Advertisers Never Intended To Honor DNT

First time accepted submitter oldlurker writes "After much discussion where many hoped a voluntary Do Not Track standard was agreed with advertisers, it turns out the advertisers already had a very different interpretation than most of us on how to practice it: 'Two big associations, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Digital Advertising Alliance, represent 90% of advertisers. Downey says those big groups have devised their own interpretation of Do Not Track. When the servers controlled by those big companies encounter a DNT=1 header, says Downey, "They have said they will stop serving targeted ads but will still collect and store and monetize data."'"

Comments

Missing the Point?

[kraln]

Isn't that missing the entire point? Or is the do-not-track specification one of those Orwellian-titled things whereby the net effect is exactly the opposite of the name?

Re:Missing the Point?

[Anonymous Coward]

On the contrary ... it is a very good pointer of someone who understands a little bit (at least of the world) so a prime target for more elaborate schemes ...

Re:Missing the Point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that missing the entire point?

Maybe, but not collecting and monetising the data is missing the point of trying to make money, and we can't have that now can we?!

They don't seem too different to the music industry: they can't quite grasp that pissing people off may be a bad way to try making money out of them, and if you try to avoid their countermeasures you're obviously someone who wants something for nothing and a terrible person.

Re:Missing the Point?

[Enter the Shoggoth]

Isn't that missing the entire point? Or is the do-not-track specification one of those Orwellian-titled things whereby the net effect is exactly the opposite of the name?

No it's just that advertisers are a bunch of assholes who think that free speech = unfettered right to harass everyone even when they're sleeping, eating, screwing, working or taking a dump.

It's about time people woke up and realised that there should be limits to what _both_ companies and governments aught to be able to do.

Re:Missing the Point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh, I'd say it's more about time people started using NoScript, Ghostery and Adblock Plus on a large scale...

Re:Missing the Point?

[wonkey_monkey]

Isn't that missing the entire point?

Err, yeah, and that's why the headline is "Advertisers Never Intended To Honor DNT."

Re:Missing the Point?

[GrumpySteen]

If you're browsing the web while you're sleeping and screwing, you're doing it wrong.

Re:Missing the Point?

[mellon]

That's right. It's very difficult to concentrate on the messages our internet overlords are trying to get us to read if we waste time sleeping and screwing. Back to your browser, citizen!

Re:Missing the Point?

[mwvdlee]

It's about time people woke up and realised that there should be limits to what _both_ companies and governments aught to be able to do.

So... who's going to enforce the limits on companies?

Re:Missing the Point?

[Anonymous Coward]

In any other civilised nation, the government. But of course in America, that'll never happen

Re:Missing the Point?

[Richard_at_work]

Why should they honour it? It's the browser which is voluntarily giving out identifiable data! Sort your browser out if you don't want to be tracked.

DNT is the same as saying passwords aren't required, because there's a "do not impersonate me" standard.

Re:Missing the Point?

[Nursie]

I don't think I ever understood the point in the first place.

A polite request to please not track you, made to an industry that exists solely to make money out of tracking people?

Yeah, that was going to work...

Re:Missing the Point?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the browser which is voluntarily giving out identifiable data!

Which, in many cases, has legitimate uses. That's like arguing that because my car openly displays my number plate that it's OK to use that to construct a database on where I go and send me advertising based on that.

Re:Missing the Point?

[SomeKDEUser]

So you see no difference between an elected administration and a private entity with no democratic oversight?

At the end of the day, the reason why companies are let doing perfectly dickish things in the US is people believe that the government would be worse. And so vote for people who promise they'll let companies be dicks.

The stupid, it hurts.

Re:Missing the Point?

[TubeSteak]

Why should they honour it?

Because it respects the social compact between businesses and the citizens they serve.

Instead, we have a prisoners dilemma where one prisoner has nothing to lose *and* can tweak the rules if they bribe^W lobby the rule makers.

Re:Missing the Point?

[just_a_monkey]

The point here is "voluntary". If it was voluntary to display the number plate, you should sort your car out if you don't want it to display yours, and I should be allowed to record and track whatever I wanted to.

Re:Missing the Point?

[Richard_at_work]

"Social compact" - what pretentious bollocks.

Your browser is leaking your info - fix that. Trying to stop people taking advantage is so utterly the wrong approach here, its the same as any security related issue - make your end as secure as you possibly can, because the world is a big wide open and very bad place. You cannot control the other end, but you can control what you are leaking.

Also, pathetic hacks like DNT do not work even when backed with legal status - the internet is not one jurisdiction, but your browser certainly is... fix your data leakage at the source, not at the receiving end.

Re:Missing the Point?

[flyneye]

Browsers work fine, their ethics don't.
Hit it with a hammer if it doesn't work.
Overkill, it works everytime.

Re:Missing the Point?

[fey000]

Eh, I'd say it's more about time people started using NoScript, Ghostery and Adblock Plus on a large scale...

I'm using all of the aforementioned as well as DNT+. No advertising agency will make a dime off of me. On a side note, is there a well defined boundary between privacy and spite?

Re:Missing the Point?

[Cinder6]

Then here's the question:

What measures should we take to stop the browser from leaking our information? Is there any way to do so without losing functionality, such as saved sessions?

Re:Missing the Point?

[fast turtle]

And the first thing that the Mozilla Devs need to do is delete the Unique ID for Safe Browsing from the firefox code base as it's a cookie that can't be deleted. For those using Firefox and it's derivitives, change the Safe Browsing ID to "0" and help Poisson Googles Data. What really bothers me about this issue is that even when "In Private" browsing is enabled, this unique ID is being passed to Google, in direct violation of my intentions when entering "In Private" mode. This is just one more reason I rarely use Firefox. Opera has a similar feature and I suspect it does the same. Sorry but Safe Browsing needs to be completely anonymous instead of tracking us like it does now.

Re:Missing the Point?

[Richard_at_work]

Stop accepting cookies from anyone except the first origin website for a start - advertisers use their own cookies to track you across sites, using site specific cookies makes tracking you across sites extremely hard. Session cookies aren't an issue - if you are using my website, you don't have any leg to stand on when asking me to not track your usage of my website.

Remove a lot of information from the user agent string. Take it back to browser name, major number, minor number.

Stop allowing plug ins etc to add user agent detail or request header lines.

Treat third party images the same way as cookies.

Rigidly enforce plugin security, so things like Flash cannot maintain cookies etc outside of the browsers control.

Etc etc etc.

There are plenty of things that the browsers need to fess up and fix before DNT can be considered to not be a joke - *asking* third parties not to do "X" when you are leaking that data voluntarily to them each time you request an object is just stupid.

If this was anything else, the onus would be on the one leaking the information - if your medical records were being leaked through system insecurity then the one being decried here on Slashdot would be the source of the leak, not the recipient! Why is this any different?

Re:Missing the Point?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you see no difference between an elected administration and a private entity with no democratic oversight?

Sure, there's a difference... with the "private entity", I can chose not to do business with them. I can block google's tracking scripts, I can refuse to load Facebook's "like" button.

With the government, I have no choice. I cannot hide my license plate from their scanners, I cannot hide my address from their databases.

Re:Missing the Point?

[TheGratefulNet]

you missed my biggie: deinstall flash.

if I need a YT video, I run 'youtube-dl'. not only do I get selectivity in what flash gets run on my system but I get to keep a copy of the video in case I want it, later. and of course, I get no 'buffering' bullshit.

I have not found a single reason to have flash installed in a browser. but I admit I'm very willing to go without the latest 'linked video' from this or that idiot. if the video is not something I can get spam-free, I do without.

not having flash installed was one of the smartest things I've done in a long time. I'm glad that info got to me very early on.

Re:Missing the Point?

[TheGratefulNet]

So... who's going to enforce the limits on companies?

citizens united?

(ok, I make bad joke.)

Re:Missing the Point?

[green1]

Yes, privacy is when you block every attempt to identify you, track you, or send you any information you don't want.
Spite is when you start sending them hate mail, having their executives tailed every minute of the day, or generally treat them the same way they normally treat us.

Re:Missing the Point?

[amck]

Because, as stated by Google, it isn't.

I will use Google and get / give a degraded service in Privacy mode by giving them less information, possibly getting more ads from Google and a less-targeted response.

With Google, the idea (the implicit "contract") was that your data was available and used by Google for targetted advertising, but not passed to third parties. I don't mind Google knowing of my fondness for Twinkies, and my purchasing of them, but I _do_ mind if my health insurer knows, for example.

Re:Missing the Point?

[green1]

Exactly, I have though since day 1 that adding a flag to the browser was at best a waste of effort and bandwidth (albeit very very small amounts of bandwidth) I never for one second thought that a polite request would make any difference what so ever.

Re:Missing the Point?

[Richard_at_work]

I didn't miss your biggie, I included a better solution in "rigidly enforce plugin security" - currently, on most browsers its a case of "hey, a plugin, here, have as much access as you like!" and that's stupid.

Re:Missing the Point?

[allo]

depends. if the session is your function, you need to know, that part of the function is, that you will be recognized on visits later on. this has positive and negative aspects, which cannot be split, independent of the way how you realize the session (i.e. blocking cookies and having sessionid in the url won't help you with being tracked)

Re:Missing the Point?

[Anonymous Coward]

The hosts file doesn't support patterns. It's a wholly flawed approach to blocking.

Re:Missing the Point?

[Dahamma]

Point out a single useful web search engine who's business model doesn't depend on that. Big surprise, you can't as there isn't one.

Re:Missing the Point?

[Anonymous Coward]

DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information. For these reasons, DuckDuckGo takes the approach to not collect any personal information. The decisions of whether and how to comply with law enforcement requests, whether and how to anonymize data, and how to best protect your information from hackers are out of our hands. Your search history is safe with us because it cannot be tied to you in any way. When you access DuckDuckGo (or any Web site), your Web browser automatically sends information about your computer, e.g. your User agent and IP address. Because this information could be used to link you to your searches, we do not log (store) it at all. This is a very unusual practice, but we feel it is an important step to protect your privacy.

Re:Missing the Point?

[sjames]

I think he meant it the other way around. BECAUSE corporations act as extensions to government they should be under the same Cconstitutional limitations as government. No more end-running the C9onstitution by having corporations do the dirty work.

Re:Missing the Point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla ... Unique ID for Safe Browsing

Could somebody give me a link to info about this? Google isn't turning up very much about this.

I'd like to know what my Firefox unique ID is, and how to control it.

Re:Missing the Point?

[zippthorne]

I actually assumed that it would result in even more tracking..... "What's this guy want to hide...."

Re:Missing the Point?

[MightyYar]

So you see no difference between an elected administration and a private entity with no democratic oversight?

There are large swaths of the US government without any direct democratic oversight. And corporations do, ultimately, follow the rules set by congress. The government can seize corporations, and it has done that a lot recently with banks, insurance companies, and even domestic automakers. Corporations are whatever the government wants them to be - they are not some natural economic entity.

That said, I think you are right - we are often more comfortable letting private individuals run the show, because at least we can be sure that their motivations are mostly fiscal. While this leads to some pretty shitty behavior, it is also fairly predictable and reasonably dealt with.

The problem we face now is that we left a feedback cycle in place when creating corporations, where the corporation can funnel money back at the government. So now you have unelected, non-appointed people with a lot of influence in the day-to-day affairs of the "real" government. I don't pretend to be smart enough to know what the answer is, but it probably involves rethinking the corporate charter a bit.

Re:Missing the Point?

[10101001 10101001]

Stop accepting cookies from anyone except the first origin website for a start - advertisers use their own cookies to track you across sites, using site specific cookies makes tracking you across sites extremely hard.

Um, not really. As you later note, advertisers can use custom named images (based upon the requesting ip address). Hell, just the ip address is often enough a lot of the time, especially if you're using ipv6.

Session cookies aren't an issue - if you are using my website, you don't have any leg to stand on when asking me to not track your usage of my website.

Except "session" cookies merely means "not written to disk cache" cookies, which still allows for lots of tracking if you rarely close your browser--a real possibility if you have a laptop and simply sleep/wake it a lot. To say it's not a issue misses the obvious: if an advertiser figures out who you are very early in each session, then effectively they can track you pretty nearly as much as if they were permanent cookies. Ie, session cookies are only useful so long as browsers leak so little information that you can't be uniquely identified through other means, like say, an ip address.

Remove a lot of information from the user agent string. Take it back to browser name, major number, minor number.

Great idea, except considering the rapid pace of browser versioning and the not so rapid pace of browser adoption, even the version number is a good way to narrow down the requester.

Stop allowing plug ins etc to add user agent detail or request header lines.

Great in theory. In practice, plugins expose support for different file types that the server probably should know about to return sensible results. I mean, yea, it'd be great if everything was writtable in the context of "it'll all fallback gracefully whatever I do", but it doesn't work that way in the real world, which basically mandates some sort of javascript wrapper if you choose to use any sort of plugin.

Treat third party images the same way as cookies.

Well, that'll break a significant part of the web, especially since there's no sensible basis to limit it to just images. It really should sensible extent to any object that can be used to track someone, which translates into anything that can be named. Other than that, great idea.

Rigidly enforce plugin security, so things like Flash cannot maintain cookies etc outside of the browsers control.

And what sort of magic do you propose to give the browser the omniscience to know that a bit of information is a cookie or not? Or should it simply bar all information transferal of any kind to-from a plugin? Or perhaps just bar all sorts of writes to the filesystem, turning all plugin data into session data? The latter only mitigates the issues, really.

There are plenty of things that the browsers need to fess up and fix before DNT can be considered to not be a joke - *asking* third parties not to do "X" when you are leaking that data voluntarily to them each time you request an object is just stupid.

As much as I agree with the former, DNT will always be a joke precisely because no matter how much browser developers try to not leak unique information, there's plenty of third party advertisers who are plain assholes who, if anything, will actively try to track harder DNT people precisely because they're a niche market who otherwise might not get many ads.

If this was anything else, the onus would be on the one leaking the information - if your medical records were being leaked through system insecurity then the one being decried here on Slashdot would be the source of the leak, not the recipient! Why is this any different?

Perhaps because it's close to impossible to *not

Re:Missing the Point?

[vux984]

Your browser is leaking your info - fix that.

Good idea.

Trying to stop people taking advantage is so utterly the wrong approach here, its the same as any security related issue - make your end as secure as you possibly can, because the world is a big wide open and very bad place. You cannot control the other end, but you can control what you are leaking.

Of course you can, and should pass laws and attempt to control the other end as best you can. What planet do you come from?

Because down here, we take a two pronged approach to problems like this... to deal with home invasions we invented walls and doors and locks and keys and motion sensors and alarms, and so on. You want to be secure in your home, secure it.

But we didn't stop there, we also made home invasions illegal, tresspassing, break and enter, and so on.

Why do you advocate only doing half when it comes to the internet?

pathetic hacks like DNT do not work even when backed with legal status - the internet is not one jurisdiction,

So, many of the big advertising firms are based out of this country, or have a physical presence in the country, and many more operate out of countries we have treaties with. Sure that doesn't reach absolutely everyone out there, but the reach is pretty decent. Any particular reason we shouldn't bother at all?

Re:Missing the Point?

[shutdown -p now]

You enact laws to make it works, like this. DNT then serves as a universally-recognized means for the user to demand the advertiser to comply - its usefulness in that it's easy for the user to enable, yet the advertiser cannot claim any misunderstanding over what precisely it means for the purpose of the law.

Re:Missing the Point?

[dkf]

help Poisson Googles Data

That sounds fishy to me.

Re:Missing the Point?

[KingMotley]

flashblock works fine. Every once in a while I want something that requires flash, but 95% of the time it's garbage.

Re:Missing the Point?

[fustakrakich]

No it's just that advertisers are a bunch of assholes who think that free speech = unfettered right to harass everyone even when they're sleeping, eating, screwing, working or taking a dump.

Oh please! Don't you know how to turn off the ringer?

Re:Missing the Point?

[X0563511]

Thanks, I'd rather my browser continue to be useful and just (continue to) block their shit.

I might have tolerated ads if they respected me. But they don't, so I don't respect them. They can go pound sand.

Re:Missing the Point?

[Tom]

No it's just that advertisers are a bunch of assholes who think that free speech = unfettered right to harass everyone even when they're sleeping, eating, screwing, working or taking a dump.

Yeah, everyone confuses those.

You have the right to speak.
I have to right to not listen.

It really is that simple.

Re:Missing the Point?

[fa2k]

They should honour it because of people like me, who don't mind seeing ads, but couldn't give a crap about "relevant ads" and don't want to be tracked.

I haven't actually enabled DNT yet, and this story will make me install something like Ghostery instead (Problem is, I have a permanent IPv6 address [not the default! don't be afraid of IPv6 for privacy reasons], but maybe I'll leave it like that as an incentive for the trackers to upgrade to IPv6).

Re:Missing the Point?

[Dahamma]

Oh, give me a break. I said *useful*. Their results aren't even remotely close to an engine like Google or Bing (it uses a lobotomized version of the already crappy Yahoo search).

And they handle in a day what a real search engine does in 30 seconds. If it was ever to scale to anything more useful than a silly counterexample, they'd either go out of business or have to change their model to something non-free or that advertisers would actually want to use.

Re:Missing the Point?

[b4dc0d3r]

I can't figure out how you got +5 interesting when the replies amount to "WTF are you talking about?"

As far as I can tell, this is the issue. Bug 368255 which was opened early 2007, and still has comments as of March of 2012.

I don't know for sure that's what slow turtle was talking about, and I can't tell from the bug discussion exactly what it means.

I don't know how to set the cookie to 0, or to set it to something random to make Google's data any more fishy than I already am making it (by searching for random terms from a safe dictionary at set intervals via a cron job and some scripting). And by safe I mean not likely to be on any watch list anywhere.

I have looked through enough of the Firefox codebase while bug-hunting for ReactOS that I am unwilling to investigate this further. It was a nightmare, and while I assume it has been cleaned up a bit, I fear going back there again.

Re:Missing the Point?

[Richard_at_work]

I don't advocate only doing half - I just understand that US laws don't apply to BongaBongaLand and the advertisers based there, so while breaking and entering, trespassing and burglary are all nicely illegal, a similar law won't matter one iota when someone can do all those things without ever coming into your legal jurisdiction. And while currently most advertisers are based in your jurisdiction, they can easily move out of it.

Its also interesting that you used examples of where someone comes into your private property, which doesn't relate at all to a browser voluntarily giving your information out - try something like walking down the road stark bollock naked and trying to claim that someone taking a photo of you is an invasion of your privacy... doesn't work does it?

Re:Missing the Point?

[vux984]

I don't advocate only doing half - I just understand that US laws don't apply to BongaBongaLand and the advertisers based there

But that misses the point. There aren't ads from some company in BongaBongaLand on 80% of the websites you visit. There ARE trackers from Facebook and Google on 80% of the websites you visit. The company in BongaBongaLand isn't able to track you meaningfully because you might hit one of their ads once a week.

BongaBongaLand advertisers can track me all they want, and they'll still get virtually nothing from me because I'll rarely hit their ads.So I'm not overly worried that the law isn't reaching them.

Meanwhile, Google and Facebook can almost track your browsing in realtime anywhere you go.

And while currently most advertisers are based in your jurisdiction, they can easily move out of it.

Google and Facebook could move their HQ out of the US to BongaBongLand, sure, but they'll still be subject to US law as long as they have US branches, and US employees. Or would they move to the UK, where we could have a treaty resulting in them passing essentially the same laws we have here.

Big multinational corporations, which are the ones that are a real threat to privacy, aren't nearly so mobile as you imply.

And small fly by night ones out of bongabongaland don't have the critical mass to be a real threat.

So laws can be very effective.

try something like walking down the road stark bollock naked and trying to claim that someone taking a photo of you is an invasion of your privacy... doesn't work does it?

Someone catching a solitary photo or 2 of me in a public setting doesn't bother me in the least, regardless of what I'm wearing. If I wander down the street naked, then I've accepted the likelihood that others will see me. That's fine.

But someone following me around ALL DAY EVERY DAY with a camera, recording every where I go, however is an entirely different scenario, and it is definitely an invasion of my privacy.

My neighbors see me in public all the time, and I have no issue with that at all. But none of my neighbors are tracking me; if they were then we'd have a problem.

Its really not that complicated.

So in other words...

[Anonymous Coward]

...they will still track.

This is where someone will say...

[someone1234]

What ads? I use noscript and adblock.

Re:This is where someone will say...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget Ghostery.

Re:This is where someone will say...

[houghi]

On top of noscript and adblock, I block complete domains with http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm
And I also edit the css of the most visited websites with http://userstyles.org/

Re:This is where someone will say...

[JayRott]

Of course, by doing this you get folks screaming "You are STEALING content! How do the content creators get paid?!?" I have no problem with websites making a buck, and I would even go back to viewing ads as long as they are not obnoxious or folowing me around the entire net. If they can't respect me enough to honor my choices I can't respect them enough to loan them my eyeballs. The internet was a huge push forward for information sharing, but I simply can't get behind every internet user having a dossier encompassing every site they visit or every purchase they make used for god-knows-what by god-knows-who!

Re:This is where someone will say...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget Ghostery.

Indeed, don't forget to avoid it. it is a product of the advertising industry itself, specifically Evidon.

Don't you think they love the metrics it provides about the types of ads and beacons that people are choosing to block?

Let's see what Ghostery's maker says:

That technology includes Ghostery, Evidon’s browser tool that reports on data collection across 26 million websites and informs the company’s business control solutions.

Re:This is where someone will say...

[betterunixthanunix]

I would even go back to viewing ads as long as they are not obnoxious

As far as I am concerned, the only advertisements that are not obnoxious are the ones that I specifically ask for. When do I specifically ask for advertising? When I search for products on Amazon, when I go to Craigslist, when I use Google Shopping to compare prices, etc. It is no surprise that those things are so overwhelmingly successful (both in terms of money and in terms of utilization): there is no incentive for anyone to block them, because they are giving people something useful and something people want.

The reason advertisers have such a bizarre interpretation of do-not-track is that they know they cannot make any money by respecting people. That's why I use ABP and NoScript: advertisers do not respect me, so I will not let them consume my screen space, CPU cycles or bandwidth.

As for the poor websites that claim they will go under without advertisers...well, maybe they should stand up for their users and say, "No, obnoxious, disrespectful advertising is not allowed on this website." What happened to just showing me a picture that says, "This product is better than the rest!" and leaving it at that?

Re:This is where someone will say...

[Charliemopps]

That's cute. And you think that does ANYTHING other than block the targeted ads? If the only thing bad about this were the targeted ads, we wouldn't have a problem. I'd actually prefer more relevant ads. The problem is the collection of the data. When you go to nearly any website on the net, they track everything you do there. Every click you make, every form you fill out, everything. Even if they don't have your name, they have your IP, your browser, your OS... enough data to uniquely identify you. Then those sites share that data with marketing SAS firms that collate, and return sales leads. You didn't sign into that pornsite when you were looking at all that midget porn? That's alright, they ship your activity off to the marketing firm who also has a contract with Newegg, where you have an account with your full name, address, phone number etc.... They compare your IP and other details, figure out who you are and sell it back to the midget porn site. Now it's 6pm on a Tuesday, you're in the middle of dinner with your familly and your wife mentions that she got a call today about a great deal on a years subscription to assbangingmidgets.com do you think she should sign up?

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Soon they will be able to predict much of your behavior and manipulate you at their whim, simply based on what your interests are. Relying on adblock is about as close to having your head in the sand as you can get.

Re:This is where someone will say...

[kheldan]

I'm 100% with you on this, and I'm here to say that because too many people are going to mod you down and/or flame you for daring to say it. Too many people don't understand that privacy is valuable and should be protected, and that corporations and governments don't give a rat's ass about any of that and only care about controlling people's lives and making profit off of them. It's a dangerous trend that may not be able to be reversed in our lifetime, if at all, but that doesn't mean that we should stop fighting against it.

Re:This is where someone will say...

[kheldan]

So what's the alternative, smart guy? Open the flood gates, let the stream of sewage (ads) in all the time? What's your genius solution? I want to hear it. Or are you one of those "people" who say "give up, you can't fight it"?

Re:This is where someone will say...

[drooling-dog]

I use the mvps.org HOSTS file as well, and have been very happy with it. Pretty much all of the crap out there now lives at 127.0.0.1.

Re:This is where someone will say...

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to volunteer that data by activating their ghostrank option. There was a AMA on reddit where the devs have said that you can unpack the archive and examine the data yourselves if you don't trust them. Apparently all it sends back to them is what advertisers ghostery saw.

Re:This is where someone will say...

[green1]

I'm doing similar right now, but instead of a hosts file I set up a DNS server to do it for me, that way I can have every one of my devices get the same one without having to keep hosts updated on more than one machine. I also don't send it to 127.0.0.1, I direct it instead to my own server which serves up a blank page (eliminates the ugly error messages in what would be the ad boxes)

Re:This is where someone will say...

[green1]

my config isn't anything special really, I have a server running anyway for other stuff so I loaded dnsmasq on it and took one of the hundreds of blackhole lists found on the net and put it in an include file. then I set my web server to return a completely empty file for any request to it's IP address that doesn't request a known server that I host by name and directed all those blackhole requests there (that way I see empty ads instead of ads with an error message in them)
Any time I see an ad on a page that gets through I check where it came from and ad it to the list.

Re:This is where someone will say...

[Trogre]

See that's the thing - I actually don't mind sensible ads on web pages. Slashdot ads for example don't get in my way so I make no efforts to block them. In fact, a while ago a checkbox appeared on my front /. page letting me disable advertising, apparently as a reward for the contributions I have made to the site - presumably good /. karma. I have not checked that box, because the ads are simply not a burden to me.

The ones I *do* have a problem with, are the ones I see on other sites that are either too intrusive (flashing colours, flash-based, massive banners, clickthroughs, etc) or outright lies ("congratulations you are our millionth customer, click to claim your prize", "1,701 infected files found on your computer, click here to fix").

Surprisingly the most intrusive advertising I have seen recently comes from none other than Google, via YouTube - in my part of the world popular YouTube movies are now preceded by full video advertisements, accompanied with a yellow progress bar. The more benign (read:less obnoxious) ones let you skip the ad after 30 seconds of watching. Some make you wait up to two minutes. I doubt any ad blocker will be able to get around this one, as it is integrated into the Flash stream - the video content isn't there until the ad has finished.

Re:This is where someone will say...

[Tom]

Welcome to the 1%. The 99% meanwhile are exploited by the advertisers. DNT would've been a solution to them, but sadly the capitalist liberal dumbfucks didn't realize that wherever money is involved, asking nicely and hoping for some free market magic doesn't do it. You need to actually create the market force that you want. It's called a law with fines. The fines create the financial incentive to follow the law. Though personally, for known crooks like these, I'd prefer the fines to create the mechanism by which people who don't follow the law are removed from the market through the method of bankruptcy.

Re:This is where someone will say...

[Tom]

"You are STEALING content! How do the content creators get paid?!?"

Content creators do not have a right to have their business model work out. Besides, most ads pay per click, not per view these days (though both kinds still exist).

There are many other business models. An online game of mine (BattleMaster) runs entirely on donations, for example. I'm very proud of having been able to run this game for 12 years now, and there has never been a single banner or pop-up ad on the site. Not in the game, not in the wiki, not in the forum.
Does it allow me to quit my day job? Nope. Does it pay for its own bills (hosting, etc.)? Absolutely.

There are Freemium models, there are subscription models like The Onion where you get a few free articles and then they ask you to subscribe. And, of course, there is the old "You want something? Pay up and you get it." system. You know, the one that mankind has been using for a few thousand years?

The Internet has been and still is experimenting with various ways of making money. If yours doesn't work out, stop whining and start taking the possibility into consideration that your business model is flawed.

Re:This is where someone will say...

[zoloto]

static advertisements like a black and white newspaper. nothing flashing. nothing moving. nothing making a sound of any kind. it requires you to click on the advertisement and a pop-up that says "did you mean to click on this advertisement? yes. no"

Wasn't the point...

[toxickitty]

Wasn't the whole point of this to encourage advertisers to not track and if they do you have a leg to stand on in a court because you specifically made it clear you did not want to be tracked?

Re:Wasn't the point...

[rudy_wayne]

Wasn't the whole point of this to encourage advertisers to not track

Yes, that is the idea. However, DNT is entirely voluntary. And if you really thought that advertisers were going to honor DNT, then you are extremely stupid.

Re:Wasn't the point...

[Entrope]

Exactly what theory would you (or your lawyer) use in court? That by sending an HTTP request with a "Give-Me-Money: $1000" line, and then not giving you $1000, they violated a court-enforceable contract?

The data that you send to a web server is not your property; without actual laws that limit the recording and sharing of personally identifiable data -- for example, Europe's data privacy laws -- or an actual contract between you and the web site's provider, you have no legally reasonable expectation that advertisers will not get, keep, massage, and exploit anything they can determine about who is viewing the web page or what else that person has looked at or done.

Re:Wasn't the point...

[toxickitty]

Good thing I'm not extremely stupid then.

Re:Wasn't the point...

[toxickitty]

There's a difference between expressing what you want done with your "property" and demanding someone give you "property".

Re:Wasn't the point...

[Anonymous Coward]

No. The idea was to get a status quo between the advertisers and the users. Track the sheep (there are more than enough to make money on ), and leave the ones that don't want to be tracked alone. It was allways clear that the advertisers would only honor this agreement if only a fraction of the users would use it, but now it seems, they never intended to even honor it in that case. So fine, no status quo, all browser producers should include adblock-style auto-updating blacklists, activated by default. Game over, punks.

Re:Wasn't the point...

[Entrope]

As I said, the bits you send to the web server are not your property. You seem to think that sending a Do-Not-Track header line gives you some claim about what the web server (and its owner(s) and their partners) can do with their property. That is why I made the exaggerated analogy to a Give-Me-Money header.

Re:Wasn't the point...

[maxwell demon]

The DNT header is the equivalent not of a "give me money" sign, but of a "do not enter" sign.

Re:Wasn't the point...

[Entrope]

Maybe in intent, but no one has given a reason that (US) courts should treat DNT as binding. If you stick a "do not enter" sign on someone else's door, it has no legal effect, and may even land you in trouble.

Re:Wasn't the point...

[Billly Gates]

It came from my computer? How can you say its not my property. Does any document I type in Word the property of Microsoft? Where do you cross the line?

If I do an action how can someone else own it?

Re:Wasn't the point...

[arth1]

As I said, the bits you send to the web server are not your property. You seem to think that sending a Do-Not-Track header line gives you some claim about what the web server (and its owner(s) and their partners) can do with their property.

By that argument, the data the web server sends to me isn't their property either. If what I send them becomes their property, what they send me becomes my property.
I can thus copy it, sell it, and do whatever I like with it, no?

What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

Re:Wasn't the point...

[Entrope]

No. The HTTP request your computer sends them is data that your computer stored at their request (cookies), data that is necessary to identify what you are asking for, or other data that are not protected by copyright. What the server sends back -- usually, but not always -- contains enough creative expression to be protected by copyright. Except in cases of people trying to pull stunts (as in another response to one of my comments), that will essentially always be true of the request headers that are at issue with DNT.

Re:Wasn't the point...

[Entrope]

You visiting Slashdot is not your property; it is a fact, and is not treated as anyone's property under the law. Non-trivial documents are often eligible for protection under copyright law, but web-browsing history generally is not. To my knowledge, the only theory that might apply to your web-browsing history at a particular site is some kind of contract between you and the site operator, but it's hard for me to think of why a DNT header would establish or modify such a contract, and it's equally hard for me to think of why a court would think violation of DNT requests would be worthy of much in damages (even in class-action form, assuming the relevant laws would authorize class status in that kind of case).

Re:Wasn't the point...

[diamondmagic]

Just because it's not their property doesn't mean they don't own the copyright.

I *own* all the data on my hard drive. I don't (necessarily) own the copyright to all the data on my hard drive. Know the difference.

Please don't eat me

[Chemisor]

"Please don't eat me, brother Wolf!" cried the Rabbit. "Aw, all right." said the Wolf, rolling his eyes. "I'll just trade you to brother Fox for some hens. Is that ok with you?"

Re:Please don't eat me

[Anonymous Coward]

You can eat those rabbits who don't have a "Please don't eat me" sign, *if* you honor the PDEM-Sign. If you don't, we'll arm ALL the rabbits with shotguns.

Re:Please don't eat me

[someones]

what would that help, if they didnt know, how to use them?
same problem with browsers.

All you need to not be tracked, is allready an your machine. /etc/hosts (even windows has that)
cookie settings
autorun scripts to clean eg. flash cookies
blocking of unwanted domains ...

most likely your machine + browser has all this functionality allready.
The thing is, the regular user wont understand how to use these features...

Re:Please don't eat me

[gmhowell]

Trade me wherever you want, just don't throw me in the briar patch.

Semantics

[TemperedAlchemist]

It's do not track not cover up track. I think these fellas need a course in remedial grammar.

There are times I do want, say, Google to keep my data, and I don't care if they share it -- like if I search for Minecraft stuffs, I want MC stuff to appear on my search. Or if I search a topic and I'd rather be swayed towards more reliable sources that I would frequent rather than like, "HOMEOPATHY MAGIC QUANTUM JUICE PANACEA MAKE MONEY FROM HOME."

For everthing else, there's Duck Duck Go

That's OK

[Anonymous Coward]

I have my browsers not respect their wishes on page composition and ad presentation, so I don't really expect them to respect my do-not-track header either. Their domains would first have to make it past my DNS blackhole anyway.

Where can I buy it...

[sinij]

They keep showing me adds for 127.0.0.1, but I can't seem to find where to by this great product. Anyone has any idea?

Re:Where can I buy it...

[JustOK]

Home Depot, check your local area.

Re:Where can I buy it...

[VortexCortex]

127.0.0.1 is like a Canary. If you start seeing ads at that address, then you know you're fucked.

why adblock exists

[myNameIsNotImportant]

and that is why i use and will continue to use adblock. the advertisers have given me no reason to trust them.

Re:why adblock exists

[drinkypoo]

and that is why i use and will continue to use adblock. the advertisers have given me no reason to trust them.

Moreover, I don't create exceptions. If you're part of an ad network, I want no part of that. If you manage to create interesting content which is also an advertisement, I will see it. If you can't manage that, and just want to tape some ads onto the side, you have already failed to face the future. Ad networks have been used to spread too much malware already.

In Other Words

[medcalf]

Water is wet.

Re:Captain Obvious to the rescue!

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me add on that nobody is forced to go to websites that serve ads. The websites allow them on their sites for a reason. If you don't like it, install ad blocking software. If you don't like them on principal, then avoid those sites. Yes, those are plentiful, but it is possible. How many websites did you browse in 1985?

Duh....

[Lumpy]

From the moment I saw the Do not Track idea come up, I was telling people that advertisers will not car and not honor it. the ONLY way you can set your own do not track is by using adblockers and other tools to strip out their crud. IF they wont honor your do not track, you no longer have to honor seeing their ad's. The only thing they can track by now is your IP address and the browser string if you install all the privacy plugins for firefox or Chrome. it strips their bugs, cookies, etc... and I am waiting for someone to start randomizing the browser string to further make their tracking harder.

Duh

[markdavis]

>"Advertisers Never Intended To Honor DNT"

Um.... Duh???

Did anyone really expect anything else?

Color me astonished!

[__aaltlg1547]

Advertisers are ignoring what the user wants and using your data any way they see fit just because they can?

Know what else they're tracking and selling to other advertisers? Your do-not-track setting.

DNT ==

[MrKaos]

Most interesting and profitable to track because they don't want to be tracked.

It's like putting a kid in front of a big red button and saying "DON'T TOUCH THAT BIG RED BUTTON". Seriously, did anyone expect anything less?

Unless tracking is made *impossible*...

[gestalt_n_pepper]

The scum (advertisers, government agencies, et. al.) will continue to use it. Three cheers for ghostery.com.

Re:Unless tracking is made *impossible*...

[Virtucon]

Yup I use Ghostery and recommend it all the time. DNT+ is also a good tool. Right now there's too much tracking going on even though I have "Do Not Track" set on Firefox. I'm now just waiting for it on Chrome.

Gentlemen,

[bickerdyke]

Gentlemen, start your ad blockers.

I'm very carefull with those as I'd like to keep my free ad-financed sites, but this is a short-cut to my blacklist.

As is content-obscuring ads, any kind of noise and excessive blinking.

Re:Gentlemen,

[betterunixthanunix]

I'm very carefull with those as I'd like to keep my free ad-financed sites

Well, two things:

1. Sites should stick to traditional advertising, the kind that does not track you around the web. Assuming they respect you as much as you respect them.
2. If sites cannot pay their operating costs without intrusive advertising then we need to build a new system that has lower costs. Peer to peer networking comes to mind.

Re:Gentlemen,

[zippthorne]

Pretty sure it's not the delivery costs that sites are using advertising to pay for.

Peer to peer networking doesn't write that blog post or draw tomorrow's comic. It doesn't buy the products for testing, it doesn't test them, or edit the review.

DNT

[JustOK]

'Cause I'm D.N.T., I'm dynamite
(D.N.T.) and I'll win the fight
(D.N.T.) I'm a power load
(D.N.T.) watch me explode

I'm dirty, mean and mighty unclean
I'm a wanted man
Public enemy number one
Understand
So lock up your daughter
Lock up your wife
Lock up your back door
And run for your life
The man is back in town
So don't you mess me 'round

Like they say:

[Samuel Dravis]

It's very difficult to communicate with someone when their livelihood is dependent on not understanding.

In other news...

[epp_b]

Water is wet, grass is green and space is big.

Honestly, you have to be quite naive and downright stupid to expect anything else.

If you provide your attacker (advertisers), who have a vested interest in ignoring the flag, with the means to ignore the flag, it's not going to work.

If Alice asks Charlie, a known snooper, to deliver a message to Bob and she expects Charlie not to take a peek, it's going to take more than writing "don't look, Charlie, tee hee hee!" at the top of the message.

This was dumb idea from the very beginning and destined to explode on the launch pad. Besides, browsers already have an in-built functionality to reject third-party cookies, which pretty much takes care of the problem. Yes, there are some clever and covert ways of doing it without cookies (hidden iframes, forms and whatnot), but there's no reason browsers can't reject those on a whitelist basis (some online software will use these hidden elements legitimately).

The argument for DNT

[betterunixthanunix]

The point of DNT was to address the most serious privacy concerns about advertising without simply blocking ads (because people have this idea that advertising is paying for the web; I have my doubts). Supposedly advertisers would be compelled to comply, because otherwise people will see that the advertisers do not respect their wishes and then they will install things like ABP.

Now we see that advertisers are not respecting DNT, so now we should get back to making sure everyone installs ABP.

Re:The argument for DNT

[Billly Gates]

Apache doesn't either. With a phone call from Google they quickly released a patch to make sure it wont respect DNT no matter what! ... ok I assume Google had a play as I do not see why the patcher bashed DNT for ruining standards and quickly did a patch to block it?!

we need to start a PAC, 'browsers unitied' maybe?

[TheGratefulNet]

being able to browse the internet is a form of free speech.

I propose that our PAC lobby congress for its proper free speech rights.

blocking ads is a form of free speech.

please donate to Browsers United so we can get our voices heard.

Re:we need to start a PAC, 'browsers unitied' mayb

[JustOK]

Blocking ads is censorship and anti-capitalistic

Was DNT Naive Idealism or Politics?

[mounthood]

DNT was never going to work in any practical way. Advertisers weren't going to change because of a voluntary system. So were the proponents naive idealists or playing politics? DNT has made an issue out of data tracking (people++) but also given industry and politicians years of cover (theman++) while it's debated.

I can't help but see this as a near total victory for industry: they haven't actually changed at all. The core issue hasn't been debated in any technical sense (what counts as tracking? how long can data be kept?...) There's little to no discussion about civil rights and privacy. No discussion about security or the legal status of the data (what happens when lawyers want tracking data for a divorce case?).

DNT is an April Fools joke (evil bit) transformed into a mock-policy discussion.

No ads browsing is a fallacy

[FlynnMP3]

Consider the alternative. Would you rather pay for the 10 or so sites that you visit on a daily basis? That's been tried and tried and tried and has always failed so far. Maybe someday in the future the magic combination of micro transactions and transparency will be stumbled upon, but it hasn't happened yet. That, and the advertising forces still believe that advertising works. A lot of people don't care about being advertised to, and in some cases they actually prefer it. So for significantly large values of stupidity or apathy, the advertising companies aren't wrong.

The technically able and the ones who care about being subjected to unhealthy amounts of lowest common denominator dreck have tools they use (Firefox, adblock plus, noscript, ghostery, etc.) to avoid the worst of it. Fortunately for them, their mostly free and unfettered access is payed for mainly by those who don't and the small percentage of overlap between the 2 sets.

Being a geek is fun and in this case healthier.

Re:No ads browsing is a fallacy

[TheGratefulNet]

micropayments were NEVER given a fair try.

wonder why.

my view: advertisers saw that as a threat and shut it the hell down (the idea).

I'd be happy to donate a penny here and a penny there if it means that the scourge known as 'push advertising' would go away.

however, I'm not willing to pay for a site that also double dips in ads.

Re:No ads browsing is a fallacy

[maxwell demon]

I wouldn't mind some advertising as long as it is not aggressive (e.g. Google's text ads were quite decent; if it were not for the tracking, I'd have no problems in enabling them; note that I don't know if they are still decent because it's quite some time since I've last seen one, and I won't change that as long as I have to assume those ads comes with tracking —which probably means forever).

Re:No ads browsing is a fallacy

[sjames]

Well, a fair number of people tried to offer an olive branch in the form of allowing advertising but not tracking people like animals. The advertisers grabbed that olive branch and poked them in the eye with it, so here we are.

The next move will be either total blocking of ads or websites finding some way to enforce no tracking on the advertisers they work with.

The very few advertisers that actually have a modicum of respect for the people they advertise to would be wise to petition the FTC to regulate advertising firmly before people just totally shut them out.

Re:No ads browsing is a fallacy

[Ash-Fox]

It has been tried and it succeeded big time.

Where is your Slashdot subscription?

I smell conflict on the horizon

[flyneye]

We're a couple decades into the general public into this inter-tube-network-doohickey.
It's been my observation that when advertisers get too smug, they lose their ass to mass protest and activism.
Some group with an opposing idea of privacy to the corporate norm will probably be glad to trade DNT for DOS.
All I have to do is sit back and keep readin' /., gimme a beer would'ja?...

Capitalism wants to make money

[Snaller]

So they don't care what you want, because they want to run their ever larger, bloated, growing websites.

Unless we get a greed cap.

Trick in the naming

[mrprogrammerman]

You have to use reverse psychology on the advertisers. It should have been named "Do Track."

Exactly!

[golodh]

The information that you don't wish to be tracked is useful and ought to be worth something to someone. So sites will need to keep an eye on such visitors, right?

The explanation of DNT

[betterunixthanunix]

I think DNT is absurd too, but that is because I long ago accepted that advertisers are untrustworthy and not worthy of any respect. However, here is the theory of DNT:

1. Website operators are increasingly concerned about ABP, because they rely on advertising revenue to pay the bills
2. Browser vendors have added pop-up blocking support by default; ad blockers may be added by default as well if advertisers do not start respecting users
3. Advertisers claimed that if people asked not to be tracked, they won't be tracked; users find that asking every advertiser everywhere not to track them is exceedingly difficult.
4. Advertisers who fail to follow a DNT request would be black sheep, and a country could theoretically pass a law requiring DNT compliance (but how would people know if DNT was being ignored?)

In other words, DNT is predicated on the idea that advertisers will actually respect user wishes, because otherwise users will respond by blocking ads. The point of this article is that advertisers have shown that they do not respect user wishes; the logical conclusion should be that browsers start including things like ABP by default, until advertisers start respecting DNT again (but that won't happen, so we'll just make ad blocking a standard browser feature). Browser makers must include ad blocking or else DNT will truly be pointless; users, by and large, will not install ad blocking extensions on their own.

More elaborate schemes?

[betterunixthanunix]

How about we just go back to pushing ad blocking software? The point of DNT was to show that ad blocking is not necessary, because advertisers will respect users if they can just get a little feedback. Now we see that that is untrue, so let's ditch DNT and get back to ABP etc.

The whole argument for DNT is that advertisers will be compelled to follow it, because if they do not do so then users will start blocking ads. Advertisers are not respecting DNT, so we have to deploy ad blockers now, or else DNT was truly pointless.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[SScorpio]

I don't feel that ABP is enough anymore. I started using Ghostery and it blocks a lot of things that ABP lets through.

Yes ABP is great for blocking ads, but Ghostery will block the tracking cookies ABP doesn't care about. A plus for Ghostery is it remove all of the +1, Facebook, and Twitter links from around the web that I could care less about.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are anti-tracking lists for ABP as well (e.g. http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/fanboy-adblocklist-stats.txt).

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[Anonymous Coward]

You really don't get it, huh?

The whole argument for DNT is that advertisers will be compelled to follow it, because if they do not do so then users will start blocking ads.

The whole argument for DNT is a moot point, that's what the article is saying. They don't care if you block the ads, they don't need the ads to track you. What's happening is that they make it look like they're not tracking you by not showing the ads. They're still gathering information about the browser that's requesting DNT and matching that up with your other browsing data to track who doesn't want to be tracked - and selling that data.

Advertisers are not respecting DNT, so we have to deploy ad blockers now, or else DNT was truly pointless.

Whoosh. The ad blockers are what have been truly pointless. DNT was only pointless if you found out your ad blockers were only keeping you from finding out the advertisers were still tracking you. There are still billions of suckers who think DNT works. It works just fine for advertisers.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[Emetophobe]

Yes ABP is great for blocking ads, but Ghostery will block the tracking cookies ABP doesn't care about.. A plus for Ghostery is it remove all of the +1, Facebook, and Twitter links from around the web that I could care less about.

ABP can do that aswell if you subscribe to the Anti-Social filter. Scroll to the very bottom of this page: http://adblockplus.org/en/subscriptions. It's under Miscellaneous.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[Elwood P Dowd]

I think it would be more harmful to those people junking up the web if we made a browser extension that clicked on every +1, like, and follow button you surf past.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[Mashiki]

How about we just go back to pushing ad blocking software?

Seems to fine to me. After all, they said they'd honor DNT, they're refusing to honor DNT. Now if that last 10% is honoring DNT, well I feel sorry for them. But it's not going to stop me from blocking their ads like I've been doing for the last 14 years either. It's not just a privacy issue, it's also a security issue. Advertisers are still terrible about who they let onto their networks, I mean how many times have we seen major advertisers pushing malware onto major sites? I mean really how hard would it be to simply hire someone to check the ads first?

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[zippthorne]

Why are you browsing with cookies on in the first place? Just turn them off except for a short white list of sites you actually want to do the things that need cookies.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[Mike Buddha]

But Ad-Block can replace all the ads with pictures of kittens. Does your precious Ghostery do this?

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[pantherace]

Because aside from Konqueror, I don't know of a browser which makes this easy to do.

Unless I've missed something, I haven't seen another browser which prompts you about the cookie, can have accept/reject and one of this cookie or the entire domain (as well as all cookies) in a nice window.

Mind you, it's a pain for a short time before you get those lists setup, but after that, it's great in the cases you do go to a new site and want to allow it. Every other browser I've seen requires editing a configuration dialog/file to change that. Which even though I can do, frankly, it's too obnoxious to do. I stick with noscript and abp. When I want to really be secure, I use a different browser with a completely different and more secure setup.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[zippthorne]

Firefox also.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[siride]

Developer Chrome allows you to block cookies per page. I don't know if that's in Beta or Live, though.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[Platinumrat]

Is that a Soft Kitty, Warm Kitty, little ball of fur...

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[fikx]

how about an add-on to that that took one cookie and returned it for every user, so that one (fake) user was the one clicking on everything? shouldn't be too hard to capture one cookie and provide it as a free download to the browser extension for everyone using it :)

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[shutdown -p now]

The point of DNT was to have a formal way to request no tracking, which is useless by itself, but is a necessary tool to implement various consumer privacy laws, such as the EU-wide "cookie directive". It means that, if some advertiser can be shown to not respect your choice to not be tracked, you can take them to court. So it's a legal tool, not a technical tool.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[Aardpig]

Only if you're an ignoramus cut from the same cloth as flight attendants who use "momentarily" to mean "in a moment". Now get off my fucking lawn.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[siride]

But I'm not an ignoramus. In fact, I understand perfectly well that idioms often don't mean what their constituent parts mean. I also understand that language isn't about making statements that are rigorous according to formal logic. Instead, we have things like tone, connotation, emphasis and so on.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[SScorpio]

Why are you so protective of ABP? I use it in conjunction with Ghostery.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[SScorpio]

Thanks, I never knew that. I might be used more if it was possible to access from the subscriptions of the plugin itself.

Ghostery can block a lot more than just the social network bugs. I've run ABP and NoScript as my go to extensions for a while, after trying Ghostery it's now included in that list. I was amazed how many tracking things it blocked.

Give it a try, if you don't like it, it's easy enough to uninstall.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[KingMotley]

I mean really how hard would it be to simply hire someone to check the ads first?

As most ads are written in flash and the advertisers only get the flash blob, it would actually be pretty difficult. I guess you could say that all advertisers should demand the flash source, but then you'd need someone to go over all the flash source in detail which would be prohibitively expensive to do.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[Aardpig]

But you're failing to recognize that the "could care less" is a misstatement of the idiom. This isn't a case of an idiom which doesn't make sense when broken down into parts -- this is a case of people saying "could care less" when they actually mean to say "couldn't care less". The latter is a well-established idiom which *does* make sense when broken down, whereas the former is a neologism employed by ignoramuses.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[siride]

Yes, the original idiom was "couldn't care less", but the "not" has been dropped for any of a variety of proposed reasons, none of them having to do with abject stupidity (the fact that a great number of well-read and highly-educated people also say "could care less" when not being careful in their speech should tell you as much). You know, it's that sort of moralizing about people's character based solely on some technicality of how they speak that I find to be disgustingly judgmental and stupid, to boot. Why is it stupid? It's a stupid line of thinking because it is built on willful ignorance (the definition of stupid). You don't know why people say what they say, but you're sure that since it's not standard, it must be wrong and the product of some sort of mental deficit. That's quite a leap, and to take that leap without any supporting evidence and with the nearly express goal of belittling people is a sign of true arrogance and douchebaggery. It's all too common on the Internet, but it is, of course, to be found in more traditional sources of media. People have complained about shifts in language since there has been language to complain about it.

For what it's worth, "could care less" has a meaning that is well-known and unambiguous. Nobody would hear "could care less" and think that the speaker cared by some amount (according to the phrase's technical meaning). Any time a pedant comes along to call someone out on their usage, they never first ask "did you mean that you did care, or did you mean that you didn't?" No, the meaning is already clear: the speaker/writer did not care at all. The correction thus immediately follows, as does a diatribe, short or long, about the intelligence of the person who "misused" the idiom. Like it or not, the mutated idiom is unambiguous, well-known and clear. There is no deficit in communication when using it. It is not at all a problem and people like you need to just let it go. It's not going away and it doesn't need to. Seriously, deal with it.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[X0563511]

Then the data miners could just filter it out.

It's one thing to waste bandwidth, but polluting their data is worth so much more.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[1u3hr]

Opera does.

F12 to just turn on/off, R-click, edit site preferences for finegrained control.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[DMUTPeregrine]

I could care less about this argument, but that would take significant amounts of alcohol.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[Decker-Mage]

And that's the point that should be hammered at them, that if a voluntary scheme isn't followed, we resort to tools that allow us to pollute their data. I already have the code to 'weaponize' this, should I go that route, and it wouldn't exactly take a whole lot of people (percentage-wise) to pollute the databases. Question is: when/if we organize?

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[God Of Atheism]

Add Better Privacy to that as well, to remove flash cookies.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[Golden_Rider]

For what it's worth, "could care less" has a meaning that is well-known and unambiguous. Nobody would hear "could care less" and think that the speaker cared by some amount (according to the phrase's technical meaning). Any time a pedant comes along to call someone out on their usage, they never first ask "did you mean that you did care, or did you mean that you didn't?" No, the meaning is already clear: the speaker/writer did not care at all.

Be careful with that - in countries which are NOT aware of this intentional misuse of the English language (i.e. pretty much anywhere outside the US), people WILL misunderstand the speaker and actually think "oh, he says he COULD care less, that means he DOES care at least a little bit". Which means that it is bad to use "could care less" when posting something on a website which is read by people from all over the world.

I am from Germany, and the first couple times I read "could care less" I was quite confused about what the poster actually meant. Now, it is just annoying, the same way as somebody writing "their" instead of "they're" or using a "plural apostrophe" as in "several CD's".

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[God Of Atheism]

Even better, get rid of flash ads. The advertisers should only allow text and non-animated graphics. That closes the flash-malware hole.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[heroid1a]

Please don't do that! "Couldn't care less about" is the phrase you were looking for. "Could care less" implies that you actually do care - probably the inverse of what you meant...

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[geminidomino]

Question is: when/if we organize?

How about now? Really, who's shocked that advertisers are outed as planning to pull scummy shit? They're not going to play nice, since that runs counter to their whole scheme.

If you've got the code, chummer, let it out.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[geminidomino]

Except firefox is functionally retarded in this aspect. It's not uncommon for it to prompt you multiple times (or even seemingly infinitely) for the same goddamn cookie, even if you do choose to apply your decision for the entire domain.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[unapersson]

I find it slightly annoying but have got used to seeing it now, much like people who manage to "loose" things under the sofa, it's just one of those Americanisms you gradually get used it.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[siride]

Yeah, it's annoying. It can even be a pet peeve. I don't see anything wrong with people being annoyed by phrases and words. We all have personal tastes and preferences. What I dislike is people taking their personal preferences and elevating them to grandiose statements about language, morality and people's character and education.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[siride]

All sorts of idioms, in any language, may be confusing, difficult or incomprehensible to foreigners. I know I've run across a few in German that I could just not figure out (can't remember them now, as that would be CONVENIENT). That's one of the annoyances of learning another language. Remember, though, that a language is for its native speakers to communicate. It is not meant to make life easy for foreigners. I think it's reasonable, though, for someone to limit the use of idioms and strange words when writing for or speaking to an audience that includes people who are likely to have less-than-fluent skills in that person's native language. In much the same way we recommend not to use technical jargon from a field when writing to a general audience.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[asdf7890]

A single cookie used that way would simply be blocked by the advertisers so it would not pollute their database any more than just filtering out the cookie from your requests completely.

Another option would be to randomly distribute the cookies between users, but that would need some form of shared location to "trade" the cookie informtation which might have legal problems (as it would give the advertisers a nice juicy target to try prosecute for sabotage) and woudl be similarly easy to circumvent anywhere were there is some extra informtaion to check agains (if you are logged infor instance they can include some saltde hash of your accounts details in the cookie and check that before entering the data into their stores, and there may be easy ways to filter the bad data if not logged in too).

Basically trying to pollute the data is going to be a waste of time long term - the only useful thing you can do is simply not provide them with any data by filtering the HTTP(S) requests appropriately.

I'm still aiting to see "this content will be available to you when our ad server tells us you have clicked something" messages when ad servers fail. It can't be far away, we've already had reasonably high profile sites (The Escapist is one that springs to mind) banning users for mentioning AddBlock and similar tools.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[zzsmirkzz]

Be careful with that - in countries which are NOT aware of this intentional misuse of the English language (i.e. pretty much anywhere outside the US), people WILL misunderstand the speaker and actually think "oh, he says he COULD care less, that means he DOES care at least a little bit". Which means that it is bad to use "could care less" when posting something on a website which is read by people from all over the world.

The expression is ambiguous no matter which way you say it, if you were to analyze it in a rational fashion. Either the person could care less - meaning they care a certain amount but could care less than that and it would not matter - or - the person couldn't care less - meaning they care a certain amount but could not care less either because it is not possible to care less or that it is possible but the person will not do it. It's a bad phrase to start with and people arguing about doesn't make it any better. We should just agree that what is meant by it is that the subject does not matter to the speaker and call it a day.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[Aardpig]

And where did I make statements about morality, character, education, etc? I simply used the word "ignoramus".

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[siride]

That's a statement about education and character.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[mcgrew]

Yes, the original idiom was "couldn't care less", but the "not" has been dropped for any of a variety of proposed reasons, none of them having to do with abject stupidity

No, in fact abject stupidity (or at least ignorance) is the only reason or you could have listed at least one non-stupid reason.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[mcgrew]

Misspelling "lose" sn't an Americanism, it's from aliteracy and ignorance. The first time I saw it was in a warning while installing Suse (a German distro) that "you may loose data" (which of course meant you'd set your data free, isn't that what you want?)

And no, for the aliterates out there, "aliterate" isn't a misspelling of "illiterate". But if you were literate you'd know that.

If you say "I could care less" or "you may loose data" or "It was band in Syria" I'll assume that either English is a second languge to you, or you're just an uneducated moron.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[siride]

I didn't list the reasons because I had already typed them out, but I accidentally closed the tab and lost all my work. So I just left it at that.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001202.html
http://www.yaelf.com/aueFAQ/mifcouldcareless.shtml

Basically, it appears to be a case of "care less" developing a negative meaning and then dropping the existing redundant negative. The latter link gives examples of other phrases that have had similar transitions. I should also be noted that the French "ne...pas" construction is not an isolated example of a positive word becoming negative and then losing the original negation element. French has a whole host of words in that category: jamais, point, que, personne, rien. English, German and Dutch went through periods of having double (and sometimes triple or quadruple) negatives, similar to the "ne...pas" construction in French, which were later simplified by the removal of the "ne" at the beginning. In German, this kind of change left us with "es sei denn" meaning "unless" and "weder...noch..." meaning "neither...nor...". The negative particle disappeared during the early modern German period, but the negative meaning remained.

You may say "that's all fine and dandy, but it could just be an example of abject stupidity across time and language". However, these types of changes appear to be systematic and logical, taken in the proper context. The transfer from "je ne sai" to "je ne sais pas" to "je sais pas" is fairly reasonable when you consider the semantics. In the first, you have simple negation. In the second, you add an intensifier. That intensifier only ends up showing up with a negative, so it takes on a negative meaning (seems like a reasonable semantic shift). We now have two negative elements in the sentence, so the weaker one is removed, reducing redundancy. Sensible, logical and it leads to clarity and simplification. Maybe the middle steps are a bit weird, but the end point is reasonable.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[Artraze]

Firefox does this, and even has a "session only" option to allow cookies but prevent them from persisting across sessions.

I use the extension "Cookie Monster" which puts an icon in the status^W extension bar so I can just click it and set the permissions for the site I'm on. It even has the added bonus of a "Temporary Allow" which disallows after browser restart.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[Mike Buddha]

Why are you so protective of ABP? I use it in conjunction with Ghostery.

Blasphemy! You are banished from the land!

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[nullchar]

And add Cookie Monster to use white-listed only [regular http] cookies!

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[Ash-Fox]

It means that, if some advertiser can be shown to not respect your choice to not be tracked, you can take them to court.

So why did the directive in the UK end up putting UK website owners at risk instead of the advertisers?

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[mcgrew]

It's not hard to see how the bastardification of "I couldn't care less" came about. "As if I could care less" was misheard by someone who never readss and never pays attention.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[siride]

You could have stopped with "was misheard by someone". But like all the pedants, you have to go on and make a bunch of judgmental statements about people with no basis in fact. Just stop it already. It's entirely possible, if not more likely, that since the phrase is so common, things like "as if" get clipped off. We frequently reduce idiomatic phrases to the core parts rather than speak or write the entire thing. Why assume that people are mishearing and being stupid, when they might actually be clever and efficient?

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[shutdown -p now]

Because website owners are the ones serving ads, and so they are the ones most directly responsible.

The advertisers will have to follow suit, though. No-one is going to allow them to show ads if those ads can make them liable.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[Ash-Fox]

Because website owners are the ones serving ads, and so they are the ones most directly responsible.

Pretty sure when I see google adsense ads, they're served up by Google, not the website owner. The website owner only linked to it in their HTML.

The advertisers will have to follow suit, though.

And yet Google has done nothing and what we see is webmasters making hacky workarounds that aren't following the letter of the law. Such as saying the user gave them implied consent for advertisement tracking when the law says the user must give implicit consent.

No-one is going to allow them to show ads if those ads can make them liable.

And yet the reality is that even the BBC (implied consent), BT (implied consent) and Sky (implied consent and don't offer even a proper opt out system)'s websites don't comply properly.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[shutdown -p now]

So sue them and make them comply. Them them fight it out with Google on how exactly they're going to do that.

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[Ash-Fox]

So sue them and make them comply.

But in reality, they aren't the problem as much as the advertisers.

Them them fight it out with Google on how exactly they're going to do that.

Google isn't violating the laws and doesn't appear to care, much like all the other advertising services out there.

In summary, the laws implemented in the UK is stupid and doesn't deliver. The best thing about this is that another EU country's implementation of this mandate may have entirely different requirements and then the website that complies with UK laws would be in violation of that country's laws and be unable to do business with that EU country.

Thanks EU mandate for increasing the amount of stupid laws that can be inherently incompatible with each other. It's yet another Euro project mess that Mr. Barroso will claim is working perfectly fine and that we should pay no attention to facts because those are 'negative'. Clearly we can't have any reality when it comes to law making, can we?

It is a game

[betterunixthanunix]

Advertisers had a choice: DNT or ABP. DNT is a lot less damaging to advertisers than ABP, since at people will still see advertisements under DNT. DNT was created so that ad blocking would not become a standard feature in browsers; remember when website owners were calling ABP users "thieves?"

Now we follow the game to its conclusion: the advertisers chose to reject DNT, so now we need to install ad blockers everywhere and make ad blocking a standard feature in browsers.

Do Not Track == Do Not Advertise?

[flimflammer]

I'm curious how they came to the conclusion Do Not Track didn't actually mean Track and instead meant Advertise.

Re:It's time for built-in adblocking

[green1]

Problem is, these companies are honouring it just enough to make it difficult to figure out which ones are honouring it or not.
Better solution is to assume, as I have always done, that everyone will track given the opportunity, and simply not give anyone the opportunity. I block all ads.

"He said, she said"?

[mrbene]

Ed Bott says that Sarah Downey (Privacy Advocate) says that the IAB says that the IAB membership "will continue to monetize data".

Except that to become an IAB member, a company must comply to the IAB code of conduct, which includes the self-regulatory program for online behavioral targeting. This includes the requirement of providing a consumer choice mechanism, which has been implemented for the industry at www.aboutads.info.

I guess fact checking was too much for Ed...

Re:"He said, she said"?

[bar-agent]

This includes the requirement of providing a consumer choice mechanism, which has been implemented for the industry at www.aboutads.info.

I looked at those links, and there's nothing about a requirement to provide and implement that mechanism. They use phrases like "participating companies" and "best practices and guidelines," and so far, the only thing they "promote the use of" is an icon linking to data-collection policies.

Maybe they'll toughen up later — they have text saying as much — but not yet.

At least they're responding.

[Chromium_One]

Stopping serving targetted ads is more of a response than I'd expected.

It started with the Do Not Call lists...

[michael_rendier]

And I told them that all they are doing is adding their name to a list that someone can download and call...

Re:It started with the Do Not Call lists...

[macbeth66]

How so? Since adding my name to that list, I haven't gotten a single unwanted call, except for one type; political robo-calls. However, that will NOT work on the internet.

Re:It started with the Do Not Call lists...

[flimflammer]

That's not how the Do Not Call list works. If you are reported for calling a name on the DNC list, you can be fined upwards of $10,000 per unsolicited call. It is in their best interest not to call the numbers on the list.

Since adding my name to that list years ago, I've yet to receive solicitations over the phone.

Re:It started with the Do Not Call lists...

[michael_rendier]

I'm aware of it's success, but that does not change the fact that it's a list...available to any who 'could/would' access it. A list of people who want their privacy...you know, the same way that NOT having a facebook makes you suspect these days...*shrugs*

woo

[nomadic]

That's libertarianism for you. If you don't want to be tracked don't go to those websites.

Which was first: Chicken or Egg?

[bussdriver]

DNT is a starting point (an egg) it could grow into something useful or die. Failure is not "egg on your face" because you have to take the 1st step for the possibilities to open up.

One possible solution:
Politicians pass a law saying how ad corps must respect DNT. It is far less likely to pass such a law without the technology in place; they have a hard time making industry implement any features.

Re:Which was first: Chicken or Egg?

[mounthood]

DNT is a starting point (an egg) it could grow into something useful or die.

DNT is 5+ years old and has resulted in nothing. It's an industry excuse.

Another battle to fight.

[macbeth66]

Okay, then.

Is there any open source software that I can use/modify that will allow me to screw with that data collection? In other words, make stuff up, change it and/or send out repetitive and incorrect information? Maybe build a huge pile of useless information that looks good to the trackers, but hides the 'real' me. Can I make myself undesirable to those that want to track me?

This has long been the case

[The Atog Lord]

Advertising companies make a big deal about "notice" and "choice." Unfortunately, while they claim to give users the ability to "opt out" of Online Behavioral Advertising (OBA), all they really do is give users the ability not to see ads. They don't necessarily give users the ability not to be tracked. Here's an entire paper about it. http://www.cylab.cmu.edu/research/techreports/2011/tr_cylab11005.html

Move ads off advertisers' servers

[mattr]

Here is a radical solution.
I would be less against advertisements being shown but the advertisers not knowing who is seeing the ads.
The only way to do so is for the ads to not be served by advertisers directly, but to be stored either at the publisher, the isp or on the user's computer.
This would be technically feasible, allows publishers like slashdot to pay for costs via advertising, and is desirable because the advertisers have been shown to be untrustworthy.

Re:Move ads off advertisers' servers

[someones]

you suggest that all ads be serverd from central servers. why?
what is "advertisment"?
is a blog post about me being happy to eat at my favorite restaurant advertisment?

so if i post about eating somewhere i have to move to a centralised server or get penaltised (becuase if there is no penalty, and/or not the whole world has this law, noone will care at all)

great!
centralise ALL the internetz! /sarcasm

Re:Move ads off advertisers' servers

[mattr]

I know it's not going to happen but suspend disbelief temporarily please.
The issue is "I trust the operators of my favorite website but not the advertisers who buy space on their pages".
Advertisers can track you if you load ads from their servers.
If you are happy with that then fine.
I am not talking about your blog posts at all.

DNT? No Problem @ ALL via custom hosts files

[Anonymous Coward]

IF you don't want to be tracked, & to get your speed/bandwidth back you paid for (as well as electricity, CPU cycles, RAM, & other forms of I/O as well), better "layered-security"/"defense-in-depth", reliability (vs. DNS poisoning redirection OR being "downed"), & even anonymity (to an extent vs. DNS request logs) + being able to "blow by" what you may feel are unjust blocks (in DNSBL's) & more...

---

APK Hosts File Engine 5.0++ 32-bit & 64-bit:

http://start64.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5851:apk-hosts-file-engine-64bit-version&catid=26:64bit-security-software&Itemid=74

---

Custom hosts files gain me the following benefits (A short summary of where custom hosts files can be extremely useful):

---

1.) Blocking out malware/malscripted sites

2.) Blocking out Known sites-servers/hosts-domains that are known to serve up malware

3.) Blocking out Bogus DNS servers malware makers use

4.) Blocking out Botnet C&C servers

5.) Blocking out Bogus adbanners that are full of malicious script content

6.) Getting you back speed/bandwidth you paid for by blocking out adbanners + hardcoding in your favorite sites (faster than remote DNS server resolution)

7.) Added reliability (vs. downed or misdirect/poisoned DNS servers).

8.) Added "anonymity" (to an extent, vs. DNS request logs)

9.) The ability to bypass DNSBL's (DNS block lists you may not agree with).

10.) Blocking out TRACKERS

11.) More screen "real estate" (since no more adbanners appear onscreen eating up CPU, Memory, & other forms of I/O too - bonus!)

12.) Truly UNIVERSAL PROTECTION (since any OS, even on smartphones, usually has a BSD drived IP stack).

13.) Faster & MORE EFFICIENT operation vs. browser plugins (which "layer on" ontop of Ring 3/RPL 3/usermode browsers - whereas the hosts file operates @ the Ring 0/RPL 0/Kernelmode of operation (far faster) as a filter for the IP stack itself...)

14.) Custom hosts files work on ANY & ALL webbound apps (browser plugins do not).

15.) Custom hosts files offer a better, faster, more efficient way, & safer way to surf the web & are COMPLETELY controlled by the end-user of them.

---

* There you go... & above all else IF you choose to try it for the enumerated list of benefits I extolled above?

Enjoy the program!

APK

P.S.=> Of course, THIS is NOT going to "go well" with 3 types of people out there online, profiting by advertising & nefarious exploits + more @ YOUR expense as the consumer:

---

A.) Malware makers & the like (botnet masters, etc./et al)

B.) ADVERTISERS - the TRULY offended ones, as it is their "lifeblood" in psychological attack galore, tracking, & more, etc.!

C.) Possibly webmasters (who profit by ad banners, but fail to realize that those SAME adbanners suck away the users' bandwidth/speed, electricity, CPU cycles, RAM, & other forms of I/O they PAY FOR, plus, adbanners DO get infested with malicious code, & if anyone wants many "examples thereof" from the past near-decade now? Ask!)

---

... apk

The only way they will comply

[Stan92057]

The only way they will comply is if they are forced too by laws. Want an example? Do not call list. nuf said

Does this even work?

[Likes Microsoft]

Is there even any good proof that all this tracking is even more effective for the advertiser's customers, than not tracking?

Re:keep, massage, and exploit

[TaoPhoenix]

Guys, sometimes the pace of "innovation" is slow. Do Not Track was Innovative. No one ever said Innovative had to be actually effective, though it helps public perception more when it is.

Look at the phrase "without actual laws that limit the recording and sharing of ..... identifiable data". Doesn't that sound a lot like ... wait for it ... Copyright? And remember how they don't care where you got your copy from?

Well for the sake of the First Raindrop, I set my User Agent string to a new Creative Commons NC poem by me. So any site that decides to "keep, and massage, and exploit" it (not just sniff!) would be violating my copyright, right?

If ignoring DNT is ok...

[cbreak]

...then I guess NoScript and AddBlock are fair game. Excellent. Advertisers should not forget that they depend on our attention, and we're not obligated to give it to them.

Re:If ignoring DNT is ok...

[someones]

they can count on all the people not knowing how to use adblock...
The few nerds that can, most likely allready do.

Re:If ignoring DNT is ok...

[Tom]

Less than 1% of Internet users use AdBlock, NoScript, etc.

That doesn't have the advertisers worried at all. DNT did. That should give us a hint that one of these things was the right approach.

Don't get me wrong, ABP is working great for me and I don't want to miss it. But it is only a solution for me, not for the Internet.

Re:keep, massage, and exploit

[Entrope]

Copyright does not protect "identifiable data". It protects creative expression, in order "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".

I would be curious to know how a court would treat someone who made an argument as frivolous as "they infringed copyright in my custom User-Agent string". I suspect most courts would settle for relatively minor sanctions, like throwing the case out and making the plaintiff pay the defense's costs. If you try it, please keep us posted!

your argument is a fallacy

[Lazy Jones]

There are more than 1 alternatives. How about advertising, but not tracking and not serving targeted ads? What's wrong with it, except that it might earn websites less money?

From my 12 years of experience running an online business, I'd still urge everyone to stop dealing with (the mostly) shady online advertising agencies. They're mostly corrupt (expecting and accepting kickback payments from websites so they do not put ads where their customers benefit most, but where they can line their own pockets best), incompetent (still using document.write in 2012 and still trying to push the most annoying ad formats down both publishers' and advertisers' throats when everyone knows that AdSense was hugely successful doing the opposite) and greedy like any other purely parasitic business that adds no value (and usually removes value).

Did you *really* expect that to work?

[someones]

If you do not want to be tracked, DO NOT SEND REQUESTS.
But sending requests with a "please handle this one but dont use it to track me" comment ...
Well, did anyone *really* expected that anyone would respect that?
Sorry to say that, but this whole standard never made any sense from the beginning...

Its the same like crying for the ability to make the internet "forget" dumb posts you did to facebook and co.
If you do not want them to be used against you some day in the future, dont post them at all.

Re:dnt standard..

[someones]

mod parent up.

this is the american way of adressing a problem:
make a law, and expect all people to car about it, if they dont, sue them...

well, that might be the way in the USA, but everywhere else in the civilisated world, noone would care

Re:pointing this out in the past = modded down

[someones]

THIS.

Re:keep, massage, and exploit

[t0y]

With that user agent string you are uniquely identifiable everywhere you browse...

Rephrased

[JonySuede]

The wolves never intended not to eat the sheep carrying a do not eat me ribbon.

Was there ever any doubt?

[sqrt(2)]

Really? Was there ever any doubt this would happen? You have to take your privacy into your own hands, you can't trust the fox to guard the hen house. I'm going to continue running ABP, blocking third party cookies, running noscript, and blackholing known ad servers in my hosts file.

The sad part is that if they would just play nice, follow the rules, and respect me, I wouldn't go through all this trouble and I'd actually end up seeing a lot of ads.

That

[marcosdumay]

That's the spirit, but those exact actions aren't great in practice. There is room for improvement:

Stop accepting cookies from anyone except the first origin website for a start

That's exactly on the mark. Of course, that'll make a ton of sites out there stop working, so you need a NoScript like interface to deal with those cases. (I'd sugest naming YesScript, but this one does already exist.)

Remove a lot of information from the user agent string.

Not necessary. The same applies for the headers. If you want bowsers to stop leaking info, you'll have to put 3rd party javascript in a sandbox where it can't access any kind of identification info (like screen resolution), the stuff on headers (besides IP) isn't enough to identify someone. I'd put that sandbox as an option at the NoScript like interface. Make 3rd party JS blocked by default, with the options of sandboxing it (includes restricting cokies) or completely allowing.

Treat third party images the same way as cookies.

Block all third party requests untill the user allow them. Put a click-to-show thumbnail in external images (like Flash Block). That'll break a LOT of sites by the way, whitelist the subdomains of the site, so it breaks less of the web. Other objects will have to be tought up one at a time. You can put a menu button for things like sound and javascript, while videos, flash and java get the click-to-show.

Rigidly enforce plugin security, so things like Flash cannot maintain cookies etc outside of the browsers control.

Put Flash Block in the browser already. There is simply no reason for not do this, I wonder what is taking Firefox so long.

Re:creative expression

[TaoPhoenix]

Exactly, but what if a piece of data is in both categories? That is what I was exploring. My string is 350 words long, containing computer code, a poem, and essay, code words, and a copyright notice, and an email for inquiries on licensing. So my point was, since that's clearly a creative work, what happens depending upon where it exists and what mechanisms retrieve it, copy it, and re-publish it?

Re:keep, massage, and exploit

[TaoPhoenix]

Oh, of course.

But "who will know"? I thought for a few minutes, and picked NC-ND for the license. So mere sniffing "isn't commercial" (because that's just the server operating etc), but then the logjam should pop up if someone tries to include it in paid sales data to an ad company, because then that's both derivative and commercial.

Not counting the whole David and Goliath problems, isn't an infringement of a copyrighted work a penalty of X thousand dollars? What legal defense could they have, "we didn't look at the data we collected and didn't know it was a creative work?" Just because "oh, our system automatically collects those" isn't a defense - it contains a notice and an email for license inquiries.

So, if a page has ... say... one min.... Let's try Gizmodo....
Ghostery has found the following on this page:

ChartBeat
Criteo
DoubleClick
Facebook Connect
Google Analytics
NetRatings SiteCensus
New Relic
Parse.ly
Quantcast
ScoreCard Research Beacon
SkimLinks
Typekit by Adobe

Isn't that 1 infringement per advertiser that received that Creative Work in the data?

Re:creative expression

[Entrope]

A court would not find your "experiment" either very interesting or very amusing. To the extent that you told your computer to present your poem as the browser's identification and configuration, I expect it would be interpreted as a nearly unlimited license to do all the things that web servers normally do with browser agent strings.

Re:A court

[TaoPhoenix]

That's exactly why I did my little experiment.

So a court wouldn't (supposedly) care about a song being transmitted just because it was dumped in the User Agent Field? Just change the file type at the end to .mp3? Oh, it's a Song, so it matters then, right? Sure, gimme an hour, I'll make it a Song.

This is part of my point that we're not treating all copyrighted works with the same zeal. Movies, followed by Songs, are driving Copyright. But only for Rich organizations, right? Meanwhile the rest of creative works get to suffer? I purposely posted a poem, and an essay, and computer code, and code words, and a notice. That surely makes it a creative work. Just because I stuck it in a place where "automated systems are used to copying stuff" doesn't make it okay to copy.

Thought as much.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, what did people expect? A simple header flag is like putting up a "do not steal from here" sign next to the front door while leaving the keys in the lock. On the outside.

Firefox, NoScript, AdBlock. And yes, Google and Apple are about the first sites which land on my "untrusted" list. The same on the smartphone/tab AND switching GPS only on if really needed (which is about not at all for me).

Internet ain't quiet, peaceful suburbs. If there is money to make, people will do so.

Re:we need to start a PAC, 'browsers unitied' mayb

[rastos1]

Can't you just put up some ads to support the lobbying?

Re:A court

[Entrope]

It is precisely because you (quite intentionally) stuck your poem in a place where automated systems are used to copying stuff that it makes it okay for automated systems to copy it. You put it there with the full expectation and intent that they would copy it, which is why I think courts would treat it as an implicit license to copy and redistribute.

Re:AdBlock &/Ghostery don't do as much

[zoloto]

just to reply to the rant no one will read in its entirety, you can disable any and all of those whitelisted you don't want to see. ad-blocking shouldn't be an automatic blacklisting thing anyways. Pay a-fucking-ttention and participate in what you block or allow.

Exactly. Look at what happened with credit cards.

[fastgriz]

Rewards cards used to be abundant and the financially responsible consumer could get paid well for using credit cards... The rewards were subsidized by the masses who paid fees for being irresponsible. Then feel-good laws were passed to make it more difficult for CC companies to collect fees from people who abuse credit and now rewards cards are much less rewarding. I am happy with the current situation of me browsing privately for free while the content is subsidized by the masses. And I want my 5% cash back on everything CC back.

Re:A court

[bar-agent]

Yeah, this makes sense. If you set up a situation where you try to make someone break a law in order to get them in trouble for breaking a lawâ¦when cops do that, it is called entrapment, and I doubt the court would look any more kindly on entrapment by a civilian than on entrapment by a police officer.

FF: Cookie Monster

[nullchar]

For firefox, use this excellent add-on for white-listing sites to allow cookies. Block all cookies by default, then only click to allow when you need it (login, shopping cart, etc.) A few poorly-coded websites "require" cookies; luckily Cookie Monster has a "Temporary Allow" which lasts for the current browser instance - or until you "Revoke" the temporarily allowed cookies.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-monster/

Re:Custom hosts = your pal (how/when/why/where)

[green1]

It was downloaded because it's spam copy and pasted in to almost every comment stream on the site... I don't think it has anything to do with the supposed faults it may or may not expose. and seriously, that text is so long that nobody in their right mind would read it all the way through.

subject

[Legion303]

Gosh, I'm shocked. Advertisers acting unethically? Inconceivable!

Re:pointing this out in the past = modded down

[Ash-Fox]

I noticed that anyone pointing out that DNT was idiotic and would be ignored,

AC posts tend to be ignored.

was modded down to -1

You're AC, it only takes one person to mod you down to -1.

Re:AdBlock &/Ghostery don't do as much

[Ash-Fox]

just to reply to the rant no one will read in its entirety,

APK does not understand this. Also, expect more TL;DR type posts from him now.

Do it yourself.

[wiedzmin]

If you want something done right, just do it yourself. Stop using Google (switch to DuckDuckGo) and use Firefox with Ghostery, AdBlock Plus and NoScript... you can throw in Tor, if you really want to toss a wrench into their salad... and if someone is still able to track you after that - they truly deserve to have your information. Trusting someone who stands to benefit financially to do something to limit that gain, will never work. Ever.