Adblock shenanigans

[Aractus]

Okay I was planning to make a topic last week, but I didn't.

Firstly, use uBlock Origin, not ABP, Adblock, Adguard, or any other 'blocker' where possible. A recent benchmark showed it still outperforms its competitors, despite it being completely non-profit (no donations are solicited) and open-source.

This is the old version of Adblock's FAQ (bottom of their homepage - click for full size).



And here is the new version (again click for full size):



What happened was Adblock sold-out to a mystery buyer around the end of September, and people were notified about it on October 1. People using Adblock then got this notice:



"Announcing the acceptable ads program"? The main point of difference between Adblock and ABP was that Adblock didn't have an "acceptable ads program" and always said that white-listing sites should be up to the individual user and not the adblocking extension. I'm not going to go into a rant about how downright intrusive some of these so-called 'non-intrusive' ads are (such as on startpage.com); but it does beg the question how long will ABP and AB (and AG) be able to keep up this farce?

See both programs are open-source. So that really begs the question - how did Michael Gundlach manage to sell something that's open-source? All he really sold was the website, and handed development to whomever now owns it. Anyone can fork their own version from the source (which isn't kept strictly up-to-date but is available), just like they could with uBlock, or ABP.

So why does the website's new FAQ lie about the 'development team'? The FAQ is just shamelessly plagiarised from Gundlach's original one and doesn't tell us anything.

And furthermore why was the Knowledge Base changed too?

Before:



After:



Notice that much more information was removed than was needed to simply patch over the introduction of "acceptable ads".

I will post a reply shortly to deal more specifically with the current opinion trend of adblockers (some of which might surprise you), but before I do I want to share one final thing in the OP - one advertising company called "PageFair". It automatically detects ads that are blocked on a website by ABP (or another adblocker) and then serves users alternate ads that conform to the 'acceptable ads program'. Of course these alternate ads get blocked anyway by any users not participating in the 'acceptable ads program', however most users leave ABP on its default settings once installed, automatically opting them in to seeing so-called 'non intrusive ads'.

But what happened a few days ago was that Pagefair ads got hacked to install malware on vulnerable systems. This just goes to prove that ALL 3rd-party ads represent a security risk to users. This is why I've ALWAYS used the MVPS HOSTS file (I honestly can't even remember when I first installed it it was that long ago now). Don't get me wrong, I do applaud Pagefair for wanting to make internet ads less intrusive in webpages - however, it doesn't solve the security risk or the privacy risk. It just solves the 'annoyance factor'. That'd be why the MVPS HOSTS file blocks pagefair.

Think about this. If you hack one single website to install malware, then you can only target that website's viewers. But if you hack the 3rd-party advertiser you can have your malicious code running on hundreds of the most popular websites on the web. This is why big 3rd-party advertisers like Pagefair are a target for hackers - because they only have to hack one company to have their malware served on hundreds of websites, without needing to hack hundreds of websites individually. By the way this should serve as a timely reminder to have flash disabled by default (i.e. set it on "ask to activate" and then activate it only when you need to on websites).