Thank you Raymond Hill

Can you imagine the amount of corruptive influences and persuasions he is resisting?

Pretty sure he has them blocked
- Though you may be right, I have a feeling that he is facing formidable opposition. That may include anything from social engineering to full on psyops.
Insightful point. And it does remind me of the corporate purchase of the Don't care about cookies extension for Firefox (And the Simple Mobile Tools for Android). Luckily it was forked. https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies Open source FTW!
🙂 🐧
- Simple Mobile Tools was forked into "Fossify *" for anyone interested.
There's a reason uBlock Origin overtook Adblock Plus in popularity.
The VLC guy turned down what a quick search is telling me was “several tens of millions” to show ads. I can’t even imagine what getting people to drop ublock would be worth.
- I wouldn't blame him if he took it, but I greatly respect that he didn't.
Raymond Hill: “Get behind me, Google.”
I hadn't even thought about that. Thank you.
What is the decentralised solution?
- There is and isn't one. For the add-on itself, you just need forks and more forks. For the lists it pulls from, those are already decentralized, but you're constantly going to deal with the issue of only the best are used and only the used are maintained and only the maintained are the best.

And all the volunteers keeping those lists up-to-date.

Yea it’s mainly those that do the work actually
- Still big kudos to Raymond for providing the foundations to make it all work too.

It's kinda sad that without Mozilla, Raymond, the NoScript guys and TOR we would lose control over the internet pretty much immediately

Kind of agree. Though there is pi-hole and several others. And there's i2p, Freenet (now called Hyphanet) and GNUnet, and similar.
- Pi-hole is nice for devices that you don't fully control. But it's not enough, due to the fundamental limitations of DNS based blocking. If the ads and the content are hosted on the same domain, it can't do anything.
I definitely agree, although really a LOT of non-Linux/(IT) guys use Chrome, some even Edge, if on Windows
- IT person...
  
  Uses chrome....
  
  Both cannot be true friend, sorry. Your buddy is either a fake engineer or their main job isn't IT.
  
  If you really have friends in IT they haven't used chrome or edge in a while, or their using the scripting bot for weekly progress reports to their boss, and they're only using it for that...
Who is Raymond? Never heard the name
- The original author of μBlock
What about controld for blocking at the dns level?
Not really anymore for Mozilla. They now get a lot of your private data and share em with their “business partners”
- I'm going to need some sources for that claim or I'm calling bullshit. I have never heard anyone claim that and I have seen absolutely zero evidence suggesting that.
  
  edit:
  
  these are the closest things I could find,
  
  https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/22/24109116/mozilla-ends-onerep-data-removal-partnership
  
  https://videoweek.com/2022/02/10/mozilla-partners-with-meta-for-privacy-preserving-attribution/
  
  and neither is bad. meta is a questionable choice for privacy cooperation but even in that it makes sure no one, not even meta, can read those match keys

If only, I know so many people who don't bother with adblocking at all. I honestly have no idea how they use the Internet without going mad

My kid discovered that he can hit the "report" button on the YouTube app on the TV to skip the ads immediately. So now every ad gets reported as "inappropriate".

I'm proud of him.
- Tip: if you have an Android TV, you can install SmartTube as an alternative, privacy-friendly YouTube client. It has no ads and sponsorblock integration
- I found out this trick when I eating dinner once at my local library. Oddly, it was a kid came up and saw I was watching YT videos. Showed me the tactic, and now I rely on it lol
- 😀 👍
- I just stay logged out of youtube. So far no ads and no nagware
I'm of two minds about people not adblocking.

On one hand: Ads are gross noise pollution, and people are increasingly unaware of all the noise around them (or the noise they're generating) largely because they've been passively trained to "tune out" ads. Also consumerism.

On the other hand: As long as there are a significant amount of people oblivious to the possibility of adblock, corporate ad mobsters and the other worst people in the world out there will largely leave those of us blocking their ads alone. If everyone ran adblockers, we'd definitely live in a world of WEI... and probably worse. So, maybe all those people are watching ads so that I don't have to, as the YouTube thumbnails say.
- If sites wanted to run ads and host them locally without tracking that would be fine. But since they're tracking users it's essential to block them for privacy and security, and if someone isn't then maybe they don't understand the level of tracking involved. We need a better name than adblocking.
People just don't know, I've been showing my wife the way little by little and she's always blown away
- I've shown a colleague after seeing him browse an horrendous fantasy football website. He couldn't believe the difference between before and after.
Yeah, it's shocking to see how many ads they jam in now. I felt so dirty.
I also don't understand it. But now I am wondering if we would not have had those "careless" (indifferent ? ignorant ?) millions of people not blocking ads then Google and others may have started pushing anti-adblock measures years earlier, no ?

What would we do without ublock origin

Use vblock ingress!
You would use noBlock origin instead
- I love posts like this. You get to discover new stuff 😂
In the 1999s-2000s we used WebWasher. It was basically a proxy server which you ran locally on your computer and it had all the filters. You just set up your browser's network connection to point to WebWasher and it acted as the gateway to the Internet.

If browsers somehow decided to kill all their plugin support, you could still use that to filter your content.

Thank Raymond and the list maintainers, you keep the internet usable

Yeah, Raymond Hill made a great plugin, but the people maintaining the lists are the real MVPs
- They're all gods among men.
Invisible and nameless internet warriors. They stay eternal.

Seriously. Says a lot about the modern internet, though. Both good and bad.

- Provide source please: xkcd

He's far too kind of a person. He doesn't accept any donations for the many years of a better and safer internet experience I've gotten from his work

When YouTube was blocking ublock people was surprised that they couldnt donate to the project.

All hail Raymond Hill :0

And the people maintaining the lists his work depends on.

Never knew the name of the guy behind it. Nice! This is why Everybody Loves Raymond!

https://github.com/gorhill

About

Free. Open-source. For users by users. No donations sought.

If you ever want to contribute something, think about the people working hard to maintain the filter lists you are using, which are available to use by all for free.
- That is some commit history!!

Im genuinely so thankful for this project, the creator and maintainers. You are doing the lords work.

Gladly upvoted to ~~worship~~ honor one of the open source heroes.

Ad/content blockers of various types are the only reason the internet is still generally usable for me.

I'd otherwise have a meltdown and watch everything burn

There is something very wrong when deleting 50% of wep page is the least it takes to make the internet usable...

We let somebody pimp it out and now the internet’s just for whoring yourself. Shoulda stopped google from turning the most useful public utility into its bitch, shoulda stopped the telcos from adding obstacles to access (thus hampering innovation), and shoulda stopped letting these idiotic politicians work on behalf of these enshittifying capitalists instead of on behalf of our actual countries, world, and species a long fucking time ago.

Messiah of the internet

I have been using uBlock Origin and uMatrix together for so long, that I don't remember when they became permanent must have.. uBlock origin sanitizes the site, while uMatrix prevents any surprises since I last visited a site. The more garbage the site is, the more broken it is on my setup.