Can you imagine the amount of corruptive influences and persuasions he is resisting?
Pretty sure he has them blocked
Though you may be right, I have a feeling that he is facing formidable opposition. That may include anything from social engineering to full on psyops.
Bet he’s had people “happen” to bump into him IRL, and gets pull requests from bad actors that are very subtly trying to take the project in the wrong direction.
Your second point is especially interesting, considering the recent xz backdoor. The bad actors manipulated a poor burnt out maintainer for it. In comparison, I'm impressed with gorhill for his perseverance and mental strength. I would like to know how he avoids burn out with such negative influences.
Insightful point. And it does remind me of the corporate purchase of the Don't care about cookies extension for Firefox (And the Simple Mobile Tools for Android). Luckily it was forked. https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies Open source FTW!
🙂 🐧
Simple Mobile Tools was forked into "Fossify *" for anyone interested.
There's a reason uBlock Origin overtook Adblock Plus in popularity.
The VLC guy turned down what a quick search is telling me was “several tens of millions” to show ads. I can’t even imagine what getting people to drop ublock would be worth.
I wouldn't blame him if he took it, but I greatly respect that he didn't.
Raymond Hill: “Get behind me, Google.”
And all the volunteers keeping those lists up-to-date.
Yea it’s mainly those that do the work actually
Still big kudos to Raymond for providing the foundations to make it all work too.
It's kinda sad that without Mozilla, Raymond, the NoScript guys and TOR we would lose control over the internet pretty much immediately
Kind of agree. Though there is pi-hole and several others. And there's i2p, Freenet (now called Hyphanet) and GNUnet, and similar.
Pi-hole is nice for devices that you don't fully control. But it's not enough, due to the fundamental limitations of DNS based blocking. If the ads and the content are hosted on the same domain, it can't do anything.
I definitely agree, although really a LOT of non-Linux/(IT) guys use Chrome, some even Edge, if on Windows
If only, I know so many people who don't bother with adblocking at all. I honestly have no idea how they use the Internet without going mad
My kid discovered that he can hit the "report" button on the YouTube app on the TV to skip the ads immediately. So now every ad gets reported as "inappropriate".
I'm proud of him.
Tip: if you have an Android TV, you can install SmartTube as an alternative, privacy-friendly YouTube client. It has no ads and sponsorblock integration
And as a better option, use an actual device instead of a short lifecycle planned obsolescence embedded android device on a "smart" tv.
This is why I refuse to buy a "smart" TV. My old flat screen TV works perfectly fine with a Chromecast with Google TV. I can even use the Chromecast in my projector or any other device with HDMI input to make it smarter than most TV interfaces I have tried.
I'm of two minds about people not adblocking.
On one hand: Ads are gross noise pollution, and people are increasingly unaware of all the noise around them (or the noise they're generating) largely because they've been passively trained to "tune out" ads. Also consumerism.
On the other hand: As long as there are a significant amount of people oblivious to the possibility of adblock, corporate ad mobsters and the other worst people in the world out there will largely leave those of us blocking their ads alone. If everyone ran adblockers, we'd definitely live in a world of WEI... and probably worse. So, maybe all those people are watching ads so that I don't have to, as the YouTube thumbnails say.
People just don't know, I've been showing my wife the way little by little and she's always blown away
Yeah, it's shocking to see how many ads they jam in now. I felt so dirty.
Seriously. Says a lot about the modern internet, though. Both good and bad.
Thank Raymond and the list maintainers, you keep the internet usable
Yeah, Raymond Hill made a great plugin, but the people maintaining the lists are the real MVPs
He's far too kind of a person. He doesn't accept any donations for the many years of a better and safer internet experience I've gotten from his work
All hail Raymond Hill :0
And the people maintaining the lists his work depends on.
Never knew the name of the guy behind it. Nice! This is why Everybody Loves Raymond!
About
Free. Open-source. For users by users. No donations sought.
If you ever want to contribute something, think about the people working hard to maintain the filter lists you are using, which are available to use by all for free.
Im genuinely so thankful for this project, the creator and maintainers. You are doing the lords work.
Gladly upvoted to ~~worship~~ honor one of the open source heroes.
Ad/content blockers of various types are the only reason the internet is still generally usable for me.
There is something very wrong when deleting 50% of wep page is the least it takes to make the internet usable...
Messiah of the internet
I have been using uBlock Origin and uMatrix together for so long, that I don't remember when they became permanent must have.. uBlock origin sanitizes the site, while uMatrix prevents any surprises since I last visited a site. The more garbage the site is, the more broken it is on my setup.
