I was with you until this piece. Not everyone is well educated enough on the nefarious nature of targeted online advertising and the technical processes of blocking them on each platform.

In some EU countries we have pretty strict regulations on what ads are allowed, where they're allowed and for what they're allowed, precisely because not everyone can "mentally ignore" them and people can be easily influenced.

So you can't just say "well, it's you're own fault you got addicted to opioids/gambling/drinking/smoking, so you get what you deserve", when the whole city is plastered with ads for such accessible addictions. "Got a tooth-ache? Ask your doctor about OxyContin." "Got trouble paying the bills? Get a loan with 500% interest rate from us on the spot." "Wanna look cool? Smoke Bullshit cigars."

Usually, the less educated and less well-off people are, the more vulnerable to nefarious and predatory advertising they tend to be, so it's the responsibility of us as a society to take legal steps of ensuring the regulation and blocking of targeted web ads at communal/societal level instead of leaving it to the individuals and the mercy of the "free market".

The statement was directed to the audience, IE HN. I have confidence that everyone on HN is capable of installing those browser plugins and comprehending the complex clusterfuck that is uMatrix.

I don't have a solution for the less-technical folks right now. The best I can do is encourage people who ARE capable of responding reasonably to that message to help the people who don't. uBlock Origin is already pretty friendly, but uMatrix is a nightmare.

They suggested regulation as is done in Europe. Perhaps that's worthy of consideration since hope and power users aren't stopping this problem

The problem we're facing is that adtech is a multibillion dollar industry with the will and means to actively research and develop new and exciting ways to bypass legislation.

I can't control the legislation beyond who I vote for, and none of the voting options I'm given seem aware of how the internet works, so I am left with the avenue of "Angrily tell people on the internet to stop doing that" and try to encourage attrition as much as I can.

It cant for existing profitable business models. You couldnt ban the google owned nuclear SLBM fleet if it already existed and represent the most profitable sector of the economy. Inertia exists and the more profitable the topics the harder it is to break from a central position. It would be economic suicide on a national level.

You would get some paper tiger checks and balances entrenching googles nuclear fleet monopoly.

Of course we can ban that. :laughs in EU:

There just isn't the political will behind it like it is on things like ICE cars or nuclear energy, because unlike the latter things, the politicians and voters don't understands it well enough to be outraged about it.

edit: Saw your nuclear energy edit too late. Thats a great example for protectionism / having a frame for subsidies. We still require energy, that section of the GDP didnt just evaporate.

Car legislation is likewise just a driver for higher consumption.

You would need something equally profitable to do for the sub fleet supply chain to ban it.

When I set a computer for any of my friends and family, I drop uBlock Origin on it and show them briefly how it works, usually using cnn or similar sites an example. It solves 99% of any computer problems they run into.

There was a time when Chrome started to be bundled with every freeware out there. Most of the people where I did IT-Support ended up using chrome at some point. They didn't even realize when or how they changed a browser. Some didn't even know what a browser IS. They just open "the internet".

I had installed Firefox with proper protection before that.

I ended up with a bunch of users who used chrome without adblocker, downloading crap.

In the end, I diverted the chrome shortcut to Firefox, which is good enough with ublock. Wouldn't install them, Brave. Don't want them to come back to me asking about that crypto custerfu.

Especially the way it started. It's till out there. The internet never forgets.

Unclear from your comment who the target audience was, but to me it would be equally inflammatory regardless. The non-tech-savvy users are a way bigger and more vulnerable target than just the HN userbase which is a microscopic minority on global level.

Encouraging those who can to do is also a component of grassroots change. I don't think it took much charity to interpret their comment as being directed toward HN, and only a little more to imagine how pushing tech people to use/develop/polish ad blocking tools can result in the spread of such things.

Seems like you're working hard to be upset.

Eh, agreed. Kinda detracts from the point. I've gotten pretty vehement about the topic over the last few years I guess.

I think it can be made to do the same things as uMatrix with advanced mode (I use medium mode on uBlock) - or am I wrong on this? Ive never used uMatrix before

I think I actually started out with uMatrix first so I've mostly relied on it to do most of the heavy lifting.

This is really "our" problem. If the audience here doesnt find fixes its unrealistic to expect that of regulators. This is a systemic issue caused by the economic structure that cant be fixed by yet another law.

If everyone blocked ads then it wouldn't be so profitable. The reason it's so profitable is that very few internet users actually have ad-blockers in place.

There is a giant industry here. Any attempt at top down regulation will fail at that and get either regulatory captured or poked holes through for the big players.

And it's not like ad-tech is an important industry that's mandatory for a healthy society like healthcare, energy, transportations, education, environment, agriculture, etc. We can easily survive without them being so wealthy and powerful. We might even be in a happier place with them defanged, even if their shareholders wouldn't.

You miss my point completely and i am unsure how to reword it.

Yes they are exclusively big players already, thats why it wont work through top down regulation and requires user action.

We might be better off without them, but i dont see how that could ever happen through top down regulation. The economic and political incentives are way to strong and bureaucracies way to unwilling and incompetent. You cant destroy such profitable business models through regulation, they have to much pull here. At best you get regulatory capture. It will be another iteration of "safe/privacy on paper" allowing for higher profits and more entrenched monopolies for said megacorps.

Intention is not a valid metric, outcome is.

Wrong. Top down regulations definitely work. :laughs-in-EU: That's how we banned Apple's proprietary connector, ICE car sales starting 2030, and how (for better or worse) some countries banned nuclear. What makes you think we can't ban targeted ad-tech the same way?

There just isn't the political will behind it like it is on things like ICE cars or nuclear energy, because unlike the latter things, the politicians and voters don't understand it well enough to be outraged about it, so they keep slipping under the radar for now, but there's no guarantee this will go on forever.

Nobody deserves to have their computer compromised - whether they block ads or not is irrelevant. Saying otherwise is victim blaming. It's the same as saying that a woman who walks down the street in attractive clothing deserves to be raped, and society is making some pretty strong statements about that sort of thinking these days.

They've had about 30 years to correct course and self-regulate, and not only can the adtech industry not help themselves but companies like The Google have proven that they'll be complicit with the swindle if they can get away with it.

If fast-forwarding through ads on your DVR isn't stealing, then neither is using uBlock Origin. In fact, the morality behind web ads means that the right thing to do is to make ads, especially malicious ads, not profitable.

The purely ethical solution here is just not using sites that have ads if you're opposed.

I don't care.

Adtech is a pursuit that has turned into a scientifically-quantified attempt to subvert the executive function of other human beings with the aim of getting them to perform actions they would otherwise not perform.

If you can't survive without engaging in amoral psychological manipulation of other human beings, you don't deserve to be paid, and your way of life should collapse.

Find a different job.

Let's not forget that this article is about adtech being used to distribute malware.

Everyone agrees the early internet and web was different. The auto-load resources "feature" was intended, or even Javascript, for a web that was experimental and fun to use.

These features are now used almost invariably for commercial purposes. Most of that is surveillance.

Without auto-load resources and Javascript, the user dials one number and only connects to one number. Most advertising and tracking stops working. When visiting sites submitted to HN, I'm not using a browser that auto-load resources or runs Javascript, hence there is no need for me to "block" ads; I control what request.

People have been expending vast amounts of energy trying to counter "automatic" behaviour of the browser they choose to use. Perhaps the challenge is a new type of "fun". Otherwise, why use a browser that one cannot control. Find an open source browser. Remove the offensive "features". Re-compile. Done.

This is exactly what I did with the browser I'm using to type this comment.

Not everything that is "popular" is good. Perhaps that's an effect of advertising. Several so-called "tech" companies want the public, including government officials, to believe that advertising dollars are necessary to sustain a useful computer network.^1 Feel free to debate.

Everything that is good does not need advertising. UBlockOrigin is one example. By generally all accounts, it's great and, AFAIK, it is not supported by advertising.

1. The truth however is that advertising dollars are only necessary to sustain those companies.

I hope you do great contributions to the cause if you are already at the point of victim blaming.

If you dont want one and keep your agency, be less dumb. This is a functional description not a moral argument. If somebody has to fix it for your, your say in the matter will drastically reduce.

Depends on your moral code, I think? Who made you a moral authority? You don't get a say in what I consider moral.

I'm sorry for the aggressive tone of my post, but people telling me what I should think are a pet peeve of mine.

I don't care what you consider moral. If you don't like it, you can do as you please. I would have thought that would have been obvious, since this is the internet and the only control over you I have is through text on the screen.

Repeating this is tiresome; take your aggressiveness and peevishness elsewhere, because I'm about as obligated to care about them as you are to consider what I say moral. You're not sorry, so you shouldn't say so, which is a pet peeve of MINE.

Morality necessarily comes from authority. Otherwise, it's nothing but a preference or a fashion. Everyone may have a different view of morality, but the whole point of morality is objective, if it is to have any comprehensible definition. Hence it is correct to state one's morality with authority if one truly believes it.

That’s not true at all

> Otherwise, it's nothing but a preference or a fashion

Morality is definitely a stronger belief than a mere preference, but it’s still subjective.

> the whole point of morality is objective, if it is to have any comprehensible definition

I don’t understand where you’re coming from here. Morality has nothing to do with objectivity.

It's easy to forget this when every article has a web archive link bypassing a paywall, or you watch YouTube with Sponsorblock, but ultimately someone has to pay the bill at the end of the day. An individual writing an investigative piece over months incurs a lot of expenses, the 10 minute YouTube video you watched probably took many hours or days to produce, the storage and bandwidth cost of the 4K video you watched is not nil.

An ideal world would have properly regulated ads on platforms like YouTube and Adwords held to the same standards as some European ad agencies. But since we don't live in an ideal world, pay for a subscription to a newspaper you read a lot. Give someone you enjoy like $5 on Patreon, maybe more if they're not the type to double dip with sponsorship spots AND have a Patreon (personal pet peeve) and immediately unsubscribe, that's worth several thousand ad-supported views depending on their CPM. Like having LTS versions? Donate to the devs or don't be surprised when they burn out[0].

Currently, almost everything you enjoy on the internet is made by other humans. Support them in doing so.

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/linux-gives-up-on-6-...

a little click / tap - open up options - send a small payment (paypal, venmo, crypcoin, more) - setup a regular support (patreon, superfans, etc), - watch an ad (able to choose type of ad and content to watch or avoid) - share this content via ..social, your site, etc.. remix.. - give a like / subscribe / follow on ..

(the site owner can choose defaults / add info maybe)

and a bridge for people to add money into a bucket that can be translated to wherever.. I've run into people online I needed to send money to (and offline too) where figuring out how to get money from me to them is just crazy.

I believe the problems with micropayments in the past have been mainly with not accepting enough payment gateways - having a search / suggest option would make it easier.

Some people are happy to do this or that if you make it easier to do that or this, but often it's not.

Is there a portal we can click to that does some basic how to get a few dollars from [where you are] to [where it's going] the easiest, least cost, most secure / less worry?

This is different for many people and places.

ai - give me a coffee cup mixed with light bulb and coin and bucket with speech bubbles that pop up with..

I explicitly reject this idea.

What did media do for centuries? They had a brick and mortar sales operation that went out and sold advertisements, took in creative, and than ran those ads inline. For those not big enough to support this, there are agencies that will do the entire thing for you.

This idea that we need to allow untrusted third parties to run code on our computer because poor website operators would just have no other way to make money is bogus. This is particularly true for journalists who should be extremely uncomfortable that google has full access to their articles and can manipulate them before they're shown to end users.

In an ideal world, people would take and make 100% of the advertising money for themselves, and pennies-on-the-dollar advertising aggregators would have no reason to exist.

For reference, I work at a smallish media company doing high quality news and content. We have a small and strapped sales team. They sell what they can but the buyers have the same conundrum. They aren't all looking for partners when they can just buy traffic at predictable prices and put their faith in brand safety tools. They want to maximize their efficiency of their ad spend and that usually doesn't involve looking for partners and relationships when they can just click a button and get more views. The result is that we've been hit by malicious ads more than once.

I remember what the internet was like before the adtech hegemony was so entrenched.

I was happier with my internet experience back then.

I legit do not care if every service on the internet that relies on ads ceased. If it all went away tomorrow, I'd be fucking fine. Sure, I'd have to find something to occupy my time that isn't Daily Youtube Binge, but that'd be a /healthy/ outcome for me.

I'm fine with going back to paying 5 bucks a month to self-host content I want to share. The newstertainment industry with all their paywalls don't actually provide much value to my life, and if they went away, I'd be fine as well, and so would you (probably?). I'm fine with paying 5 dollars a month for a reliable search engine, too. I've been collecting the patreons of every youtube channel I follow and pretty quick here I'm going to be setting aside part of my monthly budget to it. Supporting healthy monetization schemes is part of my beliefs.

Hell, I'd be 100% happy to participate in a good-faith attempt to charge me a small fee PER ARTICLE I READ (similar to how I was happy to pay for music when it became possible to buy individual tracks and not entire albums), but the industry collectively failed to grab its sac and make that change already, so I don't care about them or how Kantian philosophy applied to what I believe would ruin their way of life. That is, in fact, the point.

Adtech is amoral, and it disgusts me how we've normalized it to the point we have.

Noscript isn't worth having in favor of uMatrix, IMO.

I suppose Mozilla gets a lot of Google money to not let that happen (?)