> Before I wrote this post, I wasn't aware that eyeo served ads directly, which is what prompted me to write it.
I think they floated this idea but ended up nixing it after users weren't happy. I run ABP with "acceptable ads w/o 3rd party tracking" a subset of the acceptable ads list and have for the last couple years. I've never seen an ad they injected or I wasn't aware they injected it.
The ad-supported site I work on and who employs me was added to the acceptable ads list today. I'm not affiliated with eyeo in any other way. We did not have to pay them (yet?).
One heads up and kind of a correction, for users that want to stick to Safari on iOS (myself being one of them) after installing Firefox Focus on iOS, go to iOS Settings -> Safari -> General section "Content Blockers" and toggle on for "Firefox Focus"
As a stupid and impatient person, I didn't get to the end of the article the first time i looked at it. After I saw you wrote it I went back to check if you mentioned ublock by name.
You might want to have something below the header and above the lede that says "hey just before we go any further, the solution is to use ublock origin instead of adblock." And even better, a big image of adblock with another, bigger red "no" symbol over it (in addition to the one that's already in the logo i guess) and then a check mark next to ublock origin. Like I said, I'm stupid. It's an interesting article but i already knew adblock plus was sketchy so I didn't finish.
Although uBlock does a fine job at fighting most symptoms,AdNauseam ( banned by google. )does a better job at fighting the cause by clicking on ads in the background, providing some financial incentives to advertisers.
To fight back and undermine value & business models seems more effective than just docile ad-blocking.
Link: https://adnauseam.io/
Privacy Badger is not an adblocker. It block sites that track you by some magic heuristic. It just happen to be that ads are really intrusive. Every time I see a "please whitelist or page in your ad blocker", I get a smug smile on my face, because I do not have one
It's a great combo, although as a developer it's also a constant source of "why the fuck does this website I'm working on not work" because privacybadger is the most aggressive cookie destroyer on the planet.
Mostly automation -- you don't have to actually craft the list. It will just spot stuff it thinks it should be blocking and do so. And if you need to correct it (uncommon in my experience) the UI for doing so is right there next to the address bar. Also, it's capable of just blocking cookies for some sites, which is nice when they're hosting common J's libs/fonts or something, and blocking them outright would break the page.
I ran Privacy Badger for a while. It is very good for finding out who is setting 3rd party cookies or using alternatives to cookies (eg. localstorage with unique identifiers). Rather than using a list, my understanding is it uses heuristics based on what cookies are set, whether they are 1st vs 3rd party, their expiry time and the like.
The good thing about privacy badger is that you don't have to care about the contents of ads ('acceptable ads') or how much you like a particular site ('please unblock us in your ad-blocker).
If a site has parts with 3rd party tracking cookies then I just don't see it.
The downside of only using privacy badger is that you do see some ads. At the moment I find that level of ads acceptable.
I personally disagree with "forward thinking" description for what AdNauseam does, hence why I disagreed when the AdNauseam authors asked me to implement hooks in uBO[1].
To me the ideal for many reasons[2] is to reduce as much as possible the number of connections to 3rd parties on any given web page.
I care about privacy in absolute terms. The difference to me, personally, between the advertisements I'm served after using AdNauseum and TMN running in a tab for 6 months vs the ads I was seeing using other blocking protocol (such as UBO and Privacy Badger) for longer periods of time have me convinced that the only way to gain any amount of privacy on the web these days is through obfuscation. I couldn't care less about page load time(as long as the hit is <500ms), bandwidth consumed or CPU/memory load on my desktop.
I hate the tracky nature of the web nowadays, and feel that AdNauseam is fighting fire with fire. UBO is fighting fire with CO2, fine unless the fire has it's own oxygen supply, which I would argue the online ad industry has in the form of copious numbers of inattentive and uncaring users.
> it automatically clicks all ads your browser encounters hundreds of times
I think it would be hard to deny that clicking every ad hundreds of times is straying into uncoordinated DDoS territory, considering the installed userbase. I don't see that as enlightened or forward thinking.
I agree with gorhill on this and would rather decrease connections to 3rd parties. After all, part of the reason the web is so slow is that browsers make so many 3rd party connections! With that in mind, my approach to ad blocking is to combine DNS blocks, MVPS /etc/hosts + my own entries, JS blocking, and uBlock Origin. This setup catches more junk and is more likely to work while transitioning or temporarily changing my setup.
I would say the goal of AdNauseam is obfuscating ad profiles. It not necessarily clicks all ads, the rate can be set in the preferences.
Personally, I would welcome similar extensions for social media, automated follows/likes/post/retweets, let facebook backup GBs of generated pictures per users for facial recognition or Gmail mine random emails. A more noble use case for lifefaker if you will.
Sites that offer paid and ad sponsored alternatives are fine. It’s sites that don’t offer subscriptions that should just change their business model, if it’s now based on intrusive tracking ads from ad networks.
And no, I don’t mind consuming contents from hundreds of ad financed sites while simultaneously wanting the majority of them to simply disappear because they could likely never sustain a different business model than ads.
There are other ways to fund content that doesn’t involve slapping a bunch of third party trackers and running retargetted display ads.
Some examples other than subscriptions would be sponsored content and creating a product such as an ebook or selling products that are related to your content.
AdNauseum essentially defrauds advertising networks. That is not the righteous path.
"Acceptable ads" allowed by default (opt-out) are inherently and OBVIOUSLY the right idea, but the acceptable ad list should be maintained by a disinterested party, not an advertiser or ad agency.
Problem is that disinterested parties are just that-- nobody cares enough to do it. Who wants to go to that effort to _allow_ ads?
One solution would be for Google and other large advertisers to fund a not-for-profit company to build acceptable ad lists, and then convince adblock addon developers to enable the lists by default through sheer benevolence.
Enforcement is easy, if they play games like AdBlock and start allowing intrusive ads, Gorhill (uBlock Origin developer) and those like him will instantly disable the lists and their entire model falls apart.
The goal is to make the web a markedly less hostile place to visit by eliminating intrusive ads while still allowing sites to support themselves through advertising.
"The goal is to make the web a markedly less hostile place to visit by eliminating intrusive ads while still allowing sites to support themselves through advertising."
That's not my goal. My goal is to eliminate unsolicited advertising.
I don't want it, and if websites have to find other, non-advertising-based business models to support themselves, so be it.
This mostly just makes it so less tech savvy users would have to be exposed to more advertisements. Even after they've gone out of their way already to install an ad-blocker.
If I'm installing an ad-blocker I want it to block all ads.
> "Acceptable ads" allowed by default (opt-out) are inherently and OBVIOUSLY the right idea, but the acceptable ad list should be maintained by a disinterested party, not an advertiser or ad agency.
That's silly. If a person is installing an ad blocker, the "obvious" thing is for it to block advertisements. You may not like it, but everybody is fully capable of making up their own mind on whether they think certain advertisements are acceptable or not.
this is purely sophistic. It is shady to block ads and sell ads at the same time, but for me at least "ad blocker" meant "stop redirecting me to crap sites while clicking on your menus".
It was about being literally unable to use some sites, I don't care about still images at the bottom of a page.
> It was about being literally unable to use some sites, I don't care about still images at the bottom of a page.
For me it's about privacy and security too, but most of all, I just don't want to see any ads whatsoever. I don't watch ad-supported TV, no ad-supported radio, no ads to my mailbox, won't use apps that show ads, and no ads are allowed in my web browser either.
Use your own definition "ad blocker" if you want to, but everybody else will see it as dishonest if a product claiming to block ads doesn't actually block ads.
mozzila is now trying to introduce non tracking ads in their browser. how are non tracking ads different from posters on the street? (minus security concern, honestly i trust mozilla on that)
When walking down a scenic street, you know who says to themselves, "What this street really needs to make it truly pleasing is more flyers and posters"? No one.
When watching TV, who yearns for more ads? No one.
This is all junk no one needs except the advertisers themselves. The rest of us don't want their garbage.
uBlock Origin is great, I have been using it on both desktop and mobile for a while. I wish it would be there by default in Firefox and also other browsers!
Glaring omission that is built in to Chrome: https://www.betterads.org. one might hope it's not as much of a racket, but the conflict of interest exists.
This is just my personal opinion, but I find that it only removes the worst of the worst though, and I find it dishonest. For example, they ban auto-playing video ads, but
> The Better Ads Methodology has not yet tested video ads that appear before (“pre-roll”) or during (“mid-roll”) video content that is relevant to the content of the page itself.
So shitty news web sites that put one of those "we put a useless video here so we can show video ads" videos on their page can still continue using auto-playing video ads, with sound, and I'm pretty sure they'll find some way to define Youtube's pre-roll ads as "totally not a banned prestitial with countdown".
Also, just saw Taboola on their web site - their ads certainly meet the technical standards, but are one of the most obnoxious ones on the Internet, and the cause for many to disable the "acceptable ads" program/switch to uBlock.
They're just trying to take the worst edge off to reduce the necessity to install an adblocker, or, if you want to interpret it uncharitably, maximize the amount of people who get to see the bad-but-not-absolutely-horrifying ad formats.
I'm sure a lot of us here have already embraced uBlock Origin. It seems to be universally acclaimed on most tech forums.
Before I wrote this post, I wasn't aware that eyeo served ads directly, which is what prompted me to write it.