This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Advertisers do not have the right to demand my attention, or to brainwash me. I have every right to deny them and decide what to allow inside my head. This is war.
"We paid for the right to show you this!"
You didn't pay me, motherfucker, and my price is everything you have, or fuck off and die.
What's frustrating to me is the idea that law makers and advertisers believe I don't have a right to alter data that comes onto things I own. And nobody chime in with the brain dead "☝️🤓 actually you don't own it." Because even if you wanna waste time with that stupid distraction, I own my computer. I built it from parts.
Controlling my perception is my right. If I wanna use things that block ads that's my right. PERIOD. I NEED TO BLOCK ADS BECAUSE OF MY DISABILITY.
An adblocker on your devices is equivalent to putting a Britta filter on your water tap.
More necessary than that, really.
That entirely depends on the quality of your water.
Tangentially related but britta filters actually suck as far as I know; they're like the worst water filter for removing materials. Did a test myself with a fresh filter - 105 ppm tap to around 72 ppm vs 0 ppm for zero water pitchers and around 30ish for epic, it's been a bit so the numbers are rough for the britta and epic but I test my tap and ZW pitcher routinely.
Only a billion. Need to quintuple that.
The trade body called it “illegal circumvention technology”, said 12ft.io has been locked by its web host, and promised to take similar action against other paywall bypassing technologies.
Just because you send bits to my network does not oblige me to render them. That's like saying I broke the law back when I had cable and changed channels during ad breaks. Falls flat on its face.
Beautifully worded 🙏
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills whenever I hear them say things like this! These things belong to me, I should be able to control them. My perception, my LITERAL GATEWAY FROM MY MIND TO REALITY is mine and I have a right to control what I see.
Or saying it's illegal to hang up on telemarketers
Bottom line: if I'm forced to consume ads on a device belonging to me - I will rather throw it away!
The use of the term "Dark traffic" here is to paint the use of ad-blockers as something nefarious. Don't use it, fuck these people right in their stupid mouths.
I propose using the terms "clean traffic", for ad-blocked website traffic, and "dogshit traffic" for everything else.
depending on your household's browsing habits, it can be downright insane how much traffic goes through ones network (and the web at large), that is just nothing but dog shit.
I monitored my pihole at my place and my own traffic is usually no more than 15% garbage with about 750,000 domains blocked, but the second grandma or grandpa starts doomscrolling boomer things on their phones and ipads. I saw the network traffic at 60% blocked one time and I had to confront them and flatly ask them "what the fuck are you doing on your phone?"
also set up a Region exemption or whatever, blocking russian, chinese, and a whole bunch of other untrustworthy TLDs and im literally showing my grandmother the repeated attempts to communicate with something in fucking China in real time whilst she's playing some solitare game she downloaded.
I saw the network traffic at 60% blocked one time and I had to confront them and flatly ask them “what the fuck are you doing on your phone?”
Be careful of the answer. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
You shouldn't say that to your Grandma or Grandpa. :)
Clean traffic, smooth traffic, able-to-get-to-where-you're-going traffic
Maybe we could turn it around: adblockers are tools that block ads and other kinds of dark traffic such as trackers and malicious scripts.
Website: "You appear to be using an ad blocker." Me: "You appear to be correct."
Then I just sigh and go to archive.is and solve their captcha, so I can read the article.
'disable ad block to contine'. no
There's almost always another website that has the same thing.
yep, search subject of title. about as mush effort as fiddling with adblock settings.
Fuck yeah, advertiers are a cancer.
If ad networks weren't the number 1 way to get malware installed on your machine, didn't slowly take over the dedicated space for the actual content of a website, or put pressure on the websites in question to only publish things inoffensive to the advertisers maybe adblockers wouldn't be such an issue.
If your site can't exist without being a cesspit of annoying and useless infomercials and a deployment mechanism for malicious code injection then your site should not exist.
Not too many people had an issue with static banner ads back in the day after all except greedy website operators and advertisers.
When piholes go mainstream they are fully cooked. Even tech illiterate in your family won't get the ads
Not even a linux guy, but I had a Pi from a decade ago that I never opened, decided to set it up and use it for something useful, friends suggested Pihole. pained myself for 2 days getting everything working (most of my trouble had to do with peripherals and IP addresses not the device itself) but after the grief, got it working and it was well worth it.
I even printed a sticker for it that said "where ads go to die"
sorry doubleclick, but you're toast
I tried to give my mom a pihole, she made me get rid of it because it broke the NY times and some rando mobile game she plays. Some people can't be helped.
You just make excuses and after a couple days mom's forget about it and move on to other games
So this confirms that people have a negative reaction to ads, which every actual internet user knows in their bones already. This means they ALSO are not even doing their one job of persuading people to buy shit. Of course this won't lead to companies reducing investment for ad carrying or finding ways to make them more appealing, that costs money, instead they will use AI generators to produce WORSE ads and leverage their capital to have governments capitulate and force users to watch by banning blockers, probably VPNs too. Bill Hicks was the most correct about advertising, and remains undefeated.
Maybe if they didn’t use very intrusive ads people would not install ad-blockers so much
Many websites put a video playing in later in top of the text, with another layer of ads and tiny space to read… the website would be unreadable without ad-blocks
I used to maintain a website for a bicycling club in my county that was great for getting people into biking, getting people out the house, making friends, and staying fit.
We had a banner ad along the top of the site for a local bicycle/bicycle repair shop that aided the club a lot and was very reasonable.
He got something out of it (publicity and a seal of approval towards the value/quality of his work), and we got something out of it (money to run the site, and a bit left over for things like puncture repair kits and the occasional celebratory drink after an arduous ride).
Nobody bats an eyelid to those ads. They are reasonable.
What we have now isn't that. What we have now is an insecure, malware-infested privacy nightmare that ruins webpages and stresses everybody out.
Use Firefox + uBlock origin for your own sanity. Don't let big tech make you feel guilty for not going along with their game.
I personally am not bothered at ALL by the banner video ads overlayed on top of another banner ad that opens a new tab when you try to close the banner video then another one opens covering the original banner then the page scrolls all the way back to the top and shows you an email list sign up, why would I be?
The web has almost always been unusable without an adblocker. Ads today are less malicious, but more insidious. Clicking the wrong ad in 2003 would brick your computer. Clicking the wrong ad today means you'll have to cancel a credit card after your personal data is compiled and sold on the black market.
Nothing new. Ads don't fuel a free internet. They fuel a business model. The free internet is fueled by the time and donations of kind, dedicated people.
Ads today are less malicious
I disagree, ads today are way more malicious than they used to be, ads are the biggest vector for malware today, they are used to stalk users to an insane level and most ads are porn, gambling, drugs or fascist propaganda.
At least back in the day you would only get sketchy ads on sketchy websites.
