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Fighting Ad Blockers With Captcha Ads
krou writes "Living in an ad-free internet thanks to ad blockers? That could be a thing of the past if software firm NuCaptcha has their way by making captchas into ads. 'Instead of the traditional squiggly word that users have to decipher, the new system shows them a video advert with a short message scrolling across it. The user has to identify and retype part of the message to proceed. Companies including Electronic Arts, Wrigley and Disney have already signed up.'"
Easy. If I really want to use such a site, I'll just enable that add, authorize myself and disable it again. Besides, if it's video it'll most likely be caught in my flash-blocker rather than the ad-blocker.
Yes, this is going to endear me to EA and Disney - basically not only making me wait through an ad, but FORCING me to pay attention to it.
after the users abondon the site because of the ridiculous advertisements that disturb their viewing experience?
Yeah, I wouldn't do it.
Hooray for video captcha ads in expensive bandwidth countries!
You know its love when you memorize her IP address to skip DNS overhead.
If I see one of these, I think I'll just go somewhere else. It'd have to be something really compelling to make me endure that kind of abuse.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
If using adblocking software is the only way that people keep their web interface clear of bandwidth stealing ads, then they might have a small problem. Using a proxy and completely blocking the entire ad domain is a great solution, and easy for the average user to do.
...your lack of self-control, willpower, and independent thought makes you buy stuff after seeing an ad.
And because adverts essentially prey on weakness and are almost universally designed to mislead, it is quite simple to set your policy to being discouraged by any ad you see from purchasing from the sponsor.
So, it's advert blocking all the way, and anything which manages to slip through is avoided with extreme prejudice.
Also, don't forget that the real word in recaptcha is always "faeces". Stop doing free work for the biggest polluter of the Internet with adverts.
If a site is too obnoxious, i will just avoid it completely.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
If we are reading scrolling text, would we then be paying attention to the ad's content? This seems less like a way for users to see advertising content and more an exercise in dickery. I am finding more and more content behind 30 second video ads. My current behavior is just go read something in another tab and come back to it after the ad is done. My prediction? Captcha ads will tank site readership. Seriously there is nothing I can think of on a chewing gum site that would require me to answer a pop quiz to view.
There are two kinds of fool. One says, This is old, and therefore good. And one says, This is new, and therefore better.
My response will be simple.
Here's another website I can live without. There are very, very few site I frequent that I honestly need (my webmail, and... and... I'll think of something).
Seriously, I would expect these to be traffic killers.
EA and Disney have already been on my "No Buy" list for several years. I'll just add any site using this bletcherous garbage to my "No visit" list as well.
What a great way to dissuade people from participating in - or signing up for - anything at all.
BLACK KNIGHT SECURITY SYSTEMS
We'll bite your legs off
The quickest way to get me off your site/article is by making me watch an ad before the video starts. I don't like watching videos when I could just read an article in general, but something occasionally seems interesting enough that I click play. As soon as I see the 'your video will begin in 15 seconds' or hear some ad start, I close the tab and move on. I understand that ads are needed for some sites to generate revenue, but you've got my attention for _seconds_ so when I have to spend any length of that time watching a commercial I just move on.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
This will backfire. Too many moving parts to do it's functional job effectively. If a video captcha was a good solution it would already be in use. Making the video an advert won't help. It probably won't hurt but that's beside the point. People will try a few times then give up and start complaining. Captchas are annoying enough already.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Cheeky...
Would this be any more difficult to break than picture capchas?
Sites that force me into ads also force me to never visit them again. Usually sites like that have nothing that interests me anyway.
You can bet the people that figure out how to block ads, will figure a way around this. Either that, or just don't go to the sites, figure out if they have an FTP server if you need to download something, and download it the old fashion way.
I'm certain, if you legally force people to view your ads, they sure will.
But since I will associate $PRODUCT_X with an abusive pointless waste of my time, instead of merely ignoring $PRODUCT_X, I shall be sure to actively avoid paying for it, ever, and I shall recommend said boycott to all my friends and acquaintances. Congratulations, your marketing campaign for $PRODUCT_X has now gone viral.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Guess what. They don't care. The sort of folks who obsessively block ads aren't good customers anyway, and they aren't interested in random traffic, they are only interested in traffic from potential consumers.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
The user has to identify and retype part of the message to proceed.
Fantastic. They give you the option to turn around and say "I'll take my business elsewhere". I can't tell how many clever marketing people have lost my business because they decided to insist on using Flash on their site.
It's their loss although it probably doesn't matter to them, but it does feel good to vote with your $$$...
an advertisement is essentially a form of seduction. that's why sex figures so large in advertising. you are trying to entice someone into buying your product, to woo them to come hither
so when you intrusively force someone to view your ad, you've just completely destroyed the psychology of what makes any advertisement work
you have in fact performed a pavlovian experiment: you've force someone into an unpleasant experience, then associated that unpleasant experience with your brand name. much as with pavlov's dogs who started salivating whenever they heard a bell because you always played a bell before feeding them, forced viewing associates the unpleasurable feeling of coercion with your brand name and products
so all these idiots have done is perfected the art of anti-advertising, of driving people away from your product
just make the ad nonintrusive, and anyone who is predisposed to your product might click. that's the best you can do. anything more intrusive simply destroys your brand name with the pavlovian association as described above
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Its about time that a lot of people on slashdot realised that money doesn't grow on trees and what they enjoy on the net eventually has to be paid for by someone. If putting up with a short advert means I can continue to enjoy a lot of free sites then thats fine by me and I suspect a lot of other people.
I'll add them to my list of "websites I will never visit, places I will never buy anything from", it's a steadily growing list.
When mega rich multinational megacorps stop STEALING ALL MY BANDWIDTH then maybe I'll think about buying their product.
MAYBE.
Actively going out of your way to piss off your customers is NOT a good business model - one day you will learn.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Caprica ads? How bout sending them some Apples?
to drive people away from your website.
AccountKiller
I have the same reaction to those ads that underline random words with some JavaScript stuff. I avoid The Inquirer and Phoronix because they use this form of advertising. The Inquirer used to be one of my news feeds, so they'd get me reading half a dozen or so articles a day. Putting in these ads made me delete them and I've not visited the site since then.
I probably wouldn't mind if they'd highlight relevant words, but when they're making things like 'software' and 'smartphone' the context words for ads, it's just silly. These sites get a line in my user CSS file so any link to them has a warning appended telling me that I will be irritated by ads if I click on them. Usually, this makes me just skip over them and not click.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
How exactly are vision-impaired visitors supposed to read this scrolling message?
Do any owners (as in humans) of sites signing up for this personally use Web browsers to consume news and other data? Forcing acknowledgment of an ad view may increase the views per site visitor, but the number of site visitors is going to plummet. It is almost as bad as a paywall, and we have already seen how well that is working out for content owners.
I'll just block their video ads and use the system that they put in place for disabled users to satisfy their legal accessibility obligations.....
not a video.
slashwhat?
Really, i am, i don't mind ads in the slightest. I have found some very useful things online through advertising. From some of my most used programs to games.
I don't know why people give a damn so much about "their precious privacy". You're on the internet, run by a company that has loads of information on you, living in a world that has loads of other companies that have more information on you than YOU yourself do. Grow up. Seriously.
It's not like it is hard to erase cookies anyway, so why do you care so much when chances are you almost certainly have a dynamic IP anyway?
I'm pretty sure your family doesn't care about your fetish for girls in army costumes, or hairy guys, or whatever other fetishes you have. It is called being mature adults, we all have fetishes, big or small. Stop being so anal.
The only ads that i block come under the following categories:
pop-anything. including popups, popunders, inline overlays
Flash that is extremely resource intense. (which is pretty simple to do)
Flash anything that autoplays, especially when IT HAS AUDIO. NO, I WILL NOT SAY SOMETHING YOU STUPID SMILEY!
Direct video (rarer these days) or audio.
Video that is more than 10 seconds long. I'm fine watching your ad, but if you don't get your point to me within that 10 seconds, i already don't care because i want to get to the content i was looking for.
Animated GIFs that have a frame-rate over 0.5-1 for most of the image where said frames are overly-contrasting. (>50%)
JAVA! Yes, i shit you not. I have seen a Java advertisement once... Java is fine, but not as an advertising platform... JavaSCRIPT on the other hand.
Anything that has ever stolen focus from the website. (in fact, generally any website that is like this i usually block)
Anything that falls under those categories is permablocked for a year. Then i will review them again. If they have changed their ways, they get whitelisted.
There are enough sites that obnoxiously require flash to find the most benign content. I generally make it a practice to avoid those sites, and now I'll be avoiding these ones as well.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
This is the third company to launch such technology, including another that launched in September -- http://www.securityweek.com/sponsored-spam-fighting-captchas-emerge-latest-tool-online-advertisers
What a GREAT idea. Am I the only chess player here that can see the next moves clearly before they happen? It'll go something like this: 1. CAPTCHA-enabled ads force you to type something to continue 2. Some honest-yet-enterprising programmer that wants to make a little cash will (finally) write a program to recognize CAPTCHAs reliably. 3a. He'll make approximately $5 before some other arsehole copies his work and releases a free version, -or- 3b. He'll make approximately $5 before some other arsehole cracks his program and releases the crack on BitTorrent 4. Due to the above copy/crack, spammers previously stopped by CAPTCHAs (you know, all 3 of them) will use his programming to bypass existing CAPTCHAs 5. Final result: more spam. Thanks, NuCaptcha and Disney. We love you too.
If the owners of a website are willing to get paid for using a CAPTCHA system, then I guess they're also willing to lose most of their users because of it.
There are other methods to keep your website clean.
I can count on zero (0) hands how many times I have been to those three sites in the last five years, and I can count on one hand the number of Captchas I have been forced to interact with in the last month. I get the feeling that most of the sites I visit, and would expect to see a captcha at, aren't going to want to use such an off-putting system. The sites that I really care about blocking ads on are sites that I hardly visit.
When encountering a new site I usually block the most annoying ads and leave the static image and less annoying ads alone. It is only when a site gets douchey with its advertising that I start to block entire domains. If EA, Wrigley and Disney (and almost all other big-name company sites) could provide a less annoying advertisment experiance on their sites I would not feel compelled to block all ads.
Yeah, I've got nothing...
At that point, why not just go ahead and use a paywall?
Anything so interesting that I'm willing to spend my attention span deactivating the advertisement filter (hint: not much, with so many free alternatives for content) and paying attention would probably be worth paying to see. And any payment I'm willing to make, no matter how small, is likely to exceed the pittance a single ad impression (even a verified one) is worth.
Are they are forgetting that there are still people out there stuck on dialup?
Between not allowing JavaScript for unwanted domains, running an AdBlocker and blocking 3rd party cookies, I haven't seen an ad ... except from sites that I support .... in years. AdBlockPlus let's you allow ads from specific sites, so they can earn the revenue and stay up.
Sites that I let show ads? /.
-
- Lifehacker
- TomsHardware
- HowToForge
Sites with obnoxious ads that will never be shown
- LinuxToday (all Microsoft ads)
Maybe we should add an option to Ad-Block to register a click randomly on one of the ads that was blocked, when it's been "on screen" for several seconds, one ad one time per page load.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
I block video ads because the ones that make sound are far too intrusive (and hard to track down if you have lots of tabs open) and pop-up ads...
I don't really mind small graphical or text based ads, and still have ads on slashdot despite being given the option to turn them off.
The more intrusive ads become, the more likely i am to block them and avoid the sites which show them.
I especially hate the video ads that are on failblog these days, they force you to sit through the same advertisement for every video you watch, and the ads are full videos 30 seconds to a minute in length wasting your bandwidth and quite often are for a product not even being sold here.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Seriously, who is not getting this message? Why do ad-blockers exist at all?
How about finding a new revenue stream that doesn't annoy me to the point where I get off my ass and do something about it!
crazy dynamite monkey
My general rule is that if I have to take my hand off the mouse to view your content, I'm going elsewhere. I'll even put up with short interstitials, but I don't do quizzes.
Log in or piss off.
It's funny they think Captcha is dead and don't think they're tech will fall prey from the same. And I love the word information theif, great jobs villianize the customer, what happens when the customer realizes they don't need you?
Ahh, nothing like associating your company's brand name with the unpleasant task of having to watch something, spot the captcha keyword and type it.
They've even went to the point of getting people to activelly participate in the event thus enhancing the effectiveness of the conditioning.
The genious of promoting a brand by creating negative Pavlovian associations to that brand's name is beyond my understanding ...
Thanks to the ADA, it's illegal to make a website that does not make reasonable accomadations for the blind, so there should always be some accessible equivalent to the Captcha image that does not require seeing a video or security Captcha muddled with an advertisement.
I don't think that the intent is to make you watch a video ad. I think what they want to do is make you get past a video captcha to prove you're not a bot. Then, the website owner can be assured that his content is being viewed only by humans and not stolen by bots.
Something like this would be useful for TicketMaster and Orbitz. They could better protect their valuable content.
because it will shortly result in major advances in image recognition/parsing technology. I foresee a Firefox addon that will hide the 'ad-CAPTCHA', substituting a button for the user to click on. The CAPTCHA recognition process will happen transparently. Of course this will break CAPTCHA altogether, but we can lay that one at the feet of the advertising industry.
Never underestimate the power of a pissed-off programmer when faced with the 'all your eyeballs are belong to us' attitude of some arrogant advertising wonk.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
whenever i encounter these javascript underlining thing adds, i will stop at NOTHING untill all relevant hosts have been included in my hosts file, pointing to good ol 127.0.0.1
it usually takes a few minutes/tries to find all relevant add-servers in the resources list for a web-page, but i find it is worth the effort
People, what a bunch of bastards
Its your time, your system, you're paying for everything in the first place.
Yet they have the RIGHT to stuff their "Advertising Messages" down your throat and you're not allowed to do anything to avoid having to take notice?
It makes me sick, cat sick.
And the programmer scum who prostitute their art to provide this shit will be next in line against the wall after the lawyers and bankers.
Expression of disgust censored by Slashdot wit the message "Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters"
Given that we block ads, I don't think they will care that we avoid their sites as they lose no money.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Contest costs money to produce. And bandwidth costs money. I get the need for internet advertising, but so much of it is intrusive and annoying. To top if off, that is how a large percentage of malware is spread. I block everything but Google ads largely because they are text based and safe.
Instead of really annoying ads that will just drive me away from your sites, how about you agree to show text only ads that don't spread malware, and then ad blockers might agree to exclude your ads from the ones they block.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I don't block ads because I hate ads, I block them because I hate These.
I don't trust Ad firms. Especially when most of them will take anybody's money that waves in front of their face and distribute their infected Flash/JavaScript file without question, and the rest get tricked into running them. Considering that a rogueware firm can buy tons of ads with just one fake antivirus buy, I trust them even less.
The day ad firms decided to allow flash and scripts in ads was the day they asked to be blocked.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Nope, I live in an ad-free internet by blocking all javascript by default. Can't captcha what doesn't show up!
If I have an ad-paid site, I wouldn't mind ad-blockers visiting. The theory is that if they enjoy the site, it's likely they'll spread the news to people who don't block ads. They tell people, link to it on their blogs and Facebook, etc. Thus even the people who don't make me more money directly would be making me more money indirectly. Bandwidth is cheap compared to the cost of word-of-mouth advertising.
It's kind of the same principle of how as file-sharing goes up, so does music industry revenues. Yes, file-sharer "lose" money for the industry when they don't pay for music. They also drive the industry by providing "buzz" and testimonial to what they listen to to their friends.
Apparently this is not obvious to everyone.
Does this mean they're going to require us to solve puzzles in order to view the page? And this increases viewership and brand loyalty in what fashion?
It's amazing that someone thought this was a good idea. No, we haven't made the user's experience annoying enough with loud audio adverts (I keep my sound off when I'm surfing), floating windows and blackouts, now they want us to solve a puzzle to get them to go away.
I have a better idea -- I'll go away instead.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I can imagine being forced to pay attention to a video under court order. If you've ever had the unpleasant experience of taking one of those safe driving courses offered on DVD in lieu of classroom training in the aftermath of a traffic ticket, you know what I mean. One of the questions on the test will likely be something like "What was the breed of dog that appeared with the woman in the blue car?".
So, yeah, if a judge orders me to pay attention to a video, I will, however supremely irrititating it may be.
But forcing me to pay attention to an advertisement? That is NOT going to happen as long as I can click away.
The original poster is wrong. They do care, and you are wrong, because they care for the wrong reason.
The problem is that advertisers sell ads, not the product they are advertising. Ads themselves are the product advertising companies like the one in this article are selling. Those who buy ads are often as bamboozled as ordinary consumers with statistics made up on the spot being sold as facts.
At the core is a fundemental believe that ads work. This is not suprising since ads themselves often work on certain base believes. That a smell will attract scores of women. That cars are driven on open roads with not another car insight.
In this fantasy world, the idea that people REALLY DO NOT FUCKING WANT TO SEE YOUR GODDAMNED AD doesn't exist. And partly they are right. All those annoying flash ads? They work. They sell the product behind them. So naturally if you can make your ad even more annoying, even more intrusive, surely that would mean even bigger results?
And here the flaw comes in: Human beings operate on the "straw that broke the camels back" principle. They got a high tolerance but when it is broken it is completly gone. If you block ads because of the most annoying flash ad ever, you will block every ad from there on. Even the nicest completly unobstrusive ad.
But then these companies wonder why you ain't watching their nice ad. And want a solution.
Advertising is totally unregulated industry and they are paying the price for it. Ad blockers once installed don't care about relevancy or niceness of an ad. Block it all because some monkey ad broke the users back.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Since I won't even see the ad in the first place, it will appear to me that the site is broken and I will just move on to a site that isn't broken. These people have already lost me. For the people that do see the ad, I expect that the reaction of many people will be to immediately start seeking a circumvention. So, this escalation is just going to result in higher market share for ad blocking equipped browsers.
When pop-up ads got to be so obnoxious that people were abandoning IE for pop-up blocking browsers, even Microsoft put in a pop-up blocker. This proposal is so obnoxious that if it becomes widespread, you might even see Captcha circumvention built into the next version of Windows.
your gravity fails and negativity don't pull you through
Having stuff worth paying for is a way better way of making money than ads.
http://www.lordkat.com/what-do-you-think-about-ad-blocking.html
the people who created and work for "NuCaptcha" are stupid, and have a death wish.
We will rise against you.
Happy, and painful death "NuCaptcha".. BYE.
For the record, most of the people commenting will simply move on and not use sites like this, but remember that that majority of people out there still purchase viagra, watches, medications, and even spyware labeled as anti-spyware from obnoxious spam emails.
The majority of the folks out there used AOL at some point with it's obnoxious interface... or used MySpace or Facebook where you are required to sign up and provide your personal information just to see a friend who sends you a link to a picture.
If people would actually educate themselves and protest obnoxious content and rip offs, then issues like this wouldn't even exist.
I will say, however, the audience that uses ad blockers are probably not their target audiences so it makes no sense to do such a thing.
what is the 3rd word in paragraph 2 @ 1:42?
Yeah, that’s likely to work out well in the end. Along with...
Ads
Flash ads
Popup ads
Ads
Goatse
Video ads
Flashing GIF ads
Ads
Goatse
Did I forget anything? (Probably. There are really too many to list.)
To view this page, please type the following:
Mmm yeah I love being anally raped! FUCK ME HARDER, DISNEY!
Well, that was disturbing. Enjoy the rest of your stay!
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Well, I guess this is another bunch of sites that I won't be using any longer. I don't mind advertisements if they don't annoy me too much. If I actually have to start paying attention to them or watch them... Don't count me in. And EA's site is already horribly slow. They're going to add video advertisements now? Its going to make Ruby on Rails look like a racing car.
www.solvemedia.com
Let's say I want to look up the release date of some of EA's new games. I go to their page and ... I get shown some video, taking maybe 2 minutes to complete, can't be fast forwarded and a line below "enter captcha", which will be shown as a marquee text in the last 5 seconds or so?
I guess I'll hit close, open google and look it up there. Sure some game review page got it.
Or I want to watch their latest 30 seconds trailer for a game, but first I'll have to watch a 2 minutes ad?
I'll hit close, open youtube and look it up there.
Folks, it's not like anything on the internet is only available from one source. The difference is just that EA cannot easily remove the "this sucks, I was in the beta, it's the same game as the 2009 just with other player names" comments from other pages.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Advertisement works, that's the problem. Want less ads? Stop following them. Actively boycott sites that abuse advertising. If enough of us do it, things will change. In the mean time, please stop whining.
Wow, these guys really know what people want.
There is gizmo brand X for 3$99 and there is noname mark Y, same spec, same usage, (and frankly for most normal usage and items like washing powder, or even routers or mouses or cable : same quality) but for 1$59. Which one do you buy ? Answer , if you buy the brand and ignore the less costly money, you are burning your "Benjamins" uselessly. And most advertising I can see on Tv or the street is for small items like that, and cars. When I used to see ads for PC stuff on the internet it was the same, but for printer, routers, and the like.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
What's wrong with Nickelodeon? I quite like their programming myself. I know they like to sell their magazines and toys, but so does Disney.
Advertising exists in order to create a demand for stuff people don't need.
People already know they need food, water and shelter. Nobody needs a steak from Outback or a new Disney toy.
They can't "force" anybody to do anything and if viewing specific content requires watching an ad, then I guess they'll have to get along without my business.
It only works if you like the product, or are not consciously ANNOYED by the product, aka, if you don't really care, then you can get positively influenced. But if you *DO* care up to the point to actively try to block the ad, then you will find out that the mentioned effect in your post don't kick in. On the contrary.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
If I can't try it, I don't buy it.
So what do you do about food products with no free samples? Or movies? Or products that are mail-order-only in your area, such as (in my case) a Nokia N900 phone or an Archos 43 media player or a Pandora PDA?
An "add to hosts blockfile " Firefox extension could be a useful thing.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
one of the websites I goto on a daily basis started doing this a few weeks ago (comics.com, I think). they're clear and easy to read and tend to be long, but they mislead you into thinking that if you want to view a different day of that comic strip that you need to type in a new captcha all over. tok me a few mis-tries to catch on.
your lack of self-control, willpower, and independent thought makes you buy stuff after seeing an ad.
Until you get into those cpalead ads, which present a list of three offers that open in a new window, such as a free trial of some product, and are unskippable until you have completed one of the offers.
since i prefer not to run my browser as root (and keep my /etc unmoddifiable to my own user), i'd rather not have that feature
but yeah, for windows users, this might be a usefull idea
People, what a bunch of bastards
Yeah...what about us people that only read braile
The summary gives EA and Disney as examples of companies using this. If you are blind, especially if you are deafblind, then you probably aren't in the target market of EA and Disney.
Are they are forgetting that there are still people out there stuck on dialup?
Most of the time, a video advertisement precedes a video payload, not a textual payload. If they can't view the video payload, why would they try to view the video advertisement that precedes it? Either that or the advertisement would be for HughesNet.
the video ads that are on failblog [...] quite often are for a product not even being sold here.
If the video ads on a site are improperly targeted, have you reported this to the operator of the site?
Having given up on TV with few negative results. Bittorrent for the 2-4 things I still watch.
Although I would prefer to make the decision myself, I am just like everyone else -- I don't give up bad habits on my own. So they are essentially making this decision for me and I will simply choose not to fight it.
Down with EA, Disney and any others who follow the same path. Their desire for ad revenue compromises the security of everyone. Adblock and NoScript are essential for good security on the web. I know it is a foreign concept to them, but respecting the viewer is essential to their future -- they just don't see it yet.
The first thing I will do on a web site that annoys me in this manor is leave. Yep, I use ABP. That is because I got tired of dealing with the constant BS while browsing the web. From sites making unauthorized use of my speakers while I'm trying to listen to something else, to those links that pop up large ads while you're reading an article, there is justification for ABP. I use a screen magnifier to read the page, which means I have to scroll around with my mouse. That means I would always hover over those ad-showing links by mistake while just trying to read. As a visitor, the first thing I will do if you annoy me is just leave. Somebody else will always provide the information I seek in a clean and professional manor.
YOU ARE NOT THAT IMPORTANT.
If we're blocking your ads and you shove them down our throats, we simply won't visit. No biggie. The people who block ads have better things to do with their net usage than to fill out silly captchas just to get in.
Captchas as a means of fighting spam are already problematic and hostile to those with disabilities. To use them as a gateway is even more so.
Disney, you are not that important. Wrigley, you are not that important. The rest of you, you are not that important. It's no longer 1975 and everyone captive to 3 major television networks. We will go elsewhere.
Stop trying to shovel shit against the tide. You want us to see your ads? Stop them from being so obnoxious that we get so annoyed that we install the ad blockers. I will not punch your monkey.
Signed:
The smarter people of the Internet with disposable income.
"You need to type this word in the box below to see our ad."
ANY company that uses these is not getting my business. Going this far just to get people to click ads is pretty sad. Even without an adblocker throwing crap in my face when I'm trying to read an article or something is going to discourage me from buying the product in question. Making people watch them isn't going to change a thing. Its like with T.V. you can show as many ads as you want but the more intrusive and annoying they are the less I'll want to buy them.
Nonsense.
I have successfully used goatse in my business.
Someone was hotlinking my site. Good 'ole Mr. Goatse put a stop to that.
The idea isn't new, it was first implemented by http://www.adcaptcher.com/ about an year ago.
Those of us who don't want to be subjected to your advertisement feces will not be. It doesn't matter if you come to our houses with a loudspeaker and a jumbotron, we're not going to pay attention because we a capable of thinking for ourselves and we have shit to do. You are only increasing the amount of time it takes us to do what we need to, lowering our overall productivity, and slowing down the economy. But go ahead, do whatever you think you need to do to increase your "profits" in the short term, because in the long term, we'll find other places to go that don't try to force shit on us.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
Want to show me an ad in exchange for watching something online? Fine. They're paying for the things I'm watching, and I'll give them the common courtesy of watching them. But making me enter crap into fiddly little boxes during time that I just want to veg out? Sorry. Not watching.
... that you don't get to see ads if you fail the captcha? I am certainly fine with that!
I really don't care. I have no interest in bypassing paywalls and if the content won't show due to my adblocker - well, in that case I'll just go elsewhere or click on google cached copy.
I wonder how well the hosts file can scale. Would it handle thousands of "blocked" domains without noticeably slowing down your browsing?
Do burning Disney DVD's generate toxic smoke? Because as soon as I get home...
such as: "Fsck Electronic Arts, Wrigley and Disney".
I assume it's universal, but on my Cox On-Demand channel, all the shows now have ads. The ABC shows have Disney DVD ads, ad nauseum. Oh; and they are massively louder than the shows they interrupt. No doubt in my mind, this channel will somehow be exempt from the recent FCC commerical sound-level mandate (assuming it survives the November election results).
A large hosts file will cause issues but this can be mitigated with some DNS fiddling. Check out this site for more details (you can also d/l their updated hosts file):
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm
Please stop APK.. you're only hurting yourself.
I can guarantee 100% that I will NEVER visit a site that implements such a retarded system.
Seriously, I would expect these to be traffic killers.
I don't think the sites will have a problem with that. The traffic killed will be traffic that doesn't generate revenue for the site anyway.
Back in the day (mid to late '90s), this was a common game played by file sharing site operators using Hotline. This was the place to go for all of your P2P needs, including feature film rips that predate divx. Sites would have accounts for VIPs, and the anonymous access merely gave a listing of all the gold on the server. To get read access, you either had to upload something useful or you had to follow a list of directions in the site info, which entailed going to a website, clicking on the ads, and going deep into the advertised site so as to trigger the click-through logic used to pay for the ads.
People made a lot of money with this concept.
... any site that uses this simply won't be used by me. End of story.
To complement adblocking extensions, and prevent surprise IE users on my machine, I have a script that
runs attrib -r -s -h on my hostfile (DOS needs full filepath and name)
runs "edit" on that file till I make changes (the OS waits till you're done editing interactively)
takes over again and runs attrib to protect the hostfile.
Finally, it runs ipconfig/flushdns to apply the change without a reboot.
The annoying part is using that on a limited user account, or without elevating a runas dosbox first.
One of the PC's is family friendly, and except for Safari, browsers show the ugly "page cannot be found," so I installed Apache with a single html page responding to such queries with "(Advertisement)". Helps me notice just how much doubleclick and 3 or 4 others throw at us. If you hate a few of them, just replace 127.0.0.1 by 0.0.0.0 and your Windows/Linux will skip even the localhost lookup.
Content is endemic. If a site is obnoxious I go elsewhere.
Let's face it: 90% of all captchas are a COMPLETE waste of time imposed on the reasonable interwebs users by the effects of spambots. So I'm wasting my time, I'm frustrated that I have to try to read some garbled POS to prove that I'm human. If an ad can run to the point I have to see to defeat the captcha in around 5 seconds and then leave that content visible, what do I care if I have to type in "finding nemo" instead of "deafloo marblegreep"? I have an ad-blocker because the blinking animated images and obnoxious flash ads destroy page flow and make actually consuming article data quite difficult -- perhaps I'm too easily distracted. I don't generally use ad-aware Android apps because the screen real estate is too small to waste 1/10 of it on an advert. I don't really have a problem with creative advertising -- even if it's not for a product that I want because, as an earlier slashdotter pointed out, if the ads were targeted, that would require the ad companies to know stuff about me. So I say, bring it on. It can't be more annoying than current captchas and perhaps it will reduce the number of other annoying ads.
So... as i understand it now I'm gonna have to work to see an ad? I don't want to see an ad. Isn't that contradictory to the ads original purpose?
WAIT... i still cant wrap my head around it.. I'm gonna have to WORK to see an ad? What are these ads gonna be?!?!
I have heard of these Ad's and Ad-blockers, but I've never seen them.
When I buy a DVD or Blu-Ray, I put it in the computer, rip it to my server and then when it's done, I store the disc in a cold, dark place to keep it from getting destroyed. The ripper has this weird feature which basically just skips all that ad stuff and it usually works, but I just skip to over those annoying previews if it doesn't.
When I go to a web site, I read the article and if there's something annoying interfering with it, I simply read around it.
If there's some screen that pops up before getting to a web site, well, I just click the "click here to skip this junk" message.
I don't recall actually reading an ad (except sometimes when I get advertisements with nearly naked girls selling lingerie on facebook, but that's not really reading is it?) ever.
So... what's the big deal? I don't see why people are that offended by them. Really, ads target people with weak minds who are easily persuaded by the power of suggestion. And if you're one of them... I have a great deal for you.. just clic... wait ummm don't want to be part of the problem.
Leave the ads and let the republican voters living in their trailers keep paying for our internet and move on.
I wonder if you have heard about sudo and similar concepts...
yes i have, but giving some extension in firefox (with some updating scheme that i cant/wont review every single update) SUDO privileges seems like a rather large open door to me..
an extension which does this sort of stuff under-water would be an easy vector for phising sites to slip in their own server
People, what a bunch of bastards
The crap blocker stays - their sites go.
.
Voting up, Voting down - If I really gave a fuck about your approval or not, I'd come and ask you.
Be sure to drink your Ovaltine
Few DoS attacks on the server containing the captcha will solve the problem.
and they want their clickthru-verification trick back. "To view the porn: Click this adbanner, then come back and enter the 7th word from the 3rd paragraph..."
Also: does anyone else see rabid advances in the state-of-the-art of Firefox OCR plugins in the near future?
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.