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Online Ads Can Infect Your Device with Spyware
(www.scientificamerican.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
357 points (96.9% liked)
Technology
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Don't load ads. There, problem solved.
It takes some savviness to do this. Most people aren’t techy enough.
it's scary for people who don't understand it. i would never ask my parents to get it because i know that any errors or whatever their computer will get will get blamed on the extension and get blamed on me.
You wouldn't ask your boomer parents to block ads that will likely get them to install viruses or get scammed? They are easily the demographic that would benefit the most from ublock.
You’ve clearly never had to deal with the “you touched my computer 3 years ago and now it won’t turn on. Why did you break my computer” family members. One of the number one pieces of advice for people just starting in IT is to never work on family members’ computers. Because as soon as you agree to fix something, you’re now the person to blame when something stops working. Because “it worked fine the last time you touched it, and now it’s broken. Clearly I didn’t do anything to break it, so it must have been you” is a scarily common train of thought.
This and don't ever tell co-workers your into computers either. They will ask for say, laptop recommdations. So because you like them, you do a little research and send them some links. 6 months later they'll come back asking for another recommendation because they didn't buy anything when they last asked! This has happened to me more times than I care to think about. Totally annoys me.
Thing is most people are unaware of the harmful nature of ads and don't care to do anything to block them.
I swear 90% of the world not aware of adblocker.
And then 9% out of that remaining 10% just can't be bothered to install them for some insane reason.
"I don't mind the ads..."
"WHY THE FUCK NOT, ARE YOU EVEN HUMAN?"
Exactly! Can't understand how do so many people tolerate ads.
I think I heard that usage on desktop is something like 1 in 4, which is pretty good. Mobile is another world altogether, since it requires different browsers that support adblocking and then accessing websites through the browser instead of the app for the website, which many users would definitely prefer to use.