FBI Recomends Adblock

[linkviii]

Summary

 

The FBI wants YOU to be a privateer! An FBI PSA about scam results being displayed from internet searches recommends using an adblock to protect yourself.

 

Quotes

Quote

The FBI is warning the public that cyber criminals are using search engine advertisement services to impersonate brands and direct users to malicious sites that host ransomware and steal login credentials and other financial information.

...

Tips to Protect Yourself

The FBI recommends individuals take the following precautions:

...

Use an ad blocking extension when performing internet searches. Most internet browsers allow a user to add extensions, including extensions that block advertisements. These ad blockers can be turned on and off within a browser to permit advertisements on certain websites while blocking advertisements on others.

 

My thoughts

If the Government says to do it, then it must be ethical. Google has absolutely failed the world, and so at least part of the government has decided that their business model doesn't matter, because it puts people at real risk. Let me say it again: Google has failed.

For home use, it has been well argued that the only additional security software needed since Windows 8 included Window's Defender, is an ad blocker. @SwiftOnSecurity has been very vocal about their policy to have adblocking installed company wide and about the number of security incidents it reduces.

 

I helped my grandfather install paintDOTnet. After watching him try to click on both search ads and download ads on the actual website, I instantly installed ublock origin for him.

 

Is Linus putting his company at risk by having a no ad block policy at LMG?

 

Sources

 Cyber Criminals Impersonating Brands Using Search Engine Advertisement Services to Defraud Users December 21, 2022. ic3.gov is the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center.

Edited January 10 by linkviii
Very minor phrasing

[Quackers101]

which means, FBI in cahoots with adblock?? so much information to gather from it.

but then the fbi pirates and gets taken by the fbi, that was watched by another fbi guy with glasses.

[kumicota]

11 minutes ago, linkviii said:

Is Linus putting his company at risk by having a no ad block policy at LMG?

I want to reference the post that I did a few minutes ago on one of his recent videos, they are still using ad-block there:

 

 

[NastyFlytrap]

23 minutes ago, kumicota said:

I want to reference the post that I did a few minutes ago on one of his recent videos, they are still using ad-block there:

 

 

Yea, but they are hypocrites and thats not really a secret.

I also remember the adblock fiasco, and all the other controversies he created in the last two years.

The more income LMG has, the less integrity he has.

Edit: Inb4 comfy excuse why he had it installed *that one time* (and the million other times we dont see off camera)

[Arika S]

So does this mean Google is going to get slapped with their Manifest V3 bullshit?

[Mark Kaine]

wasnt the news recently that google will "block" adblockers like ublock completely with some fancy updates?  Ive disabled my chrome updates for this reason,  a browser without adblock and some other add-ons is completely unusable to me.

And in that case, gg google...

 

4 minutes ago, Arika S said:

with their Manifest V3 bullshit?

^ yeah this... its a huge security risk... but google knew that, so probably not stopping them...

[Donut417]

1 hour ago, linkviii said:

For home use, it has been well argued that the only security software needed since Windows 8

I recall many many years ago, probably during the Windows 7 era, I went to Facebook and my Anti Virus software started bitching about an ad trying to give me a virus. After that I have used ad blockers ever since. I currently have Ghostery and UBlock installed in Chrome. Im sorry but if Google and Facebook are not going to police who they sell ad space to, Fuck em. Both my PC and network security is a higher priority then people making money. 

 

When Google issues that update for Chrome, Ill likely move to Safari and Firefox. I currently use Safari on my Mac but I did have issues a few years ago with video playback, so I moved to Chrome for videos. Ill likely test Safari on the Mac and use Firefox on my PC. 

[tim0901]

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

wasnt the news recently that google will "block" adblockers like ublock completely with some fancy updates?  Ive disabled my chrome updates for this reason,  a browser without adblock and some other add-ons is completely unusable to me.

Move to Firefox. They've committed to supporting the parts of Manifest V2 that are needed for adblockers to still work.

[StDragon]

https://brave.com/

 

[Mark Kaine]

2 hours ago, tim0901 said:

Move to Firefox. They've committed to supporting the parts of Manifest V2 that are needed for adblockers to still work.

yeah, if google becomes a malware distributor as they've apparently planned I'll do that even if firefox doesn't really jive with me... 

[Ultraforce]

4 hours ago, NastyFlytrap said:

Yea, but they are hypocrites and thats not really a secret.

I also remember the adblock fiasco, and all the other controversies he created in the last two years.

The more income LMG has, the less integrity he has.

Edit: Inb4 comfy excuse why he had it installed *that one time* (and the million other times we dont see off camera)

To be fair I think the excuse would be Linus didn't notice it, and it hadn't been communicated to LTT Labs which is a seperate legal company that policy should be no ad block. Since they did just grab the computer that apparently was used as the keyboard tester randomly.

[leadeater]

5 hours ago, Ultraforce said:

To be fair I think the excuse would be Linus didn't notice it, and it hadn't been communicated to LTT Labs which is a seperate legal company that policy should be no ad block. Since they did just grab the computer that apparently was used as the keyboard tester randomly.

Linus should try harder to avoid getting in to pissing matches with his community over personal moral and ethical points of view, especially when it's around something that has legitimate technical and information security reasons to be using. For a lot of people their own personal safety and security comes before the profit and revenue potential of a company, which is also a personal moral and ethical thing.

 

The above situation is a stalemate, from each other point of views one's self is more important than the other.

 

So instead of trying to blanket label everyone and try and make a point the better move would be to leave things best left alone alone.

[Stahlmann]

I've been saying for a long time that adblock and cookie blockers are required to make the modern internet useable.

 

At my current employer using adblockers and cookie blockers is actually company policy.

 

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

Linus should try harder to avoid getting in to pissing matches with his community over personal moral and ethical points of view, especially when it's around something that has legitimate technical and information security reasons to be using. For a lot of people their own personal safety and security comes before the profit and revenue potential of a company, which is also a personal moral and ethical thing.

 

The above situation is a stalemate, from each other point of views one's self is more important than the other.

 

So instead of trying to blanket label everyone and try and make a point the better move would be to leave things best left alone alone.

I don't buy this whole "Linus doesn't see ads" thing. He probably doesn't because he uses Adblock on his personal computers.

 

I think the main reason why Adblock is officially not allowed on LTT work computers is because it contradicts Linus' statements about the topic.

 

And there have been cases where they openly used them in videos. ("openly" because they didn't even bother to hide the extension icon)

[Ripred]

13 hours ago, kumicota said:

I want to reference the post that I did a few minutes ago on one of his recent videos, they are still using ad-block there:

 

 

Linus has to comply or the YouTube overlords will smite him

[WereCat]

11 hours ago, tim0901 said:

Move to Firefox. They've committed to supporting the parts of Manifest V2 that are needed for adblockers to still work.

As much as I like Firefox I can't use it after getting used to the feature set of Vivaldi. Not sure how Manifest V3 will affect some other Chromium based browsers, I believe that both Brave and Vivaldi are working on something to reduce the impact but to what extent I'm not sure.

There is already also  some version of uBlock that should work with Manifest V3 but has more limited functionality vs it's currently used version.

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, Stahlmann said:

 

I think the main reason why Adblock is officially not allowed on LTT work computers is because it contradicts Linus' statements about the topic.

 

Nope. Because installing them interferes with the benchmarks.

 

If you are going to benchmark a computer, you turn the internet gateway off. Either unplug the entire computer from it, or you only plug it into a USB ethernet device that has a MAC that has been blacklisted from crossing the internet gateway.

 

Let me explain this another way. Have you tried to use GPU-Z, GeekBench, 3DMark, or anything else that lets you compare your pc against another? That requires access to the internet, and that is usually via a CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) or by launching the default browser. If it's the former, installing extensions in one CEF, can impair other CEF's (like Steam, Epic, and EGS)

 

Now on the flip side of that argument. There is no reason to run adblock. Period. People have been told the reason their internet experience is so crappy, is because of ads, but it's really because they've installed adblock and now the sites they visit are partially or completely broken. Because those sites were, MOST OF THE TIME, designed around those ad spaces existing. If you turn on an adblocker and suddenly half the page disappears, congratulations, you played yourself.

 

There are very, very easy ways to defeat adblock if a company really wants to. And "Manifest V3" would make that easier. The version "1" adblock worked by affixing CSS rules to change very generic "obvious ad sizes" on the page, or images/scripts that are not first-party. The work around? you run a script to delete all CSS scripts you didn't authorize. You put all the scripts you need to show the site in with the advertisement scripts and run jsmin on them.  Now it's impossible to "block" the ads by any browser-sided means. Everything is coming from the same place as the site itself.

 

The only, viable, way of blocking ads, is by blocking all third party scripts. Which is not default policy in chrome because of course it isn't. It would break the web. So how do you make sure that happens? devices like pihole. Just send the DNS through your own DNS server that immediately returns not found for ad urls. But in order for that to work, you need to crowd-source what exactly are ad urls, and be careful not to blackist entire CDN's, otherwise entire sites will just be Thanos snapped.

 

And who's going to maintain that?

 

No, realistically,  everyone wants you to use their "app" because you are then trapped in a user experience you can't modify. They no longer care if the web experience is crap any more. "use our app" instead. Lose-lose situation.

 

But again, I'll say that pretty much everyone complaining about ads, is making things up. Ask someone for proof. Screenshots of "ads being viruses", and they won't have them unless they're visiting piracy sites.

[Doobeedoo]

Yeah ok but not THE AddBlock which works with add companies, but somebother ones.

Sad how it is, a lot of sites feel either unusable or completely different with nothing filtering. I get reminded by this at times when I disable extensions to compare performance etc and oh wow number of sites feel extra scroll and eye fatigue.

Funny Chrome on Android can't have addblock nice meme Google.

[Doobeedoo]

17 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Nope. Because installing them interferes with the benchmarks.

 

If you are going to benchmark a computer, you turn the internet gateway off. Either unplug the entire computer from it, or you only plug it into a USB ethernet device that has a MAC that has been blacklisted from crossing the internet gateway.

 

Let me explain this another way. Have you tried to use GPU-Z, GeekBench, 3DMark, or anything else that lets you compare your pc against another? That requires access to the internet, and that is usually via a CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) or by launching the default browser. If it's the former, installing extensions in one CEF, can impair other CEF's (like Steam, Epic, and EGS)

 

Now on the flip side of that argument. There is no reason to run adblock. Period. People have been told the reason their internet experience is so crappy, is because of ads, but it's really because they've installed adblock and now the sites they visit are partially or completely broken. Because those sites were, MOST OF THE TIME, designed around those ad spaces existing. If you turn on an adblocker and suddenly half the page disappears, congratulations, you played yourself.

 

There are very, very easy ways to defeat adblock if a company really wants to. And "Manifest V3" would make that easier. The version "1" adblock worked by affixing CSS rules to change very generic "obvious ad sizes" on the page, or images/scripts that are not first-party. The work around? you run a script to delete all CSS scripts you didn't authorize. You put all the scripts you need to show the site in with the advertisement scripts and run jsmin on them.  Now it's impossible to "block" the ads by any browser-sided means. Everything is coming from the same place as the site itself.

 

The only, viable, way of blocking ads, is by blocking all third party scripts. Which is not default policy in chrome because of course it isn't. It would break the web. So how do you make sure that happens? devices like pihole. Just send the DNS through your own DNS server that immediately returns not found for ad urls. But in order for that to work, you need to crowd-source what exactly are ad urls, and be careful not to blackist entire CDN's, otherwise entire sites will just be Thanos snapped.

 

And who's going to maintain that?

 

No, realistically,  everyone wants you to use their "app" because you are then trapped in a user experience you can't modify. They no longer care if the web experience is crap any more. "use our app" instead. Lose-lose situation.

 

But again, I'll say that pretty much everyone complaining about ads, is making things up. Ask someone for proof. Screenshots of "ads being viruses", and they won't have them unless they're visiting piracy sites.

I mean many do visit pirate sites. I just went to you know which without extensions in private window now and oh boy general adds aside, every click be it search field or link opens completely random sus site and also pop up window. 

[Stahlmann]

57 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Now on the flip side of that argument. There is no reason to run adblock. Period. People have been told the reason their internet experience is so crappy, is because of ads, but it's really because they've installed adblock and now the sites they visit are partially or completely broken. Because those sites were, MOST OF THE TIME, designed around those ad spaces existing. If you turn on an adblocker and suddenly half the page disappears, congratulations, you played yourself.

I have no idea how you're using the internet, but i have never found a website that breaks because of adblock. And also no huge empty spaces. This argument ist dumb. Not wanting to see ads everywhere is a perfectly valid reason to run adblockers. Who are you to argue how other people should use the internet?

 

57 minutes ago, Kisai said:

But again, I'll say that pretty much everyone complaining about ads, is making things up. Ask someone for proof. Screenshots of "ads being viruses", and they won't have them unless they're visiting piracy sites.

I'm complaining about ads because in many ways they're just obnoxious. An article locked behind and ad pop up, minute long midroll ads in youtube videos, etc. Are you really telling me i'm "making things up" because i don't like to be interrupted with dumb shit i don't care about?

 

It's the same shit with cookies. Every time i visit a site for the first time i get these pop ups where i painstakingly need to remove checkboxes that say it's okay to steal and sell my user data. And if i decide to delete these cookies i have to go through that again. This stuff makes the internet tedious to use.

(Dammit, at least make these pop ups as an "opt in", not an "opt out")

[Dracarris]

56 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Now on the flip side of that argument. There is no reason to run adblock. Period. People have been told the reason their internet experience is so crappy, is because of ads, but it's really because they've installed adblock and now the sites they visit are partially or completely broken. Because those sites were, MOST OF THE TIME, designed around those ad spaces existing. If you turn on an adblocker and suddenly half the page disappears, congratulations, you played yourself.

Well, no. Like not at all. Like, absolutely and totally not.

 

At least ublock origin and now Safari adguard manage to perfectly reformat the page. No broken websites, no large empty space. Nothing. Just a usable web experience without annoyances.

[MageTank]

41 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Nope. Because installing them interferes with the benchmarks.

What benchmarks?

 

42 minutes ago, Kisai said:

If you are going to benchmark a computer, you turn the internet gateway off.

I benchmark for a living. It's part of my job for qualifying hardware. I don't do this. Nobody that I know of in my field does this. We keep the system unplugged from external networks to avoid breaking NDA, but nobody is out here disabling network interfaces. That's not conducive to a real-world test environment. 

 

43 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Either unplug the entire computer from it, or you only plug it into a USB ethernet device that has a MAC that has been blacklisted from crossing the internet gateway.

Unplugging it is sufficient. Why would you go through the effort of using a USB network adapter with a blacklisted MAC? If you need local file access, run an offline dedicated switch between your test systems. This is what we do when we deploy images with our testing software on them. Image server is local only with no external access on the network.

 

44 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Let me explain this another way. Have you tried to use GPU-Z, GeekBench, 3DMark, or anything else that lets you compare your pc against another? That requires access to the internet,

I use all of these except GeekBench (awful bench software) and none of them require access to the internet. You can run 3DMark entirely offline and save the results to do local comparisons. If you are a company and are benchmarking for a living, you are using their commercial version which allows you to run a command line database which acts much like their online version but local to your systems under test.

 

46 minutes ago, Kisai said:

If it's the former, installing extensions in one CEF, can impair other CEF's (like Steam, Epic, and EGS)

I need you to cite some sources here. I've never seen Adblock interfere with Steam. Also, Epic and EGS are the same thing, are they not?

 

46 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Now on the flip side of that argument. There is no reason to run adblock. Period. People have been told the reason their internet experience is so crappy, is because of ads, but it's really because they've installed adblock and now the sites they visit are partially or completely broken. Because those sites were, MOST OF THE TIME, designed around those ad spaces existing. If you turn on an adblocker and suddenly half the page disappears, congratulations, you played yourself.

I have never experienced the design of a page breaking because of Adblock. Sure, I've gotten the popup asking me to disable on some sites, and for most, I comply, but I've never seen the page itself completely break. You are reaching here.

 

48 minutes ago, Kisai said:

There are very, very easy ways to defeat adblock if a company really wants to. And "Manifest V3" would make that easier. The version "1" adblock worked by affixing CSS rules to change very generic "obvious ad sizes" on the page, or images/scripts that are not first-party. The work around? you run a script to delete all CSS scripts you didn't authorize. You put all the scripts you need to show the site in with the advertisement scripts and run jsmin on them.  Now it's impossible to "block" the ads by any browser-sided means. Everything is coming from the same place as the site itself.

So your solution to defeat Adblock is to run additional scripts on a page, thereby making the internet experience "crappy", and contradicting your previous point entirely?

50 minutes ago, Kisai said:

But again, I'll say that pretty much everyone complaining about ads, is making things up. Ask someone for proof. Screenshots of "ads being viruses", and they won't have them unless they're visiting piracy sites.

You've clearly never worked in a customer facing tech support role. The Google served pages at the top of a search are almost all fakes. So many people searched for MSI Afterburner, downloaded from the first "ad" link, and ended up with software mining crypto on their PC: https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/fake-msi-afterburner-sites-inject-coin-miner-into-software-installer.html#:~:text=Cyble Intelligence and Research Lab,detected approximately 50 bogus websites. They can also lead you into calling scam numbers. You can argue that a full screen popup isn't exactly a "virus", but the average consumer does not know this, and assuming they don't call the scammers, they call their PC manufacturer or computer retailer looking for support against what they believe to be a "virus". 

 

Also, if you doubt that ads can contain viruses, you'll need to study up some more before sharing your expertise on this subject:

https://us.norton.com/blog/malware/malvertising#

https://www.avg.com/en/signal/what-is-malvertising

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising

 

But yeah, everyone seeing ads with fake or infected downloads are automatically pirates. Let's roll with that very objective view on the subject.

[Stahlmann]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

Nope. Because installing them interferes with the benchmarks.

But why would the policy also apply to their WAN show laptops and their workstations?

[kumicota]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

There is no reason to run adblock. Period. People have been told the reason their internet experience is so crappy, is because of ads, but it's really because they've installed adblock and now the sites they visit are partially or completely broken.

How can this become more broken with an adblock?

 

 

[Radium_Angel]

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

Ask someone for proof.

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2016/01/msn-home-page-drops-more-malware-via-malvertising

 

[Radium_Angel]

17 minutes ago, kumicota said:

How can this become more broken with an adblock?

My god, that's insane (the website that is...just to be clear)