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AdTrap Aims To Block All Internet Advertising In Hardware
cylonlover writes "AdTrap is a new low-power, zero configuration device which promises to banish adverts from computers, tablets, and anything else connected to the local network. AdTrap's creators point out that their device works not only with full-sized PCs, but everything else connected to your home internet, such as Apple devices running iOS 6 – and without the need of third-party apps or jailbreaking. In addition to blocking web browser ads, AdTrap is also reported to remove ads from streaming devices like Apple TV and Google TV. A configurable 'whitelist' is offered too, so that users can allow adverts on websites of their choice."
This is why I place ads on the main page of my websites and you can only view content from the popups.
Make them indistinguishable from a normal .png or a piece of text. Or is there some technical reason why this can't be done?
Lo and behold, for I am a sig!
Already does this.. for free.. http://www.howtogeek.com/51477/how-to-remove-advertisements-with-pixelserv-on-dd-wrt/
...things that won't work for $1,000, Alex.
I already have a 50 thousand+ line hosts file. It effectively does the same thing.
Along with adblock, noscript, and flashblock.. I don't see anything i don't want.
I don't see how people use the web without adblocking anymore.
The few times i've tried to use a public machine lately it was so bad i gave up.
so. many. crap. ads.
What happens when the ads are sent encrypted?
If they hardwired the blocking in to it the ad sites could simply play a name game and get away with serving adds so it is obviously software just on another box, second this won't stop ads that are encrypted traveling over ssl if embeded in the site correctly. It is more convenient for me to block ads at my own device using no script and adblock plus, as for my mobile devices I could simply blacklist IP addresses and domains at my own router and do everything this box claims to do already. Fail fail and more fail. All this will do is give people a false since of security.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
First, someone is going to Sue them for some asinine reason, based on loss of revenue, or some such nonsense.
Second, Product Placement will become the advertisement of choice, since it's a lot more difficult to remove or block. On websites, it'll be background wallpaper, or in the motif. You want placement? Better pay what it's worth to a site, series or production!
After all, the Ad companies, "need" to bombard us with their dreck, or we won't feel the need to rush out and buy it.
You know, like Cigarettes.
Oh, wait. Those ads were all banned ages ago, and Look at how that worked.
Just sayin'
I wonder if it'll remove thinly-veiled Apple ads from Slashdot summaries.
it is called:
Block sites directly via their DNS server which gives back a NXDOMAIN for where it is propitiate.
Easy solution this f*ck advertise problem.
For me, the ads aren't really the problem on webpages any longer. It's the awful cluttered formatting. Every article I read lately has several breaks in the text for unrelated videos or headlines for other articles, and 1/4 to 1/3 of the right side of the page is just a mess of other crap I'm not interested in. Plus, multi-page articles that are only six or eight paragraphs to begin with, just to get more page impressions. That is a sure way to get me to never visit your site again. I'd really like a browser that just gives me the text that I want to read - I'll even take an old-school banner ad at the top if it gets rid of all of the other crap.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
The problem isnt advertising. The problem is F***ing obnoxious advertising! FLASHFLASHFLASH HEY THING ITS HEY THING! Or, adservers that lag and wont let the site load. And when they do load, see above. So many flash adds that they crash a browser, or make it unworkable. obnoxious, grating, irritating ads. Id happily unblock adds..Its just when I do, I get ALL THAT again. No matter how long its been. Its like its 2000 still.
So what will happen when all these free sites and services can no longer function because everyone and their mom are using devices like this or other methods of removing blocking ads.
If you ask me this would be one of those "come back and bite you in the ass" scenarios as either
a) These entities would no longer be able to function and therefore close down
b) They are forced to make money other ways (probably selling information about users that connect to them)
Blocking ads seriously seems like stealing to me. If you don't want the ad don't use the site/service. If you don't want the ad because "they are targeted advertising me :( ;(" like a lot of slashdotters seem to justify adblockers with. DON'T USE THE SERVICE. Undermining companies like this will only end badly.
I've wanted this for a while. It would be more ideal if it were something that could be incorporated into a router, so that I don't need another device, but I'm sick of seeing adverts on my tablet.
...does it work with Windows Media Center or XBMC to cut streaming ads without killing content streams?
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
When I use computers without adblock installed or without a hosts file blocking ads, I get annoyed at the amount of obnoxious ads on each site. For 2 paragraphs of content on some news sites, you have a sidebar of 2 video ads loading at the highest possible bitrate they can achieve, banner ads everywhere, and ads that somehow know which sites you've visited before. Not everyone has a decent enough internet connection that can handle all the "Rich multimedia advertisements" that most sites put out. Most of the time you have to wait for all the ads to load, and after a minute or two you can then finally read the actual content, however then there's usually some type of advertisement that covers half the story and makes you have to click for a next page, where you have to deal with the same stuff again. Seeing that ISPs are starting to put bandwidth caps on their users, I believe that most caps would be exceeded just due to the massive amounts of these "rich multimedia" ads that websites shove down people's throats... and people wonder why devices and software that block ads exist. Most people don't care for the simple google ad frame with text based ads that are based on the content of that page and that page only, like what google did when they first introduced them, I don't mind them either. But when you start pulling out bullshit like that, all it does is piss people off.
there is no anti-hosts cabal
If you try using hardware/software on a large scale to block ads it will fail. Sites can easily counter this by running some of the code critical to the page load through their ad server. Blocking the ads will also block this critical piece of code and cause the page load to fail, thus no content. Don't waste your money..
www.moonnext.com
but not ad's.
They really don't bother me as long as they aren't all flashing in my face style.
Have people really become so useless at ignoring shiny flashing things that they MUST look at the adverts, and then click them?... If a site so is bad the adverts are offputting I stop using it.
On slashdot I rarely see ad's as they let me turn them off :D
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
All I can say is how much does it cost and can it be circumvented?
I don't even see ads anymore, thanks to ad blindness. They're easy enough to mentally block (except for the auto-expanders), that whatever they're selling doesn't really register.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
It's Adnix. And by the look of it, we might soon need Preachnix. It's all for a good cause though, giving your money to Hadden so he can build the second machine.
It would be grand if there was an adblocker where you could whitelist sites _AND_ it still doesn't display the ads. I am fine with a select few sites seeing that I received their ads but they don't have to know that my browser isn't displaying them. The ads can go straight to /dev/null
I intuit that this is simply a SQUID server with a custom downloaded blacklist. If not...it could be...and you wouldn't have to pay for it. But yeah, hook this up and I'm sure it will have no negative effects or collate data then sell it to retailers. That's not intuition though...it's sardonicism...I think. Maybe just sarcasm. Certainly cynicism.
What is this ADVERTHOSIMENET you are talking about?
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
This capture all traffic and does more processing operation than a router who simply relay packets. I guess it comes with a slowdown of networking performance?
We see adblocking software all over. Firefox addons, things for rooted androids and the like. Most often, they rely on some sort of hosts file or other host identification. (Thanks APK, no one could have thought of that before you did... oh wait... they did... it was too obvious.) But that sort of functionality really needs to live somewhere on the network. I haven't started googling yet, but I'm willing to bet there is some version of DD-WRT out there which will do that for me. But the idea of building a small VM which serves the purpose doesn't seem like a bad idea either.
A handy little box like this is a cute idea, but I wonder about keeping it updated.
I see a future for these boxes though. Up the price and sell it as a security and monitoring device. The various law enforcement entities out there could require the use of the box for convicts. Concerned parents could also drop one of these in somewhere on the network at home. Of course, an encrypted service out there could easily thwart this in the sense that it it wouldn't be able to monitor what goes on within the session, but it could certainly report that such a session exists.
I don't want it as an additional link in the chain and potential point of failure. I definitely don't want some commercial device controlling the flow of my network while sniffing all the traffic. Selling me blank hardware and showing me how to set it up and even compile from source which I can examine might be acceptible.
Ad companies? You will just have to start TRUSTING the people who host your ads. It'd be impossible to block ads if they originate from the same source as the content. You're an idiot for doing things the way you do now, but keep it up... it enables me to extend my time online before caps kick in.
Just take it.
For the government.
Or what do you think paid the venture capital? It's not like anyone except form banks and the military still has any money.
I know the day that free web content and services dry up because there are no more ad revenue streams, the same people complaining stupidly against ads will want to complain about how the web is now hidden behind pay walls. The irony is that most of you won't be able to voice your opinion because you will refuse to pay to access Slashdot.
Actually, I think many of us might value when that day arrives.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
How can it tell the difference between a can of Slurm(TM) that's there because the director wanted it there vs. a can of Slurm(TM) that's there because it's a paid product-placement?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt
Or is this going to be like the parental control software that blocks porn, with the definition of "porn" including "any web site that expresses a political opinion we disagree with"?
It's always a matter of trust. And has has been pointed out, in this case, you're trusting a company that has built it's business model on denying other companies income they rely on to say in business.
Sounds cool, but I still have some questions. Can't wait to see the ads for it.
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
the page this product write up/article is on has 6 ads on it its self?
Sorry if someone has already posted this, I didn't see it in any of the popular comments while browsing.
I'm a sysadmin and I use something similar for my networks that's free. It's a Linux based firewall for complete idiots called Untangle. (I don't work for them or contribute to the project.) They have an "app" (also one of the free ones) that runs adblock on everything that passes through the device.
Take any old crappy PC, buy a NIC ($10-$20 investment), burn Untangle to a CD. It's a typical Next->Next->Next->Finish sort of installation, it will overwrite the OS though, so make sure your old crappy pc doesn't have any files you need. There are a bunch of apps, but for this project you just want the free version of their adblocker.
It runs in passthrough mode, so it is super-simple. You can tack on other firewall apps if you feel like it, and the interface is really idiot-proof. Actual Linux nerds are probably pulling their hair out at the waste of resources, but even a crappy old PC isn't going to suffer under this UI.
It seems like app designers and ad networks should be able to come up with a fairly simple scheme to detect when this is happening and (for instance), refuse to work until the ads are restored. App sends a UID along with the ad request, ad-network sends back a signature of the add content + UID using a public key, app can validate the signature to ensure their "ad" really came from the network. Not that I want them to do this, I'm just surprised I've never heard of it.
Slashdot is not a game, Slashdot is not a game. Crap, I just lost points.
Have gnu, will travel.
After all, advertisement providers are also companies who want to make a business. If you actively block someone else from his/her business then you got trouble. For the same reason Opera calls it's blocking functionality "Content blocker" instead of adblocker and does not supply predefined lists / ability for RSS providers by default.
First hit for googling host file ad block:
http(colon)//winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm
Works well.
mark
If enough people use tools like Ad block, then websites will respond by having their server contact the Ad servers and check if the Ad was served to the user browsing the site. If it wasn't, then the site will refuse to let you view their content. Ad agencies don't mind Ad block too much, as they don't get charged if a website doesn't serve the ad, its the websites generating income from the ads in exchange for content that care the most.
Once this event happens, the Ad blockers will be reprogrammed to fetch the Ad and either not display it, or display it in an invisible window. This will result in Ad companies (now that they are being hurt by it), trying to devise tricks using "rich content" like Flash that tries to detect if it is being hidden away from the user. Since control on how Flash operates is currently limited (and probably will remain so as long as Adobe is making it), I foresee Adobe playing nice with the Ad agencies and giving them a way to detect if the Ad is being seen by the user. This will then lead to creating a virtualization sandbox for the browser that has all the ads intact, the real browser only taking the non-ad content and showing it to the user.
What I don't foresee the ad agencies doing is (in any large scale): hosting the ads on the content providers servers, as this puts trust into their hands that they are properly reporting what ads are being severed, and it also increases the communication between the Ad website and the content providers website (since you want relevant ads shown on the site based on the user visiting them). However, this might be worth dong for larger content sites (like say Hulu) where the level of trust is higher and the companies can work more closely together. Once this is done, it will be difficult for the ad blocking software to detect the difference between ads and content.
What happens when the trap is full? Can users empty it? Or do you need to send it back to the factory?
Woah, apk's on-topic for once.
Watched the video. It's all about their little hardware box (which is some ARM machine), and says nothing about how it blocks ads. At the wire level, you can certainly apply a domain blocklist, for which there are already many free software tools. That gets rid of many ads, but not all of them.
Some (not yet many) sites resist ad blocking. Some Flash-driven videos won't play if you block their ad server. Some get the ads and the video from the same place. Some ad services have each site create a subdomain (like "ads.example.com") for ad serving, so blocking by second level domain doesn't work. Look at the constantly changing blocklists for AdBlock. The problem is almost as bad as signature-based virus detection. The people with this little box say nothing about this.
The one big advantage this device offers is the ability to block ads on closed systems like Apple products. A big disadvantage is that the device has a backdoor into your data stream and could be an attack vector for eavesdropping.
You are selling an Ad-blocker, so you circumvent ad-blockers (including your own !) by posting a Slashvertisement !! Sweet !!
He's modded up for it too to +1 Interesting
Magazines that are mostly/all ads in not exclusive to the fashion world. This has happened in the nerd world too. Back in the day, before the web took off, we nerds often obtained the ad-e-est magazine of all, solely because of ads, the inimitable Computer Shopper.
But, in the long run, we cared more about features and prices than we did about the glossy pictures, and Computer Shopper was killed by the web. RIP Computer Shopper! we would miss you if the web weren't so much better!
I may not be the oldest cat in the alley here, but I have been cruising the commercialized web since 1995. I've seen a LOT of stuff come and go in web advertising and I must say that I feel like, with very few exceptions, web advertisements don't offend me. I honestly don't understand this foaming at the mouth over ads. Back in the day when they would generate relentless popup windows for which there was no prevention, yeah: seriously annoying. Like, hang it up and go read a book instead annoying. Today, the default browser pop-up blocker is almost completely effective at eliminating the lame stragglers that still haven't gotten the clue on this annoyance.
That aside, ads are worked into the site content, they are tucked off to the side and clearly marked as an advertisement, they are simple graphics without any blinking text. They are quite often relevant to the content I am reading and are a great way to accidentally discover something I didn't even know that I was missing out on. Let's take it back to the 1950's here - I am a consumer, and consumerism is freedom...! But seriously... these things do not bother me at all. If I want to pay attention to them I do. If I don't, I don't. What kind of mental breakdown causes people to have a strong, negative, emotional reaction to this?
Here's the short list of things that still irritate me:
* Advertisements that purport to be content along with a primarily content site. This is deceptive, uninformative, and in my opinion is a departure from journalistic integrity.
* Inline-ads that link specific keywords/phrases in the content that I am reading to some pop-up balloon that opens on mouseover. I want to be able to surf the site and reposition the mouse without being accosted.
* Flash/video content that starts playing (especially with audio) on page load. This is a waste of my limited bandwidth. If I'm waiting for something else to download, the last thing I need is a video stream that I did not request to slow everything down.
That's pretty much it. I'm even ok with the interstitial pages that show an ad before you get to the requested page so long as they have a "skip ad" link to be able to move past it immediately. It just doesn't bother me. Ultimately, as others have mentioned previously, I believe in advertising revenue supported services - it brought us newspapers, then magazines, then radio, television and now the Internet. If you take away that source of revenue then *everything* will either be a paid content model for corporate content (or some puke's blog that I don't care about) and that will be the end of the useful life of the Internet for me.
So... an expensive little dedicated device that does little more than Proxomitron and privoxy have been doing for free for a decade? Do you really want yet another little plastic box taking up space, and with yet another wall wart demanding space at an outlet? Do you even have an outlet remaining to plug it into?
Good luck on that working. Take BoingBoing for example, now writing half of its "articles" about products. No hardware's that smart.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
I resent your FLAWED attempt at parody, TROLL. Why does your kind ALWAYS go off-topic?
APK
P.S.=>Trolls, when you've got them "on the ropes", they always revert to the same behaviors...
the ad bypass feature on mythtv is all and good, but the ads are still present on the recording which presents a problem when viewing the recording in ways not expected by mythtv. However...for my television, or an alternative dvr to FIOS or the CableCos., my wish is for a developer(s) to write the software it would take to be able to fingerprint an ad so that it can be completely blocked from view, or I would even settle with automatic volume lowering/muting: Two ways, one would be a distributable list like a custom hosts lists to block ads on a computer which can be edited/added to, and the second way/additional way, would be to see/hear the ad for the first time, hit a button, the ad or the first seconds of the ad is "fingerprinted", and then for every future ad presentation, the software automatically blocks it, switches channels, plays a video clip of length equal to the commercial that's sitting on your dvr, lowers the volume or mutes it only for the length of the commercial, or does something equally impressive.
Getting rid of Rachael and card services (which is still calling btw) may have been priority one for the FTC., but getting rid of the screaming/laughing flying witch commercial (of which I've never seen the end of to know who is advertising it because I change the channel everytime, but then end up missing part of the program I was watching many times), the jackass comedian who runs and hammers something with a big hammer while yelling, the dumbass pizza commercial that yells some seconds into it, the jackass who drinks something then "whoooos", "clucks", "coooos" and whatever other loud sounds he makes, and basically just about every commercial coming out today that lacks cleverness like a few rare ones that I enjoy, and where an advertising industry has died from lost creativity and who have convinced program executives that the only way to get the attention of viewers and keep them on channel and away from the kitchen or bathroom is to find a subject matter for the commercial where screaming or loud noises can be incorporated into the commercial under the guise of the subject matter.
Rant ended.
Indeed I didn't understand what else than Privoxy is this 'adtrap' we're discussing. What else than a Privoxy within a hardware enclosure?
Herve S.
You're not.