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Speaking of Adblock Plus, its author, Wladimir Palant, was talking about security vulnerabilities in extensions not even a week back, pointing specifically at RSS feed extensions: http://adblockplus.org/blog/amo-getting-serious-about-add-on-security

http://adblockplus.org/blog/attention-noscript-users

[citation provided]

I want my old Internet back.

No problem. Here you go.

And a pony.

Done.

Here, let me fix that for you.

I have made my change - I have canceled my cable subscription since the agreement started to get ridiculous and that they started to add new fees on top of the ordinary subscription. Add to that the number of decent channels slowly diminishing from year to year this means that it's either going to get stupidly expensive to watch TV or it's going to be only free channels to watch.

I did chose the latter... And I do zap when there are commercials. If I only could get AdBlock Plus to handle my remaining TV channels too!

For the music and film industry it's adapt or die that they have to select between, but don't insult your potential customers.

How can you trust NoScript anymore though? It really ought to be removed from the list of essential plugins.

While using my (sigh) windows box this AM I found that Adblock Plus was no longer working. Here's the fix: https://adblockplus.org/blog/the-return-of-net-framework-assistant

but if you've bothered to keep up with security updates you would have the ability to uninstall or disable the plug-in without modifying the registry by hand.

You mean like this? That's *no* uninstalling.

That may not be entirely true. Have a look at this:
http://adblockplus.org/blog/the-return-of-net-framework-assistant

Oh, how I wish that software existed to block such ads - perhaps in the form of a browser plugin or extension. If only such software existed. Oh well. ;)

Oh, how I wish that software existed to block such ads - perhaps in the form of a browser plugin or extension. If only such software existed. Oh well. ;)

I don't play video games but I wanted to chime in on the television, radio, and internet comment.

Television - I don't have cable nor can I pick up FTA channels because of where I live. The internet can fill this void very easily. I have a subscription to MegaVideo to watch the few shows I enjoy, otherwise I will rent/buy the DVD set when it comes out.

Radio - I have Sirius. All music stations are Ad Free. However I can't seem to get a hold on my addiction to Howard Stern, Bubba The Love Sponge or Jay Thomas.. so I do hear ads on channel 100 & 101. I don't mind because I know the talent needs their breaks to go to the washroom, etc. etc.

Internet - Adblock Plus is my best friend here. Works awesome. I know some people don't use Firefox, but that's not my problem.

What Ads?
http://adblockplus.org/en/ FTW

Except for the fact that NoScript itself is malicious. If I install NoScript there is a 100% chance that dodgy software is installed on my computer, if I browse without it there is less than that. Honestly I'm going to take my chances with the script kiddies, at least they don't pretend to be nice.

And by "out of date" you mean "it happened two months ago"? http://adblockplus.org/blog/attention-noscript-users http://hackademix.net/2009/05/04/dear-adblock-plus-and-noscript-users-dear-mozilla-community/ Sorry. My forgiveness doesn't come that quickly.

I'll just save my CA$28.92 and use the cross-platform AdBlock Plus, thank you very much. Admittedly, it does only work in Firefox, but I don't use any other browsers, and none of the applications I use regularly have forced ads.

Actually, the fact that AdMuncher can block ads inside other programs is very cool, even if they probably are just blocking requests to certain remote hosts.

      --- Mr. DOS

Whenever the ad servers get to a critical overusage point, replace them with a set of text ads. Or better yet, replace them with a text ad for AdBlock Plus. Hey, a guy can dream, right?

Ryan Fenton

Okay, I'll bite. Why is Firefox better for watching porn?

Addons, my man, addons.

AdBlock Plus - block ads, other random stuff if you want (like Slashdot's CSS)
NoScript - blocks nasty javascript unless you enable it so you don't get owned
DownThemAll! - download all linked videos/images from a page

Hi Unitron, and thanks for the helpful info!

I had the same problem as AC, where I didn't have those menu buttons up top.

I think that (at least for me) that weirdness is a side effect of AdBlockPlus. It's not enough to allow slashdot.org, you also have to allow fsdn.com . That's what I did and the funny effects went away.

The people who make Easylist for Adblock Plus also have a filterset for adult/dating ads.

Homepage
Adult/Dating filterset
MySpace filterset
RickRoll blacklist
EasyPrivacy

Seriously.

Huh, no shit? I thought you were joking. Seriously.

He's already being courted by advertizers like this, and is apparantly willing to work with them - he can't be trusted.

That's taking it a bit far. The guy doesn't even accept donations for his work, so I don't think we need to worry about his motivation. He knows he's treading a very fine line between keeping his users and pushing them to a fork; the recent NoScript issue shows what happens to authors who stretch it too far.

My take is that he just wants the attention. When the NoScript issue arose, Palant suddenly found himself with a soapbox to stand on. Maybe he's milking the attention a little, wants to raise his profile - no big deal. Maybe he wants to become a fully fledged Mozilla developer, rather than an extension author on the 'outside'? Maybe he'd like to see ABP's functionality included in Firefox by default? That would mean reducing its power somewhat.

I dunno, but this isn't a big deal right now.

Wladimir Palant should /not/ be allowed to control this project

Considering he's the one who created Adblock Plus, I don't see why you'd want to wrest control away from him. When rue abandoned original AdBlock without so much of a peep, Wladimir stepped in to fill the void. And he did a better job of it too. He's built up a community, introduced new features like filter subscriptions, refactored the code to remove slow iteration of filters, and done everything in a very transparent, well-documented manner. He gives back to the Mozilla community by analyzing code and documenting security flaws relevant to the XUL platform on his blog. And I don't know where you get this baseless accusation that he's somehow colluding with advertisers.

Time for a fork. If he's serious about this, Wladimir Palant should /not/ be allowed to control this project. The whole /point/ of Adblock Plus, is to, y'know, BLOCK ADS.
Seriously. He's already being courted by advertizers like this, and is apparantly willing to work with them - he can't be trusted.

Take a breather there, buddy. I don't know why the /. overlords FAILed to include a link to the adblockplus page relevant to the discussion, but here it is: http://adblockplus.org/blog/an-approach-to-fair-ad-blocking

Then, the part of that page that covers your fears: The user should have the final decision. If we allow webmasters to specify which ads the user should view or whether users with Adblock Plus should be allowed to visit their sites, they will try to maximize their profits â" and very soon users will be confronted with intrusive ads everywhere or locked out of all sites. At which point somebody will fork Adblock Plus to âoemake it work againâ and we are back at square one.

And finally, a reminder to the /. people that their fucking unicode parser is broken.

In particular, adblock was intended to be a mechanism to 'restore balance' in online advertising. Not to necessarily block ALL ads, but to give users the power to block excessively annoying ads, so that webmasters would tone back ads to an acceptable level (for fear of users blocking them entirely).

I just looked over the adblock home page and could find no such intentions. It appears adblock was intended to, well, block ads.

If you check out the blog post ( http://adblockplus.org/blog/an-approach-to-fair-ad-blocking ) this originates from , the "pop-up" is like firefox's password save prompt, not an annoying separate window. He also mentions that he'll probably go with a master checkbox to disable this new feature. Personally, I just use the "disable on this site" feature built into the Adblock icon on the toolbar if I want to show ads for a site (which I do for some sites if the ads aren't too intrusive), so I don't see this new "feature" having any impact on my user experience. Still, I can appreciate the effort to encourage people to allow unobtrusive ads on sites they frequent, so long as the option is still left to the user.

The practice of creating specific filters for web sites bypassing the more generic filters is long standing in Adblock Plus subscription history.

One of the more colorful incidents was Danny Carlton (one more), and a quick perusal through both the ABP and EasyList forums shows that site-specific filters are a fairly common practice - especially when site owners try to detect or circumvent ad blocking.

In this case, there was user requests for ad blocking on the noscript.com page, as documented in this late-March thread that resulted in a bug detection - which would have resulted in additional observation of the noscript.com page.

Personally, I think that the only thing Ares2 could have done better would have been to publicly document the ways that noscript.com was circumventing ad display. This usually isn't necessary, but would have been handy.

The practice of creating specific filters for web sites bypassing the more generic filters is long standing in Adblock Plus subscription history.

One of the more colorful incidents was Danny Carlton (one more), and a quick perusal through both the ABP and EasyList forums shows that site-specific filters are a fairly common practice - especially when site owners try to detect or circumvent ad blocking.

In this case, there was user requests for ad blocking on the noscript.com page, as documented in this late-March thread that resulted in a bug detection - which would have resulted in additional observation of the noscript.com page.

Personally, I think that the only thing Ares2 could have done better would have been to publicly document the ways that noscript.com was circumventing ad display. This usually isn't necessary, but would have been handy.

The practice of creating specific filters for web sites bypassing the more generic filters is long standing in Adblock Plus subscription history.

One of the more colorful incidents was Danny Carlton (one more), and a quick perusal through both the ABP and EasyList forums shows that site-specific filters are a fairly common practice - especially when site owners try to detect or circumvent ad blocking.

In this case, there was user requests for ad blocking on the noscript.com page, as documented in this late-March thread that resulted in a bug detection - which would have resulted in additional observation of the noscript.com page.

Personally, I think that the only thing Ares2 could have done better would have been to publicly document the ways that noscript.com was circumventing ad display. This usually isn't necessary, but would have been handy.

In the Firefox address bar, type : about:config

Scroll down to: noscript.firstRunRedirection

Right click this value, and 'toggle' it to false.

Due credit goes to posts at http://adblockplus.org/blog/attention-noscript-users

When the Easylist filter was made for Adblock Plus, it generically blocked ads for many websites, with some specific rules for other sites. Giorgio Maone (creator of NoScript) relies to a certain extent on ad revenue on his websites, without which he may spend less time working on the extension. He made a workaround on the ad blocking, and though the filter could have been updated to counter this, no attempt was made to update it.

When Rick Petnel died, they needed a new maintainer for the filter. Ares2 continued where Rick left off. He decided to fix the workaround made on Giorgio's sites.

What then followed was a game of cat-and-mouse. Giorgio would attempt a new workariound, and Ares2 would attempt to block the ads. It reached the stage where large parts of Giorgio's sites weren't working due to false positives.

Here, it seems clear that Ares2 has gone too far, and a compromise should have been reached. ABP and NoScript are a good pair when working together, though the people behind them have different philosophies. Unfortunately, things start to take a turn for the worse.

In an attempt to defend his site and ad revenue, he makes an update of NoScript to version 1.9.2. This version contains a file called MRD.js, which adds a CSS stylesheet rule to his websites that overrides the filter, by adding -moz-binding: none after the filter has loaded, which the filter depends upon. Furthermore, the file is obfuscated to hide what it does. No warning is given to Firefox users of what the extension has added in this tit-for-tat battle.

When this addition started breaking users ABP installations, version 1.9.2.3 instead adds his websites to the ABP whitelist, calling it a "NoScript development support filterset". The user isn't informed of what this is, and isn't given a choice on whether to accept it.

At present, the filter has removed its false positives, though leaves the ad blocking in place. The NoScript behaviour still remains in the latest version.

Ares2 was overzealous in attempting to block ads, and shouldn't have made Giorgio have to make excessive changes to his site. But the larger concern is that while Easylist is a filterset, which can be removed and updated by the user, NoScript went further and started to modify existing extensions, executing code without user's consent or awareness, and acting in a way that resembled malware, to display ads on his websites.

Extensions can be great for giving people freedom to control how they view the web. But creators of extensions need to be careful in what they do with them, especially with those with a large user-base like Adblock Plus and NoScript. If not handled correctly, Firefox extensions could become the next vector of malware, and that would be a shame for all.

Ads? What are those? Seriously who in the nine hells actually deals with those things anymore? After the Bonzi buddy level of irritation of the "shoot the (blank) and win a (insert iPod, Mac,etc) I went to Firefox with Adblock Plus and never looked back. I even keep FF3 on a flash so I don't have to deal with ads when dealing with a customers PCs. Whoever invented those damned flash ads really should be taken out back and shot.

On the other hand at least Yahoo has both a cookie based AND a login based opt out policy regarding ads, where I couldn't find ANY way to opt out of ads with MSFT and Google. So while I haven't needed to try theirs out(thanks to Adblock Plus) I at least give them credit for having the option, which unless I missed it somewhere Google and MSFT don't even give you a choice.

By why bother? Just use Adblock Plus and say goodbye to those irritating ads from hell. And for those that say I should have to deal with ads? When ads go back to being simple text based things and you have the asshat that made the "shoot the (blank) and win a (insert iPod, Mac,etc)" ads brought on national TV and shot for being the creator of evil that he is THEN I will think about unblocking ads. But until the soul sucking evil that is the flash ad is removed from the face of the earth there is no way in hell I'm risking it.

At install, ABP gives you the option to subscribe to a filter list to keep the blocking rules updated. The first and most used option is Easylist, which was maintained by Rick.
With adblock, you needed to have another plugin to self update the rules, called Adblock Filterset.G Updater which polled the rules for you.
Apparently, Adblock is not maintained anymore. More details: http://adblockplus.org/en/history

From http://adblockplus.org/blog/sad-news

"With his work, Rick helped improve the browsing experience for millions of people. And while he will be deeply missed, he built up a strong community that will be able to continue what he started. There are several strong candidates and I expect to announce Rick's successor as EasyList maintainer in the next few days."

So essentially not too much to worry about, but yes that was indeed trollish to care more about yourself rather that the family and friends and publicly ask that question.

Though it's sad that the maintainer of one of AdBlock Plus' block lists (the "EasyList") died he still wasn't the maintainer of AdBlock Plus itself.

That's still Wladimir Palant, as can be easily seen here.

We use the MIME type of the file which is determined by sniffing the content.

When IE does it, the press calls it risky. Besides, you don't always sniff the content: this page describes MIME information files and the glob element in the shared-mime-info namespace, both of which go based on (yup) extensions. And this page on file sniffers appears not to describe how to handle files that are identified by a string of bytes at the end, rather than at the beginning.

And what happens when an app creates a file type that your sniffer doesn't know about? I looked at what it takes to register a new application, and it appears that Windows and Mac OS (even since Mac OS 1) do a lot of these things automatically by sniffing the executable.

The old EasyList did in fact block ads. The old EasyElement hid ads. Now that EasyElement and EasyList are one and the same, EasyList technically blocks ads and hides elements.

Straight from the horse's mouth:

Unlike the regular ad-blocking rules found in the EasyList & EasyPrivacy, the element-hiding rules in the EasyList will only only hide elements ... they are still downloaded. Both types are now present in the EasyList.

Dunno where that crazy rumor came from, but ABP+EasyList blocks ads, it doesn't just "hide" them. See:

http://easylist.adblockplus.org/adblock_plus_faqs.htm#abpdownload

What he said, but with slightly more detail. Use Adblock Plus and (assuming you are in the US), subscribe to EasyList, which now also blocks (well, technically just hides) ad elements... formerly you had to subscribe to EasyElement as well.

Is Google trying to circumvent my favorite Firefox addon?

http://adblockplus.org/en/faq_project

http://adblockplus.org/blog/sorry-filtersetg-but-it-is-time-for-you-to-go

http://easylist.adblockplus.org/

http://adblockplus.org/en/faq_project

http://adblockplus.org/blog/sorry-filtersetg-but-it-is-time-for-you-to-go

http://easylist.adblockplus.org/

http://adblockplus.org/en/faq_project

http://adblockplus.org/blog/sorry-filtersetg-but-it-is-time-for-you-to-go

http://easylist.adblockplus.org/

Jeez people, get with the program already.

Use adblock plus element hiding helper to get rid of the floating div(you might also need to crush the background overlay div).
Then you dont need to click close ever again.

http://adblockplus.org/en/elemhidehelper

The only reason for Google to do this is to be able to study, what people are archiving and to be able to present them with valuable unobtrusive advertisements. Later. An encrypted file is no good for such purpose, and when people start doing so in earnest (we will, wouldn't we?) Google will attempt to limit the file types to the "known extensions" (.mp3, .doc, .txt).

At best, people uploading encrypted data (especially those savvy enough to name the files .txt) will be viewed with the same contempt, the advertisers have for AdBlock users...

People if you want real breaking science and engineering news try Eureka Alerts, no forum but at least they don't pull shit like this every other week. For the sake of god there isn't even a printable version on 95% of the ad farming websites anymore because they know we would link to it. Who has time to click a page 14 times like a trained seal for a piece of tinned herring? Speaking of herring there is a technically inclined one that does not link to ad farms. Seriously, Slashdot editors if you read this, you know we are all using Adblock Plus, well at least I have ever since your animated banners showed up, do you really think we of all people would tolerate linking to a page like this? I honestly used to look forward to being able to click on your ads after reading the article because they were mostly unobtrusive, often fun and half the time relevant but I am physically incapable of reading something on a page that has animations without frustration and discomfort. I mean who can honestly absorb a significant amount of information that way? It is the Power Point presentation level of discourse, the executive summary level of detail and the blasé attitude from site administrators that their visitors would tolerate something they would not because it sells 1% more ad dollars for 10x the ads that sickens me to the point of loathing and disgust. Grrrr!

Here's what I've found to be a better solution, and I get the impression that it's something a lot of people do:

http://easylist.adblockplus.org/

From the left panel, add EasyList, EasyElement, and EasyPrivacy. They seem to be more accurate and faster than filterset.g, and Adblock Plus will update them for you automatically.

Please don't use Filterset.G. There are far better options out there.
http://adblockplus.org/en/faq_project#filterset.g

Probably not too bad, this is slashdot after all...

"Oh honey, it's over. I feel wonderful," Amero said a few minutes after pleading guilty to disorderly conduct and agreeing to surrender her teaching license. She had originally been charged with 10 counts of risk of injury to a minor and later convicted on four of them.

Exactly what were the circumstances that inundated her with porno popups? Because it seems like she got a rather harsh sentence, even if she got off easy compared to the charges filed against her.

Also, this would be a good time to install Adblock Plus or a similar extension if you haven't already. Those advertisements have also been used as an infection vector to install viruses and such.