Can you imagine the amount of corruptive influences and persuasions he is resisting?
Pretty sure he has them blocked
Though you may be right, I have a feeling that he is facing formidable opposition. That may include anything from social engineering to full on psyops.
Bet he’s had people “happen” to bump into him IRL, and gets pull requests from bad actors that are very subtly trying to take the project in the wrong direction.
Your second point is especially interesting, considering the recent xz backdoor. The bad actors manipulated a poor burnt out maintainer for it. In comparison, I’m impressed with gorhill for his perseverance and mental strength. I would like to know how he avoids burn out with such negative influences.
Dang, for real? Do you have some more details on this?
I think he’s using old school speculative “bet”, not the new Gen Z meaning
Bet
Lol, it does read entirely differently in the gen z light… good eye! If you add a comma after “bet”, it completely changes the meaning. Fun
Insightful point. And it does remind me of the corporate purchase of the Don’t care about cookies extension for Firefox (And the Simple Mobile Tools for Android). Luckily it was forked. https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies Open source FTW!
🙂 🐧Simple Mobile Tools was forked into “Fossify *” for anyone interested.
There’s a reason uBlock Origin overtook Adblock Plus in popularity.
The VLC guy turned down what a quick search is telling me was “several tens of millions” to show ads. I can’t even imagine what getting people to drop ublock would be worth.
I wouldn’t blame him if he took it, but I greatly respect that he didn’t.
And all the volunteers keeping those lists up-to-date.
Yea it’s mainly those that do the work actually
Still big kudos to Raymond for providing the foundations to make it all work too.
Aren’t most lists available on other browsers and ad blockers? Unless Raymond created the format
The format currently used in adblocker predates uBO by almost a decade so no, but still, maintaining this add-on with how fast and often web browser changes, and keeping it performant must be quite the task.
I think performant is probably the key thing here. There were ad blockers before and there are alternative ones now, but the thing that sets unlock Origin apart is how light weight it is.
uBlock Origin explicitly says he refuses donations and to give it to the list maintainers instead.
A true hero acknowledging the other heroes on which his work rests.
It’s kinda sad that without Mozilla, Raymond, the NoScript guys and TOR we would lose control over the internet pretty much immediately
Kind of agree. Though there is pi-hole and several others. And there’s i2p, Freenet (now called Hyphanet) and GNUnet, and similar.
Pi-hole is nice for devices that you don’t fully control. But it’s not enough, due to the fundamental limitations of DNS based blocking. If the ads and the content are hosted on the same domain, it can’t do anything.
Also issues with links that get ads on top of them. You can still click them, you’ll get redirected to a blank page (because the ad gets DNS blocked), but with an adblocker you would’ve gone to the non-ad link.
Who is Raymond? Never heard the name
I definitely agree, although really a LOT of non-Linux/(IT) guys use Chrome, some even Edge, if on Windows
IT person…
Uses chrome…
Both cannot be true friend, sorry. Your buddy is either a fake engineer or their main job isn’t IT.
If you really have friends in IT they haven’t used chrome or edge in a while, or their using the scripting bot for weekly progress reports to their boss, and they’re only using it for that…
this is the stupidest comment I have read all week. chromenis fucking INFESTED in IT field. literally almost everyone uses it in my class, I’m a third year student in ict-engineering. literally everyone used it in my last school too, which was also IT related. if you actually believe that you must not really see other IT people outside the linux circles
You don’t work in the industry.
You don’t want to start this conversation, it’s a race to absolutism and purity tests at odds with one another. You say Firefox and someone comes in a calls you an idiot because you’re not using a fully FOSS browser or one that is inadequately hardened or one that supports the installation of content-management modules.
Not really anymore for Mozilla. They now get a lot of your private data and share em with their “business partners”
I’m going to need some sources for that claim or I’m calling bullshit. I have never heard anyone claim that and I have seen absolutely zero evidence suggesting that.
edit:
these are the closest things I could find,
https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/22/24109116/mozilla-ends-onerep-data-removal-partnership
https://videoweek.com/2022/02/10/mozilla-partners-with-meta-for-privacy-preserving-attribution/
and neither is bad. meta is a questionable choice for privacy cooperation but even in that it makes sure no one, not even meta, can read those match keys
I believe a lot of info I got was from this video but it’s been a while so I’m not too sure: https://youtu.be/ugnOM2mzgNU
Also yea Firefox sends a lot of telemetry data and stuff, even if you disable the option in the menu. You have to go to the developer mode to remove all of it. Check “hardened Firefox”. If there is an hardened Firefox, then there is a non-hardened Firefox.
And then there are all the contracts and calls to Google’s server, for example for geolocation and stuff
And if you want the ultimate proof, everything is in their privacy policy https://www.mozilla.org/fr/privacy/firefox/ - just see how much data they collect, use and share, for better or for worse.
after reading the privacy site that doesn’t sound too bad. or at least “tracks you private data and shares it with their business partners” bad which makes it sound like they are literally spying on you.
they do send telemetry data yes, but not your ip or anything that could be used to track against you, they do share some data while using the search function from url bar which is prettt much necessary and that seems to be only the stuff you typed.
most of it seems to just be about sponsored content where they send the amount of clicks and time when those clicks happened so advertisers know some statistics and advertisors get their royalties. firefox does suggest you content based on your browsing history but that happens locally. in no point does you browsing history go outside your computer, which is the most important part to me. they do know what was suggested, but not how it was suggested
so in conclusion, they do send some device information, information about your clicks and where those clicks happened and some other very basic telemetry with no information that could be tracked to you.
of course if one want the ultimate privacy that can be a dealbreaker. but to say that they collect your private data is quite an overstatement imo. I couldn’t give a damn if my browsing is part of some anonymous statistics.
but yeah in a way you’re correct, they do collect data. like almost literally every application does in the modern era
If only, I know so many people who don’t bother with adblocking at all. I honestly have no idea how they use the Internet without going mad
My kid discovered that he can hit the “report” button on the YouTube app on the TV to skip the ads immediately. So now every ad gets reported as “inappropriate”.
I’m proud of him.
Tip: if you have an Android TV, you can install SmartTube as an alternative, privacy-friendly YouTube client. It has no ads and sponsorblock integration
And as a better option, use an actual device instead of a short lifecycle planned obsolescence embedded android device on a “smart” tv.
This is why I refuse to buy a “smart” TV. My old flat screen TV works perfectly fine with a Chromecast with Google TV. I can even use the Chromecast in my projector or any other device with HDMI input to make it smarter than most TV interfaces I have tried.
I found out this trick when I eating dinner once at my local library. Oddly, it was a kid came up and saw I was watching YT videos. Showed me the tactic, and now I rely on it lol
😀 👍
I just stay logged out of youtube. So far no ads and no nagware
I’m of two minds about people not adblocking.
On one hand: Ads are gross noise pollution, and people are increasingly unaware of all the noise around them (or the noise they’re generating) largely because they’ve been passively trained to “tune out” ads. Also consumerism.
On the other hand: As long as there are a significant amount of people oblivious to the possibility of adblock, corporate ad mobsters and the other worst people in the world out there will largely leave those of us blocking their ads alone. If everyone ran adblockers, we’d definitely live in a world of WEI… and probably worse. So, maybe all those people are watching ads so that I don’t have to, as the YouTube thumbnails say.
If sites wanted to run ads and host them locally without tracking that would be fine. But since they’re tracking users it’s essential to block them for privacy and security, and if someone isn’t then maybe they don’t understand the level of tracking involved. We need a better name than adblocking.
I just don’t want to see ads.
Sure, that should be absolutely your choice, it’s your browser.
People just don’t know, I’ve been showing my wife the way little by little and she’s always blown away
I’ve shown a colleague after seeing him browse an horrendous fantasy football website. He couldn’t believe the difference between before and after.
Yeah, it’s shocking to see how many ads they jam in now. I felt so dirty.
The way people talk about people who don’t block ads is so funny.
I understand and respect the reasons people choose to use blockers, but ads honestly just aren’t that problematic for me in practice and are easy to avoid and ignore.
Ads have been known to contain drive-by malware. Even if you don’t mind seeing ads (which personally I don’t mind unless they’re very intrusive), an adblocker is important for online safety.
Drive-by malware tends not to be zero-days though. I’ve stayed safe for decades just by keeping my software up to date.
There’s no mention of anything like zero-days in that article. They only mention that it can target all major OSes, with no mention of cutting edge versions also being vulnerable.
Hilariously, the article directly supports my position as well:
The good news for some, at least: it likely poses a minimal threat to most people, considering the multi-million-dollar price tag and other requirements for developing a surveillance campaign using Sherlock
That’s a big part of my whole point. People who don’t do even a modicum of actual thought about a practical threat model for themselves love pretending that ad blocking isn’t primarily just about not wanting to see ads.
If Israel or some other highly capable attacker is coming after you, then fine, you really do need ad blocking. In that case malware in ads is going to be the least of your concerns.
Attacks that cast such a wide net as to be the concern of all web users are necessarily less dangerous because exploits need to be kept secret to avoid being patched.
There’s nothing wrong with taking extra precautions; I’m certainly not saying blocking ads is a bad idea. It’s the apparent confusion that an informed, tech-savvy person might choose not to block ads that makes me laugh.
Thank Raymond and the list maintainers, you keep the internet usable
Yeah, Raymond Hill made a great plugin, but the people maintaining the lists are the real MVPs
They’re all gods among men.
What would we do without ublock origin
In the 1999s-2000s we used WebWasher. It was basically a proxy server which you ran locally on your computer and it had all the filters. You just set up your browser’s network connection to point to WebWasher and it acted as the gateway to the Internet.
If browsers somehow decided to kill all their plugin support, you could still use that to filter your content.
Use vblock ingress!
Seriously. Says a lot about the modern internet, though. Both good and bad.
Provide source please: xkcd
He’s far too kind of a person. He doesn’t accept any donations for the many years of a better and safer internet experience I’ve gotten from his work
All hail Raymond Hill :0
There is something very wrong when deleting 50% of wep page is the least it takes to make the internet usable…
Never knew the name of the guy behind it. Nice! This is why Everybody Loves Raymond!
About
Free. Open-source. For users by users. No donations sought.
If you ever want to contribute something, think about the people working hard to maintain the filter lists you are using, which are available to use by all for free.
Gladly upvoted to
worshiphonor one of the open source heroes.and when asked about donations, he instead asks to donate to those who maintain the lists.
Absolute gigachad
Im genuinely so thankful for this project, the creator and maintainers. You are doing the lords work.
