Ha! Ads be gone!

Snit,

How about ads on YouTube?

On my Raspberry Pi with Chromium uBlock seems to work well.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

"R.Wieser" wrote

| But I think many of the current design problems are due to
| people only thinking of cellphones.
|
| Can you blame them ? AFAIK there are now more phones with Internet
| access than that there are desktop machines. Don't like it either
though.
|

When it started people were creating pages specifically
for phones. Then phones got better, so they could read
normal webpages easily. The problem now is that they're
designing for phones without checking the userAgent to
confirm it is a phone.

| My pet peeve is websites that stop functioning correctly when JS is
disabled
| (as I have). At some time I had a GM "rule" replacing those a
| onclick="window.location = 'http://.....' " idiocies. Don't see those
| anymore. Still have a "rule" fixing those "lazy load" images - otherwise
I
| often see nothing nowerdays.
|
Yes. That stuff is increasing. Sometimes
I fish out the image if I care. Otherwise I just
ignore them, since the images are usually not
relevant.

Last week I came across the top Audobon nature
photo awards for 2020. Nothing visible. So I downloaded
the webpage and did a couple of 'replace all' in my
editor, reloaded the page, then saved it all.

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/20...awards/613993/

Two problems with the code. No IMG SRC, and the width
is set to 100%, almost certainly distorting the images. But
it was fixable by removing "data-" before "src" and removing
width.

The really sleazy thing is that while they don't
bother to use IMG SRC so that people without script
can see it, they do have a noscript block, to
make sure googletagmanager can still track those
visitors who can't see the webpage content!

Ken Blake wrote:
On 8/6/2020 2:36 PM, Snit wrote:
On Aug 6, 2020 at 1:45:52 PM MST, ""Commander Kinsey""
wrote:

On Thu, 06 Aug 2020 21:38:50 +0100, Snit
wrote:

On Aug 6, 2020 at 12:34:31 PM MST, ""Commander Kinsey""
wrote:

On Thu, 06 Aug 2020 19:48:59 +0100, Mayayana wrote:

"Jonathan N. Little" wrote

| Yes, but some sites have a counter for that strategy...JavaScript
| injected content. You don't get the adblocker warning but you also don't
| get the content.
|

Yes, it's an arms war. I think blocking ads is much
more easily done with a HOSTS file.

How can that work when the ads are stored on the same server as the content?

Not easily.

Hmmm, I wonder if you can block specific paths at an IP? Not that I know of.

But I also rarely enable javascript. Very rarely.

Almost every site I use needs it for something, I don't want to disable it
all over.

I have some sites set to "Reader Mode" to bypass a bunch of junk. I can do
that on a site by site basis.

What is "reader mode"?

A mode in Safari which gets rid of ads and headers and the like and focuses
just on the content. It *mostly* works. You can apparently get something
similar for Chrome:


https://chrome.google.com/webstore/d...dlmlhblm?hl=en

And looking now I see Firefox has "Reader View" which I suppose is much the
same.



Thank, I use FireFox, and never knew about Reader View.

No problem.

I just tried it
on a couple of sites, and it turned out to be terrible for me. It took
away things I wanted to see. On one site, it took away the only things I
went to the site for.

Can you share the URL? I will test with Safari. Curious as to how they
compare.

But I'll try it on some other sites over the next few days before I
decide whether to forget about it or not.

Fair enough.



--
Personal attacks from those who troll show their own insecurity. They
cannot use reason to show the message to be wrong so they try to feel
somehow superior by attacking the messenger. They cling to their attacks
and ignore the message time and time again.

On 8/7/20 12:54 PM, Mayayana wrote:

[snip]

When it started people were creating pages specifically
for phones. Then phones got better, so they could read
normal webpages easily. The problem now is that they're
designing for phones without checking the userAgent to
confirm it is a phone.

I've seen a lot of those recently. One of the things they're doing is
form fields with no label except the placeholder text. It can make it
harder to use unfamiliar forms.

| My pet peeve is websites that stop functioning correctly when JS is
disabled

Yes.

Its unusual, but I design my personal website to be as close to 100%
functional as possible without JS.

[snip]

--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"Christ rode on an ass, but now asses ride on Christ." -- Heine

On 8/7/2020 11:05 AM, Snit wrote:
Ken Blake wrote:
On 8/6/2020 2:36 PM, Snit wrote:
On Aug 6, 2020 at 1:45:52 PM MST, ""Commander Kinsey""
wrote:

On Thu, 06 Aug 2020 21:38:50 +0100, Snit
wrote:

On Aug 6, 2020 at 12:34:31 PM MST, ""Commander Kinsey""
wrote:

On Thu, 06 Aug 2020 19:48:59 +0100, Mayayana wrote:

"Jonathan N. Little" wrote

| Yes, but some sites have a counter for that strategy...JavaScript
| injected content. You don't get the adblocker warning but you also don't
| get the content.
|

Yes, it's an arms war. I think blocking ads is much
more easily done with a HOSTS file.

How can that work when the ads are stored on the same server as the content?

Not easily.

Hmmm, I wonder if you can block specific paths at an IP? Not that I know of.

But I also rarely enable javascript. Very rarely.

Almost every site I use needs it for something, I don't want to disable it
all over.

I have some sites set to "Reader Mode" to bypass a bunch of junk. I can do
that on a site by site basis.

What is "reader mode"?

A mode in Safari which gets rid of ads and headers and the like and focuses
just on the content. It *mostly* works. You can apparently get something
similar for Chrome:


https://chrome.google.com/webstore/d...dlmlhblm?hl=en

And looking now I see Firefox has "Reader View" which I suppose is much the
same.



Thank, I use FireFox, and never knew about Reader View.

No problem.

I just tried it
on a couple of sites, and it turned out to be terrible for me. It took
away things I wanted to see. On one site, it took away the only things I
went to the site for.

Can you share the URL? I will test with Safari. Curious as to how they
compare.


https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb...free-web-pages

But that's about FireFox. I don't know anything about what's available
with Safari.


But I'll try it on some other sites over the next few days before I
decide whether to forget about it or not.

Fair enough.





--
Ken

Ken Blake wrote:
On 8/7/2020 11:05 AM, Snit wrote:
Ken Blake wrote:
On 8/6/2020 2:36 PM, Snit wrote:
On Aug 6, 2020 at 1:45:52 PM MST, ""Commander Kinsey""
wrote:

On Thu, 06 Aug 2020 21:38:50 +0100, Snit
wrote:

On Aug 6, 2020 at 12:34:31 PM MST, ""Commander Kinsey""
wrote:

On Thu, 06 Aug 2020 19:48:59 +0100, Mayayana wrote:

"Jonathan N. Little" wrote

| Yes, but some sites have a counter for that strategy...JavaScript
| injected content. You don't get the adblocker warning but you also don't
| get the content.
|

Yes, it's an arms war. I think blocking ads is much
more easily done with a HOSTS file.

How can that work when the ads are stored on the same server as the content?

Not easily.

Hmmm, I wonder if you can block specific paths at an IP? Not that I know of.

But I also rarely enable javascript. Very rarely.

Almost every site I use needs it for something, I don't want to disable it
all over.

I have some sites set to "Reader Mode" to bypass a bunch of junk. I can do
that on a site by site basis.

What is "reader mode"?

A mode in Safari which gets rid of ads and headers and the like and focuses
just on the content. It *mostly* works. You can apparently get something
similar for Chrome:


https://chrome.google.com/webstore/d...dlmlhblm?hl=en

And looking now I see Firefox has "Reader View" which I suppose is much the
same.



Thank, I use FireFox, and never knew about Reader View.

No problem.

I just tried it
on a couple of sites, and it turned out to be terrible for me. It took
away things I wanted to see. On one site, it took away the only things I
went to the site for.

Can you share the URL? I will test with Safari. Curious as to how they
compare.


https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb...free-web-pages

But that's about FireFox. I don't know anything about what's available
with Safari.

I meant sites that it showed poorly.


But I'll try it on some other sites over the next few days before I
decide whether to forget about it or not.

Fair enough.








--
Personal attacks from those who troll show their own insecurity. They
cannot use reason to show the message to be wrong so they try to feel
somehow superior by attacking the messenger. They cling to their attacks
and ignore the message time and time again.

In article , Mayayana
wrote:

"R.Wieser" wrote

| But I think many of the current design problems are due to
| people only thinking of cellphones.
|
| Can you blame them ? AFAIK there are now more phones with Internet
| access than that there are desktop machines. Don't like it either
though.
|

When it started people were creating pages specifically
for phones.

that was long, long ago, when phones had wap browsers.

Then phones got better, so they could read
normal webpages easily. The problem now is that they're
designing for phones without checking the userAgent to
confirm it is a phone.

actually, they're designing web sites that work on both desktop and
mobile without needing to special case either one, the way it should
be.

a major benefit of that is being able to resize the window on a desktop
computer to something small and the site continues to function as
expected.

On 8/7/2020 9:23 AM, R.Wieser wrote:
Snit,

How about ads on YouTube?

On my Raspberry Pi with Chromium uBlock seems to work well.



I just tried uBlock here on FireFox. It *sort of* blocks the ads that
start many Utube performances.


It starts with an error "An error occurred. Please try again later." A
few seconds later, the performance starts. The error message takes the
place of the ads, and lasts about the same length of time.

Is that an improvement? Perhaps it's a minor one; at least there's no
sound for the error message.


--
Ken

On 8/7/2020 11:31 AM, Snit wrote:
Ken Blake wrote:
On 8/7/2020 11:05 AM, Snit wrote:
Ken Blake wrote:
On 8/6/2020 2:36 PM, Snit wrote:
On Aug 6, 2020 at 1:45:52 PM MST, ""Commander Kinsey""
wrote:

On Thu, 06 Aug 2020 21:38:50 +0100, Snit
wrote:

On Aug 6, 2020 at 12:34:31 PM MST, ""Commander Kinsey""
wrote:

On Thu, 06 Aug 2020 19:48:59 +0100, Mayayana wrote:

"Jonathan N. Little" wrote

| Yes, but some sites have a counter for that strategy...JavaScript
| injected content. You don't get the adblocker warning but you also don't
| get the content.
|

Yes, it's an arms war. I think blocking ads is much
more easily done with a HOSTS file.

How can that work when the ads are stored on the same server as the content?

Not easily.

Hmmm, I wonder if you can block specific paths at an IP? Not that I know of.

But I also rarely enable javascript. Very rarely.

Almost every site I use needs it for something, I don't want to disable it
all over.

I have some sites set to "Reader Mode" to bypass a bunch of junk. I can do
that on a site by site basis.

What is "reader mode"?

A mode in Safari which gets rid of ads and headers and the like and focuses
just on the content. It *mostly* works. You can apparently get something
similar for Chrome:


https://chrome.google.com/webstore/d...dlmlhblm?hl=en

And looking now I see Firefox has "Reader View" which I suppose is much the
same.



Thank, I use FireFox, and never knew about Reader View.

No problem.

I just tried it
on a couple of sites, and it turned out to be terrible for me. It took
away things I wanted to see. On one site, it took away the only things I
went to the site for.

Can you share the URL? I will test with Safari. Curious as to how they
compare.


https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb...free-web-pages

But that's about FireFox. I don't know anything about what's available
with Safari.

I meant sites that it showed poorly.


Here's the worst one: https://www.marke****ch.com/watchlist

I go there to see quotes for various stocks and funds. Reader View
eliminates all the quotes.


--
Ken

Ken Blake wrote:
On 8/7/2020 9:23 AM, R.Wieser wrote:
Snit,

How about ads on YouTube?

On my Raspberry Pi with Chromium uBlock seems to work well.



I just tried uBlock here on FireFox. It *sort of* blocks the ads that
start many Utube performances.


It starts with an error "An error occurred. Please try again later." A
few seconds later, the performance starts. The error message takes the
place of the ads, and lasts about the same length of time.

Is that an improvement? Perhaps it's a minor one; at least there's no
sound for the error message.



My method has no such delay. I can’t be the only one who knows about it.
Waiting to see if folks like Gremlin know. Either way I will reveal my
“trick� soon. It is based on something I saw on a YouTube video but I
streamlined it to make it be very quick. Not sure if the same streamlining
works on Linux and Windows but the general method does. Browser
independent.

--
Personal attacks from those who troll show their own insecurity. They
cannot use reason to show the message to be wrong so they try to feel
somehow superior by attacking the messenger. They cling to their attacks
and ignore the message time and time again.

Mayayana,

The problem now is that they're designing for phones
without checking the userAgent to confirm it is a phone.

I'm not sure why you think they should do that. My stance is that they
shouldn't check the userAgent /ever/. If they do they succumb to
"optimalisations" specifically for a certain browser and version thereof,
trying to create WYSIWYG instead of HTML (that auto-flows to make the best
of whatever width is available).

Just last week I came across a website that returned an 200 OK result, but
with the "webpage" being a single dot. Up until I added a useragent (own
code, downloading raw webcontent). Yep, not even having a fall-back for
"unrecognised" useragents.

Yes. That stuff is increasing. Sometimes I fish out the image
if I care.

I stuffe that into my generic page scrubbing. Checking all IMG tags, see if
there is a "data-source" property present, split it and copy the first
result to the SRC property.

Last week I came across the top Audobon nature
photo awards for 2020. Nothing visible.

I took a look, but nonwithstanding the above scrubbing I saw nothing other
than big empty spaces - up until I disabled the CSS, after which all the
images became visible. Go figure.

The really sleazy thing is that while they don't
bother to use IMG SRC so that people without script
can see it, they do have a noscript block, to
make sure googletagmanager can still track those
visitors who can't see the webpage content!

You mentioned that some of those webpage writers cannot actually write ?
There is a good chance that they just copy-and-pasted the blob they got send
into the page - including those noscript tags.

But yes, I noticed that too. Luckily my "no third party content!"
(RequestPolicy) plugin blocks /those/ trackers too, so I don't worry about
that anymore.

Yeah, that RequestPolicy was quite a find. Between it, GreaseMonkey and
having disabled JavaScript I think I've got most, if not all nasties
covered.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

P.s.
You are aware of the ETag entry in the HTTP header ? Its property is just
begging to be used as a cookie replacement (it gets set by the server, and
send by the client on every usage of the resource - to check if the resource
has changed (read: cache busting) ).

Ken Blake wrote:
On 8/7/2020 11:31 AM, Snit wrote:
Ken Blake wrote:
On 8/7/2020 11:05 AM, Snit wrote:
Ken Blake wrote:
On 8/6/2020 2:36 PM, Snit wrote:
On Aug 6, 2020 at 1:45:52 PM MST, ""Commander Kinsey""
wrote:

On Thu, 06 Aug 2020 21:38:50 +0100, Snit
wrote:

On Aug 6, 2020 at 12:34:31 PM MST, ""Commander Kinsey""
wrote:

On Thu, 06 Aug 2020 19:48:59 +0100, Mayayana wrote:

"Jonathan N. Little" wrote

| Yes, but some sites have a counter for that strategy...JavaScript
| injected content. You don't get the adblocker warning but you also don't
| get the content.
|

Yes, it's an arms war. I think blocking ads is much
more easily done with a HOSTS file.

How can that work when the ads are stored on the same server as the content?

Not easily.

Hmmm, I wonder if you can block specific paths at an IP? Not that I know of.

But I also rarely enable javascript. Very rarely.

Almost every site I use needs it for something, I don't want to disable it
all over.

I have some sites set to "Reader Mode" to bypass a bunch of junk. I can do
that on a site by site basis.

What is "reader mode"?

A mode in Safari which gets rid of ads and headers and the like and focuses
just on the content. It *mostly* works. You can apparently get something
similar for Chrome:


https://chrome.google.com/webstore/d...dlmlhblm?hl=en

And looking now I see Firefox has "Reader View" which I suppose is much the
same.



Thank, I use FireFox, and never knew about Reader View.

No problem.

I just tried it
on a couple of sites, and it turned out to be terrible for me. It took
away things I wanted to see. On one site, it took away the only things I
went to the site for.

Can you share the URL? I will test with Safari. Curious as to how they
compare.


https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb...free-web-pages

But that's about FireFox. I don't know anything about what's available
with Safari.

I meant sites that it showed poorly.


Here's the worst one: https://www.marke****ch.com/watchlist

I go there to see quotes for various stocks and funds. Reader View
eliminates all the quotes.

Not a member but created an account. Created a watch list. On Safari the
Reader View is not available (at least on mobile — likely for desktop too).




--
Personal attacks from those who troll show their own insecurity. They
cannot use reason to show the message to be wrong so they try to feel
somehow superior by attacking the messenger. They cling to their attacks
and ignore the message time and time again.

Ken,

I just tried uBlock here on FireFox. It *sort of* blocks the ads that
start many Utube performances.

It starts with an error "An error occurred. Please try again later." A
few seconds later, the performance starts. The error message takes the
place of the ads, and lasts about the same length of time.

Is that an improvement? Perhaps it's a minor one; at least there's no
sound for the error message.

As I said, for me using chromium on my (default installed) Raspberry Pi it
works beautifully. I do not see such error messages. Perhaps some of the
(short) delays I see might be related to downloading an ad. I don't know.
And I don't really care either. Most of them are no longer than the "need
to download more data" showing that revolving "circle".

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

In article , Ken Blake
wrote:


It starts with an error "An error occurred. Please try again later." A
few seconds later, the performance starts. The error message takes the
place of the ads, and lasts about the same length of time.

most of the time, there is no error at all and the video starts
immediately.

on occasion, there's a skip ads button.

but even with a few seconds delay, it's a vast improvement over preroll
ads, which are usually 15-30 seconds (sometimes longer), and in some
cases, can't be skipped or fast forwarded.

In article , Snit
wrote:

My method has no such delay. I can¹t be the only one who knows about it.
Waiting to see if folks like Gremlin know. Either way I will reveal my
³trick² soon. It is based on something I saw on a YouTube video but I
streamlined it to make it be very quick. Not sure if the same streamlining
works on Linux and Windows but the general method does. Browser
independent.

translated: doesn't exist.