Discuss mailing list

[Jacob Bachmeyer <jcb62281 AT gmail.com>]

Jonah Aragon wrote:
> This is a good point, and I was thinking about this myself. I’m not 
> actually sure how those anti-adblocking sites detect adblocking in the 
> first place. I haven’t run into this issue yet, but if anybody does 
> feel free to send me an email with a link and I’ll see if there’s 
> anything I can do about it.

They all ultimately rely on JavaScript.  Block JavaScript with NoScript 
or similar and not only are you protected from most (all?) browser 
exploits, but most ads also disappear.

Server-side anti-ad-block *might* be possible, but browser extensions 
can defeat it easily by requesting the ad resource and simply not 
displaying the ad.

> Other than that I don’t think there’s any disadvantages, and it’s 
>  probably better than browser extensions from a privacy perspective 
> since nothing gets resolved or downloaded in the first place.

Browser extensions, assuming they implement full blocking, prevent even 
a DNS query.  DNS blocking only prevents the connection to the ad server.

> This is incredibly easy to implement. I doubt we’ll block them by 
> default at the Tier 1 level because it goes against some of our core 
> values of anti-censorship in a way, but it’d be easy for others to 
> setup Tier 2s in a similar manner.

I entirely agree with this.  Also, the problem with letting "a little 
bit of censorship for a worthy cause" is policing the censors to guard 
against scope creep and lazy filter list maintenance.  I remember back 
in school where the site that distributed the Windows port of cdrtools 
was blocked under the category "Illegal Drugs".  There was nothing of 
the sort on that site anywhere.


-- Jacob