This wound up leading to a hashtag called BlockSidewalk.
This topic caused Mozilla’s former VP to come out of the woodwork and talk about his time during their partnership with Google (read thread).
He’s not alone.
Block all ads everywhere always.
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Blast from the past: YouTube is bringing back the 5-star rating system.
It’s on mobile only for now, but still… Holy shit. That brings back memories.
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Google will roll out a policy next month to crack down on deceptive advertisements dealing with abortion—a topic rife with misleading and false health information.
The policy changes come amid backlash from a report in The Guardian saying that the tech giant granted $150,000 worth of free advertisements to The Obria Group, which runs a network of clinics across the United States that are funded by Catholic organizations. Obria’s advertisements have suggested that the clinics (aka Crisis Pregnancy Centers) provide abortions and other medical services. But the clinics are in fact opposed to abortion and all forms of contraception, including condoms. According to The Guardian, the misleading advertisements are an attempt to bait “abortion-minded women” so that the clinics can then deter them from terminating their pregnancies.
To ostensibly address this problem, Google will now require all advertisers in the United States, Ireland, and the United Kingdom who run abortion-related ads to submit to a pre-certification. The process is intended to identify the types of services that the advertisers provide. All of their subsequent advertising will then be automatically and clearly labeled with either “Provides abortions” or “Does not provide abortions.”
In an online statement announcing the policy change, Google made no mention of the Obria case. Instead, it wrote that “This added transparency will help ensure that users have the necessary information to decide which abortion-related ads are most relevant to them.”
Thankfully Firefox is still going strong.
Yeah. I still use Firefox and usually don’t have any major problems. Although unfortunately the degree of customization isn’t what it used to be. I am starting to get worried though with Blink/Webkit being the dominant rendering engine that Firefox will get left behind in the future.
I’lll point out that the android port of Firefox also supports extensions, so even if you don’t root your phone, you can have web-based adblocking.
In the end there’s always going old school and manually blocking ad serving domains.
I only use Chrome at work, Safari on Apple devices, Firefox otherwise. Also pi hole at home.
If worst comes to worst, we can always use the ultimate weapon, HTTP proxies. We can host them in our homes like pi hole, or we can all use VPNs to use a centralized one.
I set up a pihole at my parents house. Within a week they asked me to undo what I did as they “couldn’t get to websites they wanted to go to”
In this case I think they were trying to type in a uri from a mail order catalogue to buy something and that was one of the things in the gravity so it just 404d them.
Don’t do it. That catalog is probably a scam. You’ll be doing them a favor.
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I left the pi hole up but pointed their computers back at google’s dns. Least their phones and wifi and whatever else will still be safe.
I also make fun of them for wanting ads and to be scammed and to have that threat vector open for all variety of malware. I did so when I routed them around the pi hole and any time they try and claim they’re doing things right security wise.
Despite having the pi-hole up, the only time I ever see it blocking me is when I click on non-ad links that are using redirects to track clicks and such.
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Pi-hole looks awesome, but I am a dumb idiot with network stuff and anything other than Windows which is why I have been just using adblock browser plugins. The Pi-Hole site assumes a fair amount of knowledge of both Linux and network administration, so time to learn me a book about Linux and containers since all the easy plug and play dumb idiot level blocking is going to shit 
You do not n eed to know about containers or anything to setup Pi hole.
The most complex part of Pi-Hole is just figuring out where the settings are for your router. Everything else is very simple to do by just reading a How-To for setting it up.
Here’s how I did mine: Got an old garbo laptop, in my case this one my mom’s previous company gave her that still had Windows NT on it. The computer doesn’t matter, I’m just trying to demonstrate any will do.
Throw some linux on there. Most linuxes work here’s the list from the people themselves. I used ubuntu .
Run this command on there (requires internet access): curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash
Follow the prompts, it really holds your hand, just give it the things it needs.
After that you’ll have a fancy web interface you can use to configure it further. It’s really nice, how to access it will be covered by that command up there.
As part of running that command you’ll have given that linux machine a static IP. As Clinton says, yeah now you gotta go to your router and tell it to use that IP as it’s dns server.
Badabing you’ve got it.
I recommend you treat whatever machine you install this on kinda like a router. Keep it powered, and with internet access and generally don’t touch it too much.