Apple Says the Government Bungled Its Chance to Get That iPhone’s Data

I read about two paragraphs or so of this article, scrolled down to read further and then was shown a glaring "Here's the thing about Ad Blockers...We get it: Ads aren’t what you’re here for. But ads help us keep the lights on. So, add us to your ad blocker’s whitelist or pay $1 per week for an ad-free version of WIRED. Either way, you are supporting our journalism. We’d really appreciate it." message.

I immediately closed the tab and remembered that there were other sites reporting the same piece of news. I could've looked at the internals and found a way to read the rest of the article, but it didn't seem worth it.

With the ad blocker on, this page was just about 54 HTTP requests and about 3.5MB in size (including all assets loaded). Not as bad as the homepage which is about 126 HTTP requests and more than 5MB in size with the ad blocker on.

I do whitelist some sites that I visit often and if they don't seem to have many trackers (sometimes temporarily), but wired.com is something I visit only occasionally. I really am not interested in being subjected to what another site (forbes.com) did with the appeal to remove ad blocking software and then get served malware.

I wish there would be an aggregator site that could collect some subscription money, provide information from a basket of websites without ads and trackers (like for ad free paid TV). Paying each site separately or disabling ad blockers on several sites - neither of them are optimal solutions for me right now.