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Free news sites step up pleas for consumers to disable adblocking software:
If your web browser has recently updated, or you've loaded some new browser extensions, you may be seeing a message when you visit certain free content sites.If your web browser has recently updated, or you've loaded some new browser extensions, you may be seeing a message when you visit certain free content sites.
"Please support journalism by allowing ads," one of the pop-up messages reads.
In the message, there is a large link that will disable the adblocker extension in your browser. There is a smaller link that will allow you to proceed to the site while continuing to block ads.
Dominic Chorafakis, with the cybersecurity consulting firm Akouto, says adblocking extensions aren't exactly new, but it's possible browsers have strengthened them in recent updates.
"Sites that rely on ad revenue, of course, don't like this at all, and there is quite a bit of effort being put in from their side to detect when a visitor has adblocking in place and either ask them politely to disable adblocking or outright prevent them from viewing their content unless they disable it," Chorafakis told ConsumerAffairs.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday December 23 2020, @01:32AM (17 children)
Some ads get past the adblock. I especially dislike autoplay video. About the only courtesy they observe is not also autoplaying the audio. I've tried the hosts file idea, and while okay, it's a lot of work to set it up over and over and over.
Then there's those anti-social cookies. "You've read 3 free articles this month, now you must subscribe or you can't read any more!" Whenever I see that, I wipe the cookies that website planted on my computer, and that fixes that. Making my own computer turn me over to the nagging, moralizing, starving journalists propagandists! Sleazy. Really could use a good cookie blocker extension.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday December 23 2020, @01:34AM (3 children)
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autoplaystopper/ejddcgojdblidajhngkogefpkknnebdh?hl=en-US [google.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday December 23 2020, @02:28AM (1 child)
Next in line: the development of this ad blocker is supported for you by ads, please disable it! (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday December 23 2020, @02:32AM
I think that already happened.
AdBlock Plus Reportedly Allowing More Ads by Default [soylentnews.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus#Controversies [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday December 23 2020, @03:38AM
Is a counterpart to the "AutoplayStopper" extension by yochaim available for Firefox as well? I'd like to see how it stacks up against over a dozen ways to autoplay silent video in a web browser [pineight.com], many of them JS-free.
(Score: 2) by rigrig on Wednesday December 23 2020, @02:03AM
They would, but somehow most browsers by default only allow autoplay for silent videos. (My guess is that background tabs opening with noise was extremely annoying, but playing a video as background or whatever is a "valid use case" and didn't generate enough user complaints to block it)
No one remembers the singer.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday December 23 2020, @02:28AM (2 children)
Ad-blockers? Much easier to just use Firefox and block all images. Even works for blocking videos, and the site can't tell you're blocking "their" ads as well.
And for those sites that try to block all but the first few lines of content if you're not a registered user? Click on the "text" icon in the URL bar that appears after the page is loaded (you may have to scroll down and back up to force the icon to appear).
You'll be amazed by both the bandwagon savings and the page load speeds. You'll also no longer be loading tracking and "share with" icons from anywhere.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday December 23 2020, @07:48PM (1 child)
I haven't used image blocking-- well, it wasn't blocking so much as simply not downloading them, to save bandwidth-- in a very long time, basically since I was last on dial-up, in the days before Firefox existed as Phoenix. Good to know that option is still present.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 23 2020, @10:39PM
If you use ublock origin, you can even specify the size of images. First party Small ones that are usually icons can still go through. Videos or third party or large ones blocked. It's a bit nicer than blocking all images and saves almost the same amount of bandwidth. We've actually had people using less that way when we rolled it out, probably because they stopped toggling the feature on and off in the browser.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 23 2020, @03:04AM (1 child)
Do it at the router. That's what I do. Three easy steps: Import, Cleanup/Filter/Whitelist, restart DNS.
#### post_mount script
# hosts list to import and filter
wget -qO- "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/alternates/fakenews-gambling-porn-social/hosts" | grep -w ^0.0.0.0 | sed $'s/\r$//' |grep -v -e 'redd.it' -e 'reddit' -e 'linkedin.com' -e 'licdn.com' -e 'pinterest' -e 'pinimg' -e 'reddit' |sort -u > /tmp/mnt/8GB/hosts.clean;
# block facebook hosts if they get removed from imported list again
cat /tmp/mnt/8GB/all_facebook_hosts_to_block|grep 0.0.0.0 |sort -u >> /tmp/mnt/8GB/hosts.clean
# wait because sync is broken on this piece of crap
sleep 6
# make sure your dnsmasq config knows where you stashed the additional hosts.clean
service restart_dnsmasq
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Wednesday December 23 2020, @08:57AM
Just install https://pi-hole.net/ [pi-hole.net]
(Score: 2) by NateMich on Wednesday December 23 2020, @04:04AM (5 children)
If you find yourself doing something over and over, you should be using a script.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday December 23 2020, @07:43PM (4 children)
Easier said than done. I experiment with a lot of different Linux distros. Can't be sure if systemd or something else is controlling the /etc/hosts files, so that editing them directly is futile, as they will simply be overwritten by some deeper configuration.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 23 2020, @09:32PM
i use arch and fedora and i've never had my /etc/hosts file overwritten. people use that for local web dev so i'd be surprised if a distro pulled that shit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 23 2020, @10:42PM (2 children)
Which OS version and network interface configuration tool do you use?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday December 24 2020, @01:51AM (1 child)
Of late, Lubuntu and Mint. Yeah, I know, systemd. They use NetworkManager. Also trying Void on an old netbook. Have used Slackware, Arch, Gentoo, Red Hat, Puppy, AntiX, Knoppix, Xubuntu, OpenSUSE, and others I don't recall off the top of my head.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 25 2020, @05:49AM
You could be running into two issues with different solutions based on your description. The first is that the actual /etc/hosts file is being rewritten. The second is that NetworkManager is somehow splitting the horizon on its resolver. Do you have DNS sofware like dnsmasq or systemd-resolved installed? Or, did you mean the former problem of the files being overwritten?
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Wednesday December 23 2020, @08:57AM
https://pi-hole.net/ [pi-hole.net]