Google ramps up its campaign against ad blockers on Chrome.
  • volcel_olive_oil [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    78·
    3 months ago

    uBlock Origin fans can rest at ease since a new and improved version is already available - uBlock Origin Lite

    The Lite version’s capabilities are relatively limited

    so-true it’s new and improved if you count regressions in functionality as an improvement

  • citrussy_capybara [ze/hir]@hexbear.netEnglish
    441·
    3 months ago

    adblocking dns providers are a great no-system-resource, no-battery-usage solution that works in any app/program (not only browsers) and can be added for any system, as well as better online privacy especially using encrypted dns

    independent-run with added top-level domain support:

    corporate:

    FireFox and Chrome both have settings to add encrypted dns for the browser.

    Recommend setting adblocking dns as default on router if possible, sort of makes any router a pi-hole and then automatically sets these as default for any connected device so you can set it once and don’t have to do every device. Try to use at least two different providers for setups with primary/secondary/tertiary in case one has a temporary outage.

      • hello_hello [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        6·
        3 months ago

        It can’t block same domain advertisements, but you can use a proxy such as Invidious, an alternative front end such as FreeTube or Grayjay (Android) or pipe that shit into MPV and use an RSS feed reader.

      • citrussy_capybara [ze/hir]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        it’s a first line of defense against ads, tracking, malware, and phishing for every device and program that access the internet. as hello2 mentions it can’t stop everything. for something like youtube additional solutions are needed.

    • RyanGosling [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      15·
      3 months ago

      I once stood behind someone and watched them click on a banner ad that says “DOWNLOAD NOW!” while trying to download Notepad++

      They didn’t see it on the list of apps, so they refreshed the page and clicked on a different download banner ad and installed a second malware lol

      • Tabitha ☢️[she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        7·
        3 months ago

        almost all of those general websites for winblows executables seem to have ads pretending to be download buttons, like 100% of the time, it seems like natural fauna of the windows ecosystem at this point.

  • shath [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    30·
    3 months ago

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  • The_sleepy_woke_dialectic [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    29·
    3 months ago

    Their endgame is hooking directly into the TPM chip on your phone/computer to ensure you can’t bypass ads, just like netflix, hulu, etc have done. Then the only recourse will be ripping all their videos to another hosting platform which they will then try to argue is a form of piracy.

    This TPM bypassing will eventually be done by essentially pointing a camera at a screen (modern TVs have encryption baked in so even the video in transit is DRM protected), at which point the video hosting companies will bake in small differences/invisible watermarks that uniquely identify which user’s account (which is linked to a real person who can suffer legal consequences) the video came from. Then we will have multiple cameras pointing at like 100 screens with an AI mixing them together to try to remove the differences/watermarks, at which point the hosting companies will create their own AI to counter and mislead the “piracy” AI pepe-silvia

    This is also why ISPs took away your ability to run a personal server on your home computer using NATs, firewalls, and dynamic IPs instead of just transitioning to IPv6.

    Also websites are going to start blocking firefox citing low user counts but you know what the real reason is nineteeneightyfour

    I 100% believe this will happen because making commodities do as many as possible between any given creator and end-user just so they can provide more “Services” no one asked for and thus extract more value for not actually doing anything is like the only trick capitalism has left.

    it-is-known

    • ashinadash [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      11·
      3 months ago

      small differences/invisible watermarks that uniquely identify

      This has never worked so far lol. Their “invisible watermark” always ruins the media even beyond treathog consumption levels.

      Otherwise is there anything the individual user should be doing, short of not buying smart TVs (me) and not buying TPM chipped computers?

      • GaveUp [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        7·
        3 months ago

        You’re interpreting the term watermark too literally

        It will be a small unique arrangement of just a few pixels to identify the user

        It can even be distributed across the screen pixel by pixel to make it less noticeable

        All they’d have to do is make each pixel 1 hex code lighter or darker or something

        Assuming each pixel can have no change, 1 step lighter, or 1 step darker, it’d only take 22 pixels to cover 31B accounts = 3^22

        I believe there’s 25B Google accounts in total out there atm

            • ashinadash [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
              4·
              3 months ago

              It’s plausible but unlikely I think, putting a lot of faith into shitty pinhole cameras to be able to see twenty two 4K pixels one hex value lighter or darker, when most cameras have atrocious definition/sharpness and get blown out by light, blinded by darkness. I dunno, this reminds me of the screaming around Microsoft Kinect in 2013. They had bad and shitty plans for Kinect but, cheap hardware everyone hated Idk.

          • The_sleepy_woke_dialectic [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
            3·
            3 months ago

            There exists a technology that takes elements in a picture, like a bird in the background, a character, a glass of water, etc and moves them just a few pixels. You can encode a lot of data like that and it’s undetectable given just one example. They can encode your unique user identifier 1000 times in even a short video. A camera is bound to pick up at least part of it each time.

            • ashinadash [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
              4·
              3 months ago

              Quotin’

              putting a lot of faith into shitty pinhole cameras to be able to see twenty two 4K pixels one hex value lighter or darker, when most cameras have atrocious definition/sharpness and get blown out by light, blinded by darkness.

              I guess if the TV itself was doing the DRM recognition? Idk though, I’ve seen alarmist posting like this before… seems to me evil tech shit usually gets done in more mundane ways?

              • The_sleepy_woke_dialectic [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
                3·
                3 months ago

                Its definitely possible and even trivial to do there are a thousand ways to encode just a few bytes of data undetectably in a video and nothing but motivation stopping them from using every one every where. I think it’s plenty mundane and even trivial for what they get.

      • The_sleepy_woke_dialectic [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        7·
        3 months ago

        I guess put money you would have spent on streaming sites on hard drives and data horde before they stop you.

        Support libre software and projects like Firefox and invidious

        IPFS is an internet protocol that lets you the user help host things that you consume in a communal way, using some hard drive space you don’t need right now, but I wouldn’t recommend it yet because It has glaring problems. It’s a better future vision for the internet but there are a lot of crypto bros involved trying to inject capitalism where IMO it isn’t necessary.

        You can’t really get away from TPM computers for long I don’t think.

        In short; I don’t even know

        • ashinadash [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          5·
          3 months ago

          I data horde, and I don’t pay for even one stream screm-cool I should donate to foss projects more but I am broke, alas.

          IPFS sounds theoretically cool… As for TPM the newest PC in my house is a Zen Plus B450 machine that doesn’t even meet the Windows 11 TPM requirments, and the last W11 install in my house is about to get swapped for a W10 LTCS install, for g*ming. When that dies I will just run Linux/W7 honestly.

    • CarbonScored [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      I still think this is a quite an unrealistically pessimistic outlook, so long as there are a decent handful of privacy-interested technerds, it’ll be effectively impossible. The DVD encryption code was initially hailed as the end of piracy, but it was broken about 7 days into being released.

      • TPMs are already very easy to crack.
      • DRM protection today can be overcome simply with OBS, and all the protection in the world won’t work against a DisplayPort cable and a recording card.
      • Identifying every stream to a physical person is not reliable, watermarks get reverse-engineered, accounts use fake details, shows get sold, video databases get hacked, pirates use hacked accounts etc.
      • Most ISPs haven’t used IPv6 because it’s impractical, not because they love cgNAT, plus having your own public address is still very common. Even if you couldn’t get your own public address, port tunnelling is easy and would immediately become the norm. Plus if anything, only having a public IPv6 address would make your server even less accessible than cgNAT.

      The adage remains true, to keep a thing secret and secure, you have to be perfect at security 100% of the time. To hack a thing, copy it a million times, and make it effectively public, it takes one lucky break. Perfect security is logically impossible, people will find a way.

  • hello_hello [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    24·
    3 months ago

    In related news I recently set up a DNS server in my home network with adware/malware blocking and set my router to use it as static DNS so my whole house has to use it, including my parents. It was shockingly easy to do with NixOS.

    I’m going to make a separate post on how I did it using an old Thinkpad x220 in case anyone is interested or I get around to doing it.

    Anyway, use Firefox and ffprofile creator, it’s not that hard.

    • wheresmysurplusvalue [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      Which way did you set up an adblocking DNS with NixOS? Blocky?

      I’ve got an old raspberry pi running pihole. But I’ve also got a tiny headless computer doing my routing which is using NixOS. (As of yet I’m too much of a novice to set up all the firewall rules myself, so I have OPNsense running in a VM…) It’d be nice if I could just obsolete the pi and unify all my stuff into the router for more frequent updates.

      • hello_hello [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        I’m using technitium DNS server which has module in NixOS.

        It seems relatively well maintained and has what I need (web interface, one click set up etc.)

        I’m still new to this stuff so I’m figuring it out as I test things out. I didn’t want to buy a raspberry pi so I used an old libreboot thinkpad I had that I never used.

        NixOS modules eliminate a lot of the jank involved which is why I use it, I’ve also used NixOS as a desktop in the past so it only makes sense.

    • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.eeEnglish
      7·
      3 months ago

      I’ve been saying this for a while now, but Edge is a better browser than Chrome.

      Corporate browsers still suck at privacy, but Microsoft absolutely made a better Chromium browser than Google. Functional vertical tabs. Excellent memory management. Compatibility with all Chrome and Brave extensions (anything Chromium works).

      Windows, Mac, and Linux releases, and it’s (mostly) open source.

      Strictly from a UX and reliability standpoint, it might be the superior browser on the market. I use it at work for that very purpose.

      Firefox respects privacy more though, so that’s my preference on any personal machine, even if it needs to catch up with other browsers in the UX department.

  • communism@lemmy.mlEnglish
    16·
    3 months ago

    Wait, there’s only 30 mil Chrome users? I thought there were way more than that

    • CarbonScored [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      19·
      3 months ago

      The count is supposedly closer to 3 billion, but the article clarifies only 30 million use ublock origin. Which seems devastatingly low to me. Why risk such a move if it only affects 1% of your userbase?

      • CarmineCatboy2 [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        30·
        3 months ago

        Because it only affects one percent of the userbase. There’s no short term loss. Your clients (ad companies, Big Corp) see that you’re Doing Something. And, more importantly, Big Tech is removing the copper wiring out of the walls. They want to monetize ad space as much as humanly possible. YouTube is already showing 4-5 ads to normies as we speak.

        • The_sleepy_woke_dialectic [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          31·
          3 months ago

          My 13 yo cousin won’t install or let me install an adblocker on his phone and it’s killing me because he keeps complaining to his mom that he needs YouTube plus or whatever it’s called, but then I say “sponsorblock is free” and he says “oh I’m used to the ads” aaaaaaaaaaaaa why is he like this?

          • hello_hello [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
            27·
            3 months ago

            “oh I’m used to the ads”

            In bad country, the children have resigned themselves in being the target of relentless predatory advertising through an implanted sense of worship to highly marketable treats.

          • RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
            12·
            3 months ago

            Honestly, it won’t be long before you can’t use a blocker for those ads anyway. Most services now inject the ads right into the data stream for the video you’re watching dynamically. To try and block those ads is to try and block the same video of the content you want to watch.

          • CarmineCatboy2 [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
            9·
            3 months ago

            well he was raised by youtube. he’s been seeing the ads his whole life, sponsor and otherwise. it’s like with older people who don’t mind seeing ads on their netflix plan - its just tv for them.

            • hello_hello [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
              3·
              3 months ago

              I was raised by YouTube as well, it’s just a matter of being radicalized to stop giving a shit and prioritizing yourself. I’d still be watching ads on yt if I never became a leftist.