Slashdot Mirror
Are Ad Servers Bogging Down the Web?
blackbearnh writes "The work of making high-volume web sites perform well is an ongoing challenge, and one that continues to evolve as the nature of web content changes. According to Google Performance Guru Steve Souders, fat JavaScript libraries and rich content are creating new problems for web site tuning, but one of the biggest problems lies outside the control of web site administrators — ad servers. In an interview previewing the upcoming Velocity Online conference run by O'Reilly, Souders talks at length about the real causes of poor web performance today, and in particular, the effect that poorly performing ad servers are creating. 'We adopted a framework of inserting ads, of creating ads, that's pretty simple. And because it's pretty simple, it's not highly tuned. That's one reason why we shouldn't be too surprised that we see performance issues in third party ads. The other reason is that ad services are not focused on technology. Certainly companies like Yahoo and Google and Microsoft, we're technology companies. We focus on technology. So it's not surprising that our web developers are on the leading edge of adopting these performance best practices. And it's also not surprising that ad services might lag two, three or four years behind where these web technology companies are.'"
That I should read about this story with an AT&T advertisement next to it done up in Adobe Flash 10 when the exact same thing can be achieved in a few lines of HTML. Seriously, it's an all black background with four lines of white text at h2 and h3 ... then an AT&T logo in the bottom and maybe an icon for the button to "learn more." And the article is wondering if advertisers are slowing down the web?
Give the UI back to the user and leave the flashing marquee tags in Las Vegas. The only reason you would use a swf is to achieve some display interaction/functionality not suitable for HTML+CSS+Javascript. This is common sense yet you willing host ads that urinate on common sense. If you want me to read an article on your site, you don't want moving flashing things annoying my eyes while I try to read text so why serve up only a technology (as all ads on Slashdot seem to be) that is designed just for that? Ah, of course, it's your biggest revenue stream. Well then, I guess I'll just dig in and prepare for the cycle to perpetuate ad infinitum. And these two guys can chat all they want about it but there's no solution; it's never going to end because it's Just the Way Things Are.
My work here is dung.
Having worked for an ad-serving company, I'm pretty confident that the reason they don't care is that they're not measured on the speed at which they serve up ads.
If high-value websites started rejecting ad networks that served ads in less then x milliseconds after the rest of the page was downloaded, you'd see ad servers speed up, quick.
Quite often you will be loading a website, and be staring at a blank screen with "making connection to ads.blablabla" at the bottom.... The page itself has loaded, but won't display until the browser has managed to retrieve the ads.
Also you will see ad servers in completely different locations to the site you're viewing, and therefore much slower.
Also, some ads are especially large, especially animated flash ones, and can add a noticeable delay to a page load even if the ad server isn't slow or lagged.
My pet hate btw, are ads which have sound... I find that EXTREMELY annoying and quickly block access to any ad provider which serves such things.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
This is the main reason I use Adblock Plus. If the advertisements weren't so annoying then I wouldn't mind them, there are a few text ads I don't block because they aren't intrusive at all. But when I see flash based ads that yes could have been done with HTML or JavaScript then I block those immediately.
Technology: Are Ad Servers Bogging Down the Web?
Yes. Period.
I realize that most websites run some version or another of "adverts", but generally speaking, most of those sites are marginal value to start. The sites I frequent usually use text ads, and not the flash (pun intended) graphical ads on some of the more questionable sites.
In fact, I dare say, that if I see lots of flashy or ads that are obtrusive in nature, I discount the nature of the site and tend to leave quicker.
One of the things that pisses me off to no end, are third party ads that are spewing crap/malware to driveby web browsing.
I don't personally get infecgted by them, because I run all the latest anti-malware defenses (adblock, noscript, firefox etc). But I'm in IT, and I see way too many machines compromized by the lastest "Antivirus 2010" styple crap/malware all the time.
Websites that house such malware should be blacklisted. Screw them if they can't make a living without using dubious adverts.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Google is not on the leading edge of adopting performance best practices, at least not for their ad and statistics services. The ad scripts are designed to be in the middle of the document and they load uncacheable scripts, which stops page rendering completely on a network interaction with a far away server. If this is supposed to be "best practices", I shudder to see what they think is bad practices.
So, who's choosing to put these slow third-party ads on their websites again?
no-script for the win, yet again.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Surely the ads are in iframes, and so load entirely asynchronously. If they're not, then you're giving third-party content access to your site's security zone, which is a terrible idea.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Nothing bogs down a site like Flash.
Case in point: Boing Boing.
Several months ago, Boing Boing got a new layout. The old layout worked fine, was easy to read, easy to scroll. The new Boing Boing stutters when scrolled ... it's annoyingly easy to lose your place and scroll way down or way up by mistake. Grrr ....
-kgj
But ads are useful.
There are lots of possible solutions. One that comes it mine is to let the site with the ads server the ads along with the regular content.
Also its an unfair race. You enter http://example.com/ in the browser and example.com starts loading then it asks for its ads. So, of course, the ads arrive after the example.com content.
We, as ./ users, have the ability to disable advertising on ./ forums, etc. Not that this is relevant, but the rest of the world (fark, anyone?) does have serious lag time. Be thankful, guys! Back to the subject matter, though. Is this a "new" revelation?
--Stak
Holy happy hippy crap!
...let God sort 'em out. At least that's my policy.
Every single time I end up thinking "Geez, this website is taking forever to load", I glance down at the status bar and see "Waiting for adserver3.adcompany.com". Then, I hit refresh and get another ad from another round robin'ed server, and the page loads sucessfully. It's very frustrating to know that the only reason the page is still blank or half-rendered is because of a third party ad.
In this regard, AdBlock makes a significant difference if you tell it to not download ads at all, but I am not comfortable with denying revenue streams to the websites I visit, after all, they are providing me with a service I enjoy, for free.
I just wish that all ads could be loaded last in a manner that doesn't affect the rendering of the website you're trying to view...
On a related note, the same applies to external javascript. Two transactional websites I maintain are sometimes slowed down to a crawl because of the crappy external Javascript marketing made us insert in the page header to track stuff. It's always very frustrating when things end up being slow because of third parties. I wish there was a simple way to cache these things.
Slows things down for me most of the time. I'll be loading a page and see that at the bottom of the browser.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Even Slashdot is falling prey to slow ad servers. And to answer TheRaven64's presumption -- no, it used to be the case that ads loaded asynchronously, but today it seems that many, if not most sites delay loading the content you actually came to see until the ads load. I am guessing this is part of the contract between sites and advertisers. (Would any admin for Slashdot care to comment?)
-Coward
The issue is that the browser is only allowed to use a handful of requests at a time, and with a 3rd-party server some fraction of those requests are going to someone else's server. Therefore the goal should be to make sure that your content gets loaded first. This can be done in the browser--and may already be done; I'm not in the mood to parse FireFox's sourececode--using a simple prioritization algorithm:
And of course, there are HTML tricks that can be used to boost render time, like using absolute hight/width attributes on every image and avoiding the use of relative metrics against dynamic portions of the page. In other words, don't define the width of your main body element as a percentage of your advertising banner's width!
Still, I can't help but think this just 1998 again, "Now with more JavaScript!"
I've mentioned the ad bottleneck before. Slashdot is an especially bad offender. Pages use several ad servers, and they use "document.write" to stall the page load until the ad comes up. Even if you have the ad images blocked, some of the junk JavaScript still needs to run.
Some sites are just slow at serving pages. Behind my SiteTruth system there is a specialized web crawler which looks for a business name and address on each web site. It never looks at more than 20 pages, and it's looking for pages like "About", "Contact", and about 40 other words which might plausibly lead to contact info. This process runs about 5-15 seconds for a well-implemented site. I log sites where it takes more than 45 seconds. About 5-10% of sites run overtime. In the last hour, the slowest site is "www.airsmaxkey.com", at 159 seconds to read 10 pages. (Yes, they're a bottom-feeder. Not only is there no business address on the site (a criminal offense in the European Union), they have logos from Verisign, PayPay, Verified by Visa, and MasterCard SecureCode, none of which are actually clickable to do the claimed verification. Nor does their shopping cart checkout use SSL. The whole site may be a scam. SiteTruth gives them a "Do Not Enter" rating.)
Some of the social networking sites have so much Javascript that Firefox will time out. (Facebook had that problem for a while. They fixed it.)
Dilbert.com
The entire site screams PHB. It takes five minutes to load a single gif comic with all the extra crap and flash and popups that go along with it.
Seriously - it's like an act of self parody. I just picture Scott Adams sitting in a cube somewhere trying to draw comics while tearing his hair out and a PHB over his shoulder saying "We'll call it Dilbert.com BETA! And we'll have MASHUPS! OooooOOOooo!!"
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I propose a change of term for this sort of stuff. Instead of "rich" content call it "obese" content or "overloaded" content or "bloated" content. That "rich" term sounds desirable while often the opposite is true. Call the real useful stuff "enhanced" content or something similar...
--frank[at]unternet.org
I personally use adblock in addition to the hosts file from http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts2.htm It just redirects known bad/ad domains to loopback. Some affiliate sites (like bing cashback) are affected, but its easy to find them and comment out those entries. Quite often Ill find an ad that adblock misses and it just loads up a blank window because it was blocked by the host file.
"One of the things that pisses me off to no end, are third party ads that are spewing crap/malware to driveby web browsing. I don't personally get infecgted by them, because I run all the latest anti-malware defenses (adblock, noscript, firefox etc). But I'm in IT, and I see way too many machines compromized by the lastest "Antivirus 2010" styple crap/malware all the time. Websites that house such malware should be blacklisted. Screw them if they can't make a living without using dubious adverts - by Archangel Michael (180766) on Monday November 30, @12:33PM (#30271632)
Archangel Michael, meet "the LORD OF HOSTS" (just in keeping with your nick/handle here, AND the fact that much of what you note is covered by another tool you omitted mentioning that is easily edited, everyone has one (if their OS IP stack is BSD based, most all are iirc), & eats no CPU cycles like a local DNS server can (& are not as security vulnerable either if you protect write access to a HOSTS file also):
I use a custom HOSTS file, in addition to the tools you noted (which only really function for FireFox/Mozilla products, but don't extend globally to all other webbound applications, & that is part of what HOSTS files give you above the methods you extoll + utilize: "GLOBAL COVERAGE", & of ALL webbound apps, not just FireFox/Mozilla ones via the addons you noted + use yourself...).
HOSTS files can be used to blockout KNOWN "bad" adserves, maliciously coded sites or adbanners, and "botnet C&C servers" too!
You can obtain reliable HOSTS files from reputable lists for more security online, but also for speed!
(More on that later & WHY/HOW (I use reliable lists for that, such as these HOSTS @ Wikipedia.com -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_file or those from mvps.org (a good one this one))
I also further populate & keep current my custom HOSTS file with up to date information in regards to all of those threats, via:
----
A.) Spybot "Search & Destroy" updates (populates HOSTS and browser block lists)
B.) Sites like ZDNet's Mr. Dancho Danchev's blog -> http://ddanchev.blogspot.com/
C.) Sites like FireEye -> http://blog.fireeye.com/
D.) SRI -> http://mtc.sri.com/
----
My HOSTS file incorporates ALL of the entries from the HOSTS files shown @ wikipedia as well... gaining me speed online (by blocking adbanners, which have been compromised many times the past few years now by malscripted exploits (examples below)).
(I combined ALL reputable HOSTS files with one of my own (30,000 entries), & I removed duplicates removed via a Borland Delphi app I wrote to do so called "APK HOSTS File Grinder 4.0++". That program also functions to change the default larger & SLOWER 127.0.0.1 blocking 'loopback adapter' IP address to either 0.0.0.0 (for VISTA/Windows Server 2008/Windows 7, smaller & thus faster than 127.0.0.1 default) or the smallest & fastest 0 "blocking 'IP ADDRESS'" (for Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003 which can STILL use it (& it was added in a service pack on Windows 2000, only on 12/09/2008 MS patch tuesday was it removed for VISTA onwards (& now all these "phunny little bugs" are showing up as FLAWS in this new NDIS6 approach via WFP as well in the firewall, which ROOTKIT.COM has stated (with code too no less on how it is done) -> http://www.rootkit.com/newsread.php?newsid=952 [rootkit.com] that it is EASIER TO UNHOOK (than was the design used in Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003))
Another EXCELLENT benefit of HOSTS file usage? More speed online, & also more security + reliability (especially in the case of DNS servers today, per folks like Dan Kaminsky &/or Moxie Marlinspike finding various security vuln
I don't understand how an ad server can make a site slow, even if the ad server is slow in serving up an ad. So you have one externally loaded element (the ad) that is an image or a flash element. The browser allocates the space for the image or flash element in the location where it'll be rendered. When it finishes loading your browser draws it in the appropriate place. So it takes a little longer for one or two images to appear in the already displayed page. I don't see what the problem is for the end-user.
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
i think you'll find that most of the flash on boing boing is inline video. what makes web pages stutter and scroll badly is css.
Thanks, this is useful info.
-kgj
Firefox + ABP = No ads.
I'm on a pretty pathetic DSL line, so I've tried to optimize things on my end. First, I've setup my "hosts" file to loopback on about 16,000 websites. And I also use a plugin that blocks Flash (unless you click on it). My browsing experience has never been smoother.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
I use a click-to-flash plugin so I never actually see flash objects unless I click on them.
This is useful info -- thanks!
-kgj
Nonsense! I for one have chosen to keep my websites ad-free, hence no ad servers and no slowdown. The same goes for untold thousands of other webmasters.
If you've chosen differently then ... well, I suppose it's your website and your decision — but please don't come whining to us about the consequences.
There are quite a few webmasters who run their ads inside of iframes, as that usually avoids a slow ad holding up the rest of the page loading. The bad thing about that is that expandable ads (even polite, user-initiated) do not work. There are also some other tricks webmasters use, such as creating division tags and then using a bit of javascript trickery to move the ad loading to a point after the content loads.
Webmasters do hate slow ads (not to mention bad ads). I love direct sale campaigns on my site, because they almost always are run from my ad server. If that is slow, my whole site is slow anyway - and that happens very, very rarely (it has been months).
Andrew Borntreger
Champion of cinematic disasters
I for one, am shocked, astounded, flabbergasted...surprised? er Not Surprised.
I still don't get the continuing obsession with the idea that everything on the internet should be free. There's no free lunch. It costs money to run the servers, write the software, create the information that is being served and on and on. Yet all this should be free. So everything ends up being supported by ads. If customers would be willing to pay a reasonable free for the services rendered, everybody wins. The folks who run the service can stay in business and customers can get a quality product without being bombarded by ads.
When I was running a (now defunct) website, I noted that the ads were the slowest part of my site to load. My solution was to take all the static images and, with a little help of some additional PHP into my existing image system, I cached them. This sped up the loading of the page dramatically and allowed me to refresh my ad-cache when my site traffic was low.
I don't know whether or not every /. user gets the option to disable ads, but one thing that is apparent to me is that Slashdot page-loads seem to take a VERY much longer time than they used to. Given that I'm not seeing any ads (I would have filtered them anyway), and I view the content in "classic" mode, it is tempting to speculate that unless slashcode itself is somehow responsible, a speed-bump might be a simple ratio of server power to number of users.
/. page-load times as a breakdown on a per-country basis. Here's a starter: mine is just over 5 seconds for a thread with just over 100 posts. (Yikes.) I'm in Australia.
It might be interesting to see statistics for average
Just wait for someone to realize that they are missing a huge advertising market by not advertising on mobile (phone) browsers. Lots of sites these days are making their "mobile" page as a "watered down" version of their main pages, and as far as I can tell that primarily means removing lots of ads. There are some sites that I actually like better in their mobile versions than the real versions and change my User Agent in FireFox to a mobile browser to get that page. I'm not a trendsetter so I know that if I'm doing this there are others doing this as well, and once the developers catch on it is only a matter of time before we start seeing more ads on our mobile phones when we're browsing. Better hope you have an unlimited data plan when this happens.
Remember when there never was any question about what was bogging down the net?
Unless you didn't know what /. was?
But then I have blacklisted every damn site that loads up a blinking, flashing, animated images. May that has something to do with it. And no script blocks flash on whitelisted sites too!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Why not just go to Adobe's site and block them at the source?
Reply to That ||
i believe the market needs to be highly regulated to prevent bubbles and pops and to prevent manipulation of smaller players by entrenched powers
having said that, i also understand that the market is the engine that drives innovation. the market needs to be controlled... but there needs to be a market
so when i see
"Yes. Another example of the free market working its wonders."
i see only an idiot who bites the hand that feeds it
dear genius: what is your alternative to making your favorite website run?
all of the slashdot smug in this thread proudly trumpeting their ad blocking methods need to shut up, frankly, because with more widespread use of ad blocking, more websites go under. and yes, dear elitist snob, this includes some sites you like, not just myspace
so what's the solution? more seamless ad delivery, less intrusive ads, faster ads. yes, yes, and yes. but never, ever is a valid answer no ads or less ads
oh, you don't like ads? wow, you're a unique snowflake aren't you? who the fuck does?
the ads are too intrusive to your poor delicate sensibilities about proper screen real estate usage?
ok, that's fine
then pay for your content, moron. because that's the alternative. or is it that you don't understand the fucking obvious?
please, dear slashdot effete: you go ahead and continue block ads, be my guest
just show a little fucking DISCRETION and shut up about it, if you know what is fucking good for you
sheesh
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
With AJAX, caching, and sensible timeouts, this is a non-issue. The problem lies in the fact that instead of optimizing performance, they've focused on simplicity, allowing you the webmaster to embed their advertisements into your site by copy/pasting a few short lines of code vs. implementing something more robust that doesn't bog down the rendering of your pages.
body massage!
When you hit a web site that loads slow because an ad-server or its DNS is slow to respond, report it to the content-owner web site.
They will be annoyed on multiple counts:
*Their advertisers aren't getting eyeballs they want
*Their own content is being devalued due to their site appearing "sluggish"
*They are getting complaints
By the way, a well-run ad network can give better performance than a poorly-run in-house network.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
In 1995, columnist and Ethernet-inventor Bob Metcalfe was again going on about a topic that eventually had him literally eating his words (he had to chop up a column in a blender with water and chug it) - that the Internet was going to collapse from all the heavy bandwidth demands of its exponentially-expanding clientele.
So I did a "View Source" on the Infoworld page with his column on it. I've lost the E-mail now, but the stats were something like his column being 2000 bytes and the sum of all the advertising around it, mostly GIF images at the time, was over 20,000 bytes. The Ad/Content ratio even then was over 10:1.
Metcalfe, who'd been railing against irresponsible bandwidth consumption in the column, could only plead that he had no control over the magazine's decisions on what went around it.
The web has always been the reverse of TV, where the ad/content bandwidth is about 1:4 or even 1:5. It's not far different from some magazines, though, where I swear there are 3 pages of ads for every page of content. And if you digitized the magazine, the ads would mostly be images, the content mostly text, and the ratio would be at least 10:1.
This is all prologue to new web content where you are slowed down not so much by download times as the start-up times for various Flash and JavaScript programs that make the ads so much more intrusive, zipping back and forth over the text you're trying to read, or just dancing in the corner of the page.
This is all necessary: they do what they MUST to get response from the ads. If the stats don't show a response, they stop buying them and the business model fails.
Everybody says "Nobody will pay for content on the Internet". Yes, they will. The put up with all that crap rather than pull out a credit card. They just pay with their time and attention instead of actual cash.
Rod Serling, one of the great TV writers of all time, once commented that it is hard to tell a story when you must work it around being interrupted every ten minutes by dancing rolls of toilet paper. I wonder what he'd think of writing for a medium where the toilet paper literally dances all over your words until you click on it to make it go back to the lower right frame.
No kidding. Who didn't notice this, oh, at least three or four years ago?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...and a more in-depth analysis: f**k yes.
Yes, and when your karma gets really really high, you are allowed to disable /. 2.0
Reply to That ||
I think we'll find that web surfers are the real cause of web slowdown.
My internet services costs me per megabit (yes, in this modern day and age, in a modern western country, there are people who have NO OPTION but to use an internet service with either *direct* per-megabit cost or, at a minimum, a download limit of some kind), so forcing me to view HIGH BANDWIDTH multimedia ads is stealing from me.
And I have *no choice* because there's no way to tell whether a website is covered witth 100MB of ads to download, or text-only google ads (or even none).
Seriously folks, and these mental retards in the advertising industry imagine that we're not "clicking-thru" on their ads because somehow we *did not notice* the ads.
I'd like to suggest alternate possibilities:
(never never never never never I HATE YOU)
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
I haven't seen any for years. AdBlock Plus is your friend.
AdBlock increases my "productivity"* while surfing by substabtially increasing the speed with which web pages load, and by removing the unwanted and distracting content, allowing me to read those pages more quickly.
* In quotes as not everyone would consider surfing productive :-)
Ian Ameline
Dude - you just gave me eye cancer.
A good education is a bit like a STD - it makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and gives you a desire to spread it.
"Top 3 addins for privacy: Better Privacy, AdBlock Plus, and NoScript, hands down imo." - by MollyB (162595) on Monday November 30, @01:37PM (#30272526)
Per my subject line above? How about a GLOBAL solution, instead, & one that extends to ALL of your "webbound apps", instead, AND acts as "layered security" in combination with the FF/Mozilla only methods you use (which slow your browser down, use CPU cycles & more... where this solution does not & covers ALL webbound apps, globally)??
Ok, well then - Here we go, & on that note, specifically:
Here is a GOOD SOLID & GLOBAL WORK-AROUND, CALLED A HOSTS FILE!
(It works for more speed online, AND SECURITY ESPECIALLY... Also, it works for your money, because you pay for your linetime out of pocket most likely as I do, you can get back your speed, AND, gain security easily, & from a single easily edited file & a file eats no CPU cycles like a local DNS server can (& are not as security vulnerable either if you protect write access to a HOSTS file also)... Anyhow/anyways - Here goes:
SO - "that all said & aside"? Well, per your reply??
Hey - NO PROBLEM, 110% agreement here on that account... & more (like more speed online AND more security, via a SINGLE EASILY EDITED + POPULATED FILE, called a HOSTS file that extends to EVERY WEBBOUND APP YOU HAVE):
I use a custom HOSTS file, in addition to the tools others here in this thread have noted (which MANY like FF addons only really function for FireFox/Mozilla products, but don't extend globally to all other webbound applications, & that is part of what HOSTS files give you above the methods you extoll + utilize: "GLOBAL COVERAGE", & of ALL webbound apps, not just FireFox/Mozilla ones via the addons you noted + use yourself...).
HOSTS files can be used to blockout KNOWN "bad" adserves, maliciously coded sites or adbanners, and "botnet C&C servers" too!
You can obtain reliable HOSTS files from reputable lists for more security online, but also for speed!
(More on that later & WHY/HOW (I use reliable lists for that, such as these HOSTS @ Wikipedia.com -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_file or those from mvps.org (a good one this one))
I also further populate & keep current my custom HOSTS file with up to date information in regards to all of those threats, via:
----
A.) Spybot "Search & Destroy" updates (populates HOSTS and browser block lists)
B.) Sites like ZDNet's Mr. Dancho Danchev's blog -> http://ddanchev.blogspot.com/
C.) Sites like FireEye -> http://blog.fireeye.com/
D.) SRI -> http://mtc.sri.com/
----
My HOSTS file incorporates ALL of the entries from the HOSTS files shown @ wikipedia as well... gaining me speed online (by blocking adbanners, which have been compromised many times the past few years now by malscripted exploits (examples below)).
(I combined ALL reputable HOSTS files with one of my own (30,000 entries), & I removed duplicates removed via a Borland Delphi app I wrote to do so called "APK HOSTS File Grinder 4.0++". That program also functions to change the default larger & SLOWER 127.0.0.1 blocking 'loopback adapter' IP address to either 0.0.0.0 (for VISTA/Windows Server 2008/Windows 7, smaller & thus faster than 127.0.0.1 default) or the smallest & fastest 0 "blocking 'IP ADDRESS'" (for Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003 which can STILL use it (& it was added in a service pack on Windows 2000, only on 12/09/2008 MS patch tuesday was it removed for VISTA onwards (& now all these "phunny little bugs" are showing up as FLAWS in this new NDIS6 approach via WFP as well in the firewall, which ROOTKIT.COM has stated (with code too no less on how it is done) ->
So Adblock plus helps to solve the technical problem, or am I wrong?
I've noticed that with Slashdot.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Dude, it's been done: Proxomitron (or privoxy on the *nix side). You could of course use NoScript, but reading between your lines I'm guessing you're a conscientious objector to that. One of Proxomitron's default HTTP filters in fact selectively blocks JavaScript per site (maybe even per page, can't recall). Even though I now rely on Firefox extensions for a lot of what Proxomitron used to do for me, I still use it for some custom site filters. And the fact that it's independent of the browser is still one of its strongest points.
huh? what? there are ads on the intertubes?
i knew there was a reason i ran adblock and noscript.
That's why I'm blocking ads right here on Slashdot, amongst many other places. If they ever fix it, I'll be more than happy to let them through.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Why can't the serving of ads be done from the primary website's server?
Control.
The ad server outfit wants to control the ad content and the ad count from their end to avoid fraud by the content site owner.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
I am surprised that so many Slashdot users are actually waiting on ads. Why bother with them at all when you can run AdBlock, NoScript, and Flashblock to remove them? I have absolutely no qualms about doing this; the advertisers don't respect us so why should we respect them? Internet ads are for neophytes and chumps, not those with the knowledge and skill to evade them.
Turn off Java, JavaScript, Plugins, etc or run programs like PithHelmet (Safari) that can even kill these selectively per web site. This greatly speeds up browsing and gets rid of all that ugly, flashing, moving junk.
Steve Gibson, is that you?
it lets the server deliver you content you didn't know you needed. In parallel with the content you did ask for.
Google are clearly innovating in the advert experience department.
Deleted
some of them are just impossible to get into, and there is now periodically on multiple sites from the NYT to the star tribune an IE failure when the news is fully loaded, but the ads are not... "IE cannot load the website."
folks, if these here ads are going to save the news business, we better bring back the telegraph.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
(Reposting, logged in this time.)
If you're using Firefox then this bug is/will be fixed in Firefox 3.6, so that it will report the correct website when things are slow instead of saying "Waiting for *.google-analytics.com. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=487638 for the details; "status bar blames wrong resource when downloading slow responding resource" is the title of that bug.
If you're using other browser(s), let me know which.
Full disclosure: Google is my employer (and I care about making sure Google Analytics isn't slow).
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All along they've been telling us that is was the porn that was dragging the Net to a halt. And now they're saying that it's all because of dumb old ads? C'mon, now, were they lying to us all along about the porn? I mean; the advertisers are all honest, upstanding businessmen (and women), aren't they? They wouldn't drag it all down with their spam^Wattractive advertising, would they?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I'm a little worried about that guy. It's quite possible he may give us habitual caffeine users a bad name. Host files are cool, yes, I local out most of the annoying ads myself. But with three rather long repeat posts on the subject, I kind of wish he'd stop?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
And it's also not surprising that ad services might lag two, three or four years behind where these web technology companies are.
more like 10 years behind. Asking an Ad Vendor to provide me and my fellow developers with valid xhtml code got the response: "We only have iframe and javascript as our current available ad tags."
Brilliant people, these Ad Vendors.
Considering advertising is what keeps many (most??) sites in business, if ads go away there would be a lot fewer sites to choose from. And consequently a lot less traffic. I'm all for the fast, empty Internet!
The Proxomitron runs perfectly under Wine.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
When i get attacked like that from an ad, i do my best to never do business with that company again.
Sure, my dime wont bankrupt them, but it makes me feel better, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20021223_05_mistake.gif
This is your second wall-o-text... maybe take a hint?
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
rd /s /q "%AppData%\Adobe" /s /q "%AppData%\Macromedia" /y NUL "%AppData%\Adobe\Flash Player" /y NUL "%AppData%\Macromedia\Flash Player" /y NUL "%UserProfile%\..\Default User\Application Data\Adobe\Flash Player" /y NUL "%UserProfile%\..\Default User\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player"
rd
md "%AppData%\Adobe"
md "%AppData%\Macromedia"
copy
copy
md "%UserProfile%\..\Default User\Application Data\Adobe"
md "%UserProfile%\..\Default User\Application Data\Macromedia"
copy
copy
I've used this for almost a year now without problem. :P
And any problem that might surface is far less then the
privacy loss from cookies
I know... I'm doing that, too! I imported my entire Firefox profile from Windows into Ubuntu, including the proxy setting, and then ran Proxomitron in Wine to finish the migration. I keep thinking about switching to privoxy and converting my filters, but why mess with what still works?
I'm quite willing to custom-hosts blacklist CSS-servers, too.
FWIW.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Please don't encourage him. His regular posts are bad enough w/o having to scroll over his bizarre, rambling replies.
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
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LOL indeed. I'm just sick of your brain-sick rambling. Don't you have some Delphi boards to troll or something?
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Further more, my bandwidth isnt free, I pay A$60 per month for ADSL with a 22GB on peak + 30 GB off peak download cap. Every ad I download is literally stealing money from me, that's why I use adblock and flashblock with a clear conscience.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
So, if you believe in this idea so strongly, create it yourself.
Just remember that you have to take into account little things like:
- fraud prevention
- interfacing with wildly varying ad servers with wildly different features and wildly different conventions for ad calls
- the need to pull inappropriate ads from the cached ad queue asynchronously
- proper reporting of ads actually delivered
- proper ad rotation, which will depend on ads have actually been delivered
- handling rotation limited ad deliveries
- different webserver environments (IIS, apache, yadda, yadda, yadda.)
- and many, many more...
Can most of this be done? Actually it is possible, although I suspect that the resulting adserver would be feature limited (remember, it needs to work across all kinds of different webservers) and there are some features that cannot be implemented without a central adserver to coordinate the data.) The end result might be something that is too complex for websites to actually implement.
One of the biggest barriers would be the website owners. They don't want to mess with their servers just so they can deliver ads. Contrast installing something to manage the cached delivery of ads pulled from some ad providers adserver vs doing something like adding two lines of javascript (one to load the ad delivery library and one to make an actual ad call.
It all seems simple until you actually have to implement it.
1. I just block ads: This is theft, even moreso than pirating music.
There is no contract we must agree to when visiting a site legally requiring ad views, and yet that site is made publicly available. Set up a paywall and see what happens.
I completely agree. I actively go out of my way to not purchase goods that are advertised, either online or in catalogues/junkmail or even TV (hey when did I last switch that on?) One way to justify this line of action is that by purchasing said advertised product I prove to the marketers et al that their ads get results therefore they go ahead and advertise even more.
Well, try to present your information in a different fashion then. I'm not saying your post isn't informative (and I certainly mean no offense against you), it's just really, really horrible to look at ;) .
A good education is a bit like a STD - it makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and gives you a desire to spread it.