Redirects to sketchy ads on BB

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Possibly not the best place to report this but unlike last time I needed to report an ad campaign, I don’t have a good way of pointing out who’s responsible. In the past few days, I’ve been redirected from Boing Boing to a survey site purporting to be “Time Warner” and one trying to get me to “Update ‘Flash.’”

As far as I can tell, it’s only happening on Boing Boing itself. I’m running Firefox 52.0.2 on Mac OS 10.12.4 with all the updates for Sierra and no plugins on Firefox.

I don’t remember which post gave the “Time Warner” survey but I got the “Update Flash” deal on 11 obscenely optimistic songs for ukulele (which is an awesome video, thanks Cory).

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Yeah once in a while I used to get the “important security message” ones on here.

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Yeah, wish BoingBoing accepted Flattr. I don’t unblock anybody on my filters, sorry. Ad networks are evil and a massive security risk.

The only good ad network is Project Wonderful - they don’t track you, images only, sparse use of GIFs. Used on my niche sites, very nice. And unblocked on most adblock lists, because they’re too nice to block.

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May I suggest our good friend, uBlock Origin?

“Sanitizing your web from malicious malware hidden in ads” tm

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Note that uBlock Origin can reduce performance in the browser by 25%.

Verify this yourself by visiting

http://browserbench.org/Speedometer/

and running the benchmark with it on and off.

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A few things:

  1. sketchy ads bug us as much as you. We hate them too.
  2. the nature of modern ad networks makes tracking them down extremely difficult.

If you see a bad ad, try and nab a screenshot if you can, and send it, along with any other info you have (URLs, what page it was on, and if you are willing, your region, as some ads are geofenced), and send it to badad@boingboing.net. The folks there will send it up the chain to our ad provider who will do our best to squash them.

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Increases render time, decreases time spent waiting for goddamn remote objects and servers to respond before the page can render greatly. Not as efficient as blocking at router level.

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Not in my experience. There is a perf hit but it is nowhere near 25%.

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Run the benchmark and see what the data tells you! http://browserbench.org/Speedometer/

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Nah, I’ll pass. I’ve got benchmarks at work for these things, you know, where we build Firefox. It isn’t 25%.

I’m jet lagged and I have better things to do.

You might want to look at why it impacts your system so much though.

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That’s a Google benchmark. Look closer!

(Also Firefox is slower than Edge and Chrome in it as of latest versions, including the Windows 10 Creator’s edition etc)

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If you’re running chrome, we’ve already identified your problem.

Also, I don’t run Windows so I really can’t do your perf tests under it.

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It’s like you’re scared to run the benchmark! :chicken:

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Or like I’m on my phone and flew halfway around the planet in the last day.

Like I said, I already know it isn’t 25%. Strangely, a lot of my development co-workers run ublock origin and other blockers and have done perf tests under it to identify issues.

It also doesn’t change the fact that by not having flash and running a blocker, I don’t get malware from ad networks.

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It told me that without ublock origin the speedometer would always freeze up at some point… (I gave it 5-7 attempts).
Edit:
I tried a simple javascript benchmark and I got a -16% hit on the benchmark when uBlock was running.

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Things are a bit off topic right now.

@orenwolf or @Falcor can you close this? I’ll email the address orenwolf provided if it happens again.