Is Web advertising driving you mad too ?

Quite recently I've noticed that most sites carry sensationalist "adverts" at the bottom of the page. Such headings as "the $2 pill that helped a local woman shed 200lbs in 3 days" etc, etc. Once you click on one you are whisked away to a world of utter tosh and nonsence. The overheads on my bandwidth are vast, and these "adverts" seem to contain scripts that are constantly crashing and locking up my browser (Firefox).

Am I alone here ? It's pretty much ruined large parts of the web for me; but to give some perspective, porn sites seem to be free from it ;-)

AdBlockPlus appears to be powerless..... hopefully the LFGSS Tech Savy Massive can give me back my virtual life !?

Thanks in advance for any sympath / help / general Pee-taking,

Gren

PS. my PC is running Win 10 with a SSD, so I'd jus got used to some decent performance before this happened - I'll have to wait another 20 yrs for that now :-(

1 Attachment

i don't get any ads at all using windows 8 / Internet Explorer / adblocker

check you have downloaded the latest adblocker also , they update every so often as the advertisers up their game

You can also download blacklists for your Adblock extension, sometimes handy to try a few in different languages if your adblocker seems inaffective.. Don't put too many in there though as that in itself will slow it down!

Try adding the noscript add in to firefox.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/noscript/

noscript + ublock + privacy badger = adds no more

Edit your hosts file to make it impossible for your browser to even see the ad servers permanently

http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

You go and look at a kinesis gran fondo and now everywhere i have pictures teliing me to buy it all over the screen . Bikeradar singletrack roadcc. How can i kill there track and trace ?

https://www.eff.org/en-gb/node/73969

Not all advertising is bad tbf.

It pays for the content and hosting on your favourite sites so if you use ad blockers all the time, you'll eventually have to pay to visit these sites.

And very few will so content providers will have to up their game and the quality of their output- win win!

My technique:

• Chrome for Gmail + Google sites only + LFGSS (as we have no adverts) (i.e. long sessions)
  
• Chrome incognito for trusted sources only (i.e. medium sessions like Twitter, Hacker News)
  
• Firefox configured to be in default private browsing mode for everything else (i.e. Amazon, any shopping, any news sites, etc)
  
  

Then:

• uBlock Origin in all browsers
  
• HTTPS everywhere in all browsers
  
• This in my hosts file http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ipv6/hosts
  
  

I configure uBlock Origin to pretty much strictly disallow all 3rd party stuff, except where it physically breaks a site (so on this site I allow Persona, but not much else).

This deals with 99.99% of adverts.

Then for my mobile, and to deal with in-app adverts, or adverts in web views (i.e. those adverts half-way down articles in the Guardian app):

• I run a streisand proxy https://github.com/jlund/streisand/
  
• I install on that proxy server the hosts file mentioned above
  
• I use OpenVPN to connect my Android to the proxy
  
  

That nukes 95% of in-app adverts and tracking.

I just don't see adverts on the web, and my web is fast and responsive. It's a real pleasure.

^ brilliant

It pays for the content and hosting on your favourite sites so if you use ad blockers all the time, you'll eventually have to pay to visit these sites.

I'd happily pay dorrah to never, ever see one of those 'WHAT HAPPENED NEXT WAS ARSE RIPPINGLY AMAZING!' 'headlines' again.

As for "adverts are needed to pay for sites"... meh, sites should produce content people value enough to want to support.

Valuable to whom is an interesting debate... LFGSS is valuable to two audiences fairly equally, those on here who choose to donate and pay for more than half the costs, and the shops that receive sales as a result of recommendations and cover the remainder of costs.

I like that LFGSS's value is direct... no middle-men involved, and no need for adverts.

That said, I may give the affiliates more prominence, but if I do ever do that there won't be an ad server in sight, no cookies being placed, no animated banners or contextualised recommendations, just a simple "Shopping with these partners helps to support us: (list of partner logos)" thing.

Because we're valuable directly to those two audiences, we're in the good position of not needing any adverts at all.

Of course... the downside is that I'm hemorrhaging Google Analytics information as barely 20% of requests are recorded due to ad blockers (that I'm encouraging). The real loser in all of this are websites who are losing data that helps them understand the needs of their audience.

Very well put 😉 I just like this site as it works well and doesn't have jizz all over the screen.

I'm generally not too bothered by web advertising, as I very rarely buy webs, so it doesn't really affect me.

Annoying feature of web advertising is giving away what you've been looking at/buy for xmas presents for other people that might also use your computer.

I'd happily pay dorrah to never, ever see one of those 'WHAT HAPPENED NEXT WAS ARSE RIPPINGLY AMAZING!' 'headlines' again.

So much this

I really miss my edited hosts file on my phone. Never realised how many ads are popped up all over the place until I updated the OS and lost root. :(

That all sounds like great stuff.

... But for a novice with no understanding of coding or how to host files etc. where would you start reading?

(android phone rather than a PC)

For an Android phone, it's difficult.

For web stuff, that's easy: Install the Firefox app, and you can add the extension for uBlock to enable ad-blocking.

For apps... it's very hard. Either you root the phone and install an outbound firewall to give you full control over web traffic and all permissions and phone access. Or you avoid root, but install a VPN and then choose a provider that gives you access over the DNS of the VPN, or run your own VPN.

To block adverts in apps is hard for novices, but blocking adverts on the web is easily achieved by changing your browser to Firefox.

Install the Firefox app, and you can add the extension for uBlock to enable ad-blocking.

So uBlock instead of Adblock Plus and which extension does uBlock need for ad-blocking?

• Firefox for the browser
  
• uBlock Origin for the adblocker
  
  

Install mobile add-ons by going: Menu > Tools > Add-ons > Browse all Firefox Add-ons

From there, search "ublock" and install "uBlock Origin".

The defaults for that will be sufficient.

This thread is LOL

People actually get annoyed by re-targeting and content discover networks? And there was me thinking they were really effective.

I don't get annoyed by them, but I like not being tracked as a point of principle. And for me, it's trivial to prevent that.

The few times I've not used my methods I've noticed some quite dodgy stuff, i.e. the native Guardian app presenting "recommended reading" lists that look like in-app core content written by the Guardian but actually are paid-placement adverts for external content (on sites that have an almost offensive amount of tracking).

All this means is that the few times I de-cloak, the web (and apps) appears to have gotten worse.

Once in a while I'll be debugging a website in some sandbox, and will not have any adblockers enabled. I don't understand how people tolerate an internet that looks like that... but then, I don't comprehend how people manage to watch American TV either, and that's similarly overloaded with adverts.