Technik

They are not chewing through mine, I use Firefox with uBlock Origin on Android too.

After reading the article:

To test this, Enders used a browser that mimicked an iPhone 6 and accessed a total of eight "popular" news sites (though they didn't confirm what these were).

Wow yea great methodology, thanks guys. It really captures your motto of "Rigorous Fearless Independent" especially the first term.

Also good job by Santiago Luque of Nextpit to generalize the result to the maximum possible extent.

Looks like I'm not reading their article.

We require your consent for the use of cookies and other technologies by us and our partners (393) to store and process personal data on your device.

Consent dialog is not conforming law.

And man, even if you go into the settings of the consent dialog, I hate these kinds of misleading toggles. Which option do you think is active?

Ironic.

This is what is absolutely crazy about the modern internet. We pay for data -- and because net neutrality is dead, we pay more if we go over a cap. And yet, we do not have direct control over what corporations choose to force feed us through that data.*

Consider the analogy of terrestrial TV (not a perfect one, but good enough for this). Back in the day, you put up an antenna, and you received programming. There was no data limit, because it's just airwaves. Watch as much as you want. But one downside: advertising, except the case was easily made that it pays for the programming, the broadcasting, etc, so it was somewhat of a different beast. That cost was not passed to you. You "paid" for it by accepting the injection of ads into the programming.

Fast forward to today. Let's say you want to stream a show that you would have gotten on terrestrial TV back in the day. Now, you pay to access that content (not going into the deeper issue of lack of ownership here), but you also effectively pay for the broadcasting, in the old sense of the word. While it is true that companies incur costs to run their servers and dish out the data, you, the consumer, must pay to access the network it uses. And again, because neutrality is gone, you pay more if you go over your cap -- for the content that you pay to access anyway.

It starts to look shockingly like a double dip. Consider what you're doing when on a corporate website: you pay for the hardware. You pay for the data. You (often) pay for the content that uses the data. And yet, these corporations still gave the gall to inject advertising into your data stream.

It gets crazier the more you think about it.

*ad blockers and sponsorblock give you some control, but ultimately they are reactive Band-Aids on the modern system

Reminder that e.g. Firefox mobile has full extension support und as such can run uBlock Origin.

DNS blockers are nice, but they can only do so much against tracking without overblocking.

Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.

It’s the most pervasive pollution wrought upon our environments, and amplifies the carcinogenic perpetual growth delusion.

If you extrapolate from that and suppose that somewhere around half of all internet traffic is ad transmissions, that means that the internet ad industry has about 20 times the carbon emissions of crypto.

And that's why I have pihole setup to which I connect to using wireguard.

Ex wife: Turn off the blueberry pie or whatever! [She really said that.] It's blocking my clicks!

OK.

"Why is my internet so slow?!"

Dunno, let me see your phone.

Points finger: Ad, ad, ad downloading, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad...

"Fine. Turn it back on."

It's true and I saw it first hand at an airbnb with so so WiFi. My pops needed his football fix and managed to stream but the connection kept blurry or disconnect. Asked him why he was still using chrome; he even had firefox with uBlock Origin. Following my advice, closed chrome and sure enough, no video ads and shit fixed his connection problem.

Internet enshittification is real but we can fight it.

Internet, especially on mobile devices, is becoming more and more unusable every day. Fucking ads everywhere, taking up more space than the content. Autoplaying videos overlayed on top of the content. Close buttons so small they are all but impossible to hit on a touchscreen. Cookie consent banners on every site (opt out of course). The list just goes on...

I don't even care about the bandwidth, it's just a pain to use. I've started using Safari's reader view and the new "Hide Distracting Items" option to hide most of it, but I shouldn't have to. Capitalism really does ruin everything.

I have Firefox with Ublock Origin, YouTube ReVanced, and a DNS-level adblocker to cover everything else; ads ain't chewing through shit on my device.

as long as data caps exist all internet advertising is theft

I wonder how many lemmy users dont use adblock

For what it's worth, nextdns (referer link) servers block ads at the DNS level, works pretty well on iPhones and Androïd without root.

this is the main problem I have with pay as you go and data caps. It would be prefereable to me if it was only for the data I want and ads were charged back to the ad creators but its coming from my allotment of internet. Even if you block them they still will be taking up the bandwidth.