Slashdot Mirror
A Campaign to Block Firefox Users?
rarwes writes "A website is aiming at blocking Firefox users. This because a fraction of the Firefox users installed an Ad Blocker and are therefor 'stealing money' from website owners that use ads. They recommend using IE, Opera or IE tab. From the site: 'Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers.' Be interesting to see where they are getting their numbers from.
....don't need their stinking website!
Anyone savvy enough to block ads is probably savvy enough to have their browser present its user-agent as Internet Explorer if necessary.
Particularly, don't use ads that jitter about by a couple of pixels, or flash bright contrasting colours. Not only do they not make me want to buy from you, they make me want to avoid *ever* buying from you.
Be interesting to see where they are getting their numbers from.
I'm not actually that interested in looking up their arses.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
You can send me the ad; I don't understand why I'm under an obligation to look at it or why you have the right to demand that my computer display it.
I never have frustrations, the reason is, to wit:
If at first I don't succeed, I quit!
I hit a lot of websites and I've never been redirected to this page. Does anybody actually use it, or is it something someone tossed up just to generate flames (AKA a troll)?
I read the internet for the articles.
I tried to look at the website but I can't. Any ideas?
Oh, wait...
So they are worried about ad-blocking and recommend installing Opera which has an excellent content blocker built in. Seems odd.
So is this the point where we starting hearing that blocking ads is just like running out of the store with a pair of blue jeans? I mean really...
At what point do businesses start realize they they are providers of information and not the gate keepers for information...
I've already won my free iPod by clicking on the dancing monkey.
I don't need another one, thank you.
Ok... let's break this down...
You've reached this page because the site you were trying to visit now blocks the FireFox browser.
The Mozilla Foundation and its Commercial arm, the Mozilla Corporation, has allowed and endorsed Ad Block Plus, a plug-in that blocks advertisement on web sites and also prevents site owners from blocking people using it. Software that blocks all advertisement is an infringement of the rights of web site owners and developers. Numerous web sites exist in order to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads. Accessing the content while blocking the ads, therefore would be no less than stealing. Millions of hard working people are being robbed of their time and effort by this type of software. Many site owners therefore install scripts that prevent people using ad blocking software from accessing their site. That is their right as the site owner to insist that the use of their resources accompanies the presence of the ads.
While blanket ad blocking in general is still theft, the real problem is Ad Block Plus's unwillingness to allow individual site owners the freedom to block people using their plug-in. Blocking FireFox is the only alternative. Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers..
Since the makers of Ad Block Plus as well as the filter subscriptions that accompany it refuse to allow website owners control over their own intellectual property, and since FireFox actively endorses Ad Block Plus, the sites linking to this page are now blocking FireFox until the resource theft is stopped.
Netscape users can simply set their browser to IE mode to continue to enjoy the site that sent you here. FireFox users can use Internet Explorer, Opera or Netscape (in IE mode) to access it. FireFox users also have the option of using the IE Tab plug-in which uses the IE rendering engine to display pages, but also disables the Ad Block Plus plug-in.
If you are offended by the Mozilla Corporation's endorsement of dishonesty please contact the Mozilla Foundation and ask them to stop empowering internet theft.
Other comments on ad blocking...
PopularTechnology.net--Why Adblock is bad for the "free" Internet
Adblock effectively robs these free sites of their revenue. If Internet Explorer came with a feature such as Adblock, you would effectively wipe out thousands of websites, maybe more. These are the same free sites users of Adblock frequently visit. The irony is how this is self-defeating.
Information Technology and the Law--Firefox Adblock a Contributory Infringer?
Judge Posner, elucidating the holdings of WGN v. United Video (1982) among others, reasoned in Aimster that:
"[Commercial-skipping] amounted to creating an unauthorized derivative work, namely a commercial-free copy that would reduce the copyright owner's income from his original program, since "free" television programs are financed by the purchase of commercials by advertisers."
Like free television broadcast content supported financially by advertising, much of the content on the Internet today is distributed free to end-users for an indirect exchange of advertisement revenue. When a user loads an ad-driven copyrighted website, he produces a copy of the work due to the inherent architecture of the Internet. If this user is using Adblock to screen out annoying advertisements, he is creating an unauthorized derivative work analogous to skipping television commercials. By the letter of copyright law, this practice would most likely be seen as an infringing use.
You say you want a revolution....
User-Agent switcher should have no problem with this one either. It's "How to block Firefox" page just tells you to put simple code in your page to detect if "firefox" is in the HTTP_USER_AGENT string.
However, I hadn't noticed that this was was blocked in ABP until you mentioned it. I clicked the link, and it failed to load, but I thought it was because these people hadn't tested it in Firefox and it just didn't render. The fact that it didn't appear because ABP blocked it is troubling. I use ABP to get rid of ads, not to get rid of "slander". Why does ABP block a site just because it is critical of ABP? If I'm using ABP, it's because I find it incredibly useful (which I do), and reading some site tell me I'm stealing money from website owners isn't going to make me uninstall it. Learning that ABP is blocking not only ads but also sites that badmouth ABP, though, might.
I do almost all of my holiday and gift shopping on-line.
On the other hand, I seldom ever click on ads on sites. I shop at on-line stores. I find those stores by searching Google for the items I want.
So, yeah, it probably isn't in your best interest to have me use up your bandwidth to read your opinions on X in the hope that I might click on an ad for Y or Z.
My time is valuable. What are you offering me as incentive to read your ads? Specifically.
Because you're going to HIS site. He gets paid to support said site by your browsing displaying the ads, which is tracked by image requests to the ad server. The ad blocker extensions usually ignore the ads entirely, so the browser doesn't generate any hits for the ad, and the site owner loses money.
He wouldn't have a problem if the ad blocker would still generate a hit but use CSS to make the image hidden on the browser. Of course, the ad companies themselves would then have a huge problem with that, since they're paying people for "displaying" ads nobody sees.
I'd think that a better ad blocker would be one that just blocked flash and converted animated GIFs into non-animated images and then displayed them. A static image isn't that irritating, it still generates hits, and so long as advertisers aren't being dumbasses, their ads will still be seen.
I guess nobody's showed them AdBlock for Opera (or even Opera's built-in "content blocker", admittedly not quite as good as the real thing since it lacks regexps, though), or Ad Muncher for IE.
... does anyone think this may just be a troll / hoax? I've learned never to question the stupidity of people, particularly people on the Internet, but this seems like it's just a bit of a stretch. It kind of reminds me of an Adequacy.org post.
Maybe when they find out about those, they'll do the world a favor and just block everybody from their site?
Also
The blocking that they seem to be advocating that others use is pretty standard "HTTP_USER_AGENT" querying using a PHP script, so it's not like it would be hard to get around. (Incidentally, I've always felt that the USER_AGENT header was something of a bad idea; maybe it's time to kill it, or at least disable replying to it by default?)
What I'm slightly more interested in is how they're blocking the main page. It's not the same as the script that they're pushing; the page actually loads (you can view the source in FF), but it seems to take advantage of some rendering quirk in IE to produce a blank screen when rendered on Firefox. That actually strikes me as a little more subtle, although it's still dumb.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
They must not know that Opera has an ad blocking feature built-in, and like Firefox, IE has ad blocking add-ons also. Will they also block text browsers such as Links since I can't see there image/flash crap ads also? Why single out Firefox/adblock? I guess any site that only depends on ads to earn revenue and is willing engage in blocking a certain segment of web users, must be devoid of any interesting content and not worth my time anyways.
That page was written with Microsoft FrontPage 4.0, how "hardworking" could they be?
Look at the header of that page:
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0">
<meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
I guess they just can't make decent HTML that work on every browser, and blame firefox for their stupidity, after all, things that work good and nice in IE display crappy in Firefox. Instead of learning to do proper HTML, they just want to block firefox so everyone will see their crappy html right.
Who needs adblockers anyway? My brain quite successfully filters out all banner ads. I just skip right past them, at most I recall there was a rectangular area on the page I ignored. The ads that pop-up over the content, requiring you to manually close them to continue reading are a bit more annoying, but I find I'm getting pretty good at clicking the close buttons without even seeing what the ad is for.
You see ads if you want to see ads. On the internet, anyway. On TV (not that I watch nowadays), radio (not that I listen to it nowadays) and outdoors (although I try to avoid the centrum nowadays) I find them more annoying.
'Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet [...] therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers.'
So if FireFox users are so few in number, how can ending their 'resource theft' result in 'tremendous financial rewards'?
The annoying things will be washed away while the really useful things will flourish. Welcome to the web Ad 2.0.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
"Netscape users can simply set their browser to IE mode to continue to enjoy the site that sent you here. FireFox users can use Internet Explorer, Opera or Netscape (in IE mode) to access it. FireFox users also have the option of using the IE Tab plug-in which uses the IE rendering engine to display pages, but also disables the Ad Block Plus plug-in.
If you are offended by the Mozilla Corporation's endorsement of dishonesty please contact the Mozilla Foundation and ask them to stop empowering internet theft."
I have another option!
It's a simple 5 step process:
1) If I ever come across a site that throws me at that piece of donkey crap site
2) I will just reopen the same site using your handy dandy babelfish.altavista.com (using firefox), translate the referring site to any language (spanish is fine), then click on the "view this page in it's original language" [the query will come from babelfish, instead of my personal browser, and babelfish doesn't use firefox, it uses a proprietary browser script]
3) I will read the page for a contact address
4) I'll sign said contact address up on the "myfreexbox360.com" style sites
5) I'll inform them that advertisements that they are so fond of are now heading their way, while I enjoy my peaceful ad-reduced surfing, a seperate email to the contact address shall inform them Happy ad-filtering MOFO.
whois whyfirefoxisblocked.com...
Registrant:
Danny Carlton
19724 E Pine St
Suite #149
Catoosa, Oklahoma 75015
United States
See also, dannycarlton.com/net/org.
Living in Cantoosa must leave you with lot of time to ponder the big questions and it seems like Danny has plenty of opinions. His blog (which does not, by the way, block FireFox) includes his opinions on everything from homeshooling to "Jesus Camp" to pet food names like "baby-poop mustard" (to distinguish the fancy kind from plain yellow) and "booger bread" (9-grain style).
All we have here is an insignificant Internet rant. Nothing original there.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
I consider my smells copyrighted and wearing a gas mask while being in my proximity is an infringement of my rights, as the smells are blocked. Please understand that this extreme measure is necessary, since the unique cacophony of smells usually causes nearby people to give me money to leave their vicinity - but those who would wear a gas mask aren't forced to do so. It's bad for business.
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
Whoa.
I didn't even think to check for that. I was giving these guys a lot more credit than they deserve (see my comment above). I thought that they were using some difference in the rendering engine between IE and FF to produce a page that rendered (correctly) to white in FF but because of an IE quirk, showed content when viewed with IE.
It never occurred to me to check AdBlock and see if it was actually being *blocked*...
That's actually rather troubling. I use EasyList USA, like most AdBlock users, and I'm not particularly sure I like the idea of them slipping a "Firefox/ABP Slander" filter into the ad-blocking list. That doesn't seem quite kosher, as obnoxious as I find the "Why Firefox is Blocked" fools.
But lo and behold, when I disabled that line on the ABP list, the page shows up.
I still think that the "Why Firefox is Blocked" people are a bunch of assholes, but that's not a particularly good showing from the ABP/EasyList people either.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
This is almost always a mistake:
Anyone savvy enough to block ads is probably savvy enough to have their browser present its user-agent as Internet Explorer if necessary.
Necessary is the keyword, and no site dumb enough to do this is necessary. The site authors are misinformed if they think Firefox users are not affluent decision makers with significant if not majority of on line purchasing power. They might get more click through from the IE crowd, but advertising is mostly about brand awareness and click through is a misleading metric. A business that would exclude one in twenty of it's customers for having the wrong brand of anything is insane, and Firefox has way more than that kind of market share. Only a few M$ partners are going to do this and they will be punished with lower market share and revenue. Their advertisers will have their brands further besmirched by association with the lowest of the low and dishonest business practices.
It's better to punish the offending site by going elsewhere. When you change your user agent, you tell the world that it's OK to do dumb stuff like this.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"...they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks..."
"...whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards..."
No, you're not.
And his
But the ads change. This is NOT like "product placement" in a movie. I cannot "fuzz out" a can of Mountain Dew (tm) in a movie. But whether I have to walk past an ad for Mountain Dew ON THE WAY INTO THE MOVIE or an ad for Coca Cola (tm) does NOT alter the "work" that is the movie.
The frame is not the painting.
... you are a intelligent and not the sort of obvious retard we can fool into becoming a customer.
Ah, what the hell, we'll ask anyway, are you SURE you don't want to enlarge your penis?
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
As the owner of a large european Porn network/site we cannot confirm these numbers. Actually according to our sales, it's the other way around, FF users are more likely to buy (porn) as they're often more experienced users with faster machines and used to buy stuff online.
If anything, they should block users with dialup connections and Windows 9x, as they purchase less than average.
Thats our experience in the porn-business.
Bottom line here though is that the advertisers brought ad-blocker on themselves by presenting the intrusive ads in the first place.
Would you buy a paperback that had an advertisement in between every twentieth word on the page?
That's your average website.
The argument that we need to "pay" for these sites to stay in business is similarly bogus. We are all paying for out bandwidth from the ISP's and paying quite a lot in most cases.
This is similar situation to television. The reason for advertisements in the first place was to pay for the broadcasting of the programs which at the time were freely available through the air. Now we have to pay sometimes hundreds of bucks a month to access the programming on cable and the "free" broadcast TV is being shut down. Logically, the advertisements should then either disappear or at least be somewhat reduced, but that isn't the case at all.
In general we are now paying far more than we ever have, for telecommunications services and entertainment that has more advertising on it than ever before.
In the old days, the web was 100% free of advertising and the argument was that once added, the necessary capitalist miracle would occur where everything would be cheaper and better. We would have more access to more information of higher quality and it would be generally free (because of the ads). This hasn't happened at all. The internet is far bigger than it was in those days, but the majority of what has been added is commercial junk. You still can't do *any* of the great things that people assumed were in the future in those days like connect to the local library and read electronic books, etc. We now *buy* digital information with our hard earned cash, but do not own them. We also have to navigate malware and advertisements just to have the privilege of doing so.
The Internet is currently all links and no sausage IMO.
The digital revolution that we were promised has been significantly delayed by these commercial interests.
Luckily, I use _Firefox_. If you're going to do something so sad, at least get the name of the product right.
That is all I care about...lol Page seems to be down now...no matter the browser..
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Adblock only blocks what it's told to block. You may subscribe to filters and those filters may include patterns which block this site, but you can see the list if you like, just click on Adblock options. Mine doesn't seem to have any filters that target this site, and it doesn't load for me. Maybe a slashdotting, maybe adblock is blocking it. I don't care enough to switch browsers to find out.
You'd better have something that I actively want in order to convince me I should go out of my way to accommodate you, and I'd better be convinced of that before I visit your site. If you have something I want that badly, chances are good it's something I want to buy that only you sell, in which case you are turning away business if you fail to convince me to go out of my way for you; and you're doing this in order to serve ads at me; hence instead of being happy enough with my sale, you want to eek out 0.1% additional by serving me ads, and for this you're turning away a large portion of a market share that is between 10-25% depending on your industry.
If the only thing you have to offer me are words, then I guarantee that I don't want to read it enough to make me fire up a different browser just for you, there is no word-smithing site today that I wouldn't stop visiting if it did something as annoying as this, in fact most would lose me for doing anything even less annoying.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
However, I hadn't noticed that this was was blocked in ABP until you mentioned it. [...] reading some site tell me I'm stealing money from website owners isn't going to make me uninstall it. Learning that ABP is blocking not only ads but also sites that badmouth ABP, though, might.
You probably are using the EasyList subscription which blocked that page for a short while,
mainly because the boycott guy personally insulted rick, the author of EasyList.
rick has by now realised that this wasn't too smart a move and removed that filter again.
For the process, see the thread in the EasyList forum
JFTR: Adblock Plus doesn't block anything by default, user added filter rules do.
Because the guy who wrote the site coded it that way. http://dannycarlton.com/AD_Tools/ABPfence.php. He offers tools to block anyone running ABP from any site.
He's had a long-running feud with the Adblock team https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/discussio ns/comments.php?DiscussionID=3060&page=3.
"So now, it's war. As they attempt to create "work arounds" for my blocks, I work on more comprehensive blocks that will defeat their work arounds. I also am informing other how to block people using the plug-in. The people who wrote the plug-in aren't terribly clever; thieves rarely are. But now they've inspired me, via their arrogance, to make sure a method for defeating their plug-in can be developed and distributed." --> Danny Carlton (http://jacklewis.net/weblog/, posted July 27, 2007)"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I don't know what they are talking about with Firefox users not buying stuff online. I just bought 4 copies of AutoCAD for Linux through an ad on a site I visited. It was only about $20.00 US. That is great, because nobody else seems to carry it, and the Windows versions are like a really expensive. I ordered the download version by credit card about 3 weeks ago, I haven't recieved the confirmation email with the download link yet, but the site looked respectable.
PS - Anybody know what the difference is between http and https is?
Actually its not "their" claims, but "his" claims, the whole thing is just one crazy person. Bear in mind that the, um, individual, behind this is a complete loony toon of the extreme right wing religious nut variety. Seriously, check out his other stuff at jacklewis.net, unfortunately you can't read his insane ratings with Firefox, which is a shame because they're quite amusing.
Given his nuthood I'd assume that he *thinks* that Firefox users are less likely to buy things online, and that somehow in the broken fragments of his mind that becomes transmuted into "demographs show that...." Pleanty of other nutbags do the same thing, why shouldn't he?
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
One of the comments on the "block Firefox" page was:
If Internet Explorer came with a feature such as Adblock, you would effectively wipe out thousands of websites, maybe more.
To which I'd reply:
* Ad blockers are widely available for IE and many proxy servers as well (which block ads to ALL browsers--our corporate proxy blocks all sorts of content, including nearly all adservers). Yet all these adservers and crappy ad-laden websites continue to exist...unfortunately.
* There are "Thousands of websites" (I'd say MILLIONS actually) that SHOULD be wiped out because their net contribution to the 'net is negative. If ad-blockers give consumers the ability to decide which sites those are then they perform an important public service.
I'd also offer this argument: pushing excessive ads to my computer is theft of my processor time and bandwidth. I pay for my computer and for the monthly internet access so I can use them for what I wish. I am a reasonable person and expect that a lot of content is ad-supported and would find a reasonable amount of advertising to be acceptable. I am used to commercials consuming about 30 percent of TV programming time, and TV has survived on that for a long time. However, in recent times I have found that many sites literally devote MORE THAN HALF of their real-estate to advertising.
The advertising is getting far too distracting as well: I regularly encounter pages with multiple flash and/or video-clip ads, and ads that play sound without asking or warning. Advertisers go out of their way to create workarounds to pop-up blockers and use AJAX, Java and Flash technology to make ads that dance all over your screen, obscure the real content and generally annoy the user as much as possible.
The rights of corporate advertisers must be balanced with the rights of individual consumers, and, sorry to say Mr. Ad Exec, individual rights trump those of corporations. If you wound back a bit and limited your ads to 1/3 screen real-estate or relied on more considerate techniques like interstitial ads that played their message and politely got out of the way so the real content can be enjoyed, then the popularity of ad-blocking would be reduced substantially.
By the way, would you like to know why your precious ad servers are blocked at our corporate proxy, listed right alongside things like myspace and horse porn? It is because they started generating so much traffic on our corporate WAN that the ads actually had a noticeable impact on overall intranet performance. That's right...big, responsible corporations are committing "mass theft" because they are tired of their bandwidth being stolen by aggressive advertisers!
I manage to fund a website without intrusive ads. A colo'd server is not really that expensive. If you want to pull in revenue you could try selling a useful product or service. For example if you run a free forum website, sell "premium" membership.
Ads that are poorly targeted to my demographic COSTS YOU MONEY. You waste bandwidth trying to send me information about things I won't buy. I would argue well targeted advertising is what is important to the well being of the internet, not all ads. Ad blockers stop the throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks sort of advertisements.
I'm sorry if it's so much work to get customers, but the key to having customers that spend money is establishing a relationship with customers and with potential customers. Just pasting fliers all around town or shoving 4 or 5 pop-unders under my browse window is not going to establish a relationship.
TV and Radio have advertisements and commercial skipping is protected mostly because running a broadcast station is quite expensive. Putting a server on the net is only as expensive as the number of hits you get (bandwidth/load), it scales very linearly. If you can't figure out how to turn hits into revenue, stopping ad blocker is only going to keep you from wasting bandwidth on those minority of users. It won't actually fix your broken business model.
The Internet is a very competitive free market, you must adapt to survive!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Political solutions to technical problems... as pathetic and ineffectual as ever :-) What a complete non-starter.
If this "grassroots" Firefox-blocking effort takes off, we'll soon have a Firefox extension to spoof the IE UserAgent on any of the sites that blocks Firefox. Oh wait!!! It already exists, and I'll bet with a little work it could be automated to spoof based on a database of anti-Firefox sites. Of course, all the savvy Firefox users will use this to avoid the block, and only our hapless grandmothers--who don't use Adblock anyway--will be stuck wondering why the Internet doesn't work. And absolutely NOTHING will have been accomplished.
Our interconnected world is increasingly resistant to petty, arbitrary restrictions. Just witness the rise of region-free DVD players, modchips, and third-party ink cartridges... and the ridiculous, heavy-handed responses of the **AA, the game companies, and the printer manufacturers.
My bicyles
Why would I want to block perfectly good paying customers who don't have ad block installed, just because they're using the same browser as some who do?
I don't know what you're selling, but you must not be selling much of it if the bandwidth costs for not serving blocked ads (er... yeah, how's that work, exactly?) outweighs your sales revenue, or those of your ad customers.
Never mind the ludicrousness of this from the user perspective; this doesn't even make sense from a business perspective.
Are there any ad blockers for MSIE? Maybe he can block that too - on this site. We won't miss you, and yes, we'll keep making money, unlike you.
Sheesh, learn to do business.
Technically, on Debian GNU/Linux, I am using "Iceweasel" rather than the official Firefox. This is my user agent string,
Notice no "Firefox" in there. I have the Firefox Adblock extension installed in Iceweasel and have already escaped the trap without doing anything at all. ;-)
Initial test indicates they are not safe for driving if there are pedestrians carrying cans of Mountain Dew.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
... Ad Block Plus, a plug-in that blocks advertisement on web sites and also prevents site owners from blocking people using it. ... site owners install scripts that prevent people using ad blocking software from accessing their site. ... Ad Block Plus [does not let] individual site owners ... block people using their plug-in.
Hot DAMN! That's the best ad I've seen in years.
Gotta make this short so I can grab a copy of Ad Block Plus. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Oh crap, is that in the PATRIOT (sic) Act?
A little off-topic...but we could develop ads for the NSA and Secret Service. BOMB BOMB BOMB COUNTRYWIDE 250,000 FOR JUST $750 A MONTH PRESIDENT PRESIDENT PRESIDENT SHOW YOUR NSA BADGE AND GET 20% OFF BARNES AND NOBLE THIS WEEKEND!
Intelligence spam. What a concept.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Ten to one says he fast forwards his Tivo through commercial.
It occurred to me that instead of discriminating against Firefox users, webpage developers should work on incorporating product placements into their content. It's an old tactic but it still works. In fact that thought occurred to me just as I was about to light up and enjoy the smooth, mellow taste, of a Chesterfield cigarette. As I watched the smoke curl about I realized that relaxing with a Chesterfield is just the sort of break that a webpage developer needs to manage the day-to-day challenge of coming up with the content that sells those adds.
That page doesn't utilize the user agent string. In fact, Firefox filtering is done on the client end. It takes advantage of javascript execution differences between IE and other browsers. Here is the culprit HTML,
If you dont have javascript enabled, you are taken to a bullshit javascript required page. With NoScript in Firefox, this is what happens to me. I see the whole page load, then I am taken to the nojs.htm page 1 second later.
With javascript enabled, the expression !document.all evaluates to true on non-IE browsers (maybe including Opera?) taking you to the blocked page. This makes the page impossible to view on any graphical free software browsers without some special aid from plugins or something. This includes all Gecko (Mozilla) and KHTML (Konqueror, Safari) based browsers. Dillo is out because it obeys the <noscript> tag.
Both links and lynx ignore javascript, <noscript>, and the meta "refresh", allowing you to view the page with these browsers while also avoiding the image ads. These are the only free browsers you can use to view the page. You could wget the page, pull out the annoying HTML above, and look at the page in any browsers without a problem. This will not allow Adblock to completely block ads however. This will depend on your filters.
Notice: I don't have any proprietary software on my computers so I cannot/will not test this with IE and Opera. I am assuming that the page views fine in IE and I have no idea what happens in Opera.
Instead of whining about the fact that people are blocking ads, the industry should be asking themselves _why_ people are doing it in the first place. The fact is, a lot of these ads are annoying as hell (especially those bandwidth-stealing, "Hey Look at me, Damn it!!!" Flash-based pop-ups and scrolling sidebars), and they just plain get in the way of the web experience. If there were a way to incorporate their advertisements into websites without being so grating and annoying then maybe users wouldn't mind seeing the ads anyway. That seems to be a fatal flaw with most marketing types: they feel they must always "shout" loud enough to drown out the competition. The problem is that, on web pages, they often end drowning out the content as well, and sometimes seem either too arrogant or too dense to realize they're doing it.
This space for rent!
Now, the text of the message on that site equates ad-blocking with theft. Assume this is true, what about other similar situations? Look at Microsoft Window preinstalls on computers. We are being told that the cost of the system is being offset by 3rd party apps affectionately called "crapplets" here and that is why bare metal or Linux installs cost more than equivalent Microsoft Windows-based systems. The crapplet guys are paying for the privilege of being on your desktop. Does that not then make it theft to wipe the machine and do a clean install? Also, shouldn't you feel compelled to actually use them, after all someone paid money for them to be there. They have to recoup their investment, don't they?
I don't see any fundamental difference in the two cases. If it is theft to block ads, it must also be theft to remove programs from your computer that a vendor has paid to have put there.
With that in mind, let me fix the wording of your statement: Does it kill you *that* much to have to use the stuff that came preinstalled on your computer? Like it or not, the retail computer market is largely driven by 3rd party app support, and a lot of retail computer vendors would either disappear or be less comprehensive if they didn't have the incentive in place to keep providing low-cost computers. Be careful what you are asking for, you might get it.
Are you serious? Honestly, it seems like more and more paid trolls are invading Slashdot every day. That's the price of popularity, I suppose.
... end of statement. What we do with those signals after that is none of their business. If I choose not to watch their goddamn advertising by looking elsewhere, reading a book, getting laid, taking a leak, or just pressing the fast-forward button, that's just too bad. There's no agreement on my part, implicit or otherwise, that says I have to watch any of it! They are just hoping we will, and hope that it will influence our purchasing decisions. But that's all they get when they plunk down those big advertising dollars: a hope. No guarantee, no agreement, no "reciprocity." I understand that these guys feel threatened by the ability of viewers to technologically avoid viewing commercial advertising, but again, that's just too bad. Not my problem. They don't have a right to force me to watch it, and I don't have any agreement with any broadcaster or network that says they do.
What on Earth are you talking about? Reciprocity? Contract? When did ABC, NBC and the rest start making viewers sign contracts? Contracts are about mutually-agreed upon conditions, usually with some kind of formal recording of said agreement. I think you're confusing the agreement between the content producers, advertisers, and their distributors (the networks and cable companies.) Any agreement between those parties is, well, between them. I am under no obligation to watch anything they spew at me, ad-related or otherwise. Any obligations are between them and don't involve me or any other viewer.
Broadcasters beam signals into the air and we pick them up
Why do people continue to buy into this idea that content providers (whether they be TV broadcasters, satellite/cable TV providers, game console makers, music studios, software houses or anyone else) have some intrinsic right to control the use of their products after they've left the distribution channel? They don't, dude, they never have. The mere fact that you are promoting this bizarreness indicates that you've bought into it (or are a part of it.) Really, it's weird and not in the consumers' best interest.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
If there was no abusive advertising (huge banners flashing and disturbing the user) there was no need to use addon such as adblock..
Just use the user-agent switcher to pretend to be a different browser. Or don't and let sites who block firefox block you, and ignore them forever. Checkmate, bitches.
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
Reality - Firefox is spelled F-i-r-e-f-o-x - only the first letter capitalized (i.e. not FireFox, not Foxfire, FoxFire or whatever else a number of folk seem to think it to be called.) The preferred abbreviation is "Fx" or "fx". Oh my god... how could I have been so blind? Guess it's back to IE for me!
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
The site whyfirefoxisblocked.com appears to be owned by a Danny Carlton (dannycarlton.net).
Interesting that Mr. Carlton's own home site does not block firefox.
Less interesting is his reasoning, that ignoring ads equals stealing.
So I'm tooling down the highway, and avert my gaze from the latest obnoxious billboard as I pass. Have I just stolen from the billboard owner, and the advertiser?
The claim is ludicrous. The only "right" the web owners have in this context is that of free speech. They can put up any ad they want to, but I as a viewer am under no obligation to pay attention to it, and am perfectly within my rights to use any tool at my disposal to assist me. (As a species, we are, after all, really big on tool use.)
On the flip side, the web owners are welcome to try and come up with better tools of their own that get their ads through to my eyeballs.
The claim that demographics show FireFox users are a "small percentage" is outright wrong. True, the latest numbers show it to be behind IE - if you count 6 & 7 together. It's about 2 percent behind 6, and nearly 15 ahead of 7. Netscape, Opera & Safari combined are less 20% of FireFox.
I personally use noscript, not adblock, but as I'm the one looking at the site, it's my decision to ignore some parts and not others, so don't have a problem with the concept of either addon.
The only way not viewing ads could possibly be construed as stealing would be if it were a pay site, that required login credentials, and said credentials were bypassed or forged.
So far as his supporting quote by Judge Posner, I seem to recall one of the big inducements for going to cable (when first hearing of it in the 70's) was that, as a PAID service, there would be no commercials. Yes, I shell out a good deal of money every month for access to the shows I like, and have no qualms whatsoever about having the DVR skip through commercials.
What do you mean "firefox" I'm running IE 7.0 using windows 3.0 on a dual chip Pentium and only 64k of RAM!
Boy does it run great!
Good mozilla / firefox addon
User Agent Switcher 0.6.10 Homepage
by Chris Pederick
Adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59
hth
DP
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.