alt Hacker NewsAd blocking has become a safety issue. My parents are at an age where they fall for things. If a malicious ad pops up and offers to install McAfee, some other form of crapware, or outright scamware, they'll click that ad and install the thing. Then I'll get called over when the computer starts acting screwy. If Google, MS, etc. had ever gotten together and developed a way to filter malicious ads out of their own ad services, maybe we wouldn't be having this conversation. They didn't do that and probably never will.
If my parents get a new machine, the first thing I do is uninstall or, at least, delete the icons for Edge, Chrome, etc.. On goes Firefox, uBlock Origin, and a couple other extensions. They don't care what browser they use. They can't even name it. I just try to make sure they use a browser that isn't horribly unsafe.
We should all do this for people we care about. Don't ask them what browser they prefer. Odds are they don't know or care. Don't try to convince them to install Firefox themselves. They won't. Just do it for them. Think of it like picking up a rusty nail that's on their lawn. Sooner or later they're going to step on that thing if you don't.
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The better thing would be to hold Google directly accountable for every malicious ad they allow through their network. If they cannot do that, they should not be in business selling ads then.
Yes, that means amending the law (in the US). But the law as it is written facilitates crime.
A problem is that the platform owners argue that this kind of stuff is why they need to put up a security gate that prevents you from installing whatever you want on your own device while also allowing you to install the malware from the ads (... maybe because they want to control what you can install more than they care about the malware?)
It's not just elderly parents. I've sat in on many an incident where skilled people in accounts or HR similarly saw and ad and thought "I have to do this thing", leading to compromise.
> If Google, MS, etc. had ever gotten together and developed a way to filter malicious ads out of their own ad services
This is the crux of it.
If they can't block scammers from their own platform then they should be fined out of having the platform in the first place. The profit they make should easily cover it - unless they like profiting from promoting scams, in which case they should be fined out of having the platform in the first place.
I love Brave's seemingly easy and automatic ad blocking, but turning off shields for important things like banking and government sites is a chore. I struggled with domain whitelisting (if I'm honest I gave up on it some time ago as the recipes I found online didn't work). So I can't recommend it for less technical people. It's a step away from being the easiest way to control all that annoying content that comes at you when you're trying to do something else.
Evidently whenever money and safety are opposed, money wins every time.
Ad blocking is existential for Google. If everyone blocks ads, Google stops existing. They will do everything they can to prevent it, without going so far they stop existing for regulatory reasons either.
Tangentially related, but has anyone else noticed a big increase in fraud attempts over the last year or two? I hardly remember any a while back, but I've gotten probably a dozen calls this year that go "hey this is AmEx please confirm your credit card number" or some such.
The problem is, Microsoft and Google themselves are doing shady things. A full screen advertising for using OneDrive on Windows and a full screen random request to use Google App when doing a Google search on Safari comes to mind. Apple is no different, when I press my Bluetooth button, it opens Music on macOS.
I’m sure we can find rather strange things going on Ubuntu too and bending the definitions a bit, there are several pleads for donation like on Gnome, Vim and Wikipedia that are a bit questionable.
Google doesn't care about this. Try searching for a locksmith in your area on Google and the top results are all scans.
>Ad blocking has become a safety issue. My parents are at an age where they fall for things. If a malicious ad pops up and offers to install McAfee, some other form of crapware, or outright scamware, they'll click that ad and install the thing.
I've been using the internet since the 80s. This has always been the case. Even before graphical browsers.
Ad blocking has always been a safety issue.
> filter malicious ads out of their own ad services
It's worse than that. Google turned their exploit delivery platform into Google Tag Manager so they can be employed on more than just ads.
> the first thing I do is uninstall or, at least, delete the icons for Edge, Chrome, etc.
Does this run the risk of reverting with OS updates? History is full of OS vendors resetting defaults, whether that was maliciously intentional or inadvertently doesn't matter. If you set up Firefox as default browser yet the OS resets to using Edge, would you parents even notice?
Money from confused seniors getting scammed is a critical revenue stream. Without scams, ads are far less viable.
Raspberry pi + adguard + tailscale could be a good solution for you. Browser agnostic, you get an admin dashboard to manage the white/blacklists, see logs of the attempts and other goodies. Bonus, this combination works on mobile too. The only nit I have is that after restarting the phone, tailscale may not auto-start.
> They don't care what browser they use. They can't even name it.
You could even extend that to OS as well.
A few days ago, my mother asked me to fix her YouTube because she kept getting something telling her to update. I looked at YouTube on her iPhone and saw an autoplaying video ad that displayed an animated fake system style pop-up button, designed to look like an important iPhone OS security update. The ad even showed an animation of the button appearing on the screen, making it look even more like a real system notification.
This needs to stop.
Get Chromebook for them, I know it is backwards, but at least they won't install viruses.
The kinds of banner ads that exist now are atrocious, as bad as they have ever been. Anything that masquerades as a legitimate internet or site service should be banned, I really detest the ones that are simply some sort of fake captcha, sign in, etc.
They must pay the best because so many old forums that are/were near and dear to my heart use them to pay for servers, hopefully because they only saw the profit number and didn't consider the consequences, but you never know.
uBlock Origin lite is an mv3 extension and blocks ads.
> If a malicious ad pops up and offers to install McAfee, some other form of crapware, or outright scamware, they'll click that ad and install the thing.
This has been solved on iOS. It’s not an ads problem.
It feels weird that everyone is talking like Google has banned adblocking in Chrome, when there's dozens of adblockers still in the extension store, including an updated version of uBO that works 90% the same.
Ad-blocking is a safety issue, but luckily you can still block them just fine.[1]
The only thing this heavily neuters is tracking blocking, but no one admits that because they know, deep down, that ~0% of the non-tech crowd cares, so it's not as good at stirring up outrage as being dishonest is.
[1] If anything gorhill is to blame for the safety issue, since he refused to update his extension in-place, so any distant relatives will have the adblockers you installed for them removed, instead of updating to the fully functional Mv3 version.
> My parents are at an age where they fall for things.
If they're falling for things that they didn't used to fall for, that's sounds more like dementia than age.
My favorite story of just how little people who aren't as tech savvy don't differentiate between different parts of the browser UI (which naturally leads to clicking things that are best left unclicked) is when my grandmother told me her "internet was broken" and asked me to fix it. I was mentally preparing for a call to Verizon or something, but no, when she finally showed me, it turned out that one of the bookmarks on her toolbar in Safari had gone missing (presumably she accidentally deleted it). After I added it back and she clicked it to see that it opened properly, she was satisfied that I had fixed the internet. To her, when she opened Safari, it was all just "the internet"; she didn't differentiate between the local browser UI and the web, let alone different elements on a single webpage being from different sources.