In Computer News
Google defeats Oracle in Java code copyright case. This is round 2, with Oracle vowing to go to the Supreme Court because Google used some Java APIs in Android.
If you are running Windows 7 and are tired of being bugged about Windows 10, go to Windows Update and uninstall KB3035583. If they send another copy of the ‘update’, highlight it, right click and ‘hide’ the update instead of installing it. They issued a different version of the ‘update’ yesterday and I turned off automatic updates and uninstalled the sucker.
Adobe is continuing its pattern of every other update of Flash freezing your browser.
21 comments
I don’t know what I was doing, but a couple weeks ago, my laptop bugged me about Windows 10. I guess I must have downloaded it, but never installed it… until I turned it on again and it installed itself. At least that’s how it seemed to me. Since it’s already installed, I guess I will leave it as is.
Welcome back OWL! If it works for you great. It doesn’t like my main computer, so when I’m sure that all of the data is verified on a back-up I’m going to rebuild the entire thing from scratch. Your machine may be more current than mine, or it is more standardized so 10 works.
Thank you, Bryan! So far, it seems to be working okay. On that laptop, I was still getting used to Windows 8, so I wasn’t thrilled to have more changes forced upon me. To tell the truth, I really still prefer XP. You’re right that my computer is more standard. I’m not techy like you are. It sounds like a lot of work ahead of you.
Any time you go beyond ‘pure vanilla’ in the computer world you are inviting trouble. As you had Windows 8, Windows 10 will be an improvement. I had Windows 7, which worked and acted a lot like my XP machines, so it is a real change for me.
I keep Flash disabled in my browser. When I view a site that uses Flash, the Flash portions appear as little gears that I have to right-click and select “Run Flash Plugin” to make them run. I’ve found that very few sites actually require Flash anymore, and the few who do, it’s easy to do that right-click.
The problems are almost always the ads, not the site content. I block pop-ups but let other ads run to pay for the sites. The people who create the ads screw up the code and crash browsers. when it gets really bad I switch to the iPad or the Pi who tend be more robust than Win.
I unfortunately have come to the conclusion that an ad blocker is pretty much required now to browse the Internet. Unfortunately because ads are what pays for the Internet, but the ad networks keep serving viruses. Even Google’s ad network has occasionally served viruses on Google’s own sites. I was amused when Forbes.com ran an article claiming that people who run ad blockers are evil, because Forbes themselves have served viruses to their customers at least three times that have been documented.
What needs to happen is that sites get together and create an ad network that can’t be gamed by the virus writers — an ad network that requires a confirmed bank account with a U.S. bank, etc. etc., so that someone in East Bugfuckistan can’t buy an ad with a stolen credit card number that hijacks browsers to steal yet more credit card numbers. Until that happens, sites are going to continue to see their ad revenue slide as more and more people give up and install ad blockers….
The ad servers are targeting volume, quantity over quality, which is a bad advertising strategy as it pisses people off. When you throw in the malware you create the market for ad blockers. Good, well done ads, not only move product, but if they are good enough they go viral. When people are looking for your ad you have success. When they are advoiding your ads, you have a failure.
What amazes me is that all these ads are being served by javascript from 3rd party servers that the web site doesn’t control and has no idea what they’re serving. It’s as if they *want* to serve junk ads. Yet reputable web sites don’t get together and form their own ad serving network where they can vet the ads prior to them being served. It’s a ridiculous setup and one that is going to collapse under its own weight as more and more ads end up getting blocked because so many junk and virus ads get served.
Atrios is constantly complaining about ads, but apparently doesn’t have a lot of control before the ad is served. The ad consolidators just seem to relay whatever crap is put out by the advertisers with no quality control filtering going on. The middle men seem to function to collect money from advertisers. take their cut, and pass the remainder on to the site owners. Given that almost no one bothers with customer service anymore, it is about what you would expect.
The ad networks put up entire blocks of ad space for auction, get a certain number of impressions on this kinda site, all you need is a (possibly stolen) credit card number and you’re good to go submitting a virus via cut-and-paste into a submit box on the ad network’s web site. The ad networks don’t give a shit. They don’t want to have to actually look at the ads, because a) that would cost money, and b) might make them liable if they missed a virus. So they don’t. A web site can block a specific ad or a specific ad submitter, but until someone complains about the virus how the hell are they supposed to know what’s being served by the ad server? That content never even touches their web site, it’s served directly from the ad provider!
The problem with people like Atrios is that all they do is whine about it, they don’t actually do anything about it. Like I said, this is going to require a lot of major web sites getting together and forming their own ad network that specifically validates people against U.S. bank accounts before allowing them to post ads. That way if someone posts a virus, there’s somewhere to go to seize money for compensation. If Paypal can damn well validate you’re a real person by touching your bank account, then HonestAds could do the same bloody thing. But it has to be a *lot* of web sites, enough to force advertisers to cooperate. Without that, we’re stuck with the bottom feeders who let anybody with a keyboard and a credit card post any damn thing as an ad…
A lot of sites are now using ad block checking and won’t allow access unless the ad blocker is disabled. I’ve been using a modded hosts file for years now, and it does a better job and is faster anyway since the ad domains are completely *blocked* rather than having to check each page as it loads.
I use Abelhadigital HostMan to manage the hosts file & the lists which are updated regularly. Lists I prefer include:
MVPS Hosts
hpHosts (Ad and Tracking Servers only)
Peter Lowe’s AdServers List
Cameleon
Malware Domain List
SomeoneWhoCares
I also used the SpyEyeTrackers list, but it was discontinued (was a project of a Swiss Security blog ‘abuse.ch’. They have a new Ransomeware Tracker I’m trying out.
They also have what is probably the best SSL Blacklist (SSLBL) given that a significant amount of malware is now served via SSL.
Anyway, the upshot is that my browsing is a lot faster, I use less bandwidth and adblock detectors are useless. 🙂 My hosts file currently has about 35,000 domains blocked, including over 2 dozen (and growing) belonging to M$ and a dozen from Adobe.
BTW, I don’t use localhost – 127.0.0.1 (the local loopback IP) as my domain block IP!
1. It’s not a legitimate invalid address,
2. When using apache or any web server, the log file becomes huge & the server works harder!
A better and legitimate invalid address is of course: 255.255.255.0 It works much better! 🙂 Also of course, using 255… means that the FIRST rule in hosts MUST be (and should always be anyway):
127.0.0.1 localhost
Info about the above on this old, but relevant, reference (2009) site: ABE Warnings Everywhere OMG!
Hope this helps.
Oh, if anyone wants a list of malicious M$ & adobe domains, let me know. I maintain those lists, and a couple others. 🙂
Hmmmm… I should add that the last link is to a blog maintained by Giorgio Maone, creator of NoScript & FlashGot. I’ve been following (and chatting with) him for about a decade. He’s won more of my respect than just about anyone else out there in regards to ‘Internet Security’. He’s also co-founder of an Italian IT company called “InformAction” (1997).
He is a target of a lot of FUD, especially by the Mozilla Firefox community as he often accuses (with proof) several of them of being sloppy and generally poor developers. 🙂
Example: CrossFUD: an Analysis of Inflated Research and Sloppy Reporting
And so it go’s… It’s sad that good development of pretty much everything is retarded by inflated ego’s. *shrug*
I don’t see the point of blocking people who use ad blockers when you don’t make a good faith effort to protect them from malware. People who subscribe to a site should get an ad free version, like Weather Underground does now.
People are not willing to pay for being annoyed.
I have come to the conclusion that if a site blocks me because I run an ad blocker, then I don’t want to use that site. It then goes into my hosts file blackhole list so I don’t accidentally ever click on it again. At some point enough people will do this to make traffic drop off measurably, but until then, at least I don’t have to support a$$holes — and yes, anybody who would do this to their customers is an a$$hole.
The problem I have always had with advertising-supported media is my innate suspicion that advertisers have undue influence on the content. That is less a problem on the ‘Net than with paper or TV journalism, but too many people have discovered their inner Gordon Gekko when they achieve a modicum of success and believe that those who use ad blockers are thieves apparently siphoning off the vital fluid that is the output from their imagination. F**k them if they can’t take a joke!
Around 1989-91 I was a part-time reviewer for ComputerWorld mag. I did a review of AutoCAD 10 (I think it was) and it was terrible! Example: I created a simple square and flood filled it. The whole page filled in (slowly)! I tried various shapes and it happened time and again. It was obvious that where the vertices met, they didn’t join properly. There were several other issues also. So I wrote a scathing review. They were an advertiser. The editor told me to tone it down and focus on the positives, he stated that AutoDesk were working on the issues and they would be fixed by the time the edition was published. I said I’d be happy to run another review when the issues were fixed. We argued, and I quit. It wasn’t the only time I was asked to *fix* a review.
Money always talks loudest.
Business always affects editorial policy and anyone who claims different is lying or delusional.
One problem with reviews in the old day print media was that you’d be writing the reviews with pre-release versions of the software a minimum of three months ahead of the magazine hitting the news stands. I remember one review I wrote on a RAID card that actually took *six* months to hit the news stands. So there was an excuse for that sort of sloppiness back in the day. Nowadays, when it takes maybe a couple of hours to clean up, edit, and proofread a review before hitting “Publish” and having it appear on the web, there’s no excuse for that.
One reason Rolling Stone still has great political coverage is because their music advertising covers the bill and music advertisers don’t care what political coverage is running as long as it’s not espousing neo-Nazi views or something similarly beyond the pale. Their coverage of the music industry itself is… nuanced… in order to keep from offending their industry advertisers, but when it comes to politics they’re still no holds barred. “All the news that fits”, indeed.
Oh! I meant to add this to my 1st comment above. Been kinda hectic the past week. *shrug*
People I chat with online have reported success with this Anti-Adblock Killer from reek.
I haven’t tried it as I haven’t had a need to yet. 🙂 It’s a script that works with Greasemonkey (Firefox) and Tampermonkey (Chrome (and derivatives like Torch), Opera, Safari).
And some other lists I used in adition to the above when I did use Adblock (or uBlock which some say is better than Adblock/AB Plus/AB Pro):
EasyPrivacy
Spam404
Anti-ThirdpartySocial
Fanboy’s Enhanced Tracking List
Fanboy’s Annoyance List
Rickroll Blacklist
Block-EU-Cookie-Shit-List
Facebook Annoyances Blocker
Adblock Warning Removal List
I still prefer using a modded hosts file. 🙂
Yeah, I tried an adblock-popup-killer. But after Forbes did an adblock-popup-killer-killer and the adblock-popup-killer released an adblock-popup-killer-killer-killer I realized that being in the middle of an escalating arms race was ridiculous and simply plopped them into my hosts file blackhole list.
Basically, my hosts file gets filled with whoever is annoying me at a particular time, I don’t put a lot of sites there. Pinterest got in there for example because they wanted me to join their site just to view a single image linked to from some other site, and again I know how to disable that join pane that swipes down across the image, but why deal with assholes? One thing I also do is blackhole them in my Google account so they no longer show up in my Google search results. Unfortunately Google removed the feature to do this (because it interfered with their advertising algorithm apparently) so you have to use a browser extension to do it now, “Google Block List”. Sigh.