Once I had to use the internet without and ad blocker ( shiver ). It was horrible. I still have nightmares.
Joking aside. I couldn’t believe how crammed full and chaotic sites were without an ad blocker. I have no evidence to support this other than my experience but I think , for me , ad blockers are good for my mental health. Being constantly exposed to all those messages trying to exploit insecurities can’t be good for people.
Some people only believe what they're told by an authority, and some people only view massive corporations, politicians, and the church as legitimate authorities. So if a corporation tells them it's bad, they'll believe it's bad.
There's some inherent risk in the ad blocker as well, though. If it's an extension, you're trusting that this thing you installed, that can read and modify every website you visit, isn't going to do anything sneaky. Yes, maybe it's open source, but every once in a while something sneaks into open source projects, too. It will get caught, but it could be after the damage is done.
I mean, I use an ad blocker. But I don't think it's unreasonable to value security and not use one.
The benefits massively outweigh the risks when it comes to open source ad blockers (lets be honest, we’re all talking about uBO), but limiting your attack surface is a very widely practiced concept in cubersecurity, and there’s no situation where it is totally without merit.
Surprised the rates of adblocking is so high! I thought it was a little more niche.
Also surprised that the article didn't mention manifest v3 rolling out later this year to Chrimium-based browsers - which will effectively end adblocking in all browsers except Firefox.
Google isn't stupid, they know that ad blocking undermines their business. And Google controls Chromium: the backbone of almost all browsers. So of course they're going to engineer it to prevent ad blocking. It was only a matter of time.
I'm doubtful of this article claims. Majority of them use adblocker? I'm sure its inaccurate. Most of the people I have seen don't even know about adblocker. So google doesn't have to worry for a long time. This article seems like bootlicking Google.
SponsorBlock is essential now. I switched from iPad to an Android tablet largely so I could use YouTube ReVanced. And on Android TV there's SmartTube Next.
I get that creators gotta eat, but I pay for YouTube Premium already. If they would stop accepting sponsorships from scam companies I might even stop blocking those.
I'm not convinced the VPNs actually make financial sense, I kinda wonder if there is someone funding them. They market so aggressively, and are priced so cheaply it doesnt quite make sense to me.
I used to work for PIA. The best users are the occasional user, and there's a lot of them. They cost little bandwidth, they pop on every now and then and off fairly quickly. Andrew also got pretty lucky, riding both the Bitcoin and Snowden waves. It probably did ultimately run at a loss at some point, but all the big ones could ride on their crypto payments rapidly increasing in value, and the hardcore privacy people were very happy to pay in crypto.
You can easily cram ~1000-5000 active users on a 10 Gbps server because you can assume that most people are far from reaching gigabit on their own (OpenVPN limitations helped a lot there). Even at just a dollar a year per users you've still got 5 grands which more than pays for the server which really only needs a good NIC and a bunch of IPs. But remember, most of those are idle or not connected at all, so you can have many more users than there is bandwidth available. And at that scale you get bulk discounts on the servers as you fill up a good rack or two.
I have to imagine at this point the market is incredibly saturated though, I left a bit over 6 years ago.
What I wonder is... how?! A quick search shows that half of people in the USA use Chrome, another 30% Safari, 8% use Edge, and only 5% Firefox. This study was done by Ghostery so perhaps they chose a biased subset of the population? It just seems weird to me to think that more than half of average users use ad-blocking, these days.
My mom knows nothing about adblock, and is still blocking ads. You better believe all of the kids having to fix their relative's computers will set up some free antivirus and ad blocking right away.
Can't comment on the sample size though, Ghostery might indeed be somehow biased and measure devices where their software is installed vs. total number of internet users or something? But users of ghostery are more likely to be tech savvy, so there's a higher chance of them having more devices that are equally sanitized.
I'd have to dig through the study and see if the sampling mechanism is made public.
will set up some free antivirus and ad blocking right away.
Those mfs have got a way to go if they're setting up free antiviruses. Free anti-virsus will hurt your system probably more on average than actual viruses
I have an inherent distrust to all things Microsoft. And their firewall is so terrible that I don't want to find out they were as negligent when it came to developing their antivirus.
Some years ago, the Windows Defender certainly was a joke, but currently is very capable with an detection quote of 100%. A cause that Windows, as the most used OS was always also the most atacked by malware, but the devs of MS at least had made a good job. Windows is certainly an privacy nightmare, at least if used in default settings, but in question of security is currently maybe the best protected with safe boot, a good sandbox system and Defender, and, well, the Firewall is good, but sometimes overreacting with the need to whitelist some downloads and apps. But at all, there isn't anymor need for 3rd party AVs.
The better option is not to use windows at all, but if you are, I don't think disabling windows defender will stop them from getting whatever they want anyway.
Here we are spaking about that this Spyware is pretty resistant against all kind of malware, not about that it's needed to gut it from all kind of telemetries, bloatware and not needed services before the first use, that is another thing.
Kaspersky Free is top grade stuff. Bitdefender Free is good but has false positives. Defender is a joke against ransomware and without internet connection. Rest are bad.
According to statistics on my server, it's 57% Chrome, 14% Safari and 12% Firefox. Also 10% use Linux. I'm not hosting anything tech related though.
Anyways, adblocking is kind of essential. Even the boomers ask what's wrong when ads start showing. The only people I've seen browsing without adblock are Apple users.