Slashdot Mirror
Ad Blocking – a Coming Legal Battleground?
An anonymous reader writes "Computerworld asks: What will happen if big advertisers declare AdBlock Plus a clear and present danger to online business models? Hint: it will probably involve lawyers. From the article: 'Could browser ad blocking one day become so prevalent that it jeopardises potentially billions of dollars of online ad revenue, and the primary business models of many online and new media businesses? If so, it will inevitably face legal attack.'"
No. People who block ads do not click ads anyway, and as long as adblock is opt-in, this will never, ever be a problem.
The businesses it jeopardizes are flawed in that they depend on advertising. When that business model doesn't work, they deserve to die.
Internet -> Adblock -> Router -> Ad-free internet. These devices already exist, it's only a matter of time before a major router manufacturer builds in black/whitelist support for ad blocking. AdBlock Plus is great, but if they want to escalate, we are prepared to go full out.
A legal attack on what grounds? That "we're not getting the profits we have a God-given right to"?
F**K you.... The internet created and here long before you tried to use it as a vehicle to make $$$$. Don't want to be on the internet then don't be there. But I will sure as hell block anything and everything I can...
Because legal attacks have worked really, really well against anything that happens on the Internet. Taking down MegaUpload and The Pirate Bay eliminated piracy altogether, never to resurface again. Gone, dead, finished. Burying ad blocking services under lawsuits will totally never make them even more resilient and hard to pin down. No way that'd happen.
Now's your time to shine!
Is there a point to posting a purely hypothetical legal question like this on slashdot? Wouldn't this be better posted on a legal forum? Personally, I've never been a fan of the purely speculative form of alleged "news reporting."
Sent from my ENIAC
Better ban that too.
Google ads are always completely irrelevant and annoying. It is about time businesses start thinking about a real business model instead of annoying people with ads.
They'll have to figure out a way of detecting us first, and I think writing a decent law that would target this reasonably would be pretty tough.
It'd be amusing, perhaps as amusing as spammers suing Google for the right to spam your mailbox.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
I've run across a few sites here and there that won't display any content unless I disable ad-blocking. I'm surprised this isn't more prevalent. Surely it's cheaper to pay a programmer to write some code than paying lawyers to do their thing.
All advertisers have to do is drop a little code into place to make sure their ads are displaying. No ads, no product, which seems like pretty solid legal ground to me - the "cost" of using their product is looking at advertising. They don't do this now because they don't really have to, but if people really did get heavily into ad-blocking, I have no doubt they can find a way to tie ads to the rest of their product.
Could browser ad blocking one day become so prevalent that it jeopardises potentially billions of dollars of online ad revenue, and the primary business models of many online and new media businesses?
No. 99 percent of people don't bother blocking ads and 90 percent don't even know that you can block ads. This is a ridiculous question to ask, especially since ad blocking has been around for so many years with solutions ranging from a custom hosts file to browser plugins and built-in adblock (opera).
Try to make it through this video without raging.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLVWD2UNvVI
--
BMO
People want free money. More at 11.
I could say the same, there's potentially trillions of dollars at stake if people don't pay me 1$ for every website they go to. I might have to start call a lawyer to see if it's possible to mandate this.
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."
Robert A. Heinlein
Landsharks are not going to stop me from filtering out incoming malware and other junk any more than people can be stopped sharing files. When are mediasaurs going to learn that my computer is mine and that I am the master of my own property? Business models that depend on forcing malware down my throat are broken and need to die.
I'd love.. well.. no. I'd tolerate more ads on sites if they were safe. Here in the Netherlands, we've recently had infections go via nu.nl and nrc.nl. Both very respectable news websites and perfectly safe. If it wasn't for the trojans served via the ads.
Nowadays all ads are the enemy. Flash, Java and Adobe reader seem perma-broken, coming with new 0-day attacks every time.
So adblockers aren't just a convenient way of stopping the more shady sites from popping a million blinking commercials in your face, they're part of regiment to keep your PC as healthy as possible.
(Certainly with the current trend of commercialized trojan kits, which means every noob can whip up something that nestles itself in your MBR, stays invisible and undetectable to everything you can through at, can steal your passwords and inject any banking site with redirecting iframes. No sir, the internet is a wild an dangerous place.)
Not sure if it's a video version of goat.cx or an attempt to Rick Roll.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
how about everytime a site delivers malware to a computer through ads, they buy the use a new computer
Do not outsource your Ad Delivery and deliver Ad and Content from the same domain.
It's Bill Hicks. Worth watching.
--
BMO
The television folks have tried this and haven't really succeeded for the most part. It's been ridiculously easy to skip advertisements for ages. It's called a VCR. The only place where TV really has succeeded is in third-party services which remove the ads for you (as opposed to selling you a device which does the same).
First, we will see TOS change to forbid ad blocking.
Second, we'll see the technological solutions. Simply don't load content unless the advertisement has been hit. This is trivial, but also trivial to get around. There will be an arms race (possibly providing fuel for legal battles in the future).
Then finally we'll see the legal battles.
Slashdot's anti-ad rhetoric aside, content creators or rights holders have a right to monetize if they want to -- just as content consumers have a right to bypass that content. Everyone has a choice and everyone has other options.
Right now, the easiest path for those who want to skip ads is also the best-of-both-worlds path: You can consume the content you want *and* avoid the ads. Eventually, some (maybe a few, maybe many) content creators will simply not serve content unless they have confirmation that their monetization vehicle was served as well. Some sites will die because it turns out there are other options -- and many will thrive because people need what they've got.
If it *does* become a legal battleground, it'll be less about the macro and more about the micro. No one gives a fuck if there's one less or one more eyeball on some half-baked 9gag clone serving up commoditized CPM advertising. But a social-media ad that's relevant to maybe 100 people in the whole country? Advertisers -- and their attorneys -- damned well care if they're losing significant percentages on those hyper-targeted buys, which often carry a premium.
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
Anyone can file a lawsuit over just about anything..... So could advertisers decide to sue developers who made tools like Ad-Block? Of course!
I think the reason you haven't seen this happen so far (and why it may not happen in the future) is the relatively poor odds of winning such a case. First of all, you have to ask if users normally have the legal right to avoid viewing advertising that's presented to them. Clearly, there's vast evidence that they do, including the ability to change the channel on the TV when commercials come on.
One would have to successfully argue that somehow, contrary to all advertising ever created in the past, advertisers placing their ads on web sites enjoy a special legal protection where they can force viewers to view their ads.
IMO, such a suggestion borders on insanity .....
...I'll be happy to look at whatever they send to me.
And vice versa.
They probably can kill AdBlock Plus (legally). As they tried to kill libdvbcss, at least. When this happens, people will find other ways to block. And advertisers will find new ways to attack blockers, and to pass their ads through. And so on.
http://opencm3.net, http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/
Then they need to pay me for the bandwidth.
I already blackhole the sites that have the most obnoxious ads (just add them to the /etc/hosts files...).
I don't mind if they are actually honest, and provide basic information.
But interrupt my train of thought will get you blackholed.
We hold advertisers responsible for the malware and fraud peddled throughout their networks.
Web sites should put a message rectangle - like the current idiotic EU cookie banner -, that says:
"You are licensed to continue using this web site, if either you view ads and do not use any ad blocker, or if you pay our modest subscription fee, which is 2 cent/day." It is even better if it is displayed by the advertising agency, so if a somebody regularly use an ad blocker and do not pay on many sites, than he accumulates enough dept that it worths pursuing him by some debt collection agencies.
Since locked down computing devices are slowly becoming more prevalent why should they care? With the inability to install anything apple doesn't approve on idevices and before too many more years, their PC's to people like Google who can just throw a switch and suck anything they don't like off your android device after declaring it "malware" you won't really have a choice. No lawyer needed. Enjoy your locked down computer device.
When I see news stories like this, I have to chuckle at the "singularity" crowd who can't wait to get direct internet connections to their brains.
Proverbs 21:19
there is no way to legislate a ban on adblockers and enforce that legislation.. absolutely no fucking way.. so that LAWYER that wrote article and the AD-SUPPORTED site that published it both need to find some other tree to bark up.
If ad blocking was a sufficiently large problem, there are far easier solution like embedding the ads harder in the content. For example transitional ads between pages, DOM pop-over ads, click-throughs that open a pop-up and whatnot. Imagine someone went through dead-tree newspapers and noted the ad locations, then gave/sold you that list to feed into your magic black marker ad remover machine. What possible grounds would you have to call that illegal? It's a legal battle they're sure to lose.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You do not need to block ads if you have some self-respect. You have to visit ad-free and payment free pages. Good luck for that.
what about legal attack on ad's on data caped lines?
Can Comcast force you to download Comcast ad's that count as part of your download cap? Can they sue over some one trying to ad black it?
Ad block isn't illegal in any way (unless you played up a copyright angle where it was modifying the contents of the webpage...) so I wouldn't see litigation and legislation in the future. However, as Ad-Block gets more prevalent the price if internet ads will continue to decline. After a while it simply won't be feasible to support your content delivery simply by running ads along side it.
I expect paywalls and subscription sites to increase as the result of Ad-Block usage increasing.
(Then again, commercial skip on DVR's seems to be the same thing and that definitely is going the 'litigation/legislation' route.)
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
Greg is a terrible name, and anyone with that name should be ashamed. Tell me, do you know just how terrible the name is, or is it just everyone else that knows? I heard that people named Greg don't need to sleep at night because they have no souls. Sound familiar?
Oh, wait, you were cueing the anti-ad brigade. I'm with the anti-Greg brigade. I'm sure that they'll be here shortly; there must have been a mix-up at central brigade station dispatch.
Why should a programmer be required to do this? Why can't Ad-block and/or No-script be simply query-able?
The site should be able to simply ask the client, "are you blocking my ads?" in plain vanilla, and then decide from there which content to deploy.
I think this would also ease any legal concerns. As long as the add-on honestly conveys its blocking intentions to the host site, we have fair play on both ends.
that either way the lawyers win. Win some, lose some; get paid for them all.
A web page is a unit of data. It can be processed and presented on my machine anyway I like.
Stupid people think the web is like TV/Radio and we are forced to digest it in the way they want us to.
Extra stupid advertisers think so.
They do, but if they want an agreement not to block ads, then they need to present that to the viewer. There should not be invisible land mines consumers can step into where they don't know what they are allowed to do around reading content and not allowed.
Personally I don't block ads in most places other than my laptop which I use on a cell connection a lot, and bandwidth matters. I've been able to disable ads on slashdot for a long time, but I don't do it. I've even clicked on a couple that are relevant or a product I might need.
You think that social network sites can't track if you are displaying their ads or not and remove you from the "target" group before some company gives them money to run an ad specifically to you so they aren't liable for selling something they can't deliver? I'm not saying lawyers won't get involved, because they'll chase any case they can convince someone to pay them billable hours for but it'd be mighty silly and garner whoever does it will garner a lot of bad will from the technologically inclined.
For the networking sites etc, if it comes to a point where it's a more significant dollar amount they are losing to ad-blocking then whatever value the extra community they'd lose by not sending content to those people, they'll just block them. Sure a select few might work around it, but as I've encountered sights that ran ad-block detection and asked for it to be turned off or refused to display content I've just decided they were not worth viewing/recommending and I'd suspect most people that run ad-blocking software are in that same boat.
Hosts files aren't the only way to block ads. Putting Flash Player on click-to-play, with a whitelist per origin, blocks most of the more annoying and CPU- and RAM-hogging ads. And because Flashblock is content-neutral, and in effect enabled out of the box on tablets, it's more likely to stand up to legal challenges.
Rockefeller and his blasted oil wells are threatening the survival of my horse-fodder supply store! I'm calling my solicitor!
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
There are real world similarities to consider.
If you defaced a billboard, can they sue you for that? Clearly yes, that is an obvious case of causing destruction of property.
What if you simply planted a giant tree in front of a billboard, obscuring it from view from most bypassers? Can you be sued over that? IANAL, so I don't know the answer, but I imagine this legal terrain has already been well traveled.
Wouldn't this be better posted on a legal forum?
What do you think Your Rights Online is?
Even if you outlaw ad-blocking, ad-blockers will continue to exist. Only way to be sure is for legislators to require trusted computing on all computing devices and outlaw open source browsers. As long as we have control over our computers, ads will be blocked.
No, viewing a website is not a legal agreement and you are mistaken in designing your site in such an easily digestible way.
Until I sign a legal agreement where I agree to view ads in order to consume content, their content is free at a level of exposure I can decide.
I can choose to not read ads in a magazine, newspaper or anything else too.
Yes, they may register on a subtle sub-conscious level, but still. (especially in my case, I trained myself to read as much as possible in my peripheral vision, despite the blurriness. It also helped in me not needing glasses since they recovered, so great success, my vision is almost back to normal from the last test)
And note that I actually do view ads. I only block abusive advertisers who do any form of pop-anything, heavily animated flash-crap, page-jacking, page-locking, etc.
I'm fine with everything else since I'm not paranoid that some company knows I have a fetish for latex or whatever else. Big deal, everyone I know knows this, and they are relatively typical people.
If ad blocking really starts to hurt advertisers, I expect they will demand a technical fix rather than a legal one. If sites serve ad content inline with their main site content, ad blockers in their current form will stop working.
This would be a significant change to the current ad distribution model but I think it has a better chance of success than the hypothetical legal approach posited by the article.
How about an ad blocker that downloard the damn ad, but the browser just doesn't put it on the screen.
That would be useless for people who rely on ad blocking software to make efficient use of a slow or capped connection, such as users of dial-up or wireless (satellite or cellular) ISPs.
I do not think so. A web page is protected by copyright law and the owner can decide about the terms under which he allows you to use page. You either agree to the terms or skip the page.
On what grounds?
Is it illegal to offer a way to ignore content you dont want? It may piss off the advertisers, but unless they are subsidizing your hardware/software/connection and its part of your TOS, i dont see a legal leg to stand on
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The whole point of HTML's markup language is to separate structure from content so that client side devices can render the HTML (and XML/SGML) in a matter most appropriate for the user. It was planned from the onset that many different devices could render a page differently. For example, there used to be completely text based browsers and clearly they rendered pages differently than graphics based browsers. While I'm not sure if they were ever built, there were even discussions of audio based browsers for those who are sight impaired. The ability to modify how a page is displayed is central to the entire concept of HTML. Using an Adblock add-on is simply utilizing HTML in the way it was intended. If the publishers do not like it then there are many less flexible formats that render a page exactly how they want it -- most notably PDF files -- that they can use to publish their content.
Haven't the makers of certain DVR units been successfully sued or otherwise forced to stop providing devices that automatically skip ads in DVR'd content? I remember hearing stories like that and thinking "well, shit, AdBlock is next to go."
Personally I detest the idea of not being able to choose whether or not I want (my kids) to see an advertisement. It's bad enough these days that our common space has been overwhelmed with advertisements to the point where I'm bombarded every time I drive to the supermarket; browser+ Adblock is one of the few havens I feel I still have from the relentless nature of advertising these days. And I have to admit I'm a bit worried that so many people have no problem allowing themselves to be coerced into buying products... arguments about content producers having the right to monetize their products are fine and dandy until you take a hard look at the psychological trickery and deceit that goes into modern advertising. "Born to Buy" should be mandatory reading.
I'll stop using AdBlock when advertising agencies take better security measures.
Nothing more annoying than spending an entire night cleaning up, quarantining, and auditing a trojan on your computer after an advertisement tricks your web browser into loading a PDF file into the reader, which then executes a malicious script inside the PDF file.
Also, deceptive advertisements designed to look like part of the host web site's UI -- ever clicked on the wrong "DOWNLOAD" link on Sourceforge and instead ended up on some "custom installer" for what you wanted to actually download, hosted on some machine in Romania? And this was an ad on Sourceforge, for fuck sakes, not a porn site.
So when advertising firms start to put their foot down and take responsibility for security, I'm not letting a single ad make it through. Tough shit if you don't make money -- by being irresponsible, you failed to earn it.
Maybe if they would start sinking that budget into, you know, their employees, job creation or providing better products instead of massive spam campaigns, the economy would be better off at least by a little bit.
Ads which include the execution of code on my CPU are in fact stealing cycles from me. I use the term stealing because there is no language which allows me to set the terms and conditions of executing that code. It's completely reasonable that content creators and providers monetize their service, but its equally reasonable that we be allowed to set our own terms in how much we are willing to pay for that content. As it exists today, advertisers can claim as much real estate as they like, execute code without permission, track us without knowledge, and sell the resultant data without our consent. Since I cannot negotiate the terms of exchange for my personal data, my attention, or my CPU/GPU cycles I choose to block those companies which believe they have carte blanche access to our digital presence. If the advertisers wish to sue the mechanism I use to enforce my right to privacy, then I will simply choose another mechanism which is less susceptible to interruption by litigation.
A forum where every post needs to be prefixed with "IANAL".
"I'm not much interested in interoperability. I want substitutability. I want to be able to throw your software out."
Ad block isn't illegal in any way (unless you played up a copyright angle where it was modifying the contents of the webpage...)
The article mentions exactly that copyright angle.
If AdBlock ever became illegal, wouldn't editing one's /etc/hosts file become illegal too? Seriously...
Content providers are free to provide any content they think would be of interest to me.
And I'm free to pay attention to whatever I deem worthy.
If your ads suck, I'll ignore and/or block them. If your ads are awesome and actually interesting to me, I'll pay attention.
Choose ad networks that don't suck and aren't annoying and I'll gladly look at your ads. Until then (possibly also when hell freezes over), I'll adblock.
Next thing you know, spam blocking becomes illegal.
No. The thing about online advertising is that the user is still in control over his internet connection by virtue of the way the internet works. The client requests and the server delivers. The client fails to request and the server doesn't do anything either. That's ad blocking. It's also, surprise surprise, BANDWIDTH and DATA VOLUME control. It's also a security measure.
If (and this is a REALLY big IF) the advertiser paid for or even supplemented the viewer's internet access costs, there might be some argument that they are in some way obligated to not block ads.
Also, my toilet is an ad blocking device because I use it when TV commercials are on.
A forum where every post needs to be prefixed with "IANAL".
So is Groklaw, which is run by a paralegal.
Ad block isn't illegal in any way (unless you played up a copyright angle where it was modifying the contents of the webpage...)
If I rip out a page in a book and replace it with one I wrote myself, is that copyright infringement?
Why aren't there apps that activity go after the Ad sites with spam and other annoying type internet drek. We are not asking for the adds so it should be okay to send them some unwanted internet junk.
Could browser ad blocking one day become so prevalent that it jeopardises potentially billions of dollars of online ad revenue...
I sure hope so.
The internet existed for decades before it became commercialized, and it was a lot better then. Almost an infinitely higher signal to noise ratio.
The internet was taken over by advertizers and astroturfers and spammers, but it was not always like that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
this seems to be what you're saying
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Apparently, 'ahimsa' refers to nonviolence in Indian-subcontinent religious philosophy.
Yes, Hicks suggested that marketers kill themselves
Marketing is a big demand for psychologists, sadly.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Ads have become too intrusive and lets face it, security on ad servers seems to be non-existent.
If not for these two things, I would have never installed an ad blocker to begin with... I understand web sites need the ad revenue but since ads have become so intrusive coupled with he apparent disregard for security on ad servers these days, I consider an ad blocker an integral part of virus protection these days.
and im paying it not the advertiser
until they pay me then they can fuck off
Just find a better method. Ads are completely useless and I'm amazed that big companies still pay for them. This is not 1960's Coke ads anymore.
everybody has the right to speak.
and everybody has the right to NOT LISTEN.
3 million servicefolk have died for that right. don't make me open a new case of whoop-ass over it.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
If I MUST be subjected to the tons of cr@p adverts, animations, banners, and assorted other BS, then I'm going back to reading printed books. Whenever I see someone browsing the WWW without AdBlock, it is enough to make me puke.
Seconded
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
Back in the old days there was lots of talk and more than a couple of companies working on micropayment systems. The idea was that you could pay something like half a cent for a webpage. Prices could be adjusted depending on things like demand and target audience. Quality web sites would prosper, crappy ones would die out. All the good stuff you get from a free market.
But somewhere along the line, advertising usurped that role and no micropayment system ever achieved viability. So now we get useless ad-farms filled with seo-bait, articles on web-sites broken down into one paragraph a page to maximize ad-impressions and worst of all a brain-drain focused on spending billions of dollars for tracking systems to (presumably) more effectively target advertisements (never mind the societal cost of using these tracking system for other purposes) rather than creating new and innovative technology that would benefit man-kind in general.
So I welcome a show-down between advertisers and ad-blockers. There will be casualities, maybe even bullshit where adblock authors see some jail-time. But if the end result is that advertising recedes and we come up with another more straight-forward, less socially-destructive way to fund the creation of high-quality content on the internet it will be a huge step forward for society.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I NEVER click on ads. I use ad-blocker and whatever else I can get to block ads. I try to never ever buy anything from anyone who tries to cram ads down my throat. I only buy advertised products if:
A) I planned to buy the product anyhow or
B) I have no other option.
Are people really so stupid they actually buy crap from morons who spam??? Probably. Would I be surprised if someday they try to outlaw blockers? No not at all, sounds just like something the scumbags would do.
I'm old, not dead. Well that's my 2 cents worth, your mileage may vary. I say what I think, not what you want to hear.
Officially, we're not cattle. So when did making a buck off me start to take precedence over everything in the Bill of Rights?
That's not just a figure of speech. As the (great?)grandparent comment says, it's about impressions. There's plenty of evidence (1, 2, 3, for instance) that ads have the most effect on behavior when you're not paying attention. So the only way for me to stop manipulation of my own mind is not to have those ads in the background in the first place.
But advertisers have some sacred "right" to make a buck that's more important than me making my own decisions. Which is even weirder because, I'm told, the free market depends on informed consumers making free choices.
Let's face it. Advertisers are gunning for a world where our eyelids are propped open with matchsticks while we watch whatever we're told to watch.
Slashdot's anti-ad rhetoric aside, content creators or rights holders have a right to monetize if they want to -- just as content consumers have a right to bypass that content. Everyone has a choice and everyone has other options.
It seems that content creators truly fail to understand that it isn't ads that caused ad-blockers. It was the ads that played loud obnoxious sounds, flashed colors that caused epileptic seizures and took up 99% of the CPU time in process (rendering the browser and sometimes my whole machine inoperable). Oh and pop-up, pop-unders deserve an honorable mention
Slashdot anti-ad brigade notwithstanding, very very few people oppose advertisement in principle, just the obnoxious and intrusive kind. If "content creators" scaled back the ads, they could keep them. They cannot win this war by escalation.
Today we as citizens can turn off the television, we can change the radio station or turn the page from advertising. We have effectively have an Opt Out in the real world.
What the marketers want to do is remove our ability to choose, they want rights in virtual space that don't exist in the real world.
My question would be two fold, Will Opt In by default also come with subsidies to the viewer for losing their ability to choose?, will marketers also be on the hook for any malware infiltrating our machines because we're forced to Opt In, when lose the freedom/ability to block potential harm that comes with some adware?
Don't ask me to waste my time. I already believe 99% of advertising is worthless, and beside that, logically, I have the right to determine what content I choose to let down the pipe I pay for, into my home and onto my screen. I don't need or want the vast majority of advertising in my consciousness because it is worthless, manipulative, purile, propagandistic drivel. Too bad for the anything that my pass the sniff test because it's such an overwhelmed minority.
Personally, I'd be happier paying a higher price for an advertisement-free internet. Perhaps someone should find a way for me and others of a like mind to opt-out altogether by creating an ISP that would compensate websites directly for ad-free traffic. It would sure beat moving to a fundamentalist Islamic state where the censors might have some actual control over the distribution of false of misleading information.
Advertisers, networks and local stations routinely screen disclaimed content where it's explicitly stated that the content does not necessarily represent the beliefs or views or management. Wouldn't it be great if there was an alternative? Personally, I'd live it if my local library, where I routinely surf the web, would block all advertising, (even if Microsoft did pull it's support of in-kind donations).
Ad Block Plus (or some facsimile) is the ONLY reasonable recourse for people who don't want to be inundated with commercial crap while they try to discern fact from fiction in the age of disinformation.
(Not that I wouldn't love to be able to return the favor and project the same flashy, moving crappy imagery through windows and onto the interior walls of each and every executive who has control over the production and distribution of said crap. Just the thought of such an option gives me a warm tingly feeling. :-) But that's not a reasonable alternative, then. Is it?)
Legally, how could a selective (not whole page/site) image blocker for blocking "objectionable" (whatever that means) content, that "happens" to block advertising be actionable?
It would be nice if AddBlock had a (temporary or per domain) stealth option: behave like it's loading and showing the ads, but not show them on screen.
If they expect users to be forced to view their ads then they should be willing to accept legal responsibility for what the servers are distributing. If the ads take up resources or serve malware and exploits then the companies should be on the hook for it.
There are sites which I would happily support by leaving the ads visible, except the ad companies have let through some seriously nasty shit.
Seriously, I don't want to travel to some nonexistent island.
What I really want is a way to tell the advertisers my advertisement acceptance policy. I want to be able to say, "no flashing text, no moving images, no sound. No click to dismiss an obnoxious add blocking most of the content". It would be great if I can also specify a few keywords for products and services I am currently planning to buy, or topics of interest too.
As long as the ads are unobtrusive, I would not mind. But the advertises seem to be hell bent on being really really obnoxious and thrust their ads in my face.
BTW on what legal grounds can the attack ad-block? Can they force me watch TV ads instead of going to the bathroom? Or mute the TV when the ads or on? Can they stop me from turning over ad pages of the magazine without looking at them? Can they stop me from throwing away the classified section of the newspaper without looking at it? What if there is a company that will offer me the service of taking my magazine and rip out every ad page in it and then giving me a much slimmed down mag to carry on airplanes?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Slashdot's anti-ad rhetoric aside, content creators or rights holders have a right to monetize if they want to
Yawn. I'll start listening to that argument when 'content creators' start selling their products. Can I buy an ad-free version of NFL games? No. I can buy ad-laden versions, or I can get ad-laden versions for free.
At some point pro-advertising people have to argue for the proposition that advertisers have an inalienable right to try to bother people with their commercial messages, and I'm willing to engage that point because I think it is wrong. I don't think they have that right -- quite the opposite in fact.
A forum where every post needs to be prefixed with "IANAL".
"iAnal"
Apple is into sex toys now?
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Sue the ad companies for knowingly enabling viruses and trojans to infect citizens computers. Billions of $ in damages and lost income over the decades.
Advertisements are a means of subsidizing the cost of free content. People produce content, and want to offer it for free, but running a server costs money (and if producing said content is their full time job and not just a hobby, then there are living expenses to be considered as well). If you want free content, then ads are inevitable.
That said, there is a right way, and a wrong way, to do online advertising. I will block any ad that involves video or sound, animated images, or if a half dozen banner ads appear on one page. I don't block text based ads, such as Google Ads, though. (Within reason, anyway.)
Basically, if your ads don't ruin my browsing experience, I won't block them. Before I had ad block, though, if your ads ruined my browsing experience, I simply would leave the site immediately and never come back.
At some point pro-advertising people have to argue for the proposition that advertisers have an inalienable right to try to bother people with their commercial messages, and I'm willing to engage that point because I think it is wrong. I don't think they have that right -- quite the opposite in fact.
I don't think advertisers have an inalienable right to anything -- if this battle turns legal, it won't be advertisers suing end users or adblock developers.
But would advertisers sue publishers or content owners if the size and nature of the audience was fundamentally misrepresented? Oh, yeah -- that already happens in the offline media world.
That threat, if it becomes more commonplace, puts pressure on publishers to make sure those ads get seen. And that's where the trouble for end users could occur.
(It's also one reason Google's pay-per-click ad revolution shook things up so much: As an advertiser, you don't care if the ad was seen 10 times or 10 million times as long as you're getting the clickthrough rate you want and ONLY paying for that clickthrough rate. As someone else in the thread said: People who use Adblock don't click on ads, so the pay-per-click model actually helps perpetuate the current state of things by taking pressure off of publishers to deliver raw impression numbers.)
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
I've never used AdBlock. I only use FlashBlock and NoScript. Yet I never see Ads.
It's bizarre beyond belief. I'll go to numerous sites where they attempt to mess up noscript by blanking out the entire site. Never though do I see image banners or even simple text ads. Website owners constantly whine about NoScript but never ever attempt to work around it.
I'm surprised not many people have mentioned the hosts file. I've been using that to block ads for over 3 years. I've never had to update the file in that time, and I never see ads (except the stupid right hand side ones in gmail), and it works the same in all browsers, and I don't have to mess around with add-ons. (Only draw-back: you need admin rights to alter the hosts file). My conclusion is: not many people care about blocking ads as much as I do, otherwise this would be better known. And if it was at all widespread then I think companies would have started circumventing it, which would be a simple matter of hosting the ads on the same server as the main content so that ad blockers couldn't easily distinguish them (okay, it's not really simple, but large companies could do it if they cared that much). Alternatively advertisers could keep switching servers to confuse the ad blockers. Are they really going to turn to legal measures before trying some relatively simple technical steps?
Maybe this is just me, but if your page has bright (or even not-so-bright) moving ads, I can not usefully read or process your content. Animated ads are simply too distracting. Clear text or static images are fine, at least until they break up the flow of the text to the point where it's unreadable. But if you've got moving pictures on your page, my choices are limited to using some form of ad blocking or leaving your useless site.
In most cases the things you're looking for can be found on many sites. If one has too many ads, go to another.
Or in the case of television, throw the bloody thing out of your window. Watching commercials and "what's coming up next" for 15 to 20 minutes per hour really is too much. Interrupting a movie with 30 minutes of crap-o-tainment crossed the line for me.
Privacy is terrorism.
The article is written as if there is such a thing is "uncurated" raw real content on the sites of major media houses and other players!
I think the major media houses outsmarted you decades ago, and moved form "unbiased content" (where the ad used to pay for the content) to "advetorials" in various shapes and forms where you can block an "explicit ad" but what you think is "content" is "paid for in some way by someone else" anyway...
I only made it to about 1:40. Adpushers claiming that people who block ads are stealing from them... but those assholes certainly aren't paying for my internet bandwidth taken by the crap they're pushing.
Is there a possibility of that being the one time pad?
I somehow fucked up. No idea how. Post ended up in the wrong post.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror_%28TV_series%29#2._.2215_Million_Merits.22
If I rip out a page in a book and replace it with one I wrote myself, is that copyright infringement?
Pirate! Off to Gitmo with you...
They must really be shiating their silky little thong panties with what Ghostery and noscript does to their tattletale code. If they have a worthwhile product I'll hear it through word of mouth or an honest report in /. or Fark.
They dont use their tools responsibly, with blinking and flashing and loops that you cant disable. So I deny them the right to reach me at all.
When hell freezes over and they make appropriate and considerate use of their access to me, mebbe I'll turn it off. Until then I will show them the same lack of consideration and appropriateness.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
I created software that bypasses adblock so people can't block ads very easily off my site, at least it's very hard to do so considering how dynamic the code is. The ads aren't intrusive, there's 3 ads maximum per page and some pages don't even have ads. They are relevant to the content on the page or site in general so it doesn't really track people's actions, just the page they're currently on. Nothing animates, flashes, or takes up the whole screen, it's just a small space and found that even though I stop the ability to block them, the click rate is a lot higher, especially since some of the ads are customized and endorsed by us (if we really like what it is). I think that's how ad delivery should be done IMO. Don't piss off people with obstructive ads is the moral of the story.
But advertisers have some sacred "right" to make a buck that's more important than me making my own decisions.
It's not some right of the advertisers that's at issue. It's about whether the author/publisher of the original work containing the link to the ads has the right to demand you view the ads that pay him if you view his work, or whether your right to cut out the ads and only view the remainder takes precedence.
Now if the advertisers and the authors really wanted to get you to see the ads, they could literally embed the text of the ad in the text of the work, rather than embedding an easy-to-filter link. (This could be done automagically at the server.) Then you'd need some serious A.I. to do the cutting. But that would also make it harder for the advertiser to track how often the ad was seen (he'd have to trust the server) and eliminate the obnoxious graphic and animated ads.
(And they ARE obnoxious. I just started a new contract and the customer's I.T. department deployed Chrome with substantially less ad protection than the firefox+adblock plus+flashblock I'm used to. Popups/overs/unders are supposedly blocked, but the animated garbage and the mouse-over stuff that pops out and covers the screen I'm trying to read are horribly annoying, and they HAVE to be sucking up a lot of network bandwidth. If advertisers had just stuck to still images scattered around the page it wouldn't have attracted so much work on countermeasures.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
What's the url? I'd like to have a look ...
The stealthy update that is Adblock Plus 2.2 disabled its own ad blocking.
I had to roll back to 2.1.2
Whenever something is coming to my web browser, I've got a right to choose how to display it how I choose, whether I want the font to be bright, green and bold, or whether I choose not to display ads, or follow the HTML that shows the ads, etc.
If you want me to buy your products, don't use online advertising, instead, create a decent enough site and decent enough prices to attract me.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Posting anon since this crowd will just downvote the sentiments. Ad blocking is the ethical equivalent to walking into a bookstore, picking up a few books off the shelves and reading through them in their entirety, then placing them back on the shelves and walking out without buying anything, even their espresso. Sure, it's not immoral and it's totally legal. But it's also just as legal (and unsurprising) for the bookstore to throw you off its premises for abusing their goodwill of allowing customers to do some reading in the store. It's an abuse of loopholes in the system for personal gain (accessing content you don't have to pay for), Ad-block users treat every website as a public library rather than a bookstore--a library paid for by another tax district than their own. I'm sure someone will try the legal work, although it's most likely to fail. That doesn't make it any more ethical. Yeah, no one likes obnoxious ads. So? Just don't get upset if more of your bookstores ban parasitic users, which they are fully within their rights to do as well. Also don't be surprised if more bookstores switch to alternative revenue to avoid such users taking advantage of their generosity. Paywall entry fees or subscriptions or micropayments. You reap what you sow.
I bought mine. I thought I had better buy it before it's outlawed.
What about flattr.com?
The internet has ads? Since when? I haven't seen an ad online since 2004 since I learned about Privoxy, and the hosts file modification, and later Ad-Block, and Ghostery. I refuse to use the internet without ad blocking. For fuck sake, I even have all ads blocked on my smartphone. I NEVER see ads online.
Get your free Dropbox account with 2 GB Free storage!
For me, adblocking is a quality of life necessity. I find any and all advertisements that I do not seek out to be irritating and distracting, and my usual response to them is an immediate visceral sense of "fuck you". I must adblock, or else I would go crazy. Any websites that I encounter that refuse to show me content without turning off adblock immediately go on my "never visit this place again" list. My frustration with ads in the in-game browser from the steam overlay led me learn about and begin using hosts files.
That said, there are two places I can think of off the top of the head where I do not mind advertising: Steam popup notices (which can be disabled with an account option at no cost) and movie theater previews (I don't watch television, so this is the only place I can find out about movies).
If adblock becomes illegal, I will become a criminal. For me, there's no other option.
You should turn signatures off.
...content providers and the advertisers they partner with are not idiots. They will realize that trying to to legally force ad blockers off the net is not going to happen, no matter how much money they throw at it -- as long as every packet is treated the same way, ads can and will be filtered and their content pirated. They learned their lessons from the recording and motion picture industry, who lost control of their distribution channel thanks to recording and networking technologies. What they will do is take control of the pipe that is carrying the content, so that they can control the distribution channel from end to end, the salient lesson to be learned from the recording and motion picture failures to adapt their business model to the internet. The internet backbone providers want this, so they already have a major ally in making that happen. Eventually, and sooner rather than later, network neutrality will be lost, and the internet will become very much a walled garden for the vast majority of our species, which is terribly, terribly sad.
Hey, I pay (well, my parents pay) for internet access. The mobile devices that have metered access should definitely be able to use adblock. Why should I have to pay for the bandwidth-usage needed to download useless javascript and useless images and useless Flash gimiickry for the pages I would like to read? Don't tell me that the page providers need the advertisers to pay for it because we the readers also pay for the bandwidth-access to read the pages. So adblock stops the hogging of my bandwidth, and on low bandwidth lines it helps speed up the download and reading. Except for the fucked up pages where if it can't reach foogle or double-click it won't load the page right or fast.
You must be new here. Anonymous Coward never reveals anything.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I don't care.. they can take their balls and go home.. I paid for my bandwidth so they can pay for theirs. I am not obligated to prop up someone's buisness model. If they hate it so much they can take their stupid shit off the fucking public network and put it behind a paywall.
The title of the FA is a question, so the answer is no.
That's what most "apps" really are. Most of them don't do much more than a web page could. But they put the content owner firmly in control of the user experience.
"Do not adjust your television. We are controlling it. We control the horizontal. We control the vertical..."
The desire of commercial agencies to cram their so-called information into our consciousness in order to elicit a desired behavior does not abridge our right to filter that so-called information with our brains ... or any tool that we may use to our advantage to keep their ceaseless baying from interrupting our reasoning, productivity and peace-of-mind. Any law that might attempt to infringe on that right richly deserves our loathing and disregard.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
Yeah, but /. has had a box up for me since two weeks after I started navigating here as a logged in user that says "hey we like you and we can turn ads off for you!", here's the actual text: /. revenue model can deal with posters being able to stop ads. And no, I didn't bother turning off the ads because since I've got noscript and adblock, I haven't seen them. And you're a logged-in user with a six-digit UID, so you've also cleared their threshold for being a "positive contributor"!!
.
Disable Advertising
As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable advertising.
;>)
So obviously, the
BTW, I've seen how atrocious the Union-trib news-site looks at school on a browser without adblock and without no-script: UGH! I can't believe people pay subscription fees to sites like WSJ or NYT and then also get flooded with flash and javascript and animating and scrolling over ads. Ri-dic-u-lous!
We'll just go back to editing the HOSTS file.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
Some years ago, the Opera web browser was ad-supported. Some websites actually blocked Opera because they figured Opera's use of Google content-related ads diminished the value of their own ads. And yes, some users liked the fact that Opera might be showing them ads for competing products, if they visited a site selling antivirus products they'd see ads related to that (typically other antivirus products). Of course, these days Opera doesn't have their own ads, though maybe there's a niche available there ...
I don't use AdBlock+ or related products, I don't mind ads that aren't obnoxious - and I use the built-in content blocker for the ones that are obnoxious and also for web trackers. If some site wants to say "If you block my ads then you can't read my content", that's their right and I'll go elsewhere if the ads they do have are too obnoxious ... which I think everyone else would too. That is, if they use obnoxious ads and require you not to block them, they'll just have fewer visitors. Self-correcting problem.
I have several websites which have been up for well over a decade and are highly rated. Last year I was laid off my job and for the first time, started putting Google ads on my pages. I'm making a few hundred dollars per month from them. Yes, people do click on ads that interest them. I use only ads which are related to the subject of the page. I try hard not to annoy my visitors, no pop ups, pop unders, no ads in the text, no flashing obnoxiousness. No tracking.
I am embarrassed to admit that I use an adblock myself. I felt hypocritical so I turned it off for awhile. OMG. I had forgotten how bad it could be out there. I certainly don't blame my visitors for using an adlocker. I try not to punish those who don't.
Generally, the webmaster decides where and what type of ads will display. Blaming the advertisers is off base as they make a variety of ad sizes and types available but the webmaster chooses how far he goes with them. Perhaps try writing an email to the webmaster telling them that you find their site too annoying to visit again.
There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
Ad blocking becoming illegal would somehow suggest that I am supposed to be subjected to ads in return for viewing a given site. As Daniel Day Lewis saud in Last of the Mohicans, "I am subject to no man..." The technology might become illegal, but its as easy as pie to ascertain the url or ip of ad servers and simply add them to a local hosts file. I refuse to be subjected to something I didn't agree to. My paying my ISP to access the Internet is payment enough.
Because that's another Billion dollar business hampered by all kind of nasty blocking and filtering schemes...
Adblocking will never be a big issue. The unwashed masses haven't even heard of it and don't consider all kind of flashing, popping-up shit with screeching sounds a problem.
That said, they can pry Adblock Plus from my cold, dead fingers.
CAPTCHA: expunge
Oh, what's this?
Yes, it's a poster advertising a Bill Hicks tour. Hypocrite that he was.
I think the fundamental reason why the world-wide web has become so swamped in ads is the centralized distribution model, where you upload your files to a single (or a few) servers, and your users then communicate with that server, putting it under increasingly heavy load as your number of users grows. This means that it becomes more and more expensive to host files as the number of users increases. Advertisement currently offsets this by being a source of income that scales in exactly the same way. Hence, by allowing advertisers to pollute your site, you no longer have to worry that it will become so popular that you can no longer pay for it.
A peer-to-peer replacement for HTTP would stop the hosting costs from scaling with the number of users, and hence remove the main reason for putting advertisements on your pages. Bit-torrent has already solved this problem for the hosting of large files (though it is horribly underutilized), but it cannot replace HTTP due to its very high latency and high overhead for small files. To my knowledge there currently exists no peer-to-peer algorithm that could do the job, but I am convinced that one could be constructed.
If we were to get such an algorithm (and it managed to gain popularity), I'm sure we would see advertisements disappear from most non-corporate sites.
Isn't it?
John Bokma (834313) wrote: "Advertising is always obnoxious no matter how subtle it's done."
So advertising that annoys is annoying advertising. Lucky we had you around to point that out, eh?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's funny when you think that this shinny new business model depends so much on our lack of freedom. Litigating against it will be almost as evil, as backward thinking, as the RIAA suing "pirates".
In a country where Internet Access is metered by usage forcing me to watch advertisements amounts to theft.
ESPECIALLY considering that MOST advertisements are obscenely huge either actual VIDEO or else more often HUGE flash files.
My obviously well documented history of flat out REFUSING to return to a site which either FORCES me to view ads or where I cannot successfully filter the ads shows that I have NO INTENTION of actually defrauding anyone of anything.
Legally, sites do NOT have a leg to stand on.
If your advertisements were NOT huge data-hogs and visually offensive (NB the advertising industry at one point claimed that lack of click-through was due to people not noticing their ads, which quite frankly FAILS THE LAUGH TEST) then I wouldn't be blocking them (eg Google text ads).
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
And I'll decide if I want to pay for admission.
Guess what: I don't.
I really can't see why I'd want to pay to access any website over the price of the ISP service. And the price on that is getting more than I can be bothered to pay for the limited utility I get from it.
We already have a legal Ad Block for traditional mail in the form of a sticker that can be placed on or near your mailbox. If placed it 'blocks' commercial folders.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
9gag is a good example. ... users post images they found on the net, without thinking about copyright.
They have stolen content, put a watermark on it and present it with a lot of ads and facebook embedding.
They do not even steal it by themself, they let their userbase post stolen content there.
This would not be such a big deal, sites like soup are just the same
But putting a watermark on a image where you do not own the copyright is not just ignorance, but intent.
And then a lot of ads, and login only via facebook. That speaks for itself.
There was once one site, which blocked all firefox users, and demanded the adblock developer to put "adblock" into the user agent so he can just block adblock users instead of all firefox users.
1 make advertisers legally liable for attack ads
2 no more than 1 video/animation (no sound unless its set to manual play) per page
3 no more than 15% of a given page can be add/crosslink content and no more than 3% of the first "frame" can be ads
4 No cutting content into multiple pages to increase the number of ad slots if the non ad text is less than a half page of text on US standard 8.5X11 in a reasonable type then you can not break it into multiple pages.
5 any attempt to trick or force the user into clicking the ad is now a FEDERAL FELONY (the person in charge of the ad campaign goes on the hook personally for this part) with a minimum sentence of 10 years.
6 sliding frames and popup windows are now BANNED for the purpose of surveys/ads unless they are deliberately clicked for
7 "social networking" bars must collapse to a single icon/image and require a click to open (then another click to use)
8 no more than 25% of the total data sent on the page can be ad content (non ad streamed content count the first 5 seconds for this)
this is the only way i would accept not being able to do ad blocking/[redacted] filtering
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
This is simply another battle in the ongoing war against general-purpose computing.
The root of the problem is that far too many computers are powerful and flexible enough to allow ad blocking, copyright-protected file sharing, and other kinds of highly inappropriate mischief.
There is no reason for computers to be that powerful and flexible. They only need to implement the specific applications that people should be running. Any additional flexibility beyond that will end up putting tools in the hands of troublemakers -- and nobody needs that.
Don't worry -- all the applications that you legitimately need to use will always be available. They will be available on specially-designed machines that have all the necessary controls in place to ensure that the Internet will remain a safe, secure, and successful environment.
Lately have you ever looked at dozens of the most popular websites for gaming and other popular and or common interests? They are chock full of obnoxious text, graphic, flash, popups and popunders also tracking code and other ads that just drive you fucking nuts and slow down page load. I went from using proxy based web filtering to remove ads to adblock plus in firefox because the way i see it im not fucking being paid to load your stupid ass ads especially with video and audio streams when i want to watch fucking tv online and have 10 popups.. adblock plus with a good filter like fanboy or easylist blocks all that shit.
Also dont they realize if they sued the makers of adblock plus into the ground another alternative would pop up to do the same exact thing? So yea advertisers can stfu and go die.
a) An ad-block type addon does not download the ad so the user does not see it b) An ad-block type addon tells the browser that the ad should be downloaded later/at lower priority and not shown to the user. In case b) it might be slightly slower for you (or not), but you would be just as happily ignorant, and the advertiser would have no idea that you actually didn't look at it. I expect we will see b) appear if need be.
See subject.
AdBlock no longer blocks all ads by default (and those who own them know most folks won't change the default thinking it's same as it used to be but it is not), and Ghostery tracks you (same deal here, by default, via ghostrank). The foxes guard your henhouse.
AdBlock no longer blocks all ads by default (and those who own them know most folks won't change the default thinking it's same as it used to be but it is not), and Ghostery tracks you (same deal here, by default, via ghostrank). The foxes guard your henhouses...
AdBlock no longer blocks all ads by default (and those who own them know most folks won't change the default thinking it's same as it used to be but it is not), and Ghostery tracks you (same deal here, by default, via ghostrank). The foxes guard your henhouses people.
AdBlock no longer blocks all ads by default (and those who own them know most folks won't change the default thinking it's same as it used to be but it is not), and Ghostery tracks you (same deal here, by default, via ghostrank). The foxes guard your henhouses people!
AdBlock doesn't block all ads anymore by default (& the marketers that own them know most folks won't change that default assuming adblock works FULLY, like it used to, but not anymore) + Ghostery tracks you, by default (via 'ghostrank' & by default too, same reasoning as above for adblock by the nefarious sneaks known as marketers). They bought them out (or rather, both AdBlock + Ghostery "souled-out", for lack of a better expression here).
AdBlock doesn't block all ads anymore by default (& the marketers that own them know most folks won't change that default assuming adblock works FULLY, like it used to, but not anymore) + Ghostery tracks you, by default (via 'ghostrank' & by default too, same reasoning as above for adblock by the nefarious sneaks known as marketers). They bought them out (or rather, both AdBlock + Ghostery "souled-out", for lack of a better expression here). Foxes guard your adblock/ghostery henhouses.
AdBlock doesn't block all ads anymore by default (& the marketers that own them know most folks won't change that default assuming adblock works FULLY, like it used to, but not anymore) + Ghostery tracks you, by default (via 'ghostrank' & by default too, same reasoning as above for adblock by the nefarious sneaks known as marketers). They bought them out (or rather, both AdBlock + Ghostery "souled-out", for lack of a better expression here). Foxes guard your adblock/ghostery henhouses, in case you didn't realize it already.
I block ads because I want to block third-party tracking. This was the point I made back when Ars had a good cry over this a year or two ago. I don't care so much about ads as I do about Google analytics etc tracking me. (Well, I don't like ads, either.) Blockers are blocking more than just ads.
"potentially billions of dollars of online ad revenue"
Well, they might just wake up, drink some coffee, become sober, and realise that loosing some revenue might be preferable over loosing the users. Also, they just might become even smarter, think it through, and realise that those people who are blocking the ads are users who wouldn't click on their ads anyway. You know, there's a reason they're blocking those ads: they don't want to see them, let alone click on them.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
AdBlock Plus is fairly benign, if the advertisers stop to think about it. It permits exceptions, and allows users to temporarily unblock ads. If the advertisers run it out of business, I can always put into place alternatives to it. A DNS wildcard zone file that resolves all hosts in a domain to the router, a small HTTP/HTTPS server that returns "404 Not Found" for all requests, and an afternoon's work to cons up a script to convert a list of advertiser domains into named.conf syntax is all it takes to make their domains cease to exist completely as far as the local network's concerned. And it's fairly easy to add that to a flash image for most consumer routers, not much harder to add in an automatic update of the blackhole named.conf snippet from my server.
No, the average user won't be able to do any of that. They don't have to. They complain about ads to their techie friend, he offers to upgrade their router to eliminate the problem, from their point of view the problem ceases to be. And instead of one organization to deal with when it comes to ad blocking, now they have innumerable unidentified techies and modified routers and no way to argue their case with each individual consumer.
I think the advertisers ought to think about something: it's a lack of discretion that's brought things to this point. They couldn't be happy with only a few people blocking their ads, they had to get louder and more obnoxious in an attempt to force everybody to look at them and in the process convinced more and more people to use more and more effective blocking methods. So they want to continue getting ever more obnoxious? Not likely to do any better than it has to date. I'd liken it to the door-to-door salesman: when the homeowner says "Sorry, not interested." and starts to close the door, ramming your shoulder into the door and forcing it back open is not going to win you a second hearing and a sale. And if you take it any further in your attempts to force your way in and force the homeowner to listen to you, you run the risk of the homeowner calling the cops on you and really ruining your day.
worst case scenario, they'll try to make ad blocking illegal. when that fails, they'll do one of three things:
1. They'll stop advertising on the internet, or -
2. They'll find a way around ad blocking, such as having ads put directly into static web pages before they're served, so that there is no way to block them by simply blacklisting domains, etc.
3. They'll demand lower prices for advertising since fewer eyeballs are actually looking at them.
Just possibly, they'll do a combination of the above, or find some even more insidious way to get their advermessage out, via product placements in videos, or subliminal messages.
So obviously, the /. revenue model can deal with posters being able to stop ads.
Nonsense.
For /. to work, they have to sell ad space -- and they have to have visitors. The main draw here has always been high-quality user comments. Those comments bring eyeballs which see ads, and ads pay the bills. The people who produce those comments, however, are a fairly small percentage of the eyeballs in question, so it made sense to offer to forgo the ad revenue from them in order to encourage them to keep producing content.
I also have, and use, the checkbox. But the vast majority of slashdot readers are not posters, and they don't get the checkbox.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Its only illegal in the moment when you do it (and redistribute it again?), not the tool as such.
Unless the publisher's counsel advances a legal theory based on contributory infringement of copyright or on distributing tools to circumvent protection afforded by technical measures.
Don't hijack it. It will only aggravate me. If I want to buy something, I'll visit you.
~
I follow technology news, so when I see a new product that interests me, I will GO LOOK for it. I don't need companies throwing constant ads in my face for stuff I don't want. Most of the time they just annoy me and make me less likely to buy their product in the future, such as with forced trailers on DVDs/BluRays (Yes, I'm talking to YOU Disney).
My personal theory is that advertising is like The Force - it has a strong effect on the weak-minded.
but it is one of those things i don't argue seriously because those who are against adblock are being hit the hardest, with bandwidth that isn't enough and soon to mean on mobile and having technical problems as well as financial ones for seeing too many and so it won't be what i say that would change their mind buy maybe by the renewed interest of marketers though i run the risk of this becoming socialized and taking out frustration on the non-'cool' people who just don't get the trend of being exploited by marketers
It may be possible to stop automated ad blocking software, but not ad source detection. As long as ad networks have separate IPs from the content they are interrupting, it will be as simple as copying and pasting a block of text into your hosts file to do the actual blocking.
No way in hell will they be able to make a law to force you to see content without identifying it's origin - and that's what it would take.
I can't believe how many people here feel so entitled to free content, free of ads.
Look, the websites are providing you content in exchange for receiving the ads. If you don't like the ads so much, the *right* thing to do is to send an email to the publisher and stop visiting the site until the reduce the obnoxiousness of the ads.
Stripping the ads may not be illegal or stealing, but you are receiving the content in a manner such that the publishers aren't getting paid for your viewing.
So ya, think only about yourself and strip those ads, or think about other viewers, and those who worked and invested in the site and decide you'll endure the horrible torture that is a friggin' ad.
Oh, and keep in mind that technology will always be a cat and mouse game. Ad strippers will advance and so will the advertisers. This is why the *really* obnoxious ads are fully gated, pre-roll, embedded, or breaking the wall between editorial and paid content. So keep it up, and things will only get worse.
All this said, I'm not for legislation, but come on people, be reasonable here and think a little bit more about what is right or wrong versus your own self interest and sense of entitlement.
Copyright law: it could be claimed that ad blocking constitutes copyright infringement, by causing unauthorised modification to a web page (which in many cases will be protected by copyright) – that is, it creates an unauthorised adaptation of the page. As mentioned above, this has been the basis of television commercial-skipping lawsuits, and has received supportive comment from US courts.
Well, try suing us for running Lynx then, motherfuckers. Suing over choice of web browser... now that would be pure insanity.
Web browsers are designed to simply render web pages. If you don't like your pages being rendered in custom ways to the preference of the machine's user, then do us all a favor and take your web site off the fucking Internet.
Actual hot metal branding of corporate logos. I see nothing wrong with that business model.
I'm driving down the street. Suddenly the ad-fairy shits on my windshield! I have to stop, get out, clean the windshield, and only then can I continue on my way. No sooner do I get going again, than another ad-fairy shits on my windshield. Rinse and repeat, and I never do get to my destination.
How is that any different from how ads behave on some websites? Those are the ones that generated blocking in the first place.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
How's blocking ads in your browser any different than:
1. Getting up to take a shit during a commercial break on TV
2. Skipping commercials with a DVR or VCR?
3. Visually ignoring ads in the paper - or tossing aside the ad circulars that come with the paper
4. Turning down the radio in the car or changing stations during commercials
5. Using a SPAM filter for my e-mail client
6. Watching PBS
The biggest reason why I run Firefox with AdBlock Plus isn't so much the visual distraction - but it's the bandwidth and system resources that ads tie up and crashes the browser.
The websites will find ways around the ad blocks, and the ad blocks will find ways to block the ad block blocks... cat and mouse. No different than anti-virus software. Just a matter of staying one step ahead of the other guy.
Personally, I'd be fine with *some* ads... for example, if I'm always talking about guns on Facebook, then show me ads from gun and gun accessory manufacturers. Otherwise, I don't need to see any dick pill ads.
Sure - there's ways around it - encode the ad into the webpage so it's an integral part of the content - not just a pointer to an ad farm. Clever product placement. Co-branding. Etc... etc...
It's not about clicking the ads, it's about the impressions. Oftentimes the ads are about increasing awareness of a brand's existence.
Occasionally I turn off AdBlock, because it reinforces which brands I will not support.
With AdBlock, at least the turkeys have a fair chance of getting my money.
There are already enough laws on the books about cost-shifted advertising in most countries that any outfit who tried to get ad blockers taken off the market could force regulatory hands enough to implode the entire business. When a website owner pays all my costs, then he has the option of forcing ads on me. It's worth noting that ad-supported business models don't usually do too well on the internet. They're tolerated up to a point but pushing beyond that results in the targets kicking back - hard.
Internet ads are like newspaper ads. We tune our minds to ignore them. So it makes no difference if we block or not. I block because a site will load faster.
I use ad block plus to block a picture at the top of a forum I read. Not because it is an advertisement but because it takes up screen space on my netbook.
So not just for advertisements - rename it stuff block plus.
So if I tear pages out of a magazine or book that have advertisements on it, I am violating copyright? If I change the channel or go to the bathroom while an advertisement is on TV, I am violating copyright? Is it possible that some lawyer somewhere will convince a judge somewhere that this is true? If so, it won't change a thing.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
boycott the advertisers products. do not purchase said product until such time as they remove the ads. simple to do. do not purchase anything advertised on the web.
If advertisers got rid of marketers who try to sell to people what they do not want, and made what people wanted, then people ewuld seek out their ads. The customer is always right and will win in the end.
Ray Tomes http://ray.tomes.biz
Fuck off and stop jamming up my memory/browser with stupid ads......
You make an exception file in Windows Defender on Windows 8 (the exception being your custom hosts file) - problem solved.
I use Flashblock on my copy of Firefox, which is why I haven't really found much of a need to install ABP. But I've found that a lot of sites are useless until I add them to Flashblock's whitelist.
I loathe online advertising. It's a security risk. It's obnoxious. It steals resources that I already pay for. I will block advertising using every available hosts file, browser add-on, firewall that I can. I always assist friends and family who want it blocked.
...if you block ads:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+ChrisPirillo/posts/CmNNmMBASPB#+ChrisPirillo/posts/CmNNmMBASPB
Chris Pirillo blocked me (oh the irony!) after I replied to his taunt with some legitimate reasons ad blocks can be used.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion
People want free/cheap service. Service costs to provide. Providers put ads up to generate revenue so they can offer service cheap or free. People don't
want ads, so they block them, using that providers resources but denying any income to cover expenses. Result, free/cheap service goes away.
This is no different than the national "do not call" registry against telemarketers. Instead of ad company's qqing they should create more innovative ways to entice people to click or follow a link or ad.
And in the meantime, I predict that websites will realize paywalls and subscriptions will eliminate 95% of their readers, and quickly go under.
The second prediction is that the sites that survive will do so a) because the owner actually WANTS the site to exist, and pays for it out of his own pocket (such as my own completely ad-free webcomic), or b) because they... y'know... sell shit, and make money by exchanging money for goods and services. Rumour has it that business model still exists somewhere or another. Or failing those, c) their website is more of a convenience for people to get updates/information/etc, and the actual money-making venture takes place in real life. Such as websites for events, etc. Or musicians (or rather, how they SHOULD be making their money... putting their music online for free so people actually know and perhaps CARE WHO THE FUCK THEY ARE, and making their money by playing live, just like 99% of all not-owned-by-big-media-quadruple-platinum bands do).
The internet existed before retarded ads filling every square inch of blank space. Not like it'll magically vanish if people block ads.
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3270675&cid=42081935
It doesn't work that way. I'll disagree to your stupid fucking terms AND I'll fucking have your page any way I like it. Bitch.
...I realize that's the point of them being animated, but when I am trying to read an article or watch a Youtube video, my eyes are instictively drawn to the dancing "shadow people", supposedly overjoyed because of "low mortgage rates in my area"! I have never, nor will I ever, click on one of those ads, nor would I ever even consider purchasing any of their products! Old-fashioned, non-moving banner ads, however, I can have respect for; I can glance at them once, without anger, and if it's for a normal product that I might purchase (by bricks or clicks), then I'll consider it. But animated ads distract me so much that all I'll do is block them.
Good companies find clever, interesting ways to advertise.
Bad companies stick with annoying banner ad type stuff.
The only ones in any possible "jeopardy" are the bad companies. People will *find* the good ones. So if anyone's going to sue, it's just the ones with a bad marketing model.
I am not devoid of humor.
Advertising is so prevalent, it is now the largest chunk of information people receive, the strongest influence on their thinking. Mass education based on falsehoods. As soon as all of humanity gets technology to selectively receive *only* the information it deems useful, we will get rid of mass brainwashing. Perhaps elections will be only debates people *choose* to see, no advertising. All product design will be made to create good products, not rely on tricking people into buying it. Without ad-sponsored junk, media might be made only for sale, like movies, only high-quality stuff will make the cut.