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Coming Soon to a Wireless Hotspot Near You: Ads
mindless4210 writes "A new generation of spam is born with the launch of FreeFi's new Wi-Fi advertising network. It is the first service of its kind, with intentions of delivering ad content to hotspots around the world starting in mid-Summer. FreeFi's President, Lawrence Laffer, says that the service displays a 'persistent set of ads adjacent to the user's browser without use of invasive advertising software or pop-up ads.' He also claims '[their] market research indicates that, except for pop-ups, people really don't mind ads.'" This seems like the kind of thing that would keep me from using "free" wireless access, but I've a feeling I'm in the minority.
This seems like the kind of thing that would keep me from using "free" wireless access, but I've a feeling I'm in the minority.
Good... stay off the free service and leave bandwidth for those of us who have the amazing innate ability to ignore ads. Hosting these free hotspots costs money (as does slashdot). They need to recoup their costs or they will go bye-bye. Who f'en cares if there's a little bit of your screen taken up with ads that will be easily ignored (at least by the majority of us not included in your minority)?
It's a good thing you run a website free of ads. Oh... wait... shoot. Now, why again do you have ads? Oh... that's right, to pay for shit.
Casual Games/Downloads
Maybe you can run it inside Vmware, and have your "real" OS route through the virtual machine. Or the crossover guys could make a hacked WINE just for running this client and network interface.
And it failed too, remember free dialup? Free internet access for looking at ads. Where did they all go? Out of business.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Sure the ad system isn't the best but it's functional and beats having to wait in line for 45 minutes to buy a pack of $20 ciggarettes in a Socialist/Communist society.
You can't have your cake and eat it too I'm afraid.
Wagner LLC Consulting Co. - Getting it right the first time
I kept looking for how it actual works but didn't see anything. Maybe I just don't have much Wi-Fi experience. Are the ads forced through the browser? Does a custom piece of software need to run first? I'm not quite sure how the ads are going to get onto my computer screen.
Someone will write an application/patch/work-around that deactivates their ads without effecting the service. Those in the know will use it. Those not smart enough, or not clued in won't. This is how it always is. The application/patch/work-around will be brought up here of course. It always is.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
...they've found that the reason people don't mind ads other than pop-ups is that they don't notice them.
Oops, so much for that business model.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
While this whole thing sounds just great on paper, I truly think it will suffer the exact same fate as NetZero --- placing ads simply does not bring in enough revenue to cover the costs of such a service and to break even, let alone to make a profit.
I'll bet that after a year or two, they'll start charging money, somehow.
Granted high speed has more value to it than POTS dialup, but is this company really going to be able to compete? Several states are starting to consider WiFi as a viable public utility that they provide for "free" using the Tax Base. Benefit to the people is seamless wireless access without ads. Benefit to the state is reliable high speed access for public safety and services such as fire, police, EMS, etc.. Plus, once they ensure that everyone is online, they can begin reducing costs by allowing a great deal of government red tape to be handled electronically. (i.e. paying speeding tickets or applying for building permits)
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
Actually if you look at the screenshot in the article, it looks like it's simply a new browser window that is sent to the top of the screen while slightly reducing your main browser window. In other words, I believe that this will work with many browsers (but maybe not all).
Good point.
The Wi-Fi is, in the classis sense, a "Loss Leader"
If $150 / mo for a business cable modem and $300 in one time setup hardware results in an extra $200 a months in business with no extra "tech support" issues from customers, then it's worth the investment.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
So what is to happen to the use of handheld computers whose browsers are already hugely limited by screen size? I'd hate to have to use a computer on which literally half of the screen was consumed by advertisements. Still not too bad of a deal for laptop users though. But one would have to be on crack to tolerate that on a CE machine.
I don't see anything wrong with this at all... if there's a free hotspot somewhere, and the owner puts ads on it, it's not like you're forced to use it.
It's *FREE*...
If you don't like it, PAY for a hotspot that doesn't have ads. What's wrong with that?
I for one am the owner of a Pocket PC with a built-in WiFi chipset, and I don't like the idea of mandatory ads obscuring half of my device's tiny screen. I might not even be able to use the service at all if it requires software to be installed (probably Windows only, and/or resource hogging.)
This comment was thought up very late at night and does not necessarily reflect my views at a more reasonable hour.
Question: Is this a Internet Explorer specific system or will these ads show up on ANY web browser? So far, I have had very few pop-up, banner or other issues when I use Lynx.
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Except when every café has a hotspot, and it doesn't generate extra business, then it's just an added monthly cost, and has to be paid somehow.
My <1000 UID is with a hot chick
First off, these guys aren't the first: a company called DotSpot (read my article) launched six weeks ago. Second, if you don't want the ads, don't use the free service. Spam is unsolicited commercial whatever that you're the unwilling recipient of. Terms of service are different. If you sign up for a free ISP and then promise to spam you, it's not spam. If they don't disclose they spam, it is spam.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
Interesting to note that commercial-free TV (PBS..), is not really. Those messages between NOVA and Antiques Roadshow from Pfizer and IBM telling us how Earth-friendly they are? Those are called ads. They help pay for Public TV... Many worthwhile things are paid for with ads (Slashdot may fall into this category, only YOU can say...)
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
"Wait, I thought the consensus here was that everything should be free be and open. I for one find it apppaaaauuulling that they're not willing to offer a service that costs them money for free. I mean what if i'm at the park and the next kernel comes out and I can't update until I get home? This is just like the corporate fat cats, always trying to "make money to live off of!""
I know at least 20% of the people out there reading the headline to the article were thinking that. I'm also willing to bet that 40% of them are currently unemployed as they would be at work now and not slashdot. (I'm a college student so I got an excuse.) What's the big deal with this, everything "free" today is laced with ads of some type. Ads are everywhere, deal with them by not buying sugared water for $2 not by bitching on slashdot (which by the way is free to you and paid for by ads!).
Other than your internet connection, most of the content on the web is free but paid for by ads. If you're in the park and you get free web access and bitch because of some popup ad, then don't use it! Connect to the internet from your cell phone and pay for the minutes!
Look at what happened with TV.. used to be free.. then commercials.. then nothing but commercials...then cable... now you got cable and dish with a fee to watch the commercials.....
TV has always had commercials. People who wanted commercial-free content, more recent movies, etc., started to pay to get cable, because they couldn't get that (for free or otherwise) over broadcast. To pay for this new content, cable companies could depend solely on customer fees. Now, with content becoming more expensive, and more demands for revenue from shareholders, cable providers are augmenting customer fees with ads. But even then, ad rates are declining due to less viewership because of the Intarwab, video games, etc. Would you rather pay more and have no ads? Cable and sattelite providers are guessing not.
as long as they can identify xml-rpc payloads. Otherwise, it's not going to be pretty.
"Piter, too, is dead."
The easiest way would be to embed your browsing of other sites in an iframe using a transparent proxy. You can do this even on nonstandard ports, by using pattern match support plus stateful filtering. This would mean you'd need a browser capable of displaying iframes, but that hardly seems like a show-stopper to me.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"A new generation of spam is born with the launch of FreeFi's new Wi-Fi advertising network....
Excuse me, but that's not spam. It's like calling the ads on the side of slashdot for spam. It's not. Spam is something you didn't ask for. You do indeed ask for these ads when you chose to use their free service.
I hate spam as much as the next guy, so no reason to cry wolf!
Cable providers never relied strictly on customer fees for basic cable. The only channels that have never had ads are premium channels like HBO, Cinemax, and Showtime and they still don't have ads. And the cable providers only get a part of that advertising dollar. Most of it goes to the cable networks themselves.
If I were implementing a system like this I would use a slightly customized transparent proxy to put my ads on the page, and embed whatever you were viewing in an iframe. Rewriting pages to work with frames could potentially be a PITA, though perhaps replacing all instances of _top or whatever it is with the funky psuedorandom name of your frame would be sufficient. (I have not used iframes, but AFAIK web pages don't know they're running in one.) Meanwhile if the proxy is not serving you the ads, it can be configured to refuse to serve you anything else but a "until you can see our ads you're not getting free web access sucka" message. I suggest adding a new error code number, 5000, to the list of valid HTML error codes for this purpose.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
WiFi should be a condiment, like catsup or salt or paper napkins...
This is the only intelligent thing I've see posted to this story yet. WiFi isnt the business, but its a great way to get people to visit your establishment. If you think your going to get rich WiFi'ing a park and collecting ad revenue your living in 1998. If your one of these guys more power to you.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
I know this might be a naive question, but how does the technology work? I mean usually wireless is the lower protocol level (ala TCP/IP) and ads are at a higher level (ala HTTP)...do requests for webpages serve up a dummy page that loads up the small and ad on the side and the forwards to the real thing, or what?
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
And if they profit gouge and annoy the customer, someone else will come along offering less obtrusive ads while still making money, stealing all of the original company's business, making everyone more happy except the original assholes. Yay capitalism...really!
I looked at the screenshot for the ad service and I was wondering - I have a wifi-enabled HP iPaq that runs Pocket PC 2003.
I use it at hotspots frequently, because its almost always on me.
The running resolution is 320x480. (Would the ad fill the entire screen?) Also, Internet Explorer on Pocket PC 2003 does not support two browser windows to be open simultaneously.
What happens then?
A coffee shop (or any business, or private party) can't just hook up a cablemodem and resell their bandwidth. Their ISP would have a fucking FIT. It's against their Terms of Service.
Generally, you don't get to resell your cablemodem bandwidth. You might be able to work out a deal with your ISP, but you'll definitely be paying more than $70.
You can't have your cake and eat it too I'm afraid.
Cake, eh?
In our system, most businesses fail. Most wealth is horded by the top few percentiles. For the majority, most real incomes have been stagnant since the 1960s. Our communities and workforces have been devastated by two decades of rapacious mergers, corporate accounting scams, and stock inflation. Millions upon millions of Americans have no health care. Millions are so overextended in debt that they're only a couple of paychecks away from the street, even as home foreclosures have hit a 30-year high. Our middle class is contracting while our masters export our jobs overseas. Our armies are bogged down losing an imperial war being fought by economic conscripts. As conspicuous consumption driven by advertising has brought our environment to the brink of calamity, our labor force has been reduced to peeing in cups to keep their Wal-Mart jobs.
But, yes, cigs are $6 a pack in New York. Eat your heart out, socialists!