this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
2654 points (98.1% liked)

Technology

60076 readers
3488 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 287 points 1 year ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 136 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So this is part of a larger adblock checker, if the ad doesn't load within 5 seconds, it fails and triggers the adblocker warning. Since the ad should load in 3, they've set it for 5. If you have ubo, you won't see the warning that it then wants to pop up, it just seems (and is) a 5 second delay. Changing the UA probably removes this from Firefox because then the clientside scripts will attempt to use builtin Chrome functions that wouldn't need this hacky script to detect the adblock. Since they don't exist, it just carries on.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I was wondering how badly out of context the above quote must be considering the UA isn't checked in the function. Above poster is trying to construe it as a pure and simple permanent delay for Firefox.

That being said, the solution is still bullshit.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

That is just the timeout function, not the call stack. It is likely called in a function that uses a UA check.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I was wondering how badly out of context the above quote must be considering the UA isn’t checked in the function. Above poster is trying to construe it as a pure and simple permanent delay for Firefox.

The UA check can happen before the function is called though.

[–] [email protected] 103 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is some ultimate scumbaggery.

[–] [email protected] 95 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This should be illegal, Firefox being their competition (tangentially)

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago

EU might hit them for it. I have no faith that the US government is going to do anything.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The thing that gets me is they think no one will ever find this stuff. There are hundreds of thousands of people (maybe more) who are actively looking ways to block ads and get around this behavior. There's no way it'll ever go unnoticed.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

They could literally have used some variance in implementation, server side bandwidth limitations, etc, but THIS is just blatantly obvious

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I wonder if it's a case of malicious compliance.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Exactly what I was thinking. Let's not say it too loud for the sake of our mole(s)

[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 year ago

I believe that Google is just trolling people real hard. There are much better ways to disable any adblocks, but they are not even trying.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ok so this is just client side I'd imagine I'd be pretty easy to make an addon that removes the code

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago

That's not the point.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is there something like:

If(not chrome){add_delay()}

?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

No, the full context of the code snippet doesn't appear to check the browser user agent at all. Other comments have explained that it's most likely a lazy implementation of a check for ad blockers.