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A comment on The Rise of Adblock Shaming. Parent comment

Re:The Rise of Adblock Shaming by elorant on Saturday July 14, 2018 @05:00PM (#17532350)
Not with current technology because all ad blocking does is blocking hosts. So a site can tell if parts of the code have loaded/executed or not. In order to go completely stealth you'd have to let the page load everything and then just don't show it. But that's way more complicated and besides a bit pointless because part of the reason for ad blocking is to make sites load faster by removing all that bloatware. That, or we move ad blocking out of the browser and into the OS where sites have absolutely no access whatsoever.
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Re:The Rise of Adblock Shaming by akerro on Saturday July 14, 2018 @05:28PM (#17532481)
>Not with current technology because all ad blocking does is blocking hosts

That's funny as first adblockers on Firefox used to just hide divs. Browser was still downloading flash object and images, but was not displaying them

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Re:The Rise of Adblock Shaming by navbaker on Saturday July 14, 2018 @05:42PM (#17532542)
>That, or we move ad blocking out of the browser and into the OS where sites have absolutely no access whatsoever.

Interesting concept. Asking as a layman: is this possible? Is the browser sandboxed enough away from the OS that this is a difficult problem? Is that why we haven’t seen solutions that implement this approach?

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Re:The Rise of Adblock Shaming by elorant on Saturday July 14, 2018 @06:02PM (#17532633)
Possible yes, probable not so much. Building extensions is simpler than building desktop apps. For one you need only JavaScript. While if you move in the OS you'd have to support different versions of systems (you have Windows, OSX, Android, IOS, Linux) and it is much more cumbersome than in the browser.
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Re:The Rise of Adblock Shaming by contravariant on Saturday July 14, 2018 @08:46PM (#17533180)
I don't see how moving to an even higher level of abstraction would help. At the OS level you can basically only block hosts (unless you're inspecting packages but that seems excessive).

Doing what uBlock origin does by loading dummy versions of common tracking scripts is a lot more effective.

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Re:The Rise of Adblock Shaming by stefan_ on Saturday July 14, 2018 @06:12PM (#17532672)
What does "move ad blocking out of the browser and into the OS" even mean?

As long as you have websites built by JavaScript, trying to do perfect adblocking is solving the halting problem. Can't do that, but we should start fixing the most obvious, glaring abuses (JS need not be able to tell if something actually loaded, no 3rd party host resource, certainly no 3rd party scripts. If I'm putting foo.com in as the address, my browser should only be talking with foo.com)

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Re:The Rise of Adblock Shaming by elorant on Saturday July 14, 2018 @07:44PM (#17532975)
You can't turn off third party JS. What if I have an Intranet that's loading an external API. It could be anything from a chat session to analytics. You do that and you break the web.
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Re:The Rise of Adblock Shaming by krageon on Tuesday July 17, 2018 @08:50AM (#17549296)
I run all of my browsers (including mobile) with all 3rd party scripts blocked by default. Most sites that you care to casually consume will work without issue. Anything that uses a payment provider or google to login needs 2 greylist rules (which are mind-numbingly simple to click on once).

I can set it up for people that don't understand what they are doing (and I have) and they will not notice anything in almost every case.

As such, I conclude that this generalisation is grossly overstated and you probably haven't tried it to see if what you are saying is correct.

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Re:The Rise of Adblock Shaming by perl4ever on Saturday July 14, 2018 @08:21PM (#17533074)
Well, it's feasible if you fork the web instead. If a significant number of people want draconian measures to be taken, and they converge on a search engine that can exclude the non-compliant, then the new standards have a chance of catching on.

Suppose I say I just want to eliminate javascript entirely - that's not feasible to enforce, but if I could just search the non-javascript pages out there, then a new way of doing things can be bootstrapped.

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Re:The Rise of Adblock Shaming by stefan_ on Monday July 16, 2018 @05:54PM (#17545498)
Uhm, external analytics is exactly what we're trying to break here. And if you need an external API, have whoever is serving the Intranet page load that - that's how it's been forever. Websites loading data through JS from 20+ endpoints on a single page is very much a recent disease.
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Re:The Rise of Adblock Shaming by gruez on Saturday July 14, 2018 @05:58PM (#17532616)
>That, or we move ad blocking out of the browser and into the OS where sites have absolutely no access whatsoever.

that's probably overkill. all you need to do is move the adblocking part further back into the rendering pipeline (ie. outside of the DOM) so that javascript can't detect it.

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Re:The Rise of Adblock Shaming by scarface74 on Sunday July 15, 2018 @12:12AM (#17533757)
The reason I use an ad blocker is not to see intrusive ads. I've whitelisted a site and told Safari to immediate go in reader view mode for the site. It's a decent compromise.
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