The APIs that ad blockers depend on are also popular among malicious extensions.
Read the whole story
Read the whole story
Google planning changes to Chrome that could break ad blockers
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
Just the push I needed, been pondering ditching google and their privacy destroying business anyway.
Upvote
0
(2
/
-2)
There might even be more good news for browser and phone users.
A few months ago, I was approached by a friend who told me he's working with a growing team to develop a system similar to the ContentID system by Google, which will compare digital fingerprints of ads and block the "most annoying" (read: repeated) ads plaguing major platforms.
It's not designed to block all ads on the internet (impossible), but just like the copyright system on YouTube, it's designed to target sites like YouTube, Hulu, and others.
Right now, they're currently looking for investors. They're wanting to keep this off Kickstarter/GoFundMe because they don't want any issues. So far, they've raised $1.2mil.
I've been invited to beta test the feature when they're ready. Currently, it's pretty slow, but they're looking to use peer networking to speed it up (this is where the primary investment will be spent).
If it's successful, Google can go [censored] itself.
A few months ago, I was approached by a friend who told me he's working with a growing team to develop a system similar to the ContentID system by Google, which will compare digital fingerprints of ads and block the "most annoying" (read: repeated) ads plaguing major platforms.
It's not designed to block all ads on the internet (impossible), but just like the copyright system on YouTube, it's designed to target sites like YouTube, Hulu, and others.
Right now, they're currently looking for investors. They're wanting to keep this off Kickstarter/GoFundMe because they don't want any issues. So far, they've raised $1.2mil.
I've been invited to beta test the feature when they're ready. Currently, it's pretty slow, but they're looking to use peer networking to speed it up (this is where the primary investment will be spent).
If it's successful, Google can go [censored] itself.
Upvote
0
(1
/
-1)
Upvote
0
(1
/
-1)
The new API is in the beta channel. The full set of changes, including the deprecation of features in the old webRequest API, are not, and the changes in general are still in a draft state. As per a comment in response to the recent rush of feedback on the issue:
Upvote
3
(4
/
-1)
Welp, time to start using an ad-blocking service on a deeper level (network or OS).
Upvote
2
(2
/
0)
Huh. Wow. Thanks
Rasberry Pi ordered from Amazon (V-Kits Raspberry Pi 3 B+)
Other steps to follow once it arrives (including Patron level of support or higher).
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
My biggest obstacle to leaving Google has been abandoning my gmail account. I have a comfortable firstlast@gmail account, and I've been using it for about 15 years. Shifting to something else would be a challenge for my contacts. I could slowly deprecate it like I did my hotmail account, but I still have some older contacts that I lost in the transition.
It's a strange dichotomy - other than the few bits where I feel locked in, walking away from Google has been surprisingly painless.
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
I used to use Adblock Plus...until I realized how much more amazing uBlock Origin was and how many more rule-sets it offered without having to hand-craft a bunch myself.
I find 99% of my needs are covered with these rulesets:
-uBlock filters
-uBlock filters - Badware risks
-uBlock filters - Privacy
-uBlock filters - Resource abuse
-uBlock filters - Unbreak
-Adblock Warning Removal List
-EasyList
-AdGuard Spyware filter
-EasyPrivacy
-Malvertising filter list by Disconnect
-Malware Domain List
-Malware domains
-AdGuard Annoyances filter
-Peter Lowe's Ad and tracking server list
-AakList (Anti-Adblock Killer)
I still have one or two I have to "write" myself for sites but its very rare since changing. I feel like its also much more responsive than ABP was.
Honestly its not so much that I hate ads...my problem is how invasive so many ads are, and how slow they make content load. Nothing worse than being half way thru reading something only to have a full page ad cover up what I'm reading and now I have to find how to close it. Or worse, video-ads that auto-play causing a disturbance and sucking up valuable bandwidth.
Upvote
5
(5
/
0)
All I know is I appreciate all the Ars readers who use the best form of not seeing ads on the web.
https://arstechnica.com/store/product/subscriptions/
No regrets here, money well spent
Upvote
7
(7
/
0)
no regrets here either, i just let the ads show.All I know is I appreciate all the Ars readers who use the best form of not seeing ads on the web.
https://arstechnica.com/store/product/subscriptions/
No regrets here, money well spent
Upvote
2
(2
/
0)
The Windows Phone version did show adds. Microsoft did everything they could to make the app compliant with Google's wishes, Google snubbed them anyway.
And how do you account for the discovery of deprecated and proprietary chrome only code on YouTube's pages that was designed to slow down the site in other browsers?
And there's always Google's purposeful redirecting of Edge to the old WAP pages for Google Maps and Gmail.
I suppose that's what you get when you turn over the internet to what is essentially the world's largest advertising company.
It's time you stopped being such a Google apologist and woke up.
Upvote
1
(6
/
-5)
Chemical Tribe
Ars Legatus Legionis
And they never blocked ie from accessing it, just their app. To this day ie works exactly as the app does on Android, menus and all.
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
The YT redesign was in the works for a while and was based on Polymer. Polymer uses something called Shady DOM to polyfill Shadow DOM functionality for every browser. There was/is nothing proprietary about it. The performance impact comes from how they're using HTML imports, and really only affects the very first load.
https://twitter.com/slightlylate/status ... 0515312647
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/is ... 766694#c14
Upvote
-1
(1
/
-2)
What if every website you visited went away, because you didn't support them and expected free to just work forever?All I know is I appreciate all the Ars readers who use the best form of not seeing ads on the web.
https://arstechnica.com/store/product/subscriptions/
What if you had to make a payment to every website you want to visit to make ads go away?
It's that simple. It doesn't matter what your reason is. You're afraid of malware. Ads slow down your computer. You just don't like them. Whatever. I know all the arguments, and I'm not fighting them.
End of the day it's pretty simple: sites like Ars cannot exist for free. We have a large staff that works very hard to do what we do, everyone likes being able to cash their paycheck and live their life with that. If everybody ad blocks, we go out of business. Unless enough people subscribe to offset that, and right now that seems highly unlikely. Doing my best to work on it.
We're happy to have a sub program, if we could cut out the advertising middle man entirely and be direct to readers, ad-free, that would be amazing. But as you say, everyone doesn't want to pay for every site.
If the journalism you care about vanishes you can blame the greedy ad industry if you like. Blame us for not coming up with a different model. It won't change the reality, and that is that content like what we do does not exist for free, and one way or another users need to help pay for it, or wave goodbye to it. Period.
Some people like that idea, "the web will be pure like it used to be! blogs will replace it all" or whatever. If you think journalism like what we do will just exist out of nothing you're fooling yourself. Of course I'm biased, I want my paycheck too, I like my job. But I think it matters, and people aren't going to like the outcome. Because it will be the sites than can exist with other funding that survive, and that's going to mean rich people get to fund their journalism voice in a much louder way, and sites are going to take paid placements and become hollow shells of integrity to keep the lights on.
Upvote
14
(15
/
-1)
Also worth noting:
- It doesn't slow down the overall experience, only the initial site load.
- It actually impacts Google as well. Because they have to remove the deprecated functionality from Chrome, they now have to update Youtube to remove the reliance on the deprecated features.
It's still dumb to implement features like that as early as Google tends to and to end up having to go through all this crap as a result, but "dumb" is not synonymous with "malicious".
Upvote
0
(2
/
-2)
Right. You could argue that they jumped the gun with Polymer since it was only v1, but shadow DOM is also uniquely beneficial for elements like, wait for it, video. It certainly wasn't malicious.
Upvote
1
(2
/
-1)
JavaScript loading blocked scrolling. That's all. But it was super annoying.
Upvote
-1
(0
/
-1)
They're beneficial for basically everything, and for how websites are developed in general. They were part of the initial Web Components specifications, and Web Components are one of the most important features to be added to browsers in recent years (at least from a developer perspective).
It's completely understandable that developers would want native browser support as soon as possible and that Google would want to implement it as soon as possible. If the specifications hadn't been deprecated and replaced then the performance issues with other browsers wouldn't have occurred and nobody would be complaining about some grand Google conspiracy, but because they didn't wait they ended up in the mess that they're in now and the non-technical crowd has taken their stupidity to be a sign of evil and malicious anti-competitive practices.
Upvote
1
(3
/
-2)
My mom died of cancer 19 years ago. I use the the term "cancer" as OP did all the time. Stop being a poopsie-boo.
Upvote
5
(6
/
-1)
This is why I'm proud to put my money where my interests are and support ars.What if every website you visited went away, because you didn't support them and expected free to just work forever?All I know is I appreciate all the Ars readers who use the best form of not seeing ads on the web.
https://arstechnica.com/store/product/subscriptions/
What if you had to make a payment to every website you want to visit to make ads go away?
It's that simple. It doesn't matter what your reason is. You're afraid of malware. Ads slow down your computer. You just don't like them. Whatever. I know all the arguments, and I'm not fighting them.
End of the day it's pretty simple: sites like Ars cannot exist for free. We have a large staff that works very hard to do what we do, everyone likes being able to cash their paycheck and live their life with that. If everybody ad blocks, we go out of business. Unless enough people subscribe to offset that, and right now that seems highly unlikely. Doing my best to work on it.
We're happy to have a sub program, if we could cut out the advertising middle man entirely and be direct to readers, ad-free, that would be amazing. But as you say, everyone doesn't want to pay for every site.
If the journalism you care about vanishes you can blame the greedy ad industry if you like. Blame us for not coming up with a different model. It won't change the reality, and that is that content like what we do does not exist for free, and one way or another users need to help pay for it, or wave goodbye to it. Period.
Some people like that idea, "the web will be pure like it used to be! blogs will replace it all" or whatever. If you think journalism like what we do will just exist out of nothing you're fooling yourself. Of course I'm biased, I want my paycheck too, I like my job. But I think it matters, and people aren't going to like the outcome. Because it will be the sites than can exist with other funding that survive, and that's going to mean rich people get to fund their journalism voice in a much louder way, and sites are going to take paid placements and become hollow shells of integrity to keep the lights on.
Upvote
5
(5
/
0)
Oh god the Slashdot guy is here!! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
edit: p.s. a bit of an in-joke. In every adblock thread on the old slashdot forums, there was a guy selling his custom host-file solution and claiming how much more efficient it was than everything else. He did this for years. Nothing personal, and you do what works for you!
Upvote
2
(2
/
0)
Bullshit! Google tried to use the same excuse when they broke YouTube on the Echo Show. But guess what? The echo show did indeed play the fucking ads. Google eventually had to admit that it was a power play on their part, ostensibly about Amazon not selling chromecast devices. But guess what launched a few months later, with YouTube as a prominent selling point? That's right, their own screen including smart products, starting with partner Lenovo, but soon followed by their own Home Hub. Google just wanted to weaken a competitor so they could gain advantage on their own upcoming launches
Upvote
4
(4
/
0)
If Google is so focused on end user security why is it that they have all these years still allow an extension like Hola extension which purports to be a "Hola Free VPN Proxy Unblocker" in the extensions?
As far as I can determine this extension uses as an exit point some other Hola user computer. The reason why this is free is because the company sells your connection to their paid users. In fact the hola.org website says
"Hola is the first community powered (Peer-to-Peer) VPN, where users help each other to make the web accessible for all, by sharing their idle resources. We take great care to protect your privacy, security and personal information."
"If you want to enjoy the power of the network without contributing your idle resources to the network, you can purchase a PLUS subscription."
I wonder how many users who simply install this plugin actually realize that is what they are allowing the company do to? The only way you can discover this is if in fact you actually read the hola.org website.
As far as I can determine this extension uses as an exit point some other Hola user computer. The reason why this is free is because the company sells your connection to their paid users. In fact the hola.org website says
"Hola is the first community powered (Peer-to-Peer) VPN, where users help each other to make the web accessible for all, by sharing their idle resources. We take great care to protect your privacy, security and personal information."
"If you want to enjoy the power of the network without contributing your idle resources to the network, you can purchase a PLUS subscription."
I wonder how many users who simply install this plugin actually realize that is what they are allowing the company do to? The only way you can discover this is if in fact you actually read the hola.org website.
Upvote
1
(2
/
-1)
What if every website you visited went away, because you didn't support them and expected free to just work forever?All I know is I appreciate all the Ars readers who use the best form of not seeing ads on the web.
https://arstechnica.com/store/product/subscriptions/
What if you had to make a payment to every website you want to visit to make ads go away?
It's that simple. It doesn't matter what your reason is. You're afraid of malware. Ads slow down your computer. You just don't like them. Whatever. I know all the arguments, and I'm not fighting them.
End of the day it's pretty simple: sites like Ars cannot exist for free. We have a large staff that works very hard to do what we do, everyone likes being able to cash their paycheck and live their life with that. If everybody ad blocks, we go out of business. Unless enough people subscribe to offset that, and right now that seems highly unlikely. Doing my best to work on it.
We're happy to have a sub program, if we could cut out the advertising middle man entirely and be direct to readers, ad-free, that would be amazing. But as you say, everyone doesn't want to pay for every site.
If the journalism you care about vanishes you can blame the greedy ad industry if you like. Blame us for not coming up with a different model. It won't change the reality, and that is that content like what we do does not exist for free, and one way or another users need to help pay for it, or wave goodbye to it. Period.
Some people like that idea, "the web will be pure like it used to be! blogs will replace it all" or whatever. If you think journalism like what we do will just exist out of nothing you're fooling yourself. Of course I'm biased, I want my paycheck too, I like my job. But I think it matters, and people aren't going to like the outcome. Because it will be the sites than can exist with other funding that survive, and that's going to mean rich people get to fund their journalism voice in a much louder way, and sites are going to take paid placements and become hollow shells of integrity to keep the lights on.
While all this is true, the ball is in content producers' court to convince readers that their sites are safe to use with ads turned on.
Honestly, if I had the option I'd happily pay into a shared-subscription system, where my subscription is shared between all of the sites I visit. Pick the top 10 sites I visited in a month and split my subscription money between them on a proportional basis. Something like a $10 or $15 sub would probably net my top 3 news sites more money than my ad impressions, especially because I never, ever click through on display ads.
This could even be done with an ad blocker. Let me subscribe to the ad blocker, and the ad blocker publisher pays web sites based on my viewing habits. This pays sites to participate in the system, as well as blocking harmful ads. Everyone wins.
Individual subs to web sites is not something I'm likely to do, but a shared subscription system is something I'd support and be involved in.
Upvote
7
(9
/
-2)
Upvote
0
(1
/
-1)
Given that the change being discussed here is specifically removing the ability of the webRequest API to block, redirect, or modify all traffic and replacing it with functionality that can only do so for a limited set of traffic that's pre-defined, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it breaks something like Hola. I'd have to review Hola itself and the APIs that it relies on to be sure, though.
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
Sounds very similar to the model that Brave browser is trying to push.
I always figured though a dead-simple sort of Patreon-for-websites model, but with much smaller per-user transactions, is just the sort of thing the web needs.
Any model though would necessarily lead to one or more middleman services handling the transactions and knowing each and every website their users donate to and possibly even just visit. The only way I can see around that would be to make bitcoin (or something similar) as simple as *click--done, dropped 50c in the tip jar*.
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
What if every website you visited went away, because you didn't support them and expected free to just work forever?All I know is I appreciate all the Ars readers who use the best form of not seeing ads on the web.
https://arstechnica.com/store/product/subscriptions/
What if you had to make a payment to every website you want to visit to make ads go away?
It's that simple. It doesn't matter what your reason is. You're afraid of malware. Ads slow down your computer. You just don't like them. Whatever. I know all the arguments, and I'm not fighting them.
....
Very good points you made, and it made me think about subscribing. It's small subscription prices that are on a par with patreon, so I'm good with that. Much preferred to ads and the need to block them, for sure.
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
I honestly don't care that someone is tracking what web sites I visit. My username is all over the search engines anyway, since I've been a prolific forum user and poster with this name since 2002.
If I care to hide what I'm doing (which I might do when researching a law enforcement issue or a less than reputable web site), I can just pop over into Incognito mode or open my second browser profile.
Upvote
-2
(0
/
-2)
Upvote
6
(6
/
0)
This isn't correct ! ABP allows that option ... but it is still up to the end user as to whether they activate that function or not and the 'whitelist' comes disabled at install. So they might be selling whitelist space to advertisers but end users still don't have to deal with them at all.
I'm running the current version of ADP and i see it's blocking 12 items on Ars alone. Haven't seen an ad in several years except durintg an occasion 'update' period where advertising networks figured out workaround for current blocks and the ad blockers then take a minute to play catch up to the loophole.
And with scenarios constantly playing out like todays' latest news:
https://arstechnica.com/information-tec ... in-images/
It simply reinfocres the need for ad blockers. With the added argument that the average user pays $50-$100/mo or more to simply access the Internet then gets nickle and dimed every time they goto a website because of a perceived 'personalized experience' *cough Ars* ... say an average user goes to 50 website per month - then pays $5 to each of those websites per month on top of their monthly internet access bill that runs on average $300+/mo.
Sorry but most brick and mortar stores do not charge a customer to walk into their establishment and browse. And if there is a door fee, typically there is no "free" (with ads) option.
I didn't sit through tv commercials when I had a cable subscription or recorded shows on a DVR/VCR and skipped ads in magazones and newspapers. This is no different.
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
I don't think that's true honestly. Ad blocking because of malware is a niche issue. Niche because few users know or care about it (in general, obviously higher here at Ars), and niche because it's just not a major problem. I'm not trying to pick a fight with security conscious people, but malware in ads on major sites is just not a huge threat. It could be better, no argument, but it's not the crux of the matter.
People just don't want to see ads.
I think that's the honest conversation to have. I don't mean the arguments about malware or your slow computer or anything else are not valid, but in the big picture "how are we going to survive this" the main reason the general public ad blocks now is because it's easy and they don't have to look at ads.
I think most people have no idea there's even a cost being paid by that choice. They think if they weren't going to click anyways it's not harming anything. I hear this all the time. It's not true in case you're one of those folks by the way.
My response is simple: whatever your reason for blocking, now that it's widespread it's a real problem for sites. And they're going to respond by either putting up paywalls, blocking ad blockers and starting a new phase in that war, or simply laying off people and eventually going out of business.
Is what it is, but if you want to be part of the conversation you have to see all the sides. I'm not going to save Ars by trying to convince the people reading page 7 of the article comments to subscribe, but maybe at least ponder what it all looks like from different angles, and how you want to be a part of that.
Maybe that will end up the answer, I dunno. It's a pretty difficult solution to imagine right now, would require a hell of a lot of cooperation between a lot of vastly different companies.
I get that no one wants to subscribe to every site they use. But look at the registration dates in these comments. If you're a 2013 reg for instance, that's not even considered 'old school' here, and you've been with us for 6 years. It seems like we're more than just another website to some, so maybe that's worth putting in the 'special' bucket where a sub makes sense to you.
Upvote
2
(5
/
-3)
What if every website you visited went away, because you didn't support them and expected free to just work forever?All I know is I appreciate all the Ars readers who use the best form of not seeing ads on the web.
https://arstechnica.com/store/product/subscriptions/
What if you had to make a payment to every website you want to visit to make ads go away?
Your arguments do make sense, but the ad industry doesn't help themselves by distributing malware and needlessly annoying sound and video ads that drive people crazy. If you're surfing sites you're unfamiliar with you almost have to have an ad blocker these days. I turn it off for sites I visit frequently, but I can't afford to spend the time to check out every single site I might visit once for malware.
If the ad industry could at least standardize on a safe, contained, advertising format instead of distributing easily exploited client-side scripting the web would be a much safer place. The advertising industry seems to think they can do anything they want and ad blockers are the public fighting against their bad practises. With the exception of a specific LG ad that took over the entire front-page at one point Ars is pretty good for reasonable advertising (unless it's gotten worse since I started subscribing).
This will all come to a head eventually and I can't imagine it will be pretty.
Upvote
5
(5
/
0)
I'm not going to tell anyone to ad block. I stick with my principles and don't use one, ever. Maybe that makes me dumb, but I can at least say that when I argue for support I eat my own dog food. I know it's not that bad, I have no malware, my eyes aren't bleeding. I even see ads at Ars, so I can keep tabs on any issues, I don't use an ad free subscriber view, though of course I can.
But if I were to make an argument for ad blocking I'd say this: if the wild web seems scary, and you're concerned about malware on sketch sites, and you sometimes visit places that have really shitty ad practices and you really just feel safer with an ad blocker, okay. It's not unreasonable.
But please consider whitelisting your daily reads (like you're doing, thanks). If you go somewhere every day to read your news and catch up and chat with people and whatever else, there's a value there. Get a sub if you can and they offer one, but just whitelisting them helps.
Upvote
7
(7
/
0)
Just to be clear: malware and other abusive behavior from ads is a major problem, but like you said, it's not a major problem on major sites. If people want to run an ad-blocker so that they can be safe from malware on whatever random unknown sites they find across the internet then that's reasonable, but that's not an excuse to continue running that ad-blocker on sites like Ars that don't serve malicious ads.
If you visit a site like this on a regular basis and don't whitelist them in your ad blocker, at least be honest and acknowledge that it's because you're too lazy to whitelist the site or just don't care enough to bother. Don't pretend that you're worried about getting served malware from the website, because that simply is not a real problem here.
Upvote
5
(5
/
0)
Yeah, I basically just wrote the same thing in my other comment above, but I agree, this is a good clarification to my post.
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
I think you misunderstand the context.
We were talking about a hypothetical patron tool that would track sites I visit and pay those sites based on how many times I go there. Obviously, that tool has to log where i go for that to happen - and I obviously would have to consent to that logging.The purpose of Incognito mode would be partly to temporarily disable this patron tool, so I'm not counting certain web site visits as part of my patronage.
For example, I get a potential spammer on my forum. I don't want to give the spammer part of my patronage money while checking his link, so I right-click and "open in Incognito mode." The patron tool doesn't log that visit, because that visit was made with the patron tool disabled.
If I truly wanted to disable tracking for safety reasons, I'd take other countermeasures entirely.
Upvote
-3
(0
/
-3)
That argument really only applies to e-commerce sites where you're there to spend money directly.
When a site's income is through indirect means, such as advertising, there's a clear case to be made that blocking ads is not fair to the site. (Although, yes, that has to be balanced against the fact that you take a risk with every ad viewed that the ad will be harmful in some way.)
Upvote
2
(3
/
-1)