A word of warning about uBlock for those who aren't aware: uBlock Origin forked off of uBlock some time ago and left the Safari version behind. For Chrome and Firefox uBlock Origin is great, but for Safari I personally suggest Wipr[1].
Actually, uBlock Origin comes from original author of uBlock. Some time ago he said that he doesn't have time to develop Origin and passed project to other guy. Unfortunately, that guy didn't make any big changes in code (except adding himself as an author) and asked for donations. After quite big drama, original author came back, but he wasn't able to get back his project so he called it uBlock Origin.
It's worth noting that it all started on APRIL FOOL'S DAY (2015). That was the convenient day the author of the project decided to say in the comments for a random Github commit "hey, anybody wants to take this over? I'm out", without any previous discussion or announcement. Users assumed it was a joke but it was for real. Literally the first person to reply took over the entire project, and when the developer who was the real responsible for the Firefox and Safari port saw it, he stopped contributing instantly.
However, it's not that "the original author wasn't able to get it back". He is too proud of himself to admit the big mistake it was to give up the project to a random greedy teenager (who after the drama offered to give it back), so he decided to stay with the Origin name.
The result of this is that said teenager still makes a profit off the brand name (see ublock.org). People see that page and happily give him money thinking that they are helping the world.
By the way, it's also worth noting that the greedy teenager inflated his Github commits with minor changes and by hijacking the authorship of some commits, so that people would think that he did more than he actually have done (he can't really do much), and donate more to him. Eventually he just stopped making commits at all (https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/graphs/contributors), since people will still donate just for thinking that his domain is legit.
The moral of the story is that uBlock Origin is a good extension, but its developer, despite being talented, can't be trusted to be here tomorrow. He can just have a tantrum and delete the entire project or give it up to some other random teenager again.
The uBlock Origin name just adds to the confusion. The original developer (gorhill) should create a totally new project name. Word would spread that uBlock was the old thing and no longer maintained and that gorhill's new project was the future.
Even using a name like "uBlock Next Generation", which is less ambiguous than "uBlock Origin" and suggests "this is the new project", would still cause confusion. People unfamiliar with the project history would just call it "uBlock", leading to the same donation problems.
Sorry for the late reply. Tox was loosely organized under the umbrella Tox Foundation. When it was discovered that head and CEO (holding the purse strings) was abusing donation money, the devs split and created uTox. However, the Tox Foundation insists on holding the name, but as it's only one guy who doesn't appear to have taken any binding legal action, the name sharing persists.
Your comment is super confusing. Do you mean that he didn't have time to develop uBlock so then we went to make Origin? You wrote it the other way around. Which one does the original guy work on now, Origin?
I'll start over for him. Gorhill was the author of uBlock. He got tired of maintaining it, gave it up and willingly allowed chrisaljoudi to take the project. chrisaljoudi later started asking for donations, allegedly hasn't changed the code much except for some visual tweaks and added things like "Made by Chris" to the website. Some drama ensues, people accuse chrisaljoudi of being greedy, he makes some changes to how he presents things and Gorhill seemingly regrets giving the project up and instead of taking it back, (not sure if he tried or not) he forks the project and goes back to maintaining it, so now there would be 2 uBlocks. However there was an issue where Google removed the Gorhill's version from the store because it was a dupe of chrisaljoudi's version (which yes, used to "belong" to Gorhill), so Gorhill renamed the repo he was maintaining to uBlock Origin.
tl;dr Gorhill started uBlock, got fed up & gave it to chrisaljoudi, later did a reversal, forked the project and continued with maintaining that fork, only now his version is called uBlock Origin.
Origin is from the original author. The original author passed the torch to someone else who then used it as a donation source. So the original author came back, forked it, and titled their fork Origin.
the real reason, imho, was that gorhill got fed up of crappy bug reports and all the issue management hell. he forked and continued working with his own repo without ability to make issues. he probably hoped that this teenager had more energy for communicating with users and skills to merge commits back. someone probably know relevant issue numbers where drama was happening...
Wipr on Safari is great, it's super lightweight, probably the fastest ad-blocking experience on any platform. My only complaint is a lack of configurability, it doesn't seem to have any way to whitelist things etc.
Same thing it did years ago when it decided that an Adblocker should default to allowing "Show Ads" for any advertiser which paid them a blood ransom: PROFIT
You're assuming that everyone shares your world view.
I'm a happy Adblock Plus user and I like this move.
Advertising, in general, does not bother me. I occasionally even find it valuable. Ads on sites like Google and Facebook are perfectly fine by me—I just don't want big, animated ads or (more frequently) broken ones which prevent me from reading content. In fact, I already go out of my way to disable ABP on sites where the ads are acceptable.
Contrary to what people on HN believe, advertising is not inherently evil. Most people are perfectly fine with ads so long as they're not invasive.
> Contrary to what people on HN believe, advertising is not inherently evil. Most people are perfectly fine with ads so long as they're not invasive.
I would guess most people have this idea (in most cases illusion) that advertisers are not able to manipulate them. I do not have that illusion, and I do not like people that are manipulating me for their own benefit. I do not know if they are evil, but I think it is fair for me to try to avoid those kind of people.
> I would guess most people have this idea (in most cases illusion) that advertisers are not able to manipulate them.
I certainly don't pretend that advertising has no impact on me.
I also don't think I'm a mindless drone who does whatever advertisers say.
Advertising is not zero sum. It can be effective and good for the consumer. For example, I have Charles Schwab account because I once saw it in a magazine ad, did some research, and have been a happy customer ever since. Both Schwab and I won, even though they "manipulated" me into learning about their excellent offering.
> I do not have that illusion, and I do not like people that are manipulating me for their own benefit.
You should probably never leave your house then, because almost every person in the world is trying to (subtly) manipulate you. Manipulation isn't evil.
Aren't you manipulating him into not leaving his house? /jt
The kinds of ads Ad Block Plus allows will be interesting. With the push for analytics, enabling any ads may allow some crafty shnooks to manipulate the system and figure out your personal interests. It's fine to tell a person directly what you want, but it's annoying when they spy on you all the time. That said, I agree that advertising is a good thing, just that marketing has focused too much on direct advertising and less and actually being accommodating. This article showed up on HN not too long ago, but it's still worth reading twice:
https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/07/how-google-analytics-ruine...
I agree with what you say, but advertising (more specifically Google's Adwords) actually introduced me to a couple of interesting services/products! Was I manipulated? Definitely, because I clicked the ad, but I don't mind because I also benefited.
However, a lot of adverts are subterfuge these days and I did fall for one (to shame it, it was TrackR Bravo, which works nothing like its advertised, to make matters worse it was part of a present), so one does need to be careful.
I do not know if they are evil, but I think it is fair for me to try to avoid those kind of people.
This is a fine stance to have, but I don't see how it relates to the context of ad-blockers. It's a simple enough just to not visit websites that display advertisements. Why would you need an adblocker for that?
Because there are websites with content other than advertisements I am interested in.
Now, I think Facebook, Google, other advertisers and content providers using these ad networks have made the (moral) rules of the game quite clear. They try to extract as much net value from every transaction with me as is even remotely legally and technically possible. And they make massive investments on the technology that is trying to maximize this value extraction. Why should I feel bad playing by the same rules they have created?
(Note that in practice I am not as ideological as my arguments here are. I have e.g. chosen to disable the adblocker for some websites instead of paying for subscription to support them somehow. Reason for this is the fact that it is much easier to turn off the adblocker than hassle with payments.)
> Ads on sites like Google and Facebook are perfectly fine by me—I just don't want big, animated ads or (more frequently) broken ones which prevent me from reading content.
Honest question - don't the sidebar ads (on the right) on Facebook look ugly and intrusive to you (more so since they also change often)?
Apart from Facebook tracking, I block ads on Facebook because of these too.
Performing the exact opposite of the stated and expected purpose of the application, for money, is a violation of trust. There is an implied belief that a product should do what it claims (and its name clearly states a purpose -- ad BLOCK), and the plain English reading of the title makes that pretty clear.
Imagine a virus scanner that only blocked those viruses that didn't pay up.
This is a conflict of values between users and the devs.
- Users want ads to just go away, period, the end.
- The devs want ads to be nice. So they swat down the nasty ones and permit the nice ones.
Ransomware was probably the wrong way to do that, but I can see why it was superficially appealing. "We check your ads for niceness, and then permit them. We won't give our effort away for free", being the idea behind it.
As a user, I do want ads to just go away. Since they started some 20-odd years ago, advertisers have abused the medium. If advertisers had had even a smattering of propriety, I wouldn't have been using an ad blocker since I first learned they were a thing.
If advertisers take a sudden "nice" approach, I'll keep blocking ads for another decade or so and see if the trend lasts. That's all I feel I owe them at this point.
I don't want ads to go away. I want ads that are relevant, or at least aren't insultingly stupid.
The utter shit people run on major sites these days is so patently offensive ("Single Mom's Weight Loss Trick!", "Get Government Money Tomorrow!") that I keep a blocker on for my own sanity. I'm consistently appalled at the extremely low quality advertising that supposedly reputable properties put on their sites.
Whilst I largely disagree with you on advertising generally (see Adam Curtis, Neil Postman and Jerry Mander for the long argument), I have to agree with you on the growing preponderance of low-quality ads.
I see few to none on Firefox, but even with a firewall hosts blocklist, Chrome/Android shows the bottom-feeder stuff on, again, supposedly reputable publishers' sites: TIME, CNN, Salon, Vox, and more. And the only impression it gives me is that thes companies have to be absolutely desperate to let that crap darken their pages.
You're right, it's absolutely insulting. To both the reader and the sites running the spots.
They are optimizing their ads for effectiveness. Patently offensive garbage ads weed out all but the most gullible of customers. Show them to enough people and the idiots come flowing in, cards at the ready to buy miracles and snake oil.
I have never trusted the ABP people. But this is not the "opposite of the expected purpose of the application." In fact ABP is working exactly as designed, by blocking other people's ads, and allowing ads that ABP profits from. From day one, the business model was shakedowns of large advertisers. This is just a slight evolution in technique.
Well, huh, they do state the purpose clear on their homepage:
Surf the web without annoying ads!
Can block tracking, malware domains, banners, pop-ups and video ads - even on Facebook and YouTube
Unobtrusive ads aren't being blocked in order to support websites (configurable)
It's free! (GPLv3)
There's a significant difference between providing a tool to allow an end user to take an action and leveraging your position as a middleman to inject content. This is no different than the egregious behavior displayed by Verizon and others.
What gives Ad Block Plus the right or qualification to determine that my ad is a "bad" ad?
Why should ABP have the ability to suppress editorial or advertising content on my website, replace it with it's own advertising content and not share revenue with me?
Ad blocking itself may be considered a ethical issue as well, but it's a different ethical issue. With blocking, the decision is ultimately made by the end user. With ad injection, ABP is making itself a third party stakeholder.
Misleading to the user - any person who downloads a thing called "adblock" expects it to block ads. (A less charitable person may point out that a program that claims to do one thing and actually does another is known as a "trojan horse")
The same way a person who downloads an antivirus expects it to block viruses.
Well that's all ethics are anywhere. There's no concrete list of universally agreed ethics, by definition people pick and choose what they deem ethical for whatever reasons they want.
Blocking Ad is itself unethical. Ads are placed on pages to pay for the content. By blocking ads you are depriving the content creators of compensation for their work.
Replacing Ads with other ads is worse because you're not only depriving a content creator of revenue but then profiting off of their work. You could argue that it amounts to theft.
TV is paid on viewership numbers. Newspapers are paid on circulation. Gliding past ads on a site is factored into the CPM values. Books in a library are paid for and covered by the first-sale doctrine.
You don't think people who change channels to avoid ads/who use DVRs is factored into the price per viewer for TV ads?
Your individual impact might be harder to track than with ad-blockers, but on the aggregate you are driving down the price per viewer by switching on channels during ads, using DVR, etc.
(Imagine a world where 100% of people used a DVR and skipped ads. Obviously the price of TV ads would plummet. By using a DVR you are contributing to making our world, that world).
Suppose someone offered you a free TV to sit through a 2 hour presentation about a timeshare. Does that entitle you to just take the TV and leave without sitting through the presentation?
You chose a particularly interesting example: as far as I can tell, to a first approximation, all timeshares are scams designed to separate a fool from their money.
So if I had the free time, I would consider attending in order to ask pointed questions and warn other people away.
You could also make the argument that ads or ad networks are potentially dangerous. That doesn't make Ad Blocking ethical, just justified. The ethical thing to do would be to either not use an Ad Blocker or not visit sites that are ad supported, neither of which is realistic if I'm being honest.
I think we're at a very Napster moment for content websites.
That's a choice for the individual to make but lets stop pretending that Ad Blocking is ethical. It's about as ethical as Napster was, but given the alternatives it's the obvious choice.
Additionally you can use things like Patreon or Google Contributor.
counter point: blocking ads is self-defense and defense of others, including one's family. it is everyone's ethical duty to block all ads, because a non-trivial and unpredictable portion of ads contain hostile, abusive, invasive and/or subversive content. this can lead to loss of data, loss of time, loss of money and loss of privacy.
> it is everyone's ethical duty to block all ads, because a non-trivial and unpredictable portion of ads contain hostile, abusive, invasive and/or subversive content
It is everyone's duty to burn all books, because a non-trivial and unpredictable portion of books contain hostile, abusive, invasive, and/or subversive content.
They meant it in terms of malware/viruses/tracking and probably could have phrased it better as "hostile payloads" or something similar. Books generally don't contain malware and those that do don't contain malware that will run on your computer when you open the book.
This is made apparent by:
>loss of data, loss of time, loss of money and loss of privacy.
> loss of data, loss of time, loss of money and loss of privacy.
Not really. There are certainly plenty of books which will lose you money and time.
More importantly, if the sole concern is "hostile payloads" then the acceptable ads program should be exactly what you support. I'm fine with ads on sites like Facebook where I know it's not going to take over my computer or launch a massive popup, and I support ABP in pushing more publishers towards acceptable ads.
>Not really. There are certainly plenty of books which will lose you money and time.
But what about data or privacy?
>I'm fine with ads on sites like Facebook where I know it's not going to take over my computer or launch a massive popup
The concern there would be privacy/tracking via advertisements. I readily admit that is a silly argument if one is already using Facebook. I do not have a Facebook account. I do not know when, if ever, Facebook will extend their advertisements to be used on partnered sites instead of internal-only. I can block them in advance even if I may never see them at all.
Ads are placed on web pages in the hope that people will click on them and make them money. It's not unethical to instruct my browser not to download them any more than it is unethical to avoid the lady giving out free samples at the grocery store.
If it means we go back to the days where people spent their own money to create pages because they were passionate about a subject, I'm fine with that. I miss that era. It sure beats advertisers thinking they are entitled to know where you go when you browse around the web.
> It's not unethical to instruct my browser not to download them any more than it is unethical to avoid the lady giving out free samples at the grocery store.
The difference is that you're not having someone sweep the grocery store and remove all free sample ladies before you enter it. Ignoring a free sample lady is akin to ignoring an ad on page.
The primary difference though is that the lady doesn't take a photograph of you, follow you around the store noting everything you stop to look out or put in your cart, and then follow you out to the parking lot and go to the next store with you.
I'm not saying that what content owners or advertisers do is right or ethical, just that at it's core blocking the ads is unethical as well.
I'm not having someone alter the web page on the server. I'm declining certain files. The original analogy is much better than your version. At most I have an assistant declining for me. But I didn't damage the displays or affect anyone else.
Back in the late 90's and early 2000's, before it was possible or commonplace for ads to track whether they were being shown, plenty of web sites included text like: "Support this page by clicking on our ad banners!" Would you have argued back then that it was unethical to view a web page and not click on all of the ads displayed on it?
> This all adBlock making money by blocking ads and then showing their own ads is becoming ridiculous and unethical.
I think they've mentioned that a site owner signs up on AdBlock Plus marketplace to sell ad space on their _own_ site.
It will be just another ad marketplace with one exception: AdBlock will make sure that these ads are shown to people who uses the extension. They also promise to allow only "acceptable ads" on the marketplace.
I understand where you're coming from, but "open source" does not mean "I can read the source". If that were the definition, then Windows 2000[1] is open source.
That qualifies as Open Source under any reasonable definition of the word [1].
So being Open Source is no argument for or against either Adblock Plus or ublock origin, because both are.
The OSI definition of "open source" is not the only definition. I would argue that most people see "open source" as software where the source is "visible" (no data to back that up).
Then you have a gazillion of "Open source licenses", that can be less "free" to more "free", like BSD, GNU, MIT, Apache, the free source license, ...
My definition of open source is software where I can modify the source and use the resulting modified software without unnecessary roadblocks or fear of legal reprisal.
By open source, most people mean that the source is free to redistribute legally. The OSI definition is more formal. The source being viewable is not enough to qualify it as being open source.
As someone who regularly uses a Surface Pro 3 without the keyboard attached (it's become my default couch computer), Edge is the only Windows browser I've found that's touch-friendly, so it remains the main browser I use on that machine.
That's fair - I just find it's horrendously unstable (often hanging or crashing) with only a few (under 8, generally) tabs open (also on an SP3), whereas Chrome / FF will handle up to hundreds with no issues.
While it's running it seems smooth and efficient, or at least not a bear like Ghostery. It's something with startup. Anyway, minor nit, it's a great extension.
It looks like another addon was phoning home to a blocked resource. I should've tried more combinations first. The best thing I can think of is that it would be cool if uBlock reported when a call from another extension has been blocked.
> it would be cool if uBlock reported when a call from another extension has been blocked
That is the purpose of the built-in logger[1]. By default uBO is not setup to block other extensions' network requests, or those made by the browser itself, one has to configure it explicitly for this to happen[2].
That's bizarre! Have you tried disabling everything except uBlock and seeing if that persists? Maybe it's some kind of interaction with other addons causing the problem.
Another user recommended uMatrix as a Ghostery replacement in this thread which I was trying out, and it looks like some Ghostery/uBlock interaction was to blame. My best guess is some Ghostery resource is correctly flagged by uBlock and that the delay I experienced was a request timeout or similar, from Ghostery.
That makes sense, and oddly enough I was just (literally for the first time, 10 minutes ago) looking at switching out Ghostery for uMatrix. Decision made, thanks.
Maybe it is interaction between it and another addon. I just removed and reinstalled all my addons last week and performance was dramatically increased.
Well, not all my addons - turns out though my Scriptish has been installed since Firefox 3 (now at 45), it wouldn't reinstall after removal for compatibility problems. Not sure why that wasn't automatically detected, and that may have been the performance issue
I find that it goes very well with script blocker and ghostery; that handles most combinations of advertising, trackers, so on. You can add privacy guard if you feel like it as well, but I haven't' tried that and can't speak for it.
Using a HOSTS file to block things while effective, is also a very bad user experience.
For example, some sites won't let you in until you unblock ads. With an extension you can use the in-browser UI to whitelist that site, with a HOSTS file you'd have to figure out exactly which domains got blocked, then update the HOSTS file, and finally restart the browser & flush the DNS Cache Resolver for it to take effect.
Again, it works, it is just a bad user experience.
This is also the purpose of using DNS management like Umbrella from OpenDNS, which has been serving me very well. It catches most malware sites, and I can add in my own whitelist, blacklists. I did get a bit overzealous and add a cdn once that caused a ruckus, but besides that, one by one blocking ad networks based on which ones generate the most traffic is not only keeping my bandwidth cleaner but makes parsing through dns logs much easier.
