Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | bryanculver's commentslogin

A follow-up/related message would be great:

> "To the Guy I Invited to My Wedding, Even Though We Have Never Met"


This will sound like cheating but I argue for the time it saves me, both in creation and on-going maintenance, and delivering a quality finished project: Squarespace.

The clients are happy, if they get to the point where they want to manage the content themselves, and for less than $300/yr they get hosting, access to a payment processor if they need it, and domain renewal. It's been a no-brainer.


I don't feel that's cheating. In many ways you're a better option than a generalist, since I assume you've become an expert on that platform. I know others who focus on Shopify, Wix, etc.


I do same, but with Wordpress and Elementor builder. It's good enough for most small scale clients on nano-size budget. But Squarespace is a solid tool too!


"'I understood that reference' - Captain America" - Michael Scott


Will they make a couple more $ out of this? Maybe.

I suspect they'd rather not have a proliferation of developers farming out their profiles and dealing with it on the service/support side. Developers with pseudo-ownership of strangers devices and users who don't fully understand what they are agreeing to with tying their device to a unknown developer can't be fun.


The article is fascinating but one thing I am finding very common on these engineering blogs is no easy path back to the company or service. Understandably the logo at the top goes back to the blog homepage and the copyright at the bottom is just static text.

I could search or visit one of the social pages linked to in the footer but it seem like an obvious link one would want to have.


Hitting the “Join The Team” button up top takes you back to the main site, which seems reasonable since in most cases a technical blog is meant to be a recruitment funnel more than a general public-facing PR document, no?


I see that now. I wouldn't disagree, but if you're a CTO for example you might have interest in the services more than joining the team.


Thanks for bringing this up. We'll add a link to the main Datto website shortly. :-)


So although there might be “waste”, emergency preparedness shouldn’t be forgotten about. It’s safer and better to have blood available when it’s needed than to be begging for it.


What I think they're saying is that with Adblockers, they can phone home which ads they block, URLs they see, etc.

Content blockers impose rules at the outset and the rule generator won't see what the URLs/content actually is.

The way I would think of it would be like "let me see what you're seeing and I'll let you know what to let through" vs "here are a list of things you shouldn't let through but I don't need to know about what the hit rate actually is".

Although I could be misunderstanding the implementation.


While true with some, I believe uBO is a list implemented client-side, right? Other ad-blockers can and do phone home and let through ads that have paid, but uBO just has the EasyList filter installed locally and blocks those URLs. That was my impression at least, I never personally went through the source code.


I trust uBO and roughly zero others. In fact, uBO has to remind people at every opportunity to avoid certain others. It is all the others, now and in the future, that are prompting Apple to do this, and the one well-behaved extension is unfortunately suffering as a result.

I mourn the loss of uBO, but I'll take that tradeoff knowing that I can relax knowing that my family and friends aren't going to end up using some intrusive nightmare of an "ad-blocker" with Safari.


This is exactly it. Even if a malicious extension gets through, they have access to nothing on the user side. It's not a fair trade off but, in my opinion, it is a worthwhile one.


> That was my impression at least, I never personally went through the source code.

That's the rub though. There's nothing but trust preventing them from including some spyware in the next automatic update. Actually not even trust, whoever has account access to publish for uBlock could have their account hacked and someone malicious could inject spyware into a version of the extension.


Trust is everywhere in computer security. You trust Google to not deliver a backdoored version of Chrome to your machine when you download a binary instead of building from source. You trust them to not break the law and leak your personal data to third parties or discriminate against you based on the content of your emails.

I trust Raymond Hill more than I trust Google.


This isn't as much about what existing extensions do today but all about what potential extension could be doing tomorrow.

If an extension doesn't get full access to all the pages you are reading, it can't do bad things with that access when the extension's owner inevitably changes (see the fight between uBlock and uBlock Origin for example) and spyware features are added.


Even if it is, it doesn’t matter. The problem Apple faces is how to prevent the other bad actors from abusing their API. The answer they’ve settled on is remove those capabilities from the API. Another answer would be to leave the capabilities but somehow only grant access to them to “trusted” parties.

I’m sure that would have gone over really well, too. /s


In the later scenarios, what assurance does the Ablocker have that their requests are respected? I could easily see a scenario where an Adblocker says "Hey Chrome block all requests to ads.google.com" and Chrome saying "Sure thing buddy" then completely ignoring that request.


The same assurance you have that the browser wouldn’t simply inject its own ads into all pages.


There's really nothing at all preventing Chrome from doing that today if they wished... they can manipulate the page before and after the Adblocker sees it.


SHHH!!! That's for Chrome 100 ;P

I agree it's totally possible they would do that, but one could figure it out pretty easily with a touch of detective work.


And then what? Google will say that it's protecting critical functions from breaking and to piss off. Suddenly Google is a monopoly in the ad space because they have the predominant browser and let through only their ads.


they arguably are effectively a monopoly now. Them doing things like this isn't remotely new. They just got caught tracking everyone's smart TV usage. Nothing will happen to them until:

1) the Government decides to intervene.

2) Users give up and start using different services.

I'm pushing for #2, but then I switched off like a decade ago, when I saw the writing on the wall.


Were they tracking smart tv usage or were smart tv manufacturers using google apis to store their tracking data?


Both it seems:

"The most prevalent tracker, Google's doubleclick.net, showed up in 975 of the top 1,000 Roku channels, with Google analytics trackers showing up in 360, the researchers found." - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/09/studies-google-n...


Adblocker apps/extensions don't require that assurance. The user requires this assurance, and if the browser ignores the user's wishes, the browser is the application that should be held accountable by users.


How is the user to know if it's the AdBlocker or the Browser though? It's a he-said-she-said kind of situation with the AdBlocker and the Browser potentially pointing the finger at each other.

This setup gives the Browser/Maker plausible deniability when they act badly.


Browsers and extensions aren't black boxes; it's easy to inspect them for this kind of behavior.


  - Random scratch files in ~/Desktop/Rug (purged monthly, no backup)
  - All development in ~/Workspace (routinely backed up)
    - Source controlled development in ~/Workspace/Repos/[entity]/[project name] (excluded from backups)
    - All non-SCed files in ~/Workspace/[entity]/[project name]
  - Downloads in ~/Downloads (purged daily of older than two weeks, not backed up)
  - Personal computer has ~/Workspace symlinked from a Dropbox folder: ~/Dropbox/Bryan/Workspace
  - Family photos in ~/Dropbox/Family/Photos/[year]/[month]/[YYYY-MM-DD HH-MM-SS].[format]
    (routinely push-only sync to Amazon Glacier)

  * Several cron jobs to help maintain everything
  * Several custom Zsh plugins to make jumping around in shell a breeze
  * Daily bullet journal+markdown style notes auto source controlled in
    ~/Workspace/Repos/Personal/eod/[year]/[month]/[day].md


Click and drag it to the right.


I started a company, Argonomo (https://argonomo.com) and we founded and soft launched two ventures:

- SafeWhistle: An anonymous, encrypted, privacy-focused whistleblowing and incident management application companies and institutions can implement to help cut down on lack of reporting and increase transparency. (https://safewhistle.com)

- Sidepitch: A venture management system targeting private equity groups and venture capitalists. Streamlining the application process for startups and giving investors a central management solution for their investments, instead of a collection of emails, paper documents, and in-face communications. (https://sidepitch.com)


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: