★ Regarding Ad Blockers and Daring Fireball

Following up on the previous item today, re: content blockers and ad-blocking , I ran into a weird situation a few weeks ago with my column “ John Ternus Should Reverse Apple’s Slide Down the Advertising Slippery Slope ”. That article contains this sentence, in Markdown: And -- at this writing, still "coming soon" -- Apple is launching [ads on Apple Maps][🗺️]. [🗺️]: https://ads.apple.com/maps The problem is that anyone reading that article in NetNewsWire saw it rendered like this, with the words “ads on Apple Maps” 1 omitted: It looks like I forgot to finish writing that sentence. But I did. NetNewsWire simply omits the hyperlinked words. After a few readers reported this, I immediately suspected the problem was the “ads.apple.com” domain. I’ve never linked to that domain before, and many ad blockers just block any domain that starts with a domain prefix like ads.* . And that’s exactly what the problem is. I had no idea that NetNewsWire filtered any content whatsoever (and I sort of think it shouldn’t), but DF reader Antonio Germano searched through NetNewsWire’s open-source code and found it in the core.css file , line 49: 38 /*Block ads and junk*/ 39 40 iframe[src*="feedads" ], 41 iframe[src*="doubleclick"], 42 iframe[src*="plusone.google"] { 43 display: none !important; 44 } 45 46 a[href*=".ads."], 47 a[href*="feedads" ], 48 a[href*="doubleclick"], 49 a[href*="//ads."], The culprit identified, I dutifully pinged my friend Brent Simmons to report the problem. But then I had to decide what to do about it.