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Pi-hole dot net and hardware ad blocking



 
 
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  #16  
Old May 19th 18, 05:07 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
pyotr filipivich
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Posts: 752
Default Advertising was Pi-hole dot net and hardware ad blocking

Wolf K on Sat, 19 May 2018 09:23:45 -0400 typed
in alt.windows7.general the following:

The one thing I didn't see mentioned is the increasingly common and
obnoxious behavior of sites that are configured to notice, in a big way,
that you're downloading their content but not their ads. Some of them
replace the content with a big message that says, in effect, "Hey, we
see that you're using an ad blocker. Cut it out!"


And I suppose the advertisers think that the ads are actually viewed?
Poor sods, they're wasting their money.


They are wasting their money - on you. As the saying goes "Half
of your advertising budget is wasted; the problem is you can't tell
which half." Likely they get enough responses as to make it worth the
effort. How many is that? Enough that income remains expenses (the
numerical answer is left as an exercise for the student.)

The most effective ad-blocker is the one in my head.


Fifty years later, I still refuse to buy General Tires, due to
their advertising slogan when I was I was ten.
Dentine and Trident have a negative Q score for me, in large part
due to some obnoxious ads back in the 80's, unfortunately reinforced
due to recorded radio programs I hear now and then.

Eg, I don't see ads when I view a news source on the
PC, but I do see them when I view that source on the phone. Guess what?
I haven't a clue what most of those ads are about. Racking my brains,
OK, I vaguely remember some colours. Pink. Green... I do recall that
Subaru advertised on one of those news sources, but I was primed to
notice it, as I was musing about trading my car for a newer one, and
Subaru topped my list. But I thought better of it. My car is good for at
least another 100K km. :-)


Neighbors had a gas guzzler, and couldn't afford the gas. So they
traded that one in for a new car, rolled what they owed on the gas
guzzler into the new car payments ... You know, for what you're still
paying for the old car, you could have bought a lot of gasoline.
They had other issues, too.
--
pyotr filipivich
Next month's Panel: Graft - Boon or blessing?
Ads
  #17  
Old May 19th 18, 10:09 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
VanguardLH[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 10,881
Default Pi-hole dot net and hardware ad blocking

Mayayana wrote:

"VanguardLH" wrote

| The hosts file lists *hosts*, not domains. That is why it is called a
| hosts file. There is no wildcarding. The hosts file was not created
| for the purpose of adblocking.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_(file)
|
| That Acrylic allows wildcarding is unique to that proxy in its
| interpretation of the content of the hosts file.
|
| I don't use Acrylic...

Yet you're determined to explain it. John understands.
And probably everyone else here does, too, without
needing links to the history of HOSTS files.


I was determined to find out WHICH file Acrylic actually used. You
misled by saying it was the 'hosts' file. Not true. Acrylic uses its
own and separate acrylichosts.txt file. It seemed dangerous to be
putzing with the standard 'hosts' file by putting entries within it that
nothing other than Acrylic would understand.

If you want to understand then why not just read
the instructions in Acrylic HOSTS rather than posting
all this stuff that everyone already knows?


Provide evidence that "everyone one already knows" to circumvent your
misleading statement that the hosts file had wildcards. Um, so where
was that hidden help where you illustrated how to perform filtering on
Doubleclick in one line using regex? If pyotr knew about the standard
'hosts' file then why is using a DNS server such news to him? I see you
didn't bother to offer explanation of how Acrylic differentiates a
"pattern" from regex.

Oh, so someone that doesn't use Acrylic DNS cannot comment about it. Uh
huh. Well, gee, you said "If I remember correctly, it turned out that
Acrylic can handle RegExp." Doesn't sound like you are too intimate
with the product, either.
  #18  
Old May 19th 18, 10:44 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
VanguardLH[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 10,881
Default Pi-hole dot net and hardware ad blocking

Mayayana wrote:

"VanguardLH" wrote

|: I've yet to see that. Maybe it requires javascript to work. (Which I
|: generally don't enable.) That seems like poetic justice: They need
|: javascript to spy on you but they also need javascript to check
|: whether you're letting them spy.
|
| No, you have a connection to them so your IP address is known during
| your session with the site. If your client refuses to get their ad
| content using that IP address during your session with them, they can
| detect your client is not retrieving all content and only some of it.
| The site will cooperate with the off-domain site (theirs or someone
| else's) to see if you went there to get that content. They can do that
| whether or not Javascript is enabled/available in your client or not.
|

In theory. But that's unlikely. Sending data requests
back and forth to 3rd parties with every page request
would put a significant load on their traffic and processing.


Oh, as, um, versus using analytics. Uh huh. Bury your head.
Cloudflare and other CDNs provide feedback to their customers plus the
customers can institute their own handlers. Is the expense of paying
for more bandwidth with a CDN by a site worth the loss of revenue
generating by adblockers eliminating their advertising content? Why
would sites strive to prevent adblocking if it wasn't worth it to them?

You think Javascript is the only means of thwarting adblockers. Nope.
A page could be written to incorporate ad-looking tags into HTML tags,
like body id="banner_ad". Do the same in every div tag. The result
is the adblocker filters out the tag hence the document has no body or
divs are no longer delineated so the client has nothing to show. Every
URL to a resource, like the file in href for an img tag could include
a substring that looks ad-like, so all images would disappear when the
adblocker was active in the client. Those old methods just uses HTML.
No Javascript is involved at all.

It's all built into the javascript in that case. And as
I said, I've never had a site show me with a message
about blocking ads. I know you hate to have your
beliefs contradicted by other peoples' experience.


You've lived a very charmed life or are highly selective and narrow on
the number of sites you visit and never roam outside that list.

https://www.google.com/search?q=blocking%20adblocker
https://www.google.com/search?q=site...able+adblocker

Think about what you're claiming. I visit a site. They contact their 6
ad servers and spyware partners to see if I'm loading the ads. But I
can only load ads after I've loaded the page. Without script, how are
they going to block the page they just gave me while they wait 3
seconds for the other servers to respond?


Wow, you really don't know how external resources are delivered. That
you get a web page delivered to you does NOT mean you yet have the ad
content from the external resource. Obviously the externally resourced
content cannot be determined until AFTER the document has been delivered
to your client.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/new...block-scripts/

This contradicts your original farfetched claim that websites will get
around my disabling script by contacting the ad server from the
backend and asking whether they see my IP address.


You must be employed as an editor of a history book that likes to
rewrite history to bend to how you want it to have happened. I never
server-side detection is the only method. However, you seem hell bent
on claiming Javascript is the only detection method. Geez, even when
someone agrees with you in part you just cannot stand it. You want to
deny server-side detection is employed. Okay, bury your head. Above I
showed that Javascript is not needed to thwart adblockers by just using
HTML. However, I *was* agreeing with you that Javascript present a
low-effort method of thwarting adblockers. Get it now, I agree with you
that Javascript is very much used. I disagree with you that Javascript
is the ONLY means available to thwart adblockers.

Now you're off on another of your huffy
pronouncements and not paying attention to
my original statement: I don't get blocked for
blocking ads because I don't enable script.
It's all in the script.

You live in a world of escalating arms war, using
ublock origin. I just use a HOSTS file. You may
insist that's not possible, but I'm doing it.


I never said it wasn't not possible. I've claimed that it is clumsy.
There is no quick means of disabling the hosts file during a web session
as there is with an adblocker extension. When content you want is
getting blocked at a site you choose to visit, just how to you get the
hosts file out of the way and ONLY to allow some content and not all of
it? You would have to rename the hosts file (so it cannot be found) and
likely have to restart your web browser (with it configured to purge its
local data) to load the page again but without interference from a hosts
file that can longer be found.

Meanwhile the rest of us can use an extension that disables Javascript
by default and we can enable it at will, plus the rest of us use
adblocker extensions that let use either globally enable/disable them or
selectively allow only some content at a site to make it usable.

That you claim to leave Javascript disabled means you only visit a few
sites that don't have dynamic content. Those are becoming rare.

Some examples of my browsing:
WashPo, npr.org, TheRegister, Slashdot, Wired,
alternet.org, infoworld, duckduckgo, Google,
stackoverflow and most other online programming
info sites....
They all currently work fine without script.


Fine for you. The rest of use are not restricting our use of the Web to
just non-scripted sites or those where scripts do not limit or control
content.

A few sites are actually completely broken. I used
to sometimes read business articles at forbes.com.
Their site is now broken. The webpage content itself
is embedded in script!


They aren't unique. Not by far at all.

What this boils down to is that they're refusing to
allow access to their website unless you allow them
to run a rather large software program on your computer.
It's an end-run version of a push webpage. I'm not
going to allow push webpages. Good riddance to them.


Again your choice. Your opinions and choices do not reflect how others
want to use the Web as a resource.

It's one thing to pay for a newspaper. It's another thing
entirely to be recorded while you read the paper and
to have the article dynamically change in order to
get me to look at ads. Why would anyone put up with
that once they realize it's happening? (Well, OK,
millions of Facebookie addicts put up with it.


Wow, someone who compares many centuries old technology that contained
static content on clay tablets, papyrus, or paper to the Web. Hmm,
wonder why that old communications venue had static content. Oh, I know
why, their medium was static. Duh! Only in movies due to special
effects do you see writing on paper morph into something else. So,
let's see, we have multple editions of a book to make corrections and
add material that was unavailable or not ready at the time of printing.
So buy a whole new book to get the updated version. Doesn't seem to be
any "cheaper" than viewing web pages with dynamic content.
  #19  
Old May 19th 18, 11:00 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
VanguardLH[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 10,881
Default Advertising was Pi-hole dot net and hardware ad blocking

pyotr filipivich wrote:

As the saying goes "Half of your advertising budget is wasted; the
problem is you can't tell which half." Likely they get enough
responses as to make it worth the effort. How many is that? Enough
that income remains expenses (the numerical answer is left as an
exercise for the student.)


The same reason spam (e-mail, Usenet) continues to survive. It only
take one or few boobs to pay the spammer to make it worth their efforts
to continue spamming some more. If spamming generated absolutely no
revenue, it would've died long ago. That advertising survives attests
that is *is* effective.

Advertising is big business. Businesses don't survive without
customers. So blame the customers on keeping advertising (and spamming)
alive. Yet, just how would we consumers know about any products without
being told about them? Just take the car out for a drive (and how did
you determine which car to buy) and wander around to see what happens to
be out there? I'm sure you don't work for free. You like to get paid.
So do all those people working at the sites providing "free" content to
you. So it's a bit of pleasure and a bit of pain: you want something
but they want something, too.

So we consumers started a war. We block the ads that we detest (well,
actually ALL of them, including those we might want to see at the time)
to focus on the other content in a web page. That product costs money
to deliver to you. As with any business, they aren't looking to merely
sustain their existence. Businesses want to grow. Mom and pop stores
would be incapable of providing the world-wide news and information that
you seek. To survive, they fight back. Gee, that's not really a
surprise or it shouldn't be. They need positive cash flow, not
negative. So they decide not to deliver some or all of their content to
you if you block other content. Hey, it's still THEIR site, their
property, their service. Yes, you could go elsewhere but then that
elsewhere still wants to survive and grow, too.

Tis too bad the sites didn't form a legal coalition to force advertisers
to comply with a known set of rules (adiquette) regarding good behavior.
Bad behavior is what instigated the use of adblockers in the first
place. They shot themselves in their own foot. Instead of fixing their
gun, they bandaged their foot and got a different gun.
  #20  
Old May 19th 18, 11:13 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
Mayayana
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 6,438
Default Pi-hole dot net and hardware ad blocking

"VanguardLH" wrote

| Oh, so someone that doesn't use Acrylic DNS cannot comment about it.
|

Take a breath, V. Then if you want to know
how it works you can download Acrylic and try it.
It's free. The instructions, such as they are, are
in the HOSTS file.

(Yes, the Acrylic HOSTS file, named AcrylicHosts.txt.)


  #21  
Old May 20th 18, 01:25 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
J. P. Gilliver (John)[_4_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,679
Default Pi-hole dot net and hardware ad blocking

In message , Mayayana
writes:
[]
I click a link and see a normal article. But there's
one problem. The font is serif, 18px high, with triple
line spacing! It's like reading a billboard from
6 feet away. Why? I don't know. Maybe they're
catering to phones? In any case, I often find it
easier to switch to no style and read the article
in simple, 12px verdana.

[]
Did you really mean px, or pt?

In general - VanguardLH and Mayayana: can you please kiss and make up?
Both of you know far more about the mechanisms involved in ads,
adblocking, adblocker-blocking, and so on than I do, and I _suspect_ you
both know most of what the other does too. This thread looks like each
not wanting to give way, and I don't like to see people I consider
friends arguing, at least not heatedly rather than good-naturedly.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

"Gentlemen, you can't fight in he this is the war room!" (Dr. Strangelove)

[That was selected at random, honest!]
  #22  
Old May 20th 18, 01:37 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
J. P. Gilliver (John)[_4_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,679
Default Advertising was Pi-hole dot net and hardware ad blocking

In message , VanguardLH
writes:
[]
you seek. To survive, they fight back. Gee, that's not really a
surprise or it shouldn't be. They need positive cash flow, not
negative. So they decide not to deliver some or all of their content to
you if you block other content. Hey, it's still THEIR site, their
property, their service. Yes, you could go elsewhere but then that
elsewhere still wants to survive and grow, too.


Sometimes, I get "we see you are using an ad-blocker. We rely on
advertising to fund this site, so would you consider turning it off, at
least for us?", or similar wording. (Yes, whichever of you said they
never see these - I _do_. Often on smaller sites, such as a regional
newspaper, or specialist site.) When such a request does pop up, I often
_do_ turn off my blocker (I still use ABP; that can be set to turn off
just for a given site, or even just for a page); if they've asked
nicely, and I think they are a site I'd like to see continue, I will do
so. (Equally, I occasionally make donations to other sites, for example
Wikipedia and Gravestone Photographic Resource - especially if they
specifically say they don't take advertising, such as Wikipedia do.)

However, when - and it's usually the bigger sites - they just
malfunction, I tend to just go elsewhere. I probably _would_ do so on
principle, being just an ornery guy over such matters, but mainly, I go
elsewhere _because_ the page is malfunctioning.

Tis too bad the sites didn't form a legal coalition to force advertisers
to comply with a known set of rules (adiquette) regarding good behavior.
Bad behavior is what instigated the use of adblockers in the first
place. They shot themselves in their own foot. Instead of fixing their
gun, they bandaged their foot and got a different gun.


Nice analogy (-:. Though realistically I can't see many advertisers
complying with a code of practice (I like your "adiquette") - probably
only the companies who already were anyway, who are probably the ones
whose ad.s we didn't mind seeing anyway.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

"Gentlemen, you can't fight in he this is the war room!" (Dr. Strangelove)
  #23  
Old May 20th 18, 01:48 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
Mayayana
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 6,438
Default Pi-hole dot net and hardware ad blocking

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote

| I click a link and see a normal article. But there's
| one problem. The font is serif, 18px high, with triple
| line spacing! It's like reading a billboard from
| 6 feet away. Why? I don't know. Maybe they're
| catering to phones? In any case, I often find it
| easier to switch to no style and read the article
| in simple, 12px verdana.
| []
| Did you really mean px, or pt?
|

px. Here's a typical example:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...067_story.html

I looked at the P tag for this text in Firefox
Inspector:
"Live on the black rock and amid the skinny palms."

I see this:

font-size: 18px;
line-height: 1.8em;
margin-bottom: 18px;

There's so much whitespace in the text that I find
it easier to read it without CSS.



  #24  
Old May 20th 18, 02:08 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
J. P. Gilliver (John)[_4_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,679
Default Pi-hole dot net and hardware ad blocking

In message , Mayayana
writes:
"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote

| I click a link and see a normal article. But there's
| one problem. The font is serif, 18px high, with triple
| line spacing! It's like reading a billboard from
| 6 feet away. Why? I don't know. Maybe they're
| catering to phones? In any case, I often find it
| easier to switch to no style and read the article
| in simple, 12px verdana.
| []
| Did you really mean px, or pt?
|

px. Here's a typical example:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...open-walls-of-
lava-encroached-thats-just-life-on-a-hawaiian-volcano/2018/05/19/b54128c
a-5ac7-11e8-858f-12becb4d6067_story.html

I looked at the P tag for this text in Firefox
Inspector:
"Live on the black rock and amid the skinny palms."

I see this:

font-size: 18px;
line-height: 1.8em;
margin-bottom: 18px;

There's so much whitespace in the text that I find
it easier to read it without CSS.



Oh. OK. (I'd assumed px was pixels and pt was point.)

Seems a poor design decision to measure font size in one unit (px) and
line height in another (em). [Whether that decision is made by the page
designer, or whoever defined the "language" s/he is using.]
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

....Every morning is the dawn of a new error...
  #25  
Old May 20th 18, 02:08 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
Mayayana
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 6,438
Default Advertising was Pi-hole dot net and hardware ad blocking

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote

| Sometimes, I get "we see you are using an ad-blocker. We rely on
| advertising to fund this site, so would you consider turning it off, at
| least for us?", or similar wording. (Yes, whichever of you said they
| never see these - I _do_. Often on smaller sites, such as a regional
| newspaper, or specialist site.) When such a request does pop up, I often
| _do_ turn off my blocker

That's become a kind of noble ideal among
some techies. I see people at Slashdot at least
claim that they allow ads on some sites. But
the whole approach is not workable.

I don't actually block any ads. Not one. I only
block adware/spyware domains that I never chose
to visit. I block Google analytics. I block Doubleclick.
But if a website has an ad I'll see it. I've never
blocked images that are actually on the site I'm
visiting.

The problem is that they want to make more
money, and that means targetted ads, and that
means being tracked online. The website asking
you to allow ads is not asking you to allow their
ads. They're asking you to allow tracking and ads
injected by a dozen spyware/ad companies.
That means a system of dishonesty and
misrepresentation, as they sneak around trying to
hide what they're doing.

And as I described elsewhere, it's now leading to
a sneaky kind of push webpage, where the website
you visit expects to take over your browser, ID you,
then customize the actual content of the page. Not
just the ads but also articles, prices for retail goods
or airline tickets, search results, etc.

I don't accept the idea that they have a right to
rig pages with spyware simply because it's possible.
No more than the company selling me a newspaper
has a right to film me as I read the paper. The only
difference between the two is that one is easy and
can be done transparently, while the other would be
an unwieldy, obvious and possibly illegal undertaking.

In the interest of civility, the whole system will
eventually have to be reworked. In the interest of
relevant content as well. A site that operates that
kind of spyware-based content doesn't have content
worth seeing. Their business model becomes like
Facebook, doing whatever it takes to keep you
on their site. The whole thing becomes an aggressive,
push-based ad. The website, at that point, doesn't
really have any content at all. They only have
strategic advertising machinery.

In short, the Web is being turned into one big
sleazy racket. The solution can't be to adjust how
the racket works. A new model is required. A model
that doesn't reject honesty and dignity.



  #26  
Old May 20th 18, 02:40 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
Mayayana
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 6,438
Default Pi-hole dot net and hardware ad blocking

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote

| Oh. OK. (I'd assumed px was pixels and pt was point.)
|
Yes.

| Seems a poor design decision to measure font size in one unit (px) and
| line height in another (em).

It's not really different, but it is superfluous.
Em is the measure of the font. If the font is 18px
then em is 18px. In theory it's possible that em
and line height are different, but it doesn't seem
to work that way in practice. The px spec seems
to be the line height, rather than, say, the measure
of capital A.

So line-height: 1.8
and line-height: 1.8em
are actually the same thing. They both cause a
line, including white space, to measure 32+ px
vertically with 18px font.

I think of 18 as the biggest size for the biggest header.
But WashPo's headlin on that page is 44px! Weird.

I suspect the use of em may be due to automated,
WYSIWYG CSS code. Most people don't actually
write webpage code anymore. You can see the bloat
that results in almost all commercial webpages.
That page seems to have close to 100 class names
just to assign styles to text sections! No one
writing the code could ever keep track of such
a mess. There are at least 2 CSS files pulled in, plus
an unknown number linked from the voluminous,
obfuscated script.


  #27  
Old May 20th 18, 02:51 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
Mayayana
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 6,438
Default Pi-hole dot net and hardware ad blocking

"Mayayana" wrote

| There are at least 2 CSS files pulled in, plus
| an unknown number linked from the voluminous,
| obfuscated script.
|

That page has some interesting glop that's apparently
connected to trying to block ad blockers. The word
"doubleclick" doesn't appear in the page. But there is
a long section of this kind of thing:

\x65\x45\x6c\x65\x6d\x65\x6e\x74','\x70\x75\x73\x6 8','\x63\x68\x69\x6c\x64\x4e\x6f\x64\x65\x73','\x7 0\x61\x72\x65\x6e\x74\x4e\x6f\x64\x65','\x69\x6e\x 73\x65\x72\x74\x42\x65\x66\x6f\x72\x

That's ASCII codes. \x65 means hex 65, which is decimal
101, which is "e". Running the obfuscation through
a translator script turns up, among other things, this:

'https://securepubads.g.doubleclick.net',
'http://s0.2mdn.net/instream/video/',
'https://securepubads.g.doubleclick.net/gpt/pubads_impl_108.js'

It turns out 2mdn.net is yet another Google alias.
I just added it to my Acrylic HOSTS file.

So there's no place in the webpage to find a
doubleclick link, but it does come out once the
script is run. Not only an ad but also another
script from doubleclick itself. (I'd go check out
what's in that script, but it's too much trouble
to undo my doubleclick blocks.)


  #28  
Old May 20th 18, 06:53 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
J. P. Gilliver (John)[_4_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,679
Default Pi-hole dot net and hardware ad blocking

In message , Mayayana
writes:
[]
That's ASCII codes. \x65 means hex 65, which is decimal
101, which is "e". Running the obfuscation through
a translator script turns up, among other things, this:

'https://securepubads.g.doubleclick.net',
'http://s0.2mdn.net/instream/video/',
'https://securepubads.g.doubleclick.net/gpt/pubads_impl_108.js'

It turns out 2mdn.net is yet another Google alias.
I just added it to my Acrylic HOSTS file.


I've just added the securepubads bit to my hosts file (haven't got round
to implementing acrylic yet), so thanks for that, but as for 2mdn, I
found this in my hosts file:

#Youtube
....
#127.0.0.1 s0.2mdn.net #} comment out everything in this
segment
#127.0.0.1 static.2mdn.net #} from this point down if you need
to use
#127.0.0.1 www.youtube-nocookie.com #} YT, since these next few servers
are its
#127.0.0.1 youtube-nocookie.com #} dependencies and can cause major
#127.0.0.1 youtube-noscript.com #} functionality problems if blocked
#127.0.0.1 www.youtube-noscript.com #}

since I _do_ use YouTube, I've left that bit be. (I can't remember where
I got that information from - possibly you!)
[]
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

`Ergonomic' =/= `dext-handed'
  #29  
Old May 20th 18, 07:01 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
J. P. Gilliver (John)[_4_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,679
Default Pi-hole dot net and hardware ad blocking

In message , Mayayana
writes:
"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote

| Oh. OK. (I'd assumed px was pixels and pt was point.)
|
Yes.

| Seems a poor design decision to measure font size in one unit (px) and
| line height in another (em).

It's not really different, but it is superfluous.
Em is the measure of the font. If the font is 18px
then em is 18px. In theory it's possible that em
and line height are different, but it doesn't seem
to work that way in practice. The px spec seems
to be the line height, rather than, say, the measure
of capital A.


Yes, in points, it's the height of the printing block, or something like
that - IIRR, 72 point is an inch.

So line-height: 1.8
and line-height: 1.8em


"If the font is 18px then em is 18px." as you said, then I'd assume
1.8em would be 1.8×18=32.4px?

are actually the same thing. They both cause a
line, including white space, to measure 32+ px
vertically with 18px font.

I think of 18 as the biggest size for the biggest header.
But WashPo's headlin on that page is 44px! Weird.

I suspect the use of em may be due to automated,
WYSIWYG CSS code. Most people don't actually
write webpage code anymore. You can see the bloat
that results in almost all commercial webpages.


Autogenerated HTML is huge and sloppy. Multiple nested DIVs and TABLEs -
with little or, frequently, nothing inside one and not inside the other
(apart from sometimes a single NBSP) to justify them.

That page seems to have close to 100 class names
just to assign styles to text sections! No one
writing the code could ever keep track of such
a mess. There are at least 2 CSS files pulled in, plus
an unknown number linked from the voluminous,
obfuscated script.


Yes, it's like the .PDF (or similar) some OCR software produces - might
generate something that looks the same, but - with each letter or maybe
group of two or three letters, or at least word, on the page having its
own XY co-ordinates, no chance of the text actually being usable. (To be
fair, OCR has improved a lot lately, perhaps due to the needs of blind
people.)
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

`Ergonomic' =/= `dext-handed'
  #30  
Old May 20th 18, 01:44 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
Mayayana
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 6,438
Default Pi-hole dot net and hardware ad blocking

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote

| since I _do_ use YouTube, I've left that bit be. (I can't remember where
| I got that information from - possibly you!)

It's news to me. I use DownloadHelper in Firefox.
If that can't get a video I don't see the video. I've
never streamed anything and don't plan to start.
So I don't need script, cookies, etc to see videos.

I've noticed that some videos are blocked with
DH, but in general I don't care about those. For
example, I can usually get homemade handyman
videos, or obscure, 20-year-old lectures, but I
probably can't get most pop music videos. I don't
generally listen to music by choice (much less
top-40 pop) so I don't care about those.

This recalls the discussion with VanguardLH. People
vary a lot in terms of what they do online. Someone
who does interactive things like shopping, watching
music videos, and using Facebook, for instance,
probably can't afford to improve their security and
privacy. Everything will break. They're already using
the Internet as interactive TV. So they've given up
most options aside from making entertainment choices.

There are trade-offs.


 




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