One Reason Why I Dislike AdBlock Plus

Development Web Development
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Don't get me wrong, I love AdBlock Plus, I think it's great, HOWEVER, moments ago, while working on a website, I encountered a rather strange issue... One of the images that I had uploaded to the server was getting blocked by ABP, long story short, HOWEVER, it was behaving like some serious bug was happening or something. I mean I only discovered it was ABP because I found someone had the same issue on Stackoverflow. I then quickly disabled ABP, worked first time, but I s$!t myself because I thought I had gone and f$!ked up big time....

My boss thought I uploaded a virus onto the server... :joy: ... I even begun to wonder if I had done something that terrible, I mean I was certain I hadn't, but I couldn't formally say that the machine I'm currently using is 110% virus free and that there was no possibility that I uploaded a virus. I mean my work's machine isn't my own machine, and I do run maintenance software on here myself, but IDK what they do or if anyone uses the machine when I go home, etc.

Anyway, I tried debugging it before I found the issue on Stackoverflow, I tried a different image with a similar name, that worked. I also then tried to see if the image WAS actually on the server or not, it was. I then made sure I hadn't done a typo, which I hadn't. etc.

I'm still unsure why ABP picked that image up as an ad, but it did, and the funny fact is that I've changed the image name, literally only slightly, and it now works fine.

WHAT THE ACTUAL F!$K?! :joy:

Anyone else been confused by this issue before? :joy:

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Try using uBlock Origin, enable advanced mode so you can see what elements are being blocked. While it probably won't tell you why it is being blocked, you may get some additional information that could be of use.

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Not only that, but there was a story floating around of adblock plus doing something shady about a year back. I can't seem to find it now but ublock is definitely my preference regardless of the story.

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I'm not sure if we're talking about the same incident, or if this is something well known, but in The Art of Invisibility, Kevin Mitnick mentions that ABP logs all of your internet history.

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Ah, that must have been it. I couldn't remember exactly what the shadiness was, but it turned me off from it completely.

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I have never heard anything about that.

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I recently installed AdBlock Plus, but I am not as sophisticated as you to notice those problems.

I find ABP to be a welcome pain in the ass. Often I go to a news site and get the 'AdBlock detected. Whitelist us or pay for a subscription.' pop-up. At first I say "Damn it! I wanted to read that." Then I remember, if I whitelist this site they will harvest my data. To the blacklist with you and you are deleted from my bookmarks. I can go elsewhere for the same story.

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Hes actually correct and so does ghostery. None of it can be trusted. Pull the list of websites from each list and put it in your hosts file instead routed to 0.0.0.0

They dont try to maliciously do so … I suspect its more for their own analytics

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What about ublock?

makes task to investigate

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As far as I know ublock is better but nothing beats the security of locality

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2 year old topic.

But yeah basically all ad blockers monitor your internet traffic.
Otherwise they cannot get in between the sites you visit and the ads they need to block.
Ublock origin basically does the same thing.
The only downside with ABP is that it can slow down certain browsers.

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I think the point of the op was to show that this had the potential to be abuses and dayum… Nice necro everybody :joy:

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I really don’t care.

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It used to be a big deal I think largely it doesnt matter anymore

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We’re playing Indiana Jones I see …

No. For years, no. A long time ago, yes. But I stopped when the quality dropped to the level of the gutter.

Now ublock origin + privacy badger + PI-Hole with excessive number of lists that block 2,718,804 domains.

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