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Comment by hugo0384729109 | Hacker News Reader

A bit odd to open an article about an arms race for my attention and see an ad for a book (A whirlwind out-of-this-galaxy adventure! #1 New York Times best selling author...) in the menu that takes up the top half of the page, and then only the title of the article and no actual text before scrolling (mobile safari)... and then a donate now box also came up over 80% of the screen. Also a nice touch to have all the social media widgets connected so my attention can be weaponized while I read about my attention being weaponized.

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There's no better time than now (Meltdown/Spectre) to switch to whitelist only JS (NoScript works). The menu/ads completely fail to display but the text is just fine.

Nope. My personal preference is uMatrix, but that's an implementation detail. I rarely see an ad, and I didn't see any on this page. Also, I have more or less tuned out Facebook and similar sleaze, and I try to maintain some vigilance concerning anything which begins to unduly attract my attention.

And then I have to wonder: Am I living in a cleanroom? Am I letting my defenses rot? Am I setting myself up for a fall if some day I end up face to face with all the unfiltered gunk out there, presented in some new, insidious manner that I believe myself far too sophisticated to succumb to? Have I - or we - perhaps already succumbed, but do not know it?

Didn't the author of uMatrix stop using it himself in favor of uBlock origin?

No idea. It's certainly still being maintained. Gives you loads of very finegrained control. Not quite clear to me why it's so overshadowed by the good but far less capable uBlock.

I'm pretty sure you let your defenses against invasive advertising rot if you live in your adblocker bubble. You know, pathogens and immune systems and such...

I've done the same thing, but I wonder how much I am really protecting myself. I need to whitelist sites that I use to get them to work (HN, for example), but that doesn't stop HN from attacking me.

I suppose it raises the bar, but how soon until I whitelist a site that attacks me?

You don't need to whitelist HN. It works fine without it. It just involves reloads. Also, it really helps to only ever temporarily whitelist so exposure is minimized and you learn what you can get by with.

You'll never have perfect security, but whitelisting JS does raise your defense a lot : mainly because you'll be able to block most attacks from third parties/ads

That's why javascript blocker is just one layer of a multilayer defense.

It would be an excellent outcome of Meltdown/Spectre if we could just get rid of JavaScript and other attempts at throwing arbitrary crap code at you (such as WASM unblockable ads, bc miners, and what not) and work towards the original goal of the Web as federated (or even better p2p) hyperlinked documents once again.

Seriously. My kingdom for 10pt verdana and a few hours clicking through a web ring.

Funny, I didn't even notice the adverts. Looking back I now see them. I guess my attention filtering is fairly well tuned.

I did notice the banner asking that I subscribe.

Honestly, BoingBoing has devoted itself to misleading-hype summaries of other people's content in almost the same manner as Huffington Post.

I'll still give Doctorow credit for emphasizing the right topics, like media accountability and a cooperative browsing experience. But his personal output is hardly consistent with those positions...

I agree re giving him credit and I’m certainly a fan. It’s a hard topic to publish about on the web because that type or article could very easily be a plain static HTML page with no JavaScript on a personal server but obviously he’s a professional writer and probably sold to that site to get paid (fair enough) and the site gets that money from ads so circle of life but still dissonant to take the message to heart in that context.

The irony being that boingboing is the proto-Buzzfeed

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