Tutorials & Resources Working Around Rotten Web Sites

We've all seen it before. You go to a site, and some sort of popup or overlay shows up complaining about your 'ad blocker', or demanding some other kind of unrealistic penance for attempting to view it. And you know damned well that the ads will probably have malware mixed in them, or obnoxious video. You just followed a link and wanted to read the article, or wanted to read the latest chapter of a story, and today they decided to use a new 'ad blocker blocker' script, and the eternal 'electronic warfare' battle hasn't swung the other way, yet.

The most common (and easiest to subvert) thing slaps an overlay on top of the content briefly after it appears, with a nagging message.

Disabling 'javascript' on the page usually (NOT ALWAYS) fixes this, as well as disables all other possible scripted nonsense (and possibly menus and other 'features'). In Chrome, there is 'site settings' that can do this, but the 'uMatrix' plugin is more convenient, works on Firefox and other browsers, and has finer control... at the cost of being slightly more complicated and giving you a laser guided foot shooting shotgun. (No, you can't really 'break' anything, it just 'breaks' how your local web browser renders that particular web site.) You can revert your changes or selectively disable it on different web sites, and it can remember everything for the next time you visit.

There are also sites that try to 'customize' your experience, with odd scrolling behaviors and 'helpful' menu overlays that appear if you scroll in the wrong direction. Disabling javascript on them usually clears it up, and since I mostly only navigated there from 'novelupdates', breaking all of the custom, scripted navigation usually isn't an issue.

Sometimes, picking over and disabling the 'CSS' and/or 'XHR' columns on uMatrix will also yield results. There are some sites where the whole uMatrix box is red (everything disabled), and I'm looking at raw text... which is all I wanted in the first place. Sure, it's a bit 'ugly looking' with borked menus and such at the top of the page, but usually a vast improvement over someone's silly attempts at imposing 'themes' and random imagery on top of the text that I wanted to read.

In some cases, once the popup appears, you could use the 'uBlock Origin' plugin (it's an ad blocker, and other ad blockers might or might not have this feature, too), to 'Block Element' by right clicking on it. Sometimes you'll have to poke around with it, and block several things, but it's persistent, so they won't appear again. This also eats 'EU Cookie' banners, and all manner of shitty web site design nonsense.

In other cases, a 'Reader View' plugin might make the overlays go away while presenting a nicely formatted, clean wall of just the text you wanted. The only downside is that it usually must be invoked manually, and doesn't always work as you wished.

Worst case for the overlay thing, is to just right-click and read the HTML source code... which isn't ideal, but it's usually easier to read than a 'google translate' MTL.

A troublesome trend is sites that use javascript to download and insert the content after the page loads. Sometimes there are greasemonkey/tampermonkey/etc. scripts available to work around these, This is the trend that is growing, and there aren't many trivial work-arounds.

In that case... just use a content aggregator site. Don't feel too bad about an 'unofficial' translator who whines about not making ad revenue on copyrights that they are violating, themselves.

 

TL;DR - Use JavaScript disablers and if the sites are too complicated then just use an aggregator site

 

Well, I use adblock plus and popup blocker. The popup blocker is especially useful since you can remove the overlay if there's an overlay that says you need to disable adblock.

 

I don't agree to the content aggregation but I do agree that many sites have too many needless extras that waste my limited mobile bandwidth.

Google Chrome on "saver" mode is basically nothing at all and I would use up my 1GB of free data in like a week on every blasted advert and image that shows up when I don't want them to.

So, my suggestion for mobile users from personal experience is UC Browser. If you set it up as disabling images (Clicking on the image icon that substitutes it offers a Display Images for each individual image) and data saving mode, it can cut down on every advert, every image, every video that auto-plays when you visit a site.

 

First of all, 'EU Cookie' is not 'shitty website design nonsense' as you claimed. Any websites that gather Europe Union countries' citizens data required by law to notice users. It doesn't matter the website owners are EU citizens or not. Failing to comply to this can be fined or being imposed penalties under GDPR law.

And "sites that use javascript to download and insert the content after the page loads" isn't a troublesome trend like you say. Any decent websites that use javascript to provide advanced interactivity can improve user experience dramatically. Certainly, reading on Medium feels better than reading on random outdated Blogger. And if website owners really want to, they can actually invest time and resources to research more on javascript to provide faster pageload and far better user experience than usual static web pages provide. You can disable javascript per individual sites on browsers but I wouldn't recommend to disabling it globally, since most website features require javascript to run--even this thread alone will lose many of its features if you disable javascript.

Unfortunately, Chrome's data saver, which many websites blatantly ignore, requires effort from website owners to make it really works.

 

I use an old iPad Mini 1st gen to read when I'm not at home, and this shit is so old many sites will outright crash unless I disable javascript. If a site complains about it I tend to just skip them entirely and not read their content.

Basic HTML or bust!

 

when fuckers that makes spam apps whine adblock, i feel like breaking that a-hole's skull....

 

there is a chrome extension called f*ck overlays that just allows you to delete those popups, also ublock origin works for most as well

 

It is certainly a shitty web site thing, since there is never a 'fuck off, no cookies' button, and it assumes permission to use cookies when you click it away, and it's a floating popup that sits on top of the content.

The EU's 'cookie banner' thing is just half-hearted, dimwitted nonsense for show. Disable cookies yourself, with a plugin. Besides, there are OTHER WAYS to store the data persistently that aren't technically 'cookies', that are not even covered by the law. Also, any web site with a 'login' can collect the data on the server side. So your 'cookie protection' is beyond hollow. A bit like web sites that have spent ungodly hours to implement some kind of 'night mode', who didn't realize there is a 'Dark Reader' plugin that makes EVERYTHING dark mode, so you can enable it at night and disable it in the morning, and cover everything, rather than dealing with every kinky individual web site's nonsense.

The RIGHT WAY is to simply tell the browser makers to provide a LOCAL STORAGE preference, and warning about web sites that wish to violate it. But it's easier to bully millions of individual web content creators than to make Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. do anything.

But with uMatrix (and similar plugins), you can disable any and all cookies, including third party cookies, scripts, etc. You know, the things that aren't ads or even cookies... they're MUCH WORSE.

Though I also use another plugin that deletes every kind of locally stored browser history whenever I close the browser. But this obviously doesn't protect me or anyone else from the server side at all.

 

Because following EU laws is shitty design, as is trying to earn money from your hard work... Yeah, right, that makes total sense... >.>

 

EU Cookies law is not there to regulate how websites store data, but to regulate data passed around by third-party that usually used to track users. It's being used by ads network to provide personalized ads based on users' browsing history as well as Google Analytics to create visitors' profile. If you visit adssettings.google.com you'll see that Google save your anonymous profile like age and interests--that can be only done because Google track you with cookies every time you visit any different websites that also install their services and benefit from you being tracked (personalized ads simply generated more money).

Cookies and local storage is different. The funny thing about Local Storage is that it is local. You can't even access local storage from your own server, nobody is gonna care about what you store in your own local storage.

 

So... if your 'hard work' is copying books, music and videos... and reselling them, that SHOULD be applauded?

I wonder what EU copyright laws would say about translating current German/Dutch/French/etc. books and reposting them online?

Not that I'm not benefiting from it, but your feigned 'outrage' is almost amusing.

 

Spoiler alert: 'Local' Javascript can read and write 'local' data, then send it on to a server very trivially.

Spoiler alert: When clueless (about technological details) politicians pass laws that have been gutted by the tech giants' lawyers and lobbyists, the people receive no protection whatsoever. But they feel better. So much so that they even defend these pointless laws.

Protecting people is not pointless. Banners that do nothing but annoy people are.

 

Accessing and sending are two completely different ideas.

 

Copying and selling? No.

Translating and making it available for free? Sure. It's why this website exists in the first place.

You want me to not applaud the thing that makes NU exist?

And I'm not really outraged, I just find your point of view hilarious due to how misguided it is~

 

I highly discourage the use of UC Browser. Just search "is uc browser safe" [1]. It's much better to either use blockers -- extensions(e.g. uBlock Origin) or browser(e.g. Brave), or use a text only browser such as w3m* and links*. You will only feel awkward using text-only browser at the start just like when you do something for the first time. Links maybe much better if you are not comfortable with keyboards.

* They have not been updated for a long time. Hence, there might be vulnerabilities!
** A w3m alt, "emacs-w3m" is in active development!

[1] duckduckgo - duckduckgo dot com/?q=is+uc+browser+safe

 

My mobile phone has 0 uses of shopping sites and the like where anything useful is used, so I do not mind it "Not being safe", because, what is? The Play Store itself detects 33% of malware.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateof...never-rely-on-googles-own-malware-protection/

And other than that, I much appreciate the additional things that it adds to ease the use of it and I don't want more than the two browsers I already have (Chrome and UC) just so that I can browse the web pretty much the same or in worse quality.