Adblocking list should be what their name says: lists that match ads (and advertising-related trackers). There is no place in such a list for politically motivated blacklists.
Content based blacklists have their place too. Users are of course free to create hate-speech-block, union-block, trump-block, liberal-block, nazi-block or any-other-category-block, but if these lists are distributed through an adblocker they should be off by default and clearly labeled.
Adblock plus is a client side plugin, the issue was that the blacklist was maintained by someone who wanted to block more than ads. Perhaps there needs to be reviewers from multiple sources for when changes are made to these sort of lists.
Requiring a review before release requires a rather large change to how the current system works, adding more centralization, and slows down how quickly new threats can be blocked. This event took two days to notice and be changed, and that's for a list with a relatively low amount of users. The current method seems fine.
The advantage to your proposal is that I can unfilter when I actually have the focus to meaningfully engage with public policy questions, rather than when I first wake up and am too tired to question my biases.
I learn things of value when reading materials from opposing points of view, even if the opinion or spin is extreme. I think it’s a valuable and important exercise, but, as you say, probably best when you have your wits about you.
It's time IMVHO to start "filter out" actual web from our lives, we have usenet, we have mails, we have spamassassin, killfiles, mail aliases (at least on paid mails), we have (few) modern MUAs like Notmuch, Mutt&forks, Pine&forks, we have slrn, leafnode, ... we can keep up and evolve them.
It seems you've been triggered. Perhaps as a vocal minority pushing an agenda, apparently all the time ("since forever"), who has taken offence at someone elses free speech you should just use the block button that you have.
You don't see me throwing piss in people’s faces or crashing and trying to ban talks in universities just because they express views and opinions that contradict mine do you?
I don't need to block anyone with contradicting opinion because I'm open to changing my mind if someone comes out with solid research data and facts to prove their view.
But nice try ;)
There's a fine line between expressing one's views and trying to silence others you seem to have problems seeing the difference.
I didn't think being against censorship is such a controversial stance here on HN my how we have fallen...
I mean, it sounds a lot like you're complaining about other people's free speech. People campaigning to have have someone censored is still free speech, even if you don't like it.
The issue is when companies build platforms which are literally designed to allow people to force their views (and often threats) into other people's faces because that "drives engagement" or improves some other bullshit statistic. If companies were to stop doing that, there'd be much less of a push for moderation of those platforms.
Of course, luckily, there's now federated systems like Mastodon which are designed to avoid doing that and to provide the tools for communities to self-organise, meaning one group can have their neofascist server and another their tankie server and the two can block each other and be relatively happy.
Your proposal is for each facet of content you wish to block be an Addon/Extension/Plugin which is completely unnecessary. Today uBlock Origin and other products perfectly handle multiple lists pulled from different maintainers simultaneously.
There is no one central block list, out of the box uBlock Origin uses something like 9 or 10 different lists and the interface has ~50 to choose from. It also has the ability for you to import your own lists form custom sources and to maintain your own.
The fundamental problem is that these filter lists are maintained by random volunteers, who everyone just assumes are trustworthy.
The browser makers avoid the issues by having ad-blockers be third-party extensions. The extension makers don't make the filter lists either, they just import from EasyList and similar. It's surprising there arent't more cases of corruption and broken trust.
I wish I could get ad-blocking some somebody I can trust. Unfortunately the only way to turn ad-blocking into a business is to charge advertisers to un-block them. That defeats the whole purpose of ad blocking, and is basically blackmail.
I maintain an open source project. It isn't my day job though. Sometimes I accept pull requests right away, sometimes it takes me months to get to them. One advantage commercial projects CAN have is someone paid to do daily work on it. (Can is key, sometimes that person exists, sometimes that person doesn't get time)
I agree with your main point that OSS is underfunded, but Babel also collects donations through Open Collective[1] and Henry Zhu withdraws a monthly maintenance fee (recently $8k/mo).
At least there's clear progress. Things like Patreon are great for reach and engagement. It's a step-up from having to either work at a company directly using the tech, or keeping it as a "side-project" that either eats your life away or lags behind.
projects don't get donations just by existing and being used. They need to actively acquire donors/patrons just like businesses acquire customers. Asking for patrons for an individual is also a whole different thing from asking for patrons for a project.
It seems to me like the potential for abuse is relatively limited. Or maybe I'm just not creative enough.
What's the worst that can happen? If a maintainer starts blocking things that shouldn't be then it's easy to complain publicly (as we see in this GH issue) and get the change reverted. If it becomes obvious that a given maintainer doesn't play by the rules then their list will be dropped.
If a list fails to block some ads then people will complete it or create a new one.
Since as far as I'm aware these block lists can't inject or replace content I can't really imagine how one could take advantage of it in a non-obvious manner.
You could sell a better ad block list. The free ones are very good but could be improved providing bypasses for ad-blocking-blocking. A button to report a website showing ads to have somebody write new rules would be nice too
I have tried that. Every other time I tried to book a flight, hotel or buy something I enter my credit card info and got a blank page or an endless spinner. Now I don't know if I have been charged and whether the purchase has gone through. I do not have time to deal with that. Also I ended up white-listing so much garbage just to do basic browsing that it defeated to whole purpose.
I use a separate browser for one-off purchases for this exact reason. If I do repeated purchases on a certain site, I go through the steps to set the rules on my main browser. Feels like a good enough balance.
Yes the amount of effort to manually whitelist everything needed to make pages work but still not show ads/trackers is too much.
I use uBlock with stock default settings. I also have set my browser to purge cookies, local storage, and history every time I close the browser. That's low effort and cuts the annoying crap from websites by a large amount.
If you're using Firefox, check out the containers extension as well. You can isolate sessions or specific websites without worrying about clearing cookies and history. It's not perfect in terms of usability but is a great advancement for plugging privacy leaks
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Users who refuse to think, work, or pay for quality, are not entitled to personally customized services. That would be an act of charity, which is affordable for the few who are far pooorer or sicker then the mainstream, but isn't sustainable for the masses.
i guess this is an unpopular position for some reason, but i'm inclined to agree. in pretty much every part of life you have to choose between effort and price. i can change my own oil or pay someone else to do it. i can cook myself dinner or pay to go out. why do people expect the internet to be different?
Surely you can see how these are different. The imposition of third party tracking and annoying advertising isn't inherent in the medium of the web; it's been/being altered to be that way.
Now, if in order to change your own vehicle engine-oil third-parties made it impossible without viewing advertising and giving personal information up would that be fine with you because some blind people who could disguise themselves were still able to access the oil without viewing the advertising and getting tracked?
"Well you have to make effort to change your own oil, if you don't want to use a white cane and custom printed dazzle-camouflage prostheses then you should pay for someone else to do it."??
okay you're right, the analogy doesn't fit as well as i thought when i woke up this morning.
at a very high level i do still think there are some similarities. people want to consume a tailored tech experience that costs time and money to put together. they don't want to put in any effort to improve their experience, and they definitely don't want to pay for it. what do we do with/for these people? i say we leave them be and document workarounds for people who are willing to do a little reading.
> people want to consume a tailored tech experience
No, in general I don't "want to consume a tailored tech experience".
When I go to a newspaper or magazine site, for example, I want to read the content I've chosen to look at, just as if I'd picked up the paper in a store. I'll "tailor" my experience by choosing which sites to visit and which links to follow, but I do NOT want the news outlet to "tailor" its content based on having tracked my activity across the web for the past year.
I want to be shown the same content as any other visitor to the site, and to be allowed to explore it on my terms, not have some algorithm looking over my shoulder and deciding what to push at me.
Likewise, when I visit a web store, I want to be offered the same range of products, at the same prices, as any other customer. I don't want the store to analyse my interests, demographic details, past purchasing habits, etc., in order to "tailor" its offerings and prices so as to squeeze the maximum amount of money from me.
If and when a use case arises where I do want a "tailored tech experience", then we can talk about how I might pay for it.
I'm not familiar with it but aren't Apple doing things with built-in adblocking these days?
As an aside (but still relating to your comment) I tend to trust my adblocker based on the "many eyeballs" theory and I think the OP and ensuing discussion here is proof that the system mostly works.
I know Firefox uses Disconnect.me's filter lists, which do have a company backing them.
I trust gorhill to make the right decisions when it comes to uBlock Origin and the filter lists it uses, based on his previous track record, his stance on Adblock's "acceptable ads" and his refusal to take donations from anyone.
I don't necessarily trust the individual list maintainers[1], but I do trust that gorhill will quickly purge any filter lists that try to put in shady changes.
[1] I do trust the maintainer of the DNK list. He's a former colleague of mine, and I know how strictly principled he is in regards to ads and tracking.
He'll work on it for as long as he feels like it. I've made sure to thank him for his work and signal that I appreciate what he does very much indeed. All in the hope that he will continue the good work.
Will the project die at some point? Maybe. Or maybe someone will take over. Maybe another better adblocker will come along. The need is there, as long as ads/trackers exist.
I didn't know Apple blocks something? I know that they developed API which allows third-party apps to block anything including apps (if we're talking about iOS).
Can you teach me this skill? I usually don't mind steep learning curves and taking a while to familiarize myself with a piece of technology if I believe that I'll end up benefiting from it (I type in dvorak, use a tiling window manager, I'm a shell power user etc...) but try as I might I just can't wrap my head around umatrix.
I understand what it does, I just don't understand how to use it effectively. Like I just tried it: I enabled uMatrix and went on the website of the NY Times. I end up with a rather large matrix with a bunch of domains like "a.nytimes.com", "api.nytimes.com", "samizdat-graphql.nytimes.com", "optimizely.com", "js-sec.indexwww.com" and many others, includind a bunch of google and amazon domains.
How am I supposed to figure out what I should whitelist in there? Trial and error?
There are a few obvious candidates for blacklisting (amazon-adsystem.com for instance) but I'm sure that those would already be blocked by my uBlock filters. Actually so far uBlock with a few ad + privacy enhancing filters seem to do a decent job which makes uMatrix even more frustrating because I feel like I'm doing something by hand that uBlock does just fine automatically.
But at the same time I often see people praise uMatrix here on HN and that makes me feel inadequate and noobish so I really want to understand what I'm not understanding.
Not sure if you know, but you don't need uMatrix when using uBlock Origin - it has build in the same functionality. You just need to tell uBlock that you're advanced user by checking option in settings.
What TekMol is using sounds like Hard Mode. Personally, I chose Medium Mode (blocking only 3rd-party scripts) as there isn't much difference between them. [1]
Generally, if the website breaks it's "scripts" from somewhere, or rarely xhr. When it's frames, it looks like a chunk of the site is missing. If media won't load it is media. And basically never allow anything from a dark red square.
I'd check umatrix's site and there are a number of presets to make major sites work you can use. After that, if a site doesn't work fiddle with allowing things from places. Save when you're content. It's pretty easy to get the hang of.
I don't run uBlock. Only umatrix. So my situation is different then yours. As I said, I don't blacklist specific hosts. I blacklist everything. And then whitelist specific hosts.
I'm asking about the whitelisting process: when something breaks how do you figure out what you have to whitelist? Many websites load dozens of external resources, how do you figure out what does what?
I usually hit the right one on the first or second try. The hostname usually tells you what it does.
Say the images of users on github.com are broken. I open umatrix and think 'Hmm.. which host could they load them from?'. I enable 'githubusercontent.com' and voila! The user images appear.
Domains that include "assets", "cdn", "static" and similar will probably be needed, at least if you want scripts to run and css to be included.
Anything with "ad" in the name you should probably not enable.
Other than that, basically trial and error. After a while it'll hopefully be easier to tell, but it will still be somewhat tedious each time you encounter a new site.
When you add Decentraleyes and add its ruleset to uMatrix, a lot of things start working.
Context: Decentraleyes is an extension that bundles a lot of those CDN-served JS frameworks and serves the locally stored version when it intercepts a matching HTTP request to fetch from those CDNs.
Basically, another extension can intercept the request before Decentraleyes can get to it.
"The race is always won by the most recently installed extension."
This works but it becomes a grind, especially on sites that fail in subtle ways until you realize why they are broken. And clicking in the matrix is kind of finicky, which the magic spots for subdomain vs domain.
There's a lot of room for streamlining the UI for enabling resources.
I would say it’s normal; bound to happen at some point. That, or a mistake. That’s why we have peer reviews even for maintainers of mature open source projects.
That was fast.
Not only has the list been yanked from hosting, but Juvander Consulting, who was responsible for it, has deleted the Facebook page for the list, and all mention of it from their site, even scrubbing old blog entries about it.
In fairness, Ilpo Juvander's web log stopped getting AdBlock entries in 2015, the same time as xyr Twitter account stopped getting entries, and the web log ceased getting any entries at all in 2017.
True, but that makes it all the more weird that they'd delete them in the first place. It's like they wanted to remove any evidence they were involved at all.
The only remaining indication is the domain, and their iOS app that's still up on the App Store.
I am becoming to doubt the value of adblock and the mindset of filter maintainers these days.
It cause a lot of issues on their side but the customer blame the server.
I've heard a story that web-based game not working for some people for no apparent reason.
The developer used their psychic power and change the file name of image files which was something like "foo_ads_bar.png"(the user supplied error log indicated they faild to fetch that resources which shouldn't happen) to not contains the "ads". And he got less bug report.
The image file was not AD but a essential resource for the web-based game. Blocking that, you break the game implementation.
Blanket blocking based on partial three-letter string match on client side? Fine do what you want. It's your computer after all. But don't come toward us crying for help because it's non of our problem.
Similar situation: The company I work for uses the word "ads" in their website's asset filenames, for all images. When uBo is enabled, their website is basically text-only. They were oblivious until my first day when I mentioned I reviewed their website from home.
Shameless plug: I'm building BlockedBy.com, a tool to monitor adblock rules that start blocking your content. Adding them is very quick but removing them isn't and you start getting a lot of complains from your users.
I've had the issue at one of my projects where an overly broad rule blocked all my images.
If my users are all using list based blockers (adblock, uBlock, mobiles, proxies, ...) and those lists block my content, I'd like to know quickly so I can appeal to the list maintainers.
What if it's a false positive due to overly-broad heuristics? For example, try looking at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ads with Adblock enabled. It shows a blank page for me. (Actually I just wanted to see whether "ads" might have a different meaning in another language.)
I've been noticing this a lot more lately. Lots of websites have broken elements from my adblocker. I have to turn it off and reload the page to get those elements to load. A lot of the time they aren't even close to ads, it's like a drop down menu or button that doesn't render.
Though false positives happen, an ad can also contain the code for another part of the site. Most common is a site using some kind of Google script that could be an ad or tracking.
The goal of the service is not to be an anti adblock tool. It's futile and publishers I've discussed with start to realize this more and more.
The goal is to let you know if you're about to be impacted by a false positive. I've been there and it sucks as your users leave your site or contact your support team.
This is not precisely about the filter list but the whole shenanigans that led to it. Persons from other countries might be interested in this little quirk of Finland. Especially as it relates to workers rights in general.
In Finland, unique among Nordic countries, political strikes are allowed. What does this mean? Let's say you're not happy about a decision made by Trump you can go to a strike. Sure the company doesn't have to pay you but they also must allow you to come back to work without repercussions when you decide. It's basically unlimited unpaid holiday. Or alternatively keeping the employer hostage in order to affect the behavior of an unrelated third party.
So obviously we as a country are bit torn on the issue as what can the employer do about it? Go to white house and take Trump as hostage so that he would change his decision? It is also questionable from democratic perspective. Why should a subset of population have more saying than the rest. Shouldn't everyone have a single vote and based on that decisions are made. Instead of a minority having a vote + a veto right.
Similar overreactions like this adblock may come as right now bunch of major unions are protesting against government and that has brought political strikes back into limelight.
The fact that people are abusing tools for ad-blocking to achieve political goals is a major breach of trust. This is the main issue.
For the record, political strikes happen in the other Nordic countries as well. According to a quick search on the Internet, the only Nordic citizens who are _not_ allowed to partake in a political strike are public servants in Sweden.
Correction on that: any employee in Sweden is forbidden from striking if they are currently bound by a collective bargaining agreement. This means strikes are only legally recognized as strikes in the period between the expiry of an agreement, and the signing of the next one. This is generally every three years.
In other words, political strikes are effectively banned i Sweden.
I'm not aware of any exception to this rule for public servants but I could be wrong.
The Nordic countries all have certain restrictions on striking for some groups of public servants. The groups vary and the restrictions do, too.
If I read my book correctly, Sweden forbids key officials (those who have certain positions of authority) from participating in solidarity strikes (strikes in support of others), unless those others are also public servants.
The purpose of the law is to prevent certain tempting corrupt practices.
As far as I know, this law has never been used, but I feel like it is sensible.
Note: 99% of the time, like all Swedish workers, those officials have a binding collective bargaining agreement, so are forbidden from striking anyway. (I e if they go on strike, they may be legally fired.)
> In other words, political strikes are effectively banned i Sweden.
Not exactly true. What you're talking about is the industrial peace obligation inherent in each collective agreement. But this obligation is not applied where the strike has nothing to do with the collective agreement, i.e., where the objective of the industrial action is not covered by the collective agreement. This is precisely the case with political strikes. In this respect, the system is very similar to that in Finland. However, AFAIK, there are other limitations to purely political strikes, see the source below.
At least this source [1] states that 'purely political strikes are, in most countries, at least in theory, prohibited, exceptions being Denmark (if short and for “reasonable cause”), Finland, Ireland, Italy and Norway.'
Looking more carefully at that source you will find, however, that there is, in practice, a lot of room for strikes of varying political nature in many more EU states.
Ah, that's it -- I remember now. Basically you're free to go on strike unless you have agreed not to. If you do, it will simply be treated as a breach of the agreement and the other party will be able to sue for damages.
what even crossed the mind of the guy, I am still laughing at this. with a straight face, he opened a file called 'ad-blockin-list' and wrote words 'political stance' in them. so silly its unbelievable
Yes I agree that the adblock list is a major breach of trust and should not have been done.
I just wanted to give especially Americans some view on how different things may be.
According to my search as an example in Denmark they're only allowed if "Short and for reasonable cause" and so forth and sweden was not listed at all, but norway was. This is likely a mix of case law and actual written law. https://www.asi.is/media/7581/Strike_rules_in_the_EU27.pdf
Yeah, there's a lot of single cases with little actual law on the subject.
Finland is probably one of the few places where you can't fire an employee for participating in a poltical strike. The ability to fire someone for going on strike doesn't make the strike illegal though.
Amusingly not even illegal strike allows one to fire someone. In Finland even illegal strike gives you protection from retribution and the damages are capped at around 24000€ total (not per employee, but total sum for the strike and this is paid by union).
So even if Finland would make political strikes illegal it would not change much.
Yes, they do. But for many low paid jobs, you need all of your salary to make the ends meet. And the unions don't have unlimited budgets either.
One of the major reasons why strikes typically last only a couple of days, is that the unions start losing their support when their members' personal financial loss exceeds the perceived importance of the issue.
> So obviously we as a country are bit torn on the issue as what can the employer do about it? Go to white house and take Trump as hostage so that he would change his decision?
Given how cozy the ruling coalition are with business interests, this is hardly some one sided thing over which only one party has control. Sipilä isn't just pulling this shit for fun, that's not how Finnish business or politics works. Everyone knows everyone, and the PM himself has personal business interests even.
The rule serves as a check against the collusion of the state and capital. As a card-carrying union member, I quite happily support any and all attempts to block this coalition's relentless attacks on workers' rights.
It depends. The card carrying union members in our company are protesting the strike. They want the union to focus on their contracts and not go against government some of the members potentially voted for.
So it’s a bit more complex issue. I just wanted to tell HN readers that there even is such a thing as a political strike.
If you do not stand with all workers, you will be divided, and fall. That's what solidarity means.
I have a cushy tech job, with a big company, so the recent attempted changes probably won't affect me at all. But if they can go after those it will and get away with it, then next time they will come for me, and there will be no united front left to defend me.
The alternative is we end up like America, and as much as some blinkered people in tech and business seem to want that for their own greedy purposes, a good look at the news should tell you why that's not a road we should want to go down.
From my point of view, the Sipilä government is working with own best interest in mind, even though I actually do believe they also think that's what's best for the country.
Being selfish now won't help me if I need someone else's solidarity in 15 years though, so I'd rather support the cause now and know that I did what I could when it mattered and not when it happened to suit me.
The difference is in methods. Not on the concepts.
As an example I aim for system where employment is at will but that is balanced by strong social security and unemployment benefits. It kinda gives best of both worlds. When you are not screwed when you're fired you don't need insanely strong protections.
I refuse to accept that as a worker I have to support decisions that I personally think as stupid just due to "solidarity". I vote based on my own conscience just like everyone else ought to vote according to theirs.
If Finland was like Sweden where unions don't have legislative power I'd by all means belong into one. And considering that so many more in Sweden belong in unions vs in Finland I am not alone in my thoughts.
I guess this change by the Sipilä government could be fine in isolation. But the fact is that the same government has done/is pushing for cuts to the social safety net, unemployment benefits, schooling, health care etc at the same time.
Please don't look at Sweden as an example for how it should work. Personally, I'd prefer a system more like the Danish one, with unions that are less politicized but with a social welfare net that will catch you fairly quick if you need to change jobs or get fired or whatever.
I worked on that side of the Pond for almost a decade, and was quite involved in the union where I worked. They're quite politicized there as well although I heard the Social Democrats are slowly losing their grip of the larger unions now.
There's more to at-will employment than just "unemployment kinda sucks."
At-will employment is the reason there's no real workers' rights in the US. If the employer can fire you at any time on a whim and for no reason, it becomes impossible to enforce any other labor protection laws, from discrimination on down.
Sure it was illegal for my employer to fire me from my job at a thrift shop in the States after I got injured on the job doing work I shouldn't legally have been expected to do alone. So they just found another excuse and fired me anyway (in this case, because I took a day off to mourn my dying father. Remember what I said about America?).
This happens over and over, with racial, gender, disability discrimination, labor violations, and on and on. There's no real way to enforce the law when there's a giant loophole around it, and who do you think has more money to win a labor suit? The unemployed person, or the company who fired them?
There's also the pressure and the power imbalance it creates. If my employer can fire me whenever they want for no reason, then I have basically no clout at all on the job. I'm under relentless pressure to just do whatever I'm told, because if I don't, then I'm out on my ass in a day. You make a normally small mistake on a day when the boss is in a bad mood? Disagree with the wrong manager? Decide to stand up when the corporation wants you to do something unethical, or even illegal?
Tough luck. Better hit the dole queue tomorrow.
It creates a constant, oppressive pressure on employees, because you will never have job security. You are always one bad day or one wrong move away from the unemployment line.
And let's face it, the same kind of voters and politicians who say things like you do, are the same ones that aren't gonna be in a hurry to raise the unemployment benefit to actually fit the cost of living. The last time I lost my job in Finland I nearly wound up homeless (surprise! I was on the very probationary period the gov't wants to extend indefinitely, and got let go along with all the other new hires, so my startup could cook the books for the VCs). Helsinki benefits haven't been adjusted for cost of living since the 70s, and if you think the same government looking to toss more people out on the street is gonna be in a hurry to fix that, well then I have some very interesting cryptocurrency investments I'd love to show you.
Part of having a strong safety net is employees having the security not to need it all the time. If anyone can just shit-can people for something as simple as fudging the budget for next quarter, then unemployment costs rise, and the response to that has consistently been to cut benefits, not raise them.
For all the system is imperfect here, Finns need to understand just how good they have it already, and stop supporting people who want to drag us down to the Americans' level just to make a few more euros.
I'm a Finnish enterpreneur and priviledged tech guy. While I'm politically right of (Finnish) centre, I've been voting left recently because I perceive the ruling coalition is doing crony capitalism and unsound policy. Even here in the social democratic north the deck is being stacked against workers. We must be careful of any attempts to further weaken them.
> It is also questionable from democratic perspective. Why should a subset of population have more saying than the rest.
I wouldn't accept this argument at face value unless you were unusually disciplined about applying it equally everywhere.
For example, applying this rule equally everywhere means, among other things, eliminating capitalism. After all, capitalism creates a significant imbalance in power in practice via private ownership of the means of production. (It doesn't necessarily mean abolishing the free market, though - some form of market socialism should be compatible with democracy even in this extreme interpretation.)
If we step back from the extremes again, it's clear that this is all about balancing acts. Capitalist power means that a tiny minority has much more say than the rest. Political strikes can be a useful tool to provide a counterbalance.
Maybe there are better ways to provide this counterbalance, but you can't just take employee rights away without taking appropriate measures elsewhere as well to balance things out again.
I should have been more clear with "more say than the rest". I referred to making the laws of the country. In Finland the parliament makes the laws according to the constitution and everyone has a single vote for electing members of said parliament. From what I know companies have no extra votes to give for representatives.
Here in Finland, this does happen, yes. But the larger problem is "gray money"; everyone goes to the same business parties and sauna retreats (expenses paid of course), is friends with everyone.
more recently there's the novel shortcut of the business people themselves just running for office. Our current PM has a long list of business interests, including lobbying the Modi government on behalf of a startup he co-owns to sell them a chemical plant. His family also has holdings in a mining company that has received considerable amounts of government money, a fact he actually tried to cover up with in the Finnish state media Yle.
So painting this as "why is it business' fault what government does!" is more than a little misleading. Government doing exactly what business wants is the whole problem.
Thanks for such news, here in France and in my home country Italy, we do not here anything at all... Well I know YLE because of an ancient article about their "Nuntii Latini" news but substantially nothing else.
Apart of YLE in English (witch feel... A bit limited) did you know other finnish media in English?
There's Helsinki Times, which is about the only Finnish news media in English that even attempts to report on the bad side of Finnish politics. So much of the English language media here is just stories about "Wow, isn't Finland great?!" Yle English even cuts up stories from their Finnish versions to elide some of the more embarrassing details.
Yes but at the end of the day all they can do is use that money to try to convince other voters to choose to vote their way.
The power to convince is different from the power to flatly override the wishes of others.
If you start trying to equalize the power to convince, now you're upending the entire media/journalistic system (where reporters and filmmakers and celebrities have far more influence than normal people) as well as the economy.
The strike thing is complicated, but generally, democracy does not mean "1 person 1 vote, majority rules" or even any of the representative variations. Living under a tyranny of the 51% is not democracy for the 49%.
Democracy means "rule by the people". Anything that devoLves power from leaders to individuals is democratic. And anything that shifts power from some individuals to others is a complex case to analyze.
Hmm. In the UK we have representative democracy - the people choose to devolve powers to the leaders on the principle that they work full-time to make the best decisions for the population they represent.
This is a huge shift of power. But perpetual referenda doesn't seem workable with present technology so rule by the demos is always going to mean devolving power to a small group, which has inherent difficulties.
I like the system of the demos being able to force a referendum with a substantial minority, eg 5%. Then perhaps require a supermajority to pass legislation. This works to limit the power of the chosen representatives.
I’m eagerly waiting for the Brave AI-based blocking to be rolled out. That will hopefully be a start to the end of unwieldy and hard to maintain filter lists in general. I know there are lot of good people who put time into these things, but the blacklisting techniques these extensions use seem rather outdated in 2018.
IMVHO this is the umpteenth sign that WE MUST GO NOW for distributed or if not actually possible for decentralized tech. NOW. Sorry for the caps.
It go nice with https://lwn.net/Articles/768483/ in FOSS world we must understand actual IT evolution path and know how we work freely in the past.
So please reconsider Usenet, advertise it, enforce email instead of ANY actual "communication platform" from WhatsApp to Slack passing trough Reddit, StackExchange etc. We know that finding past information on usenet for newcomers it's not as easy as these modern platform, but we have wiki's, blog's for that. We need to act now us all, anybody who understand because tomorrow it will be too late.
This isn't the first time bad-faith alterations have been made to filter rule lists. The maintainer of a popular porn site (can't remember off the top of my head which one) famously requested a special exemption for the ads on his site.
Adblock broke websites more than once for me. `.btn.btn-primary { display: none }` and similar things. They are fixed relatively fast, but if user uses adblock, he must be aware that this addon can and will broke websites, so he must know how to disable it if something doesn't work. Not saying that politics has place in adblock, of course, but worse things happened.
I run a Raspberry Pi/Pi-hole along with uBlock Origin w/ all filters enabled, Decentraleyes, Privacy Badger, Webmail Ad Block, Tracking Token Stipper, Neat URL, and No Coin. I also have about:config set to disallow referers, fingerprinting, sites reading history, no geo location, etc. Works a treat.
Content based blacklists have their place too. Users are of course free to create hate-speech-block, union-block, trump-block, liberal-block, nazi-block or any-other-category-block, but if these lists are distributed through an adblocker they should be off by default and clearly labeled.