I'm running NoScript, and I saw no anti-AdBlock or video. It's becoming increasingly clear to me that NoScript is the only reasonable way to browse the web today. Random websites can't be entrusted to run javascript in a way that's not hostile to my interests.

> Random websites can't be entrusted to run javascript in a way that's not hostile to my interests.

I encourage you to consider that any website that runs arbitrary code on your computer _at all_ is hostile to your interests, by default. Websites today are becoming more programs than documents; rather than presenting you with a download dialog like you'd traditionally see with software, your browser is clicking "Download and Run" for you.

Cooper Quintin of the EFF had a Privacy Badger talk at LibrePlanet 2016 that emphasizes just how many third parties you are "trusting" when you visit a website.

https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/ending-online-...

I spoke more generally:

https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/collection/resto...

You do realize that if everybody followed your example, they will at one point block NoScript too?

Also, half of HN would be out of a job :)

Setting aside the why and wherefore; how would they block NoScript?

Imagine a world where all content is loaded over XHRs and the DOM serves only to load Javascript.

This is becoming an increasingly prevalent pattern. I really miss the document-oriented web of the late 90's / early 00's.

Honest question: Why?

I don't understand why people inherently dislike Javascript (aside from, y'know, creepy ad networks).

Because we want the information to be free. If the web server is serving a document, you can do all sorts of stuff with it - you can index it, you can transform it, you can save it for later.

If the web server is serving a DRM-ed program, that loads the human-viewable data over non-standard interfaces, all that breaks. Only humans in front of the web browser will be able to see the data.

Or sufficiently dedicated people to run a headless browser to run the Javascript and re-build the content and work on the rebuilt DOM. But also we now need NoScript, JS blockers, 3rd party blockers, and the publishers invest in anti-adblocks. It's a neverending arms escalation between those who want to restrictively publish information, and those that want the information without restrictions. So all this JS-based workaround to try to DRM things only brings more work for everybody involved, with minimal results.

NOTE: when I say DRM, I actually mean Digital Policy Enforcement - the publishers want to maintain their policies around access to their information (e.g. you cannot see this article without seeing this ad) using digital means. But DRM has a nicer twist to it - the uninformed may mistake the R for My Rights.

I like the term DRP (Digital Revenue Protection)

Seems to cover the intent of things quite nicely :)

RMS always refers to DRM as Digital Restrictions Management.

Also conveys the intent quite nicely - plus you can keep the acronym ;-)

I thought he used it to refer to delicious ripped foot manifolds?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ

Because, besides the creepy ad networks and stuff, it's most often used in a mix of shitty engineering and user-hostile practices.

Let's consider a web document like this article here. Its stated goal is to be read by the visitor and thus deliver him value. So presumably, an article that's easier to read is better than one harder to read. An article that, ceteris paribus, consumes less resources on user end is better than one that consumes more.

Now we have a perfect technology to deliver that article. Plain old HTML. With a little bit of CSS on top. When what you want to send is text communicating a message, you need exactly zero JavaScript to do that successfully[0]. You barely even need much CSS - the default browser styles, raw as they are, are better than most web designers produce, if you care about providing value to the user.

Now if you don't, here starts JavaScript. Look at just what JS on Wired does and find me one line of code that actually serves the user. The JS there tracks you, shows you ads, shows you nagging popups[1], adds social media buttons that are somewhat useful if you want to exchange being tracked everywhere for convenience of not having to CTRL+TAB to that Facebook tab. In general, JS here is a waste of electricity (often in users' phone batteries).

You can run a similar analysis of other websites[2] and rarely if ever you'll find one when JavaScript does anything other than fuck users over more or less subtly. The technology is fine, but everyone[3] is using it for user-hostile purposes, and/or because of bad engineering. Think of all the scroll hijacking, JS rendering article text dynamically on a blog page, etc. Personally I dislike it from the very same reason I dislike crappy code.

--

[0] - Sure, JS can be used to qualitatively enhance the reading experience, to make it more pleasant and efficient. I accept that in principle, but I'll cede the point only when I see anyone other than Bret Victor actually doing it.

[1] - Wired, I appreciate that you wanted to say "thank you" to me for turning off uMatrix for a second, but could you please do not do that with a popup?

[2] - Web apps are a different topic; I don't think anybody is saying you should turn off JavaScript for GMail or Google Docs. But most of the sites on the web are not, and should not behave like web apps.

[3] - Except Bret Victor.

I once was smart enough to burst into a rant about exactly this in an interview question.

I didn't get the job.

Next I was joking with a friend that all the layers of abstraction added to the web are probably part of some big conspiracy by web developers to create artificial demand and job security. You run a heavy CMS but the bells and whistles confuse rather than help the user, and they'd rather pay for an hour of hour time than figure things out themselves. Your spa makes a simple series of documents feel like an app, with all the added complexity, but in the end the user couldn't care less about the full page transitions or parallax scrolling.

I have one simple rule: if it's about information retrieval, it's supposed to be a simple bloody document. If it's supposed to act like an app, it should look like an app. The latter is the propper use case for JS, but people are applying the latter to the former. This is not user centric design.

Agreed.

JS on a website that is otherwise not an app has its use cases ie. tabulated data, search, filtering, realtime data etc.

But a static website displaying a simple article has no fucking business running any code other than HTML/CSS on my computer.

Reddit's mobile site takes 1-2 seconds to load comments through JavaScript, and heaven forbid you click a link; that destroys your scroll position. Disable JavaScript and comments load instantly and the back button actually works.

JavaScript seemingly is more often used to degrade basic site functionality, rather than enhance it.

Because js-heavy sites are slow on a bit older pc's that are otherwise perfectly capable for most of the other tasks.

See idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

Speed and bandwidth usage are part of it. I visit a site, wanting to see specific content. The vast majority of the 44 domains (according to uBlock Origin) that Wired connects to aren't actually needed to render what I'm trying to look at. They're mostly ads, tracking scripts, analytics. None of which help me and most of which are never used to help shape the content, only monetise user data and serve adverts.

I recently found d a stash of web pages I had saved locally over a decade ago. They still load...a modern one wouldn't.

You should create screenshots instead.

Those don't scale with resolution changes.

A saved webpage can stay as responsive as an ebook.

Screenshots are also bigger than necessary (image instead of text + metadata), and are not greppable.

Why? So I can fuck around with OCR later?

The data is already structured.

Render the page invisible, make it viewable with JS and/or just use an XHR to load the content.

If you happen to be using Firefox, setting the config variable:

media.autoplay.enabled

To false, disables auto play media everywhere.

Thanks, good tip. That should probably be the default, but oh well.

edit: I just realized it also affects youtube in an annoying way (have to skip ahead a bit or the video won't play at all). Would be nice if I could whitelist that.

Yeah, agree. You shouldn't have to skip ahead though, just double pump the play button. A greasemonkey script should be able to do it too.

In chrome I blocked plugins by default under Settings>Show Advanced Settings>(Privacy section)Content Settings>Plugins Section

I do that too, but it still autoplayed. I think it's an HTML5 video.

this is what bothered me about html5, a new ability to shove video content. Surprised it took so long to take off.

Same reaction here... they made me feel guilty about using adblock, I was nice enough to disable it, then that unrelated video kept on playing, and they popped up another message saying thanks... Who's in charge of this? ugh...

I clicked back instantly. It's idiotic to have a video spew out high volume sound automatically. Almost woke our one year old.

So no more clicking on wired links for me!

That's why I always have the sound muted in my laptop. I, of course, use an adblocker, but there are some sites I had to whitelist which cannot be trusted. Disabling the sound makes it much better: even if something decides to auto-play, so what? Most of the time I don't even notice when this happens: such videos are frequently at the bottom, and by the time I get there the video already stopped playing.

It's also at the bottom of the page. Even if we assume I'm interested in their video I would have to manually restart it anyway just so I can see it from the beginning.

Part of their war on adblockers. In the past the adblocker nag has popped after you scroll down, well an autoplay video will get you scrolling to find out where it is and blam they pop the adblocker. Of course none of that happens if you hit 'reader view' in Firefox, nice easy to read article.

Its one of the reasons I've stopped reading Fortune and Wired web articles.

Don't all of the major videos have mute buttons on the tabs. Firefox has had it for a while now

mute doesn't seem to stop the bandwidth hogging.

Although once the 'blocker' nag pops up reader view gives a cannot load message

Wrong answer. I don't have an adblocker, yet I have too got an auto-play video with very loud sound.

Collateral damage?

No anti-adblock message with uBlock.

That video (assuming we're seeing the same one) seems to be a short Wired production; unrelated content rather than advert.

It was a (very loud) Kayak ad for me. What a blatant user-hostile move. Pathetic.

Oh well, Wired just got itself removed from my adblock whitelist (after only a couple weeks on it).

I see the anti-adblock with my uBlock. Must be your filters.

Edit: yep, I just activated the "Anti-Adblock Killer | Reek‎" filter and it's gone.

Sorry, it's uBlock _Origin_. Not sure what the difference is, but I haven't done anything custom.

Strange, I have uBlock Origin and the Anti-Adblock killer | Reek, yet I still see the nag

I have uBlock Origin, no custom filters / extra plugins. No nagging. I'm from Europe, maybe it has something to do with the types of ads displayed to the US users? (Like some providers requiring anti-adblock measures)

Ah, that might be it. I am too.

Same here, also no auto-play. I use uBlock Origin and disabled third-party scripts and frames globally. I whitelist only a few pages.

Just block the JS. I looked around for a JS blocker, and found ScriptSafe, which makes the web really usable. I turn on JS for the servers I trust, and sites like Wired and NYT just feed me readable text without any ads.

Some of the more obnoxious sites won't let you read the full article (or any of the article, in some cases) without JS. Of course, you can just use some trickery to hide the overlay, but it gets pretty annoying.

For such sites you keep the button "temporarily allow JS execution" somewhere handy in your browser UI, but for more obnoxious sites you'll probably quit after getting bored from long loading time after getting used to how fast everything else is with scripts disabled :P

What's the advantage of using an add-on like ScriptSafe against just disabling JS in settings?

I use uMatrix for blocking scripts. By default I allow all 1st party scripts, and disable the rest. Then I can enable additional sources one by one if site functionality (e.g. playing YouTube videos) needs it.

The point is not to block JS completely, but to disallow it when not necessary (which it isn't for most of the time). There are plenty of legitimate uses of JS and keeping "allow JS on this domain now" button in accessible place is very handy.

Plus of course you can lift the restrictions selectively for each domain. From my experience it usually takes one or two domains to allow in order to get the needed functionality, and the rest (usually around 10) can be kept blocked.

You can whitelist easier and quicker and in some blockers you can block specific ad or tracker domains only.

It isn't just their website either. I noticed over the last few years that they've gone all-out on advertising in the magazine too. It's not just so bad in the US where the magazine is around $1.50 an issue on subscription, but in the UK it's around $3.50. I unsubscribed after a few years. It was so stuffed full of adverts, I just couldn't be bothered with it any more.

Some months it would take 10+ pages of adverts to get to the first piece of content. And the worst was those glued-in cardboard ad pages in the middle - you can never really rip them out properly, and the magazine always inconveniently flops open at that page whenever you get close to it.

They're just trying to monetise the pants off the brand, and it's a real shame. I loved Wired. Not it's just another Outbrain-laden, cardboard-stuffed piece of junk.

My adblocker blocks the nagger.

But the video still plays.. I actually wonder how the coerce my Chrome to do that.

> What's going on with Wired? This page has an autoplay video ad below the article text and an anti-AdBlock full-screen subscription nagger that pops up a few seconds after page load.

"Revenue is falling; quick, what should we do?"

"Shut up and keep digging."

Thanks for the warning, will not visit Wired again. Auto-play video ads, anti-adblock screens and clickbaity, capitalized titles are all diseases of the "modern" web and should be dealt with accordingly.

I have privacy badger from eff on, I don't even care about ads, as long as they don't track me. But that still shows up the subscription nagger.

They should update: We get it: Tracking you through multiple pages without your permission is not why you’re here for. But Tracking you through multiple pages without your permission help us keep the lights on.

Really. Find a better way to "keep the lights on". I wouldn't block ads if they would respect my privacy.

Turned off JS to read the article.

I rarely visit Wired, so I have no issue circumventing their anti-adblock popup, as far as I am concerned those auto playing video stunts immediately put them in my little book of offensive websites.

A little bit of investigation in the source shows that if you block 'www.wired.com/assets/load?*' with AdBlock (or your blocker of choice), then the page works fine, but without the annoying popup.

Didn't see the anti-AdBlock nagger with ublock O.

Sometimes when I hit a nagger, for example Forbes, I can load the site from google search and the nagger is averted

https://www.google.com/search?q=site://www.wired.com/2016/07...

How's this for strange: I got a modal popup Thank You for not using an adblocker... so, distracted all the same.

Haven't read a single Wired article since. Can't say I have really missed much.

Consider using the browser Brave which strips all ads by default. When a site like Wired screws with me, I just use Brave.

Viewed with JS disabled, no video, no pop ups.

I figured that when publishers do that (autoplay) to you, you can respond back by blocking scripts for them.

never noticed that, but I'm running uBlock + NoScript.

2008

I down voted this because it's off-topic and is taking up the top half of the comment section.