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Which Is Better, Adblock Or Adblock Plus?
An anonymous reader writes: Wladimir Palant is the creator of the Adblock Plus browser extension, but he often gets asked how it compares to a similar extension for Chrome called Adblock. In the past, he's told people the two extensions achieve largely the same end, but in slightly different ways. However, recent changes to the Adblock project have him worried. "AdBlock covertly moved from an open development model towards hiding changes from its users. Users were neither informed about that decision nor the reasons behind it." He goes through the changelog and highlights some updates that call into question the integrity of Adblock. For example, from an update on June 6th: "Calling home functionality has been extended. It now sends user's locale in addition to the unique user ID, AdBlock version, operating system and whether Google Search ads are being allowed. Also, AdBlock will tell getadblock.com (or any other website if asked nicely) whether AdBlock has just been installed or has been used for a while — again, in addition to the unique user ID." Of course, Palant has skin in this game, and Adblock Plus has dealt with fallout from their "acceptable ads policy," but at least it's still developed in the open.
Adblock Edge
uTorrent IS malware these days. Try installing it without unchecking all the extra crap that gets bundled with it, then come back here and tell me why it shouldn't be flagged.
I don't use Adblock, but I've been using this for years. I rarely see an ad unless it's served directly from the site I'm visiting, and it blocks a lot of malware as well. It has something like 16,000 entries, but doesn't seem to slow things down at all.
/etc/hosts
Install once, update if you care to, but it's not essential. Requires no configuration after installation, works for ALL browsers on your system with no setup, does not require the browser to "support" it in any way (i.e., extensions), never ever gets broken by browser updates, works on ancient computers with grossly out-of-date browsers. Works with ANY tcp/ip-based app on your system, really, so it lowers vectors for IM apps, Acrobat, etc.
The first computer I used it on was an 800 MHz G3 iBook with 640 MB RAM. Some people may say a large hosts file will slow down your computer, but I've never seen that happen myself in over a decade of using it on literally every computer I have.
It may not block EVERY ad like a dedicated extension does, but it comes really really close, and I like the fact that it works with all browsers and never requires updating. When I get a new computer, I put the hosts file on and pretty much never touch it again. A handful of sites (like hulu) will not work with an adblocker and it's a manual process to edit the file, but for unix types, that's not a problem. It blocks google's sponsored links so you may need to take that out too, for people who google "sears" and click the first (sponsored) link instead of the first actual link.
No reason not to do security in layers and use it WITH adblocking extensions, I suppose, but I've never felt the need to.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Chrome is by design a tool to report your browsing to Google. Why else should they spend money in it ?
It began with Chrome Sync, which sends home your bookmarks, tabs and... passwords, and became better with the "Reduce data usage" option, which directs all your web browsing traffic to Google servers for analysis.
If Google created it, it IS meant to get data about you and sell it afterward, like any other Google creation.
Chrome is closed-source (Chromium isn't Chrome) and made by a company that makes money off the data they have on you.
For instance, anything you type on the address bar is sent to Google.