this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2025
674 points (96.2% liked)

Microblog Memes

11507 readers
827 users here now

A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.

Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.

RULES:

  1. Your post must be a screen capture of a microblog-type post that includes the UI of the site it came from, preferably also including the avatar and username of the original poster. Including relevant comments made to the original post is encouraged.
  2. Your post, included comments, or your title/comment should include some kind of commentary or remark on the subject of the screen capture. Your title must include at least one word relevant to your post.
  3. You are encouraged to provide a link back to the source of your screen capture in the body of your post.
  4. Current politics and news are allowed, but discouraged. There MUST be some kind of human commentary/reaction included (either by the original poster or you). Just news articles or headlines will be deleted.
  5. Doctored posts/images and AI are allowed, but discouraged. You MUST indicate this in your post (even if you didn't originally know). If an image is found to be fabricated or edited in any way and it is not properly labeled, it will be deleted.
  6. Absolutely no NSFL content.
  7. Be nice. Don't take anything personally. Take political debates to the appropriate communities. Take personal disagreements & arguments to private messages.
  8. No advertising, brand promotion, or guerrilla marketing.

RELATED COMMUNITIES:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Billy_fuccboi@lemmy.world 145 points 4 months ago (20 children)

You could also just tell them

[–] red_bull_of_juarez@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Boring. Using the environment to your advantage. Sun Tzu approves.

[–] Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip 3 points 4 months ago

Sun Tzu wasn't using the environment to send messages to his allied generals, though.

load more comments (19 replies)
[–] TWeaK@lemmy.today 145 points 4 months ago (2 children)

It's sad how few people have ad blocking.

[–] napkin2020@sh.itjust.works 24 points 4 months ago

Best Holiday present: Uninstall $SHIT_BROWSER and install Librewolf with uBO(which LW ship with by default).

[–] BilSabab@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

meanwhile in Ukraine - a steady barely contained stream of russian propaganda in the paid ads kinda conditioned everyone that ublock origin is the default extension no questions asked. Youtube was absolutely unbearable to watch with no adblock before Google pulled russian ad accounts - like just they bombarded with defeatist messages all the time.

[–] TWeaK@lemmy.today 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Sponsorblock as well for youtube.

[–] BilSabab@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago

oh yeah, that's a good one

[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 54 points 4 months ago (1 children)

That's so disgusting to me... Social communication through targeted ads? What are we even doing here...

[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 14 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

You can always think of it as wasting ad budgets on things you could trivially tell each other

[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 15 points 4 months ago

That's distopian as fuck.

It's not the hints I have a problem with...

[–] fushuan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 4 months ago

No one isn wasting and budgets, they would get ads anyway.

[–] rekabis@lemmy.ca 36 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

Ads?

What ads?

I mean, who TF is not running with a proper adblocker and multiple other anti-spyware and anti-malware add-ins in their browser?

I’ve been doing so since 2004, when the first adblocker came out for Firefox. Except for system set-ups of client machines and working on the machines of new clients, I haven’t seen an ad in over 20 years.

Of course, you actually need to be running Firefox to have anything approaching an effective in-browser adblocker… Chrome has massively neutered adblockers into near uselessness.

Seriously, people:

And for those on mobile:

[–] Zorque@lemmy.world 24 points 4 months ago

I mean, who TF is not running with a proper adblocker and multiple other anti-spyware and anti-malware add-ins in their browser?

The average person.

[–] Turret3857@infosec.pub 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

You really shouldnt need all of these extensions, and the more extensions you use the more fingerprint able you are. May I suggest stock LibreWolf/IronFoxn or Mullvad Browser instead?

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 1 points 4 months ago

Problem with multiple adblockers is more with inefficiency and breakage. Use multiple solutions only if they don't overlap.

[–] rekabis@lemmy.ca 1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

the more fingerprint able you are

Missed Privacy Tweaks, did ya? Look closer.

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It lists these tweaks, none of which I understand to have anything to do with extension detection/fingerprinting:

[–] rekabis@lemmy.ca 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

extension detection/fingerprinting

So you’re talking about bot detection and bot denial of a website, then.

Well, I’m not a bot.

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

No, I'm talking about extension detection being used as part of the process to fingerprint your browser to identitify you as a unique person.

That's used to track you across websites for ad targeting and other shit such as but not limited to sites displaying different prices to different people based off information they've gathered on you and connected to your unique fingerprint.

Fingerprinting effects a lot more than the ads you don't see due to blocking them and bot detection. Please read up on it more instead of running with assumptions.

[–] rekabis@lemmy.ca 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

This makes sense for extensions that respond to and directly process and interact with page elements, such as Flash or Silverlight.

This makes absolutely no sense if the app has no ability to load or interact with anything in the page. If there is no interactivity - and why would there be, with simple blocking? - there is nothing for an external script to “grab”.

Which security add-ins, an external script can tell - at most - that an in-page element was not loaded by the web browser, but then anyone doing the tracking needs to contend with the dozen-plus add-ins that have the capability to block an element like that. The exact add-in is still not identifiable, only the class or type of add-in that has the functionality to block said element.

I have read through a number of white papers that explore this technology, and to a T,

  1. This is still largely experimental and proof-of-concept
  2. Is still primarily meant to block bots that are trying to mimic humans, and to ensure that the site visitor is actually a salty bag of mostly water
  3. Can only identify apps that are explicitly designed to produce a response, as a core aspect of their purpose and design. Which, by default, fails to include almost all security-based add-ins, which behave more as “black holes” that have never been designed nor have any capability to respond to external queries.

So when a website bitches about you having an adblocker installed, the site cannot tell WHICH ad-blocker is installed, only that ads are not loading because it is not getting any telemetry from them.

So the website cannot track you by your installation of uBlock Origin unless it has that mix of ads that uBlock’s particular DEFAULT blocking pattern can be identified with. And since you can add or remove black lists at will, this becomes an infinite game of whack-a-mole for anyone trying to track you. Plus, other adblockers can load the same black lists, giving the exact same pattern for any website not loading ads from many dozens of different sources.

[–] Turret3857@infosec.pub 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)
[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Notable section from the Wikipedia article linked there as "stand out":

I'm not well versed on it, but I believe installed extensions are directly query-able through javascript or html5 on sites loaded by the browser.

[–] rekabis@lemmy.ca 2 points 4 months ago

believe installed extensions are directly query-able through javascript or html5

The requirement for this is that those extensions need to directly interact with - and respond to - page elements.

Security add-ins are a “black hole” in that the vast majority of them only block, they don’t interact. There is absolutely no way for a website to tell which ad-blocker is installed from purely the ad-blocking component itself. Provided the add-on is constructed properly, it should never respond to any code either on the client-side or server-side, it should only block the browser from not even requesting certain assets in the first place. In fact, a good adblocker should be indistinguishable from a failure of DNS in providing the IP address of the ad server.

[–] rekabis@lemmy.ca 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Preaching to the choir.

The list above is the vast majority of my add-ins. I don’t use any which are sufficiently duplicated in the browser or which are not required for enhanced security.

I am not one of those people with multiple dozens of add-ins.

[–] Turret3857@infosec.pub 1 points 4 months ago

You say you aren't one of those people but i genuinely dont believe most of those extensions are needed if youre using hardened Firefox (LibreWolf/IronFox/Mullvad Browser/Tor)

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Prettt sure DecentralEyes has been abandoned. I think LocalCDN is the reccomendation now.

I also believe there are ways to configure uBlock Origin to handle referrer stuff, clean links, for smart https stuff, and to handle redirect links as well. Probably something you can do with it for amp links as well.

Also, just know that every extension installed absolutely spikes up your uniqueness to fingerprinting.

[–] rekabis@lemmy.ca 0 points 4 months ago

every extension installed absolutely spikes up your uniqueness to fingerprinting.

Missed Privacy Tweaks, did ya? Look closer.

[–] BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] rekabis@lemmy.ca 2 points 4 months ago

Now granted, most of these will need additional configuration once installed to be effective. Downside is that you need good security knowledge to configure some of these settings. Most can be rather obvious, but some can trip up those without deep knowledge.

For example, Referer Control is particularly subtle, as its only mod requires you to set the referrer to be [REFERER_HOST], and (if it is disabled) to have JS referrer handling active as well.

[–] realitaetsverlust@piefed.zip 22 points 4 months ago

First of all, kinda cringe to not just have basic communication, second, that's not the point of a present.

[–] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 9 points 4 months ago

Does everyone not have their own profile? I lock mine when I walk away - login to your profile.

[–] Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 4 points 4 months ago

My wife was looking for neck massagers online so i bought her one for her birthday. She really loves it. I would never have thought of that without seeing the Amazon recommendations.

[–] BilSabab@lemmy.world 3 points 4 months ago

but what if that dude has adblocks? what a bummer

[–] zephiriz@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 months ago

I'm sure this happens but have no proof. I have family and friends who use my WIFI and I'm sure google and Amazon look at what they search for and think maybe I'll be interested in it as well and start showinge ads. I guessed I was going to get a chess set for Christmas because I kept seeing sets in my Amazon account but I personally never looked for one or something similar. But my mom got me one. So there is that.

load more comments
view more: next ›