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NoScript Adds Subscriptions To Adblock Plus
hahiss writes "Apparently, NoScript has taken to adding its own whitelist updates to Adblock Plus — so that the ads on the NoScript page show up — without notifying users. (It is described on the NoScript addon page, however.) This was a part of the last update to NoScript. Wladimir Palant, the main developer of Adblock Plus, describes the situation in an informative blog post."
Update — 5/02 at 12:30 GMT by SS: Reader spyrochaete notes that "InformAction, makers of the NoScript extension for Firefox, have removed the recently introduced AdBlock exceptions which unblocked the revenue-producing ads on the NoScript homepage with little or no warning to the user. According to the changelog, InformAction pushed out an update specifically addressing this controversial decision 'permanently and with no questions asked.'"
Seriously how could you not expect someone who spent a huge amount of time and was making money off of his work to not do everything he could to continue making it?
I'll repair your car for free, and as an added bonus I'm also going to change all of your saved radio stations, adjust your seats, replace your tires with a cheaper brand, and rape your lass.
I do it for free, so people aren't allowed to complain!
Ad Blockers suck, plain and simple.
We have pop-up blockers, so what did we get? Annoying flashy banner ads. Flash thingies that track us. Other nasty stuff all over the page, inserted between text, every 3 paragraphs, dozens of ads to a page. It's so utterly horrible.
So now what do we do? We block everything. Not just the annoyances, but anything that's "an ad." Everything from pop-ups to stupid flash things to a harmless link sitting in a div somewhere. It's an ad, it needs to die!
What message are we sending? We're sending the message that advertisers have to try harder to make money off of us. They need to either charge subscriptions per site, or they need to start breaking our filters. Sorry, it's not enough that you only have 3 ad boxes on a page, of fixed size, with just text, eating a few hundred bytes of bandwidth on page load, with no tiny embedded flash applets to track us down; you serve an ad, we block your revenue stream.
This is another implementation of The Great Socialism that is Welfare, socialized health care, socialized housing (where I live, if you have no job, they will automatically give you a house if you're really lucky-- it's strange, you pay like $100 a month and the government subsidizes the realtor $1000 a month). At some point, you get out of "public services" like schools and police, and you get to "The Government is supposed to do everything for you" and start taxing 100% over $x and redistributing so everyone can be middle class.
Ad Blockers are not analogous to "public services," they are directly analogous to worst-case socialism: we don't think advertisers have a right to make money, so we are going to take money away from them. This has a trickle-down economy effect: The advertisers are now poor, they don't have money (or desire, due to no impressions and no click-through) to pay the ad-supported ("Free") services you were using, and the "Free" services you were using now don't have any money. Those "Free" things you enjoy now have to close or start charging a door fee ("Subscription"). This means you are now directly poorer, by reduced capital (subscription fee) or reduced value service (access to a site/program).
You know all those economic theories are right though. There's no regulation here; we use an unregulated free market model, and that means the advertisers will use dirty, underhanded tricks like this to get around your thrashing and flailing with such ad blockers. When it becomes simpler and easier to appeal to reason and ship something less intrusive, they'll do that; otherwise they'll force ads down your throat in any way possible. This is basic economics on a level even Ronald Reagan could understand.
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There's another side to this... displaying ads is a perfectly acceptable revenue model. Turning off scripting is perfectly acceptable, all browsers allow users to do this, NoScript just makes it more convenient.
Blocking scripts enhances security against drive-by downloaders and various types of malicious-code-related threats.
However, AdBlock is illegally manipulating the author's content to remove ads designed to produce revenue. It's not merely disabling features, it's changing the presentation of web pages.
In a sense, AdBlock is acting as malicious software, because it's altering the site author's message, without their permission.
NoScript is taking measures to manipulate AdBlock so the message is preserved.
They are taking measures so that their users are not effected by the malicious activity that the AdBlock software is performing.
They do have some other options.... they could force the user to sit through some advertising immediately after every NoScript install.
They could inform the user of an incompatibility, due to "Adblock's nefarious practices", and require AdBlock to be uninstalled, before NoScript can be utilized.
Or NoScript could actually monitor whitelist entries, and inform the user that "NoScript functionality will be disabled unless you whitelist our domain"
IOW, they could take more proactive measures, that will hurt AdBlock users in the long run, if adblock users continue to attempt to block their site's ads.
"There are words for that sort of behaviour, starting with "malware" and in many places ending in "illegal"."
Wow... and I can't even think of one word that begins with 'malware' and ends with 'illegal'. But there are many you say?
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
like sucking those dicks linux fag? take a big one up the ass? ubuntu 9 sucks more than any other os. suck on that faggot.
Maybe he did what he really should have done: installed privoxy years ago.
*falls off his chair* thank you for opening mine eyes! If only I'd had the necessary brain cell population primed to have worked that out for myself, that'd probably completely change the tone 'n spirit of my post. Imagine if that was actually the case!
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Are you people serious? If this was just a program on Windows, everyone would be pointing out how incredibly insecure Windows is to even allow this behavior.
Honestly, I have no sympathy for either of the plugins, both are designed to deprive revenue from the internet at large, so if they are doing this kind of sneak, they should just stop updating the plugin and withdraw support for it.
No, it desperately asks for an answer, thus it begs the question. It's not our problem that a lot of people who don't know what begging is translated the name of a circular logic fallacy improperly.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
God, why does everyone take everything so seriously? One must not play with words lest he be deemed 'troll'?! Sheesh. To mods 'n others of a hair trigger offence mechanism: learn to appreciate the jest, it does make life more fun.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia