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Comment by zer0gravity | Hacker News Reader

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zer0gravity

> There is no core privacy premise of the internet, and certainly not one that everybody used it signed up for.

Sure there isn't. The internet is just a jungle where predatory animals can hunt you down if you go in their teritory.

They say we've exited from the jungle once, but apparently the jungle is still in us.

Besides ad blockers, we need more plugins to help us mark these animals and keep us away from them.

A nice plugin would be to just remove from your searches all the links to domains known to be involved in spam.

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At this point a plugin probably isn't enough. We need a better browser that gets back to the document viewing roots. Something better than NoScript that has a rough idea of the types of transforms a domain's JS performs so that it can serve me the "page" w/out running suspicious code. Although I suspect this would just start a new style arms race of obfuscation similar to adblock, etc.

> Although I suspect this would just start a new style arms race of obfuscation similar to adblock, etc.

We could use AI to detect and remove ads, perhaps combined with collaborative filtering.

And what would the advertisers do next?

That would just further the arms race.

I don't think so. If a really smart AI cannot detect the ad, why would a user be able to consciously detect it?

AI will perhaps push ads into the subconscious space. But an arms race will make ads more and more subconscious, until they basically disappear.

Well... So what? I mean, just because an arms-race exists doesn't mean participation is futile or counterproductive.

("But Thog, bigger sharp stick will just mean angrier dangercat. Is club race. Why ever do?")

> Although I suspect this would just start a new style arms race of obfuscation similar to adblock, etc.

Then so be it. Apparently life is an arms race..

This works really well for me, and avoids the overhead of using a browser plugin: https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

hosts file blocking will never be as good and complete as add-on based blocking. You cannot block on DOM, you cannot block specific things from a host but let through others, etc. Not to mention that it is much harder to toggle if you need to.

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