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from the if-they-had-only-listened-before dept.
Marketoonist ran a story about marketers saying, "Oops, our bad."
The Interactive Advertising Bureau issued a remarkable mea culpa last week about the state of online advertising. In response to the rise of ad-blocking software, IAB VP Scott Cunningham said digital advertisers should take responsibility for annoying people and driving them to use ad blockers:
"We messed up. As technologists, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of the user experience....
"We build advertising technology to optimize publishers' yield of marketing budgets that had eroded after the last recession. Looking back now, our scraping of dimes may have cost us dollars in consumer loyalty...
"The consumer is demanding these actions, challenging us to do better, and we must respond."
Nod to pipedot for running this story.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday October 26 2015, @01:24PM
I just recently installed NoScript, and WOW!, what a difference. uBlock Origin is good too (I still use that), but lately I was having all kinds of problems with my browser eating up 100%+ CPU time, and I couldn't figure out why. So I finally installed NoScript and suddenly my browser isn't pegging my CPU all the time, so it was obviously all the JavaScript bullshit these sites run. And now that I've been looking at the NoScript toolbar and seeing all the JS that sites want me to load, it's been a real eye-opener.
Anyway, I don't use PolicyRequest (nor have I heard about it before), but NS seems to work well, but the problem I found was that frequently sites just didn't work right until I enabled the right scripts. The simple solution is to simply allow it to temporarily whitelist the site's own domain. It seems rare for BS JS to be loaded from a site's own domain, it always comes from someplace else. For instance, I have another tab open for an auto parts site, and it has no less than 5 domains loading scripts. The first is the site itself, but the other four are newrelic.com, addthis.com, google-analytics.com, and trustwave.com. NoScript blocks those last four and everything seems to work fine. Occasionally I'll run across a site where I need to enable something like sitenamecdn.com, but that's it.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Snow on Monday October 26 2015, @05:11PM
Try visit this site:
failblog.cheezburger.com
If you start temporarily allowing all, you'll see that 3rd party scripts call 4th party scripts, call 5th party scripts, and so on. It's like a stack of turtles. There are a lot of sites that do this. Newspapers are some of the worst.
NoScript is also pretty annoying when ordering things online. It seems I always miss a script at the payment screen and end up entering everything again.
But I'll be damned if a website is going to load content from 100 different untrusted places on my computer.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday October 26 2015, @06:25PM
Anyway, I don't use PolicyRequest (nor have I heard about it before)
Possibly because the actual name is RequestPolicy. [mozilla.org] It's like NoScript but for cross-site scripting. Unfortunately they also block CSS* and in my several attempts to find a way to only disable that functionality I've been so far unsuccessful. So basically 75% of the time you load a new site, the entire page style drops out until you just whitelist the domain...which kind of defeats the whole purpose (?).
Hmm. I get a "site says it's HTTPS but we don't trust it" error when trying to go to their non-Mozilla website. That's interesting.
*"that's not a bug; that's a feature"
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2015, @04:49AM
uMatrix ftw! You can control cooke, image, css, iframe, plugin, script and XHR blocking separately, globally and per-site. It's UI may be somewhat confusing at first, but when you'll get used to it, you'll wonder how you managed to live without uMatrix before.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2015, @04:46AM
uMatrix is WAY better than RequestPolicy, and it was written by gorhill too!
Also, you don't even need ReqiestPolicy with uBO: check "I am an advanced user" in uBO options, and you will be able to block 3rd-party thingies from uBO popup.