I might be a little crazy, but I like to browse news sites in a virtual machine, without a script or ad blocker.
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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.
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Kevin Mirsky :donor:replied to BrianKrebs on last edited by
@briankrebs it's honestly insane when you think about it. No other medium is this drowned in advertising. Print media ads are fine. Heck, even TV ads are practically pleasant comparatively.
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@briankrebs Don't need to. It's bad enough when my wife hands me her phone to look at something.
I run a Pi-hole on my network so my phone doesn't see that garbage but, my wife is one of the 5 people on earth that click on ads and wants her device excluded from the filtering.
I can't stand using her phone. It's honestly distracting and obnoxious.
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(Operating System chosen * how many hours spent hardening it) = Crazy score
Since you are running with no script blockers, no ad blockers, and likely 10 instances of Bonzi Buddy swinging around on the screen, etc. then I'd rate it as fun, not crazy!
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kurtseifried (he/him)replied to BrianKrebs on last edited by
@briankrebs when I visit a traditional news site on a non-lockdown system yeah it’s visually difficult to read the news I find because of all the moving crap and ads overlaid. I can’t help but wonder if this ad brinksmanship is a major part of what’s killing readership.
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@briankrebs Let’s bring RSS readers back! Never gave up mine and can’t be bothered with overloaded news (or other) websites. Besides, you’ve got everything you want neatly categorised and in one spot.
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@michaeltomasek Did I mention it's a Linux VM?
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@steinbrecher Mine never went away. We have a huge number of readers who consume our content this way now exclusively. The sucky part is the folks who read through RSS don't often visit the site, and when they do they almost always block my ads, even though there is zero third-party content on it.
the other sucky part about leaving full-feed RSS is that a ridiculous number of blogs and websites simply republish my RSS feed in full on their own sites, without once linking to the original source.
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@briankrebs <Subtly pulls scorecard back out> So are we talking Mint/Fedora/Ubuntu-like or Qubes?
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@briankrebs My home network is ad-free (mostly) due to a pi-hole. This itself is sublime. I also use @littlesnitch and various other measures to counter intrusive junk. The moment I get on my work VPN I get bombarded with ads and it's so glaringly bad. I think, "this is what normal people see" and am grateful I do not. Thankfully, while on the work VPN the vast majority of the sites I interact with are not those laden with ads (AWS console, tech related sites, etc.), but it's still obvious.
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@briankrebs do you mean tor-browser in a disposable VM?
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@briankrebs At this point ice used an ad blocker for so long I've forgotten just how bad it is out there (though your site is one I have unblocked).
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@briankrebs I seem to recall a supply chain attack that impacted a bunch of news sites a few years ago?
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Robert [KJ5ELX] :donor:replied to BrianKrebs on last edited by
@briankrebs this is not crazy.
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@briankrebs It is bad.
It begs the question who is paying for that thinking they are reaching people?
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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 read about something in a small town 5 states away I'm not about to get an annual subscription to read just 1 or 2 articles. I suspect if all of these outlets worked together to provide reciprocal memberships/subscriptions we would see a lot more people subscribing. If subscribing to my local paper would give me access to local papers across the nation I would absolutely subscribe.And to anyone that points out that some papers provide an option to pay per article I hear you but most don't and considering the logistics of breaking out my credit card every time I want to read an article is just not practical. Perhaps a service that you pay into a bank and then all news sites accept payment from that bank?
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I do not even bother anymore. They either want me to disable my ad blocker or sign-in.
I get most of my news here.
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@bobkmertz I agree. I bet a lot of people would pay a subscription if they thought it would be like an Eagle Pass that gets you into all the parks for the year. I seem to recall reading about a few experiments in this, but I can't place that rn.