It's not a matter of risks for me. I haven't a clue how to install an ad blocker, being a non-techie geezer. Same for VPN etc. The only code I know is Morse and I've forgotten most of it.
Every time I remark on this subject, well meaning commenters tell me how easy it is to install/use an ad blocker.
"Just..." — in my experience, statements that begin with "Just..." end up leaving me frustrated once I've tried and failed to follow the "simple"/"easy" instructions.
Also, I note that commenters here WITH ad blockers installed sometimes STILL see ads. So why bother?
I don't understand the enmity of HN in general for online ads and advertising.
Really? there's a commenter in this very thread who's having that experience. And I have seen this ad blocker FAIL issue raised here from time to time. More than "very rarely" judging from my own eyes....
>advertising enables surveillance, ads cost resources, and they distract from the content.
I'm amused whenever I see avoiding surveillance raised here. That ship has sailed. Did you notice your neighbor's Ring doorbell camera, BTW?
ok, maybe very rarely is too strong. i do have the experience rarely myself however. i suppose it also depends on which sites you go to. with ad surveillance even a 90% reduction is a win (my own experience is even better than that), so in my opinion it is definitely worth it.
Did you notice your neighbor's Ring doorbell camera
yes, i noticed its absence. in my home country cameras recording video beyond your own property or sound are illegal. an even in the US resistance is growing. so in my opinion that ship can still be sunk.
The button will take you to the correct download for your mobile device or desktop/laptop operating system.
One click install. No plugins, it just works.
If you don't like it, you can go back to your old browser.
Your experience without ads and tracking will be amazing. Content without distraction, annoying animations, or popups. Just the text, images, and video you want to see and nothing else. And the pages load five times faster.
It's a matter of logic and capacity of the individual.
You argue online advertising but you've been exposed to offline advertising in your life a lot more. Now you are offered the choice to "turn most of it off" but you choose to spend your time replying to internet comments saying that you're stubborn and can't do it because it's hard and not 100% effective.
I'm sorry sir but your reasoning is flawed: you could have learned how to install ad block plus, noscript or whatever you want to experiment with, with all of these work out of the box, in the time needed to write your two comments.
I suppose it's worth reminding that the advertisement industry is one of the biggest economic areas of our society so the brightest of us will be coaxed into making advertising more effective, and the cat-and-mouse game between blockers and advertisers will continue forever.
You can spend the same time asking someone advice on where you're stuck, or even go ask an.. LLM.. for a simple step by step breakdown, with 1 step per line to set your pace. The options are all there at your disposal.
To complain with reason is all fine and dandy, but to not act to satiate those complaints is an area to improve on..
Then challenge yourself, for the sake of the conversation and spirit of hacker news, to try out the experience and accomplish something that you've only heard from others.
I feel the pain of old geezers. I grew up figuring out which pixels actually do something, like an adversarial game where UI un-designers make the useful buttons look less like buttons.
uBlock Origin is the best ad blocker. The full uBlock Origin works on Firefox, but not on Google Chrome. The cut-down uBlock Origin Lite works on Google Chrome. uBlock Origin Lite still blocks many ads. Don't fall into all-or-nothing thinking. Imagine if you could block just half of the ads on cable television :) an improvement, though not perfect.
If you use Firefox, follow this link. On the right hand side, click the blue button with the label "Add to Firefox". A confirmation dialog box will pop up. Read it. Click the blue button with the text "Continue to Installation". That should install it.
If you use Google Chrome, follow this link. On the right hand side, click the blue button with the label "Add to Chrome". A confirmation dialog box will pop up. Read it. Click the button with the text "Add extension". That should install it.
Yeah I'd argue that the beginner friendly version of the rule is probably "Never use exact == or != for floating point variables" and the slightly more advanced one is "Don't use it unless the value you are comparing to is the constant 0.0".
I wish that (still) worked reliably, but it can unfortunately get one into trouble with some compilers and some optimization modes that assume that NaNs are undefined behavior.
Man, I only understood half of what you were describing, but it sounds fascinating. I you happen to find the time to do a write-up or share your workflow, I would love to read more about it.
The irony of advertising a privacy-enabled de-googled system, and then telling me that my Firefox browser is not support, and that I should use Edge, Opera or Chrome instead....
This is related to Firefox unwilling to add support for WebUSB because, I suppose, they believe that a browser is not a general purpose application launcher and the scope of what it can do should be limited. As such, it should not be allowed to e.g. control peripherals like the USB devices.
Which is in my opinion a fairly reasonable take.
But given the current situation, I would assume that the companies providing WebUSB tools like installers would also spend a few moments to create e.g. a Python script that would do the same thing but locally. So that anyone unwilling to use WebUSB within their browser can have a vetted and transparent way to get the same thing done.
I am opposed to it for similar reasons as in GP, but it does let you do cool things like installing Android ROMs without touching adb by having a (presumably) WASM-based impl of adb.
And, to counter the arguments that "the site tells you that you need WebUSB support": you get to the https://e.foundation/installer/ when you click "Check device compatibility" on the main page. Personally, I'd expect either a check that works in any browser or a simple compatible device list. Why would I need a special browser just to check if I can use this OS?
main page -> download and try! -> check device compatibility
lands on https://e.foundation/installer/ the chromium-only webusb page. It could be a better page; instead of showing a scary "navigator not suppored" modal demanding you install a particular browser, it could say the automated compatibility tester requires one of these browsers and your phone plugged in with USB, otherwise here's the device finder page
It's the specific functionality needed here that Firefox lacks that makes the /e/ page show the warning, unlike the lineage page that does not have the problem in the first place.
e/OS is not degoogled, only some of the functionality has been rewritten in microG (eg not implementing security checks but instead spoofing them), but still uses Google play sdk and libraries.
Additionally it runs in the privileged mode, so any exploit on that, well, means back luck.
As I explained elsewhere in this post, I got to this installer page by clicking on "Check device compatibility" on the https://e.foundation/e-os/ page.
So I was actually expecting a device listing page, not a WebUSB program.
That's a bizarre one. 'You need Chrome' is bad enough, which even the bloody NHS are guilty of, but I always assume that's 'just' an assumption that not Chrome means IE or something, and they haven't woken up even to the proliferation of mobile Safari users.
I didn't know it did, the commenter didn't mention it, and Imgur gave me an overloaded error message. (When it doesn't do that, it usually tells me it's not available in my region or that the image has been deleted anyway.)
Anyway, assuming it's for WebUSB flashing, I agree with other commenters it should just explain that's not available and still give the instructions - bonus points for hiding the unusable WebUSB option.
Just out of curiosity (not knowing anything about the complexity of adding new devices) what makes the support of a Xiaomi pad 5 and pad 6 possible, while there is not support for the pad 7 and 8?
Are these devices so different that none of the testing and development work is transferable to the newer devices?
And, reversing the question, if one was to be the owner of a such a Xiaomi device, what can be done to help them being supported?
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