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Lately whenever I open a link to a WashingtonPost.com article, I've been getting a sidebar message telling me to disable my ad blocker, with much of the page covered by the sidebar and scrolling disabled. Till now, I'd been closing the articles; not wanting to read them that badly.
But today, I started playing around with my uMatrix settings, trying to find out which domains I'd need to allow Javascript for, to get the message to go away. I'd be ok with allowing some advertising domains, if the ads weren't intrusive. I had to keep on enabling more and more domains, until the page finally worked. Then I started over from scratch, allowing only the last domain I had enabled, but that didn't work. Sigh. I started to wonder again if it was really worth it; I can live without WaPo articles.
I did some web searches to see if I could find info on which domains needed to be enabled. I didn't find that answer, but from what I read, WaPo has been doing this kind of ad-blocker blocking for several years already. I haven't had a problem reading WaPo articles until recently. So then it occurred to me that maybe to fix the problem, I need to *disable* Javascript for the WaPo domain. I did that, and ta-da, no more sidebar message and no more problem reading the articles.
The problem was because I had changed my global uMatrix settings a while back to allow Javascript for the main website's domain by default.
I feel somewhat bad about blocking ads, as I understand that websites need a source of revenue. My main reason for blocking JS and ads is to make it less likely to be exposed to malware. I remember some instances where ads were responsible for loading malware onto people's machines, even though I don't remember if that actually happened to me from any ads. I think my antivirus caught it before I was infected. My other reasons are because of how much slower enabling all Javascript makes some pages, and because I don't like it when audio and videos auto-play.
I also sometimes feel just a tiny slight bit wistful, wondering if maybe I had Javascript and cookies and all that enabled all the time, and if Google and everyone else had built up good profiles of me, maybe I'd be seeing interesting, useful and relevant ads that I'd want to click on.
I've bought subscriptions to some sites, and given others donations, to help them out financially. But that's a lot harder sometimes than it ought to be. I wrote a rant-post this morning about a problem with TheAtlantic site; this time it wasn't letting me update my credit card expiration date, even though their system had sent me an email asking me to. But I made that post private, because ::meh::.
But today, I started playing around with my uMatrix settings, trying to find out which domains I'd need to allow Javascript for, to get the message to go away. I'd be ok with allowing some advertising domains, if the ads weren't intrusive. I had to keep on enabling more and more domains, until the page finally worked. Then I started over from scratch, allowing only the last domain I had enabled, but that didn't work. Sigh. I started to wonder again if it was really worth it; I can live without WaPo articles.
I did some web searches to see if I could find info on which domains needed to be enabled. I didn't find that answer, but from what I read, WaPo has been doing this kind of ad-blocker blocking for several years already. I haven't had a problem reading WaPo articles until recently. So then it occurred to me that maybe to fix the problem, I need to *disable* Javascript for the WaPo domain. I did that, and ta-da, no more sidebar message and no more problem reading the articles.
The problem was because I had changed my global uMatrix settings a while back to allow Javascript for the main website's domain by default.
I feel somewhat bad about blocking ads, as I understand that websites need a source of revenue. My main reason for blocking JS and ads is to make it less likely to be exposed to malware. I remember some instances where ads were responsible for loading malware onto people's machines, even though I don't remember if that actually happened to me from any ads. I think my antivirus caught it before I was infected. My other reasons are because of how much slower enabling all Javascript makes some pages, and because I don't like it when audio and videos auto-play.
I also sometimes feel just a tiny slight bit wistful, wondering if maybe I had Javascript and cookies and all that enabled all the time, and if Google and everyone else had built up good profiles of me, maybe I'd be seeing interesting, useful and relevant ads that I'd want to click on.
I've bought subscriptions to some sites, and given others donations, to help them out financially. But that's a lot harder sometimes than it ought to be. I wrote a rant-post this morning about a problem with TheAtlantic site; this time it wasn't letting me update my credit card expiration date, even though their system had sent me an email asking me to. But I made that post private, because ::meh::.