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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
If my customer has Firefox installed, I use Adblock Plus with it. That is also what I have on my own systems.
If they have Chrome instead, I use Adblock. I don't use Chrome, because I don't like its style, but several customers prefer it.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
If the ads on a site are so obstructive or malicious that you want to block them then stop using that site. Blocking ads only encourages site operators to use more aggressive ad serving tactics and resorting to that kind of subsidized assault on the user is usually an indicator that the site doesn't have anything useful on it in the first place.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
The real question is: If you value privacy and dislike ads, why would you ever use Chrome?
The entire goal of that browser is counter to user Privacy and choice. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, if you don't care about that stuff then I'd same Chrome is probably the best browser out there. But I do value those things, and in fact they are probably my #1 consideration when choosing a browser so I use Firefox despite its many faults.
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.
I'm behind Ad Limiter, which limits Google search ads to one per page, picking the best one based on SiteTruth ratings. You can set it for zero search ads if you like. It also puts SiteTruth ratings on Google search results. It's a demo for SiteTruth search spam filtering.
This Mozilla/Chrome add on has a general ad-blocking mechanism inside. Unlike most ad blockers, it's not based on regular expressions looking for specific HTML. It finds URLs known to lead to ads, works outward through the DOM to find the ad boundary, then deletes the ad. So it's relatively insensitive to changes in ad code, and doesn't require much maintenance. The same code processes search results from Google, Bing, Yahoo, Bleeko, DuckDuckGo, and Infoseek. (Coming soon, Yandex support, and better handling of Google ads within ads, where an ad has multiple links.)
So, if I wanted to do a better ad blocker, I could do so easily. Should I? Is another one really needed? Are the headaches of running one worth it?
/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.
But there is a strong misconception that android is still FOSS. The phrase that comes to mind is the rug has been pulled from under them. I was surprised to learn to what lengths google has gone to lock down android. It was certainly a huge reason as to why a lot of the tech sector was pushing android in the early days (nothing gets the tech sector weaker in the knees than FOSS). While you are right, that users don't care, google has performed a massive bait and switch.
The TSA has been around for a while, too. People don't seem to care about privacy, fundamental liberties, or software freedom. Does that make those things bad or unimportant? No. It just means that people are ignorant.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Are you aware of Cyanogen? Did you know that you can buy high end phones with Cyanogen as the default OS? Cyanogen is built from AOSP and is fully free. It also supports extensive ad-blocking and app permission control, way beyond what any other mobile OS offers.
In what way exactly is Android not free? You can build and run it perfectly well without the Google apps, as Cyanogen and many others do. The resulting OS is fully featured and compatible, and can be distributed commercial without permission from Google.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC