“Now”?
This has been an issue for many years. As in before Windows XP.
You guys still watch ads? UBlock to the rescue!
I’m always amazed at the amount of ads people tolerate. Why do people even watch TV. The programs are only mildly better than the ads.
Same, if I get an ad in a youtube video and realize I didn’t install ublock or something, I literally rage quite the browser tab, get ublock, then go back. I can’t even watch youtube on my TV, I have to use smarttube. Shits insane.
LOL. Same. My tolerance for ads has dropped down to zero over the years of aggressively blocking them. The more you block ads, the more you realize how much you hate them. Once you start using DNS level blocking, there’s no way back.
Yeah and it must go beyond that because of DNS over TLS and such.
There’s a sub set of people who get upset if you tell them that get upset when you saying watching content on a smart TV is the worst experience, and will call me dumb for using a PC connected to a dumb TV.
They argue that its silly to have to use a mouse and keyboard to type out things in the living room as they spend 10 minutes chicken pecking out one word on their remote control.
That and all the service providers know they are mouth breathers and intentionally give them more ad time because they know they won’t do anything about it.
You can’t even buy a decent television anymore because there’s more money in the money they get from prebundling spyware on the TV. Then fucking tv manufacturers use your TV as a proxy so ai and Israel not farms can use your residential IP to scrape the internet and write fake reviews. Stuff that you aren’t allowed to do but some how this is all just business. Disney would have your ass in a federal prison with no chance of parole yet they can rape and pillage the entire internet.
I bought a used commercial display. It’s great!
I’ve been thinking about those ever since smart TVs took over the market. I’m still using my over 15 year old FullHD TV with my HTPC. Is there something I should know about those commercial displays before buying one?
Watch the inputs to make sure your setup will work, but otherwise not really
I would way rather use a remote. But I’m so close to just reinstalling a PC for my media center again lol
Every once in a while I’m somewhere with cable and my wife and I like to watch it and laugh at the commercials. The commercials are not supposed to be funny, but boy are they sometimes entertaining, especially when one of us spots evident AI like how the fuck did that make it past so many people
Imagine someone looking at terrible slop and saying: “You know what, this is good enough to be published”. Does that person really exist somewhere in the chain? Does that person really know what they’re doing? Maybe there are multiple people like that.
I’ve set things up so I never see ads (uBlock Origin, AdGuard Home, etc.) but I watched an NBA game the other day on broadcast TV and immediately saw a Wendy’s ad that was entirely AI generated. Blew my mind. It was slick. I’d bet most people that are accustomed to seeing ads wouldn’t have even noticed.
I’ve been blocking ads since the 90s. I honestly do not understand how people use the Internet without ad blocking. It’s completely unusable to me without.
Though I also turn off my radio volume when ads come on, so maybe I’m just really opposed to ads in general.
I heard someone say they are ok with accepting all cookies on sites because they actually prefer “targeted ads” because they are more interesting than generic ones for casinoes and medical scams.
I had no words.
no more fight left on those kinds
Fuck me people are stupid as shit.
I really dislike the general population, they seem to just zombie walk themselves through life paying no attention to anything at all.
You 👏 know 👏 what 👏 I 👏 mean?!
People do not pay attention, 👏 at 👏 all.
Did ad blocking work much differently from today, back in the 90s? Or was it the same kind of just “block requests from this domain”, kind of deal?
A lot of it was blocking IP’s and Domains in your hosts file since a lot of those connections were dial up, not high speed.
Once networking expanded a bit, it was blocking the same in your router. There were maintained lists around like there are today as well.
Neat, thanks for sharing.
I’m afraid to post links because people will complain about ads or that they can’t see it. Pipepipe, RSS feeds, ad blockers on dns and for fun a detention in the web browser and I don’t see anything. I expected most people on here to have a similar set up.
I have to go out of my way to even see things, I have Sam sedar, fox news, CNN, etc all subscribed on my RSS feed just so I can see the world outside of what I’m subscribed to. Just so I can see some headlines that give me an idea of what’s going on, and then I can decide if I need to look into it more.
Mutahar is annoying as f.
Um, why the star of David
Because the star of David features prominently on the Israeli national flag. Israel is where this particular set of attacks is believed to have originated.
Ads had malicious payloads for nearly as long as externally injected ads existed on the Internet.
Maybe yours. We don’t all run shitty Microslop systems with no adblockers. :)
Just learnt about drive by malware? Been a thing for over 15 years.
Is there any way to block tracking pixels and tracking social media buttons without breaking functionality of websites?
Is there a reason you want to use sites that are actively spying on you?
If it breaks, they aren’t worth your time.
Occasionally, such a site might be the only source for something.
I have to poke around fairly often while moderating, especially with very recent news
Yes but such exploits have been getting fixed in recent years.
Can you convert the page into RSS and read it that way? Some sites don’t convert and I never understood why but that might be worth looking into.
No idea 🤷♀️
noscript
That will break functionality at first. But over time, you build up a whitelist of allowed scripts. Usually, you can re-enable a website’s functionality while leaving tracking pixels and the like disabled.
For example, I had to add Cloudfare’s captcha shit to the permanent whitelist, because half the damn internet is inaccessible of you don’t do that. But Cloudfare’s analytics tracking shit is always always blocked.
I’ve been using noscript for a great many years, but lately the functionality started to break. There are websites where even if every item is whitelisted the page wouldn’t load without disabling noscript. Probably will need a bit more sophisticated script blocker eventually, if anyone makes one.
Yeah, I’ve seen that a few times. Luckily, none of the websites that are important to me fall into that category.
Most of the time when I find a site like that, I just say fuck it and go to a different site instead. If I really need that site for something, I’ll open it up in (mostly vanilla) Brave instead of the noscript Firefox I’m usually using.
But if I whitelist the whole site those pixels and buttons are also enabled, correct? Or how to disable those and keep website functionality? It doesn’t work with either browser I have but I may change that.
You don’t have to whitelist the whole site at once. Most sites break up their scripts into multiple categories that come from different servers, and noscript lets you pick and choose which of those to block.
You can usually get most of the site’s core functionality working while still blocking most of the ads and trackers and junk.
That’d be awesome. Do you know the particular scripts used by m_ta (pixels and button), r_ddit, twitler, etc? Not just for my future reference, but everyone’s? No is ok, I just thought I’d ask, just in case.
Thanks so much for your time and patience to reply several times.
Generally, it’s not hard to figure out – the options noscript gives you for disabling them are usually clearly labeled. Cloudflare’s tracking shows up as “Cloudflare Analytics”, for example – an easy and obvious one to leave on the ‘blocked’ list.
Just give it a whirl and see how it goes. Install the browser extension, and whenever you visit a site that doesn’t work, click on the little noscript button and try changing important-looking scripts from ‘blocked’ to ‘temporarily allowed’. If doing that fixes the site’s functionality and you’ll be using that site a lot, you can then change that to ‘allowed’ and have it permanently whitelisted, and it will work every time you go back. (Fair warning, though: some sites have a very long list of different scripts, and it can sometimes be difficult to figure out which ones are required for site functionality and which aren’t. But a little trial and error will always work it out eventually. Often, it’s actually pretty obvious. Core functionality scripts are often named directly after the site you’re trying to use while all the ads and tracking and shit has different names.)
Thanks so much, for everyone who hasn’t used it or forgotten.
