Some pages don't let you "Reject All" cookies, you have to uncheck them one by one, and there's literally hundreds of ad networks listed.

It's spooky, I tell ya!

Use your browser settings to block third-party cookies altogether. And, better yet, install uBlock Origin and never see an ad again.

Doesn’t Google grant itself first-party status by redirecting you through an advertisement domain? µBlock definitely is the king of ad blocking extensions — only the fork AdNauseam (https://adnauseam.io/) can compete, and that’s by both blocking ads and fighting back with obfuscating click simulation.

Hmm. I think it would be better if the extension clicked randomly rather than clicked on all ads. That would cause the numbers to be much harder to interpret, and ad agencies or departments would have a much harder time measuring their efficacy or justifying their existence.

Me too, and it provides a slider for the percentage to click that I kept below 100 when I used it (now I use Palemoon, which doesn’t support WebExtensions, and I use /etc/hosts).

You can change the click frequency in the settings. I guess it would be better to make that setting a part of the splash page that shows up on installation, though, as otherwise many will miss it.

> ad agencies or departments would have a much harder time measuring their efficacy or justifying their existence.

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

this. this is the way i solve this. They can use all the cookies they want, ublock tends to just eliminate all of it.

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.

> never see an ad again

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.

If a website doesn't let me in because I use an ad blocker, I respect their decision and I leave the site and find what I need elsewhere.

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.

> There are also some sites that detect ad blockers and refuse to let you in unless you disable 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.

It can "detect" if JS is disabled (by loading content via JS) so this doesn't always work.

I agree, although to add, uBlock Origin has an 'annoyances' list that does a pretty good job of stopping detectors.

Thanks for the reminder that I hadn't enabled this in my current browser :)

Unless you get the pop-up from the site that says, "We see you're using an ad blocker. You need to turn it off in order to access our site."

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

This is when you revoke that website's privilege to run arbitrary Turing-complete code in your browser because it didn't use it wisely.

Please don't. Unless you are willing to pay for the services you are using for free now, ads is what keeps them "free".

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

Eh, I get where you're coming from, but no. The ad industry is insidious and has exploited every means possible to hijack the user's attention: pop-ups, flashing banners, auto-playing videos with sound, inline ads that reflow what you're reading after they take way too long to load, extensions that insert ads, paying ISPs to insert ads, talking to Alexa through your TV...

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

It's my device and it's my choice what it's allowed to load and display to me. It's not my responsibility to make sure someone who provides their service for free earns money from shitting into my brain. Implied contracts aren't a thing for me. If you want to make sure you get paid for your service, put up a paywall.

Too late. They had their chance and blew it.

Ad networks had their chance, it's done now.

I seem to always have this handy snippet in my dev tools history:

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

https://github.com/oblador/hush if you use safari :) Basically the regulations say that if a user doesn't respond to this popup, by default all the cookies are rejected except the ones the site needs.

This app hides the popup :)

Sites can set as many cookies as they want. I have installed temporary containers (that is a Firefox only feature sadly), 15 minutes after I close the last tab in that group all those cookies are automatically deleted.

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.

How do you circumvent browser fingerprinting? If every container has the same user agent, canvas, screen resolution, JS benchmark test results, etc. then no matter what but you are uniquely identified, bingo!

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

I wonder how many people reading this comment are thinking, "what's a fax machine?" :o)

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

I'm old enough to remember (like New Coke) ZapMail by FedEx where you would send documents by FedEx and FedEx would Fax it on their equipment to a location near the recipient for physical delivery. Obligatory Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapmail. Hey, most businesses didn't have one of those newfangled FAX machines.

Newfangled? It will enter its third century in a decade or so.

So just fangled

I think it's sufficiently geriatric to be considered oldfangled.

You might be surprised how many of us under-35s still have to use Fax machines on a regular basis ;)

Especially anyone who works in law, government, banking, or healthcare.

I love that some of the most-sensitive information users are the ones hanging on to a completely-unsecured transmission method. Sure, tell me again about all those HIPAA and SOX requirements when we still have fax machines.

You have to keep in mind the time when these requirements to "use fax" for security came about.

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.

or Microsoft

Counts as government.

Especially in Japan.

> You might be surprised

This is such a meaningless statement.

This below 35 yr old discovered a fax machine. You won't believe what happened next!

Better?

I had to use a Fax machine in 2018. In the United States. As the only acceptable way to submit certain documents.

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 still use checks because in the US there are certain things you can't use a credit card for, e.g. loan payments.

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.

what on earth is banking doing over there in the US? I wouldn't know how to write a cheque these days if I wanted to, and the only cheque I've seen in the last 10 years or so is from my (now deceased) grandmother in-law sending birthday money to my wife.

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?

Banking in the US has first mover disadvantage.

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.

The first digital computers were used by banks within years of each other - 1955 for BoA in the USA, 1958 for BNP in France and 1959 for Barclays in the UK. And those machines merely took over from existing calculating systems that had been in place for a good couple of decades.

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.

Can't you use a wire-transfer or an ACH transfer? All those use cases are easily solved with electronic transactions in most of Europe, Asia and even in Latin American countries like brazil. They are usually inexpensive or free and instantaneous.

ACH in the US is not simple to use. Companies that accept ACH payments are using a payment processor that comes with a fee (usually less than credit card fees); contractors aren't going to set that up. Consumer to consumer transfers built on ACH have increased in the last couple of years, but with low limits, inappropriate for contractors, and generally with terms of service prohibitting business use. It's easy to move money between my accounts with tools based on ACH, though. There's nowhere at my bank where I can say send $x to a routing number and account number, it takes a bunch of setup work.

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).

In the US, wire transfers can incur fees for both sender and recipient. ACH is more often used by medium to large businesses transferring money from or to consumers, but the ergonomics are pretty bad for one-off person to person transfers, to the point that if you hire a plumber who owns their own business, they'll probably accept check, and sometimes accept credit cards.

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.

Australia too. Electronic transfers here are free and instant. When I used to rent I just set up a recurring payment through my bank’s website (free and easy, with any bank to any bank). Now my mortgage gets taken out each month automatically via a direct deposit authorisation. (ACH equivalent).

Wire transfers from my bank in the US require me to call up and make a request.

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

New Zealand is phasing out cheques.

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?)

Checks still in use in Canada as well. I had a person today tell me they had 3 checks stolen and cashed and my response was “people still use checks?”.

The demise of checks is greatly exaggerated. I've written about 70 or so checks in the last 5 years. Mostly: Property taxes, home improvement contractors, dues for various clubs and social groups, kids activities, and some mail-in retailers who simply don't take credit card.

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.

> The demise of checks is greatly exaggerated.

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

Yeah, only cashed in checks from US and U.K. Each time I need to find out how to do it! Think three checks in 40years ain’t bad

I have only ever paid once with a check here in Denmark. I won't ever do it again, because no bank that I know of will issue a paper check.

In Canada it's spelled cheque, I have no idea why. </pedantry>

Still in us but much less than the US. Interac bank transfer has cut on a lot of that usage.

I maintain a legacy service at work (I originally wrote it back in 2014) that is responsible for sending eFaxes from our various other services and platforms. It's one of the most internally trafficked services we have. We're in the healthcare space. Almost every document created on our different platforms results in a fax being sent.

For the SS-4 form, to get the Employer Identification Number, you have to either make a phone call (fairly long, half na hour in my case), send a fax (and get the EIN in 4 days) or apply by email and... wait 4-5 weeks! [0]

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

A small business owner I used to work for got sued for fax blasting people when the marketing company he hired was sending out some 2K faxes per day to unsuspecting business owners.

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.

I’m in the age group you mention and although I’ve only used a fax twice, I can totally understand the analogy.

Easy enough to just use "text messages" since it was not very long ago that you had to pay to receive them but had no ability to block them without disabling them entirely.

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

This also depends on where you're from - I had a cell phone for the past ~20years and only learned that you pay for receiving texts in the US when I first visited, ~9 years ago.

My bank still accepts fax documents. All I would have to do is find a fax machine ...

> My bank still accepts fax documents. All I would have to do is find a fax machine ...

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’m not sure if it required anything from the network, but my Siemens C35 could send faxes

GSM yes, but once phones went digital that capability was lost.

GSM phones are digital and include a special FAX mode.

One of my previous employees had a Kofax server with 6 ISDN lines for faxing. D in ISDN stands for Digital.

Try this online fax service: https://www.faxrocket.com/#!/start

I have bookmarked them from long ago.

Unsurprisingly Equifax requires you communicate with them through snail mail, fax or a telephone call.

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.

There are online services that let you upload a PDF, and they'll fax it for you.

Even in the 90s a lot of folks didn't send a "physical" fax, you could print it thru your modem. Or something similar, memory fuzzy, only did it once I think.

Or going to a shop like Kinkos or a local print/copy shop. They offered sending/receiving faxes or FaaS before _aaS was a term of "endearment".

In the Apple store you can find apps that send fax to a physical location. That's what I used the last time I had to send one.

There are quite a few multifunction printers with fax.

That assumes a land line to plug the fax machine into.

We have two.

Pharmacy, nursing, and medical students will find out soon enough.

I'm 21 and I know what a fax is.

i started working at a place that would get stacks of flyers across the fax machine every day , they would just toss them in the recycling bin all the while wasting tons of paper and ink .. i started calling all the removal numbers and got it down to zero .. they thought the fax machine was broken haha.

This is a terrible analogy. Nobody forced you to go to the website that voluntarily decided to include the trackers.

I can't tell if this argument is meant seriously but it is incredibly specious. If every single website operates in this fashion and modern life is nearly impossible without them, then consumers are presented with no option and it amounts to coercion.

It’s inconvenient for me to have to pay for things, that doesn’t mean stores are obligated to let me shop for free.

If that website doesn't ask me if I want to allow those trackers then it's forcing them upon me without my consent. How am I supposed to know if a website has a tracker before I visit it?

They also don’t ask you if you want whatever specific content they are rendering that day to be rendered or not. Caveat visitor.

It is still not a nice thing to do. Can we at-least agree on that?

If people didn’t want ads it wouldn’t be a multi billion business. Also your analogy is wrong. Your browser won’t execute code unless it requests it. Fax machine spam you don’t have do anything except have it connected to a live telephone connection.

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.

People don't want adds. how do you infer that people want ads because the ad industry is profitable?

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.

Why do they work? Why can I go start a business and scale it to millions of paying customers by using ads?

Because there are businesses and politicians willing to pay through the nose to get their message in front of those that they want to influence, and you are then the middleman that gets our irritation and ad blockers and pushback for contributing to the proliferation of the most invasive, unscrupulous segment of our entire society.

Because you’re infecting people with mind-viruses to force them to buy your crap. Advertising is about exploiting human psychology, taking advantage of people with weak impulse control, and outright lying.

Often something is a multi billion dollar industry that people don’t want!

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

Not in ads but I know they are quite effective. Most startups can attribute their growth to the effectiveness of digital advertising. Robinhood was driving app installs for $10 each while E*TRADE and Ameritrade were paying $1000 per customer.

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.

Thanks for your considered response to my snarky comment. Personally I don't mind plain ads which are simply a commpany advertising their product/service on a billboard etc, what I find unbelievable in the digital era, is the extent of the intrusion now on finding out everything about people to market to them better (which I'm not even sure if having more data on someone has been proven to produce better results). Its really the data broking side of it - if that went away I'd have no issues.