I don’t know if it’s just me, but browsing virtually any mainstream website without an ad blocker or with alternative frontends is becoming harder and harder to justify. It’s getting to the point where adblocking isn’t an optional luxury - it’s a requirement to effectively get basic information about things.
Yesterday, I was trying to search some information about Ghouls from Fallout. This lead me to this Fandom wiki page which had ads on almost every corner of the website, autoplaying video in the corner, asking for my age as soon as I clicked on the site, injecting polls and random unrelated videos into the communty wiki content and being incredibly slow to browse. A query that in the past that took 5 seconds now takes 50, for what? Money?
I get that online services cost a shitton amount of money to operate, but the sheer level of degrading quality is not OK. This is just one example of how services are completely barreling towards the shitter at 100+ MPH with no brakes or airbags. I feel some guilt for using content blockers, but that guilt is being wittled away every single day because of websites like this.
Fuck fandom
“We hate ads, too!” — some window asking me to turn off my adblocker
No, you don’t. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be showing me this notice asking me to turn off my adblocker. Either that or I hate ads way more than you do.
online services cost a shitton amount of money to operate
A 40kb HTML page packaged with 450MB of JavaScript, AJAX, and streaming video costs a shitton for some reason.
Becoming?
yeah that part confused me at well… never used the internet without ad blockers since popup ads were a thing.
Lol I was thinking the same thing.
Ive used ad blockers since 2011. And when mobile browsing got to shit, I got a pi-hole because fuck that noise.
I don’t even browse on mobile much anymore, “oh wow a paywall guess I’ll have to live without whatever this is” 🤷
I have always used ad blockers and whatnot. I used a friends phone to show them something and was blown away by the web. Wtf happened? I knew it was bad but damn. It’s like playing a fucking minigame to use the web.
At home I’m hardcore. I use noscript to essentially white-list the things I want to see.
Let me just step back here, away from the fact that they’re obtrusive, annoying, and waste your time you didn’t sign away.
Malvertising is a serious risk these days. Every week we see new malware kits, phishing and increasing complexity. Now, Google’s search algo source code has been leaked. You can bet your shiny ass that the attacks will get more dangerous and even harder to discern.
Block the fuck out of ads, JavaScript, frames, xhr. Use a secure browser that doesn’t have ad revenue at their forefront and use hardened configs where possible.
This isn’t tin foil hat, and it’s not hard. Plenty of people out here want you safe and for corpos to eat shit.
I can attest to this. I’m a security analyst / incident responder for a large organization. 9 out of 10 times we get a “malware domain” hit on our network sensors, it’s due to malware being pushed in ads. It’s real and it’s dangerous. Our entire organization runs adblockers.
It’s gotten worse I feel like, I had a post in infosec somewhere talking about how hovering over google sponsored results don’t even show the first level url - they resolve them
Using a DNS for blocking some ads I’ve noticed often the first couple links on Google are unusable, literally won’t pass me through lol
Yeeeeah, I find dns is hit or miss - so easy to stand up a new one or use an open resolver to skip around
Ultimately it’s up to preference but I find blocking at the browser level to be most effective
Yo hire me. I can’t get a job because I don’t have experience… I can’t get experience because I can’t get a job.
employers hate this one simple trick: lying
It’s deeply frustrating to see how easily someone can land a very technical job via a very unsophisticated HR process.
Hack your way to the goal - start small at a place that’s expanding their tech team and buckle up for a bumpy ride. Get that foot in the door
But like… Life balance holds me back. I make more than an entry level and support my family, thus cannot dedicate the time for a second full time job.
I am destined to remain in role and climb a corporate ladder that I do not enjoy because money
Where there is a will, there is a way.
You might not be able to use the same beaten paths as everyone else, but you can always hack a new path.
At the end of the day, I can’t speak for the entire industry, but when I look for new employees, I care less about resume experience and more about education, drive, and creativity. Once they’re in the role, I can show them the ropes. We also (hopefully many others, if not a majority) invest in serious training and learning platforms to keep people updated.
Infosec is about continuous learning and curiosity. You don’t have the luxury of learning the skill and being done. Security, arguably, changes the most out of all the tech spaces and you need drive and curiosity above all else.
If you’re serious about infosec, you sometimes have to hack it to make it. A -> ? -> B
If you don’t mind me asking, what field are you in rn?
Thank you dude! I appreciate you.
I work retail right now as a manager and although I have a skillset for it, have made great strides, and have changed the company in a few ways for the better, it’s not my desire to stay in this path.
P.s. You say the things I say to others. It’s good to have it thrown back at me lol
Of course man - the world is your oyster. Not everyone is as privileged as me though, so I try to help out where I can to give ‘em a boost. Not everybody knows what they wanna do on the first shot and that can be tough
This isn’t tin foil hat, and it’s not hard.
It’s an escalating game. 95% of the shit is dealt with by a native browser feature or extension. But that last 5% can get very ugly very quickly.
And the longer the escalation game goes on, the more likely you are to make a casual mistake - clicking on the wrong part of a screen or getting fooled by a deceptive link or being sucked by an ad or just feeling curious/horny enough to finally see whether there’s really pussy in that bio.
For folks who pirate, it can be even more dangerous, depending on how malicious some counter-piracy agency wants to get.
And now the gas pumps blather at you while filling your car. Marketing ruins everything.
Second or third button down on the right side will sometimes mute it. (I always mute it before I start filling because FU advertisers!)
Of course now there are new pumps with full screen video that may or may not have a mute button. It would almost be too much to bear if not for the refreshing taste of an ice cold Coca-Cola.
They fucking blather at my when I walk past on the footpath.
Becoming? I think we are past that stage. What grinds my gears is how hostile the net is to adblockers where users are either barred from the site entirely or guilted into turning it off.
Worse yet is if you try to take back your privacy thru a VPN you are instantly deemed a bad actor or a downright threat!
https://fallout.wiki/wiki/Fallout_Wiki
Don’t use Fandom
What really pisses me off is when sites tell me to disable it. It’s my computer, I’ll choose what extensions I run. Fuck you.
Speaking of gaming websites being goddam awful, you ever accidentally clicked on an IGN link? Goddamn that site is cancer.
Don’t feel bad for blocking their ads. The internet was never meant to have that much advertising in the first place. If websites can’t afford to keep their site up then they probably don’t need to be running it in the first place.
If your site has to host spammy bloated malicious third party advertising then I think there’s a bigger issue at stake. Users shouldn’t have to sacrifice their privacy and security to view content. Also greed isn’t the same as “we need ads to keep our site running” when clearly they are making enough but want more.
It’s honestly insane how tech illiterate people can’t grasp this privacy concept and just learn to use a damn ad blocker. I don’t mind justification but at some point you have to be the bad guy and fight back against cooperate greed.
Stay strong. Firefox+uBlock origin is the goat!
I feel this. Sometimes I’m looking up something on a fresh browser and I say to myself ‘I’m just looking up one thing, I don’t need all the extensions’
Then the google results get buried and the article is clogged with ads. It could also be I’m so used to an as free internet I can’t tolerate even the most innocuous banner ad
But they ads to pay for seo engineers to get more traffic to show more ads.
This is the current metagame of the web, only people profiting are SEO engineers and ad services.
