Are you familiar with the podcast “Firewalls don’t stop dragons”? This week’s episode is about online advertising and about how you are the product. E
[See the full post at: Firewalls don’t stop dragons]
Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher
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Firewalls don’t stop dragons
- This topic has 82 replies, 20 voices, and was last updated 3 years, 9 months ago.
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Unfortunately, there is no way, at least that I have found in a hurry, to speed up, or cut short the long and tiresome patter of the host, or anchor, or whatever, that precedes the talk by the guest speaker, to get directly and without further delay to the meat of this podcast. So I wonder if the guest got to say something about using ad blockers, because I have mine on at all times and never, ever see an ad. If, as it is implied in the summary copied by Susan in her blog, seeing an ad equals being robbed of personal information, so some rich people can get even richer by selling that information to the higher bidder, then how about someone like me who blocks all ads? Am I also getting robbed by way of blocked ads? This is no rhetorical question: I would really like to know the answer.
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If you download the podcast you can speed it up in a media player.
Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher
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Probably a lot of money spent in ads is wasted, but that does not mean that there is no point in advertising one’s products: people are more likely to buy something they have heard of before than something they have never heard of. Then there are certain kinds of ads, such as those for real state on sale, that people looking for a house to buy will read carefully, because they give descriptions of what the houses are like, their locations, some idea of the asking prices, and how to arrange to go and see them.
None of that means that one should not block ads at Web sites,
Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).
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OscarCP. I do a online search, then read reviews, then go to the source/Amazon/eBay/local store to buy the product. Never due to ads which I don’t see or skip (TV..)
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Alex writes: “I do a online search, then read reviews, then go to the source/Amazon/eBay/local store to buy the product. Never due to ads which I don’t see or skip (TV..)”
So do I, pretty much, but I am not everybody, or most people, just me, myself and I. Business owners and those who are invested in their businesses: for example the people that work there, maybe because they like it, but in any case to earn a living, are not interested in me in particular. If they have a decent product and I have it recommended repeatedly by different people, be it in the flesh or by writing articles in publications, digital or printed on paper, dedicated to reviewing and advising where and how to buy the best kind of what I am looking for, that’s fine with the business owners and their workers, all so very happy to sell me their what. Advertising is one way to get customers, building and keeping a good reputation is another. They are not exclusive of each other.
All this, of course, is about ordinary business owners of ordinary businesses: grocers’, clothing stores, butcher shops, pubs, computer repair shops, restaurants, bookstores, car repair garages, pharmacies, interior decoration, gardening and landscaping companies, and so on and so forth, and not about certain kind of supposedly big-time genius billionaire entrepreneurs who depend significantly on the use of surreptitiously spying and tracking ads to amass enough information from enough people to sell it at a profit big enough to fund their various quests for world domination.
Also I am not buying a house.
Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).
MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
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For example.. Look at games on mobile phones today. Apple and Android/Google, both with the same principle.
As an “older” person, who knows and played older games (even on a “portable devices”), the game was about having fun. Today game is “for free”, but the ammount of ads is simply unbearable, until you purchase the “premium version”. The game itself is less about having fun, its more about you being the “money-generator”. Games today are based on the same engine, just different pictures in it. Also very often the game trailer does look completely different from the game itselft.
Pay for VIP, or see 50 ads in a hour, that generates money for the developper.
Thank you Susan, for bringing this podcast to us, it contains interesting facts. Adblock is musthave for me.
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Speak of the devil, the people who produce the firewallsdontstopdragons site have arranged to let google know every visitor.
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Why do you think so? The linked website is tracker-free. No google there.
One found on the index page. Thats because of the Twiiter plugin embedded on the webpage.
I recommend to use DuckDuckGo essentials to block trackers on all websites. Works flawlessly for me 👍
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doriel, those tracker-finding sites are not exhaustive. The podcast connects to fonts.googleapis.com. Spying google does not provide free custom fonts because they are generous and they just want to make the internet look pretty. That is a tracker, it tells google who you are and what page you are on and when. Now that some privacy browsers automatically block google’s analytics and tags, the fonts serve as a sneaky end around. So when using e.g. Brave, google still tracks you on a very large percentage of websites via the fonts. Brave knows that, but Brave’s users mostly don’t.
firewallsdontstopdragons is using WordPress. The WP theme designers love to put in google fonts at every single opportunity, they admire google and will sell out your privacy to them more eagerly than the webmasters. (They also put the fonts on the admin pages, so that tells google who the blog writers and admins are even if they use aliases for authorship.)
Maybe Susan has enough clout to get the podcast to use the plugin that removes google fonts from WP themes. It’s a start.
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Of course, if you use some pre-programmed CMS like wordpress is, of course there is some API in order to use plugins, widgets, fonts and other things, that are ready to use. It depends what plugin do put into your CMS.
firewallsdontstopdragons is using the WP indeed. I can see the admin login page 🙂 🙂 default login adress is not changed, so the security is not so good on their webpage, I admit. Now silence, doriel! In order to keep their webpage safe 😉
But my opinion is, that nobody forces you to use the internet, if you are not satisfied with the security and anonymity. You can make your browsing secure and anonymous as much as possible (I see that you do and I appreciate that), but you cant blame others for using tools, that are available.
PS – I think someone with your knowledge knows, how difficult is to create PHP or js webpage from scratch. Its very very complicated, very few people can do it, that why people use CMS and APIs – to make things work together.
EIDT – Id like to blur the append to FQDN in order to not reveal the login page, but Im not able to do that anymore, cant delete the attachment, could some admin do that for me please?
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I understand you, doriel. But I’d say that this is a special case, since both the podcaster and the guest proclaim to be pro-privacy and anti-BigTech, whilst both employ google spyware on every site they have. To me, that makes them seem insincere or incompetent. AFAIK, they can keep the WP, but simply use a plugin to remove the fonts.
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Two self proclaimed privacy advocates in the US Senate are Rand Paul and Ron Wyden. Both have their official websites loaded with google spyware. Naturally, they didn’t do it personally; but there is no way to get them aware or to get it changed.
Btw, genuine thanks to Susan for st least trying to get people aware. Maybe she can try to get this very askwoody site to be a google free zone.
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I’ve removed the YOP poll plug in as that was one. I will have to investigate if I can get rid of the fonts. There comes a point in time that I’ve tried as much as I’ve humanly can to remove all of everyone’s complaints but the site has to function. This may be one of them as it appears it’s in the bbpress code.
Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher
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P.S. I’ll need to see if this impacts the site speed.
But on a personal level you can do this:
How to disable DNS prefetching?
For Chrome browser, click on Menu > Settings and scroll down and select Advanced option. Scroll down to the “Privacy and Security” and toggle the “Use a prediction service to load pages more quickly” option to disable or enable DNS Prefetch.
In Firefox, type “about:config” in the browser address bar. Search for “network.prefetch-next” and double click it to set it to false. Setting it to false would disable DNS prefetch
Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher
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There are more for FF
browser.urlbar.speculativeConnect.enabled False
network.http.speculative-parallel-limit 0 (that’s a zero)
network.dns.disablePrefetch true
network.predictor.enable-prefetch false (false is default in ESR, not sure about fast release version)
There are all the new tab page and urlbar preferences, too.
Arkenfox on github is the queen of FF about:config for privacy settings. Make a profile backup before experimenting, you WILL wreck it at first.
https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/blob/master/user.js
Read this and change the settings one by one to really understand what’s happening. Makes browsing really fast and clean. Can only do a small portion of this to Chromia.
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Bob1515: I don’t know what is Wyden’s profession (besides being a politician) but I would hazard the guess that he is a lawyer; I believe that Rand Paul is a physician.
Whether I am right or not about either of them, their Web sites being loaded with spyware and other beautiful things is what we get in this country when the US Congress decides, as it did some years back in order to save money, to kill off its own research organizations — and when most politicians in power, regardless of party, are either lawyers or physicians of one sort or another. And when some have done little actual professional work or even have had a regular job that was not in politics.
Something that is not exclusive to the USA, by the way.
Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).
MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
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I deliberately chose both an R and a D to be politically neutral. This is one topic that both sides can hopefully be united on.
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How to spot google spyware (and I’m not using ‘spyware’ in the antiquated, narrow definition):
- simplest is to right-click a page and view source, then Ctrl+f to search google, gstatic, doubeclick
- easiest once installed, use the browser addon uBlock Origin (not plain uBlock), and set to advanced. uBO also blocks, not just shows.
- use the browsers Developer Tools / Network tab. That’s better with FF, worse with Chromium browsers because they show only “provisional” headers.
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From ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ “Nothin’, don’t mean nothin’ hon’ if it ain’t free”
Rule #1: There is NO such thing as a Free Lunch! Or anything else for that matter, somebody pays somewhere along the way.
Rule#2: Advertising is just the first version spam. Put it out often enough to enough people and you’ll get enough bites to pay the freight.
HTH 😎
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I would think that it would behoove a nation’s federal legislature or parliament to enact legislation that by law requires every maker of an internet browser, that makes itself available to internet users in said nation, to provide an interactive prompt every time a user launches the browser giving the user the option to disable all tracking and ads during their browser session. If the user chose to disable all tracking, ads, and data collection immediately upon launching the browser application, that choice would only remain applicable until the browser application was closed. There could be two choices in a pop-up prompting window: block or skip. Anyone uninterested in making the choice would just click on “skip.” The addition of the prompting option could be incorporated into any of the frequent (at least monthly) browser updates. Governments could thereby establish a legal right of their citizens to choose not to be tracked, invaded and robbed of their data.
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I must confess that both of the employers that I worked for during most of my working life, one was one of America’s largest state university systems and the other a large supermarket chain (a combined 30 years between the two employers), both had closed intranet systems that prevented users from accessing the outside public internet. Their intranet systems only allowed the user to access what was readily available via their internal network, which in the case of the university system also included the other colleges and universities and system administration in that state, as well as the state government, itself. For the supermarket chain, their intranet only provided access to other corporate offices, such as other store locations and the corporate headquarters. I have often wondered why more businesses, state and local governments, and other targets of hackers aren’t walled off from the outside public internet like that, too. Maybe my experience was too long ago to be applicable in today’s business world. But with both of those employers, I would have had to use my own personal laptop computer with my own separate internet connection (not the company’s internet) to get on the public internet; and no company computer or device would have permitted any connection between my laptop and one of their devices.
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How would you then handle the sites that will not allow entry until adblockers etc are turned off??
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DriftyDonN: “How would you then handle the sites that will not allow entry until adblockers etc are turned off??”
(1) Mostly by getting out of there in a hurry.
(2) Unless it seems they have something I really need to see. In such a case: With great care. I’ll probably get out and then delete cookies, if the site looks sketchy. That is going to have some repercussions, but better that than something much worse.
Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).
MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
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I just go in anyway. I haven’t found one yet that will defeat Reek’s Anti-Adblock Killer, even as old and out of date as it is said to be. It’s a combination of a script for *monkey (Greasemonkey, Violentmonkey, Tampermonkey) and an adblocking list subscription for the adblocker of your choice. I’ve seen people say it’s no good because it’s old and unmaintained, but when I have had a site pull that stuff, it’s gotten rid of it.
If that did not work, I would try other things to get rid of the ads without triggering the script that puts up the adwall (on some sites, it’s as easy as not allowing a script from a third party), and if all of that failed, I’d go elsewhere.
Adblocking is more than annoyance removal… it’s also an important privacy and security tool, as there’s almost no such thing as web ads without trackers these days, and the ad networks have been used to distribute malware before. If the site wants to host non-third-party ads without trackers or analytics scripts, I’d consider dropping the adblocker, but the odds are I would not have to, as ads that are hosted by the actual domain in question wouldn’t be recognized by the ad blocker as ads.
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“How would you then handle the sites that will not allow entry until adblockers etc are turned off??”
For an often visited site like weather, I’d tinker with uBlock Origin (a self-described “broad spectrum blocker” not just ad blocker; and it’s a rare example of a truly good natured non-profit effort. Some ad blockers are for profit).
But for a one off, I’d switch to using the Epic browser, which self clears all data on shutdown and also has a builtin proxy.
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I think that would be dreadful.
I have my privacy settings the way I want them. I don’t want to be queried each time I start the browser about this.
As bad as it currently is, one way to make sure it gets worse is to get government involved.
The EU’s rule about cookies requiring permission has resulted in every site in the world now pestering me with a “we use cookies; if you proceed, it means you’re ok with it” message. I KNOW you use cookies. They all do. I don’t need to be told that every time I visit every site (any cookies it may set to record my preference get removed, as do all of the other cookies). So now I need a browser extension to remove the cookie warnings, and it has to be constantly updated as cookie warnings on different sites change form. Some sites refuse to work because the addon has hidden the cookie warning… apparently it’s waiting for some kind of a response.
Has that annoyance come with any improvement in privacy at all? I don’t think so.
For the typical, non-techie user who may not have understood beforehand that nearly every site sets a cookie, now they know that there’s an annoying popup on every new site they visit. They’ve quickly learned to hit the X on the cookie warning on each new site to get rid of it and get back to using the web, no different than dismissing an advertising popup that is doing the same thing (getting in the way of what they’ve come to the site to do). They’ve probably forgotten what these little popups say, as the habit is to just dismiss it without ever reading it, just like they ignore security popups and just hit “allow” to get the annoyance out of the way, without ever wondering why the annoyance is there or what it might mean. For sites they have visited before, they’ve forgotten there was ever a popup about cookies in the first place. Out of sight, out of mind.
Despite having approved cookies all those times, they still have no idea what a cookie is or why they should care, but the requirement the EU imposed has certainly made the web more annoying (and I don’t even live in Europe).
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There is an interesting and fairly recent article about cookies and tracking over at the Markup org website, where their motto is: ‘Big Tech Is Watching You. We’re Watching Big Tech.’ The article: Is the Cookie Web Tracker Dying? By Colin Lecher – July 30, 2021 states: “The internet’s original data collection tool is still ubiquitous, even as the web moves away from it”
“For now, however, cookies are still nearly ubiquitous. When The Markup scanned more than 80,000 popular websites using our web privacy inspection tool Blacklight, we found that 87 percent loaded cookies from third parties or from tracking network requests.”
The Markup org hosts A Real-Time Website Privacy Inspector By Surya Mattu named Blacklight, where you can “Enter the address of any website, and Blacklight will scan it and reveal the specific user-tracking technologies on the site—and who’s getting your data.” One of my favorite sites to visit for amateur astronomy is EarthSky org, which has a lot of Ad Trackers and Third Party Cookies. I use multiple extensions to block these, but I thought some may find it interesting to see the results of Blacklight for EarthSky org:
https://themarkup.org/blacklight?url=earthsky.org
I can not remember who said that if we use the internet our privacy is gone, but we still do our best to try and be private, thanks to all who help out here at AskWoody.-
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FWIW, the NOAA radar maps work pretty well now. I don’t use the site you mentioned much at all these days. They ate WU, which basically became a tracking site, then quit loading well if at all. Go IBM!
There’s a topic here somewhere on the NOAA maps.
Rant: I have an outdoor weather station that measures everything you’d want and uses its own radio to send the data to an indoor display. Any idea how hard it is to find one that doesn’t require a phone?
End of rant. 🙂
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There are UTM codes that get add to link that describe the site you are coming from, what advertising campaign the advertiser is using, etc. Google Analytics does make use them and others, it is uncertain whether these UTM codes are combined with other methods of collecting data.
UTM codes are common on Facebook and embedded in some other websites to track your navigation to use a service provided by the owner.
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I’ve been using uBlock Origin for around 5 years on Firefox and am very happy with it. It does more than just block ads and I feel more secure with it. I use Firefox exclusively now and got rid of Adblock and replaced it with uBlock Origin.
Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's-
I m using both Adblock Plus and uBlock Origin and have not noticed any adds sneaking in when using my main browsers: Waterfox “Current” (default) ,with both addons enabled and, now and then Chrome, always with Adblock enabled.
Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).
MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV1 user thanked author for this post.
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uBlock Origin works well for me on Firefox.
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Ah, my little post was moved! Good! Now I can ask:
Does simply using an ad blocker in my browser allow me to be free of concern ref SB’s good post? (assuming something like uBlock Origin and FF)(there are a few “good” ad blockers out there and a few good browsers.)(imho 😀 )
EDIT: no, I will rant on this. People need to take full responsibility for clicking on a link that does them in. After all, you can just hover and see right where it is going! If you can’t trust yourself, unplug that RJ45!
EDIT: also note that I always assume that the CIA and NSA, and doubtless much other alphabet soup, knows precisely everything I do, and I am okay with that. I have always assumed that. I compute accordingly. I have never had a virus or been hacked. (though I did once have avast or some AV go completely ape on my computer trying to tell me that everything on my computer, including my very existence, needed to be isolated and removed. Oh and then there was the time I installed norton long long ago and when I rebooted it showed me a picture of a bomb – you know, one of those round things with a lit fuse… But no real ones.
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uBO = uBlock Origin
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First, set it to advanced (click the icon then the gears). Then whenever you click the uBO icon in the browser top bar, you’ll see everything.
Btw, if you install uBO in Brave, you will see that Brave allows the google spyware known as custom fonts.
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Does simply using an ad blocker in my browser allow me to be free of concern
No. We have had plenty of no click holes in browsers etc (remember Flash player?} and there are likely to be more.
Run a good anti virus product – MS Windows Defender is good.
Backup regularly.
Watch out for odd things happening on your PC.cheers, Paul
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imho, NO. The foolishness and problems come simply with what you access with your browser. It is an operator problem, NOT an opsys prob. I use WD on 21H1 and essentially nothing on Mint(I use their built in firewall at “home,on,allow,deny default settings)(there is nothing in the log and 9 items in Report). I use FF with uBlock Origin or AdBlock Plus so I never see 99.999% of the stuff that is getting folks into trouble. FF also has a built in thing that asks me if I REALLY want to access this site that is supposedly bad (I usually do temporary if I know the site is good.)
At this instant I am on Mint 99% of the time. But things always change! 🙂
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Does Using the GNU/Linux minimize the risk of getting stalked, or data stolen?
No. Linux has close to none malware but Linux severs (and PCs) are hacked constantly (see attached)
iOS has been targeted with NSO’s Pegasus but for a private user is is very secure with buit-in anti-stalking and privacy features.
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Remembering Woody
