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Comment by delroth | Hacker News Reader

> if there are ads resources in the page

Please read the full comment (or preferably, the standard) before spreading FUD.

Whether ads are being loaded is being determined by an opaque, ever-changing algorithm implemented in a closed source browser. We have no way to verify that this is how it's actually working, or when it will change. That doesn't even include how a good majority of the internet is monetized by ads, often Google's ads.

It's simply safest to assume that every page will be included.

I don't think calling Chrome a closed source browser is accurate unless you have a citation showing that Chromium is missing this code

Microsoft Edge is a closed source browser, for comparison

Chrome is a closed-source fork of Chromium that applies numerous proprietary patches to Chromium. There's no way to tell what has been modified in that process (short of decompilation, et.al.).

Pretty much the same process that Microsoft takes with Edge, really.

I don't think calling Chrome a closed source browser is accurate unless you have a citation showing that Chromium is missing this code

That's completely backwards. You would need some evidence showing that Chrome does not include proprietary patches, otherwise you pretty much have to conclude that it's closed-source, even if it includes a large % of code from an open-source product.

Is it well defined what "ads resources" is?

It doesn't seem to be defined in the standard, but it's partially documented in Chromium's docs how they determine what is an ad resource:

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs...

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/master/...

This seems to indicate the authoritative source of truth is EasyList. On my current machine, the list seems to be stored in "~/.config/google-chrome/Subresource Filter/Unindexed\ Rules/9.22.0" and should be easily inspectable.

I don't know if I've missed some documentation pointers related to this.

It is kind of hilarious that they use antitracking resource as part of their new malware infrastructure.

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