Disconnect has generally been working better for me than Ghostery did too; although some parts of the Disconnect UI I still find more confusing and harder to use than analagous parts of ghostery.
I keep a Git repository with the contents that I update from time to time - this makes it easier to do diffs against past versions: https://github.com/chalst/pollockhostsfork
If you want a smaller HOSTS file (useful with Windows) that only targets advertisement and tracking servers, I've found HP Hosts' ad_servers.asp list to be good.
I use the venerable (but still actively maintained) Privoxy, which is a proxy but still does most of what I want on HTTPS pages. It can't examine the page contents themselves, but it can block 3rd-party requests by hostname, which gets most of the web-bugs and such.
I had some problems with loading times/pipelining in Opera (12.x) and Privoxy and hence changed to AdBlock (which appears to be the same as AdBlock Chrome referred to above). Browsing became much smoother afterwards.
Privoxy is associated with SPI, which is a 501(c)(3) non-profit. A far cry from that shady AdBlock garbage.
If you sacrifice privacy/security for convenience, don't be surprised when it has later repercussions. Privoxy is also highly configurable unlike AdBlock. I don't know about you, but I don't want to be at the mercy of some jerkoff named Wladimir, who seems to have basically zero accountability and a very lax sense of ethics.
Is there some mistake in your NoScript item? Installing the plug-in and then using "allow scripts globally" is the equivalent of never installing the plug-in. It provides almost no value at all when run that way.
No. It stills protects against known attacks, like XSS attacks. If you block scripts by default you'll have to configure what scripts to allow every time you visit a new site, or every time the site adds new assets.
RequestPolicy suffers of the same problem as NoScript with default settings: it blocks everything and you have to waste time configuring what JS files are allowed in each site you visit. Your browsing becomes 10,000% more inefficient.
A blog post on the Adblock Plus-website from 44 days ago mentions a "joint campaign" by several German newspapers against ad blockers. I imagine this is part of it, although that's doesn't necessarily mean that they are wrong and/or exaggerate their accusations.
no that is something different. (at least the joint campaign had pretty much no arguments, whereas the submission raises a few doubts, to say the least.)
"AdBlock is not to be confused with Adblock Plus. The developer of AdBlock for Chrome claims to have been inspired by AdBlock Plus, which is a community supported development effort, but otherwise the two efforts are unrelated."[1]
I've tried both and was curious as to why the "Plus" version of an extension allowed tons of ads when the regular "AdBlock" did a perfect job of never showing me ads. I guess that answers that question.
I'm struggling to fully understand the article due to the poor Google Translation. Anyone offer some concise clarification as to what ABP is actually doing? Is it "just" that they are changing Amazon referral links on websites to their own referral links so they get money instead, or is there more to it than that? Are they even actually doing that? (Or is it just that they aren't blocking referral links made with software by one of ABP's creators?)
They are also allegedly not filtering a set of white-listed ads, most of which come from companies that pay 30% of their ad revenue to the company behind AdBlock Plus.
Allegedly they are changing Amazon referral links and on top of that they automatically convert non-affiliate links to affiliate links with their own ID wherever possible.
that paragraph is difficult to understand even in german, to me it sounds like not apb, but another addon ( http://urlfixer.org ) is the one with the amazon link tampering.
I think the word "rewrite" is misleading in that context. ABP does not rewrite existing referrers (which would in fact be "mafia style"), instead it adds its own referrer when correcting/rewriting links with a typo:
amazon.com/?tag=someReferrer will not be changed
amazon.comm will be rewritten to amazon.com/?tag=uf024-20
Not much better, arguably worse. If my intention was to go to Amazon.com, they're now "helping" me and writing a cookie that wouldn't have been there, and earning $ in the process. A bare WWW request should never result in affiliate income.
I tend to agree with you, but I'd be happy for Pinterest to convert any non-affiliate links to affiliate links. They'd need to make it very clear what they were doing before doing it.
I get value from Pinterest's collection, so I'm happy for them to skim a little bit of money from my purchase. Shopping is hellish, and Pinterest makes it easier for me.
I am aware that they got into trouble for using skimlinks to convert links. (I think they were converting affiliate links to their affiliate links which is pretty dodgy.)
"Adblock Plus will always block annoying ads.
Still, many websites rely on advertising revenues so we want to encourage websites to use plain and unobtrusive advertising instead of flashy banners. That's why the Adblock Plus community has established strict guidelines to identify acceptable ads, and Adblock Plus allows these out of the box. You can always disable this feature if you want to block all ads."
The original, german text does not state that ABP actually rewrites amazon affiliate links. It mentions "Amazon" once, in a sentence which could be translated at "..how to justify drying up financial base (which are amazon links) for thousands of small blogs.."
(That doesn't mean ABP does not change amazon referral links, though)
Could it be a typo, i.e. that adblock plus charges (money) for allowing people's amazon refs through the filter?
Although if you check exceptionrules.txt there are only 3 domains that have amazon links whitelisted.
EDIT: apparently the 2nd page of the article writes about the possibility of changing links.
It's not a typo. Here is a manual translation of the paragraph containing the allegation:
Schaut man sich den Quellcode von Adblock Plus an, dann stolpert man ueber die “typoRules.js”" welche Vertipper in der Adresszeile des Browsers ueber eine dann nachgeladene Datei http://urlfixer.org/download/rules.json korrigiert. Den Spass gibt es uebrigens auch als separates Add-On http://urlfixer.org, ebenfalls vom feinen Herrn Palant!
Und jetzt anschnallen, denn dabei werden fuer alle internationalen Amazon-Shops automatisch die eigenen Amazon-IDs angehaengt!
"If you take a look into Adblock Plus' source code, you will trip over a "typoRules.js", which corrects typos made in your browsers' URL bar with the help of the subsequently loaded file http://urlfixer.org/download/rules.json. By the way, you can obtain this funny little gadget as a standalone add-on from http://urlfixer.org as well, from the same honorable Mr. Palant!
Now fasten your seatbelts, because this automatically adds their own Amazon IDs for all international Amazon shops!
From the article: Investors in Adblock Plus / Owners of the company behind Adblock Plus also invest/own ad-network companies, which they put on the white list while they keep out competitors. The article claims one can buy oneself onto the whitelist.
I have Adblock Plus installed, but comparing an Amazon affiliate link in Firefox with Adblock Plus, with one in Chrome (no Adblock Plus) shows no difference.
> Fuenfzehn Mitarbeiter, davon zwei Geschaeftsfuehrer, weitere Stellenanzeigen sind geschaltet, Bueros im Koelner Clusterhaus? Und das einzige Produkt ist eine kostenlose Browser-Erweiterung? Wie kann das funktionieren?
Fifteen employees, two of those managers, further job ads are taken out, offices in Cologne's Clusterhaus? And the only product is a free of charge browser extension? How does that work?
Additionally, this part seems important as well:
> Viel wichtiger: das ist also Till Faidas Verstaendnis von akzeptablen Werbeanzeigen: gefakte Testberichte und Auszeichnungen, pseudoneutrale Bewertungen auf anonymisierten Blogs. Artikel, geschrieben von der PR-Abteilung und Geschaeftsfuehrung eines Unternehmens, suchmaschinenoptimierter Content-Dreck fuer das eigene Produkt. Scam nennt man sowas in Fachkreisen!
More importantly: so this is Till Faida's understanding of acceptable advertisements: faked test reports and awards, pseudoneutral ratings on anonymised blogs. Articles, written by the PR-department and by the management of a company, search-engine-optimised content-dreck [i.e. crud] for their own product. Expert circles tend to call this scam!
[the translation isn't the prettiest but hopefully quite close to the original in both meaning and intent]
[edit] The whole "mafia" argument seems to stem from these questionable practices of "anonymous" and thus seemingly neutral feedback, originating from within the company itself.
[edit 2] fixed first translation, since I forgot the half-sentence "weitere [...]"
The allegations concerning changing referal links are based on a source file of the extension. Did anybody check that? Any real proof or is this just a leftover?
Interestingly, Amazon is changing the terms of their Associates program to (among other things) specifically prohibit browser plugins from being eligible for sales commissions:
7. Except as agreed between you and us in a separate written agreement
referencing this Participation Requirement, you will not use any Content or
Special Link, or otherwise link to the Amazon Site, on or in connection with:
a. any client-side software application (e.g., a browser plug-in,
helper object, toolbar, extension, or component or any other application
executable or installable by an end user) on any device, including
computers, mobile phones, tablets, or other handheld devices;
I cannot verify the claims, but I'll state the reasons once again about why I'm not using ad blockers:
1) free websites and web services need revenue and as long as the ads are tasteful, I don't mind them
2) I actually want websites to annoy me with lots of stupid ads, as I want to stop using such websites, because I want to reward publishers that don't do that
Ad blockers are trying to fix a symptom of the disease and in doing so they only help spreading and growing that disease.
Hmm, I haven't seen it that way. I guess I start stop using adblockers, too.
Now some of my daily news sources will become pretty unbearable ... but I guess I better look out for other websites that don't need to put up full site flash wrap-banners.
How do ad blockers affect revenue? Don't they still fetch the ads but just limit the presentation of the ads? So it would be indistinguishable from someone who just does not click on the ads?
Only if you own both the site and the ad network otherwise you'll be unable to tell if they made a request for the ad or not. There are also ways of getting false positives with that sort of test, for instance if for whatever reason the server that has the ad on it isn't reachable from the client (say a problem in one of the major backbones, or a bad DNS entry).
The usual approach I've seen sites take is they have some sort of "Please disable your ad-blocker" image that they load everywhere ads go, and then just overlay the ad image on top of that one when it loads.
2. Even if they did this would be very unreasonable, either you view adverts and the publisher gets paid or you don't view adverts and the publisher doesn't get paid. If you're triggering the pay-out criteria without actually doing whatever is required (view, click, interact) it's just moving the financial hit to the advertiser, which is still unreasonable.
Not my problem. The entire point of HTML is that the server sends files and I have a client that decides how to interpret them. I may be using a browser that is set to display larger fonts for my poor eyesight, or I may be using a mobile browser that decides to use different CSS, or I may be using Lynx that doesn't show images, or I may be using a browser that displays some images and not others based on a blacklist. It's not up to the server to determine.
Plus a huge number of people that adblock have been doing it for years and are basing the continued usage on the assumption that adverts now are similar to the adverts in 2006 - 2009. I use a lot of different websites with advertisements and I can't think of the last time I've seen an advertisement that auto-played sound or caused lag, whereas in 2008 it was a daily occurrence. The value that advertisements provide (support websites) greatly outweighs the inconvenience that current advertisements cause, even Youtube pre-roll adverts are not that bad after getting used to them.
I started blocking ads less than a year ago because of YouTube's pre-roll advertisements, since I'm perfectly capable of filtering out text based ads but a format that requires me to watch the ad to be able to view the content without letting me pay them is a deal-breaker for me.
Is it really that hard to let me pay a monthly fee to turn ads off?
Google is serving the vast majority of ads online and they already have the infrastructure in place to channel part of that fee to the content creators including knowing whom I visit and when.
Someone should make a paid adblocker service that shares revenue with site owners. Site owners can opt in to get a share of the revenue, so that each time a visitor using the adblocker visits their site, the site owner gets paid an amount equivalent to the potential ad revenue from that visit. That means they could serve up a custom ad-less page that's designed to look nice sans ads.
Users get a good adblocker that they don't have to feel bad about using, and site owners get to sustain the revenue they would've lost.
Maybe it could provide more benefits than just ad blocking? Perhaps it would just be a "premium membership to the internet". Site owners can take even more revenue if they implement even more features. More web app options, custom styling options, social badges, etc. The more a user pays a month, the more features he gets all over the internet.
The tech I'm developing makes this possible. The basic model is subscription sharing based on views, but it can be adjusted for time on-site etc. My intention is that the agreement with publishers is that they won't show ads to subscribers.
I thought that "this" meant I agree. What additional information is conveyed by adding "Exactly"? Now when I encounter "This" I am going to be confused as to whether the author is agreeing in whole or in part with the parent comment.
As if I need every single website hooked into Google Ads, all of them reminding me that I'm single, trying to sell me clothes, trying to sell me dating websites, trying to predict what I want in life.
It's invasive, and quite frankly, it's disturbing and creepy that the same advertisements follow me regardless of website. I feel like the guy in Pachebel's Rant, finding Canon in D across modern music, except what I'm finding is invasive Google ads, and I find them on most websites...
So no, I actively refuse the narrow demographic Google placed me into, and chases me around the internet with.
FYI, you can change some settings for google ads[1] so that you're not shown targeted ads at all (for example). You can also block ads to have them and related ads never be shown again.
There's a growing segment of users that just don't want advertising in their faces, period. Thankfully a not-insignificant portion of these are willing to pay for it through subscriptions on sites that offer this. Not enough sites offer this.
I envision an "ad network" appearing eventually that doesn't display any ads, just distributes revenues from an aggregate subscription. Then sites can still be supported by spontaneous visitors and users can control their exposure to advertisements online.
I pay for Arstechnica premium for this reason. I have adblockers turned off on The Verge, and emailed them asking for a subscription option but received no reply.
This idea has been around for a while; I call it "microsubscription". Several companies have tried and failed to make a go of it. Kachingle is still limping along, though fatally hamstrung itself by picking a dumb, public fight with the New York Times.
As I said in reply to another of your comments, I've been working on the technology to make it possible to do this reliably for some time now. It's harder than it looks.
From memory there was a few, but I've lost the links file I had. Contenture was one of them. There was a project at one of the journalism schools trying to push the same model too.
It's a good idea on paper, but actually making the market-building side work is really hard.
I've been focused on the technology side because hey, that's how I'm wired. Essentially, you can't rely on standard web bugs or javascript approaches; they're much too easy to subvert.
In my honours dissertation I identified 9 distinct attacks on the "naive" protocol and developed countermeasures for each. But that design is fatally flawed too. I have another design which ... well, watch this space: http://robojar.com/
That would be tricky. People would need to have a good idea of which sites they care about would have ads removed if they pay X dollars/month. Then maybe their favorite sites use three different networks, all of which they have to pay for. Maybe you could do it where the user picks the network, not the site.
This is the problem: the ads stopped being tasteful. Remember pop-ups? Remember how, when browsers started having pop-up blockers as a default, the response by the advertising industry was to try to circumvent the blockers, resulting in even more annoying ads? Remember how ad companies did not get the message when people stopped accepting their cookies, and now use dozens of techniques to track people? Remember how they said they thought Do Not Track meant "track but do not show targeted ads?"
Unfortunately, the annoying, intrusive, privacy-invading advertising is not limited to a handful of sites. It is all over the place. That's why ad blocking is important and necessary: we users should not have to suffer because of the advertising industry's greed.
I agree with both of those principals, but I continue to run an ad filtering proxy on my home network.
I don't do this because ads annoy me (of course they do, but for the above reasons, it feels wrong). I do this because a few years ago, certain less technical members of my family received a nasty bit of malware/rootkit combo delivered -- as best I could discern -- via a song lyric look up site. Another laptop picked up malware around the same time, though its source was more difficult to discern. In addition, about this same time, Microsoft and Google's ad networks were found to have some Flash ads that were malicious.
After spending a few hours reloading laptops (with the offending individual being my first experiment with Ubuntu on a non-technical user's PC), I got fed up and installed a proxy.
My computers all have local firewalls and anti-virus, but I'm sure nobody's surprised that they were still infected.
I wonder, is the state of these ad networks improved at all? Are there advertisement blocking tools that just target ads that have the greatest probability of being exploits (flash, java, smaller ad networks)?
I ended up switching to openSuSE because she was having a difficult time remembering how to connect to our network shares and I didn't have the spare time to sort out what it took to get Active Directory membership working. After the switch, though, we never went back. This was 4 or 5 years ago, and she's now my ex- (unrelated to software choices), but for what she used it for -- e-mail, basic document creation, YouTube (Flash at the time), music organization (I believe we used SongBird? ... whatever it was, she was happy with it), and (at the time) a SageTV client. Aside from having to learn what did what, where (which was pretty minimal, she was already using OpenOffice on Windows, and Firefox was Firefox, SageTV was SageTV, most things were familiar), it was great. She figured out, on her own, how to customize the background and some of the other user settings.
And I had fun from time to time connecting via SSH and making a song or two play when I knew she had to be cheered up. She thought that was a little creepy, but hey.
Not all of us block ads because they are annoying to look at. They are also a very real threat to privacy because ad companies track us across multiple websites (yes, I block Google Analytics and other trackers as well).
OTOH, I also feel tremendous sympathy towards websites trying to survive on ad revenue. I'm actually the type of person who still buys music to support artists.
I don't know what the solution is. We are forced to choose between being watched as we browse the web, staying completely offline, or blocking ads but not supporting the websites we visit.
No. Not because I won't pay certain sites for their content (I subscribe to LWN, for instance), but because I don't want to pay some aggregating middleman service that by necessity can then track across all the sites I visit.
In principle I like the concept of paying a fixed amount per unit time and splitting that across the sites I care about. In practice I don't see any obvious privacy-respecting way to do that.
That is an excellent point about micropayments. Creating a system that pays sites without a middleman that tracks visits would be challenging (though I imagine it's technically feasible).
Sure, I was always intrigued by the micro payments idea. Heck, if that we're the norm I wonder if it wouldn't promote better web content. I'd be more likely to spend more time on sites I wanted to support than the sensational sites I may feel guilty about having clicked through to.
But I don't think most folks think this way, so practically speaking I don't see micropayments ever working. Would love to be proven wrong.
I use mainly so I can search with Google. Without adblock, it's a nightmare on many searches, the first screen of my laptop is all ads (not including youtube, maps, Google local etc.
Conversely, three very practical reasons to use ad blockers:
1) You save battery life
2) You save data
3) Pages load quicker
And you lose no content in the process. So why wouldn't you? If you're using a fast machine hooked up to fibre broadband, perhaps it's a different matter, but as a mobile user it's a no brainer. And that isn't even mentioning the content of ads or privacy concerns...
If you think ads are necessary for the health of the internet, then they need to be presented a way that doesn't actively harm the experience of using the internet.
I too do not mind "tasteful" ads but unfortunately being a gamer leads me to man game related sites I do not trust and for good reason. More than once I have read postings where ad servers were hacked to server malicious items and more than once it was suggested the site operators didn't care. Fortunately being on a Mac as well as defaulting to strict blocking has protected me in every case.
I would not mind a solution that provides trusted ads. A system by which I can inspect what the site is trying to feed me and whitelist what I am willing to deal with.
I do acknowledge a moral conflict when using add blockers, for the first reason you give. But ads and trackers have gotten out of hands, to the point where most of the chrome extensions I have installed deal with that type of things:
- Adblock
- DoNotTrackMe
- Disconnect
in addition to
- Quick Javascript Switcher (if I really get pissed)
The reason everyone should have ad blockers is to be free from exploitative coercion.
If someone could attach electrodes on your cranium and "reprogram" it so that it would permanently increase your propensity to buy product X by 10% in exchange for viewing an article on a website would you do it? Would you justify doing it by statements like "free websites and web services need revenue and I don't really mind the electrodes"?
I block all advertisements because the majority I've seen are manipulative and push us to constantly be purchasing shit we don't need by making us afraid we aren't good enough. Or they're just nakedly bold; "come spend your real dollars on this online game featuring this witch's breasts".
If websites have a problem with this they can just respond 402 to all my requests and I won't cry to anyone.
Some advertisers are just honest people trying to make money and I hope word-of-mouth will cover those. But for the rest of it, let's just say my life is much better without TV, radio, or magazines.
The link refers to a given interview (http://j.mp/138mDHs) with Till Filda (Owner of Ad Block Plus) who gives the information that user can opt-out of the build in "Acceptable Ads program".
In his words the reason for an acceptable ads program seems to be showing acceptable ads (non flashing, blinking, annoying, ...) to the user which seems legit.
Can't understand the 'Mafia' term in this. It's a free product this is their business model. You as a user choose if you accept (or opt-out) this or leave the product behind.
AdBlock and AdBlockPlus are free to run their company any way they want (within reason). However, this is a serious breach of trust. They should inform me of any change or re-direct they perform - before they do it.
179 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] threadAdblock Edge looks like a decrapified fork of Adblock Plus.
https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/?sr...
http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
I keep a Git repository with the contents that I update from time to time - this makes it easier to do diffs against past versions: https://github.com/chalst/pollockhostsfork
On Linux, 127.0.0.0 is a broadcast address, while on Windows, it is a sink address.
http://hosts-file.net/ad_servers.asp
If you sacrifice privacy/security for convenience, don't be surprised when it has later repercussions. Privoxy is also highly configurable unlike AdBlock. I don't know about you, but I don't want to be at the mercy of some jerkoff named Wladimir, who seems to have basically zero accountability and a very lax sense of ethics.
- AdBlock Edge. Filter subscriptions: EasyList, EasyPrivacy, Disable Malware, Fanboy's Annoyance List, Prebake
- NoScript. Use "allow scripts globally" or otherwise most websites won't work. It will still protect against know attacks.
- Cookie Monster. Then set global/default preference to saving cookies for session only.
- FireGloves. Uncheck "disable plugin and mimeType lists" in Cloak Settings.
- HTTPS Everywhere
- LastPass
Google translated Google cache: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&u=ht...
AdBlock - Donationware. They also run this http://chromeadblock.com/catblock/download/ It replaces ads with pictures of cats. Hilarious
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/report/cfhdojbkjhnklbpkda...
and
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/...
See here: https://adblockplus.org/blog/our-thoughts-on-the-unity-of-ge...
"AdBlock is not to be confused with Adblock Plus. The developer of AdBlock for Chrome claims to have been inspired by AdBlock Plus, which is a community supported development effort, but otherwise the two efforts are unrelated."[1]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdBlock_(Chrome)
I've tried both and was curious as to why the "Plus" version of an extension allowed tons of ads when the regular "AdBlock" did a perfect job of never showing me ads. I guess that answers that question.
https://chromeadblock.com/pay/
EDIT: I came across this from a few months back: http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/adblock-plus-accused-of-sha...
Seems to be about some similar stuff
(from a few months ago)
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5946194
I get value from Pinterest's collection, so I'm happy for them to skim a little bit of money from my purchase. Shopping is hellish, and Pinterest makes it easier for me.
I am aware that they got into trouble for using skimlinks to convert links. (I think they were converting affiliate links to their affiliate links which is pretty dodgy.)
"Adblock Plus will always block annoying ads. Still, many websites rely on advertising revenues so we want to encourage websites to use plain and unobtrusive advertising instead of flashy banners. That's why the Adblock Plus community has established strict guidelines to identify acceptable ads, and Adblock Plus allows these out of the box. You can always disable this feature if you want to block all ads."
Could this be related?
Link to the guidelines: http://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads#criteria
Edit: I just contacted Till Faida about this, will keep this post updated.
Would be good if somebody could confirm if that is the case.
(That doesn't mean ABP does not change amazon referral links, though)
EDIT: apparently the 2nd page of the article writes about the possibility of changing links.
Now fasten your seatbelts, because this automatically adds their own Amazon IDs for all international Amazon shops!
Fifteen employees, two of those managers, further job ads are taken out, offices in Cologne's Clusterhaus? And the only product is a free of charge browser extension? How does that work?
Additionally, this part seems important as well:
> Viel wichtiger: das ist also Till Faidas Verstaendnis von akzeptablen Werbeanzeigen: gefakte Testberichte und Auszeichnungen, pseudoneutrale Bewertungen auf anonymisierten Blogs. Artikel, geschrieben von der PR-Abteilung und Geschaeftsfuehrung eines Unternehmens, suchmaschinenoptimierter Content-Dreck fuer das eigene Produkt. Scam nennt man sowas in Fachkreisen!
More importantly: so this is Till Faida's understanding of acceptable advertisements: faked test reports and awards, pseudoneutral ratings on anonymised blogs. Articles, written by the PR-department and by the management of a company, search-engine-optimised content-dreck [i.e. crud] for their own product. Expert circles tend to call this scam!
[the translation isn't the prettiest but hopefully quite close to the original in both meaning and intent]
[edit] The whole "mafia" argument seems to stem from these questionable practices of "anonymous" and thus seemingly neutral feedback, originating from within the company itself.
[edit 2] fixed first translation, since I forgot the half-sentence "weitere [...]"
http://www.mobilegeeks.de/adblock-plus-undercover-einblicke-... http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...
The allegation concerning rewriting links is on this second page, for example.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5946194
1) free websites and web services need revenue and as long as the ads are tasteful, I don't mind them
2) I actually want websites to annoy me with lots of stupid ads, as I want to stop using such websites, because I want to reward publishers that don't do that
Ad blockers are trying to fix a symptom of the disease and in doing so they only help spreading and growing that disease.
Now some of my daily news sources will become pretty unbearable ... but I guess I better look out for other websites that don't need to put up full site flash wrap-banners.
In that regard, it's very easy to detect if someone is using AdBlock or not.
The usual approach I've seen sites take is they have some sort of "Please disable your ad-blocker" image that they load everywhere ads go, and then just overlay the ad image on top of that one when it loads.
In fact, several websites show you a warning message, or refuse to load, if you're running an adblocker.
2. Even if they did this would be very unreasonable, either you view adverts and the publisher gets paid or you don't view adverts and the publisher doesn't get paid. If you're triggering the pay-out criteria without actually doing whatever is required (view, click, interact) it's just moving the financial hit to the advertiser, which is still unreasonable.
Is it really that hard to let me pay a monthly fee to turn ads off?
Google is serving the vast majority of ads online and they already have the infrastructure in place to channel part of that fee to the content creators including knowing whom I visit and when.
I'd trust very few web sites to stay ad-free if they switched to a pay model. The money is just too good for them.
http://www.hulu.com/support/article/20356372
Users get a good adblocker that they don't have to feel bad about using, and site owners get to sustain the revenue they would've lost.
Maybe it could provide more benefits than just ad blocking? Perhaps it would just be a "premium membership to the internet". Site owners can take even more revenue if they implement even more features. More web app options, custom styling options, social badges, etc. The more a user pays a month, the more features he gets all over the internet.
Or eliminate it. He provided a small comment afterwards, and the replies to that comment are good. Not what I'd call noise.
Your comment and my response however...
It's invasive, and quite frankly, it's disturbing and creepy that the same advertisements follow me regardless of website. I feel like the guy in Pachebel's Rant, finding Canon in D across modern music, except what I'm finding is invasive Google ads, and I find them on most websites...
So no, I actively refuse the narrow demographic Google placed me into, and chases me around the internet with.
[1] https://www.google.com/ads/preferences
[1] https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout
They are like antibiotics creating stronger bacteria?
I envision an "ad network" appearing eventually that doesn't display any ads, just distributes revenues from an aggregate subscription. Then sites can still be supported by spontaneous visitors and users can control their exposure to advertisements online.
I don't want advertising in my face, full stop.
As I said in reply to another of your comments, I've been working on the technology to make it possible to do this reliably for some time now. It's harder than it looks.
What were the others?
It's a good idea on paper, but actually making the market-building side work is really hard.
I've been focused on the technology side because hey, that's how I'm wired. Essentially, you can't rely on standard web bugs or javascript approaches; they're much too easy to subvert.
In my honours dissertation I identified 9 distinct attacks on the "naive" protocol and developed countermeasures for each. But that design is fatally flawed too. I have another design which ... well, watch this space: http://robojar.com/
eg.
This is the problem: the ads stopped being tasteful. Remember pop-ups? Remember how, when browsers started having pop-up blockers as a default, the response by the advertising industry was to try to circumvent the blockers, resulting in even more annoying ads? Remember how ad companies did not get the message when people stopped accepting their cookies, and now use dozens of techniques to track people? Remember how they said they thought Do Not Track meant "track but do not show targeted ads?"
Unfortunately, the annoying, intrusive, privacy-invading advertising is not limited to a handful of sites. It is all over the place. That's why ad blocking is important and necessary: we users should not have to suffer because of the advertising industry's greed.
I don't do this because ads annoy me (of course they do, but for the above reasons, it feels wrong). I do this because a few years ago, certain less technical members of my family received a nasty bit of malware/rootkit combo delivered -- as best I could discern -- via a song lyric look up site. Another laptop picked up malware around the same time, though its source was more difficult to discern. In addition, about this same time, Microsoft and Google's ad networks were found to have some Flash ads that were malicious.
After spending a few hours reloading laptops (with the offending individual being my first experiment with Ubuntu on a non-technical user's PC), I got fed up and installed a proxy.
My computers all have local firewalls and anti-virus, but I'm sure nobody's surprised that they were still infected.
I wonder, is the state of these ad networks improved at all? Are there advertisement blocking tools that just target ads that have the greatest probability of being exploits (flash, java, smaller ad networks)?
And I had fun from time to time connecting via SSH and making a song or two play when I knew she had to be cheered up. She thought that was a little creepy, but hey.
OTOH, I also feel tremendous sympathy towards websites trying to survive on ad revenue. I'm actually the type of person who still buys music to support artists.
I don't know what the solution is. We are forced to choose between being watched as we browse the web, staying completely offline, or blocking ads but not supporting the websites we visit.
In principle I like the concept of paying a fixed amount per unit time and splitting that across the sites I care about. In practice I don't see any obvious privacy-respecting way to do that.
But I don't think most folks think this way, so practically speaking I don't see micropayments ever working. Would love to be proven wrong.
1) You save battery life
2) You save data
3) Pages load quicker
And you lose no content in the process. So why wouldn't you? If you're using a fast machine hooked up to fibre broadband, perhaps it's a different matter, but as a mobile user it's a no brainer. And that isn't even mentioning the content of ads or privacy concerns...
If you think ads are necessary for the health of the internet, then they need to be presented a way that doesn't actively harm the experience of using the internet.
I would not mind a solution that provides trusted ads. A system by which I can inspect what the site is trying to feed me and whitelist what I am willing to deal with.
- Adblock - DoNotTrackMe - Disconnect
in addition to
- Quick Javascript Switcher (if I really get pissed)
If someone could attach electrodes on your cranium and "reprogram" it so that it would permanently increase your propensity to buy product X by 10% in exchange for viewing an article on a website would you do it? Would you justify doing it by statements like "free websites and web services need revenue and I don't really mind the electrodes"?
If websites have a problem with this they can just respond 402 to all my requests and I won't cry to anyone.
Some advertisers are just honest people trying to make money and I hope word-of-mouth will cover those. But for the rest of it, let's just say my life is much better without TV, radio, or magazines.
In his words the reason for an acceptable ads program seems to be showing acceptable ads (non flashing, blinking, annoying, ...) to the user which seems legit.
Can't understand the 'Mafia' term in this. It's a free product this is their business model. You as a user choose if you accept (or opt-out) this or leave the product behind.
AdBlock and AdBlockPlus are free to run their company any way they want (within reason). However, this is a serious breach of trust. They should inform me of any change or re-direct they perform - before they do it.