Agreed. As someone who could not use the web without an ad blocker, I wouldn't even be opposed to a `X-Blocks-Ads: true` request header or something, to just shut down the hue and cry between the two parties. Let's all be honest, then see where it gets us.
If we could trust adtech to be honest we wouldn't have to vigorously block them. You and I both know X-Block-Ads would be nothing more than an extra wrinkle for your browser fingerprint.
Right, because the Do-Not-Track flag was respected oh so well. The only people that seem to care about flags are an invading colonizing system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTduy7Qkvk8
It would be another bit for the fingerprinting, that's an important caveat.
The point is that web site owners should be able to easily implement ad/pay walls, and let the market decide whether users are OK with that. The current situation is that ad blocking is a luxury, afforded by people like us with a decent Internet connection for the constant updates, and understanding of technology, to enable ad blocking in the first place.
You're choosing to run their javascript. If you turn off JS, they don't get any control, and you'll likely not get any content or ads.
Let's not forget that people are (1) choosing to visit the site, and (2) choosing to run the server's code locally. This isn't authoritarianism.
If you want to watch YouTube, or Netflix, or whatever, you have to seek it out, and run their code. And of course, you should mutually agree to terms to see be distributed their content.
>I paid for my device, they should have no control over it, yet they do.
no they don't. Even with this theoretical header, they wouldn't have control unless it was an OS-level setting (even then, it'd be trivial to spoof).
they have data you desire, you send a request to connect, they use info in that request to give you a response. malicious services aside, the worst they can do is send nothing, or only undesirable data (a page full of nothing but ads, that you'd block. resulting in nothing). It doesn't control your ability to tab out, close the tab, switch the browser, nor change your OS.
I've read about the chromium stuff. This is why 1) alternatives are important and why I switched to Firefox this year and 2) why being open source is important for competitors to fork and avoid this BS.
>certain cables being unable to display movies, etc.
HDCP was indeed a mistake. A very flimsy one at that. There's so many ways to display content that trying to block it on some specific kind of cable protocol is silly. It just makes people think the device is broken.
