Edward Snowden says it's your 'duty' to install ad blockers | Hacker News Reader

Edward Snowden says it's your 'duty' to install ad blockers

mashable.com

28 pointshellofunk36 comments

Ironically, this site presents a huge ad at its top that makes reading on a small laptop a challenge until the ad disappears.

"Edward Snowden Says X" has become pretty effective clickbait.

It's hard to deny that he says smart things that make sense, that's probably why. Whatever people may think about what he did, he remains quite an intelligent fellow with a good knowledge of relevant matters.

It's also hard to deny he's become a brand, and most of what's attributed to him, now, comes second and third-hand from sources with a stake in viewership.

Not that this discredits anything, but if we're moving into a post-Snowden age in terms of most coverage being meta-coverage, people might need to start being concerned about the biases and motives behind stories attached to him.

Im personally more concerned about trackers more than ads. I don't want commerical companies collecting more than 2000 data points on me then selling it to some other data broker. I've used many tracker blockers, and one that lets me keep organized is https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redmorph-browser-c....

I happen to agree that it's a good thing to use ad blockers (and that malvertising is becoming a bigger and bigger problem), but it's a bit much being lectured on duty by someone who betrayed his duty, betrayed his colleagues and betrayed his nation.

How did he betray his nation exactly?

From where I'm sitting, it looks like he did everyone except the government a huge fucking favour.

Your government is not your nation, and your government are the ones betraying you.

> How did he betray his nation exactly?

He revealed information about supposed national-security intelligence-collection measures.

> From where I'm sitting, it looks like he did everyone except the government a huge fucking favour.

He certainly did the Chinese and Russian governments a huge favour.

> Your government is not your nation, and your government are the ones betraying you.

Hardly. Nothing he has alleged is illegal; nothing he has alleged is unconstitutional; everything he has alleged was appropriately targeted.

I'll grant him this much: he doesn't think he's evil; he thinks he's doing good. But what he's actually done is cause exceptionally grave damage to the government and people of the United States of America (and, insofar as the United States act as guarantors of the Pax Americana, he's endangered the rest of the world as well).

> He certainly did the Chinese and Russian governments a huge favour.

How?

> Hardly. Nothing he has alleged is illegal; nothing he has alleged is unconstitutional; everything he has alleged was appropriately targeted.

Have you been reading the same news/leaks as I have?

> But what he's actually done is cause exceptionally grave damage to the government and people of the United States of America (and, insofar as the United States act as guarantors of the Pax Americana, he's endangered the rest of the world as well).

Again, how do you know this?

Well that's the whole argument there - what he revealed was illegal and unconstitutional. Denial of that makes him look pretty bad, I admit.

You sound like a propaganda sponge.

I'm guessing that Edward pays for all content and services he uses along with the rest of the world so the ad model is unnecessary. And so his advice doesn't equate to stealing. ;)

The ads are "stealing" your: cpu, battery, bandwidth. Thanks to economies of scale it costs them almost nothing to serve the ad while it costs you a measurable amount to download it and display it. If it cost equally for them to serve the ad there wouldn't be so many obnoxious ads.

Also, malware.

They're not stealing anything. You are agreeing to them when you consume ad-supported content. You are free to never use that site again. Yet, you come back because you think the benefits are worth the cost. There are people who don't come back and gripe about a different kind of ad: those snuck into paid services by oligopolies. I feel their pain as they are getting shafted by the power the oligopolies have.

The rest of you want to freeload and aren't getting the freeloading experience you desire. Feel free to try but be responsible enough to admit what you're doing. Otherwise, many services that are ad-supported can be replaced with paid ones with more privacy-focused ones than ever post-Snowden. There's also the alternative of not using what you won't pay for in attention to ads. If you're just getting robbed by ads, feel free to give up the content as it had no value to you and was a robbery rather than an exchange.

No. Clicking a link does not constitute consenting to ads, as the link itself does not come with any legalese saying so. And since I'm already using an adblocker by default, the content as displayed on my screen gives no indication whether or not I'm missing anything. So me being a return visitor is also not any indication that I've consented to whatever my browser is not showing.

There are a few sites that don't work at all with an adblocker, and those sites I'm happy to not visit again. But the whole "consent by default" is not a valid interpretation of consumer law in the EU, whether you phrase it as freeloading or not.

In fact, my browser is muted by default, and I always mute TV commercials (used to have a mythtv plugin for it, even). Are you now going to accuse me of stealing for protecting the silence of my own home?

I already agreed with another commenter that I should've exempted the first click. The rest of your arguments seems to go like this.

1. You know that most of the web's content is paid for with ads.

2. You've installed an ad-blocker to prevent them from loading.

3. You didn't see them when you do so it doesn't count.

That's a funny argument, right there. You could just as easily cover your eyes as you're driving through traffic and make the same argument. However, you knew what would be ahead of you, the significance, and made the decision anyway for selfish reasons. Fine if you do as I run an adblocker, too.

Strange that so many pretend like they aren't ripping off sites giving them content or a huge uptake of this wouldn't damage those same sites. Why do you keep pretending?

"In fact, my browser is muted by default, and I always mute TV commercials (used to have a mythtv plugin for it, even). Are you now going to accuse me of stealing for protecting the silence of my own home?"

Did you blank the content that the ads paid for, as well? Or just your end of the arrangement? I'm accusing you of talking content while blocking what pays of it. If it's not stealing, it's something very similar.

Many ads are visual or textual, though, so I'm not sure why you're bringing up the silence of your home as a counter to all ads except as a reframing of the discussion to make your ad-avoidance seem more sensible. Realistically, you don't care if they loose money and go out of business so long as you get the content with little to nothing in return. That's your actual position.

I don't pretend. You make it seem like I need to defend my choice of using an adblocker, I disagree with that premise. There is no sales contract, and I have no obligation to waste my attention on webpage ads anymore than I have an obligation to listen to TV commercials. There is no moral argument to be had either, as long as we ignore the morality of user profiling by the same ad community.

Besides, the cash flow for ad monetization is so convoluted that it would be very hard to conclusive demonstrate financial harm by my actions.

The user profiling and obscure cash flow I agree with. They certainly have to get some shit straight on their end, too. Haha.

I do pay for ad free content (hulu, netflix, aiv, hbo now, etc...), or I pay then block ads (youtube channels w/ patreon).

The problem I have isn't so much that I'm worried about ads, or entirely anti advertising. It's that online advertising has reached the point where it's too annoying not to block it. The amount of ads I was seeing outweighed the value I got from the content, so I block them all.

Now there's a more honest answer and approach. I agree with you on how annoying they're getting. Far as paid vs unpaid, the question is are you blocking ads only from sources you're paying or also ads that are paying for content you aren't paying for? I'd bet it's still piracy partly or mostly.

To be clear, I block them too for their annoyance and malware risks they pose. I push for solutions to that (eg Adblock's Acceptable Ads, ADsafe). Well, some like Youtube I let through because they're easy enough to ignore (esp with mute button). Amazon and eBay have those, too. On rare occasions, it's actually something I'm interested in. The rest are blocked by default. And you won't catch me lying about essentially ripping them off until they ditch their annoying, dangerous BS in favor of acceptable ads or option to pay.

Note: One thing I miss about late 90's and early 2000's Internet is that there were tons of good subscription, services plus "all on a CD" paid content. Our modern stuff is more fun and diverse for sure but innovative efforts like Patreon show there's room for improvement in ads vs paid.

Nope Nope NOPE

When I click on a link I have no idea what is behind it. If every link had some pointer-hover stats that popped up to tell you that it will be making X requests and X amount of data will be downloaded it would be possible for users to make informed decisions. Instead we click a link and pray that we don't get socked with malware from an ad network.

Every link click is executing unauthorized code in your browser sandbox.

And let's not forget that "news" on the internet today is simply "copying and pasting an entire article from another site, modifying the title to be clickbait, and waiting for the masses to consume your ads"

Websites with original content are not the ones trying to fuck over the users, and if they offered good pay-for content people would... pay for it!

All the thieves can go bankrupt for all I care.

"When I click on a link I have no idea what is behind it."

You're a real, online adventurer if the links you click are so random that you have no idea what's on the other side. That means you religiously avoid sites like Google, Yahoo, Youtube, Facebook, etc where you understand what your getting and what's supporting it. The rest of us know what's behind some links and not others.

"Every link click is executing unauthorized code in your browser sandbox."

It's authorized because you clicked it knowing that. Whole web model is others supplying HTML and JS, at a minimum, to your browser without you knowing what's in it before hand. It's why I run sandboxing and isolation schemes. Anyway, you're more than happy to run all of it but the advertisements. So, clearly that isn't your real worry. :P

"And let's not forget that "news" on the internet today is simply "copying and pasting an entire article from another site, modifying the title to be clickbait, and waiting for the masses to consume your ads""

Given that, I guess you don't use news sites either. Means the hacker who is controlling your PC is also an avid reader of Hacker News. You might want to restore from backups and harden your system more. Adios.

> They're not stealing anything. You are agreeing to them when you consume ad-supported content.

I don't remember signing or agreeing to anything.

Did you compensate the author in some way or just take their stuff then move on? What effect do you think that will have if majority also started blocking ads?

If their business model is poor, it's not up to me to compensate them by dealing with their obnoxious, psycholigically manipulative, bandwidth hogging, performance-crippling, potential malware attack vector ads.

If their business fails, it fails.

Spoken like a true pirate. I've heard people that rob stores use the same kind of logic. At least you're honest about not caring and ripping them off. I'm mainly calling out the dishonest here. ;)

The problem there isn't advertising per se, it's that any URL can return an arbitrary amount of content of any type . Advertising is no more "stealing" your resources in that sense than any other heavy assets.

Great point. Reminds me of another issue: people who claim it's just about the malware are likely to be visiting arbitrary sites loading JS, etc from them. Plenty of malware risk there. Must be blocking ads for other, different reasons. ;)

By simply clicking a link, you have not made any agreement with a given website you're visiting. It is not stealing when you click a random link from a friend. Sure, by "continuing to use this site," (usual EU privacy popup message) your continued browsing could be constituted as acceptance of their policies. But until that happens, there is no implicit agreement. Any tracking they attempt is outside of any agreement, and it is your duty to protect yourself and your privacy.

Your point about the first click does necessitate revision. Let's exclude unknowing clicks from my original claim. That leaves at least two (a) the domain name makes it clear there will be ad-supported content on it and (b) the second or later click on one which you now know has ad-supported content. Block ads while consuming their content is a parasitic relationship with less benefit to them at the least and piracy at the worst.

Definitely not a "duty" people have to do such a thing. The malware issue is a valid concern and people may decide on that issue. They're still pirating the content if they keep doing that on websites they use. Web metrics show this would be the majority of site visits for majority of people following his recommendation.

No one signed a covenant saying that they would point their eyeballs towards ads, be they web surfers with ad block or television audiences with TiVo.

The flip side being, no one (or very few) ever signed a covenant saying they would not spy on you and sell the information you handed over to them, intentionally or not.

It is not stealing to install ad blockers. It is not stealing to fingerprint browsers.

I agree. I'm only saying they take something while dodging all methods to compensate its creator(s). Quite a selfish choice which damages creators. There's other angles but isn't it odd that not one person (except me) admits to doing that? Like they're reframing it in their heads to be A Good Thing rather than some selfish benefits plus potential harm.

It is definitely problematic, and I don't feel great about it. I recognize the need to compensate the creators of the content we consume. But the industry needs to move on from the surveillance business model before it rots away under them.

I guess this might be a good time for me to buy a subscription to NYT and WP.

Least you're thinking on it now. You might like this article that sums up the situation, how we got here, the issues, and possibilities for a better Web.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advert...

Personally, the echo chamber risk is the scariest for me as I get to see every day a democracy subverted by major media companies that do exactly that. It's incredibly effective. Far as alternative models, I think one start we can push is paying to make ads go away. I could be one time, monthly subscription, etc on a per-site basis priced at whatever you'd likely be worth in per-user ad revenue. Plus invest money into smart youth in academia or even private sector to work on alternative business models that optionally start with ads given their value to startups.

Just ideas I've been toying with.

Hey dipshit he threw away his entire way of life to tell you about an enormous imbalance of power. Try not to miss the forest for the trees.

When the visionary points at the moon, the fool looks at his finger.

Oh no, it's another Snowden fan boy that see's him as the Second Coming with associated perfection rather than a mixed bag of a person. One that thinks we should never critique any idea he has because he did something one time. That's not logically justifiable but let's try that.

Reality check: Snowden is both a whistleblower and a traitor. Heroically leaked evidence of abuse in domestic collection. However, he also leaked all our specific capabilities we legally and with America's support used on foreign countries ranging from competitors to opponents. Even Snowden admitted the good those tools do... did... again opponents like China. No good reason to ne to blow all our capabilities and many assets while leaving cooperating and competing nations to do same stuff against us PLUS have moral high ground.

Did he do this for a great reason with a gain worth that loss? No, he said why he didnt take time to differentiate the files: he didn't want to be caught with them, interrogated, bear journalistic burden, etc. So he just dumped our unredacted, foreign ops onto foreign journalists to dodge that risk and burden. Went from hero to total coward when I learned this. No self-sacrificing patriot of U.S. would blow all legitimate, foreign activity to save his own ass. That's what he said, though.

So, far from infallible God, your beloved Snowden has a complex, moral situation. He seems like a principle-driven person who took enormous risk to get information the public needed to know. He then published that plus stuff he shouldn't... which public largely condemns him over... just to reduce chance of harm to him. Quite selfish and treasonous. So, I have mixed feelings about him while being greatful for good stuff he did. And so... "but Snowden said!"... does not a good argument make unless it's specific, NSA stuff. Try again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com