All extensions disabled due to expiration of intermediate signing cert

Just discovered the same message in the Tor browser, and it seems that NoScript got disabled. So people running Tor are a lot more vulnerable right now.

Also, wow, the web has a ton of ads. I've been running uBlock origin so long I forgot how bad it had gotten :(

Yikes.

That's really bad because it means it also effects Firefox ESR which is what lots of large enterprise users have installed.

That was predictable.

> Also, wow, the web has a ton of ads. I've been running uBlock origin so long I forgot how bad it had gotten :(

Try turning it off. I got rid of ublock after arstechnica complained about a lot of their users blocking ads years ago and it honestly isn't that bad. Every once in a while I do back out of a page for maxing out one of my cpu cores but otherwise, nothing ever bad happens. With ads: either it takes me half a second to tell I'm not interested in an ad, or I actually am interested and i follow the ad because I am interested and I want to support the website.

The alternative is websites charging insane amounts of money with paywalls (Wall street journal has their "best" price for 12 months at $360 a year). That is horrible because it means only rich people can pay for high quality news as ads are one of the most progressive forms of payment (rich people ads are way more valuable than poor peoples and yet everyone gets the same quality services/news with the ad model despite their income/net worth).

> With ads: either it takes me half a second to tell I'm not interested in an ad, or I actually am interested and i follow the ad because I am interested and I want to support the website.

If ads weren't doubling as tracking beacons and the occasional malicious drive by download, that certainly would be an option.

>nothing ever bad happens. With ads: either it takes me half a second to tell I'm not interested in an ad, or I actually am interested and i follow the ad because I am interested and I want to support the website.

You just described something bad.

Assuming you mean that half second looking at the ad: Name a better alternative for funding the internet. Paywalls at every website?

What's bad about supporting a site you like while learning about something that interests you? If this were really all ads were I wouldn't block them.

It’s the sheer number of trackers online that really pushes me to use lots of security extensions. I really can’t support that kind of malicious behavior.

>Assuming you mean that half second looking at the ad: Name a better alternative for funding the internet. Paywalls at every website?

Funding the Internet? What you're talking about (ads) is a revenue stream for what amounts to a handful of websites. google.com, amazon.com, ycombinator.com, reddit.com, thefacebook.com, tweeter.com, etc. could all go offline right now and the Internet would still be here.

That doesn't sound right. What about all the other websites with ads, like recipe sites, guitar chords, porn, diy, etc.? or apps on the Google play store with ads?

I run sites that don't have ads. I don't make any money off of them. I still run them. Seems like a lot of people in software development think similarly.

I don't understand your question; what about them? The websites are just nodes of the Internet. And I don't understand at all why you brought up Google app store apps, so I'll refrain from commenting on that until I better understand your point.

It doesn't feel like a handful of websites. It feels like the dominant experience of the internet for most people. Ads are a source of revenue for many more websites than just a handful. They are also a source of revenue for more than a handful of apps. I

That's not what the post says at all.

Well, it was. I mean, it's Firefox!

But see https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30388 for the same temporary fix as at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19823928

An open, transparent, convenient, anonymous protocol for micro payments, with good cost contol build into browsers.

It is coming :) https://lightningjoule.com/

This is the web that I like. Hobbyists and volunteers running low-fi websites for common interests. I'm not against commercial sites like Netflix but don't think every last blog should be monetised.

The alternative is those websites not using third party ads with third party trackers on it. Adblockers already do not block those (cause they're indistinguishable from image links). If they really just want my eyeballs they know how they can get them.

But they really want to track me. And I'm not having that. The moment they stop tracking their users through third party ad networks, most adblockers stop blocking (because there's no AI involved and they wouldn't know what to block except images in general).

It's in their hands, really. If they want to show me ads they can do it in a normal and decent manner.

News websites should in fact be the first to adapt this model, because it's exactly the same thing as ads in print media. But they chose to get those disgusting third party tracking networks involved. And not just one or two.

I don't have to put up with that, but I really don't see why there would be an action required on my site to stop blocking those tracking ads.

You really seem to care a lot about this, let me guess, you work in adtech?

Which adblocker do you trust not to track you?

Just FYI, that's not really true. Adblocker use mostly all the same filter lists and those do regularly block ads that just are regular images, and even text notes. https://www.troyhunt.com/ad-blockers-are-part-of-the-problem... is an example, even if that specific one got resolved

Adblock Plus has the ability to not block ads that conform to a certain standard, but in addition to conform to standards ad publishers need to pay for that. At least that's what they claim.

The more people who use adblocker, the more ads websites need to make the same amount of money. It's been brought up that many twitch streamers don't receive ad revenue from more than half their viewers.

I can only find a source right now for YouTube, but they're out there for twitch too.

[1] https://www.vg247.com/2015/10/30/around-40-of-pewdiepies-aud...

"Adblock Plus has the ability to not block ads that conform to a certain standard"

Not my standard. Ad blockers should be rebranded as "tracking blockers" so everyone calls them that. Then sites would have to ask you to "disable your tracking blocker", which sounds scary as hell to users, as it should.

If the images are hosted on the site instead of a third party the list won't matter.

And? If ads were ads and not malware trackers I wouldn't care. Calling these franken-programs ads stretches the word past its breaking point.

No one can stop actual ads - this comment was brought to you by Pepsi, Pepsi for the love of it. See? Everyone had to read the last sentence even if they had adblock on.

Considering that JavaScript has been used in the past to unmask Tor users, this is a frightening security bug and is not "fail-safe" behavior. The extension should remain enabled, but with a warning.

It is doubtful that Mozilla will change this behavior, as they will likely consider it a niche case, but the Tor browser should probably look into alternate means of changing the behavior (patching).

Edit: apparently the packaged versions of NoScript and HTTPS Everywhere were not affected. See thread here https://old.reddit.com/r/TOR/comments/bkg7vf/due_to_a_bug_in...

Not true, here is an example of easylist blocking OpenStreetMap advertising OpenStreetMap events on openstreetmap.org [0].

[0]: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/pull/900

Even my example I linked in the comment you answered to is not about an image hosted on a different server. It's not an image at all. And ublock origin even still blocks it today.

That really sucks that Tor was vulnerable to this too.

Tor needs to fork Firefox "properly" and remove all of Mozilla's bullshit like I've seen some forks do (Waterfox?). I thought this would be common sense for the people at Tor.

To add to the specific example of twitch, their ads are broken and annoying as hell.

The broken:

- they still don't have the volume of ads under control

- the android app regularly freezes during ad display

- sometimes it disrupts and buffers the stream without then displaying the actual ad

And possibly more, I wouldn't know since all these are enough to make me either not watch twitch or block ads. I disable it once every few months to see if it got better though.

The annoying:

- the same ad every time often (when The Grand Tour started again this year, it was the only ad that ever played for me)

- most ads seem to be trailers for TV shows or movies. Most of those spoil half the story

- if you just want to see what some streamer is doing you have to watch an ad first

Twitch Prime was the only reason I still had Amazon Prime when it removed ads officially. Not anymore.

Twitch turbo was great before Twitch Prime and I had it. But now it's 9,99€ per month which I find outrageous, especially because the streamers will see very little of this money anyways, afaik.

The person who I am responding to said the following describes something bad:

> either it takes me half a second to tell I'm not interested in an ad, or I actually am interested and i follow the ad because I am interested and I want to support the website

The second half of that sentence is precisely what I'm describing. Do you disagree with my characterization of that sentence?

I assume they included that part in the quote rather than cutting it off earlier because this was part of what they were saying is bad. Do you disagree with me there?

Requiring ads like that will only kill small businesses. Big companies can get custom ads like that. Small ones have to rely on Adsense.

You can justify it however you want, the fact is if you remove automated ads from the internet, the internet would be a lot smaller than it is today.

How do you pay your bills? If running those websites were your full time job, would you still be okay not making any money off of them? Or have you just decided that only people who have other income should have websites?

What?

This has Nothing to do with "Ads". It has to do with malicious scripts and gratuitous webtrash that sucks up resources.

The instant Mozilla turned off my "Noscript", I got one of those phishing popups that pretends to be from Microsuck and totally locks up Firefux.

On a machine with limited memory, cores, or what-have-you, every webprogrammer's special cute little "Animation" will run, gratuitously, and slow your machine down so much that it becomes unusable.

Maybe "Advertisers" need to finger out how to write adaptive code that doesn't depend on cutesy little videos that choke older systems to death. (I notice Amazon has done that... you can run it on nearly anything. Which is why... oh, never mind.)