Can you imagine the amount of corruptive influences and persuasions he is resisting?
Pretty sure he has them blocked
Though you may be right, I have a feeling that he is facing formidable opposition. That may include anything from social engineering to full on psyops.
Bet he’s had people “happen” to bump into him IRL, and gets pull requests from bad actors that are very subtly trying to take the project in the wrong direction.
Your second point is especially interesting, considering the recent xz backdoor. The bad actors manipulated a poor burnt out maintainer for it. In comparison, I’m impressed with gorhill for his perseverance and mental strength. I would like to know how he avoids burn out with such negative influences.
Dang, for real? Do you have some more details on this?
I think he’s using old school speculative “bet”, not the new Gen Z meaning
Lol, it does read entirely differently in the gen z light… good eye! If you add a comma after “bet”, it completely changes the meaning. Fun
Insightful point. And it does remind me of the corporate purchase of the Don’t care about cookies extension for Firefox (And the Simple Mobile Tools for Android). Luckily it was forked. https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies Open source FTW!
🙂 🐧Simple Mobile Tools was forked into “Fossify *” for anyone interested.
There’s a reason uBlock Origin overtook Adblock Plus in popularity.
Raymond Hill: “Get behind me, Google.”
The VLC guy turned down what a quick search is telling me was “several tens of millions” to show ads. I can’t even imagine what getting people to drop ublock would be worth.
I wouldn’t blame him if he took it, but I greatly respect that he didn’t.
I hadn’t even thought about that. Thank you.
What is the decentralised solution?
And all the volunteers keeping those lists up-to-date.
Yea it’s mainly those that do the work actually
Still big kudos to Raymond for providing the foundations to make it all work too.
Aren’t most lists available on other browsers and ad blockers? Unless Raymond created the format
The format currently used in adblocker predates uBO by almost a decade so no, but still, maintaining this add-on with how fast and often web browser changes, and keeping it performant must be quite the task.
I think performant is probably the key thing here. There were ad blockers before and there are alternative ones now, but the thing that sets unlock Origin apart is how light weight it is.
It’s kinda sad that without Mozilla, Raymond, the NoScript guys and TOR we would lose control over the internet pretty much immediately
Kind of agree. Though there is pi-hole and several others. And there’s i2p, Freenet (now called Hyphanet) and GNUnet, and similar.
Pi-hole is nice for devices that you don’t fully control. But it’s not enough, due to the fundamental limitations of DNS based blocking. If the ads and the content are hosted on the same domain, it can’t do anything.
Also issues with links that get ads on top of them. You can still click them, you’ll get redirected to a blank page (because the ad gets DNS blocked), but with an adblocker you would’ve gone to the non-ad link.
I definitely agree, although really a LOT of non-Linux/(IT) guys use Chrome, some even Edge, if on Windows
IT person…
Uses chrome…
Both cannot be true friend, sorry. Your buddy is either a fake engineer or their main job isn’t IT.
If you really have friends in IT they haven’t used chrome or edge in a while, or their using the scripting bot for weekly progress reports to their boss, and they’re only using it for that…
What about controld for blocking at the dns level?
Who is Raymond? Never heard the name
Not really anymore for Mozilla. They now get a lot of your private data and share em with their “business partners”
If only, I know so many people who don’t bother with adblocking at all. I honestly have no idea how they use the Internet without going mad
My kid discovered that he can hit the “report” button on the YouTube app on the TV to skip the ads immediately. So now every ad gets reported as “inappropriate”.
I’m proud of him.
Tip: if you have an Android TV, you can install SmartTube as an alternative, privacy-friendly YouTube client. It has no ads and sponsorblock integration
And as a better option, use an actual device instead of a short lifecycle planned obsolescence embedded android device on a “smart” tv.
This is why I refuse to buy a “smart” TV. My old flat screen TV works perfectly fine with a Chromecast with Google TV. I can even use the Chromecast in my projector or any other device with HDMI input to make it smarter than most TV interfaces I have tried.
My cheapo dumb tv died a couple of years back, was a great bit of kit for $400au that gave me 10 years. I’ve got a “smart” tv at the moment which isn’t connected to the internet, and just serves as the display for my Shield TV.
I’d probably consider an LG commercial / signage display as my next device, some old work connections can get me one as a special purchase through their distribution channels it’s just waiting out the current panel dying.
I do the same, I use kodi on a CoreElec box on my 10 year old dumb TV. It works great, but my issue is it’s going to be extremely difficult to replace my TV when it gets time to upgrade. (Eg, if I want to move to an OLED, or QD panel). Every new TV on the market is a smart TV. It’s getting to the point that you need to buy a very large monitor, rather than a TV, to achieve the same setup.
At least the Chromecast with Google TV (HD) is cheap.
AndroidTV also exists on Chromecast devices…
AndroidTV is not exclusive to TV manufacturers.
There’s also Playlet for Roku users, which is an Invidious client.
thanks for the link.
😀 👍
I’m of two minds about people not adblocking.
On one hand: Ads are gross noise pollution, and people are increasingly unaware of all the noise around them (or the noise they’re generating) largely because they’ve been passively trained to “tune out” ads. Also consumerism.
On the other hand: As long as there are a significant amount of people oblivious to the possibility of adblock, corporate ad mobsters and the other worst people in the world out there will largely leave those of us blocking their ads alone. If everyone ran adblockers, we’d definitely live in a world of WEI… and probably worse. So, maybe all those people are watching ads so that I don’t have to, as the YouTube thumbnails say.
If sites wanted to run ads and host them locally without tracking that would be fine. But since they’re tracking users it’s essential to block them for privacy and security, and if someone isn’t then maybe they don’t understand the level of tracking involved. We need a better name than adblocking.
People just don’t know, I’ve been showing my wife the way little by little and she’s always blown away
I’ve shown a colleague after seeing him browse an horrendous fantasy football website. He couldn’t believe the difference between before and after.
I also don’t understand it. But now I am wondering if we would not have had those “careless” (indifferent ? ignorant ?) millions of people not blocking ads then Google and others may have started pushing anti-adblock measures years earlier, no ?
Yeah, it’s shocking to see how many ads they jam in now. I felt so dirty.
The way people talk about people who don’t block ads is so funny.
I understand and respect the reasons people choose to use blockers, but ads honestly just aren’t that problematic for me in practice and are easy to avoid and ignore.
Ads have been known to contain drive-by malware. Even if you don’t mind seeing ads (which personally I don’t mind unless they’re very intrusive), an adblocker is important for online safety.
Drive-by malware tends not to be zero-days though. I’ve stayed safe for decades just by keeping my software up to date.
Ads are probably actually not that bad. But to me the massive stalking is unacceptable. So, uBO FTW!
Of course; I’m just a lot more worried about the systemic problems of mass surveillance than any practical risk to me individially.
You never visited the not-sheltered web…
You say with such confidence. Is it so hard to imagine people can defend themselves with means other than ad blocking?
Please tell me what other ways you can block ads other than ignoring them or not visiting the web at all.
Btw: Custom apps (like it was for Reddit) don’t count.
Huh? The point of this discussion is that I don’t need to block them to keep myself safe in sketchy corners of the web.
What would we do without ublock origin
Use vblock ingress!
You would use noBlock origin instead
I love posts like this. You get to discover new stuff 😂
Seriously. Says a lot about the modern internet, though. Both good and bad.
Provide source please: xkcd
All hail Raymond Hill :0
And the people maintaining the lists his work depends on.
He’s far too kind of a person. He doesn’t accept any donations for the many years of a better and safer internet experience I’ve gotten from his work
When YouTube was blocking ublock people was surprised that they couldnt donate to the project.
Never knew the name of the guy behind it. Nice! This is why Everybody Loves Raymond!
About
Free. Open-source. For users by users. No donations sought.
If you ever want to contribute something, think about the people working hard to maintain the filter lists you are using, which are available to use by all for free.
Gladly upvoted to
worshiphonor one of the open source heroes.Ad/content blockers of various types are the only reason the internet is still generally usable for me.
I’d otherwise have a meltdown and watch everything burn
Thank Raymond and the list maintainers, you keep the internet usable
Yeah, Raymond Hill made a great plugin, but the people maintaining the lists are the real MVPs
Messiah of the internet
deleted by creator
