Ive had app based ads which redirect me elsewhere and are annoying to the point that i stopped using them.
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Apple Removes Some Ad Blockers From App Store for Installing Root Certificates
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Ive had app based ads which redirect me elsewhere and are annoying to the point that i stopped using them.
This isn't the mess it appears to be.
iOS9 introduced ways to block ads which didn't compromise privacy. The old ad blockers which used insecure methods have been now been pulled and/or updated. End of story.
Oh, one developer pulled his safe ad blocker because he felt bad about it.
I would be very surprised if Apple allows apps that block ads from the network they are promoting and selling ad space on. Maybe a few will slip through, but not for long.
This is in reference to old ad blockers which used their own tricks to block ads, including rerouting unencrypted traffic through filtering servers (I believe this was openly known to happen - not nefarious). It's not about the new iOS9 apps which use a secure API provided by Apple.
That's wonderful. Good for you, supporting them. But I still want a way to block ads.
If you had bothered to read the iMore article, you'd know why they did that:
Rene Ritchie on iMore said:
ke-iron said:
Blatant? Really? Can you quote the rule you think these developers broke?
RTFA. There was a good reason the devs did what they did: ad blocking in other apps. Apple is conservative in rolling out APIs; they'll probably allow blocking outside of Safari in future releases. And the App Store rules are constantly evolving. This kind of second guessing after the event is pointless.
Thats in relation to the blockers that were there before the functionality offered by iOS 9 which doesn't use another server. That said, even for those blockers the amount of data used would still be more or less the same since you are sending and receiving the same data, and it's just going through a different server in the middle.
This isn't about the current generation of ad blockers that use the newly available iOS 9 functionalities to do their job.
It's how ad/content blocking can be done without anything related to it being offered (until iOS 9).
Ad Blocker for Safari (one of them, the one with the light blue icon) was removed. Crystal is still there.
Crystal and most of the recent generation of ad blockers don't use this type of proxy/VPN functionality for their blocking (they use what iOS 9 offers for it).
What happened is that some of the adblockers installed their own root certificate, so they could perform what resembles a man-in-the-middle attack on user's SSL-encrypted traffic. Installing a root certificate enables the proxy at the remote end of the VPN to replace the original encryption keys offered by an HTTPS web site with their own, without the user having any way of detecting this. After replacing the keys, they can see all the user's SSL-encrypted traffic (potentially including things like passwords entered in banking apps etc.).
Even if we assume this was well-intentioned (i.e. the adblocker dev only wanted to make sure that adblocking works on encrypted sites/apps too), this is a very dubious proposition, as most non-technical people won't expect this. At the very least the blocker needs to make it very clear to the user that their end-to-end encryption is being broken.
It's worth repeating that this issue does *not* affect bockers that use the new iOS 9 content blocker mechanism, such as the ones listed in the first post in this thread:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/the-ios-9-content-blocker-thread.1916783/
Even if we assume this was well-intentioned (i.e. the adblocker dev only wanted to make sure that adblocking works on encrypted sites/apps too), this is a very dubious proposition, as most non-technical people won't expect this. At the very least the blocker needs to make it very clear to the user that their end-to-end encryption is being broken.
It's worth repeating that this issue does *not* affect bockers that use the new iOS 9 content blocker mechanism, such as the ones listed in the first post in this thread:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/the-ios-9-content-blocker-thread.1916783/
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Thank you
I think this should have been made clearer in this article especially with that headline.
Apple does allow them an option for allowing spying. It's a special setting called "Go Buy Another Manufacturer's Phone"
Paying doesn't necessarily get rid of ads. I pay for Hulu, for example, but they still show the ads. (At least until recently when they finally added the even more expensive ad-free tier.)