Ph.D. Candidate, Political Science @SyracuseIDJC, @SUPolisci, American Politics, Comparative Politics, Political Behavior, Public Opinion, Methodology
Washington, DC
Joined September 2015
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Murat Abus retweeted
🦊 Firefox added a built-in ad blocker to its iOS app. It’s a great privacy win, but it actually highlights a massive, anti-competitive problem with Apple
On desktop and Android, you can install any ad-blocking extension you want on Firefox. But on iOS, Apple's strict rules ban full extensions for competing browsers. Only Safari gets dedicated content blockers. Because of this, Firefox was forced to build a basic blocker from scratch just to compete
So, is the native Firefox blocker enough? It’s a solid start (powered by EasyList), but it’s just an on/off switch. It purposely leaves search ads (Google, Bing) untouched — which makes sense, since search royalties make up 73% of Mozilla’s revenue
If you want total control and custom filters on iOS, Apple essentially forces you to use Safari with a dedicated blocker like AdGuard
But if you’re loyal to Firefox, you don't have to choose. Add a system-wide DNS layer (like AdGuard DNS). Our system-wide DNS protection filters trackers across all apps, covering the blind spots Firefox leaves behind
adguard.com/en/blog/firefox-…
Murat Abus retweeted
Whatever book you pick up, it’s likely to make you feel better—maybe even a whole lot better. “In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks,” Ceridwen Dovey writes, in “Can Reading Make You Happier?,” which was published in 2015. Dive into the research behind the therapeutic effect of books: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/Wv…
Murat Abus retweeted
Can governments preserve political support during crises and disasters by redirecting responsibility to God, fate, or foreign powers? In our new article in Political Behavior, we examine this question using experimental evidence from Türkiye.
link.springer.com/article/10…
Murat Abus retweeted
❗️Mozilla is hitting out at Apple over the closed design of iOS, the platform owner decides which privacy tools competing browsers may offer, it says. So they were forced to build ad blocking straight into the iPhone app.
Mozilla says Apple's rules left it no choice, because iOS blocks browser extensions.
Mozilla is going after Apple over iOS lock-in, more than two years after the EU's Digital Markets Act forced Apple to allow rival browser engines, Mozilla says the entitlement's requirements are so detailed that no browser developer has met them.
Murat Abus retweeted
Reminder that support for uBlock Origin is here to stay on Firefox.
iOS users deserve the same choice and control, so native ad blocking is now rolling out. blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/…
Murat Abus retweeted
The gold standard for producing PDF documents (especially books and journal articles) has been LaTeX. @typstapp re-engineered the entire process in an incredibly elegant extensible way. On my MacOS LaTeX (TexLive) takes 9.1GB of disk space. Typst takes 43MB. Not a misprint.
Murat Abus retweeted
Daron Acemoglu blasts The Economist over their bizarre critique of him: “Your central verdict that I am 'oddly unconvincing' rests on unnamed economists revealing their true opinion of me over a few drinks. No persons who have been offered drinks to get to this truth are named. Would you publish a letter asserting that, over a few drinks, most people tell me that your newspaper is no longer worth subscribing to? The only person quoted with such views is a blogger, Noah Smith, a thin basis for judging a lifetime of academic work [...] If this is the best you can do with a body of work spanning 33 years, then it is your critique that is 'oddly unconvincing.'”
Murat Abus retweeted
There is a post making rounds about how a fingerprinting script from Alibaba’s AliExpress interrupted someone’s bluetooth headphone connection. AliExpress was trying trying to discretely track users, but was thwarted by Firefox’s anti-fingerprinting technology.
Murat Abus retweeted
Firefox Is Bullying Microsoft publicly...
And Microsoft kind of deserves it.
uBlock Origin is the free ad blocker that actually kills ads, pop-ups and trackers properly.
Microsoft Edge is quietly shutting down the system it runs on. Full uBlock Origin gets phased out by the end of 2026, replaced by a much weaker Lite version.
Google already did the exact same thing to Chrome earlier this year.
Firefox saw it happening and started posting.
"Our support for uBlock Origin isn't going anywhere."
Then this one, days later: "Reminder that you can still just use ad blockers on Firefox. Wild concept, we know."
Here is the part that should bother you more than the jokes.
Google sells ads. Chrome just cut uBlock Origin.
Microsoft sells ads. Edge is next.
Firefox is now the last major browser where the full ad blocker still works.
Murat Abus retweeted
Como cada 18 de agosto recordamos a Khaled Asaad, el héroe de Palmira, de la que fue director arqueológico durante 40 años. El Estado Islámico lo asesinó en 2015 por negarse a revelar dónde estaban las 400 piezas que había ocultado para evitar su destrucción.
¡Eterno Khaled!
Murat Abus retweeted
Firefox is now the last major browser that fully supports uBlock Origin
As Microsoft Edge (and other Chromium browsers) move to Manifest V3 and heavily restrict ad blockers, Firefox has confirmed it will continue supporting uBlock Origin.
The result:
Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera… → limited version (uBlock Origin Lite) or built-in blocker
Firefox → full support for uBlock Origin
For anyone who wants uncompromising ad and tracker blocking, Firefox is currently the only major option left.
Personally, I’m staying on Firefox. Zero issues so far.
Article: pcworld.com/article/3212428/…
Still on Firefox for this reason? 👇
#Firefox #Privacy #uBlockOrigin #OpenWeb
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Brave still fully supports MV2 extensions including uBlock Origin.
x.com/brave/status/2…
neowin.net/news/forget-go…
Murat Abus retweeted
Firefox is calling out Microsoft Edge over its plans to limit ad blockers.
Microsoft is moving away from the older Manifest V2 system for browser extensions. This will eventually affect the full version of uBlock Origin on Edge.
Firefox says it will continue supporting it.
“Our support for uBlock Origin isn’t going anywhere.”
“Reminder that you can still just… use ad blockers on Firefox. Wild concept, we know.”
Murat Abus retweeted
Firefox support for uBlock Origin is not going anywhere.
Microsoft’s plan for Edge means that uBlock Origin users are losing one of their browser options. theverge.com/tech/976880/mic…
Murat Abus retweeted
New article by @kevin_a_mazur in @law_middle
Wartime Destruction and State Contraction: The Case of Aleppo doi.org/10.1163/18763375-bja…
Murat Abus retweeted
Where do Americans stand on democracy and the rule of law? Our new Polling Hub lets you search, filter, and compare. 🗳️
pollinghub.statesunited.org/
My new co-authored article with the brilliant Sabri Ciftci is now out @ElectoralStdies . "Administrative Unit Proliferation in Parliamentary Systems: Evidence from Turkish Elections, 1960-2018" is available as Open Access. doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.…
Murat Abus retweeted
I've been tinkering with a new project I am calling rurality.app, which is tool that scores any U.S. location on a 0–100 rurality index using RUCC codes, population density, distance to metros, and broadband data. The index is very much a work in progress, and I hope to get feedback. I also recently released a companion R package (rurality) on CRAN (dev version on Github) so researchers can plug these measures into their own analyses. If you work in rural policy, election admin, public health, or just think a lot about how we define "rural," I'd love to hear from you.