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Ai Weiwei, Edward Snowden and Pussy Riot to remind you of threats against privacy. But... removing ads isn't censorship?
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Pot, meet kettle.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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The bit which concerns me is ad-blockers that charge to appear on a white list.
That smacks of a protection racket to me.
Overall though, people may stop using ad-blockers when ads become less intrusive and stop delivering malware and inappropriate content to people's computers.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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Rob Grainger wrote: when ads become less intrusive and stop delivering malware and inappropriate content to people's computers.
You for got to mention peace on Earth.
Life is too shor
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If you don't want ads replaced by something else, replace them by nothing. I use http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm which contains hosts file entries rerouted to a null address (so no 'real' network traffic); you can subscribe and it will send notifications when there are updates so you can update your own hosts file. This is not an Ad! There are probably many other similar services.
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Privacy Badger is for ads. ABP with my own ruleset is for all the other crap various web sites vomit all over themselves.
None of ABPs flirting with treason with advertisers over acceptable ads matters to me because I'm not using their filter list.
That said, if you want to run an adblocker with 3rd party block lists, take a look at uBlock/uBlock Origin (one's a fork of the other; AFAIK there aren't any major functional differences between them). uBlock used to have a major memory usage advantage in FF, but FF fixed the issue sometime last year (sharing the internal representation of a css file across multiple tabs) so that's mostly a non-issue now. I've played with it a bit and in auto-pilot mode it seems to work well; but the options it gives to create your own filters is more limited and seems to not include things I generally used with ABP.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Kent Sharkey wrote: But... removing ads isn't censorship?
It is, if it's an OS or browser feature outside the end-user's control. It is not when the end-user consciously installs a blocker.
That said, if ads were served as static images off the 1st party host (and not via a 3rd party cookie-based host), there's no way an ad blocker can safely and consistently block an ad. Nor would the host file hack someone mentioned below have an effect.
Reddit has recently started showing ads that look like reddit threads. You won't know unless you look twice. Not sure how ethical that is. Slightly similar is gmail showing ads as conversations, but for some reason 99% of the time, they show relevant content, and I almost always click on it automatically.
modified 14-Mar-16 11:46am.
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Nish Nishant wrote: if ads were served as static images off the 1st party host
Then we wouldn't have started down this rabbit-hole in the first place! 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Nish Nishant wrote: if ads were served as static images off the 1st party host (and not via a 3rd party cookie-based host), there's no way an ad blocker can safely and consistently block an ad.
In theory perhaps not, but >90% of the time I can still write a rule based off the DOM to make native ads go away without breaking anything else. It's no harder than deleting any other crap div on a page.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Even as it embraces open source, Microsoft is shaking down the Android and Linux communities for patent licenses. Will the real Microsoft please stand up? Don't think of Microsoft as a single entity, but as an ant hill, where individuals seem to be moving at random
... but drop a piece of meat nearby, and you'll see them act as one. We are the meat.
(I heard this back in 2000, and it's always stuck with me. I wish I could credit the philosopher.)
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I always liked the cartoon that said, 'if you can't tell what the product is, you are the product'...it had some pigs in barn thinking how great it was to get the free accommodation. They were referring to Faceberg and Tweeter.
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blablabla...
don't Apple, Google, Samsung, etc... (and our patent troll friends!) do the exact same thing?
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Well, Apple just never open sources anything (okay, Swift, but nothing really otherwise). But yeah, as with everything else, Microsoft is always held to a different scale.
TTFN - Kent
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And LLVM, and Webkit, but apart from that nothing.
(Although webkit forked KHTML, so they would have no choice).
(A bit more investigation revealed LLVM started at the University of Illinois, so I suspect they had little choice there either).
OK, in that case Apple never open source anything (except Swift).
Of course, Swift is itself based on LLVM, so maybe they couldn't escape that one either.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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If Apple doesn’t comply with the court order requiring it to weaken the security on the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, it may be asked to hand over the source code to the entire operating system instead, the Department of Justice has implied. "Every man should know that his conversations, his correspondence, and his personal life are private."
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Compliance will put the company in a tailspin and they will go out of buisness from lack of trust.
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ledtech3 wrote: Compliance will put the company in a tailspin and they will go out of buisness from lack of trust.
While that would certainly be a shame - for me the bigger issues are:
0) The precedent that even in times of peace the US government can force companies to perform duties for the government.
1) Smart phones (all of them since this will certainly bleed over to the others) will become even less secure to hackers and thieves.
It's almost unimaginable to me that the US government is being so short sighted with its demands. Word is they're going after Facebook (WhatsApp) now over encryption.
There are two types of people in this world: those that pronounce GIF with a soft G, and those who do not deserve to speak words, ever.
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What about the women? 
The sh*t I complain about
It's like there ain't a cloud in the sky and it's raining out - Eminem
~! Firewall !~
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It appears that no company that relies on its Intellectual Property remaining private can afford to do business in the U.S. anymore.
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.
--Winston Churchill
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Hmmmm. It seems like the FBI have pulled out the nuclear option now.
Such a demand would make the initial one seem like dinner, roses and chocolate with lovemaking compared to being raped in a dirty alley as the current one could reasonably be compared against.
I'm fairly naiive in such matters, but didn't the title "The artist formerly known as Prince" allow said artist to wriggle out of contractual obligations? What if the company as we know it was to fall on its own sword an re-emerge with a name that makes it clear of their origins.
Perhaps something like "Not an FBI Apple" or "The Apple the FBI didn't steal" (Anyone reading this can surely come up with an infinitely more clever suggestion)
Basically, off-shore the company and setup child companies in the US that simply provide shop-front and programming services to the parent company. All keys could be held by the parent company and be inaccessible to the child companies, whether they be located in the US or elsewhere. The tax all goes elsewhere, surely you could leverage a similar structure to keep IP out of the continent too?
I mean, the publicly visible FBI budget is about 8.5 billion and the net worth of Apple is about 700 billion. Surely a pi55ing match's outcome depends somewhat on the size of one's pockets?
If not, well - capitulation is going to be one hell of a bitter (and expensive, brand-wise) pill to swallow. Better get some popcorn either way.
modified 14-Mar-16 6:21am.
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Former Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer once considered Linux users a bunch of communist thieves and saw open source itself as a cancer on Microsoft's intellectual property. But no more. It's 'the good kind of cancer?'
But then again, maybe he realized it's THE YEAR OF LINUX
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Surely a man to follow...
Quote: Microsoft's shares lost 40 percent of their value during Ballmer's 14-year tenure.
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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 And they stayed flat around USD30 during his tenure as well. Now they're over USD50.
TTFN - Kent
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