[stevenh]

You are vehemently and loquaciously defending malware. You are also callously disregarding sites operating on razor-thin profit margins from their ads which, if lost to a firestorm of theft of revenue by criminals distributing malware such as Superfish and Privdog, will cause them to have to shut down their sites altogether.

The only site owners who aren't hurt by this type of malware are the terrible ones with no regard for their users, who are willing to double up on now many popups they slam the visitor with, or ironically even willing to join shady pay-per-install malware networks just to get their revenue back up to normal levels.

I'd like to believe you've never run a site before, because otherwise you'd have an idea of just how expensive it can be.

[userbinator]

How exactly is advocating users' freedoms "defending malware"? By the same reasoning that advocating privacy is "defending terrorists"? I wouldn't want to use Privdog or Superfish, but if someone voluntarily wants to change how he/she views the Internet on their own machine, they should be well within their rights to do so.

The only site owners who aren't hurt by this type of malware are the terrible ones with no regard for their users

...or the ones who don't put any ads on their site? I do happen to have such a site, and the reason it doesn't have any ads is because it doesn't need them.

In my experience, the most ad-filled sites also tend to be of the content-farm type, providing little in the way of quality content.

[seestheday]

I'm not arguing that users blocking ads is an issue. To me that is the same as someone deciding to not look at an ad in a magazine or tear them out/cover them up before reading the article. What they decide to do it up to them.

See my billboard example reply to the comment above to see why I believe that Privdog and Superfish are run by thieves.