I don’t really use facebook anymore so couldn’t care less; but so happened to log in today to change my password and saw this on my front page.
Ad Blocking is Cyber Security, never ever let anyone convince you differently
if ads were just static PNGs with a link you went to if you clicked I wouldn’t have ever bothered. but ads became a major malware and tracking risk so plugging that security hole became mandatory.
I tried finding that website, but I can’t remember what it is. I’ve seen it use the static image advertisement. It changed on each reload too.
But yes, that website had last update somewhere in the early 2000s.
When I last used it a few years ago ExplainXKCD used static images and had a note about how they hand picked each ad to avoid any problems.
People are gonna say I’m being hyperbolic or crazy, but I swear that the internet died the day the first line of production Javascript was ever written.
The internet died in September 1994 everybody knows that
Hey, that’s not too far away. Javascript came about in December 1995.
Even static PNG ads are purpose engineered to grab your attention. People with attention disorders like ADHD and autism don’t have as much attention to give, and when it’s gone we’re debilitated. We need to start considering cognitohazards a legally prosecutable form of violence.
Could attention grabbing dark-features be considered a violation of the ADA?
Which part of it, specifically?
Edit: No, the ADA word not apply. My point was that you should understand the ADA a bit better and what it covers. Accessing a building open to the public, not facing discrimination in employment, and accommodations in education environments are examples of things it covers. I’m willing to be proven wrong, but don’t just guess or generalize. Please try and understand the topic a bit more as it’s a very important piece of legislation that makes a big difference in a lot of lives and treating it lightly dilutes that in a similar fashion to emotional support alligators vs trained service animals.
Did you really just compare accommodations for ADHD to “emotional support alligators?”
I am not a lawyer, but there is precedent for ADHD to be covered under the ADA and precedent that it (meaning the ADA) applies to websites for private businesses.
Edit: ADHD fits the definition of a disability as defined by Sec. 12102 of the ADA, specifically:
- 1a: it’s a mental impairment
- 2a1: it affects: learning, reading, concentrating, thinking, communicating, and working.
- 3B: it’s not transitory/lasts longer than 6 months
Edit 2: a lawyer could argue that adblocking is an assistive technology for people with ADHD. If a person is looking at a tutorial at work and is inundated with ads that effect their performance at work that they can not block using an adblocker, that is denying a person with a disability as (defined by Sec. 12102 of the ADA) the full and equal (to a person who is neurotypical and can more easily not get distracted) use of a title III entities service.
Thanks for taking it seriously, that’s what I was looking for.
I’m also not a lawyer, but I do have a disability covered by the ADA. I understand that ADHD is a recognized disability. That’s not the specifics I was looking for.
That being said, the ADA doesn’t define how to make a website accessible and that typically falls to the WCAG, which is not specifically mentioned in the ADA (though neither is ADHD, those cases you mentioned confirmed it is covered). The best things I can find than might cover the specifics of ads are maybe section 2.2.2 or 2.2.4 or 2.4.1 of the WCAG (the first and last are level A, the middle AAA, with the standard recommendation being AA.). How would you apply those (or others you think are more appropriate to ad blocking) given that the guidelines are for service providers and ad blocking is usually done client-side. Examples for 2.4.1 given by W3C just seem to specify a way to move past things like ads via a link.
Also, some interesting other things:
This mentions the following and cites the case on their site:
For example, a web-only service with no nexus to a physical place of public accommodation is not subject to the ADA under Ninth Circuit precedent.
I’m not sure if that’s changed since 2019 or not. California has more specific legislation that covers that, though.
I’m all for ad blocking and accessable websites, I just don’t think the ADA covers ad blocking through the WCAG.
I’m all for ad blocking and accessable websites, I just don’t think the ADA covers ad blocking through the WCAG.
How would you apply those (or others you think are more appropriate to ad blocking) given that the guidelines are for service providers and ad blocking is usually done client-side.
Probably under WCAG Principle 4: “Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies.” If we’re treating ad blocking as an assistive technology, purposely attempting to break an assistive technology would run counter to that principle, much in the same way that purposefully breaking a screen reader would (although, it should go with out saying, purposefully breaking screen readability is much worse).
I’m not sure if that’s changed since 2019 or not. California has more specific legislation that covers that, though.
I’m wondering if legal action is something that could be done on a state by state basis starting with California (which conveniently is where Google is headquartered) or if the case could be made that Youtube is used to stream live events and those events should count as a physical nexus under the ADA.
I’m assuming that addictive ui designs fuck with people with ADHD disproportionally. Since ADHD is considered a disability, could things like infinite scroll that can’t be turned off (for example) be considered an ADA violation?
A violation of which part of the ADA? Can you point an a specific part of the law that would cover it?
That was the question posed, yes.
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It’s true. I work in a computer shop and we see literally thousands and thousands of dollars lost from people clicking on ads that look like normal buttons (things like “Download”, “Next”, etc). And not just the elderly either. Everyone has a a combination of inputs to get scared and comply. Folks that are otherwise extremely competent and savvy can get scammed too.
The best security you can have online is adblockers, only beaten by using trusted websites.
Edit, fair points with sites being slimy these days. I meant using legitimate versions of websites rather than copy/fake websites designed to steal credentials.
I dunno’, the way Google themselves have served vulnerable ads, it might be true that ad blocking is more important than using “trustworthy” sites.
But what websites can you trust these days?
YouTube? Serves up scammy bitcoin ads. Google? Places ads as “search results” Twitter?
Maybe that one website unchanged since 1998.
You can’t trust any website 100%
You need to continously verify and reverify the details you can.
I can totally trust the hmpg site.
Space Jam?
It was updated when the shitty new one came out :c
Does anyone have screenshots of these buttons? I didn’t see an ad for so long that I don’t even know how they look like.
something like these
Yes, these exactly. There does seem to be a bias towards sites with multi-page articles (think Yahoo news, BuzzFeed type stuff), and what I’ll call “disposable income listings” like boat and sports car-listing websites.
Definitely. Ads are eye cancer at best, and infiltration channels for malware at worst. Compromised ad networks pumping out executable code via javascript (or back in the days, Flash) are still a major source of trojan infections.
And just to add to your important point, Ad Blockers are really Content Blockers. They allow the user to delete annoyances that have nothing to do with advertising. We should all start calling them Content Blockers.
Have tried the zapper in ublock origin? I love it.
I use it often for sites I rarely will visit again. It keeps My Rules file from getting cluttered.
And it’s fun!!!So fun! I think it gives me a tiny power trip when I feel like Bruce Lee karate-chopping away an annoying part of a website :D
I have said it before, snd I will repeat it as many times as it takes.
Adblocking is security, untill website owners take legal and financial responsibillity for the harm that a hacked ad spreading malware or attenpting any kind of deception, I won’t even consider removing my adblocker.
If this changes, I will consider it, but will still not do it, the risk to my data is too large.
Ads are malware for the mind, even when they’re not malware for the machine.
Well put!
Thanks :) I was quite pleased with that one!
Yeah, there’s no proper screening process and companies aren’t help liable for malicious advertisements. It’s the Wild west out there, and companies take money from anyone due to there being no consequences. Internet advertising has no proper screening process like network television.
Seems like a feature to me.
Oh yeah aunt Greta, I’m still friends with you, but it’s so weird how I can’t see your anti vax “facts”
That’s the government censorship!
I took a peek at my feed for the first time in years. It’s all junk lol, no one I care about is posting anything
The only thing worth seeing is my local Buy Nothing group, but there are other services popping up which do something similar.
Yeah all my actual friends are messaging me elsewhere, facebook is more like a picture dump for old people. I only use it occasionally for joining various expat groups since I move countries frequently for my job, and they are rather resourceful.
It sure might be, but the one friend who got blocked is just casually posting stuff from his personal life, nothing spammy going on there. Either facebook is screwing with me, or they are playing out some friend’s posts in the ad-network stream so you are actually losing some genuine content. That would be evil (and totally something Meta would do), but I really couldn’t care less.
I do think that sounds more like they’re hiding it and blaming adblock than pretending something was missed. Wouldn’t be surprised if it starts small and ramps up over time, but that’s just speculation.
Your ad blocker is blocking posts from friends
Thank fucking god
My Facebook is hardly even friends these days. It’s basically ads, suggested posts, and posts in groups. Maybe because none of my friends really post anymore, I dunno.
Yeah 1 out of 10 is a friend’s post. The rest is just garbage.
I’m at the stage where I check it once a day, maybe twice, for things like birthdays and anything important that my friends post. 90% of what’s there is suggested posts, ads, or reposted shit. ‘What type of gemstone suits you best? Tap here to find out!’
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Even if they were blocking posts, it’ll be because FB purposely wrapped them to look like an Ad
Or a friend shared paid content?
Yeah, Facebook can not know when your adblocker is blocking those posts, unless they did it themselves.
Facebook has groups, and unfortunately, that’s a pretty important feature. The car groups I belong to are hardcore track drivers and DIYers that share knowledge (problems and resolutions, alignment specs, tire and wheel experiences, custom parts, parts swaps, etc) and independent manufacturers who make stuff that isn’t otherwise easily available.
Until there is a solid replacement for that, I can’t get rid of Facebook proper.
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Boom boom boomers
So people who don’t know about adblockers, generally.
I love that go-to. The boomers aren’t the ones using it, it’s their kids. I seriously think 90% of the people that use the term Boomer have no clue what generation their talking about.
Eh, I see Boomer used as a state of mind as often as a generation. It’s like Karen, calling soneone a Karen isn’t claiming their name is Karen, it’s calling out a state of mind.
That’s fine, but Karen was always meant that way, Boomer is a very specific generation, which are all geriatrics and even their kids are nothing like them.
There are a few countries where Facebook is still pretty popular. The Philippines, for example
One of my parent’s dozen+ facebook bots that steal their pictures/identity, because they are too dumb to know how to configure FB privacy settings. It’s disturbing how many of them just scour profiles, replicate, and impersonate to scam.
Averyone who wants to have social life in my country
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Call them, text them, there’s a difference between FB friends, and actual friends.
Or maybe don’t tell other people how to live their lives?
I did no such thing dipshit.
You seem pleasant.
Thanks, I try…
In Brazil, it is useful to contact people that you know in real life, family and friends…
Plus, it sorta works like a Craigslist here. People sell and buy things from Facebook everyday, and people advertise their business and services here (e.g: restaurants, plumbing services, gift stores, etc)
I’ll be that sort of person to say that the change starts when you also start. When messengers weren’t a thing here, I started moving people I talk with to a messenger of my choice. Slowly after some time all the people I know were using it without giving any thought because turns out they just use whatever works. Several months go by and I safely use nothing but that messenger of my choice. Whenever a person asks if I use Facebook/Whatsapp, I just say “I don’t have it, do you have (that messenger of my choice) or do you prefer SMS?” - and it kind of works for me.
My ASD brother, who prefers to be contacted through it. I want to maintain what little relationship I have with him.
I think people are underestimating how important the YouTube thing is.
If they succeed, the entire ad funded internet are going to clone what they do.
It will effect everyone everywhere, whether you run an adblocker or not.
It will benefit the large corporations and choke out the smaller people. It will consolidate control and wealth.
Exactly and I think what we are seeing here is that the other companies are now helping build a very frustrating user experience to break down the everyday user. We will likely see Twitter and others joining in the coming weeks
To you and @[email protected] (and everyone else); What do we do about it? How can I fight back?
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They have already succeeded.
Other than YouTube, I’m basically off all of these centralized social media platforms and it feels great.
I do need to occasionally use Facebook for market place and messenger for contacting business.
Basically every business operates over messenger where I live.
Yes same for me, whatsapp is pretty much the only “genuine” communication channel. I only keep a presence on facebook since I have to move countries frequently for work, and the “expats in $city” groups are quite helpful to find people, and then move the discussions off-platform :-)
I’m trying to encourage people to move to peertube. Not much content there, but i’ll reward what intersting content I find. You should too
Yeah, also please, make some content.
Doesn’t matter that it stinks, we wont watch it till you get better anyway.
There’s just nothing there besides tech content
I’ve been trying to switch over but haven’t found a good iOS app yet. Know of any?
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What is wrong with safari?
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Not really, I am in a third would country and if you call the landline, you still have to pay by the minute. Most businesses do not even have a landline to contact. Typically they give a viber number or messenger number.
Even when I needed to get a rabies shot, my wife found a place on facebook. They did not even have a website of their own. Sadly that is how the internet works where I live.
It’s YouTube (piped when I can but the servers seem to be down) and old.reddit.com for me.
I don’t like that it doesn’t save video progress mid video. It also is not very reliable for me, so I use an iOS extension called vinegar and use YouTube through a browser.
Piped.video does though, if that’s what you want. Yes, reliability is a problem; I’m just waiting for when I’ll host my own piped instance
I will check it out again. I thought it only marked videos as played but did not save the position in the video when you stopped watching.
Someone on here linked to odysee.com which appears to be a better version of YouTube so far, even Louis Rossman is there talking about YT’s new adblock situation as one example: https://odysee.com/@rossmanngroup:a/youtube’s-adblock-war-is-backfiring-in:c
Thanks! I always forget about that platform. I did see he made a video about that. I’ll watch it on odyssey now
I find it quite dubious their claim of it blocking posts from friends, vs. ads. Friends don’t post ads, so if it’s blocking posts, they are inserting ads colored up as “friend posts”.
So this is how it will start.
First it will be a back and forth war of Anti-adblockers vs Adblockers
Then when the Anti-Adblockers start to lose, which they will, then they’ll come crying to various governments with massic PAC campaigns among other insane garbage about how “Adblockers are Piracy!” and that they need to be banned.
This will not end well.
It’ll end well enough. People will just stop using their shitty platforms. They’ll start looking for alternatives, from which there are loads, find that there are platforms that don’t require ads, and go there.
Those that stay deserve the shit they get
You’re massively overestimating the conviction of the average internet user. They’ll do whatever they’re told is cool to do, including visiting a site that is nothing but ads.
Alternatieve for youtube ? Have yet too find a good one 😞
The closest thing I’ve seen is lbry, where some creators have mirrored their YouTube accounts. But it feels like a very small number of them uploading there.
E to add: As with all alternative platforms, it’s also home to a lot of content that was kicked off of more mainstream platforms for one reason or another.
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Peertube. Youtube, but with federation and webhooks.
For desktop I use the FreeTube client. For mobile, there’s various options line NewPipe and Revanced. But these are all Android Only.
Those are literally all still YouTube.
Newpipe supports federated video plataforms like peertube.
They asked for an alternative for youtube, not to youtube.
The thing is, if they get really stupid with it I could just go ahead and install pi hole. I haven’t already because it’s a bit of a fiddle on and I don’t apparently don’t need it yet. There’s no way for the government to mandate against that, unless they actually want to ban me from owning a computer, Which obviously won’t really work.
That only allows DNS-based blocking of domains, which isn’t going to be nearly as effective. A lot of modern ads are served up from the same domain that you’re visiting. Browser-based ad-blocker extensions are in a position to block domains, URLs, and specific parts of the HTML DOM itself. This is going to sound rude, and I’m sorry in advance, but when people bring up pi hole, I assume they aren’t very knowledgeable about how things work.
Pihole was once a good adblocker, but as more and more websites realize ads being served from an external domain are easily blocked, they too push their ads through their own domain.
Pihole is still good for some pages, but mostly, its useless as an adblocker.
I have 2 piholes on my network, mostly useless they might be but both block over 20% of the traffic, ublock origin and Firefox take care of the rest. Are you sure you set it up correctly?
20% is a far cry from what it used to be, and it also depends on your use case.
I’m spend my time online 60% on lemmy, 30% on YouTube, and 10% elsewhere.
The internet access on my network is much more varied, 12 clients including work laptops, an HTPC, Unraid server, smart TV, phones, watches, tablets, games console, VR headset. Several of these use VPNs so bypass the piholes, I used to see up to 45% a few years ago, but I see no reason to switch them off just because other systems are taking up the slack. Seriously, I can’t remember the last time I saw an ad.
It’s definitely not useless, it blocks a ton.
There’s only a few sites, like YouTube it doesn’t help much on.
Pihole hasn’t worked with YouTube in almost a decade. They changed their ad service to their own domain, so there isn’t any way to distinguish between an ad and a regular video on the domain level that pihole uses.
Setting up a pihole takes minutes, and will block literally millions of ads on your home network.
The biggest hurdle is teaching yourself not to click on sponsored links. Google will still show promoted results, but you’ll get an error when the pi blocks them from loading. This is annoying for new users, especially if some of the users don’t care that they are being manipulated and just want to see the thing google wants to sell them.
Eventually they will just use server side authentication that the ads were displayed properly and the best an adblocker can do is draw a grey rectangle over it and mute your tabs sound.
Or Ad Nauseum, which make them think the ad is there.
This will be the way.
Oh no, I have to stop using Facebook too? Holy shit I might get something done
You guys should implement that shit here on Lemmy too
I left reddit for like two weeks before joining lemmy.
I felt like I wasn’t so attached to my phone anymore.
Then I downloaded Sync for lemmy knowing full well that I’d end up addicted again… The internet is the hardest habit to break.
Helps that Lemmy has orders of magnitude less content. After the third time refreshing with no new content, it gets much easier to put the phone down.
It’s pretty good though 😃😁
1% good stuff, 99% delicious horseshit
LOL, if you block ads they’ll hide a message from one of your friends that you never would have seen anyway because it would’ve been buried in ads.
I think this is good though. I think this is just what a lot of people need to get them off FB. I mean… have you tried surfing the www without an ad blocker? I’d rather not use the www.
Stop using Facebook.
I’d rather have some false positives than a single unblocked ad.
It’s been for a long time but not overtly. (I’ve never used it, this is someone else’s screenshot)
Facebook splitting the word “Sponsored” to bypass adblockers – r/assholedesignHoly shit that’s devious.
They also use all those uglified class names so you can’t easily target a class to block. They’re total bastards. The Facebook Purity plugin is hip to all these tricks though. There are some very dedicated and talented developers who have put in a lot of time and creativity to circumvent these assholes.
Yes, just like Pinterest. It’s easier to find a direct image URL using Network Analysis than Inspector.
iirc Pinterest just uses a div with a background image. Could’ve been insta though
If I inspect the element in Firefox, it’s a
divwith about 8 layers of randomly named nesteddivs inside, sometimes branching (but the mouseover border preview tool helps). It takes 10 careful clicks to reveal the finaldivand its background image URL. Maybe there’s an “Expand all” button, IDK.
They ain’t my friends if they be posting ads.
