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Only Thieves Block Pop-Ups
aurelian writes "It's official: using browsing the web while blocking pop-up ads and other such exciting website enhancements is theft. Anti-leech.com are offering to protect your site from browsers blocking pop-ups (or 'theft tools' as they call them) - just try stealing from them with your favourite pop-up free browser. (I picked this up on the phoenix discussion forum...)"
If a site doesn't want me then they can %^&* off. There's no shortage of sites that haven't resorted to pop ups.
A long while back, in a little debate here on Slashdot, someone called me a thief for blocking pop-ups ads. If I recall, I think I stumped them by asking if Lynx users were thieves since their browser didn't support pop-ups.
Anyway, I didn't sign any contract to view pop-ups, and there is no guarantee I will support any soft of technology when I browse the web, so they take a chance in using it knowing it may not work. Same with Flash, other javascript, or even images.
bandwidth theft?.. they're stealing OUR bandwidth by polluting our pakets with junk
Telling me not to block pop-ups because the website needs the pop-up income is bad motivation.
No website is worth wading through hundreds of pop-ups.
If their only source of income is pop-ups, they aren't long for the web anyway.
Pop-up income is a bad way to "earn" money, and everyone knows it. (except classmates.com)
What can I do on the internet that isn't illegal these days?
Soon there will be warning messages when connecting to the internet: "You have connected to the internet. This is in violation of blah blah blah. Disconnect now"
"Go into the hall of mirrors and have a bloody hard look at yourself" - HG Nelson
I've never worked out how much bandwidth popup ads have sucked out of me over the years, but until recently, I had to pay for 'x' amount of MB's over my monthly limit (crap monopolistic ISP).
The people that block popup ads are the same people who would *NEVER* click on a popup ad and purchase something, so I'm sorry, but I can't really see what their problem is. Surely we are saving THEM bandwidth?
-- 7 string electric violin + live loop samplers
Since we've also recently been told that going to the loo when the ads are on is theft, this latest mob can go screw themselves. If a site doesn't let me view it through Proximitron (will test when I'm on my own PC) then there are plenty of other things I can be doing with my time.
You must block ads, or avoid those sites entirely.
.. wait for it .. CHARGE MONEY.
/. subscription.
If companies and individuals go out of business because of blocking ads, that will lead to fewer, higher-quality companies like google that can come up with ways to make ads *work*, or sites that actually
I would rather pay money to visit a handful of web sites, then to put up with this bullshit pop-up ad crap all over the place. In fact these days I don't even bother visiting more than about 5-6 web sites, since I'll just drown in ads anyway. And I paid for a
Don't take over my computer with your ads and javascript nonesense, and I won't hack into yours. Deal?
Remember folks: Advertising is not a god-given right. It just happens to work for TV and magazines. If they don't want me ad blocking, they should take down their sites.
Is it theft to get up from a TV commercial? To skip the big ad section in your magazine? No. Ads are priced by the eyeballs after the fact, you don't try and force the eyeballs to match your expectations.
It finally happened. The word stealing has lost all meaning. Stealing used to mean physical theft, as in you stole my calculator. You stole my book. You stole my videogame. You stole my song. You stole my TV show. You stole my internet site. You stole my cable. You stole my bandwidth. Stealing = made me mad
Theft? That is insulting and offensive.
I guess you can consider these other things theft also:
Using the Lynx web browser
Any TV using Tivo or ReplayTV
Going to the bathroom during commercial breaks.
Coming to the movies a bit late for the commercials.
Despite what it may feel like, pop-up ads account for less than 5% of the total advertisements on todays websites. Further, AOL (see this NYT article posted on ./ several weeks ago) has confirmed that pop-ups are a huge source of dissatisfaction from web users - thus making them in-effective.
Rather than use "anti-leech" technology, wouldn't advertisers be better served by simply employing technology that would be more palatable to their readers?
I guess that there are multiple sides to any story, though in the end I find the efforts of sites like anti-leech both amusing and somewhat dangerous. On the one hand, I do understand that serving a website can be expensive, and that as the recession continues many people are becomming more and more desperate to avoid going under. However, anti-leech is bad for at least two major reasons, one economic, and one societal.
;).
1. Alienating your customers rarely makes for a solid business plan: As the RIAA and countless other harsh regimes(both in business and government) have learned, the more you clamp down, the more people squirm to escape your grasp. Companies forget that one of the whole points of the WWW is choice- and that includes the choice to go to another website if this one is treating me badly. I don't think I need to point out that long term business is built on repeat customers, but then again maybe I do. Repeat customers are ideal, because they are likely to spend more, and have a far lower cost of acquisition. You generally get repeat customers by building loyalty, a positive feeling towards the company. Loyalty does not generally follow from pissing people off.
2. Even more so then with programming, many people start learning their HTML by looking out how another site has done it. I now do a lot of website development, but I got my start when I was younger in part through liberal copying/tinkering with already built stuff until I figured it out well enough to do myself. This makes me concerned about their 'anti-view-source' offerings. While I suspect much of their stuff can be circumvented, the very people who might benefit most from looking at code are new to the web and thus might not know how to get around stuff. If such things became widespread, it could have a somewhat chilling effect on the learning that goes on for the general, casual designer, who might never have the chance to get bit by the bug and learn more(/me looks over at large pile of Mt. Dew bottles, not totally sure this would be bad
Any how, I hope that the concept embodied by antileech gets thoroughly trounced. Heh, and I haven't even touched on the whole rediculousness of the 'theft' thing, but I'm sure that will get pretty well gone over by others.
I am not morally or legally bound to view the advertisements of others.
If pop-up blocking in browsers is "theft", is it then also theft when your Tivo skips the commercials??
This is incredibly silly, and I wouldn't frequent a web site, or give business to a corporation that would ban be based on my browser or browser settings.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
If the window is loaded, but not shown, then everyone wins except the advertiser. As far as you're concerened, you saw no pop-up. As far as the web site is concerned, they get paid. As far as someone like doubleclick is concerned (or any other advertising-helper company), they pushed the impression and get paid by the actual advertiser. The advertiser loses, doubly, though. They have to pay for an impression that was never "impressed" upon the user.
As far as I'm concerned, this is fine. I don't like companies that would want pop-ups. This is like blocking spam as far as I'm concerned. I don't feel bad that the spammer paid for the bandwidth and I didn't read their spam. And in the same way, they're forcing ME to PAY for the bandwidth for getting their advertisement. It's not a big deal now, but what do I do when my I have a transfer limit on my broadband and actually start PAYING for downloading their ad.
I must say, that might be a *good* thing about this whole data transfer cap. People are going to get damn pissed when they start getting billed for receiving spam.
You know this is silly. I bet that advertisers are pretty happy with this. People who block ads (I bet) are much more likely *not* to buy products related to those ads (if they saw them, of course). So advertisers are getting better views for their money. In reality, however, maybe the website providers should go after the advertisers, not the blockers.
That said, providers have a right to block access to people not requesting their pop-ups. I also have a right to avoid their page....
-Sean
No, I'm not stealing from them. There is no agreement saying I have to view the website the way they say I have to, and the Web was explictly designed so that publishers could not impose layout decisions upon browsers. I hate all sites that use popups and would never click on a single one out of principle even if I was interested in what they were selling. So I'm saving them bandwidth costs by not loading their ads which I would ignore anyway.
The more advertisers try to saturate our lives with forced advertising, the stronger the backlash will become. What has effectively happened is that due to the sheer number of ads the impact of each individual one has been reduced to near zero. They're really shooting themselves in the foot by using these invasive techniques.
Using Mozilla is not stealing; I see it more as a start to forcing sites to use more reasonable advertising methods by undermining the market for their invasive techniques.
"Close your browser window, uninstall your pop up blocker and come back here to visit us."
How about I go to another site and forget about yours.
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
I don't see what's wrong with this. I'd rather have them attempt a technological solution than buy some congressmen and have them make popup blocking illegal.
The solution is to allow popups, but not to display them to the screen.
It's not really an improvement since it wastes bandwidth. It is really bad for websites that have popups but don't install this software because now they will have to pay the bandwidth costs for popup images that will never be displayed.
In my mind though, computer users rights are more important than website owners. It is justified to waste bandwidth if it makes computer users happy.
Ok, so calling ad-blockers "thiefs" is stupid, and the odds of this thing taking off is something around zero. Some points, though:
1. There's nothing wrong with a site requiring you to view ads before viewing it. This isn't the best way to do it, mind you, but it's a reasonable theory.
2. Everyone is better off if websites know what advertising works. Pretending to view ads hurts everyone in the long run.
3. What we really need, at the end of the day, is better statistics on Internet ads. Radio and TV people can factor in bathroom breaks and channel surfing into their ad rates, but we're only beginning to get those stats for the Internet.
4. Somewhere deep inside of me, I suspect that people who refuse to look at (any) ads are the first ones to yell when their favorite sites go to a subscription model. Actions do have consequences, and your ISP fee doesn't subsidize the sites you visit.
Yes. Pop-up ads are annoying. I'm not sure which planet the marketing folks who think "Oh, if we annoy them _more_, they'll buy from us" are from, but, well, they're wrong. I have no problem with the banner ads on, say, slashdot or userfriendly, or wherever. They're just there - they don't interfere with the "web browsing experience".
Pop-up ads on the other hand, are extremely annoying. First of all, they rely on either a) JavaScript kludges; or b) HTML kludges such as bogus frame targets. Second, spawning too many windows can suck if you're on a slow machine, and I've seen pop-ups kill Netscape on Linux, Win32, and Solaris. The only-thing worse than pop-up ads are the pop-under ads, or the pop-up ads that move around your screen by themselves.
If I'm browsing /., and I'm bored, I might glance at the banner ad and click it. If /. used pop-up ads, I'd close them as soon as the page loaded, and if I was bored, well, I'd just get back to work rather than looking at their ads.
I'd like to see some serious statistics on banner ads vs. pop-ups. I strongly disbelieve that pop-ups have a higher click-through rate. Don't people understand this?! Your morning newspaper doesn't have a spring-loaded ad that hits you in the face as soon as you open it. Why should the newspaper's companion website have that feature?
And the "just close the window" is the same argument as "just delete the spam". It's not the point. If I have a friend who sends me mail from yahoo, I don't mind the shameless plug for Yahoo that's inserted as a footer, because I can ignore it. If Yahoo were to send me a mail directly, saying "use our mail service", I would mind a lot. It takes no time at all to visually parse a web page and see what's an ad. It takes a significant amount of time to locate a pop-up window, close it, and close the 10 others that it spawns.
Of course, now comes the argument "Well, if you can ignore inline banner ads, then they're not useful." Bullshit. I can ignore billboards while I'm driving; I can ignore ads in the subway; I can mute commercials on TV; I can toss the flyers from the Sunday paper. Apparently, however, some people still think these methods are useful, because they don't seem to be going away.
(Of course, this is all moot for me, since any packets outgoing to doubleclick.net or the other ad places get redirected to 127.0.0.1, which answers everything with 1 pixel image :-)
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
Their site doesn't have the blocker on it, the page with the blocker is an example to people who may want to use the blocker.
Any idiot website that insists on using popup ads when the entire planet hates them deserves to not get any revenue... If people were watching TV and halfway through your show a huge popup ad appeared over the screen you'd be pissed.
If sites that force popup ads shut down... Well boohoo...
I'm an avid user of Phoenix, which of course blocks pop-ups, and this is great news to me! Websites that use this will now immediately inform me, "We don't want you to give us (or our advertisers) your money." This is a big time-saving feature from having to wade through a webpage for a while to determine whether or not it's crap. Now I know from the outset. Thanks, webmasters!
"there're bandwidth costs to be paid, servers to be bought and maintained, and some of the information you read doesn't just appear there; someone had to do research and type it out."
OK. So, by that logic try this one on for size. Every time you walk into a store at the mall to browse and maybe talk to a sales clerk about this item or that, do you give them a quarter? After all, there's rent to be paid, a staff to hire, electricity, inventory costs, etc. These things aren't cheap, and if you're just going in there to look, you're wasting their time and energy. You're a THIEF!
Didn't think so.
But I will never buy anything from any company that uses a pop-up to try to sell it to me. NEVER. And by extension, that means that I will never click on their pop-up either. So I should be considered a thief because someone doesn't like the fact that I can't stand their method of advertising?
I do not read or respond to AC's. If you want a discussion, log in. Otherwise, don't waste your time.
if you ask me about this whole deal, it screams fair use; if i go to a burger joint and get a kids' meal requesting no toy, they should give it to me that way. if i forget to request no toy, and throw it out without looking, there should also be no problem.
are blind people all theives? they don't see ads!
what about stereo systems? they come with graphic equalizers, which let people filter music as they see fit. but hark! this means radio broadcasts and cds can be played without so much treble! the thieves!
this whole thing reeks of 'loss of potential sales' -- the same argument as used by the MPAA and RIAA. sure, it's a bit more far-fetched (and therefore more obvious), but this may help our case against the motion picture and recording industries.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
I understand that you just don't like the idea that people shouldn't have to give something in return for content; and that sites deserve to be paid. That's true, to an extent: if I like a site and choose to pay them for what they offer, then I have no problem with that. I subscribe to several websites that I frequently visit exactly because I feel they deserve to be paid for what they provide me. But, that's MY decision to make, not the site's. I dislike popups because they are like the site is forcing me to look at their ads. I don't want to see your ad unless I choose to do so. To me popups are like stealing my time.
If a site can't survive without pop up ads then they probably aren't a worthwhile site anyway. Alternatively, they can go to a subscription model, and people who want to will pay them.
Lastly, web sites only engage in popup advertising because they can. If everyone had software to block these ads all the sites would stop using them and find some other way to make money. By using such software I'm just making the statement that I think they should make their money some other way that doesn't steal my time and patience.
I don't think these people understand who the real thieves are. Sites that serve unwanted popups, banners, etc. without my consent are stealing the bandwidth that I paid for. If they want to use my bandwidth, they can damn well pay me for it at the prices I set. If they don't want to pay my prices, then they shouldn't be able to use my bandwidth. By the same token, if they don't want me to use their bandwidth, they're perfectly within their rights to deny me access to their sites.
These bandwidth looters are trying to set the tone of the game by portraying those of us who are trying to preserve our bandwidth usage as something dirty. I am paying for my bandwidth, and I will be the one to determine when it gets used.
Theft? That is insulting and offensive.
:)
I guess you can consider these other things theft also:
* Using the Lynx web browser
Lynx is 100% fine. It works perfectly and is not blocked for a reason.
* Any TV using Tivo or ReplayTV
The day everyone has TIVO, you'll see that the advertizements start to get buried INSIDE the show, or that that show you loved in no longer supported. All you can access for free will be propaganda supported stuff or pay-per-views. I'm nt looking worward to that day
Going to the bathroom during commercial breaks.
Nobody requires you to look at the screen when they display an add last time I checked. Not even to stay on the channel. Most websites are not asking people to click the banners nor asking you to pay carefull attention to all the banners.
* Coming to the movies a bit late for the commercials.
They couldn't care less, the fact is some people enjoy those commercials, and for the movie you have already payed a ticket wich is the way you supports the creation of movies.
unfinished: (adj.)
As long as you don't request ANY image, they site will still load. The moment you start selectively loading images, they block you.
Hope it clears your concerns (note: I don't like pop-ups, i have a commercial website and refused to sell pop-ups over and over. I'd be very unhappy if everyone just blocked my 1 add per page in selected pages...that helps me pay for the journalists)
unfinished: (adj.)
A web site has every right to decide wether or not they allow a particular browser configuration to access their site. Of course, the more people block pop-up ads, the fewer people that will be able to visit anti-blocking enabled sites, the less cash they'll get for ads, and eventually they'll die a natural death from lack of money.
A free market cure for stupid business models. one that I will totally support by continuing to use pop-up blockers - and encourage friends to do likewise.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
On one side, the client can block popups. Its perfectly legal/morally right.
On the other side, when I request a HTML document from a website, they are no way obligated to send it to me. Calling blockers thieves is bullshit, but they are in no way obligated to serve me data if I block popups. And if IE ever implements popup blocking, the sites that block users who block popups could find themselves with no audience.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Popups can be used for other reasons. Maybe I'm blocking pop-ups for a totally different reason than advertising. The fact that Anti-leech.com thinks that blocking pop-ups == blocking advertising, is wrong because many more applications exist for the standard pop-up window (like games, application notices, cool effects, temporary data store, etc. -- whatever the programmer can imagine).
On the flip side, there are other ways to make advertising annoying without popups. For example, some sites now use a DHTML layer that floats across the content to get your attention. Now that's annoying, but it's not a pop-up, which proves pop-ups aren't needed, so why protect pop-up advertising? I don't see a reason, but maybe somebody else (an advertiser) can shed some light on this. I would like to hear perspectives from advertisers on that point. DHTML layers are a good idea from the advertiser's perspective because layers can't easily be suppressed, unless JavaScript is turned off completely, which most people are not likely to do. Sorry about giving out such "evil" pointers but it's nothing new that people don't already know about.
Excluding anti-pop-up browsers will make most potential clients angry. Instead, the advertisers (and Anti-leech.com) should better spend their time creating alternate methods for delivery of advertising (like the DHTML layer) intsead of blocking the defunct pop-up. It's easy to see that protecting pop-up advertising is short-sighted because popups are not the only delivery method available for advertising. These companies must not be technically savvy. Whoever buys into this foolish logic will end up annoying their potential clientel, and therefore alienating them. Are you gonna' buy from someone who calls you a thief and then forces you to see pop-ups that you've already decided you don't want? Notice the accusing intonations of the text that the anti-popup detector displays -- very rude indeed -- any descent advertiser or sales outlet wouldn't use it, unless they are convinced they have to deal out punishment to their potential clients as a parent might to a child. Very demeaning to say the least. We're all grown-ups here.
Why do so many browsers allow you to block pop-ups? Because the people have spoken, and the people do not want pop-up advertising! For any advertiser to now force-feed pop-ups and call clients thieves -- especially at this point in history -- it goes against every ethical and smart business practice.
I don't mind advertising being displayed to me, because I am so accustomed to it. However I do despise it being pushed to me in pop-up windows or any other annoying fashion that blocks the primary purpose of my visit to the website. If they have to yell that loud about their product, then I would say the product most likely sucks. For example, you probably won't see the Segway HT in a pop-up window anytime soon because the product speaks for itself. Quality, value, and purpose.
So if blocking popups is stealing, does this mean that when their site is unavailable they are obligated to compensate us for the downtime their site was unavailable?
So many times ive been upset because a site i needed to get to was down.. At long last justification for getting money for my loss!
After all, im not paying my ISP for bandwidth just to have these sites be down stealing information from me.
Technology makes some good business models go bad and eliminates certain categories of jobs. It happened for farming...
Which is still the most important job in the world, and always will be. It takes a lot of decadence to forget that fact.
#define sig "Every social system runs on the people's belief in it."
Would be about 3 lines of code added to konqueror to download blocked files but not display them :)
loply.com
"This makes pages un-readable for some visual disabled who use text browsers to get to what they need and read it out on a braille-board or via software that simply reads the text out- load to them."
Don't sue -- bring criminal prosecution.
The one guy with the case against Southwest Airlines really didn't have a case, because SWA actually was making it possible for him to purchase tickets. Here, the situation is different. Not only is this company actively and agressively forbidding access to the blind, the spokesperson for the company is accusing these disabled individuals of being theives. I'm likely to get modded down as a troll, but I honestly believe there is a potential for litigation here.
Don't some of the larger internet providers distribute pop-up ad blocking software? AOL? Isn't that the sort of kindling for being a target of one of those lawsuits that bankrupts you just by being sued? You know, the kind of suits that "Everybody" is afraid to make the slightest contraversial move in busines because they're so afraid of being sued?
This would be a terriffic time to show me that's not a myth.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
As George Orwell made so abundantly clear those who control the language control the world. This is why you are called a thief and a bomb that wipes out villages is called the daisy cutter.
It's all double plus good.
War is necrophilia.
until I sign an agreement
Wait for it. Websites will eventually show a click-through popup agreement to all non-cookied users, consenting to using your bandwidth just like they want.
Web interactions can be described at two levels. The first, and the only one nontechnical folks know about, is the human level. Here interactions are described as they are perceived by a human using standard tools. That is, when I click a link I'm asking for a page as rendered by default configuration Netscape or IE -- a bundle of content which you're offering as a bundle and which I see only as a bundle. If this is the way you understand web interactions, then accusations of theft make sense. But it's an abstraction that doesn't reflect what's really going on.
The truth is at another level, which is network level. Under HTTP, I request a chunk of data and, your server may or may not send it to me. That's it. The protocol says nothing about what I do with the data once I have it -- my computer is my agent, not yours. In particular, it says nothing about whether or not I will follow any suggestions to request other chunks of data. The protocol says nothing about what whether or not I'm using the standard tools. (It does suggest that I tell you, but I see that as a detail of the request -- "I want the version you've prepared for IE5".) Those are the real terms of use. If you're server sends out data on those conditions, you've implicitly agreed to them
(This doesn't give me license to violate copyright law or commit identity theft. Those are illegal independently of any protocol.)
If you want to make sure I download your ads, use a protocol (or server configuration) which is a better fit for your abstraction. You can:
- Configure your server to deny content requests until the ads has been downloaded. E.g. don't serve me part 2 unless I've downloaded the ads in part 1 (tale.com does this), or put the content I want in a frame that I have to load last. [But there's no way to tell whether or not I've displayed the ads.]
- Use a protocol in which the whole page -- text, images, and all -- are transfered in a single bundle, like a zipfile or tarball. The protocol makes it clear that the ads and the content are a package. [There's no way to tell whether or not I've displayed them here, either].
- Require me to use code you trust. It could be a signed version of a standard app or your own applet. [But the only way you can require it is by serving the content only to machines that have proven that they know some secret. With fully programmable computers -- i.e. not crippled by "trusted computing" hardware -- the secret will be be DeCSSed.]
In other words, you can readily force me to download the ads, but forcing me to display them is just another DRM use case. Or maybe it's a DMCA issue.The protocol is the law. Or at least it should be -- reality may differ.
Only Thieves Block Pop-Ups
I do not think so. Company who gives Pop-ups ads are Thieves. They use up our bandwidth and cpu, when most users clearly do not wish it. Is it fair, for a person, who pays months for a set bandwidth (let's say 1 gig a month) and some of that bandwidth is wasted for these ads? I do not thinks so!
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...