There is no "Advertisers" here - blackhats are using advertising tools but there is no advertiser involved at all. This is not a nitpick - advertisers aren't doing this.<p>1. Ad networks / exchanges allow (don't catch) these ads<p>2. Publishers don't do enough to stop them<p>3. Browsers allow it to happen
So it has come to this. The Advertisers are shedding their self-righteous camoflage and just being evil. Adblocking is a necessary component of defense in depth.<p>At least nobody will be able to give the old "Oh, but advertising is necessary for Capitalism" excuse. This is way over the line. Down with the corporate capitalist "internet" of ads!<p>Use Firefox. Use uBlock. Use NoScript. Use Privacy Badger.
I'm not sure I understand that, why go through the trouble of setting up random domains to bypass filters if you then load <a href="https://coinhive.com/lib/coinhive.min.js" rel="nofollow">https://coinhive.com/lib/coinhive.min.js</a> directly? Any filter will probably already block that URL if no other.<p>Now if they started serving the JS from random domains and URLs that would mean trouble because you couldn't just use the URL-based filter approach most adblockers use. I'm surprised this doesn't appear to be more common. If it gains steam we might have to use a whitelist approach for trusted 3rd party javascript sources. Not necessarily a bad thing IMO, although that might stifle innovation a bit on the web.
I think only one approach works these days:<p>Consider the whole web hostile. Browse with uBlock Origin and JS off. Enable JS for trusted domains only. Give up, blacklist, and go elsewhere if whack-a-mole enabling needs too many unknown random domains enabled just to read that article.
Chrome displays an icon on a tab to convey that it’s playing audio.<p>Perhaps it would be a good idea to similarly visualize tabs with high CPU/GPU consumption?<p>A browser does most (if not all) of what an OS does, so it shouldn’t be surprising if a task manager (which shows CPU usage) is also useful for browsers.
I use some advanced techniques myself: ublock origin! Seriously though, fuck ads, fuck ad companies, fuck browsers made by ad companies. Each and every one of them is actively working to erode your privacy and use your resources.
Using uBlock Origin in medium mode will block third party domains by default. You will be safe.<p><a href="https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium-mode" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...</a>
"Conceal" is quite an ambitious term for something that literally makes noise out of your computer fan. `top` to check that Firefox is guilty and `about:performance` to close the guilty tab. There are so many shitty JS single-page sites out there that abuse clients' resources I don't even care whether it's crypto mining or just incompetence.
So… the next line of defense is to block all third parties by default (requests to other domains) and only enable specific domains on a case-by-case basis?
Publishers with “legitimate” ad mechanisms are using new techniques to entice people to not use ad blockers.<p>Are any of the legit ad networks doing anything to combat the problems in the article?<p>As long as there are bad actors, the good ones will get caught up in the net and must own the major share of combating the problem that affects their core business.
I wish I could just throttle javascript execution to 1/100th its current pace. I really don’t need it for most websites after the initial load of content, which is unfortunately driven a lot by javascript these days. They mostly exist to serve more and more annoying ads, best I can tell.
I used to get angry at ads on my laptop, but uBlock Origin took my worries away. That left my Android phone, but recently I've discovered Blokada[0]. The app - which is for obvious reasons not available on the Play Store - appears to run a "VPN" through localhost that filters out an absolutely staggering amount of ads and other nastiness. Suddenly my battery life has improved, and my phone no longer runs too hot to touch. It's a win/win.<p>[0]: <a href="http://blokada.org/" rel="nofollow">http://blokada.org/</a>
I have an extension to disable WebRTC to prevent leaks (uBlobk added that too), I have another one that claims it blocks mining, I have uBlock and Disconnect - all fighting for my privacy.<p>This is getting out of hand.
If you disable JS you won't need any ad blockers and you will be surprised how faster the sites will load (if some sites are still not fast enough, try disabling web fonts; they are heavy and block rendering, but sadly Chrome doesn't allow to block them on per-site basis).
Are there even any legitimate domains under these new super-cheap-50c-domain TLDs like .bid? I've seen a 100% spam bot rate for all email domains ending in .bid on our sites.<p>I'm considering changing my local DNS to NXDOMAIN the whole TLD if it's this messy.
Doesn't it cost a few bucks to register a domain name? How could a malware group pay to register thousands and thousands of randomly generated top level domains?
Instead of trying to block ad-mining, consider this;<p>With the right PoW algorithm and the hardware access to optimize it, it really seems like an excellent economic model, specifically if you must opt-in in exchange for seeing no ads.<p>Today we deal with advertisements that destroy the user experience and have a very real cost to the user in having to navigate through intrusive ads. Which also, by the way, often cause the same over-revving and slow downs as mining do.<p>In response, ad blockers rewrite or block a site’s code to eliminate the ads, consuming the content but starving the site from its only revenue stream. Not theft, perhaps not even morally wrong, but certainly to the detriment of the site owner.<p>Microtransactions or subscription-based content pools with view-based payouts have been proposed for years and have had some traction but certainly aren’t widespread.<p>If you could opt-in to mine on behalf of the sites you visit in a way that respected your real-time compute resources, in exchange for a completely ad-free experience, would you do it?<p>It seems like mining for someone is the ultimate micro transaction. There is no overhead and no fees and you can mine for a portion of time equal to tiny fractions of a cent of value. In fact, mining for enough cycles to produce even a penny of value would be a fairly substantial amount of computation.<p>The crucial question is the effeciency of the process. There are no transactions fees whatsoever to mine for someone else, the bandwidth is minuscule, the code is fairly tight. But the one thing that makes it inefficient is if you’re consuming more compute than necessary to most optimally perform the PoW. In other words, if your hashrate per CPU-second is sub-optimal because the sandbox doesn’t allow an efficient PoW implementation, or because the algorithm can be run orders of magnitude more efficiently on specialized hardware, that in itself is a form of transaction fee.<p>If we can get a PoW algorithm which runs near-optimally on general purpose computers on a blockchain that isn’t dominated by botnets, then the economics should work out that you are paying whoever you mine for approximately the cost of the electricity required to perform the mining, effectively leading to a way to make free micropayments.