Hacker News Reader

Comment by massysett | Hacker News Reader

NY Times guy is still justified. No, his company should not serve malware. But if I get malware and it hijacks my machine, that means my browser and machine were both insecure. An ad blocker seems to me to be a bizarre way to make up for an insecure browser.

People get this odd vehement behavior when told that companies that depend on ads won't like it if you block their ads. The grown up thing to do would be to stop using these companies if you dislike their stance against your ad blocker. Instead there is this childish whining, as though people are entitled to free news without ads.

View on HN

Your computer is insecure. Mine too. Even if we applied every single patch from your OS vendor and application vendors we're left with the undisclosed vulnerabilities sold by black hats to malware writers. The ad blocker is a prevention system to limit the exposure of out computers to attacks.

There isn't a list of sites serving ads that carry malware so we have to block everybody, sorry for them all. If there were a blacklist of notorious malware carriers, much like the one for spammers, we could use it to mount a blockade. Maybe it's really the right thing to do. I'm afraid it will include most of the news sites.

Every time someone posts something like the parent comment, I just assume they're using Urbit or TempleOS and move on.

This is like claiming a firewall is unnecessary because properly-configured software should be unexploitable. It's correct in a certain sense, but it ignores that configuration is terribly difficult to do correctly, hence the idea that security should be layered.

Ad-blocking is a security layer; browser configuration is terribly difficult to do correctly.

> This is like claiming a firewall is unnecessary because properly-configured software should be unexploitable. It's correct in a certain sense, but it ignores that configuration is terribly difficult to do correctly, hence the idea that security should be layered.

I actually agree with that. Firewalls are often incredibly complex codebases and usually written in C (with a rationale of the need for performance). Exposing such a thing to arbitrary internet traffic virtually guarantees exposing a vulnerability.

Just don't open network ports except for services that you want to expose to the network. If you really need to expose an insecure service to a limited set of machines, use a VPN.

Browsers are insecure. Fact of life. A lot of work is being done to rectify this; but in the near future, this will continue to be the case. Meanwhile, using ad blockers for security may seem bizarre, but it works.

Judging by your post you seem to have no knowledge about computer security.

There is probably no internet-connected workstation today that is safe from malware, so one needs every bit of protection they can get.

Not running an ad-blocker or even better something like the Firefox protection tracker is foolish.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com