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What do you all think of this extension? I like my uBO and filter lists but this (the video and paper linked) also seems to make a compelling case for what it does and how. Would love to hear your thoughts on this compared to uBlock Origin.
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AdNauseum uses uBO internally, so you can use the same filters.
Right, yes. But this also does more than uBO (apparently). I cannot confirm this myself just yet but Louis Rossmann explains it in the video. I recommend watching it.
I have watched it. The point I was making is that uBO filter lists can still be used with AdNauseum.
I read this as saying that you didn’t want to move away from uBO and lose the features that it offers, which would not be the case.
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I think this really comes down to how much you believe in their method. It seems obvious from the white paper that using AdNauseam is a performance hit compared to uBO in pretty much every category (ie adblocking efficiency, page load speeds, memory efficiency).
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Yeah that’s what I’ll have to evaluate if I have the time. Or perhaps use it in a different profile where I do other things just to see how well it works.
I am also concerned by how settings dependent the process seems. I think there is a high probability of users changing settings and making their clicks easily filterable.
This is and always has been a bad idea.
edit: content blockers have three benefits:
- privacy through reducing exposure to predatory data collection companies
- security by not making unnecessary connections or parsing untrusted scripts/images/etc.
- (and lastly reducing data usage and increasing performance)
and this extension directly eliminates both of those in a misguided attempt to poison the well.
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Okay… please elaborate? An ominous statement with no exposition doesn’t say much now does it.
I’d like to learn what I don’t know that I perhaps ought to know about something new I have found.
I see.
So does this mean said poisoning is really a failed attempt and this add on does not keep up with its promises for what it says it can do?
Or do you mean their approach for what they want to do itself is faulty? If so, how come?
It seems like it’s just uBO w/ a more antagonistic approach towards advertisers + a worse skin.
The ad vault seems circular too. Conceptually, if my ad blockers are doing their job, then the ads I’m recommended are irrelevant/generic, so checking to see the ads I’m being served seems irrelevant. OTOH, w/ this extension clicking every ad, the ads I’m being served are similarly irrelevant, so I don’t understand the point of an ad vault to show what ads I’m being served.
It seems like introducing a less vetted/less popular maintainer/extension to do what uBO already has a track record of doing, no?
Yeah, that’s what I am starting to realize too as I am reading more about since having seen the video and posting this here.
I can see why people are saying this is not a good way to go about it and uBO is still best as the wheel doesn’t need reinventing.
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because the trackers will still directly learn the pages you visit and we know many of them also record form content too, so anything you type gets siphoned off too.
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Ah! I see. Got it.
Thank you for clarifying. There’s the friction and context I was missing as I was trying to make sense of atleast one of the core issues.
I’m not a developer but only a teach savvy person so there’s always something I miss when understanding tech.
uBO blocks the connection to trackers, so the tracker doesn’t learn anything.
With Adnausem the connection happens, and it does an extra connection to the advertiser.
So the tracker is probably able to profile you, unlike with uBO.
Site operators using bots to click their ads to fraud the adnetwork is not new. Ad networks have protections against that so any data that Adnauseam creates is just dropped.
It doesn’t even hurt big ad networks like Google, they just make advertisers spend more on Google ads.
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Thank you for the ELI5. Makes sense.
The logic Rossmann was using is somewhat backward then. Probably because he may not know with specificity of how these ad companies work.
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I created a fresh virtual machine to test AdNauseum.
Long story short, Arkenfox and uBlock Origin play well together. Arkenfox and AdNauseum do NOT play well together.
I abandoned testing AdNauseum.
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I wouldn’t use it because I don’t want to potentially give ad networks like Google more money. They’re the problem, not the advertisers using them.
Reminder that installing extensions can be a major security vulnerability.
Not if you have evaluated the extension and you trust it to do only that it is supposed to.
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