That’s exactly what I’d love to be able to do. Just imagine, a “mere” 10% of routers affected would be enough to give a significant reduction in ad revenue to some big corps
This predatory ad shit works because most people don’t care enough to do something about it. That same cohort of people likely also won’t care enough to fix the “issue.” They’ll hear about it, see their email still works fine and move on with life.
Edit: could we design something like a community vpn project? Something like… I don’t know… like Tor, but for a completely different purpose? Something you can install and it routes your traffic through globally distributed nodes which automatically filter your traffic to remove ads and other security measures?
That would keep things opt-in. It would keep control of the system / filtering bound by community interest. We could set up separate filtering systems too — in case that would be required. Users can pick which filter package their traffic is treated with.
I don’t have a lot of bandwidth, but I definitely have some to spare. I am not using my Internet 24/7.
Edit 2: to be clear, I don’t really think opt-in is justified here’s though. The interesting question isn’t whether we can block advertisements for strangers. It’s whether we can justify protecting people from a demonstrably dangerous infrastructure, even when they haven’t requested that protection.
Consider three premises:
An infrastructure exposes people to harms they generally don’t understand or meaningfully consent to.
A third party possesses a mechanism that can reduce those harms without requiring individual participation.
The intervention introduces substantially less risk than it prevents.
I don’t think requiring explicit, individualized consent is automatically the most defensible ethical position. We already accept similar arrangements in cybersecurity.
Email providers filter malicious attachments without asking recipients about each one. Network administrators block connections to malicious destinations. Browsers prevent known dangerous downloads.
The important precedent is that protective defaults can be justified without affirmative consent for every individual intervention.
However, those examples involve services or systems with an established responsibility for protecting their users. Therefore I think our approach should be similarly designed. A stranger modifying somebody else’s communications has no comparable authority.
Silently installing protective software through advertising exploits is theoretically conceivable, but it would reproduce the same unauthorized device-compromise problem we’re trying to eliminate. I would be cautious about this — what if your infrastructure can itself because a centralized attack surface?
I also wonder about what methods can target ad infrastructure directly, though. That’s another approach.
That’s exactly what I’d love to be able to do. Just imagine, a “mere” 10% of routers affected would be enough to give a significant reduction in ad revenue to some big corps
I think you’re on to something.
This predatory ad shit works because most people don’t care enough to do something about it. That same cohort of people likely also won’t care enough to fix the “issue.” They’ll hear about it, see their email still works fine and move on with life.
Edit: could we design something like a community vpn project? Something like… I don’t know… like Tor, but for a completely different purpose? Something you can install and it routes your traffic through globally distributed nodes which automatically filter your traffic to remove ads and other security measures?
That would keep things opt-in. It would keep control of the system / filtering bound by community interest. We could set up separate filtering systems too — in case that would be required. Users can pick which filter package their traffic is treated with.
I don’t have a lot of bandwidth, but I definitely have some to spare. I am not using my Internet 24/7.
Edit 2: to be clear, I don’t really think opt-in is justified here’s though. The interesting question isn’t whether we can block advertisements for strangers. It’s whether we can justify protecting people from a demonstrably dangerous infrastructure, even when they haven’t requested that protection.
Consider three premises:
I don’t think requiring explicit, individualized consent is automatically the most defensible ethical position. We already accept similar arrangements in cybersecurity.
Email providers filter malicious attachments without asking recipients about each one. Network administrators block connections to malicious destinations. Browsers prevent known dangerous downloads.
The important precedent is that protective defaults can be justified without affirmative consent for every individual intervention.
However, those examples involve services or systems with an established responsibility for protecting their users. Therefore I think our approach should be similarly designed. A stranger modifying somebody else’s communications has no comparable authority.
Silently installing protective software through advertising exploits is theoretically conceivable, but it would reproduce the same unauthorized device-compromise problem we’re trying to eliminate. I would be cautious about this — what if your infrastructure can itself because a centralized attack surface?
I also wonder about what methods can target ad infrastructure directly, though. That’s another approach.