#ad-blocking

#ad-blocking

Privacy advocates have always argued that Google is an advertising company that just happens to build a browser. Most of us shrugged that off because, well, Chrome is fast, familiar, and hard to abandon. But Manifest V3 really does change the landscape. Google frames it as a technical upgrade for security and performance. Yet the underlying mechanics point to a different goal: reducing user control in ways that closely align with an ad-driven business model.

Ad blocking is in a weird place. Google, the company that makes more money from advertising than any other on Earth, is actively working to make ad blockers worse on Chrome while it also makes it harder to block ads on YouTube. Basically, it's a good time to not use Chrome. So it's nice that Apple users have another choice: Safari. And, as luck would have it, Safari has an extremely efficient API for ad blocking built right in.

I thought smart TVs would make my life easier. What I got instead was endless frustration. My four Roku TCL Smart TVs crawled through menus, took forever to load apps, and bombarded me with ads at every turn. I was thinking about replacing them when I tried something different: blocking ads through my router. This simple change made my TVs run faster than they had since the day I bought them.

The ruling says that the appeals court erred when it determined that the use of ad blocking software does not infringe on a copyright holder's exclusive right to modify a computer program.