I might be a little crazy, but I like to browse news sites in a virtual machine, without a script or ad blocker. I've started doing this just to be reminded of how the other half lives.
E.g, when was the last time you visited Yahoo News without a script or ad blocker installed? Or MSNBC or WaPo or virtually any major news site w/out these things? It's a full frontal assault of loud videos that launch and play on their own, and pop-ups and pop-unders and 97 pieces of third-party Javascript.
So not only are they typically aiming a firehose of extraneous and distracting stuff at you, each one of those ad relationships offers the possibility of malicious ads running on your machine.
It kind of seems like we don't talk enough about how this aspect of news websites really does turn people off of reading the news from the original source.
https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/113526930319399955
@briankrebs I don't think I've used the internet without an ad blocker in a very, very long time. Much of the internet is basically un-useable without one. Even on my phone I use Firefox with […]
@briankrebs @threatresearch I believe circa 2015 @SwiftOnSecurity tweeted “deploy adblocks or deploy malware”, which got quite some traction
@briankrebs
I was trying to explain this to my mom and grandpa by comparing it to a music video I showed them, Ad Infinitum, by The Stupendium, which absolutely captures the feeling of […]
@briankrebs I regularly watch YouTube with ad blockers and a few days ago, I played one of the videos on my phone. It was awful!
I can see their point - they need revenue to offset the cost of […]
2024-11-23 SpaceLifeForm ┃ 1#️
@briankrebs
I do not even bother anymore. They either want me to disable my ad blocker or sign-in.
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@briankrebs
The most frustrating thing to me is the news sites say it's because no one wants to pay for news but the reality is they don't provide a fair option for us to pay them. If I want to […]
@briankrebs I think it goes far deeper & more malicious than even that Brian. I don't have ad blockers on myself. I didn't through the whole election too. I saw some truely iffy shit that leads […]
@briankrebs
makes those dry single product hawking sessions on right wing media come off like zen in comparison.
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@briankrebs Okay, I do actually believe that it is as described. I just don't understand how most people would put up with the constant ads.
@briankrebs Well said. I personally try to avoid news sites for the mentioned reasons. Also from a point of view your ISP is watching you read your news or (Government) they know your political […]
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