I blacklist any site that is anti-adblocker. You should grab an old computer and install pi-hole on it and you will be able to blacklist sites and just stop the ads from getting into your home.
https://pi-hole.net/
GDPR is a disaster. Already I am getting overwhelmed by requests from people who don't want people to know that they are running a business at such and such an address and I can only assume they are running a criminal business.
There are two ways that "privacy" can be violated: (1) somebody exploits your data, or (2) somebody violates your space. Something like GDPR addresses (1) and might put an end to those shoes from Zappos that keep following you around, but it does not stop the disincentives that destroyed the world wide web.
> Already I am getting overwhelmed by requests from people who don't want people to know that they are running a business at such and such an address
Huh? What does this mean? I've been getting the usual "Please consent to let us continue spamming you" emails, but I have no idea what your sentence above means. Can you elaborate as it's not clear what you're talking about.
(sorry for out of sequence reply but I could not reply directly to the message in question)
I run a business directory site, or at least used to until this morning. If I was like many people I would blame GDPR, but really I figured I rather spend the money I was spending on AWS on something else.
I'm still not getting this... did people get in touch and say "I don't want people to know I'm running a business at this address"? Or did they say "Please remove me from your business directory which you added me to without asking"?... and how does your mind jump to "must be criminals" - are there intermediate steps in your logic or is it just: doesn't want me to have their business address on my database = criminals?
My directory was generated from public information (the Legal Entity Identifier)
The EU has been making moves towards financial transparency largely driven by the UK getting on the open data bandwagon. (Ten years ago they were much worse than the US in terms of seeing government data as a revenue source, now they are far ahead of other countries.)
This is endangered by Brexit and GDPR.
One part of the global governance crisis is that legislators have been captured by a "one dollar one vote" situation and in turn cannot maintain tax rates that produce sufficient government revenues. Thus the bureaucratic sectors have focused on keeping the lights on by trying to get people to pay what they owe. Given massive tax evasion by the rich that has to be a priority so general transparency around cross-border financial transactions has to increase.
Perhaps some people who want to be "forgotten" are not criminals, but when you look for specific cases of people who are making these requests they are frequently white collar criminals who are hoping they can sweet talk somebody again into another chance to lie, cheat and steal to pay for gambling or cocaine or whatever.
Perhaps some people who want to be "forgotten" are not criminals, but when you look for specific cases of people who are making these requests they are frequently white collar criminals who are hoping they can sweet talk somebody again into another chance to lie, cheat and steal to pay for gambling or cocaine or whatever.
This seems like a slightly modified version of the old, “if you have nothing to hide...” saw and I don’t like it.
I have an aunt who has a nursing degree, burned down a barn with horses in it and attempted to kill two people (her mother and her sister) by injecting them with insulin. At some point in between all of that she drove a school bus and for some reason decided to slash herself up with razor and claim that she was assaulted.
We heard that she'd gotten a job as a nurse and we we wonder how that happened. My father-in-law was in the hospital (not where she worked) and she changed his IV bag when it ran out and started beeping.
A week later we read in the paper that she was raiding the medicine cabinet at the nursing home she worked at and found out she was also stealing ADHD medication from her grandson.
Turned out she failed to tick the box that asked if she'd ever committed a felony and the employer was too busy to run a background check on her SSN.
Dangerous people are out there.
That kind of behavior is a direct threat to life but I think tax evasion, corruption, rent-seeking, a lack of responsiveness to problems such as global warming, homelessness, and affordable housing and similar behaviors threaten our civilization and one thing we know is that when a civilization goes down the people left behind turn their back on everything that civilization stand for. (Ex. look what happened when the Christians took over Rome)
The main thing our civilization stands for is individualism and if you like the idea of being able to decide anything at all for yourself (or people 50-100 years) you should have been helping turn the ship around 20 years ago and it might be too late now. (Eg. Listening to people like Frederick Hayek is the real "road to serfdom")
An Iranian physicist living in the UK threatened to sue me under the UK libel laws because he thought I brought attention to him that might lead Iranian grad students to come around looking for job. Well, I was chewed up and spit out by that system and I was not going to be intimidated by that -- if you are sitting pretty on a tenured job on the back of young people in an unfair situation you deserve to hear the voices and see the faces of people who are harmed by your privilege. It is not such a big thing.
Somehow your domestic intelligence service, foreign intelligence services, organized criminals, rip-off artists and other people are going to steal your information and the more that information is pushed underground the more impunity that they are going to operate under.
(To paraphrase Heinlein: a transparent society is a going concern)
Yes, and psychopaths like your aunt exist, but if we design society around authoritarian ideals designed to totally eliminate their ability to do harm society breaks every time. A balance has to be struck that acknowledges the presence of a significant minority of criminals, while protecting the rights of the majority. A thousand anecdotes will not change that.
Just as a meta note, if you click the timestamp of the post, you'll be taken to a page with a comment box. HN has some rate-limiting where it hides the comment box for some period of time, but you can get around it by clicking the timestamp next to their name.
Job ads being one. Also, HN has behind the scene deals to peddle certain news organizations ( nytimes, wapo, wsj ) and certain ngos with certain agendas.
What do you think HN is? What do you think dang, sctb and the mods do?
The company in the source article also has a DNS service (adguard dns: 176.103.130.130 & 176.103.130.131) that blocks ad domains.
It works pretty well, but requires trusting them to follow their privacy policy (which is good) as with any DNS provider.
I've found it useful and lower maintenance than other approaches, but you trade power and flexibility. And is presumably less performant than preventing the lookups in the first place.
