don’t forget good old hosts file. This file exists on both linux and windows.
Seriously. Says a lot about the modern internet, though. Both good and bad.
Provide source please: xkcd
It doesn’t say “xkcd” anywhere in their post except for the URL, and most people are not going to bother clicking on View Source.
So, that is a “citation” in the loosest possible sense.
deleted by creator
Thank Raymond and the list maintainers, you keep the internet usable
Yeah, Raymond Hill made a great plugin, but the people maintaining the lists are the real MVPs
They’re all gods among men.
Amen to that
Invisible and nameless internet warriors. They stay eternal.
He’s far too kind of a person. He doesn’t accept any donations for the many years of a better and safer internet experience I’ve gotten from his work
When YouTube was blocking ublock people was surprised that they couldnt donate to the project.
All hail Raymond Hill :0
And the people maintaining the lists his work depends on.
Never knew the name of the guy behind it. Nice! This is why Everybody Loves Raymond!
About
Free. Open-source. For users by users. No donations sought.
If you ever want to contribute something, think about the people working hard to maintain the filter lists you are using, which are available to use by all for free.
That is some commit history!!
Im genuinely so thankful for this project, the creator and maintainers. You are doing the lords work.
Gladly upvoted to
worshiphonor one of the open source heroes.Ad/content blockers of various types are the only reason the internet is still generally usable for me.
I’d otherwise have a meltdown and watch everything burn
There is something very wrong when deleting 50% of wep page is the least it takes to make the internet usable…
