As the most technical person in my network of friends and family I'm often the one they go to for computer help. For years one of the first things I do if I touch their computers is install uBlock.
Lately a couple of them have gotten new computers and mentioned that they think it came with a virus because there ads everywhere on the internet.
Also, restricted privileges (Windows problem, mostly). You just don't need to be an administrator to browse the web, check your emails, play games, sort some photos or video chat. Remove this vector and save yourself a lot of pain.
The best thing that could happen to Windows is a user-privilege level where instead of providing a UAC prompt to the user when a program tries to elevate, the UAC daemon instead sends off a push-notification. The "real sysadmin" (e.g. nephew) would then install some app on their phone, which will catch these notifications and prompt them to remotely approve/deny the elevation requests. Or maybe even just make it non-interactive: default deny unless they've given an explicit elevation authorization in the last 30 minutes. "Phone me when you want something installed and I'll enable it." Sort of like a remote version of wi-fi router WPS pairing.
(Obviously, you can also build this for corporations, where the notifications are emails and managers can approve software installations on workstations and such from their email client. But corporations already get the benefit of "managed app stores" for frontloading software approval; they need this much less than individuals do.)
It's actually counter intuitive but in practice, anti virus are useless for non advanced users because they don't understand it.
A normal people get a message "Virus win32.badthingy detected: -delete- -quarantine- -ignore-". He clicks on the little "x" in the corner of the window.
1. AV solutions do in fact offer a lot of protection.
2. You will reduce you attack surface a lot more by not installing Flash, Java, and using an ad-blocker than not using AV.
Do they, though? Everything I've read over the past 5 years has claimed an 80-90% miss rate. On the other hand, often the first sign I see of an infection is that the virus scanner is disabled, so I suppose it acts as a kind of canary, in that sense.
I can't really argue with you if just going to make up stats... I have been helping non-tech savvy family, friends, and co-workers for over 25 years. The ones who didn't have AV installed or let the one that came with the PC expire had a almost 100% infection rate. Once I installed a good AV product infection issues with most of them was not an issue again. Yes, nothing stops stupidity 100%.
25 years ago, I'd be right with you. 15 years ago, too. Since then? I think your anecdata are outdated. Things just aren't going to be caught by signature-based scanning anymore. In terms of automated detection, the bad guys won. "Good" AV detection, if there is such a thing these days, are the tiny vendors that infections aren't designed specifically to fight against. All the big names get disabled, or otherwise rendered non-functional.
I don't agree with you on (1), so I think we need data.
(2) is creating an entirely different argument from blue sky. You're putting words in my mouth.
I support installing ad-blockers to reduce attack surface.
Removing Flash and Java is more nuanced. Most non-advanced users expect Flash sites to work and many non-advanced users need Java sites to work (e.g. enterprise internal crap). I think click-to-play is a decent mitigation here that non-advanced users can understand.
Maybe disabling Java is okay, so long as they really do not need it for anything. Disabling Flash is a harder sell.
Well in my experience as I mentioned in another comment is regular users with no AV solution will get infected almost 100% of the time in a short period of time. The same users with a good AV product I usually don't have to deal with them again. I have no idea how anyone couldn't agree AV solutions have a use.
I didn't put any words into your mouth but was just pointing out better things to do to reduce your attack surface than not installing AV. Java is dead and I can't recall any site needed to use in years that requires it. Flash doesn't need to be installed standalone at all anymore and shouldn't be. When a site requires Flash I fire up Chrome which has Flash built-in and is of course way more secure.
AV does have limited use for advanced users... I have gone back and forth between having a 3rd-party AV solution installed over the years. I have a high end PC and the product I use has little impact resource wise so why thinking is why not?
I hope you inform them before installing it. If someone installed something that's tampering with my browsing experience without telling me I would be pretty mad.
yeah right! i don't know very much how to use a computer so i asked my cousin who is a professional hacker haha to set up the programs i use! i was blaffed to know that he installed a plug-in (that's how you spell it right?) that blocked all the ads that would appear in a website! how could i enjoy surfing the web without ads? real life has ads everywhere i go, so i called him immediately and ordered that he removed this "virus" that removed the ads!
Since you appear to want to learn, I won't feel bad (or pedantic) in explaining that he installed an extension, which is a browser add-on. A plug-in is also a browser add-on, but is used to describe QuickTime, Flash, Java, etc.
After I wrote the above, I double checked myself and, apparently, I am using Mozilla's definition. However, it seems Apple also differentiates among the terms add-on (the super-set), and extensions/ plug-ins (subsets).
I agree, especially since even ublock occasionally gets caught by those 'you're using an ad-blocker' ads that tries to get you to either disable it or subscribe. That would really confuse, say, my mom if she had no idea she had an ad-blocker.
I wouldn't say it's inarguable. I'm not using Adblocker for many different reasons but that's not really the topic here. I think you should at least inform someone that you install stuff and let them give consent, regardless of what it is.
Even my grandfather (in his 80s) uses one and when I asked him where he got the idea for using it he said "I got sick of all the spam and thought I might get a virus so searched for ' block ads / pop ups and installed the first one I found, I guess it could be doing bad things itself but websites load so much faster now!" - pretty amazing invasive ads are now that they lead the elderly to a search engine for a fix! (Not an easy thing to do at the best of times!)
I really wonder in what % of the elder people your grandfather is and what does that mean evolution-wise e.g from an end user perspective, how much of that is google accountable for or, if you prefer, any other search engine.
I browse most of the time without extensions other than a cookie editor, since I've encountered a number of weird bugs in my company's own product that turned out not to be bugs but weird interactions with browser extensions I was running. I also read a lot of news articles both on big sites like the WSJ and whatever regional news outlets turn up in my news searches. That is to say that ad networks should (presumably) have a great profile on me and be able to show super-relevant ads.
But I still get Linode ads for weeks if I make the mistake of visiting Linode outside incognito mode (I've been a customer there for 5 years; I don't need another ad prompting me to sign up). I still get ads for things that I've just bought instead of complementary goods for the things I've just bought.
I still see absolutely insulting garbage ads for One Weird Trick that $GROUP hates. It's the offensively stupid Taboola/Outbrain etc. bottom-of-the-barrel ads that repulse and puzzle me the most. My memory says -- and scanned newspaper archives confirm -- that back before online news was a thing, regional newspapers had plenty of advertising but it was advertising for normal goods and services: snow tires, a clothing sale, lawn care, oil changes, etc. Shortly after the turn of the millennium I thought that online advertising was going to be kind of scary due to the profiles advertisers could build up on me but also kind of nice because I'd always see ads that aligned with my interests, instead of e.g. randomly bombarding me with ads for baby diapers in hopes that I am a new parent. Ha, if only.
The most noticeable difference between small news outlet ads now and 30 years ago isn't that the ads I see are now all eerily aligned with my interests; it's that worst of them are aggressively misaligned with my interests and with the interests of anyone who's not a total fucking rube. Who actually believes that they've won the iPhone giveaway contest or that they need a weird trick to clean the dangerous fluoride toxins from their tap water? I've never clicked on this trash but I appear doomed to encounter it forever.
I often joke that I'll believe "The machines are taking over" immediately after I get a relevant ad on Facebook. Of all places - they should know exactly what I like and what I would buy. They haven't got a clue.
I just finished "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley" and there is a discussion about this in there. Turns out its very hard to get from "what you like" to "what I want to buy." Google actually has an advantage here, in that it is easier to identify search phrases that are part of the pre-buying process.
I will actually click ads if they show me things that interest me. I'm not a miser or trying to hide my true interests from advertisers. But weirdly I still seem to see more ads relevant to my interests when reading a niche print publication (e.g. Scuba Diving) than I do reading a newspaper article about diving online. The ad networks have had years to gather all sorts of information about me and the end result seems more scatter-brained than old fashioned print ads.
Whenever I browse without an adblocker, I get constant ads for my employer.
I work for a mid-size telecom that exclusively does B2B. There's no way an ad network would be serving up that many ads for that company unless their ad network knew I'm connected to it. It's also bizarre, because I'm the last person who needs to be advertised to about the company.
It's probably just standard remarketing to people who have visited the website or a specific page on the site recently. Something you probably do a lot as a employee. It's actually a good thing privacy-wise that it's not easy to be more fine-grained in filtering audiences on adwords, though the marketing department could probably remove employees from the audience if they had visited an employee login page or something that would show you weren't just a random potential customer.
That's probably only because you have the cognizance to be shameful of what other people your age have done and are doing to the world. Most baby boomers don't have this.
"Millenials" is always used in combination with derogatory terms like "entitled, lazy, hopeless". Sometimes I wonder if boomers have _any_ idea of the frantic pace of today's workplace and how little power you can hope for, regardless of how much you work.
It's used to try and drive a wedge between the elderly and the young so that the old will be apathetic about fighting against onerous student debt/shitty entry level jobs and the young will be apathetic about fighting the drive to destroy medicare, privatize social security, etc.
Divide et Impera, etc.
Unlike other propaganda attempts this one actually works pretty well.
> "Millenials" is always used in combination with derogatory terms like "entitled, lazy, hopeless"
No, its not.
> Sometimes I wonder if boomers have _any_ idea of the frantic pace of today's workplace
Probably many of them don't. Then again, its not boomers that are mostly writing about "Millenials" (there's probably more Millenials writing about Millenials than Boomers doing so, and Gen-Xers are probably next. There's certainly more Boomers than Xers, but a lot of them are retired rather than trying to eke out a living in the frantic pace of today's publishing workplace.)
> Sometimes I wonder if boomers have _any_ idea of the frantic pace of today's workplace and how little power you can hope for, regardless of how much you work.
Millennials have as much or more power than the boomers did when they started working. The difference is that they expect more, because they spent their childhoods getting participation trophies and being waited on hand and foot by adults concerned for their comfort and 'safety.'
In the real world, the reward for doing exactly what is expected of you isn't promotion: it's that you keep your job.
In the real world, sometimes you're expected to sacrifice for your goals.
> The difference is that they expect more, because they spent their childhoods getting participation trophies and being waited on hand and foot by adults concerned for their comfort and 'safety.'
Bullshit. If millennials expect more, it's because they see the standard of living their parents and grandparents have and have had their entire life. They own homes that have gone up in value 5 fold. They owned homes at an early age. They got high paying jobs easily and costs of living were low.
Youth and young adult unemployment rates are shit if you don't ignore the "discouraged workers". We have expectations for young adults to take on tremendous levels of debt like never before. Housing prices are higher than ever before. Healthcare is more expensive than ever before. Millennials are having to pay into a social security system they see their parents or grandparents benefiting from, knowing (or often not knowing) they'll never get those same benefits despite all the money paid in.
The baby boomers are handing the millennials an entirely fucked up world. The environment is a disaster, politics are a disaster, the perpetual war and crony capitalism of the MIC is a disaster. Things will only get better once the boomers die off and we can rid ourselves of the "fuck you, got mine" generation.
It's a disaster either way, just in different ways.
HRC wins and we continue to kill civilians by the tens of thousands overseas, destabilizing entire regions in the Middle East. All the problems of our current status quo get worse. People in power continue to cement their position there. I don't think HRC is going to be any different from Obama and I can't imagine she's going to do anything positive he hasn't already done.
Trump wins and we get a likely ineffective commander in chief and congress becomes a useless sack of potatoes, getting upset that their bullshit has been called out and going home with their toys. Definitely hope for withdrawing from our perpetual war, fixing our election and campaigning systems, and making future elections much better at representing what most people want.
Between the two, I go with Trump, if nothing else because it means more hope for a future of better elections and putting an end to blowing up women and children every day with drone strikes. Yeah there are some bad characters in his supporter base and some of what Trump says is equally as stupid as what HRC says. At least I can believe Trump sometimes, which isn't the case with HRC.
Because Millennials is the most catchy term for a generation in a while (compared to gen x/y anyway), and so they keep extending what it applies to.
As someone born in 1991, I genuinely thought I was really close to the end of the "millennial" generation, but apparently i'm almost a "young millennial"...
On the official forums for Strauss & Howe generational theory, the community uses "Gen Y" to refer to late-wave Gen X-ers and early-wave Millennials who have some of the social characteristics of both generations due to being on the cusp.
The exact years are nebulously-defined (cusps typically are, since they're unofficial extensions of the theory), but I've seen it defined as wide as people born 1977-1988. Mid-80s are almost universally accepted as part of the cusp, but how early or how late it extends beyond that seems to vary.
I temporarily disabled ghostery yesterday and ended up visiting the LA Times. Without an adblocker the loading / performance / experience was horrific! Long live the ad-free web!
Imagine it's not blurring, but random replacement of alphanumeric characters that quickly replaces the original text in the article. Would you use it that way and which route: micro-payments or ads?
Agree on short reading articles. How about longer size content? And have a direct correlation / Math formula between how much time you need to "invest" consuming the content vs how much time you need to "spend" up-front in unlocking the content: micro-payments vs ads. Would that work for you?
And, regarding the payment, would you connect with Apple Pay or Amazon Payments or PayPal instead of providing publishers your card directly?
That is significantly better than a site filled with banner ads, and a small fee like 5 cents is something I'd actually be willing to pay for an article like that, if the payment process were that seamless.
Thing is though, unless and until we have a standardized web payments API, I'm not sure it can be. If doing this required me to create accounts with every ad tech provider who wanted to offer something like this... no thanks.
It might not be very helpful in this context, but I'm an engineer and our company aims to empower publishers and content providers offer the best reader experience by building this solution white labeled, with low barrier of entry.
If this will evolve into a standardized web payments API, I'm on the same page with you (I don't think so). But quality journalism is struggling and solo micro-payments won't work, we all agree on that, so how can we help the freedom of speech remain free? Think about it ;)
P. S. By the way, like in software engineering, we target to reuse existing e-commerce (or m-commerce) processes for both authentication and payments, so in theory you should not be asked to create a new account. Instead reuse existing ones.
No, that demo really doesn't feel respectful of readers:
- The headline loads, then flashes off, then reappears when a webfont finishes loading
- A "Support quality journalism" popover jumps in front of the content I opened.
- A fifth of the screen height is taken up with a permanent fixed-position header nav
- When I scroll to the bottom, the page gets jumpy and scrolling lags as it tries to on-demand load a bunch of related / recommended articles
I thought when I first saw that page that it could be defeated with a simple inspect element, but it looks like when the atm-blurry is removed from the paragraph id's that the paragraphs themselves were all gibberish! I wonder if the text is randomly generated or if it's some kind of text-cypher.
Either way, this type of paywall experience is significantly less annoying than a pop-up, but I personally would still be unlikely to pay for a subscription
Interestingly the text is garbled after it's loaded. So if you view the page with JavaScript disabled, the original text is completely readable (no blur effect either). I assume this is an attempt to make the page accessible to robots but not to humans.
Cool feedback. Thank you! This approach doesn't get you to subscription (although technically it could), but rather allow you to read without unblocking or whitelisting adblockers, and without subscribing or sharing your personal data.
No. why not just show some reasonable, small ads instead of slowing my page load time with 20 trackers and ad auction scripts.
If you host the ads on the original site and show them without JavaScript you can easily make it almost impossible to block.
Nickel and diming users isn't going to work either, if you want to get paid for the content you'll have to do an all-in deal like Netflix and hope people sign up.
Fair point, but it's not a restaurant and educating readers this etiquette would be really tough. How about pay for reading and refund if you think it's not worth your money? Would you do that?
I'm not sure that educating readers would be that difficult if you cater to a well-cultured audience, personally I like the approach of Smashing Magazine when you use an ad blocker:
If I ran a blog I would include the same element, some wording like "you know, creating quality content requires more effort than spewing clickbait, mind leaving us a tip to let us know that you appreciate our efforts?" and a flattr button.
Although your idea sounds like a good starting point for a website which caters to a massive audience (basically, every news website).
A simple method for that could be if the user closes the tab or navigates away before a fixed time period passes, such that it's clear they didn't have time to read much of the article, automatically cancel the payment.
It's not a bulletproof idea of course, can be gamed. Users could take a screencap, or copy-paste, before the timer is up. But that's probably not worth worrying about until the model becomes widespread.
I use an Ad Blocker, but happily unblock sites that ask if I see they are not running a large number of scripts.
However the reason I installed the Ad Blocker in the first place is the way some local newspaper sites in the UK (run by http://www.localworld.co.uk/) will try and run 50+ scripts and make it almost impossible to read the article.
It's baffling how bad news websites can be, it almost seems intentional. Displaying text is one of the simplest jobs, and yet somehow your typical local news website is one of the most complicated, infuriating and burdensome websites out there.
Local World are the worst offenders by far, their sites are unusable sometimes - full screen popups without a close button for example, especially on mobile.
Add that to their removal of experienced staff and replacing them with 18 year olds that think news is what you find when you search Twitter for your home town, or 'is this Gloucestershire's largest chip?' deserving of 4 'stories', it's no wonder local newspapers in the UK are going down hard.
I have a similar use case. I generally visit websites with adblock disabled, but will turn it on when I know I'm going to a website that has a lot of invasive ads. I would happily download an ad blocker that had a pre-populated white list of some sort.
I'm not where my position is relative to the rest of my generation, but for me it's all about practicality. I have no vendetta against advertising and I don't think it is inherently evil. I don't think it makes for a good content publishing model, but that is the content publishers choice. What bothers me is how intrusive and obnoxious they are. Large ads that pop up or take up 3/4 of the screen, can't click out because the [x] button is too small, making me wait to watch an ad with no escape hatch, video with loud volume, popunders, etc. it just got out of hand, so I opted out completely.
I don't have any moral problem with ads and companies need to make money so I don't have an adblocker and I just don't visit sites with obnoxious ads. 90% of the sites I visit (i.e. google, facebook, stackoverflow, reddit, hackernews, xkcd, netflix, etc...) don't have annoying ads.
Oddly enough the only times I have really regretted turning off my ad blocker is when I'm watching videos where an unskippable ad longer than 10 seconds comes up or I go to some news site (which seems to 3/4 of the time have some full page popup or autoplaying video).
> I don't have any moral problem with ads and companies need to make money so I don't have an adblocker and I just don't visit sites with obnoxious ads.
How do you keep track? What about drive-by exploits that could infect your computer on first visit? Or mobile ads that redirect to the app store?
I know to just avoid most news site except for maybe 5 or 10 that don't have terrible ads (5-10 isn't that hard to just remember). Mobile ads that redirect to the store are annoying and there's no great way to deal with them but I don't seem to run into those much where I go (maybe happens to me twice a week). Other than those the only real concern is drive-by exploits from legitimate ad networks, which doesn't seem to happen very often in the wild.
An interesting point came through on Twitter yesterday: ads for/on TV are increasingly seen only by "the olds". This is going to be a fascinating turn of the worm as cord-based TV implodes further.
I've cut the cord 10 years ago, and (because I don't watch any sports) I _seldom_ watch live TV (Oscars, New Year's Eve, Thanksgiving Day Parade are some notable exceptions.)
My son (who never had broadcast TV) learned how to push the "skip ad" button on Youtube years before he could read.
Same here. I think the only time my son sees traditional advertising is at a movie theater. However, I have noticed more "native advertising" in his favorite youtube channels.
I hate Ads as much as next guy, but what will be the future of the internet without the Ads? where the revenue comes from? do we have to pay for every site that we use?
I prefer a free content internet with reasonable amount of ads!!
I'm willing to pay for content, but honestly only up to how much a site would get from me for an ad impression. I am not going to do $N/mo/yr for X sites however.
Once I found out the sum total of what my ad impressions for every site amounts to about $10/yr, I am really annoyed that the ad industry and content publishers aren't coming up with their own google contributor type deal.
Free content isn't worth the cost in Ads. By this I mean the bandwidth, the cpu/energy use, and the cognitive cost. The monetary cost for people is insane. I'd pay $20/year to tell ad companies to go away and let companies replace my ad impression with a micro transaction equivalent.
Until then, screw the whole industry, ad blockers it is. Give me a real choice or accept that reality.
It was actually $6.20/year at that time. I've been generous with the $10/yr. I also consider $20/year a win for consumption companies as that would mean we could outbid ads for our own eyes. It seems stupid to have to say that but you'd be surprised how little money an individual makes on their own.
Thanks. I definitely hear "nobody would want to actually pay for what their advertising value is actually worth" all the time. Personally, I'd happily pay more than $10 for the benefits.
Yep, I'm willing to concede this isn't fully accurate. But if we don't have numbers at all its not even a point worth arguing. If anyone has other numbers please post them.
As a publisher, even I find myself using ad blockers on certain websites that are totally unusable without them.
One problem is that most sites seem to think of advertising as adding value for themselves and the advertiser. Advertising can and should actually add value for readers with a good example being the job listings here on HN.
I think some % of publishers will have to try and adopt better advertising practices (plus maybe offer some additional paid features), and those that do will be able to survive.
Think about it this way - regardless of the revenue model, it's the users that are paying for the content. It might be direct, as in a NYT subscription, or there could be detours (advertiser pays the publisher -> a business pays the advertiser -> the customer pays the business). There would be no ads if they didn't work and people didn't buy the things that they advertise.
The fundamental problem is the same as with spam. Let's say it takes $1 for a business to show an ad to a person and that every hundredth person is going to buy the product. If their product brings in $100 or more of profit, they break even and are justified in running the ad.
What this model doesn't consider that for the rest 99 people the ad was an inconvenience and, in fact, provided a negative value. Let's say that was 20¢ worth of attention and annoyance. Is anyone going to give them their 20¢ back?
In essence, businesses are only concerned with their customers while non-customers are in a way subsidizing the business. What kind of system can fix this, I don't know, but I'd be interested in hearing what other people have to say.
Ads can be completely acceptable so long they don't detract from the user's experience. If loading times weren't so ridiculously afflicted by adserving and tracking scripts, then things would be fine.
Ad blocking is a textbook case of "prisoners' dilemma". And as someone that uses an ad blocker, I find the increasing popularity of ad blockers unnerving.
This is why I self-host my advertising and try to make them as high quality and relevant as possible (no animation, popups, etc). I have no idea if the concept could be replicated to other content verticals, but it has worked well for me.
That's assuming losing the content creators serving ads would be a loss for internet users.
Given that there exist people that hold this opinion, their own view about using an ad blocker is not at all in the same context than in the prisoners dilemma.
Thus the dilemma is biased, to an extent directly proportional to the number of people holding this opinion.
If it is biased, the standard game theory analysis does not apply directly. i.e. the best move might not be to suffer ads for no long term gain.
More prosaically, I do not care in the slightest if people living in selling ads disappeared completely from internet. They are a cancer, ads are a cancer to the utopia that internet was for a short time.
We need come back to this state. We will, actually, by empowering users.
> More prosaically, I do not care in the slightest if people living in selling ads disappeared completely from internet. They are a cancer, ads are a cancer to the utopia that internet was for a short time.
Excellent response, but on this particular point, I'd suggest you are being intellectually dishonest - or at least overly simplifying things. You use an ad blocker precisely because there is content you want to see. To claim that you don't care if the content you are trying to see disappears from the Internet is rather silly.
Fair point, though there might an argument about content "curators" (clickbait websites for example), leeching off the production of amateurs who don't care about monetization.
Continuing on this line of thought:
I might be interested in some amateur production, genuine efforts borne from passion and dedication. I think actually that any effort to become a professional on this segment will make the creator distort their creative process. That's the cancer I'm talking about. It's not simply from the end-user point of view, but about the approaches that are made possible for people to reach out.
I don't want to condone this monetization scheme. I think advertisement is a bubble waiting to collapse (with rigged analytics and big players monopolizing revenues).
Using an ad-blocker prevent me from ever generating revenue streams toward this industry. I already pay for using the pipes on the Internet. My only concern is communities being able to strive, be it on obscure BBS, IRC channels, subreddits or specialized fora. Others, I wish they would disappear.
Now if only there was a feature on ad blockers that blocked all the crummy youtube videos my daughter watches that are effectively 20 minute ads of people playing with toys.
If you're in my house and got your IP address from my DHCP server, you're ad blocking without even having to lift a finger, thanks to dnsmasq and several volunteer-maintained ad blocking hosts files. Similar method to what Pi-hole [1] does. It doesn't get everything but it's a nice default starting point.
It operates at the DNS level, preventing known ad hosts from even resolving, so it should have no negative effect on your throughput. It could only speed things up since requests to those domains are never made.
They make you do it. I just installed Adblock this morning, actually. I have been holding out this long. But some horrible -- I mean, truly horrible -- browsing experiences on a couple newspaper websites this morning pushed me over the line.
Of COURSE we do, half of the websites you visit these days will crash the browser regularly if you don't use an ad-blocker!
(half is probably an overstatement ;) Nevertheless, I was resolutely trying to be 'moral' and not use and ad blocker until my browser began to regularly crash and I traced the crashes to ads. That issue may be fixed now for all I know, but I can't really go back, though I still try to whitelist sites that I want to have a bit of support, and pay for others somehow, here or there. :) )
Who in that age cohort didn't experience the wild west days of shady Flash and Java applets, Punch the Monkey games, RealPlayer, Shockwave, Internet Explorer and all the other insecure crap we used to deal with.
Raise your hand if you never got a virus and almost bricked the family computer doing something mostly innocuous...
Ad-blocking may not be as essential to self-defense as it used to be, but old habits die hard.
there is a reason for this, and that reason is ABUSE. you know... one or two small well placed ads fine.. but what you get are situations where content is tiny, and really it's just about seeing who can spam you the most ads half of which serve malware.
I started using an adblocker in the aughts after a site I frequented served up a drive-by download from an infected ad network. Because of this, I never disable it even for sites I like.
I loved that add-on until they started adding a bunch of other filters that really aren't particularly funny (Great Recession -> Time of Shedding and Cold Rocks).
I had that installed for a while and totally forgot about it. Then I was very confused for a few months about people putting the word Butt in their new product offerings. Then I realized it and uninstalled because I felt silly.
Is no one else concerned about granting this extension a permission to "Read and change all your data on the websites you visit"? This is a joke extension and nothing is stopping the author from selling it to someone who might have more sinister uses for it.
It needs that permission to read the page and perform the text swap. Text swap is change data, the DOM needs to be read.
This is a big reason to support open source add-ons (not sure if add-on is, might be since it was forked? No idea.) You can see if they're doing anything malicious on the side.
Extensions are so broken. They can update at any time without your knowledge or permission. There is a whole market of selling extensions to malware companies so they can put malicious code in an update.
But besides that, most the extensions I use have serious bugs. I'd be willing to fix them, but there is no ability to do that. Chrome makes it difficult to view the code and there is no ability to edit it or copy it. Let alone submit pull requests to the author, unless they happen to have put the code on github also.
I'm not sure how this addon could possibly work without that permission. After all, that's literally the point of the addon, to read the data on the websites you visit, find instances of Millenials, and then modify the data so it says Snake People instead.
I understand how DOM and extension permissions work. What I don't understand is how 22k people thought giving access to every single site that they visit (banking, facebook, email) to some person that they don't know anything about and have no reason to trust, was a good idea. It's mind boggling.
Lately a couple of them have gotten new computers and mentioned that they think it came with a virus because there ads everywhere on the internet.