transhumanisticpanspermia:

stego:

illogical-bullshit:

@sites that openly call me out for using adblock

did I ask

IT Guy here. We (the IT and IT Security experts) continue to find that the more obtrusive a “turn off your ad-blocker” site tends to be, the *more likely it is* for that site to serve ads containing viruses or malware.

A great example of this is, I shit you not, Forbes.com. They refuse to let you see their content with an ad-blocker enabled, yet they do such a profoundly shitty job vetting their ads that their site has *repeatedly* served up Malware to end users. Yet they still demand your ad blocker be turned off or you subscribe to their content to see it.

Look, I get that content owners need to get paid. I think we can all agree on that. The problem is that until and unless ad networks are extensively vetted, and until and unless these site owners agree to compensate users infected with malware from their site for lost time or damages, then an ad blocker is more of a *LEGITIMATE SECURITY TOOL* than some mere banner ad blocker, more along the lines of your anti-virus suite or anti-malware scanner. I’d recommend anyone and everyone at home make use of ad blockers by default, to be honest, to protect yourselves.

So yeah. If a website calls you out on an ad blocker in anything beyond static images in place of ad blocks (like Reddit, Spiceworks, and Nexus Mods), then keep them blocked. More than likely, those cretins have served folks malware before, but they’d rather you unblock their dangerous ad networks instead of fixing the problem in the first place.

It’s not just security either - the code ad networks use to serve even non-Flash ads is so preposterously bloated that a single tab of a nominally non-interactive website can consume upwards of 300MB of memory and 20% processor time on a *high end* processor. And that’s assuming that you’re blocking Flash - allow Flash and you might as well just have the website delivered by mail.