On the Fence? Major in CS - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/f2/on_the_fence_major_in_cs/ <comment><USER2> > _"if you know you want a technical major but you're not sure which, choose > Computer Science."_

I disagree. If you know you want a technical major but you're not sure which, choose Math. It is the common factor that all other technical fields share, and it will give you the most options. Major in math, then go to grad school in CS, Physics, Economics, or even Law. But majoring in either CS or Economics makes it difficult to go to grad school in the other one.

And most of the "benefits" of majoring in CS that he mentions don't actually require you to major in CS. You merely have to have an interest in programming, which is easier to pick up on the side. On the other hand, try teaching yourself abstract algebra.

Further, the analytical thinking skills that university-level math gives you serve you well in many fields, including computer science. But all that said, if you know what you want to do, definitely do that!

<comment><USER3> I agree with you in that Math is more universal and probably a better place to go if you're on the fence.

But it depends on the Computer Science program. I think of CS as more of a theoretical approach to computing, but it seems a lot of schools are placing emphasis on the more practical aspects of development (like actually working? who'd of thought). I've heard complaints that universities have just been turned into Java mills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Many people on this thread are suggesting a math degree instead of a CS degree if you're 'on the fence'. I was on the fence and got a math degree, and I disagree.

Perhaps math programs are far different at other schools but here are some of the classes I was required to take, along with a few electives: real analysis, abstract algebra, "foundations" (more abstract algebra), knot theory, topology, algebraic geometry, number theory and so on and so forth.

You'll note that almost none of these are applicable to anything unless you're doing very abstract research. It's impossible to get a job doing anything useful related to these topics with an undergraduate's understanding. It's probably impossible to get a job in these fields with a phd's understanding - math phds have the highest unemployment rate out of any phd, but that's another discussion. If I hadn't been a campus Perl programmer in my spare time I would have been unemployable like the other math majors who didn't take teaching credential courses. The only math I've really used much as a programmer is linear algebra, and perhaps "discrete" math which I didn't learn about in school because that class was offered by the CS department...

In contrast, every job interview I've had they've asked the same algorithm and big-O questions. Those first interviews would have been less embarrassing if I had taken those classes in the first place.

If you're on the fence, don't want to do CS, and want to major in something technical which is not only applicable to every scientific field as well as economics and finance and Google and Paypal, but is also in short supply, major in STATISTICS. Learn C, Python and Matlab in your spare time and take the intro algorithms class from the CS department. Good luck.

<comment><USER5> I often kick myself for not taking Statistics more seriously as an undergrad.

Maybe a Stats/CS dual major is the ultimate?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "if you know you want a technical major but you're not sure which, choose Computer Science."

I completely disagree. I am not even convinced that a computer science degree is the best degree to have for a software job, but a computer science degree is useless unless you go into computer science.

The other degrees can yield multiple career opportunities math being the most widely applicable to different careers. Disclaimer: I have a degree in mathematics.

<comment><USER7> I'd say just the opposite, and not just because I have a degree in CS.

My reasoning is: in the next 50-100 years, there will be a ton of breakthroughs in other fields brought about by sheer number crunching. Biology is seeing this with bioinformatics, physics is seeing it by being able to process the humongous amounts of data thrown off by modern equipment like the LHC, etc. Having a CS degree allows you to work in any of those fields, applying your knowledge of computation to help others achieve decidedly non- useless breakthroughs.

To give an example, the biology department at my alma mater is recruiting CS grad students as fast as it can to help implement some distributed system to simulate protein interaction (or something like that, I know so little about biology that it's embarrassing).

I'm not saying CS should be the default choice of every technical person, but it's not utterly useless to other fields. In fact, I'd say CS is _more_ useful in this case than it is to cubicle software jobs, because in the average Enterprise Doohickey, you aren't doing anything complicated enough to care if your algorithm is O(n^2) vs O(n).

<comment><USER6> Your still doing CS - not biology and that was my point. The article seemed to be saying if you are not sure about what to do choose CS. I think that is the wrong choice.

I love software and can't imagine doing anything else but if I had a CS and didn't like it I would need to go back to school and get another degree to do something else. That isn't true with say a math degree.

<comment><USER7> I guess I fail to see how math prepares you better to do biology than CS does. Neither major contains the domain specific knowledge that a biology degree would impart, so it seems like neither would prepare you better than the other. I'd also imagine that both involve more math than biology, so they are both sufficient in that department.

And as I pointed out in my last paragraph, I'm not saying I agree with the article either... I was just pointing out that CS knowledge _is_ useful outside of CS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _CS majors learn to really program_

I have to disagree. People with a real passion for programming will use a CS program to become even better at programming.

Other people, lured by the promises of big $, can get through a CS program with a bit of effort and at the end still be worse then average coders.

That's certainly what I experienced when I got my CS degree. About half the people loved to program and the other half hated it and weren't good at it, but still got their degrees. A CS degree does not make you into a good coder, it can help you be one, but it doesn't make you.

</comment><comment><USER9> Maybe I misunderstood the article, but it seems like he was talking mostly at students with advanced degrees (possibly at the Doctoral level):

Presumably two assumptions are made:

1) Getting a CS degree at some level is not the only degree that they will get

2) They are frickin' smart.

The advantages that the author proposes are as such:

1) You will probably learn how to use a computer to solve problems for you at a level beyond using Matlab or Excel

2) You will have a practical and marketable degree with which you can enter the work force if you decide that academia is not where you want to stay.

3) The abstractions that you learn from studying Computer Science are applicable to many common systems beyond those found in computers.

That is my interpretation.

</comment><comment><USER10> I strongly disagree.

Statistically speaking, most CS majors are doomed to salt mines (or a change of profession entirely.)

See:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/83dzc/dear_redd...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/83dzc/dear_reddit_i_am_a_15_year_old_boy_that_is/c08673l)

<comment><USER11> Statistically speaking, that is true of nearly all fields. Only 5% of people can be in the top 5%.

Some data points (hey, the singular of data is "anecdote"):

My sister's boyfriend has a Ph.D in biomedical engineering. He makes less than half what she does, post-doccing. His day job consists of writing papers that the tenured professors get credit for.

My roommate has a degree from Cornell, also in biomedical engineering. She runs community outreach (i.e. posting on FaceBook) for a youth soccer nonprofit.

One of my best friends from college is working on his Ph.D in physics. He is planning to become a baker afterwards, because there are very few jobs for physics Ph.Ds.

Another of my college friends has a masters in mathematics after dropping out of the Ph.D program. He teaches math to high school girls at an elite private school.

My dad has an MIT Ph.D in nuclear chemistry. He became a househusband when I was born after finding the corporate world a soul-crushing mess of office politics.

One of my netfriends has a degree in biology. She kills rats for $30k/year and considers herself lucky.

Another netfriend has a degree in biochem. She works as community manager for a Web 2.0 fashion site after a stint as a UPS store manager.

It's necessarily true that professions will seem more glamorous as a kid than they are in real life, because you only hear about the glamorous ones. They wouldn't be noteworthy if they were just like what your parents did. But most people still manage to be happy in their job, even if its nowhere near as exciting as they imagined when they were young.

Heck, I work in what most people would consider a fairly glamorous programming job (Google Search, as a UI engineer writing new features for the search results page). Y'know what the majority of my workweek consists of? Tweaking CSS so an element is no longer off by 1 pixel in WebKit. Writing tools to automate 5-step long build processes. Getting things to work with other teams' features that basically invalidated all my design assumptions. Figuring out why my new feature is suddenly broken in IE8. Getting yelled at (metaphorically) for breaking the build.

This really isn't all that different from what any other web developer does for a living. Everybody's doomed to the salt mines: it's whether you enjoy mining salt that matters.

<comment><USER5> Now contrast all of these people to some other groups with just a high school diploma. They might not even have the options open to them of becoming a house husband, or never met the people in college who became the connection for a job at a Web 2.0 fashion site.

Getting graduate degrees learning stuff that you cannot apply to gainful employment may seem a waste, but it is difficult to predict how educational opportunities will benefit you.

<comment><USER11> "never met the people in college who became the connection for a job at a Web 2.0 fashion site"

I think that one was actually a cold call...she applied to like every job in San Diego before finding one that would take her. Persistence pays off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I disagree. If you're capable of being a good programmer, you'll get there faster by doing it than majoring in CS.

If I were giving my 18yo self advice, I'd suggest majoring in physics but taking the minimum required courses. With a light core schedule, fill up the rest with economics, writing composition and history. Maybe design.

On the other hand, PhD programs in CS are worthwhile.

</comment><comment><USER13> "When a math ABD starts telling me about how she really likes her work but is sick of the slow pace and the fact that only six people in the world understand her work, I get to take a nice minute alone with my thoughts: I've heard it over and over again, in the same words and the same weary, beaten- down tone."

It's interesting to keep this in mind when reading Kaczynski's "Industrial Society And Its Future". He spills a lot of ink on how humans in industrial societies waste a lot of time and energy on "surrogate activities" rather than focusing on their own survival (which is no longer a challenge). It sounds a lot like the frustration of an academic who sees no use for his increasingly arcane work.

</comment><comment><USER14> Exactly.

Most of CS also revolves around making things easier (correctly, of course) for yourself.

If there's a method that will get things done with less work, you are usually encouraged to take it, provided it gives the right output - nobody cares too much unless its completely slow or bloated.

That was the biggest reason for me over going into engineering - CS actually _rewards_ you for thinking outside the box, and it thinking like that really helps most of the time.

<comment><USER15> \- CS actually rewards you for thinking outside the box

... where on earth do you work? Dont get me wrong, I love CS; however, I dislike when people romanticize it. Read thedailywtf.com over and keep in mind that there is no shortage of stories ever to get posted on that site. and as for:

\- "What invariants must this process satisfy? What's the cleanest way to organize this structure? How should these subsystems work together?"

      I know a lot of people who graduated with me that I would not trust to ever answer any of those questions.. I have seen their programs and do not believe they know a good way to cleanly organize themselves out of a cardboard box.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> CS is a subset of Mathematics, if you argue that the CS way of thinking is valuable you're really arguing that the Math way of thinking is valuable and Math would be much more applicable to a more wide range of Professions.

On the fence? Major in Math.</comment>


Liberal, Harsh Denmark - <AUTHOR> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/03/10/liberal-harsh-denmark/ <comment><USER3> Definitely Denmark stands out compared to their Scandinavian measures.

But looking here ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_refugee...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_refugee_population)) they still have 4x refugees per capita compared to the US, 2x more than Australia, and still have more refugees per capita than Germany. And they're well above most EU countries. And I can almost guarantee they're more generous to refugees than the US.

Seems funny for a US paper to be calling Denmark "harsh".

<comment><USER4> In terms of attitudes, Denmark is the least welcoming to foreigners, of all Western countries: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/03/21...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/03/21/a-fascinating- map-of-countries-color-coded-by-their-openness-to-foreigners/)

<comment><USER5> In-group altruism is correlated with out-group hostility.

<comment><USER6> They have to be, otherwise the vast welfare state system collapses. It's why the big European welfare states can't handle huge amounts of immigration very well. The greater the welfare state, the greater the influx of immigrants that you're likely to see wanting to get there. The only reason the US was able to absorb the massive immigration it did on a few occasions in its history, was due to the almost complete non-existence of a welfare state at the time, immigrants had to make it on their own at very limited additional cost to the state or tax system. If you deployed a full European style welfare state in the US, and then attempted that scale of immigration again, it would collapse the political system and economy.

<comment><USER3> Sweden has more immigrants per capita than the US. It doesn't seem to be collapsing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The money quote is a few paragraphs in.

"Denmark has long led the continent in its shift to the right—and in its growing domestic consensus that large-scale Muslim immigration is incompatible with European social democracy."

Europeans have generally experienced good cultural assimilation from immigrant populations, although I imagine conservative Jewish populations are an exception, leading to some troubling parallels right now. American politics and journalism make those parallels uncommonly mentioned in national media, but we should be considering them as societies.

At the same time, lack of assimilation to these previously well functioning societies is troubling. The lack of liberalism (in a formal sense, not an American political sense) is here on HN, too; debate on the story about whether religiously conservative men could/should be able to move women away from their assigned seats on planes was shockingly vigorous to me. This seems like a battle that countries like France and America helped win decades ago.

I read a suggestion many years ago (well before Turkey entered the EU) that in part Northern European countries "worked" because of their social homogeneity, and their success at cultural assimilation of immigrant populations. However true that is or was, that homogeneity is seen as at risk right now.

Like anyone, I have some mixed feelings about this as seen from across the Atlantic. I both like and dislike America's fragmented and vigorous culture, and I think of these more homogenous countries like I think of the small town I live in; with some rose colored glasses on about how 'nice' they must be. And a small town can be nice. But, it can be nasty if you don't fit in. And a small town with a massive population influx can lose its niceness quickly.

At any rate, it seems to me that Denmark should be allowed to ignore Syria if it wants, and also turn away refugees if it wants, or vet them on whatever criteria the country decides to. Right now liberal and right-wing (in the European sense) politics are ending up in bed together over immigrants, liberals on the behavior front, and right-wing on the culture front. Things seem likely to get more heated and violent before they cool down.

<comment><USER8> > although I imagine conservative Jewish populations are an exception

I'm a dane living in Copenhagen. I am atheist as well. I really do not get what you mean by "conservative Jewish populations are an exception" to good cultural assimilation.

I grew up unaware of the jewish population, I studied and later worked with several jews, unaware that they were in fact jewish, My wife had several jewish friends from college. Except for the fact that some of them chose to live "more" jewish than others - and generally take Fridays off - I have _never_ ever noticed them to stand out in any way. In fact, I have known several people for years without realizing that they were jewish.

They seem to have been assimilated to the point where it is actually a threat to the (little) cultural diversity that Denmark has.

It is the same way in the other Scandinavian countries. Your comment is very, very strange.

> I read a suggestion many years ago (well before Turkey entered the EU)

Turkey has not entered the EU. In fact, due to concerns about democracy and human rights, they have not even been promised that they can start negotiations.

> Like anyone, I have some mixed feelings about this as seen from across the > Atlantic. I both like and dislike America's fragmented and vigorous culture, > and I think of these more homogenous countries like I think of the small > town I live in; with some rose colored glasses on about how 'nice' they must > be.

One very important mechanism to make the Danish society work, is _trust_. We are generous with welfare. We have paid education through college/university or equivalent. In fact, in addition to free tuition, we will _pay_ you to take an education. Danish "SU" ("Education Support") amounts to DKK5941 /month - apx $10464/year.

The backside of the trust is, that one of the least socially acceptable things you can do is to _cheat_ the generous system.

> At any rate, it seems to me that Denmark should be allowed to ignore Syria > if it wants, and also turn away refugees if it wants, or vet them on > whatever criteria the country decides to

It seems to me, that every country in the world - Denmark included - <USER2> accept their fair share of refugees. Smaller populations with different cultures are generally not a problem. Only when populations with very different culture and religious views grows faster than their culture as well as the host country culture can adapt to eachother do problems arise.

<comment><USER9> > In fact, I have known several people for years without realizing that they > were jewish.

I'm sure those aren't the people the parent commenter was referring to.

Jews throughout the world follow an incredibly broad spectrum of belief and practice, including an extremely broad set of views about how to relate to other cultures. At the most conservative end, there are some communities who view it as an essential life priority to try to follow all of the laws of the Torah fully and literally. This may include not only the dietary and Sabbath laws, but also rules about sexual modesty and limiting physical contact between the sexes

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzniut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzniut)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negiah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negiah)

and for some people also varying degrees of effort to limit social interactions with non-Jews

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishul_Yisrael](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishul_Yisrael)

See generally

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haredi_Judaism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haredi_Judaism)

for the people who are making the most conscious effort to be socially and culturally separate from secular society.

<comment><USER10> It still seems very strange to single them out to Europeans, where strictly observant Jews are a tiny minority, especially when in many respects the most strictly observant Judaism resembles far more mainstream Islamic culture, with Muslims being a much larger, more likely to be foreign-born and faster-growing minority.

(This is also reflected in the way anti-Semitic sentiment in Western Europe tends to focus on Israel and perceived Zionist conspiracies whilst Islamophobic sentiment tends to focus on the idea that Islam could never be compatible with European culture)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a dane, I would like to point out that the largest group of "Muslisms-not- welcome" are the people who are seemingly at the bottom of society. They are the ones spewing uneducated nonsense on social media, and in general, have no idea what they are talking about. Most of the time, their "solution" is simply to "send them home". I feel bad for this group of people living in fear, when there's (perhaps) not that much to fear. I can however understand that you would feel threatened when you don't have an education, and can see the government trying to help refugees by offering them the same jobs you would be applying for.

Also, if you have any questions regarding this whole matter, I would like to answer them as best as possible.

<comment><USER12> The US has still only welcomed 2,300 refugees. That is less than Denmark, a country the size of the state of Maryland, received per month this fall. In one week alone, Denmark received 11,000 refugees from the Middle East. I'd like to see the reaction in American media if you received 300/6 x 10,000 = 500,000 refugees in one week. Denmark received 21,000 official asylum seekers in 2015, most in the second half of the year, and mostly young men from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan etc. That is like if the US received 1 million. And on top of that a much larger number seemingly just traveling through.

With 31 governors refusing to receive any Syrian refugees at all (and so too your likely next president) I think Americans should keep the Euro bashing at a minimum.

<comment><USER6> The US is and has been taking massive numbers of refugees from Latin America (how many are European nations taking from Latin America?). Latin America over the last 30 years has witnessed a lot of chaos, war, huge murder rates, etc. of nearly the scale Syria is seeing. The murder rate in Honduras for example is half the casualty rate of the Syrian civil war. How Honduras isn't considered an active war zone I don't know. If Honduras were the size of Syria, it would have seen upwards of 100,000 murders in just the last five years. In just seven years in Mexico, around 164,000 people were murdered in the cartel wars.

The US has taken in 10 million immigrants (twice the population of Denmark) from just Mexico in the last 30 some years. You don't think those people are every bit as much refugees as the people of Syria? They've fled intense poverty and domestic war, and they're willing to die to try to get across the US border to a better life.

How much more do you think the US can absorb exactly?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As a brown man who's lived awhile in Northern Europe, watching this saga unfold, I have to say the nimbyism shown by Denmark and Norway has been astonishing. Only Sweden and Germany seem to still be able to hold their heads high, actually treating brown people as humans without prejudice. Norway and Denmark have shown small mindedness comparable to the likes of Poland and Hungary while being vastly richer and better educated.

I've had to eat my prior words and praise sung in favor of N.Europe to my friends and family and restrict it to just Sweden, because the entire world can now see the reality of the actions taken in adversity by each of the countries and not just the words.

It is a small matter of consolation that the iphones so many Danes and Norwegians love is the brainchild of a man with Syrian blood whom they would have refused to shelter while counting their nickels and dimes. They are welcome to deal with that cognitive dissonance as they fade into the twilight of history while hoping the names of their ancestors are not much tarnished by the actions of the current generation. It would take a long time for the world to forget these things.

<comment><USER14> For Norway it is a perfect storm. A right wing coalition government (with the "extreme" right wing party as member for the first time in history no less), a slump in the oil price, and therefore a slump in offshore related services and industries, and a influx of refugees, in particularly across the border with Russia.

Its basically a very messy situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Denmark values their own way of life more than a stranger's. I admire them.

</comment><comment><USER16> How dare you be a sovereign nation with a border!

<comment><USER17> Though Denmark signed up to the Schengen Agreement allowing border-free travel in the EU.

<comment><USER18> And, to be fair, Sweden did start border control first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'd like to add a few points to the article. First, the party which got the most votes at the election was SD, the center-left Social Democrats, not DF (Dansk Folkeparti). However, overall the left-wing "red block" did not have enough representatives to form a coalition government. Out of the right-wing "blue block", DF was the party with the most votes [1].

Secondly, the current conservative government has indeed a tough line when it comes to asylum seekers and refugees. Their allies from DF have in particular an obsession for muslims, which leads to fairly transparent measure such as mandating the presence of pork in menus offered by the city of Randers to "preserve Danish food traditions" [2].

If we ignore momentarily foaming-at-the-mouth-about-muslims-but-we're-really- not-racist DF types, it's hard to deny there are real integration issues with immigrant populations. However, I wouldn't be so quick to put the blame squarely on these people. You regularly have tests which show that, depending on how ethnically Danish the name on your resume sounds, your chances of getting an interview, all other things being equal, are drastically different. And I have the feeling that anti-Muslim feelings have become relatively mainstream.

On the other hand, you do have a number of Muslim extremists which clearly have absolutely no intention of integrating and who'd be better off emigrating to Saudi Arabia, for everybody's good.

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_general_election,_2015](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_general_election,_2015)

2: [http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/01/danish-city-pork- prote...](http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/01/danish-city-pork-protect-food- culture-160122075225203.html)

3: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hizb_ut- Tahrir](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hizb_ut-Tahrir)

</comment><comment><USER20> Yes, we reduced social benefits to refugees by 45%, from $1600/month to $871/month, which means that we now provide roughly the same as in Norway and Sweden. If that is harsh then I'd rather not tell you what I think of the Mexico–U.S. border. Please America, go fix your own problems before you point fingers at your friends.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra I envy Danes, at least they seem to decide for themselves.

I can't, most of people in most of countries can't too. We're instead driven by a combination of dictatorship, baseless populism promoting things nobody wants, alienation ans promoting political agenda over citizens' wishes.

</comment><comment><USER21> The article says 2016, March 10, any idea why?

</comment><comment><USER22> It seems like a political problem, like most of Europe's problems. People just aren't choosing to work on obvious solutions to the problems, like a coordinated EU-wide refugee program. There is no question Denmark (and others) can afford the refugees, and the refugees certainly are not going to threaten the national security of any nation.

As in the US, the problem is politics. Climate change, health care, judges, and most of the rest of the issues have obvious solutions, it's just that some politicians currently refuse to participate on the grounds that other Americans also get a say in what happens (it is a democracy, after all). Unless they get their way 100%, undemocratically imposing their will on the rest of the country, no matter what their fellow citizens vote for, they won't act.</comment>


A plea to Google: Protect our e-mail privacy - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/12/op-ed-a-plea-to-google-protect-our-e-mail-privacy/ <comment><USER2> (disclaimer: I'm employed by Google, though not in anything related to Gmail)

The article quotes Vint Cerf as saying that encryption isn't being used because it would inhibit advertising, but I think that's incorrect. There is no obvious reason why ads couldn't be selected client-side, with the text of a message sent to Google over an encrypted connection and not stored.

In my opinion, there are at least three much more significant reasons why Gmail won't support end-to-end encryption:

1) It puts a huge barrier in front of new users. Instead of picking a username and password, now they have to create an encryption key, have a (strong!) password for the key, install client-side software to manage it, keep a backup of the key, and keep backups of their email in an encrypted form (with yet another strong password).

Can you imagine any ordinary person going through with all that just to read email?

\--

2) User-managed encryption would be a support nightmare. Imagine: your grandmother buys a new laptop, and donates her old beige box to a local school. After getting home, she tries to check her email. Except she can't, because the encryption keys were on her old computer, and now they're just noise on some platters because the school's IT guy wiped the drive.

Would you want to be the customer support agent who had to tell her that her email was gone forever, and that she would have to make a new account with a new address?

This is why no major company encourages users to manage their own encryption keys, and why every company that does will never become a major company.

\--

3) Google's primary value-add to anything is search. That's their brand, they are the company people go to for finding stuff. End-to-end encryption means that Gmail can't do search any more, and then what's the point of even having Gmail? Even if you could somehow convince users that it's worth putting up with all the extra hassle to protect their email, you'll never convince a company that it should scrap one of its most successful products just because a fraction of a percent of its userbase thinks its existing security features are insufficient.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

Here's another thought. The world the author describes, where people install special client software to manage their keys and read their email, ALREADY EXISTS. If people actually want to, they can download Thunderbird and GPG and set up their keys and treat Gmail as just another IMAP/SMTP service. It's an annoying process, but the only ways to make it simpler would also render it useless by reducing the security.

So really the author isn't asking for Gmail to support encrypted email, _he's asking Gmail to stop supporting un-encrypted email_. Hands up if you think this will ever happen.

The fact that nobody outside the crypto-nerd community uses existing client- side encryption support is strong evidence that most users consider the convenience of provider-readable mail to be more important than protection against police warrants.

<comment><USER3> You're right, there are very real barriers to this happening, and I agree that the author of the article may not have considered them all, but barriers aren't always insurmountable.

(1) basically reduces to having the user install client software (which would handle key management, etc). Not easy (and complicated by the fact that existing software sucks) but not impossible.

(2) is probably the biggest challenge. The solution requires a server which can manage keys without being able to read them. It does reduce the strength of the system to a strong passphrase or series of passphrases (and there are ways of making the UX for this less horrible than it currently is in most places) but that's still way better than anything we have right now--it essentially reduces the attack vectors available to someone with _root access to the server_ to those available to everyone on the internet for any other service right now (ie. brute force).

(3) I agree, no one will ever convince Google to encrypt Gmail. Search would still work for meta information though (to/from/subject lines) which is good enough for most situations. The client would be able to perform deeper searches within a particular date range by decrypting messages in that range should it be necessary.

So yeah, the world of encrypted email already exists but it sucks. Yes, making it easier involves reducing security somewhat (not even close to "rendering it useless") but it also provides a level of privacy that should have been expected from the get-go. _Nobody should be able to run a search on every word I've written to anyone in the past ten years but me._ The fact that nobody outside the crypto-nerd community uses existing client-side encryption has more to do with the poor usability of existing solutions and general (changing) assumptions about the privacy of email than anything to do with police warrants.

<comment><USER2> For (1), if the user has to install software on their client, then the entire point of webmail has been bypassed.

I disagree that reducing the security wouldn't render end-to-end encryption useless. Remember that the purpose of end-to-end encryption is to protect the user against malicious service providers. If you want to store a user's data on a Google server, but ensure that Google is unable to read it for XX years, then you need to take a lot of security precautions. Forgetting any of them would allow the user's data to be compromised.

      > Nobody should be able to run a search on every word
      > I've written to anyone in the past ten years but me.

If this is your goal, then your only realistic option is to install an open- source mail client on its own dedicated machine, set up GPG, generate your GPG keys on that machine, and don't let it do anything but talk SMTP+POP3 with your mail provider. Read all your email in plaintext.

This sounds paranoid, but it's actually the absolute minimum required if you want to ensure that your emails are safe from a malicious entity with corporate- or government-sized budgets. Further precautions might include removing the HDD and keeping the machine airgapped with email transfer performed by CD-ROM. Then you get to go down the physical-security rabbit hole to prevent someone with a warrant from bugging your keyboard.

The reason for all these precautions is that a malicious provider could save all of the encrypted emails you send/receive over the years. They only need to grab your keys once.

Or you could, you know, relax a bit and figure that storing personal email on Google/Microsoft/Yahoo/Apple servers is probably OK.

<comment><USER3> It's not webmail as we know it, that much is true. In an age of mobile and tablet prevalence, that's less important than it used to be. It would still be possible to _send_ emails from a browser session (doesn't require exchanging private keys, it just wouldn't be signed... in other words, a "stopgap" sort of ability) and if you are using a trusted SSL connection (I know that's an _if_ , but still pointing it out) you could have synchronous communications in a browser that were still being saved in an encrypted format.

The purpose of this is actually _not_ to prevent a concerted attack on your communications--there are too many physical/social vectors in that scenario for encryption to even matter. The purpose is to prevent your personal correspondence from being indexed anywhere outside of your complete control, and to be transmitted in a way that prevents the elementary eavesdropping possible today. It should also make the sort of subpoena requests performed by "regular" law enforcement impossible. Most departments don't have the resources to crack a sufficiently complicated passphrase. So what I should have said is _nobody should be able to run a search on every word hundreds of millions of people have written in the past ten years which they thought was private correspondence_. And the system I am describing really would put an end to that ability. (NOTE: I'm _not_ saying I think anyone at Google can do that. Maybe the NSA, but there's no proof of that either. My only point is that it's very technologically feasible right now and it shouldn't be.)

EDIT: By the way, for people who _do_ know what they're doing and _are_ willing to go through the extra steps, a system like the one I describe here (and am building) is still a net win--instead of your ultra-secure setup being limited to communicating with your ultra-secure friends, there would be a middle road for general communications with less tech-savvy associates.

<comment><USER2>
      > nobody should be able to run a search on every word
      > hundreds of millions of people have written in the past
      > ten years which they thought was private correspondence.

If it's possible for your provider to compromise your system and take your keys, then they can run a search on everything you've sent through their routers.

If they can compromise one system, they can automate it and compromise ~100% of typical consumer machines, and then have access to all of their email.

The steps I described do not stop a concerted attack. They are merely the minimum required to prevent blanket surveillance of all email accounts managed by any given provider. If someone does less than what I described (and I'm sure I didn't get everything), then sending encrypted email is just wasting their own time.

<comment><USER3> Forgive me, but I don't understand how what you're describing is remotely possible. Cracking a single bcrypted passphrase should take an average time on the order of _years_. NSA and their ilk can maybe reduce that significantly, but they still won't be cracking an entire system any time soon, even if it's only 1,000 user accounts.

We must be talking past each other. I promise I'm not trying to be obtuse-- could you please try again?

<comment><USER2> A malicious provider wouldn't have to brute-force the key; they could compromise your browser to steal the key and install a keylogger to take your password. Browser exploits aren't expensive, and zero-days are discovered semi-regularly.

A sufficiently well-capitalized provider could even pay researchers to find new browser exploits, so they don't have to depend on scavenging them out of feral malware samples.

This would probably work only once or twice, but would give that provider the ability to read any encrypted payloads that they have recorded.

<comment><USER3> Ahh yes, we did somehow manage to misunderstand each other completely. There is no scenario in my system in which the browser sees any keys or passphrases, encrypted or otherwise--that would only happen in a signed standalone client program capable of running native code. (The browser _does_ see a password in the potential "send-only" scenario I described earlier, but that's a separate secret unrelated to the PGP key.) Yes, it would be possible to maliciously alter that code and redistribute it, but it would be difficult since the source would be open and anyone could verify the hash. At that point, it's probably easier to just infect the host computer with a keylogger some other way (and wait for the user to lose their key so that they need to use their passphrase, then intercept 2 factor auth somehow), but that's like the _deus ex machina_ of computer security (and still not at all automatable at large scale as far as I can see, especially due to 2FA).

<comment><USER2> If the user's browser runs in the same account as the user's mail client, then any browser exploit will be able to access the user's key.

The keylogger would be to take the user's key password. To my knowledge, there is no way to hook up 2FA for accessing a GPG(,etc) key.

<comment><USER3> I think you're making some assumptions which don't apply to the system I'm working on. We're getting pretty far to the right margin in this thread, but I would love to continue this discussion out of band (and it's entirely possible that I really have missed something, in which case I would like to know it sooner rather than later). My email is in my profile :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> My little company has started working on a solution to this: <http://parley.co>

Google will never store email in a properly encrypted fashion, because their incentives lie with advertisers rather than with users. The only way for encrypted email to both work and reach mass appeal is for it to be implemented in such a way that private keys never touch the server while still being ridiculously simple to use at a highly accessible price point.

<comment><USER4> > Google will never store email in a properly encrypted fashion, because their > incentives lie with advertisers rather than with users.

Also I'm pretty sure search would suck with encryption, which is easily the primary draw of GMail for many people.

<comment><USER3> I agree that search is pretty nice to have, but most of the time I find myself searching for "messages from so-and-so" or "that email I wrote about X" which is still searchable after encryption (subject fields remain unencrypted, and you obviously also have to/from/date/time). For deeper searches, a client could decrypt and search a smaller time span (messages to X last week containing Y).

It's still a trade-off, but I don't think it's a deal-breaker at all. I also think we overestimate how much non-geeks know about search features in GMail.

<comment><USER5> Why are those fields still searchable after encryption? Doesn't that fly in the face of the article's utopian state of email? I can still see you're emailing with this contact, at this frequency, and with these subjects; seems like an awful lot of insecure leakage.

<comment><USER3> PGP doesn't encrypt the recipient's address for obvious reasons. Subject and sender are useful for the recipient; it's a tradeoff, as all security is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Someone needs to invent a Firefox or Chrome addon that solves this problem.

Here's how I see it working. You get a message on Gmail, and it looks like this:

        This message is encrypted with FooAddon.
        To view it, copy and paste the encrypted message
        to a FooAddon tab.

        ----FOOADDON MESSAGE START
        ...a bunch of base64-encoded binary data...
        ----FOOADDON MESSAGE END

You paste that into the addon's tab and it uses your private key to decrypt and show the message.

To send, you select the recipient's public key in a FooAddon tab and type your message there, then click Encrypt. It gives you something like the above which you then copy and paste back into Gmail.

Clumsy, yes, but you'd have a working proof-of-concept that would allow you to send and receive encrypted messages through _any website with a text field_ without leaving the browser.

The security implications of being able to type a secure message directly in Gmail and be sure Google isn't reading it with JavaScript are no doubt much more complicated.

<comment><USER2> <http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/>

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/enigmail/>

<comment><USER6> Since you missed it, the key point of my proposal was that it works:

> through any website with a text field

> without leaving the browser

<comment><USER2> I don't consider either of those to be useful, because once you've had to open a new window/tab, you might as well just have opened another application.

This recent obsession with rewriting the world to run in a jumped-up document rendering system is unhealthy and insane.

<comment><USER6> It's a question of adoption. Asking people to install a browser addon is easier and less hassle than a whole new application.

I use Thunderbird myself, but if we want email encryption available to everyone - not just us geeks - then the simpler we can make it, the better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> GMail will probably never encrypt our emails for us. But what it could do is automatically decrypt someone else's email and verify the signature. This would make encryption much more accessible without any (advertising) cost to Google.

<comment><USER2> Automatic decryption would require uploading a copy of the recipient's private key to Gmail, which rather defeats the purpose of end-to-end encryption.

For protecting mail in transit, SMTP TLS is just as secure and much easier to deploy.

<comment><USER8> SMTP TLS has to be deployed by the email server admin. Google could implement PGP (with the private key stored on their server) and it would work with any PGP-compatible email client regardless of support by the peer's email _server_. So for example, if your company runs your email server and doesn't use SMTP TLS, you can still use e.g. Thunderbird with GPG and correspond with someone who uses gmail without the gmail user having to take any steps whatsoever -- it would be trivial for google to supply a page like '<https://gmail.com/[email@example.com]/PGP> (and autogenerate a new key for any guessed address to thwart spammers guessing addresses), where you could get a copy of the user's public key and then send encrypted messages without the gmail user having to do a single thing.

That doesn't keep the email private from Google, but if your only concern is to keep your communications private from your email provider for some reason (or from your ISP etc. if you like your email provider other than the fact that they don't use SMTP TLS), it gives you something you didn't have before.

<comment><USER2> "That doesn't keep the email private from Google, but if your only concern is to keep your communications private from your email provider"

If you use Gmail, then Google is your email provider.

<comment><USER8> And if you don't use Gmail, but you're corresponding with someone who does, then Gmail is not your email provider.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Don't quite understand why Google drafts would be thought safer than Google email (between Google addresses). Aren't both sent via (technically unsafe) https and stored on some google disk somewhere?

<comment><USER10> If I send you an e-mail, it exists in at least two places on Google's servers, and on whatever devices you've used to read and send the message.

<comment><USER9> I agree that it exists on two places on Google's servers, but a draft also exists on every device that has used that account (and viewed or edited the draft).</comment></comment></comment>


Thorough description of a negative experience interviewing at Palantir - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/50csfd/long_rant_about_drawnout_negative_interview/ <comment><USER2> _A few days later I got a 2-minute rejection call, in which the recruiter said simply that the Skype interviewer did not feel that my technical skills were good enough._

So they're being fair and giving it to the candidate straight. Which is actually quite laudable (considering how many companies never go anywhere close to providing meaningful feedback after interviews).

 _The Skype interview was all talk and involved no coding whatsoever--how can the interviewer gauge my technical skills with such an interview?_

Actually you can gauge quite a lot about someone without delving into code at all. In fact, minute-for-minute it's often vastly more effective. So for these purposes, that was probably an excellent question to ask.

 _I had 5 other evaluative interviews that were ALL stated to have been "very positive," after multiple rounds._

OTOH this (along all the other back-and-forth) is pretty clear indication that the recruiters were lying to you at that particular stage. Obviously the feedback wasn't "very positive", more likely it was "mixed" \-- but the recruiters, being recruiters, felt they had to lie to you to keep you in the funnel. Otherwise they wouldn't, you know, make their numbers.

 _Their reputation for having tough interview problems is totally overrated at this point._

Sounds like they've wisened up, and realized that asking gratuitously "tough" (read: hit-or-miss) technical questions just isn't very useful as a filtering technique.</comment>


Please Stop Using Adblock (But Not Why You Think) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@trybravery/please-stop-using-adblock-but-not-why-you-think-13280e76c8e7 <comment><USER2> > hardworking volunteers continually update and maintain the filter lists

This can't be said enough.

Large numbers of users still have no idea that their blocker works at all because of these lists.

The collective amount of work which goes into these free-to-use lists on a daily basis is impressive, especially considering it's done entirely on a voluntary basis.

To get an idea just glance at the commit rate:

EasyList/EasyPrivacy: [https://github.com/easylist/easylist/commits/master](https://github.com/easylist/easylist/commits/master)

uBlock Origin: [https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/commits/master](https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/commits/master)

Add to this all the regional lists, specific-purpose lists, the hosts files (Peter Lowe's, Dan Pollock, malware lists), etc.

<comment><USER3> Thank you gorhill. Seriously, all the work you have done with uBlock Origin has made the world (wide web) a better place. And first recognizing the oft thankless blocklist maintainers here without a hint of name dropping yourself is truly honorable.

<comment><USER4> uBlock + uMatrix is such a powerful combo that I don't need any other ad- or script-related extensions on top of them. No Ghostery, no NoScript, none of that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This graphic from within the article

[https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1000/0*aXa0ZmMFzEgSxsOx....](https://cdn- images-1.medium.com/max/1000/0*aXa0ZmMFzEgSxsOx.png)

is what drove me over the edge on the Acceptable Ads program as well, and I switched off of ABP and onto uBlock Origin for this same reason.

I get that it probably doesn't break the Acceptable Ads rules, since they are probably stuff like: your ad isn't allowed to talk, or to pretend to be someone like the FBI or the user's Operating System, or include a JS payload that tries to break out of the browser sandbox, or to break the page layout, or to move around or flash. Those "Around the Web" things break none of those rules, and from a technical standpoint I don't know of anything objectionable about them. Not to mention none of this stuff is any worse than the papers I see in the grocery aisle, and Eyeo probably doesn't want to enter the business of judging whether a headline is Truth or not.

But tabloids have done enough damage to our society without migrating them to the Internet. So off to UBO I go, and I'm bringing everyone else with me that I can. Also, you should delete your Facebook account and never go back, because there's tabloid crap in there, too.

<comment><USER6> why not just disable showing of acceptable ads? i have always done this, since they introduced it.

<comment><USER7> The fundamental problem with defaults is that people do not change them, no matter what they say.

There might be a fantastically tiny fraction of people actually following through.

Eyeo even uses this behavioral insight to make a case that users like the acceptable ads program (since users don't change defaults)

The speaker was asked by the audience whether there is a control group in which the acceptable ad option is switched off and the speaker only grinned about it.

It's a dark pattern and Eyeo is fully aware of it.

<comment><USER8> It's still a little surprising here. Not having an adblocker at all is the default setting, users had to go out of their way to install it in the first place. Given that, you'd think that people would manage to turn off the 'allow acceptable ads' option too. (Perhaps it is well hidden?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Basically, they ran a survey which found that 71% of their users would allow > ads with "no annoyances". That means no animations, no sounds, and no flashy > colors.

This needs some context.

This survey ran in 2011 - older readers may remember with some nostalgia the slightly less evil online advertising landscape back then -- pre-Facebook / partner analytics scares, pre Spectre/Meltdown, pre javascript bitcoin miners ... and various increasingly nefarious activities that may fall under the umbrella of 'online advertising'. Plus a significantly smaller ratio of mobile:desktop browser users -- advertising on mobile is rarely thoughtfully executed.

This survey question was answered by just over 1500 people. AdblockPlus on Chrome alone today is showing up on the store as having an installed base of 10,000,000+ people. No idea what it was in 2011, but 1500 people -- some of whom (70 people, 4.5% of responders) indicated that _" Blocking ads is wrong and I disable Adblock Plus whenever possible"_ \-- is a tiny, skewed by self- selection, horribly dated basis for current state.

</comment><comment><USER10> "eyeo does mention that smaller websites can be whitelisted for free. In fact, they claim that around 90 percent of their partners are given this service free of charge.

But that means diddly when we all know that nearly all global ad revenue goes to just two companies: Google and Facebook."

So 90% of websites get it for free, and mainly Google and Facebook have to pay. I think the author intends for me to be outraged, but I'm not.

I'm also not having any reaction to the "acceptable ads" the author thinks I'm supposed to find unacceptable. They're clickbait, sure, but they fit the "no animations, no sounds, and no flashy colors" criteria.

<comment><USER11> It seems that the problem is people have different reactions to ads. Some want no ads at all, some don't mind ads as such, but are wary of ads with heavy js and video payloads that cause slowdowns and are potentially malign. There doesn't seem to be a good solution that allows the user to easily modulate what they'll accept.

<comment><USER12> Don't forget all the tracking and the profiling.

They hardly ask your consent for that.

I really wouldn't feel bad about any adblocking.

And for anyone that wants to _run ads_ : just serve them locally in a sufficient format and you'll slip through blocks.

<comment><USER13> > And for anyone that wants to run ads : just serve them locally in a > sufficient format and you'll slip through blocks.

I thought so too. Once you reach a certain size, even 1st party ads get blocked.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, but...

> Once you reach a certain size

Top 5 annoying ads of all time for me are autoplaying Youtube ads -- which I would think would be self-hosted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't understand. Generally I don't mind ads if a website is giving me content I want and what I need. But, what I _do_ mind is when whole sections of a website get their content and scripts from multiple different other domains! Most of times it's easy to block such references altogether, but often it breaks the websites which rely entirely on them. Not the _ads_ are the problem. The websites are the problem.

Why don't they embed their ads entirely inside the webpages? They could do an elaborate _internal_ dynamic ads system without needing to load a whole stream of third party content and software from other domains! What's the problem? I don't get it. So, I continue to block ads per default, and I don't care about the constant whining about how "morally wrong blocking ads is".

EDIT: Having a process integrating ads internally will also give the operators of websites the opportunity to vet the ads for potentially malicious advertising campaigns, aka fake ads, etc. Just an idea.

<comment><USER16> Facebook serve their own ads inline. Adblock engaged in a cat and mouse game trying to block their ads whilst simultaneously attempting to get them to sign up to the acceptable ads program.

Adblock does nothing to incentivise publishers to behave (rewarding relevant, low bandwidth, visually appealing ads). They only care about using their user base as a weapon so they can extort 30% of profits.

<comment><USER17> "Facebook serve their own ads inline. "

It is never too early to say goodbye to ads

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/socialfixer/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/socialfixer/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Full disclosure: I wrote this post.

I'm sure a lot of us here have already embraced uBlock Origin. It seems to be universally acclaimed on most tech forums.

Before I wrote this post, I wasn't aware that eyeo served ads directly, which is what prompted me to write it.

<comment><USER18> EFF Privacy Badger combined with uBlock Origin is my current combination.

<comment><USER19> what does privacy badger do that can't be accomplished with a custom ublock list?

<comment><USER20> Mostly automation -- you don't have to actually craft the list. It will just spot stuff it thinks it should be blocking and do so. And if you need to correct it (uncommon in my experience) the UI for doing so is right there next to the address bar. Also, it's capable of just blocking cookies for some sites, which is nice when they're hosting common J's libs/fonts or something, and blocking them outright would break the page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not mentioned: on Android, Firefox can use extensions including ublock origin.

And on that topic, "Dark Background and Light Text" currently at 0.6.8 is also mighty handy, though there are some items that end up invisible like voting arrows on HN.

<comment><USER22> If I switch to Firefox mobile, is there a way to transfer all my stored passwords from Chrome?

<comment><USER23> Firefox for desktop can import settings from Chrome and desktop can sync. passwords to mobile

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > Let me get this out of the way: I have nothing against businesses making > money. Businesses which find a market need and fill that need deserve to > make a profit. That's the only way many services would exist.

Let ME get this straight. I _DO_ have issue with businesses making money by being slimy, rule breaking, ethic-breaking or otherwise deceitful so they can make a buck.

A good purpose for companies is to better society by either make a product, or provide a service. I nary think that people (not other companies, mind you!) would think that some inapp pay-to-play lootbox chumfest would be bettering society. But hey, we offer them LLCs so they can engage in horrendous behaviors and then protect everyone in charge.

And lets discuss ads... No, I'm not paying the bandwidth to download them. I'm not paying the CPU time or ram to display them. No, they are bastions of computer disease and poison. I will block each and every one of them as soon as I find them. I will ignore every domain that attempts to host them. I don't care if "your company relies on them" \- well, too bad. Die then. My personal network/computer well being is worth more than your bad actions.

<comment><USER25> woah. I understand you would like to see the ads economy burn to the ground. but do you plan to build a viable alternative from the ashes? I am not criticizing your hate for ads, but as a fact they empower a sizable sector of our economy (directly or indirectly, like how amazon sell discounted devices with lock screen ads).

I agree that ads-driven websites tends to turn into tabloid full of clickbaits but newspapers had always had ads, why not on the internet?

<comment><USER24> Let me give you an alternate hypothesis.

There's the story about the kid who broke a window, and all the resulting economic activity somehow 'bolstered' the economy. In truth, when all is added up, the community lost by the cost of a window. This is called the "Parable of the Broken Window" (broken window hypothesis relates to a Reagan-era policy of broken windows = crime. not related).

Advertising is the same way. Their primary mode of communication is to jam up legitimate communication and crowd out others. Their best efforts is to enact in a combination of the parable of the broken window alongside the tragedy of the commons to see their wares.

You ask for a viable alternative? There isn't one. The very basis of advertising is parasitic. It cannot live on its own. It has nothing of value to offer. But it can crowd out legitimate discourse and sell our attention and thoughts back to us after weakening us slightly. We wouldn't fight for a tapeworm, tick, or mosquito, would we?

You also argue that they "empower a sizable sector of our economy". Again, that does look to be the case on a first look, but I say look deeper. They're costing even more, and we as a society only recoup the sizable sector as its outcome. Again, the parable of the broken window rears its ugly head.

(edit: because I got the name of the thing wrong)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I have wondered many times how those bad ads keep showing up on many pages despite of AdBlock Plus and now I understand. It's eye opening that these evil people charges 30% of ad revenue to let you through their plugin called AdBlock Plus! For what? Just "reviewing" the ad? There can be one time review fee but not the recurring fee. That is pure conflict of interest and immediate give away to this whole evil money making scheme called AdBlock Plus. They are ad mafia in its very sense.

Thanks for writing this article. AdBlock uninstalled. uBlock Origin installed.

</comment><comment><USER27> Classic clickbait title:

"Use uBlock because Adblock's parent company eyeo GmbH runs 'Acceptable Ads'"

That's very old news, surely.

<comment><USER28> And? It seems many people still use Adblock, so it is a good reminder to use something else.

<comment><USER29> Could've at least tried to not be misleading and spelt out "Adblock Plus".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> While on one hand, the acceptable ads program does border on extortion, and them allowing Taboola is bullshit (and the reason why I no longer allow those ads), I think "acceptable ads" is a sane approach.

I'm willing to tolerate ads to a certain extent. I'm not going to pay (in money, time, or looking at ads that I consider unacceptable) to sort the good from bad. Ad companies have consistently failed at avoiding bad ads. So some third party will have to do it, and either advertisers or publishers or platforms are going to have to pay for it. That's what Acceptable Ads is doing. Are they abusing their leading position with ABP to charge obscene amounts of money? Definitely.

Could the ad industry have avoided it by introducing strict, technically enforced ads quality rules earlier? Maybe. (Depends on whether they could have convinced the early adblockers to not block those ads, which they might have been able if they enforced really strict rules instead of just banning the worst of the worst.)

ABP allowed Taboola (fun fact: The Taboola ads you got with ABP are/were different, less obnoxious versions than the ones served to people without adblockers). I don't like that, so I no longer use ABP, so ABP gets less revenue. Maybe someone else will make a different "acceptable ads" system that I'll be willing to opt into - and I'm perfectly OK if they squeeze money from publishers/advertisers/platform to make it profitable to maintain such a list.

</comment><comment><USER31> Somewhat related:

Anyone know of a clickbait "not why you think" blocker? I bet 71% or more of users find it an annoying pattern. And a clickbait blocker would be _wonderful_ in general.

<comment><USER32> I was interested in the article because of the 'not why you think' clickbait.... turns out that was exactly why I don't user eyeo blockers...

So not only clickbait but misleading in my case.

<comment> zupa-hu isn't that the definition of clickbait?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> In conversations about ad-blocking a common idea that comes up is that "you look at the sites -> so there's value in them -> so you should be paying for them". I don't follow this chain of logic. Firstly, it presumes that humans are perfectly rational machines and that we only do things that we want to do, or that are valuable to us. This does not match my experience of reality. Often the main reason we choose to visit a site is because a link to it has been put in front of us. A lot of the time this is largely due to the site's PR/marketing budget. So we've only ended up at the site in the first place because the site wanted us there... then they act put out by our presence and consumption of their hallowed content and demand we allow marketeers' manipulations into our psyches in return.

Most websites (say as a completely unsubstantiated, overgenerous guess: 99% of them) don't need to exist. internetlivestats says that there are 1.8B websites, 200M active. So even if as few as 1% managed to stay alive without ad support, that's between 2M and 18M websites still left to look at. I'd find something to read in there.

Choosing to visit a website is generally extremely passive. We look at the front page of HN (for example), make a few micromovements of our fingers and now we have dozens of tabs full of stuff to read. We didn't wake up that morning desperate to read any of those things, our existence wouldn't be negatively affected if went to bed that night not having read them.

Some people (especially those who currently make money from ads on sites) seem to think we're desperate for them to exist and that's why we put up with their ads. It even materialises into weird threats sometimes "wait and see what happens when we stop operating because you wouldn't watch our adverts"). Bring that world on, I say. There was plenty of content on the early internet before everybody saw it as a way to make money.

People who create content online for business reasons (either to directly make money or to keep their business relevant and known) then act as if they are obliged to make them for the good of society. If it's that difficult and expensive, and you don't want to do it for the joy of it, just stop. Don't pretend you're doing it for altruistic reasons.

<comment><USER34> > _It even materialises into weird threats sometimes "wait and see what > happens when we stop operating because you wouldn't watch our adverts")._

Note that the threat is _not_ "if we can't make money from our ads, we'll need to start charging a subscription fee for our content."

Because they know that hardly anyone would actually find the content they provide to be useful or entertaining enough to justify paying real money for.

If I woke up tomorrow to find that all commercially produced content on the web cost money, there's only a handful of sites that I'd consider subscribing to (maybe a couple of high-quality news organizations). The sites I find the most valuable are blogs where people freely share their own interests (which cost almost nothing to host).

</comment></comment><comment> 03- > On mobile, Firefox Focus

I can't speak for other platforms, but Firefox for Android does support "add- ons", including uBlock Origin.

<comment><USER7> Firefox for Android (other then Focus/Klar) has the added benefit of also providing cosmetic content blocking.

This allows blocking ads on Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, etc.. For many this might be the greater part of their mobile internet experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The industry got greedy over Ads money which transformed into a revenue generation model and destroyed the user experience in so many cases. Go to NFL or MLB and I find it extremely ridiculous that you have watch 30 seconds of video ads before watching a short 30 second game play.

Some of the Ads are annoying in page popups and sometime some just hover around as you scroll.

<comment><USER36> I get the idea behind video ads, but nothing makes me hate a product more that when I want to watch 5 different clips and each one has the same ad before it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> For those who haven't heard of it, I just deployed pi-hole on my home network and it has been great. It is a DNS server that blocks ads, running on a raspberry pi.

Just point your router at it, and all clients get ad blocking. Works for mobile apps, like YouTube, too.

<comment><USER38> Doesnt work for youtube for me though. The ads come through.

<comment><USER39> I have that issue as well and read somewhere online that it's due to youtube serving both their ads and normal videos from the same domain name, which can be distinguished by content-based blockers like uBlock but not by pihole which only looks at the domain names.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> The internet is a pull medium. An "adblock" is nothing more than saying I do not wish to receive your files.

<comment><USER41> Which is also why publishers will soon realize they can't serve stuff in chunks where the reader can opt out of downloading or rendering certain parts.

I thinking canvas+wasm and similar tech will soon be used in a second coming of flash - where a full site will be downloaded as a blob and rendered by site code.

<comment><USER42> The code used by ads would still need to be hosted on third parties servers, because ad servers can't trust sites owners to host the ad code because of cheating. So blocking advertisers hosts could still work even if ads use canvas and wasm.

<comment><USER41> I think the idea of downloading ads (code) directly from third parties will die sooner than this "Flash 2" becomes an issue. That just isn't sustainable regardless of the trust issue (a person described his ad network that doesn't rely on third party served code in another comment).

But if blocking advertisers' hosts is working, it's trivial for publishers to simply present nothing if the ad isn't successfully downloaded. When the rendering is controlled by the third party, it's an all or nothing affair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'd throw Brave browser into the mix, which blocks native ads and replace them with _its own_ ads.

<comment><USER44> Really? I haven't noticed this, admittedly I don't use it much.

What's the best alternative on android?

<comment><USER45> Firefox

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I use Safari. Whenever I go to Medium, I get this error: "Safari Web Content quite unexpectedly." I can eventually get this to go away by reloading the page several times. The number of reloads necessary to get it to work seems to be more or less random, ranging from 2-6 or so. Once the problem is gone it stays gone on subsequent reloads, but if I close the browser window and re- open it, the problem recurs. Medium is the only site on which I see this problem.

I can't think of anything non-shady that a blog hosting site could possibly be doing that would cause this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about this. I haven't heard anything bad about Medium, but you can read the original post on my blog instead: [https://sricks.com/please-stop-using- adblock/](https://sricks.com/please-stop-using-adblock/)

<comment><USER36> You've never heard anybody talk about the design nightmare that their comment section is?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Is it just me, or have medium article gotten very clickbaity lately?

<comment><USER48> It's always looked that way to me. That along with Hacker Noon and Kickstarter. Everything looks like a promotion and I'm less inclined to find any good articles even if they are. It still seems to be trending with a lot of people here though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Does anyone still use Adblock ? Thought that most people jumped ship to Ublock Origin years ago.

</comment><comment><USER50> Can we just write articles without click bait headlines? Like "Please stop using adblock whitelists because the companies behind them have ethics issues"

</comment><comment><USER51> So actually they title should be "Stop using AdBlock Plus" for reasons that are old news.

</comment><comment><USER52> I go a step further and use pihole and ublock origin. pihole can't catch everything so thats what ublock is for - mostly cosmetic filters really.

</comment><comment><USER53> On Android, DNS66 via f Droid has been my go-to and works great. Blocks in app ads, and even makes my Google play music skip the audio ads.

<comment><USER54> Same here, super under-rated app

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I remember reading about some project where as a user you would automatically take part in the bidding process for ad placement on the websites you yourself visited.

The idea was to outbid real ad networks and serve yourself bogus no-op ads while paying the websites you visited through their usual channels.

Does anyone remember reading about this as as well? What happened to that project?

<comment><USER56> Not sure what exactly you mean but there are several sites that offer self service ads and also some third parties.

There is a popular one in the Bitcoin world (forgot the name) that definitly paid more per click than Adsense for good sites.

<comment><USER55> Maybe you mean Brave. That's a browser that blocks ads, bit pays out bitcoin to site owners. I found this one today while researching.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There's one place I still will consider using Adblock Plus - I support some users who still use IE on Windows 7 boxes, and I've kind of looked at it as "good enough" for those situations.

There may be better options, but I haven't really felt the need to go digging through reviews and comparisons of software targeted at IE users.

</comment><comment><USER57> Beyond all points, I found it interesting how people think they get to control their ads, but at the same time don't want to pay publishers for content.

I often find it funny when people complain about ads on torrent sites.

I think this speaks of a culture that thinks they should get everything for free.

50 years ago, if you wanted to read the news,you paid for it.

Today , we complain about want ads can the free content providers give us. Yet, we wonder why publishers provide such crap content, because their Main focus is pleasing free users with what ad they will like.

I'm not surprised by how many people speak of micropayment for articles, but no one does it.

The more we block legitment ads, the more crap we'll see.

The cost to behave nicely becomes too much.

Hacker News has been an amazing place, but more and more things like "evil" for people pushing ads is insane. Evil is hilter, but now you're comparing you're as provider in the same way?

Ps not in ads, just a realist.

<comment><USER58> The issue is that the ads/commercials are not relevant...and there are too many...many of them of very low quality and even misleading. I don't mind the ads from stackexchange for example or various Pro-audio forums that I use. But compare that with a file sharing website that you mentioned where you have multiple "download" links masking various ads. Micropayments don't work because nobody got them right...

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I'd never heard of eyeo and was only vaguely familiar with adblock plus before reading this. But I have ublock origin installed on all my browsers, and can't imagine browsing without it. For Facebook I use FBP and like wise can't imagine using Facebook without it.

</comment><comment><USER60> Am I reading this right, that Adblock considers chum boxes acceptable ads? I never really considered it; I have AdBlock Plus installed and have seen way too many of those. Does uBlock Origin block them?

<comment><USER61> Yes it does. I would recommend ublock origin over Adblock Plus any day. That said, you could also disable "acceptable ads" to get rid of these with Adblock Plus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> For iOS and Mac users, may I also suggest people consider using an adblock product we develop – Magic Lasso ([https://www.magiclasso.co/](https://www.magiclasso.co/)).

We agree with the sentiment of the post and are working to create a great alternative to misleading adblockers like Adblock Plus.

Magic Lasso is an efficient and high performance ad blocker with native Safari integration and we don't take kick-backs from advertisers or follow any 'acceptable ads' policies.

</comment><comment><USER63> You should try Brave browser. They are trying to align the incentives the righ way imho

[https://brave.com/](https://brave.com/)

</comment><comment><USER64> I got clickbaited. I thought it's about ad blocking in general, but it's actually an ad of great piece of tool which is uBlock Origin that I already use.

</comment><comment><USER65> "Users say that they need full control over their technology and that advertising often leads to security risks."

Never heard that.

At least personally I just don't want to see ads.

<comment><USER66> It's been widely reported that malware has been served up through ads. They are a security risk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Yep, use [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock)

</comment><comment><USER68> Stupid title, good title 'Please stop using adblock PLUS'. I just gave $10 for the creators of adblock (not plus) and ublock origin

</comment><comment><USER69> I'd be pretty OK with this if they have me, as the viewer, 30% of the revenue they generate from ads served. Seems fair.

</comment><comment><USER70> I don't mind ads. What I do mind is intrusive behaviour of ads on a webpage. Some of the sites even crash my browser. I fear that, more we block ads, the more they'll find a way to show ads to users. And I fear that adblocker's might lose in this cat and mouse game.

</comment><comment><USER71> Yes, we all want unobtrusive ads, but the problem with unobtrusive ads is that they not call your attention, so there are less chances of seeing them... For me the best solution is to pay for the service you want, that's the best way to asure quality and independence.

<comment><USER72> I don't want unobtrosive ads, I want no ads at all, which is why I block them all.

And there is nothing wrong that. Companies that rely on ad-views aren't entitled to anything and its perfectly fine for me if they go the way of the Dodo (including e.g. Google).

It's perfectly normal and reasonable to choose for yourself what you want to watch and listen to.

<comment><USER73> I on the other hand am fine with some ads, as long as they are not annoying or don't track me.

I am willing to deal with ads which don't do that in exchange for consuming more content and supporting the sites I visit often. Which is why I actually am ok with the acceptable ads setting, which allows me do block most ads except the annoying ones without any major tinkering or extra effort on my part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Seriously? You want people to switch from software A to software B and you write an article that for the first half of the page sounds like you want them to stop using either of those softwares?

<comment><USER75> And that title is pure clickbait.

Summary: don't use AdBlock, use uBlock Origin instead. (I may have got the wrong as I only skimmed the article to get the gist.)

<comment><USER76> If you are going to complain about the article, please read it at least.

<comment><USER75> Well, you know, if it was less verbose and got to the point a bit quicker I might not have lost interest and skimmed everything after paragraph two.

I may as well say, "If you want me to read the whole article, please write cogently and engagingly at least".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Somewhat related: can anyone recommend an ad blocker for Safari (on macOS) that uses the Safari Content Block API (instead of JavaScript injection? Right now I am using AdGuard, but I am looking for alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER78> I've been looking for years for an adblocker that's disabled by default.

I only want to enable it on certain sites. On those however I'd like them to behave like all the other blockers with all the lists etc.

Any recommendations?

<comment><USER79> Ublock Origin can work this way with a couple of clicks. Use the advanced user option. Allow all content globally, and then use local override on sites where you want ad blocking.

<comment><USER78> Thanks. Unfortunately it doesn't seem as straightforward (or I'm missing something)

The advanced options documented here ([https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Advanced- settings](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Advanced-settings)) don't seem to fit the description.

<comment><USER79> What advanced settings allows is to edit the blocking rules with something like the uMatrix gui. Once advanced is set, open the uBlock dropdown, then click on "requests blocked".

You will see a table with three columns. The second column edits the global rules, the third one is for local rules. Each of the rows in them shows three bars once you hover over one. Green = allow, grey = noop, red = deny. (Noop is the setting to not overrule the adblocker lists.)

In the "all" row at the top, click on green in the global column, to allow everything everywhere. Click the lock icon. Now uBlock won't interfere at all.

On a site where you want to block according to the lists, open the dropdown, and in the row with the site's domain name, click the grey bar in the local column. Click the lock icon to save the setting across sessions. uBlock will apply the lists' rules to that site.

If this is unclear, I can make a guide with images.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> Why does your blog post ([https://sricks.com/best-ad- blockers/](https://sricks.com/best-ad-blockers/)) suggest avoiding the Brave browser?

</comment><comment><USER81> Is it possible to release the filter lists under a noncommercial license?

<comment><USER82> Easylist and Easyprivacy, the most common community-maintained lists, are licensed under creative commons. Pretty much everybody uses them.

[https://easylist.to/pages/about.html](https://easylist.to/pages/about.html)

<comment><USER83> According to that page, Easylist uses specifically the CC-BY-SA, which doesn't include the Non-Commercial features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> The web advertisers have a twisted vision of ad effectiveness:

1.I don't want to see ads and i will block them as much as possible.

2.If i see ads i would not click them

3.if i accidentally click them i wouldn't buy anything advertised, even if i have the need for advertised product class: instead of trusting ads i research stuff to decide on my own and then buy it.

4.If i see a product on any site that was advertised to me,i will have a lower opinion of it because it associated with web advertising(which i consider obnoxious and avoid).

So in effect, advertising will ruin your reputation in my eyes and will not get you any financial benefits. More and more users are going this way and consider all ads as visual spam that designed to steal their time.

The ad industry attempts to recover user attention with "Product placement" and "organic insertion" of ads into real content have the effect of increasing distrust in content and will not work long term(wordfilters and content filtering).

The whole model has no future: the problem with the concept of advertising is that it using old media "mass broadcast" techniques and isn't relevant to the content: an example is advertising in search results;

Instead of search algorithm delivering "best match for query X" we get ""Best match+Artificially boosted SEO sites+Ads";i.e. the concept of advertising is essentially "pushing our stuff in front of user regardless of our quality",which reduces relevance of content itself, reduces the quality of data channel and user trust.

To further understand the "anti-quality" inherent in advertising, imagine ads as biased news designed to influence people and content as neutral news: with less content(neutral news) and more ads(biased news) the site becomes less neutral and loses quality(despite still having real content).

The advertising industry "broadcast" isn't accepted, so what they decided is that to tailor their broadcast to the user, creating targeting criteria and increase effectiveness of the the ad. Why would this work at all?

Only if the user private information is disclosed: That reasoning is that "targeted ads require target personal data to be effective" and in effect condemn advertising to seek for this private data from all sources. Note that doesn't increase the quality of their product, its finding a cheaper way to advertise that filters out users not interested in their product.

But of course advertising industry is overly-optimistic as what constitutes 'interest' and is eager to "broadcast" its message at anyone showing a minimum interest in "targeted concept".

Why this doesn't create interest, is that people being targeted know that "related ads" are just accompanying noise to their content and that they are specifically targeted because they see it in action(e.g. show interest in topic X, get ads for X-related products for weeks).

This fundamental break with basic psychology, being hostile to user and stealing his time is the fatal flaw. "Unobtrusive ads" are just less obnoxious way to steal our attention, they're still ads and they still degrade quality of sites.

But what about ad-supported sites struggling to pay the bills? If you can't afford the minimal hosting fees associated with a website there is a problem with your finances: solving it with ads is just masking the problem. A large site with heavy traffic should depend on products and services it provides, not ads. Ads will eventually get blocked and ignored.

Users don't come for the ads, they avoid them. Ads are only effective when they are centralized on one place where users come to expect them, such as e.g. craiglist categories, ebay,marketplace-type sites,etc.

Classifieds outside such 'centralized marketplaces' are perceived as biased and out-of-place, becoming normal ads and losing their relevance without being embedded in a marketplace. Psychologically:ads turn sites into mini- marketplaces and are perceived as corruption of a site.

</comment><comment><USER85> Blocking ads will become nearly impossible once WebAssembly becomes ubiquitous. Sites will simply have their own custom render engine and transport protocol; it will be game over.

<comment><USER33> I don't see that as game over at all, just a change in the game.

Maybe ad-blockers will become site-blockers, or when you hover over a link it will go turn [[bad-colour]] to show you it leads to a site which forces advertising. Or on touchscreens (no hover) maybe those links open into a different, purgatory window. I do something similar manually at the moment, for example when I see Bloomberg/Techcrunch/Medium stuff on here I read the HN comments but very rarely go to the original article as I expect them to force autoplaying videos on me (I'm on a limited data plan) or use horrible UI such as scrolljacking or dickbars that I don't want to spend slices of my finite life experiencing.

Or maybe adblockers will use AI to detect certain images, salesy phrases, moving images etc and employ their own custom render engine to remove them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> I have AdGuard, a paid adblocker that blocks ads in apps as well.

Whenever I use my girlfriend's phone I wonder how people can actually enjoy the internet in the state it is.

</comment><comment><USER87> These days you also need a crypto miner blocker.

</comment><comment><USER88> I would say that even better than ublock origin is nano adblock with nano defender that it is an anti anti-adblock

</comment><comment><USER89> I thought this was common knowledge among tech people, though it can't be stressed enough to non-techies.

</comment><comment><USER90> ABP allows me to whitelist Youtube channels. Last time I checked, other blockers did not. Has that changed?

</comment><comment><USER57> Sorry for the two post,

I want to pose a question for the community.

60 years ago you paid for news paper. It was direct. Plus they had ads. Business model was clear.

Here my question,

Would everyone be ok with adblocker to have an option for you to pay the owners of the websites you visit?

Instead of them replying on ads, you just pay a fee for each visit. Then there a weekly payment sent to publishers.

I'm not speaking of the likeliness, or the technical issues.

Just the concept.

Interested in hearing you responses.

Ps I'm not a publisher or in ads.

<comment><USER91> Yup Someone put head said they had something like $100 off 60k views. That's about .1p per view.

I'd like to visit a page and before it loads, it would tell me the price. If that's 1/10p then I'd probably just allow it automatically. If it's 1p then I'd probably manually approve it. If it's 10p I might think "nah". I'd rather pay directly than pay through increased prices at shops that advertise. Same principle with videos on youtube - at least those one that someone actually makes.

However if I choose to pay - whether that's 0.1p to read a blog post, or £15 a month for Spotify, I expect no adverts or begging or product placement of any kind. Amazon prime gives videos, and when I watch on A smart TV or on laptop it's fine. On the old fire tv box we have it prepended clips with adverts for other shows. That's not on.

Currnently I pay for a couple of sites, but it's a heavyweight way to crack a nut.

Some sites have this sort of model, but want far more per page than they get from adverts, and then there's a massive hassle of different accounts and managing payments. I might read a blog with a donate button, however it's u likely I've judged the page to be worth more than a penny or two, and the donate options tend to start at $1.

<comment><USER30> This, and it would also need to be 100% frictionless.

I'm giving money to The Guardian to support their good journalism, but I still get the nag popups to give them money because I'm not signed in (and I'm certainly not going to enable persistent cookies for the site and then sign in across all the devices I use).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> now that net neutrality is effectively a distant memory, you may also wish to consider null-routing known advertisers using pihole or your own DNS resolver null zone

[http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/](http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/)

</comment><comment><USER93> So, they've created a product and they're making a bit of money of it. Whats the problem?

<comment><USER94> Problem is that they promised no ads and got free labor toward that mission. Now that people have marketed them into almost every browser that matters.. they're getting in bed with advertisers.

And amount is going to be 100s of millions, not just a bit of money. money earned by deciving and free labor

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> The ads shown in the article aren't blinking gifs so I'd say it covers enough ground.

</comment><comment><USER96> This was what I thought, in fact it's the exactly why I stopped using adblock.

</comment><comment><USER50> Can anyone do a shakedown on Ghostery? I'd love to know their ethical stance.

</comment><comment><USER97> ABP has been known to be garbage for many years now, at least since 2014.

</comment><comment> keir-rex Is the date 2002 correct? Which browser was that released for?

</comment><comment><USER98> TL;DR: Adblock sold out. Use uBlock Origin instead.

<comment><USER99> AdBlock sold _you_ out if you use it. They're monetizing _you_.

That's the part that's ridiculous.

The downright offensive part is the companies they've chosen to whitelist serve up the absolutely stupidest ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> I don't need a adblocker, the ads don't load at all because of my pi-hole box. The only adblocking thing I need is for YouTube against the in video ads.

</comment><comment><USER101> Ads? In my ad blocker?

It's more likely than you think.

</comment><comment><USER102> Please just let me pay for not seeing ads.

<comment><USER103> Donate to ublock?

</comment></comment><comment><USER104> uMatrix is very nice. Gives you fine granular control over scripts like noscript does.

<comment><USER105> I don't really see any ads just by running NoScript. I don't see the need for an ad blocker.

If a site won't render with javascript disabled, then I just close the tab.

<comment><USER104> I moved to uMatrix because of this[1]. That doesn't seem very practical to me. Don't you need javascript to view, say, youtube videos? Also to make almost any sort of purchase transaction too. I do think it's a shame that that's the kind of internet we have to deal with now.

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12624000](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12624000)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER106> As the ad lists grow, chrome continues to slow.

</comment><comment><USER74> Whatever the reasoning:

HAHAHAHAHA! No.

<comment><USER107> The article says you should stop using one particular ad blocker, and has good reasons for doing so. It's not telling you to stop using all ad blockers, and it gives a name for an ad blocker that people should use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER108> TL;DR, use uBlock Origin.

</comment><comment><USER17> It is also good to have several lines of defense

* Host File

[http://www.hosts-flash.com/](http://www.hosts-flash.com/)

[https://oldj.github.io/SwitchHosts/](https://oldj.github.io/SwitchHosts/)

* Browser:

uBlock

uMatrix

* Facebook:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/socialfixer/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/socialfixer/)

<comment><USER109> there is no reason to run both ublock origin and umatrix, they run the same engine with different frontends

<comment><USER17> [https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/enhancing-ublock- ori...](https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/enhancing-ublock-origin-with- umatrix.388704/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER110> Hahahaha. I browsed without any adblocking for years, and the ads just got worse and worse.

I'm still running Adblock.

</comment><comment><USER111> Yet another rant by an ad proponent. Forgets to mention that there is "Acceptable ads" checkbox that can turn off all ads, and whitelisting only affects users with default settings. There is no doubting the power of ads, but personally I want many publishers to go out of business because their content is crap and clickbates.

Websites serve near viruses all the time, both content- and cookie-wise, and AdBlock is a good firewall for both visual and javascript exploits

<comment><USER112> Those checkboxes are no longer a argument.

Companys have turned keeping those settings you want into a chore, constantly updating away the users work, pushing in a war of attrition their preferred settings - and sometimes even just outright ignoring the done settings altogether.

So having a checkbox to turn it off- is by now nothing more then a pr- stuntstrawmen - just as the constant updates, which are used to wriggle out of responsibilities for errors and bugs.

<comment><USER73> >Companys have turned keeping those settings you want into a chore, constantly updating away the users work, pushing in a war of attrition their preferred settings - and sometimes even just outright ignoring the done settings altogether.

Is it a chore though in ABP? It's front and center in the settings.</comment></comment></comment>


Happy Festivus HN: Stella, a Feats of Strength - <AUTHOR>

Okay, so I launched something quietly today. Stella. I was planning on keeping it low-key but with the "Happy Holidays" and "Hacker News goes Christmas" posts (and colors!), I thought I could balance it out a bit with some Festivus activity. I'm not particularly qualified to promote Festivus but I'm doing my best.
In any case, Stella is a performance testing tool, written in Ruby that also supports the Java VM (through JRuby). This is a preview release (0.5.3) but it's already useful for running and comparing Apache Bench, Siege, and Httperf tests. Here's an example from the current release:

    stella -a opera-10 -w 0.5 -r 25,300 -m 'MaxClients=768' -x 5 ab -c 100 -n 10000 http://stellaaahhhh.com/search?term=trooper

    -a: Use an Opera 10 User-Agent.
    -w: Run a warm up with half the users specified for the test.
    -r: Ramp up the number of users from 100 to 300, in intervals of 25.
    -m: Remind yourself what this test is about.
    -x: Repeat each test run 5 times, average the results with standard deviation.

 More info in the release notes: https://rubyforge.org/frs/shownotes.php?release_id=29826
P.S. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmq-JDonTpc <comment><USER2> I thought this was going to be a post about the awesome Atary 2600 emulator. <http://stella.sourceforge.net/>

<comment><USER3> That's an anachronism man.</comment></comment>