My retired parents live with me. I went ahead and put a PiHole on our home wifi. A day later my mother was literally complaining that she couldn’t click on ads on facebook. I told her those are ads and they track her and she says “well everyone likes to use the internet how they like to use it… can you put it back the old way? I want to look at these shoes”. Can’t fucking win.
The ads on Facebook (and many other sites) are served from the same site as the actual content. So if you try to block ads with pihole it will stop the website from loading any posts.
My wife turns off the WiFi on her phone to avoid the pihole. She does this so she can watch the ads in her games to get an extra life or whatever. You’ll never win on that front and I won’t either.
I get so pissed off when I try to play sudoku on the bus and it forces me to watch 30 seconds of ads between each game. And then during the game I have to ignore the flashing banner ad at the bottom of the screen.
I also really don’t like ads, but I think what’s lately been bothering me more is every short form video that exists has subtitles added to the middle of the video. I can’t even look at the videos because I hate getting distracted by the unnecessary text in my face. Like just let me watch your video, I don’t need you to spoon feed me the words too.
The thing is with a small app ads pay f all compared to the ongoing development costs. $100usd a year for Apple developer license, recent Mac and time spent developing it.
but this means that she would see the ads but not being able to click? I don’t get it. They should had just disappeared, no? Or was she complaining that she wasn’t seeing the ads?
No. Google search results still show sponsored links. But if you then click on them it breaks. Same thing for FB. The links are served from Facebook.Com and so they are not flagged as ads.
So she is likely getting exactly what she searched for and then it breaks after clicking on it
The ads still appear in the facebook feed but clicking them results in a “this site could not be found” or similar error, is how I understood it to work. I know the PiHole basically makes it so the routes from “whateveradwebsite.com” end up not resolving to an IP address. I’m not sure how FB is serving them; so the text/image content might be coming from an FB server and the link is just an ad URL with a bunch of tracking info on it.
I do when it is advertising something I hate. Publishers get dollars for clicks, pennies for impressions. That way I force someone I dislike to give money to someone I like.
I use adnauseum on my computer so it blocks the ads, but also sends a request simulating a click to the ad network. Based on average CPM, I’ve cost advertisers like $300 so far.
That’s because it’s built on top of uBlock. If you click on the extension it even has the uBlock logo. It’s literally just uBlock except it clicks on ads in the background. It even tells you how much projected money you cost them for clicking their shitty ads. And the websites gets paid. Only the advertisers get shafted.
Interesting. But wouldn’t that still decrease my privacy? Advertisers still won’t know which ads I’m interested in, but they will know what sites I visit and can still build a profile from that data.
Some people care more about fucking advertisers than privacy, as long as they don’t have to suffer through the ads themselves. But yeah, blocking is more private than fake clicking.
I got a lot of complaints from family, too. Especially because I block Meta. I just let them bitch and I tell them things like “those ads are broken because of malware” which isn’t entirely untrue.
Yeah for sure. I’m no expert by any means, but I can talk through what I did.
I used the instructions directly from their code repository: github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/#one-step-automated-in… (I used option 1, the automated install). I did this on an old RPi2B that I had laying around.
After I set up the pi, I got its MAC address. I used this to set a static IP address in my router settings. This is important to make sure the pi keeps the same IP at all times. Then, also in my router settings, I set the DNS server to be the pi’s static IP address.
After all that was done, I just plugged the pi into a dedicated power supply and rebooted the router.
I know it’s rare, but there have been times I intentionally clicked on an ad - if it genuinely seemed like a unique or useful product I had some interest in.
I imagine the fake-social-post type of ads are worth blocking though since it’s based in dishonesty and deception.
Some shops I only used once still send me their written newsletters and I don’t mind checking them if they do them entertaining, or about some niche products, even if I don’t consider buying them at all. I miss well-designed full-page print ads in magazines, or just those with a catchy imagery\wording. Now these all feel like a vintage, premium product, akin to vinyl records, if compared to what garbage web serves today. Such a weird thing to be nostalgic about, but I hope oldschool advertisers\smm persons feel it on their end too.
“I’ll try to fix it. Now that I put it in taking it down brings the Internet down. Sorry, let me think how to fix this”
And literally put up excuses until they get used to it. I’m sorry but they made you do stuff you didn’t enjoy for your own good while telling white lies, it’s time for payback.
Spot on. I was incredulous when they told me they each sent their cheek swabs in to the “free to be me”, the population tracking group 🌊 👁️a. Now I understand that that same company’s entire database is on the dark 🕸️.
You forgot the endless popups in the 2000s, which led to every browser integrating a popup blocker since then (and which often fail to stop actual malicious popups, no less)
Yes, in these years are a lot of pop ups, pop unders among other crap in some pages, but normally in most pages there was, apart of an ocassinal Banner not much else to justify an adblocker. But nowadays, between ads, clickbaits, cookie consent, adblocker detections and ant-adblocker, paywalls and other shit like these, you need a lot of extensions and scripts if you don’t want that the page fills your browser and HD with all kind of PUPs and unwanted scripts, apart of an ad/trackerblocker. It’s a cats and mouse game between companies which want to track and profile you with all kind of dirty tricks, and the user and devs continuos searching contrameasures to show them the middle finger.
It’s always difficult with digital matters, since there isn’t anything tangible and concrete to show.
Like, there’s no shady person following them with a notebook and reporting back to their boss all day, but that is kinda what’s happening, just invisible to the user.
My pihole is pretty good at showing family how many connections their apps make are completely unnecessary to their actual functions. That’s a good illustration to start with.
As I recall, back in the late 90s there was a story in the Wall Street Journal about a man who loved receiving email spam. After a long day’s work he would go home and relax by looking through his email spam and order things.
Yeah, when I watch sports events from other countries it’s interesting to see the commercials, even if I don’t speak the language. It’s when I have to watch 20 minutes of the same commercials every hour that it gets bad.
I once had a user whose PC would freeze every time they tried to see their desktop. Like, you minimise something full screen and the PC would freeze for a few minutes and crawl while the desktop was in view.
Turns out they had more than 4,000 items on their desktop.
That day I learned where Windows puts icons that don’t fit on the desktop (it stacks them all on the first icon’s place, lol). And this wasn’t even the problem they called about! They were just grumpily blaming Microsoft and working around it for years.
I guess my point is computer illiterate/belligerent people will find a way around the problems they cause and just blame something/someone else.
Ah this brings back the memories of the race to close pop-ups as you can hear your parents coming home. For every one you close, three pop up to take it’s place. You can hear the key in the lock. Sweat pouring down your face you finally do it, you hit the last X and nothing new pops up. You have defeated the pop-ups… this time.
All the better to track you with so you have no choice but to agree and agree to their arbitration clauses if you want to use their and their competitors’ products with no alternative to avoid it. Sometimes you can’t even use the mobile site when so many services and businesses have flat out broken their mobile sites just to force the app. I don’t like DuckDuckGo’s browser but I use it to block trackers in the background.
This is correct. I use ddg for the same reason, and the “Desktop site” option for those little shits that broke their mobile site to force the app. If that option doesn’t work, I leave the site.
I found that Firefox mobile with adblocker solves 100% of my advlock issues, and usually fixes format and display issues with websites. Half the websites I view on chrome mobile don’t even fit on my screen anymore!
Last time I tried ff mobile, it was sluggish, and had no extensions. I’m guessing they fixed those issues? I like ddg mobile browser well enough, but I’d love to use ff on my mobile, too. And, yes, I did notice those formatting issues. I thought it was just bad design, but it’s the chrome engine? Interesting. Not at all surprising, though, but interesting.
Yes, typical screens from these years, from a user who, as a newbie in the Internet, clicked on these beautiful banners and animations that were on certain pages with nice freeware stuff, screensavers, games, funny Powerpoints, etc… Nowadays these things do not appear and you can only notice that the PC goes every time slower and you know that you belong to the big family of the botnet community.
I used this scene in a cybersecurity training session. I knew it got the point across, when our resident ad-clicker asked me for advice to avoid that situation.
E: she asked for advice for her home computer, as she didn’t understand that “at home and at work” meant “at home and at work with any device, not just work’s”
I have spent a lot of time around a lot of IT workers and I am literally the only person I’ve ever seen on a project that has an ad blocker installed in their browser.
I use Firefox on my desktop and laptop devices. I’ve tried using Firefox on Android. It’s slow, and breaks on some sites. If you use it, good for you. I’m not gonna use it just for virtue signalling.
Bruh. I do care about privacy and security. Otherwise I would’ve used Chrome or Brave. Stop acting like anything except Firefox is trash. (That is the virtue signalling part.) They’re not. I’d be happy if Firefox suited my needs on Android. I’m sorry that I can’t change my experience just because you say so.
Firefox is very likely the best suggestion for people on android who have those concerns. I’m sorry it didn’t work out for you but that’s what you are seeing here, people reccomending the best option. No one is telling you can’t use whatever you want.
Not really. I started out by saying that this is the suggestion if one doesn’t like Firefox on Android. I also said that I do use Firefox everywhere else. If you still say that I’m “justifying my poor decisions”, it’s not simple recommendation. It gets annoying.
I don’t know the technical reasons. Probably due to people optimizing their pages for Chromium, since it’s the de facto standard. Most pages load slower on Firefox for me. Chromium based browsers are usually better. Also, most websites of Indian government break for me on Firefox. It’s probably their fault, not Firefox’s. But I don’t want to deal with the annoyance. Everything seems to work most of the time on desktop, though.
I have a friend who has their entire center 5th of their laptops screen just dead. they move windows around it to deal with it. I look at the way they’re using their computer and like I can barely reach it at their window size but it’s better than paying the $500 MacBook repair to them
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