I don't know much about running a public company, but my guess is that he has an obligation (maybe a legal one?) to his shareholders to not hint to news like this before the company is officially announcing it.

You are correct. This is part of his duty.

I had 2 autoplay videos and 1 popup, ibtimes has really gone to shit.

uBlock is your friend

https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock#getting-started

uBlock Origin is a better friend. :)

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...

How does it differ from uBlock (or, how is it better?)

It's maintained by the original author. The readme is a good place to start researching, but it's not that interesting a topic tbh.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/README.md

I read this and the wiki page and still have no idea which I should run (usually Chrome / Mac if that matters). I'm using non-Origin right now.

Sorry, I thought they linked to this https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Maintainership-transf...

Note: that's an old version. The current revision is here https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Maintainership-transf...

It doesn't seem to matter which fork you use, but I personally use uBlock Origin

So the original author transferred ownership (incl. github page) to a the uBlock community, in reality to one of them. It turned out he handed it over to s kid who in turn made some weird source code changes and asked prominently for money/donations.

This scheme seems to popular with adblockers, afaik the original AdBlock and the AdBlockPlus had a similar "relationship". And later a German company took over AdBlockPlus in a similar manner and is doing big business in a gray area (whitelisting domains costs ad networks a lot of money and is absurd for an adblocker!?)

I have ublock installed and the popup still happened.

As usual, NoScript puts shitty webpages in their place.

Was there a time when ibtimes was good?

Dick Costolo in a Bloomberg interview in May[1], when asked what he thinks of skeptics who say he should be fired:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41NrVg-7bQw

[1] Twitter CEO Dick Costolo Q&A: What to Do When People Say ‘You Suck’

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-07/twitter-ce...