Absolutely fucking not. Let me pay safely (privately) and we both win.

This is an arms race against an evil industry.

Ad blockers are a self-defence by nature.

Lol no. When I help most people fix their computer issues like having an infected PC, I honestly think UBlock Origin and HTTPS Everywhere are most effective than antivirus software. Of course, I don’t let them go without antivirus software but my point is that adblockers like UBlock Origin are arguably a more effective preventative measure than most antivirus software.

The idea that adblockers are piracy is just a foolish use of the word privacy and it’s weird that Linus took the stance he did on this. He’s a smart guy, at the very least I don’t get how he didn’t think the community wouldn’t clown on him for this.

Someone said

Ad blockers are a self defense technology by nature

Add ads in small quantities to your website that respect me and my privacy and I might just whitelist you, but at this point the internet is unusable without AdBlock

Adblockers are like piracy because they are cool and good.

No, adblockers are not piracy. It’s more similar to using a “free service/resource” that has a recommended (or even expected) donation, which you decide not to pay.

If you’re somehow using adblockers to get past a paywall or some other authentication/authorization system, then we have a legitimate piracy conversation.

Nope. Web tech is designed from the ground up to give the end user full control over how they render the documents they are sent. That’s why the pages are sent without DRM to your browser using a well-documented standard and every browser has extensive infra to let you write code that modifies browser behavior and allows you to automatically edit the pages you’re sent.

Content creators are free to bundle ads with their content, and content consumers are just as free to strip the ads out and refuse to view them. This is literally how the Web was designed to work.

You want something else, go help Google kill the Web and replace it with DRM-infested walled gardens and let Google tell you how and when you can communicate with other users as the inevitable price.

Under most circumstances you can’t even call adblocking a DMCA DRM circumvention violation because for most web documents there isn’t even any copy protection embedded in the page??? (Might be different for YouTube admittedly since there absolutely is DRM embedded)

It’s literally as if as someone was selling their novel as an unprotected Word document, included a bunch of paid product placement in their novel, and then got mad and called it piracy when readers opened the Word document and stripped it out AFTER the users had downloaded it.

Of course this is different with YouTube and streaming video platforms in general since they generally have TOS that cover adblocking and they do bundle DRM. However, it’s up to the video platforms to actually do the legwork of implementing DRM and enforcing the TOS, and putting up with irate users who inevitably get screwed out of money for one reason or another or just have the user experience degraded in the name of intellectual property.

no, refuse to elaborate

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Adblocker: a resource that blocks, for you, ads in the internet. That modifies the way you view the content someone publishes.

Piracy (in informatics): illegal use of copyrighted content, and, more specifically, using it for personal profit, like selling copies.

As long as sites don’t (usually) come with a contract you have to sign, and no law forbids adblockers, it is a legal option to visit online content. Like, you can use lynx (text-based browser), so you don’t see webpages as graphically planned, and blind people only listen to the content, in both cases not seeing ads, or not all of them. Would we call it illegal for some reason? If not, why not showing ads would be different? (I imagine someone cutting ads on a magazine to give another example of you’re not obliged to visualize or even read what you don’t want to.)

…is this about Linus’ stupid tweet? Because no, using adblocker is not piracy. How would it be? All adblockers do is, wouldn’t you know it, block ads. They don’t illegally copy data.

For me, adblocker are more kind of self defense. One wouldn’t need them, when most website operators wouldn’t add more ad than content to their pages.

Ads have no right be as invasive as they are. So ads, and only ads, are to blame.