It's spooky, I tell ya!

50% of adverts are a waste of money, the problem for people wanting to advertise is nobody knows which 50%

Overall FF has been incredibly user friendly making all sort of plugins that focus on privacy possible, while Chrome has been as hostile to it as possible.

I wish that were true. Although uBlock Origin does a good job, some ads definitely still make it through. There are also some sites that detect ad blockers and refuse to let you in unless you disable it. There are workarounds for some of these, but it's still a bit of a mess.

I have yet to come across a site that offered something so unique or compelling that I decided to turn off my ad blocker to use it.

That, and when there's an email subscription popup, is when the one-click JS toggle extension comes out. Can't detect anything if it can't run any code in your browser.

Along with some marketing drivel about how its important advertisers get their ad revenue.

You can object to being targeted based on your browsing habits, but don't stop ads altogether.

There is no level these people will not stoop to, and we're sick of their shit. They brought this on themselves.

document.querySelectorAll('input[type=checkbox]').forEach(el => el.removeAttribute('checked'))

This app hides the popup :)

Each tab group then has its own cookie container, so I can have multiple groups open and they don't share anything - I can login to different google (or any other service) accounts in different contains and it works like I want it to.

For the sites that I want to use logged in, I either create a special container for that site only, or I just use a password manager to log me in each time I need to visit it.

The added privacy is great, the peace of mind in just clicking I agree is great.

I really feel today having different devices with different browsers, connected to different providers is only working solution.

I like the analogy, but I wonder how effective it is on anyone under the age of what, 35?

There was a single telephone company (or it was shortly after there were plural "baby-bells") and the telephone network was a completely private, isolated, network that only the phone company (or baby-bells) even had access to. It was also a network that was heavily regulated such that the possibility of a random attacker from half a world away being able to tap into a phone call as it happened simply did not exist.

In that environment, placing a phone call was considered "secure" (or at least as secure as network isolation and regulation could cause it to become [I'm ignoring NSA style 'state secret' taps, those have likely always been available to NSA style agencies]). So it would have been seen, at that time, as reasonable to use fax machines for document exchange, because the "phone network" was considered to be secure against having a man-in-the-middle tapping off one's communications.

Wind the clock forward thirty years, and have the once isolated and highly regulated telephone network more or less become just another packet protocol on the general Internet, and the choice of using "fax" for secure document exchange sounds ludicrous.

The issue is that the regulations those environments operate under have not been updated in the ensuing thirty years to account for the fact that "phone network" is no longer the once isolated, mostly secure, network it once was. And if the regulations don't get updated, no lowly clerk at the front lines is going to lose their job by _not_ using the comm. system called for by the regulations.

This is such a meaningless statement.

Better?

I should also point to non-Unitedstatians that checks (that physical paper worth as much money as you write and sign on it) are still in use in the USA.

I pay contractors with checks because almost none accept credit cards and cash gets cumbersome once you start getting into 4 and 5 digits.

My local utilities all charge a "convenience fee" of a few dollars when paying online or with a credit card. Sending a check in the mail costs me only $0.50. (Even though it costs them some employee's wages to handle my envelope and cash the check. Go figure.)

Checks are also convenient for transferring small amounts of money to friends and family. Yes, there is Paypal and the like and some of them don't even charge fees but I trust my bank way more than I trust a random company with direct access to my bank account. (Paypal in particular have proven over and over again to be untrustworthy in this regard, which is why not only do I have two Paypal accounts--one for buying and one for selling--but I also have a special "firewall" account between PayPal and my main checking account. This is so that the most they can grab is a couple hundred dollars on average, rather than some arbitrary fraction of my life's savings.)

Checks are sometimes the easiest (or only) way to move large amounts of money between my own accounts. There was a time where most online bank accounts would let you make ACH ("electronic checks") transfers to any other account, but they seem to be moving away from this, I presume due to its high use in fraud.

I'm guessing this is why several US payment companys and start-ups just don't make any sense to me: "make payments easier!"

but it's hard for me to understand how to make it easier than just typing in someone's phone number or email and sending them money, or purchasing via tap and go with your card/ phone. Don't you at least have electronic transfers if not those other newfangled technologies? are you (seriously) suggesting you can't transfer money between your accounts?

Because of how and when it got computerized, it's hard to move it forward again. There's no desire for sweeping changes, everything has to move slowly now.

There are several personal transfer services (PayPal is ancient and fits the mold), but none have a lot of penetration. I think Zelle? is deployed through bank integration, and may end up with a lot of users as a result; possibly critical mass.

There was a lot of backlash on rf payments the first go round, a few issuers gave me cards with it, but then they removed it. Then they started issuing cards with chips, and now most of them are putting rf payments back in. A lot of payment terminals have the hardware for it, but a lot of them also have signs that say don't tap to pay.

I can easily do electronic (ACH) between my accounts, as long as I've gone through setup, which takes days for test deposits to show up. But to transfer to a friend or a relative is tricky.

US banks suck for a lot of reasons but part of it is that culturally and regulatorily the entire financial/banking/commercial environment in the US is very conservative. And there's not much in the way of pressure to make changes either - whether internally from competition and regulation or externally from the need to interact with other countries. Like broadband, consumer banking is basically an oligopoly that will quite happily plod along providing the same service as long as it can.

Wire transfers are expensive here; my credit union which doesn't generally have high fees, charges $29 to send a wire (they don't charge for incomming wires, but some banks do). I've had some brokerages with free wires, but usually that's tied to a balance requirement or in connection with a company sponsored account (for stock based compensation or retirement accounts).

The US does have some electronic networks for instant, no-cost p2p payments. https://www.zellepay.com/ has a large number of participating major banks with some major exceptions. A lot of people use https://venmo.com/ or https://cash.app/ which are not directly integrated with banks but then offer electronic transfer of funds to bank accounts.

Writing a check is the fastest way for me to transfer between two accounts. :(

Many shops don’t accept them, some banks have already stopped using them altogether, and the rest of the major banks are phasing them out this year.

A cheque is a rare thing to see (I haven’t handled one for a decade or so?)

That's leaving out the "automatic bill pay" function of my bank's web site, which, for most payees, at the end of the day results in physical paper checks being printed and sent in envelopes.

That varies a lot by jurisdiction. I'm 50 and I haven't written a single check in my entire life. (Sweden.)

[0] https://www.irs.gov/instructions/iss4

I still laugh about how he got several cease and desist letters and still continued sending the same businesses stuff.

Ahhhhhhh yeah, the good old days.

At least for those of us that were late adopters of text messages.

On linux you can use [efax](https://linux.die.net/man/1/efax) and a modem and... ooops, good luck finding a modem.

I did this for real ~10 years ago when a stupid company didn't accept a scanned PDF by email and required a fax of the actual document "because security". The difference is that I had a modem in an old laptop at that time, so I just send them the same scanned PDF.

Now I'm wondering if there is a provision for sending faxes somewhere in the GSM/3G/4G rabbit hole of standards.

I have bookmarked them from long ago.

Every other credit agency had no problem with my SSN + address then Equifax throws a flag, locks my account and says I have to validate my identity by faxing them identity documents.

Fat chance, idiots.

It’s more like complaining that your sole of your shoes is being worn out more because grocery stores put the milk in the back forcing you to walk past items you don’t intend to buy. You can always go to a different store just like you no one is forcing you to browse websites that are ad supported.

It's profitable because a few people want to influence and spy on a lot of people.

Most people don't want ads they just tolerate them for getting actual services. Most these people don't even know how much tracking is involved and how nefarious this industry really is.

Perhaps you’re invested in the ad industry. No one else wants ads buddy.

Most of that VC cash startups raise is spent on marketing. I don’t understand why people have such negative perception of ads especially on a VC run news site. All the ycomb companies drops tens of millions on digital advertising.

We talked a little bit about how these ads still work, even without tracking you. You might be losing 10-15% of revenue, but if you never had that revenue to start with, you don't miss it: https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2018/04/ethical-advertising-w...

I think the real secret is just to not become dependent on the additive revenue. All businesses forgo additional revenue based on ethics and regulation, and I don't understand why that's such a odd thing to do with advertising.

> All businesses forgo additional revenue based on ethics and regulation, and I don't understand why that's such a odd thing to do with advertising.

The great bulk of advertising is built upon a conflict of interest and is essentially manipulative. Consider, for example, an article. Both the writer and the reader want the reader's maximum attention on the article for as long as the reader cares to give it. The goal of advertising is to distract from that in hopes of extracting money from the reader. Generally, ads are constructed without much regard to whether the reader was intending to buy or would really benefit from the product. The goal is to make a sale. (If you doubt me, look at how many people who create or show ads, say, test a product before putting the ad in front of people. Or just look at tobacco advertising, a product that has killed hundreds of millions.)

So I think there's an inherent lack of ethics to ads as an industry. It could be that you'll find enough people who are worried about privacy but not about the other stuff to build a business. But I wouldn't bet on it. It's no accident that this security hole is being closed not because of random miscreants but because of industrial-scale exploitation.

I use Firefox with Strict Enhanced Tracking Protection [0] and Privacy Badger [1] as an extra layer of protection. Some sites, mostly news orgs, complain that I'm blocking ads, but inevitably these are the sites Privacy Badger reports 20+ trackers blocked. I'm happy to see ads online, I'm just not willing to sacrifice my privacy for them.

[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote... [1] https://privacybadger.org/

I don't love advertising in many of it's forms, but taken from the viewpoint of those who make money from ads (i.e. content creators), it is one of the best ways out there for them to make a living. Platforms like Patreon are great for some folks, but not everyone can make a living off of sponsorship from their viewers. But, I am not willing to sacrifice my own privacy to allow someone else to make money, especially given that we have tonnes of examples of non-privacy-invading advertising that works.

I listen to 8-10 hours of podcasts a week and I generally find the ads on them, usually where the host does an ad read and includes a discount code, to be far more useful and relevant to me than the hyper-targeted ads backed by 20 tracking scripts I see on news sites. Another example, many of the indie tech news sites I read (e.g. Daring Fireball or Six Colors) will have a weekly sponsor that will have an advertising post or two interspersed with their regular content. I'm happy to take 2-3 minutes out of a 30 minute podcast episode to listen to a couple ad reads or see a brief write-up of a sponsor's product as I'm scrolling through the week's tech news. What I'm not happy to do is have my web browser load a dozen tracking scripts in the background when I open a news article and have flashing pictures deliberately trying to distract me from what I'm reading.

Fundamentally serving an advert should be a light process adding only a tiny amount of overhead to the site.

If I want to buy something, I seek it out. Anything else is a waste of my time and a waste of the advertisers money.

I long ago decided to throw out every piece of physical ad mail I receive without even glancing at it more than long enough to recognize it as an advertisement.

I don’t know why you expect me to treat your digital ads any differently?

You can call my perspective extremist, but is it any more extreme than the methods used by advertising networks to steal my attention?

I'm curious, how many services do you subscribe to and pay for content? I pay for a few ad free resources, but certainly a lot of the sites I enjoy don't get my $$.

This isn't "ad free" but it's close enough in my opinion. There's a huge gulf between contextually relevant content curated by the creators and the kind of shite that ad networks push.

I think a service that allows for website usage based payments, a Spotify/Apple News for websites would be interesting. I can see a decentralized crypto application evolving around this usecase

Payment from one user produces more revenue than showing ads to hundreds of users. That should be multiplied in to any analysis of friction.

> I think a service that allows for website usage based payments, a Spotify/Apple News for websites would be interesting.

There have been many attempts to do that, none of which have succeeded. One major problem: they tend to track all your web activity, and the kinds of people interested in services like this are very much the kinds of people who don't want to be tracked. Another problem: it's easier to convince people to pay for a specific source of content than to amorphously pay for "various content".

The problem with charging per click or impression is that you're vulnerable to fraud which means you either lose money/trust or you have to do invasive tracking to detect & prevent fraud (which you'll be unlikely to achieve as well as the big players - Google & Facebook - do). Charging per amount of time (regardless of actual impressions or clicks) doesn't have that problem.

Do you have a good example of how this is priced, and how it would work in practice?

Determining the price will be a bit tricky (and I would expect that you'd have to lowball yourself until your platform builds credibility in terms of good ROI) but in the long run it should mean your advertisers pay a flat price to be included per week/month regardless of actual impressions or clicks (thus there's no fraud potential as only the raw profit from the ads will matter - the only "fraud" potential would be to literally buy the advertised product en masse).

Thanks for following up.

Advertising is a cynical deployment of our knowledge of crowd wisdom, media manipulation, and statistics to make people part with their money for things they wouldn't think they needed. Our economy can't handle this kind of reckless consumerism anymore.

Worse yet, we don't need advertising to bolster our media. Unfortunately, the media execs don't realize this yet.

All your metrics are fuzzy, your standards ridiculous. We have far better practices we can deploy than the ones the advertisers use.

Please, stop advertising to us. If that's all you plan to do with this new company, can you please kindly go away?

How do you propose that companies should promote their products and services, if not through advertising?

Are you somehow suggesting that they should just sit there and hope that people who have never heard of their product independently decide they happen to want or need that product and seek it out, unprompted?

You say "people part with their money for things they wouldn't think they needed, Our economy can't handle this kind of reckless consumerism anymore": Surely you don't think you speak for everyone?

You certainly don't speak for me.

I am not some blind sheep who is suckered into buying things I don't need. I am a grown adult who can make informed decisions with my money, including sometimes buying frivolous or unnecessary things.

I hate these arguments that assume everyone is stupid except for the person making the argument. It feels like there's some weird savior complex at work.

People have free will and are allowed to spend their money as they wish, and I think YOU are the cynical one if you think otherwise..

Yeah, it's even got a name: shopping.

So, for direct to consumer companies who only ship online, SEO?

Here's the thing: ads can be useful.

Awhile back I got a, highly targeted, ad for high protein sugar free cereal. That's awesome! I am 100% the target audience for that product, and until I saw that ad I had no clue it existed! To find a product like that I'd have to search for it, but I would never search for an entire new category of product that I didn't know about.

Same thing for the fitness app I am using (BodBot, it is amazing!). I am quite literally healthier right now because of a targeted advertisement.

Was I aware of fitness apps before then? Sure. But the ad for BodBot was informative about what features differentiated it from the literally hundreds, if not thousands, of other competing apps.

Do most ads suck? Sure. Should ads be highly invasive? Nope. But interest tracking and basic targeting actually help me find products and services that I want to buy!

Facebook in particular, for all the things wrong with it (long list!) has some amazingly relevant ads that inform me of products that I never knew about.

Those who want to shop know where to go. Those who don't, know where to avoid.

Perhaps there is a way we can both enjoy the internet in our preferred ways. Perhaps not, I don't know.

Or do you have infinite time to go browse every single store in your city on the odd chance that you'll see something you want?

I get the point you're making, but I hope you realize you're just backpedaling from your original "no advertisements ever!" statement.

I believe in giving people better control over how they receive ads (I personally run an ad blocker in my browsers and a Pi Hole on my network), but you position that there should be no advertising at all, and that all ads are unethical is just silly, and you're proving that point yourself here..

The false dichotomy you pose is ridiculous. People seek out information on what to buy all the time. But when I am listening to music, watching television or film, or reading a fucking news article, that is not the time I want to be given that information. It is unsolicited and I don't care about it.

People seek out information on what to buy because at some point they found out about it via (perhaps indirectly) the provider's promotional efforts (i.e. advertising).

We can certainly talk about the appropriateness of when an where to advertise, but that's a very different topic than your ALL ADS ARE UNETHICAL screeds that you've posted in like a dozen threads on this topic from 2 different accounts..

Never mind continuing to believe that somehow those of us who engage with advertising are lying to ourselves or somehow less in control of things than you?

Now who's spinning a web..

A bit more color here: https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2016/aug/31/funding-oss-ma...

However, that does not mean I have to agree to advertising -- whether it is labeled ethical, green, sustainable, cage-free or whatever. If you're lucky, you won't have a lot of extremists like myself visiting your site; i.e. the advertising will be successful.

We could use help, particularly from anyone who's good with css.

Comments are a cynical deployment of our knowledge of crowd wisdom, media manipulation, and statistics to make people part with their opinions for others they wouldn't think they agree with.

--

Sorry, there is such a think as "more" ethical ads. If you want to be pedantic and argue they should use "more" suit yourself. But things are not black and white, your comment is in itself "manipulating" the reader trying to convince them that ads are all the same and that they cannot be put on an ehtical spectrum which is not true: tracking ads vs billboard, I'd much rather a billboard (which I hate in and on itself as they are usually just making the place they are in uglier).

And while you are not "trying" to manipulate anyone (maybe), I also disagree that you are not effectively influencing your reader thoughts to some degree.

The analogy I made is: even an internet comment does, on a smaller scale, less maliciously, use persuasion techniques: should we get rid of discussion forums too? I don't think so, and while an ad-less world seems like a nice experiment, sounds pretty unrealistic, regulating (outlawing would be nice) tracking in ads? More realistic and fixing 80% of what's wrong with 20% of the effort if you ask me

But that does not mean I have to partake in them, watch them, or allow them to consume my attention and time. I also don't need to spend my limited time on this planet trying to "fix advertising". I can simply block them and ignore the ones that slip through, and get on with my life. If this is an issue that is dear to your heart, that sentiment undoubtedly feels dismissive. I'm sorry about that.

Because I wonder what percentage of bandwidth (in terms of bytes) trackers/banners/ads account for.

Need to set up a pi-hole ... just too many other projects....

My pihole is showing 18.7%-23% of requests blocked :)

It would be nice to know how much we're wasting.

Is it their content to do what they want with? Sure.

Does the same logic apply to the $9 I used to give them each month? You're damn right.

Normal display ads all being blocked is generally fine 99% of the time, but if you care about not being permanently tracked across the internet then there are a couple more domains you have to add - except some sites make it mandatory that those invasive fingerprinting scripts and port scanners run and report back a session, otherwise you're refused login or banned.

They focus not only on tracking but also malware prevention, where possible via dns filtering.

Pi-Hole still does not properly support wildcard filtering, only via regex but that is not really efficient (requires tons of resources).

wget --quiet "http://PIHOLE_IP/admin/api.php?disable=60&auth=YOUR_API_TOKE..."

You can find the token in the pihole Web GUI at, Settings > API/Web Interface > Show API token

An no, there isn't "tons of alternatives". In theory there is. But in practice, they can really make your life harder. Some may say that Signal is an alternative for WhatsApp, but if people you communicate with don't want to use anything but WhatsApp, then Signal is useless. I hate Facebook but when I want to plan an event, I found nothing better, simply because that's the platform that reaches the most people. Network effects... But also, your favorite show may not be on "alternative" streaming platforms, sometimes your job, or worse, the government may require a specific website.

There are extremists who are ready to find alternative friends, shows or jobs just to avoid using some website. It is a good thing these people exist, that's how progress is made. But for most people you have to make compromises.

Ah! That's why I haven't missed Facebook. I am old enough that I don't plan events any longer.

(Or maybe I have no social life. Actually, that's right, I don't. ;-))

Best part? Trying to convince the operators of such sites that users they cannot see in their "analytics solution" are worth fixing their site for is not exactly a straightfoward job - from their narrow view, these users simply do not exist, because the tracking does not show them!

I can't effectively keep a mental black list of all the sites which I don't want to click on.

As of now, it is called whitelist/blacklist in PiHole [0]. Maybe it will change, maybe it will not, but there is already a place to fight that battle [1] and it is not HN.

[0] https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/misc/whitelist-blacklist/

[1] https://github.com/pi-hole/AdminLTE/issues/1448

If the terms whitelist/blacklist are hurtful to some people because of all the racial baggage we've applied to the words white and black, why not switch to allow/deny instead?

Using allow/deny is more explicit and doesn't rely on the benign cultural associations with the colors black and white. The choice of colors used here is arbitrary. For example, one could just as easily use green/red in reference to traffic signal colors. Ask yourself, would it bother you if we used blue and pink for allow and deny? What if we used blue or white as synonymous with deny?

Two good reasons exist to change our habits, basic manners and clarity.

I'm sure I'll use the terms blacklist and whitelist from time to time out of accumulated habit. But there's no reason for me to cling to those terms. Being gently reminded to use objectively clearer terminology shouldn't engender hostility on my part. I try not to be an unpleasant person, part of that is when someone tells me my behavior has a negative impact on them, I try to listen to what they say and modify my behavior--while actually effecting change can be hard, the underlying concept is pretty simple.

Of course, my coworkers don't represent all black people, and especially wouldn't claim to represent African Americans, but if even black people can hold this opinion, are you surprised others don't see this as worth the effort to change?

This is an OSS project. If someone cares enough about it, they should submit a (non-breaking) patch along with a patch for the documentation. There are no costs to people who don't find it a valuable change.

> My experience talking to black (one African, one European) coworkers is their reaction is "That's the problem you're going to fix?".

Obviously this isn't fixing any of the fundamental issues, but it does bother some people. My preference is to respect the people who have problems with it. An easy policy is to simply avoid creating new software which uses that terminology and to accept any patches which fix it. That way the people who feel the change is important bear the burden of the cost (which is likely small some thing like this).

And throwing aside 600 years of clarity for "basic manners" also seems rather weird. Sort of like banning the word "engender" because a small minority might find that to be offensive. It isn't clearer to use a different word than has been used for over half a millennium.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_n...

Should all terms for the colour-that-is-somewhat-the-absence-of-colour now be banned? Is Vanta Black now racist?

Manufactured controversy leads you down a path of absurdism. It isn't helpful to the people it purports to help, whilst granting the vocal group the ability to say they're being helpful whilst actively ignoring any actual problems.

But my point is that, if people took the time to learn the background, perhaps (in both of these examples, and others), we could avoid the kerfuffles.

Nor can I find any example where blacklist is not a list of denied subjects. A blacklisted person, website or process is immediately clear within their context.

Where the clarity is lacking is not clear to me. However the mismatch between "allow list" and "whitelist", is. The latter seems to have a different meaning altogether.

Sorry but I find this claim (which I've heard from others too) ridiculous. "Blacklist" is an actual common English word in the dictionary. "Denylist" is an incredibly awkward-sounding neologism without any context or history behind it. There is no way that "denylist" is the "objectively clearer" one here.

EDIT: apparently setting allowlist/denylist won't work so it's not just being pedantic, it's wrong.

So, I kind of see the point.

To fix the problem, we either have to stop referring to any metaphor/symbol involving color with negative connotations; or we have to stop using color to identify and refer to people. I think the former is good for precision (allowlist/denylist are great identifiers in that regard), but won't really solve our other problems; while the latter is probably better for human dignity, mutual respect, and combating our propensity for tribalism/racism. (Or, why not, we could do both.)

Yes you have to log in to the interface unless you engineer a way around it

Can be nice to use to quickly disable pihole to get through to a particular website.

When I need to access ads.google.com or analytics.google.com for my company, I turn on Cloudflare, and pihole is bypassed.

I'm all for news sites, for example, hoisting ads if I knew they were getting the money from those ads, knew the ads were actually coming from their site.

I wonder if you could hijack those requests at your router and send them back to your Pi-Hole? But then they just switch to DNS over TLS...

In the corporate world, I think the future is managing your network by managing every single device on your network. Only let authorized/corp devices in and all those devices must be enrolled in an MDM solution that enforces all sorts of policy and includes monitoring traffic/DNS queries. Of course that's a lot more work than just monitoring things at the network level.

Your computer sends the raw domain name to pi-hole (e.g. ads.google.com), and pi-hole returns 0.0.0.0 if it's on the block list.

There's nothing Google or anyone can do to make pi-hole stop working.

For now, I've configured my router to force all UDP port 53 traffic to my Pi-Hole which overrides what I mentioned above.

But, in the future we may start to see IoT Devices hard-code DoH servers which will be harder to force over to the Pi-Hole.

Oh wow, how do you do that?

  [i] Target: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/hosts
  [] Status: Retrieval successful
  [i] Received 59896 domains

  [i] Target: https://mirror1.malwaredomains.com/files/justdomains
  [] Status: Not found
  [] List download failed: using previously cached list
  [i] Received 26854 domains

  [i] Target: https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_tracking.txt
  [] Status: No changes detected
  [i] Received 34 domains

  [i] Target: https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_ad.txt
  [] Status: No changes detected
  [i] Received 2701 domains

  [i] Target: https://dbl.oisd.nl/
  [] Status: Retrieval successful
  [i] Received 1167690 domains

  [i] Target: https://phishing.army/download/phishing_army_blocklist_extended.txt
  [] Status: Retrieval successful
  [i] Received 21379 domains

  [i] Target: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/deathbybandaid/piholeparser/master/Subscribable-Lists/ParsedBlacklists/AakList.txt
  [] Status: Retrieval successful
  [i] Received 5 domains

  [i] Target: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/deathbybandaid/piholeparser/master/Subscribable-Lists/ParsedBlacklists/Prebake-Obtrusive.txt
  [] Status: Retrieval successful
  [i] Received 3 domains

  [i] Target: https://gitlab.com/quidsup/notrack-blocklists/raw/master/notrack-blocklist.txt
  [] Status: Retrieval successful
  [i] Received 14724 domains

  [i] Target: https://gitlab.com/quidsup/notrack-blocklists/raw/master/notrack-malware.txt
  [] Status: Retrieval successful
  [i] Received 412 domains

  [i] Target: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hectorm/hmirror/master/data/adaway.org/list.txt
  [] Status: Retrieval successful
  [i] Received 9182 domains

  [i] Target: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hectorm/hmirror/master/data/disconnect.me-ad/list.txt
  [] Status: Retrieval successful
  [i] Received 2701 domains

  [i] Target: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/notracking/hosts-blocklists/master/hostnames.txt
  [] Status: Retrieval successful
  [i] Received 209608 domains

https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

What is the advantage of having DNS on a separate device other than that it provides ad blocking for multiple devices?

But also you can have more flexible block patterns. I run DNSCrypt-Proxy and my block lists can have wildcards. With /etc/hosts you have to enumerate each origin. It can also do things like IP blocking where if any domain resolves to a known ad network IP, then that request is blocked.

But mainly, DNSCrypt-proxy encrypts all my outgoing queries and round robins them across resolvers. (Also hi dheera!)

Kid's computer has dnsmasq as a similar solution.

Obviously not a NextDNS specific issue, it’d happen with anything that blocks the call, but just putting it out there for the next sucker that tries to google why their IKEA gateway suddenly stops responding.

Even if you did share a URL with another site, the benefit is low compared to what you can do with same-domain requests. Most sites should be served with HTTP 2 already, which means even unoptimized sites should still load decently fast as requests aren't as expensive as they used to. You can get almost all of the same bandwidth benefits from a cross-domain cache by just making sure your own resources are being cached for a long time.

It's just frustrating that it's one more optimization that is getting turned off. And makes the internet just a tiny bit worse as a result. It's like death by a thousand cuts.

It's almost impressive how they manage to load so much crap. Just visit a site like mediaite.com, the list of trackers is damn long.

I have a community site I want to build. If it stays small I can probably run it for $20 a month all in and not pester anyone. But I’m still keeping my eye on some of the saner ad networks that use subject matter instead of user tracking to target ads. That might be an option.

Linus tech tips has a video where he gives us a peek into their finances. Among other things the merchandizing arm makes them about a third of their revenue, and no one advertiser is allowed to pay more than that, so they can maintain a degree of objectivity. I think a lot of us don’t want to approach sponsors so we feel sort of stuck with ad networks.

And I’m not much of a materialist but I’m a tool nerd (you possibly don’t need it, but if you’re gonna buy it, get a really good one) so I’m not sure how I’d do merchandizing, since I’m more likely to recommend a brand than have something made for us. That leaves what? Amazon’s “influencer” BS, which is more money for Amazon? Discount codes, which are untargeted consumerism?

For every site I've developed and have been tasked with adding adverts, and every colleague that I have worked with that has done the same:

- Yes, we are aware.

- Yes, we doth protest.

- No, we were not successful.

How demotivating. It was time to start thinking about moving on anyway, but I basically stopped trying to pursue contract renewal at that point. All that work (and uncomfortable meetings) so Google could triple our load time.

You load one ad and they want their own analytics or they try to stuff multiple ads into the same slot so you get multiple analytics.

We clocked one ad at 800Mb loaded once.

The really frustrating thing about this bit is that because it disables optimizations, it potentially impacts sites where they don't actually use tracking.

I don't object to (silent, low resource, banner) ads, even targeted ones, as long as the targeted ads aren't building a comprehensive profile of me.

I think my ideal would be telling my browser a list of a couple interest areas (prosumer tech, sci-fi, dog peripherals) that the website could target on to serve ads. They'd get targeted ads, I'd get privacy, and I'd get ads that actually match things I care about.

Anyway one more thing that I can observe on Ubuntu 20.04. Firefox has become noticeably faster. I dont know if this is due to the fact that is not from ubuntu repositories or some serious optimizations were made.

"On Linux, the WebRender compositing engine is enabled by default for the GNOME desktop environment session with Wayland. In the previous release, WebRender support was activated for GNOME in the X11 environment. The use of WebRender on Linux is still limited to AMD and Intel graphics cards, as there are unresolved problems when working on systems with the proprietary NVIDIA driver and the free Noveau driver."

(Fax machine enthusiasts, please stop abusing the thread and move to Ask HN or something)

[1] https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/

1. https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/abp/

Indeed. The brave move would be to firefox to include built-in adblock, but I don't think Mozilla has the cojones.

>Of course we'll have the inevitable guy pop in here and talk up how awesome web tracking is because it helps sites monetize better, but that's all bullshit.

I think if adblocker usage became widespread we would in fact see the death of a lot of websites, but to be perfectly honest I kinda want that to happen because advertising is cancer.

What I’m saying is that a lot of applications have many attackers in their threat models, but advertisers have so far been out of scope.

The latest casualty was podcasts. It's revolting.

Ad-based businesses need to be boycotted until this disease is in lasting remission.

Hmm?

Yes, there are adverts on all the podcasts I listen to. Many of my favorites offer members only ad-free versions. Usually I suffer through the ad supported versions because the adverts are easy enough to skip.

Some podcasts have too many adverts or annoyingly inserted advertising. Those are pretty 1 and done. No point listening to them.

IMO the (current) podcast market is a good example of how we can enjoy content and know the producers are compensated without having to deal with obtrusive marketing crap.

It is getting clear some podcasting is getting sucked into things like Spotify, but there is still enough good content I don't think it's a problem.

Do you feel people should volunteer their time gratis to entertain you?

What Hacker News does with adverts slipped into the newsfeed is essentially the same as what podcasters do.

> Do you feel people should volunteer their time gratis to entertain you?

No. They can do as they please. I'd prefer them to do it for the sake of it, or charge in a direct matter like a subscription model. However they should not, never, try to manipulate me for their profit.

I merely said the scene dominated by enthusiasts/hobbyists changed to a predominantly revenue-focused environment. You see the same dynamic at play, which made youtube the signal:noise hell it is today.

Mind you, the German and American podcast scene were very different in that regard, as in America monetization of every possible creation seems to be much more common. I assume this is down to a different set of factual constraints and values.