Absolutely. Just wanted to get some feedback on this in its current state. Agree that it should detect user's browser/device and suggest an appropriate blocker.
I wish uBlock Origin had a nice install page I could point to that would do that kind of detection itself. All I could find at this point was the Github page.
For me it would just take away from the service, if you want to detect what I'm running, you are only a little better than advertisers. I understand, it is for the 'greater good' from your pov, but this way the means impairs the cause.
Are you serious? Basic browser/device detection to suggest a suitable ad blocker is not really the same as the tracking carried out by big ad networks. I don't see the similarity to be honest.
I'm very serious [1]. It is not at all basic for me.
I can't find the discussion from a couple of days earlier, but afair it basically said wsj let the google crawler indexing their articles, while simultaneously blocking users by detecting their device.
That blog, to me, only shows the problems of selective enforcement I fail to see how it is relevant?
Regarding the WSJ: it's a technologically unsophisticated (but probably effective) way of having indexing work with a pay-wall (which requires more tracking in and of itself anyway). But selective access does not violate your privacy, only your freedom to view their content. And as much as I oppose the "companies are people too" movement I do think they have a right to selectively serve their content as much as you have a right to decide what you want to do with the bytes they (try) to send you (e.g. adblock them).
Not a lawyer, and not even a native speaker, my interpretation might be false. I take away there is a very fine line what is authorized access and it can be bent depending what size of a fish you are. And if I violate CFAA when accessing systems someone not cared to secure (not that I do), they sure as well when running scripts in my browser that track me or try to detect my system.
I think it derails the conversation, but do you have the right to pretend to be the google crawler then?
What about CSS extensions like .webkit? Same thing really. AFAIK the standard way to do browser-detection is to use the user-agent string, which your browser sends with every request it makes (but can be overridden) anyway, so them programming an if(browser == firefox) statement does nothing whatsoever for their knowledge of you. They already get told what browser you are running.
And I am no webdev, but a quick google seems to show that it is possible to do browser detection completely client-side anyway with Javascript, so even if user-agent strings did not exist they could detect your browser without any kind of fingering.
Granted, if you wanted to do so perhaps you could use this to circumnavigate people hiding their user-agent by having the generated link be a hosted redirect link, that way you know that if someone clicked redirect-firefox.theirdomain.org they were using firefox even if they hid their user-agent string. But it's not really fair to assume that in this case. (and i have to wonder what the value of an ip-adress/browser pair is).
I wish uBlock Origin had a nice install page I could point to that would do that kind of detection itself. All I could find at this point was the Github page.