The bright side of Google's anti-ad-blocking efforts is that ad-blocking is clearly no longer just an insignificant blip on their radar. There must be enough users of ad-blockers now to start to significantly affect their bottom line.

There might even be a critical mass of people who are against advertising to attempt to make some legal headway on this issue in Washington. Just as there has been legal action against telemarketers, there might be something on the legal front that can be done against online advertisers, who could be considered just as much or even more of a nuisance than telemarketers ever were. In addition, online advertising has repeatedly been a vector of malware, and perhaps companies which try to circumvent or forbid ad-blockers could have some legal consequences -- and, if not, perhaps laws could be introduced to make such consequences a reality.

IANAL, and this is just a pipe dream of mine at the moment -- but plenty of pro-consumer legislation has been made over the years. Perhaps the dawn of an unsolicited-advertising-free world is upon us.

> There must be enough users of ad-blockers now to start to significantly affect their bottom line.

I host a bunch of websites, and about five years ago I stuck adsense adverts on them. Due to the decent traffic I was earning about £80/month and that was stable for 3-4 years.

This year, and last year, I instead earned about £100/year, despite having much more traffic/visitors, and more "aged content". When I get a chance I'll rebuild all the sites and drop the adverts. Adblockers - which I use myself - have rendered them almost pointless.

You can always do a direct ad deal if it's the right niche. Better privacy for your users and it's impossible to block.

> [...] and it's impossible to block.

That's not entirely true. Troy Hunt had (and still has) that[1], and his banner got added to EasyList none the less.

[1]: https://www.troyhunt.com/ad-blockers-are-part-of-the-problem...

He keeps calling this a false positive. It's not. Easylist is a list of ads. That is an ad. The ad is listed on the list of ads. He seems baffled by the idea that someone could be against the concept of advertising in general.

Hunt is under the impression that he has a right to force Web clients to consume content like he wants to after it has left his server. This is, of course, not how the Web works, and he should know better. There is no point in getting upset about it and then writing a blog entry. Content blocking is a direct consequence of past abuse. He must understand even though he thinks he does nothing wrong, the bar of acceptability for people who subscribe to content blocker update lists – after past abuse – is: no distraction at all. Having a peace of mind without advertisement intruding into it is a human right. I would be glad if someone could find for me that article making that legal argument.

> He must understand even though he thinks he does nothing wrong, the bar of acceptability for people who subscribe to content blocker update lists – after past abuse – is: no distraction at all.

Simple solution for you then: Don't visit sites with advertising. By repeatedly visiting sites with advertising, you're basically saying, "I want all this content but I'm not willing to support them financially."

A much simpler solution is to keep visiting them.

That's a false dichotomy if I've ever seen one. Operators should choose a way to support themselves financially without the advertisements plague.

So he added an ad to his site and it got added to a list of ads. What's noteworthy here, besides the fact that he doesn't understand what ad blockers are for?

This is the whole point of those filter lists. Otherwise I would have to remove his ad manually, which is undesirable.

I can only speak for myself: but it seems to me that most people aren't against advertising, only the magnitude of advertising and the tracking that goes with it.

AdBlock should be about making the internet tolerable again instead of the cesspit it's slowly becoming, but it's exasterbating the problem.

Troy made a step in the right direction.

Very interesting. I wonder if it's possible to get around by randomizing the element class after each reload - sounds like renaming it worked temporarily.

Similar for my blog/site (>20 years old). But, it used to pay me my hosting costs + a computer component upgrade. Now I get a few pence here and there, an order of magnitude less.

So now it costs me to run it (excluding time considerations of course) whilst before it paid for itself.

Also with sites like Stack Exchange I tend to use them for what I blogged before (computer fixes mainly), so most of my new content nowadays is UGC on other people's sites too. Personal stuff goes on Facebook, on the whole.

Is it definitely ad blockers or have rates also dropped?

I would think it's more likely they legislate against us, i.e. making it a crime to circumvent advertising (see: circumventing DRM).

DMCA was hard to get people upset about. It was all new stuff that most people didn't understand or care about. This was before Napster, even.

People clearly care about net neutrality, and they would/do also care about browser ad blocking. At this point it's clear to people what the issue is and how it affects them. Taking something away from people is much more painful than preventing them from getting it in the first place.

Even if there could be enough lobbying pressure to seriously propose such a law, it would be deeply unpopular and have difficulty passing.

You wouldn't download a car, you wouldn't block an ad! :)

As always: I would download a car if I could :).

Fun fact: the line of the ad was twisted by internet people for meming purposes. The actual line is "You wouldn't steal a car".

I always thought a good answer to this was "well I'd think about copying a car if I could..."

How sweet would that be? Friend gets a car, I make a copy of it at zero cost!

I guess the standard answer to that would be "but you're depriving the manufacturer of money to cover the costs of providing the car in the first place"

Which is reasonable, but I'd have to question their business model if their manufacturing costs are so high and yet I can copy it for free ...

Nah, the standard answer isn't reasonable. They're depriving themselves of that money by choosing a business model that matches neither the customer needs nor physical reality.

In hopes it'll one day turn into a catchphrase: no one is entitled to have a particular business model working for them forever.

In fairness I'd give them that much. There is a quid pro quo between me having a need, and a business providing that need. If it's not commercially viable for a business to then perhaps my need may go unfulfilled.

What irks me is that such a gracious outlook leaves me open to being gouged by profiteers.

So copying it is!

I believe they tried, but it basically never made it out of committee as it's basically the same as banning people from using a highlighter on a book. It became very very clear that not only was it not enforceable but trying to go after the people supplying the adblocker would run into serious human rights issues.

Yep, this is what greedy corporations are willing to do to protect their profit margins.

It's already copyright infringement. In USA Fair Use probably does the necessary; but in UK I'm pretty sure it's infringing (you've modified the work without permission).

I wish them good luck with that.

They're more likely to outlaw adblocking than they are outlaw advertising. Frankly I fear we're nearing the end of a golden age, where those in the know have an incredibly easy time blocking ads with a simple extension while our content providers are funded by the ignorant tech commoners watching ads. I don't want a future where ads are baked right into the YouTube video stream and articles refuse to load until they get confirmation the ads have been downloaded from an ad server.

The funding to produce the media people want to consume has to come from somewhere. If it’s not baked into the video stream, it will be baked into the video itself, aka product placement.

Watch any new movie or TV show, and it’s unbearable to see the videography just to catch a car logo or drink logo. Shame. There’s even been full on descriptions by the actors of a car’s features, basically a commercial within the dialogue of the media.

My solution is to stop consuming it, not that I consumed a lot to begin with, but there’s no other option.

banners and logos obscuring the view, and often mantling plot critical visual details are what turned me off cable and satellite feeds. i just wait until the disc is being sold and enjoy it sans banners. thats not available with the net.

here the state law defines ANY unauthorized access to any computer system as felony, that includes snooping unsecured systems or MANIPULATING FUNCTIONALITY.

You know it's funny, I was watching horrible bosses last night, and was thinking just this. Some fairly blatant product placement for a major car manufacturer.

It didn't spoil the movie though, and in fact the bare-facedness of it even added some humour (-:

I don't think product placement is soooo bad. It's up to you if you're making a movie to make it fit. If you don't it detracts from the quality of your movie which to me seems a good enough motivator to get it right.

We are not helpless in this and we should not just lie down and accept our fate.

On what grounds and by what rationale could adblockers be possibly outlawed? If you cannot answer this question reasonably, then please don't even mention this as a reasonable possibility.

Lobbying from the advertisers?

I personally don’t think it’s very likely, for one thing I expect most of the staff at the likes of Google run an adblocker.

Put the ads in the browser -- not the content. Change chrome to show the ads in the client like an ad supported software, then make it speak a new dmca:// protocol.

This is a problem for the advertisers, they don’t want their most valuable prospects walled off by adblockers.

My guess is we will see much more sponsored content as a response to this.

> The bright side of Google's anti-ad-blocking efforts is that ad-blocking is clearly no longer just an insignificant blip on their radar. There must be enough users of ad-blockers now to start to significantly affect their bottom line.

I think the issue is that shareholders want to see significant year-over-year growth, something that isn't sustainable in the long-term. We're merely being seen as an untapped market than can keep the needle moving for a few more years.

I like capitalism, but I think it's entirely unreasonable for shareholders to expect such gains in perpetuity. After all, there's a finite amount of money that can be extracted from any user. The trendline will inevitably start to level off after a period of time, and I'm frustrated by the fact that this eventuality has negative connotations associated with it.

Here's a thing: the shareholders may very well know not to expect gains in perpetuity, but surely something could be done to boost growth just this last time? Given how much money is at stake, plenty of extreme things can be done before the particular growth source is exhausted. And we all have to suffer the collateral damage.

> Looks like I’m going to rewind 13 years

Well if you had asked your typical HN developer a few years ago whether they'd be using a Microsoft code editor ...

+ Microsoft tool for compiling to JS

+ Microsoft Public/Private Git Hosting :-)

Lets not forget WSL. I just got the WSL2 upgrade - it turns a Windows 10 desktop into a quite decent software developer workstation.

Seriously guys, if the last time you used Windows was a few years ago it is time to give it a another shot.

Isn't the surveillance/telemetry problem still as much of a problem as it was on day zero? As far as I know, it hasn't been removed nor lessened. As far as I remember, it is absolutely overreaching, collecting your name, email address, browsing history, searches, application usage and more.

Microsoft also keeps a copy of your full-disk encryption key. <https://theintercept.com/2015/12/28/recently-bought-a-window...

> As far as I know, it hasn't been removed nor lessened.

IIRC they lessened it by some ε > 0 in 1803. [1]

> As far as I remember, it is absolutely overreaching, collecting your name, email address, browsing history, searches, application usage and more.

Some of these seem more alarming than others. Where are each of these pulled from? If you have a Microsoft account they already have your name and address. Most people use Chrome and I assume Windows isn't sending that info to Microsoft (although this does make me worry for those who use IE/Edge). Searches and application usage I haven't heard explicitly but those would worry me more.

> Microsoft also keeps a copy of your full-disk encryption key.

Wasn't this only when you had a Microsoft account or something? We can debate how they shove MSAs down users' throat (I want to punch my computer when they do that too), but as far as the FDE key is concerned, I feel like those who don't want this also wouldn't want to use a Microsoft account for their logins to begin with?

[1] https://windowsreport.com/windows-10-v1803-privacy/

I'm almost entirely certain that the storing the Bit locker FDE key in your Microsoft account is an optional choice presented during the BitLocker setup.

Recently due to a firmware upgrade losing the key I had to do the disable/enable dance for Bitlocker and you need to store the key somewhere removeable (usb stick etc) which is enough of pain I just went for a Microsoft account.

You can remove them easily enough from a Microsoft account.

It definitely is. It’s not even very prominent - you have to intentionally click on it.

I'm not sure of the details anymore, I was going by my memory.

But to respond to your overall point, there are probably hacks around each of the things I've mentioned, but the point is that I don't feel like using an OS that does these things is a reasonable alternative for me. Particularly because who knows what other kinds of aggressive changes are being concocted for the future. I try to make this point to my family and friends too and they seem to agree.

Thanks for the link though, I'll take a look.

Yup, and all the Turn Off Telemetry toggles are all placebos. I think the only solace one can find from constant phoning home is with the LTSC version of Windows 10, but Microsoft makes it very inaccessible to a home user.

There's also a few custom installers/scripts that people have written to disable the telemetry via PowerShell that are floating around, but I think their up-to-date-ness varies from author to author.

> Seriously guys, if the last time you used Windows was a few years ago it is time to give it a another shot.

What's the point? They do it all the time when things start going bad. It'll turn to garbage as soon as they have enough of mindshare. Why be among the ones who run back and forth?

If the WSL is the only reason windows is a decent development workstation, then why not just use Linux in the first place? What unique factor is Windows offering here?

In a word, drivers. We’ve come a long way since the dark days of the 90s, but hardware support on Linux still lags far, far behind Windows. This shows up in all sorts of ways on a daily basis. Graphics drivers, I’m looking at you Nvidia, are noticeably buggier and slower. Lots of little random errors crop up that are simply unfixable because the hardware mfr isn’t interested. Example: My USB controller resets itself every 15m for some reason. And good luck getting sleep/hibernate to function correctly unless you went out of your way to choose a hardware combination that is known to properly handle PM on Linux (I’m talking every peripheral here). For server-class stuff you’re generally in good shape but desktop Linux is still mostly an afterthought.

> you went out of your way to choose a hardware combination that is known to properly handle PM on Linux

This is no different than with windows. Except that more vendors sell you windows compatible pre-built systems. With macos the situation is far worse.

If you want more Linux enables hardware it will help to vote with your wallet and buy hardware from manufacturers that do provide support for Linux.

no different ... except...

very funny

Being able to run two OS'es at the same time seamlessly is pretty cool. Many programs I use are either Windows or Linux exclusive so it saves me a lot of time rebooting compared to double-booting.

It was a long time ago I had reason to start Windows specific software, but even back then wine did a really good job. It even had functionality for things like running IE versions in parallel, good for the frontenders in the team. And development hasn't slowed down since then.

I would rather not fuck with the OS on my Surface. Not only does it have a bunch of oddball hardware that may or may not have fully-functional drivers on Linux, but Windows has a really good touchscreen UX that I'd rather continue using.

If I need to do serious work, I'll snap the keyboard on and open WSL, but for anything else, I'll detatch the keyboard and just browse the web with Edge.

The last time I used windows was last week.

It's still awful.

Sure, all you have to do is install some extra software and then it's almost passable as a decent Linux.

It's not a great selling point. Not everyone thinks it's productive to switch operating systems once in a while.

but, why? I use Windows 10 and Server all the time and I hate it.

What I really like about using "code" on Ubuntu is the nostalgia.

# name that assumes no other apps exist, check

# randomly freezes, check

# doesn't produce a log without jumping through hoops, check

Seriously though, I only just started using it, looks great ;o)

It is not quit clear what exactly they think regarding ad blocking. Edge team AMA on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/c094uf/hi_reddit_were...

> Looks like I’m going to rewind 13 years and use IE again(IE of today).

Why not using Firefox?

Google has every incentive to believe ads and user surveillance is not evil

Agreed. The problem with a mission statement like “do no evil” is that in today’s pluralistic world (especially in the west), there’s no generally agreed-upon definition of evil.

Philosophically, defining “evil” requires defining “good” first, and a definition of “good” depends entirely on one’s notions of origin, meaning, morality, and destiny — one’s worldview.

In google’s case, it’s probably better business to simply remove the motto than to risk offending large groups of people in the quest for philosophical rigor.

> there’s no generally agreed-upon definition of evil.

Philosophically, yes. But moral relativity does not hold well due to the existence of culture. For western countries, no one can defend the morality of slavery or genocide. While those are pretty extreme, we have also collectively (democratically) decided that screwing over customers for your own profit is also not moral and should not be allowed. That's why antitrust law exists.

And do they agree with you. Google actually dropped the motto sometimes in Q3 2018.

https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/

ctrl + f "don't be evil"

> And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!

Yes, but only for as long as Google allows them to do it in their Chrome mod. Microsoft will keep away from centain Chrome features in Chromium as long as all they need to do is to turn them off. i.e. stay on the same trunk but without certain optional element. Key here is - optional elements. If Google will change something that will require to branch Chromium (and I mean really branch, with internal changes) to stay away from such changes, I highly doubt that MS will do it. They don't wan't or can't to maintain a separate different browser as they already shown with Edge.

I've been running it on the Edge Chromium Dev build for a few weeks now, works great!

Well, that's exciting! I didn't know there was a build [0]!

[0] https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/en-us/

Ditto. Google Meets didn't work for a while, then it did. Now it also has a dark theme.

I've swapped to Edge Beta on my PCs and Brave on my Android.

Since it keeps being misquoted: the motto was "don't be evil", not "don't do evil".

Isn't Microsoft selling ads too? I believe they do (that's why bing was created). If so, I don't trust their ad blocking initiative any more then google's. Maybe in short term, as they want to steal users from Chrome, but in longterm, they'll in same position as google is now.

They probably do, but Microsoft isn’t an ad company like Google, so that danger is probably fairly existential to them.

It is difficult to assess which company is more 'good' or 'evil' nowadays. Microsoft did a lot of good by competing with UNIX in the 90s (Windows NT was cheap compared to UNIX). They also did bad with their embrace & extend and other anti competitive behavior.

Microsoft is a much older company who recently transitioned from being a proprietary software company selling licenses to a company who sell that but who also do services such as cloud (Azure) and who also do all kind of FOSS and tracking (Windows 10).

I fear the future is going to be that the poor are paying with their privacy/time/focus (as a result of advertising and tracking), while the rich buy licenses to pay off the licenses. Heck, it is already like that. My Scrabble clone application (Wordfeud) costs ~3 EUR in the Play Store. The free version costs nothing, but shows ads (not sure about tracking). I figured 3 EUR is a good deal for me for a perpetual license to never see ads. However, 3 EUR for me could be a lot of money for someone who's more poor than me.

A little know fact about IE8 is that it came with a built in content blocking mechanism appropriately called Tracking Protection way back in 2009. IIRC it was the first browser to come with ad blocking built in, although not turn on by default. Opera came with content blocking a bit later.

IE9 improved on it with what I think is one of the most impressive feature to this day. It had a heuristic tracking protection that block trackers once it's detected at a certain re-occurrence counts that you can config. So in theory it doesn't need to subscribed to an ad list like all browsers do today.

IE took a lot of crap deservedly so, but that overshadowed a lot of pioneer works that later browsers adopted.

Speaking for Tracking Protection on IE, the Easylists TPL lists on the official IE gallery site is severely outdated[1] (Last updated Nov 7, 2017) This page from filterlists.com[2] offers an updated collection of TPL lists

[1]https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/iegallery

[2]https://raw.githubusercontent.com/collinbarrett/FilterLists/...

Link?

there was a reddit ama where someone asked about adblockers and they said:

"we occasionally hear requests for a built in ad blocking experiences in Edge. For most users, we find that extensions (combined with strong defaults around tracking prevention) are the best option here because you can choose from a variety of experiences and defaults, but we absolutely want to hear from you if you think this should be built in."

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/c094uf/hi_reddit_were...

The quoted bit was about a built-in ad blocker specifically. I think the real major point is:

“There are a couple components I want to touch on here - As mentioned elsewhere, we're still evaluating the adblock Manifest V3 changes, so we're not quite ready to commit to a statement one way or another on that issue.”

And:

“Second, we're committed to a strong extension ecosystem, including ad blocking. We're still evaluating some of the latest changes here in Chromium, but we're committed to the customer scenario as a principle. To be clear, we will not artificially restrict ad blocking for business reasons related to advertising.”

That's mostly fluff. Google also says they're not restricting ad blocking for business reasons, but for performance, and they haven't banned all ad-blocking, just forced addons to use their new mechanism, so they can still claim to support an ecosystem that includes ad-blocking.

Agreed. It doesn’t mean much, but I thought I would just point out the actual relevant bits even if they don’t hold much weight.

Do you have a link to that?

My only issue is that chrome is great bec I can have multiple profiles on the same windows user account, but that’s kinda anathema to the paradigm of how Microsoft wants us to use Edge.

I use chrome profiles the same way ppl use Firefox containers, my only hope is that edge builds something similar.

I’ve also been using Vivaldi, I love it but I’m worried about using duh a small project that is still dependent on chromium.

Try also Brave. It is fully open source and based on Chromium.

In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20096868 You asked: > Anyone uses FreeBSD on laptop? How is your impressions?

I do since years and here are the tips you may find useful if You would also like to run FreeBSD on the desktop.

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/freebsd-desktop/

... and please stay away from Project Trident or TrueOS or Lumina, they are from from being ready.

... eventually GhostBSD is quite OK.

... sorry for hijacking the 'Brave' thread but I am not able to reply to the original comment (time).

Don't. Brave has so many problematic sides. Just stay away from that one.

Go on?

Apart from the frankly horrendous political views of the founder, they have claimed to collect donations for creators who have never signed up for this.

And, the business concept of blocking other people's ads and showing you their own is pretty despicable in its own right.

Chromium Edge allows multiple profiles just like Chrome.

This is good news.