me_irl @lemmy.ml

1y ago

me🚫irl

toot

77 comments

Next, give warnings that Chrome and Edge are not supported browsers.

This technically makes this an ad for adblockers. Which, by enabling an adblocker, will disable said ad.
- Make it infinitely more obnoxious, 90's era blinky text, gifs, auto play music... "You wouldn't be seeing or hearing any of this bullshit if you ran an ad blocker"
- https://media.tenor.com/bD9vHNiR1rQAAAAd/boom-mind-blown.gif

🕵️ hmmm, corpo shill has been here
- That or they're downvoting low effort comments
- Or someone who doesn't like generic comments. You could paste half those on any comment chain. They're the equivalent of an upvote but the commenters felt the need to say it instead. Good downvotes.
- I'm not sure how, but you can find their username on lemmy 💀
  
  Yeah... don't though. It is bad practice to target people like that
  
  You need to be an admin on a federated instance
- Jerboa user?
  
  yep
- I would downvote that crap too. Contributes nothing to the discussion, waste of time and screen space. That's the comment equivalent of banner ads

I mean, it's totally fashionable to give people who still somehow use Microsoft Internet Explorer scare pop-ups, so why not this?
If you don't run an ad blocker, your browser just isn't safe. This was the security community consensus 15 years ago. Shit sure got worse since then!
- And now you got the likes of google and YouTube that prevent things from working if you do run an ad blocker
  
  They try, which ended up just making a certain adblocker much more effective.

Hot take: I don’t want / need more people to use adblock.
Right now it is in a good position where the numbers just are not that high for advertisers to really give a hoot. Yes there is the ocasional shit like with YouTube, but the thing is - they are not really trying, they only put enough effort in to inconvenience, hoping more people will drop blocking.
However, if more people start blocking, I think they will be forced to find more concrete solutions, like the whole DRM fiasco.
- I could be wrong but I don't think there even is a way to fully prevent adblocking without something like the proposed web integrity API, since it's all clientside and the browser can easily just choose not to render any ads.
  Overall I do agree that less people using adblocks means less attention from corps and less adblock-blocks like youtube's, but I'm conflicted on whether that's a good enough reason to have most people suffer through so many ads.
  
  Even with web integrity, I don’t see anti-Adblock working. We’re almost at the point that client side AI can screen capture the web page and recreate it sans-ads.
  And there are probably simpler solutions to bypass anti-adblock
  
  Maybe not prevent entirely, but I am sure they can make it extremely inconvenient to block. Part of the reason I pay for Youtube Premium is that it would be just too much of a hassle to set up PiHole and manage it, to get that ad-free experience across all of my devices.
- If ads were just ads, then sure. But now that they serve as trackers too, and are oftentimes hijacked by malware... yeah no, screw all ads.
  
  Ads being trackers, and especially being a vector for malware is nothing new, yes screw ads, I block them, but I really don’t give a hoot if my neighbour blocks ads. I’m certainly not gonna go out of my way to preach the gospel of adblocking.
  And part of the reason is the above - more people blocking ads will probably cause ad companies to make ad blocking more inconvenient, and you will end up with the same situation - only tech literate people will block ads.
  Now don’t get me wrong, that is not the reason, just a reason, mostly I just don’t give a fuck if others block ads.
  However when it comes to the idea in the OP, the reason does become more salient, because someone is going out of their way to preach the gospel of adblocking.
  Obviously my original point was a bit lighthearted, realistically it doesn’t matter, I doubt any dev who would do this is making products to reach masses that do not already adblock, so this shit is probably just some virtue signaling anyway.

This already exists - @soatok@furry.engineer's blog already has a popup about not having an adblocker, although it is easy to dismiss. It's probably a bad idea to block content based on not having one, as detecting ad blockers is a losing battle (as YouTube is learning).
- i don’t really know what im talking about, but wouldn’t it be a bit easier in this case since the goal isn’t to evade the ad blocker? rather than try to detect the ad blocker, wouldn’t it be possible to design the pop up so that it’s easily detected by ad blockers (or annoyance blockers)?
  
  If you're not serving data from a popular ad server like google/doubleclick there will always be a false positive or two, especially with things like hosts-based ad blockers that are extremely rudimentary but work ~60-70% of the time.
  And if you manage to serve data from doubleclick then either you're working for them or something has gone horribly wrong. In either case just putting up a script to say "please use an ad blocker" is the least of your concerns.
  
  Not all ad blockers remove elements from web pages, and if they acted that predictably you could detect the ad blocker by detecting whether an expected element is hidden.
  I have not looked through an ad blocker's code, but I don't believe it is that simple.
- yeah the adblock detection doesn't work for me
  at least not in Mull with uBlock Origin on Android with AdAway (root)
- Web Environment Integrity enters the room
- ah but this is easy to deal with. Simply put the message in an ad campaign that
- Just put class="facebook ad" to your div and 99% of adblockers will hide it, really simple.

Not joking, every time a website asks me to turn off my adblocker, I leave and put it on my blocklist so it never shows up again. Then I simply use their competition instead.
- i generally go into noscript, poke in the console, or look for a bypass extension, just to spite them.
  like sites that disable right click, i scrape them on principle...

Using ad-blockers is actually better for the environment too.

ublock origin support his motion

I love this

Good old Cluley, he also has an award winning podcast, Smashin' Security. It's a light hearted take on recent security events. Its usually 30 - 45 minutes long.
One of my favourites

Uno reverse 😂

Since mastodon and lemmy are federated, could one have postet the mastodon toot directly?
- Think about it like this: even when you link other posts in lemmy, you link them in their home instance, because there is no way to link posts so that everyone gets one to their own instance as you can do with communities in the threadiverse. Neither can you repost it in any meaningful way, since that just means copying the content, which would make it appear as though you said it yourself.

well now I know what's going into my side bar

GET ON MY LEVEL

Graham is awesome. I remember working with him 20 years ago as an ISV rep and he's come such a long way.

Adblock users optimise their adblockers to be invisible to adblock-checking code. If your site works well, and is worth visiting, the only change in behaviour you can inspire is people nerfing their own adblockers.
- how is that possible because I'd like to know how to do that in general?
  
  Step one is you don't refuse files from the server, and try to answer as if you have them when asked in js. But the current actual methods and arms race is happening by comparing computed results, how your page is rendered according to your own browser when probed, vs how the detection code expects it rendered. Adblockers do things like lie, or inject things that can look close enough to ads that you pass the tests. You can see how detection works and try to sidestep what it does by looking at libraries like these https://github.com/sitexw/FuckAdBlock
  This one in particular will probably just not run in uBlock out of the box so this one's pretty easy to sidestep. But you can stuff code like this obscured in your site and another piece of code that checks that it hasn't been removed. It's pretty difficult for website develops to win this fight, since ultimately they're letting us download and render their pages with fairly transparent technology.
  
  In uBlock Origin, you can add filters.
  Either those you download from the internet, or you can go add items yourself by clicking the uBlock Origin icon and selecting the "item picker".
  Then just click on the item you want to block.
  There are more advanced ways to block stuff, like based upon content. I used this to block all the "suggested for you" posts on Facebook.
- Do they? I remember not long ago I just had to have an ads.js file, and if the user had an adblocker this file wouldn't load.
  So I just had a
  undefined
  
  var ads_enabled = true;
  And I could check if the user had an adblock.
  I think most people just install ublock/others and leave it default. When I tried to customize ublock all those lists and regex pushed me away, never tried again since.
  
  Ads can mean many things. It could be short for something (for example Active Directory Settings). I remember getting something legitimate blocked like 10 years ago but nothing in recent years so I imagine the detection got better at dealing with that.

Okay, so I've been thinking of doing something like this for my neocities site (whenever I have the time and drive to work on it). The biggest problem to all of this is the fact I don't wanna use any JavaScript and don't know if it's even possible without JS.
I've already, in the past, been experimenting on another neocities page I have access to the idea of blocking access to everyone using a chromium based or safari browser with and without JS, too. To say the least, it's difficult for a noob like me and so far has not worked like planned. Especially since there are so many forks of chromium with different names/user-agents.
- Put it in an element with a class like "ad-banner", it should be enough for most ad blockers to block it.
  
  I'd have to look up how to do it, but I'll definitely have to try this to see what happens.
- You can try to load an image from a subdomain like ads., or from a filename like 468x80.png (see EasyList) to catch all the common ad blockers, maybe with an id of Ad-Container to catch css-based ad blockers.
  DNS based blockers that use regular expressions or wildcards will work with the subdomain approach, but most of them still rely on hardcoded list of domains which means you either need to get a throwaway (sub)domain on their lists OR serve data from an actual ad server (or just live with the occasional false positives from people who believe DNS blocking is enough [which it really isn't if we're being honest])
  But honestly, in this case doing it with JS should be fine since disabling JS is a quite effective ad blocker anyway. Here's how I do it for example: https://ads.d.on-t.work/ad.min.js (and you can try it out at https://w.on-t.work)
- I mean, I'd imagine it's trivial to do without js. Just try to load an image or similar with a name that'd be blocked into the background image for a div that covers the entire page. Should silently fail to load with a blocker, or shows your error image if they don't.
  
  As a total HTML/CSS noob, I'll definitely have to look up how to do this. I'll probably end up trying it on the other site just in case I royally mess up my main site by accident. I at least have immediate backups for the other site right now, so I don't mind experimenting with it.

Based
- Ad man?

Chad

People will decide what is best for them. Blocking access to websites for having ad blocker or having no ad blocker is an asshole move. I know it is intended for pun, but still.
- Encouraging a safer internet is an asshole move?
  
  Encouraging and forcing is different. Just because forcing ad blocker on people is aligned with so many people's view doesn't mean that it is a great move. Anything that is forced on people is an asshole move.

That's not very pragmatic - if not for chumps without ad blockers, a lot of the free stuff I get online wouldn't exist.

77 comments