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An Antidote to Corporate Media
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curious2
2017 Mar 13, 8:03pm
Forbes greedy grinches have gone overboard.
That happened already years ago, when Steve Forbes took over from his late father Malcolm Forbes, who had built the company. Malcolm was a proud capitalist along the lines of what the ancient Romans used to call "Ultimus Romanorum," by which they meant an exemplary Roman male citizen. Alas, Steve is a craven conservative who campaigned wretchedly for POTUS and who distorted the magazine's coverage to promote fake narratives about political issues, e.g. Obamneycare. I've lost count how many Forbes articles have advocated Obamneycare's individual mandate penalty as necessary due to adverse selection, without even mentioning the countervailing effects of propotious selection and subsidies. If they respected the reader, authors would write objectively without favoring their corporate sponsors, but instead they write thinly disguised advertorials: advertising written by ostensibly editorial staff and passed off as if they were objective news.
Patrick
2017 Mar 13, 9:04pm
Lol, excellent!
I have been using Safari lately in my attempt to live a completely Google-free life, and it looks like Safari can simply change the reported User-Agent at will like this:
* Safari -> Preferences -> check "Show Develop menu in menu bar"
* Develop -> User Agent -> Other... -> enter the custom user agent string, like "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html"
And then you're surfing as if you were the Googlebot!
Dan8267
2017 Mar 13, 9:29pm
In Firefox it's about:config, but the plugin makes it really easy to switch between common user agent strings.
Patrick
2017 Mar 13, 10:11pm
Wow, this is great!
Pretending you're the Googlebot also allows you to surf wired.com with the adblocker on!
Patrick
2017 Mar 13, 10:16pm
Reminds me of another trick someone showed me a long time ago. I think it was that some English website was blocking access for Americans, and to get access all you had to do was open the browser's development tools and set the time zone to be somewhere in Europe via the Javascript console.
Forbes has become real bitches about their online content, so much so that I stopped linking to their site altogether. However, now the Forbes greedy grinches have gone overboard. If you run adblock, they give you a big fuck-you and don't let you continue to the article. Well, fuck them. And now it's time to fuck back.
First off, the reason people run ad-block is that ads have gone way to far in
- outright lying
- spying on you
- being extraordinary annoying
The fact that people are pissed off with ads is the direct and sole fault of the advertisers. If advertisers were honest and respectful, people would actually seek out ads. Whenever I am considering buying something I look for online reviews about competing products. Yes, I seek out ads that are honest and not spyware, i.e. user reviews.
But greedy ass Forbes, instead of using less intrusive and disrespectful ad networks -- ad-block blocks the worst ad networks not every ad -- Forbes is giving the world a big fuck you. This is stupid because it actually decreases their ad revenue, but greedy leads to stupidity. Even though they don't get ad impressions from me directly, I've probably given them a hell of a lot of ad impressions by directing other people to their articles, given them more traffic, and improving their search ranking with organic links. Well, that's all over. You shouldn't have killed the goose that laid the golden eggs, dummies.
Now that Forbes has given us all a big fuck you with their "remove ad-block" coercion, I'm going to let everyone know how to fuck Forbes and all ad-generated sites. You see, any attempt to hide content from users if they don't let you render content on their computers requires an off switch for Google. Otherwise Google doesn't index your pages and you don't get shown at all in the Google search results. That means you kill your traffic and your ad revenue. So no content provider ever fucks with Google.
That means you can see Forbes or any other content without having to log in, provide Facebook credentials, turn off ad-block, or jump through any other hoop just by impersonating Google. Oh, does that sound complicated? No. It's a one time install and click of a button.
1. Install user-agent switcher. http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/
(You can do this without that extension, but it makes it easier.)
2. In the Firefox menu bar, Tools...Default User Agent...Search Robots...Googlebot 2.1
(For other browsers, edit your user agent string to "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html".)
3. Have fun
In addition to no longer blocking ad-block, you're webpages will look a lot better. Without impersonating Google, Forbes looks like this.
It's not even laid out correct. There's a big gap at the top of the page and it's not using the available width.
When impersonating Google, Forbes looks like this.
Fewer layout problems and no ads.
So fuck Forbes and impersonate Google.
P.S.
I suspect that many ad networks will stop tracking you if they think you are a Google bot. Why bother building a marketing profile on the Google bot. You'd want to filter those HTTP requests out of your spying.