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.
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
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
Do not outsource your Ad Delivery and deliver Ad and Content from the same domain.
It's Bill Hicks. Worth watching.
--
BMO
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 .....
Maybe not such a crazy idea. Maybe it's time to start laying criminal charges against the sites that deliver malware
the above is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect that of the little voices in my head
...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.
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.
how about everytime a site delivers malware to a computer through ads
Does this really happen?
I'm online hours per day, have no adblocker, and zero malware. Now granted my Windows PCs are patched up to date, but still...?
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--
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.
It does, its even happened to major sites like the NYT in the past.
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.
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.
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?
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.
With home bandwidth getting higher
For you. Not everybody happens to live within range of fiber to the home. Nor does everybody happen to do all their web browsing at home; some people browse using a cellular connection on the public transit commute to and from work.
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 ----
You could also get a computer (or person) to block ads in a magazine on your behalf, so you never have to see them at all.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
With home bandwidth getting higher
For you. Not everybody happens to live within range of fiber to the home. Nor does everybody happen to do all their web browsing at home; some people browse using a cellular connection on the public transit commute to and from work.
This implies that one would need no less than FTTH speeds just to surf the web *without* AdBlock. Has it gotten *that* bad? (I wouldn't know, since I use AdBlock.)
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
If the site you are talking to is, say, having your client make asynchronous javascript requests to the server and fill in assorted requisite fields in your visible web page, then there's not really any way, programatically, to tell on the client side whether any given content you receive will be useful content from the site or if it will be advertisements. If you have javascript disabled, you won't be able to view the content at all.
Of course, you can choose to simply not bother to visit websites that do that sort of thing, but I highly doubt they will miss your business, since you weren't going to generate any revenue for them anyways.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't block ads. I block OFFSITE ads. This has an important LEGAL aspect. I do not want third parties to see my browsing habits. Offsite ads let them do that. But any legal action against the site I visited is weak because of the subtle difference between whether my browser is providing that info to the third party (even if under the direction of the web site I visited) or the web site itself is. If a web site inserts ads (or doesn't) and they provide information to their advertisers about what I visit, then it is that web site that is violating my privacy (unless they disclosed this practice in an obvious way and I continued on their site knowing this).
This is one reason why I say that web browsers should have a simple to use configuration setting that can allow the user to decide what action to take for various classes of offsite media. Embedded media is one class. Javascript loading is another. Following links is another. Action choices would at least include ignore, ask, proceed. The settings can be per web site with a default for TLDs and all. A list of hostname components to ignore when matching site names would start with just "www" in it (so "www.slashdot.org" is considered the same as "slashdot.org" so "adserver.slashdot.org" would be consider as onsite for "www.slashdot.org").
At least with ONSITE ads, web sites become more responsible for the abusiveness of ads shown when you visit their site. And they become more responsible when private browsing info is released to those advertisers (aside from actually clicking on the ads). FYI, I also think browsers should give users the option to suppress referring the URL when jumping to another site (or even all the time for that matter).
Ad supported web sites then get as much opportunity to be supported by ads. They just have to play responsibly to do so, and not just give away to others the easy opportunity to abuse.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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.
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"!!
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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!
I remember in the '90s surfing the net on the T1 (1.5Mbps) at work. It was awesome, pages were instant, it quick, responsive, and enjoyable. Now surfing on a T1 isn't fast at all. The HTML on this page is 400KB alone, without compression, and with fast RTT that's still a 3 second download, then all the external calls to ads (which ./ doesn't have too many), the size can easily reach 700KB. It's not hard to find pages that load many MBs of data. If it's all coming off one server with keep-alives, it's not too bad, but the external calls to piles of different servers each with there own TCP and HTTP handshake it's a different story.
Just surf with almost all ads blocked for a while, then go back to no ads blocked. It's like two different internets.
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"
Yes, quite often. The most annoying offenders pop up the full screen shit saying in big scary letters that you have a virus and that bad things are going to happen if you don't clean it (install their program). These tend to reopen themselves again and again unless you kill the browser off. The worst offenders target Flash exploits to auto-install their payload.
These kinds of attack have hit almost every big site. Sometimes it makes major news stories.
https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9200899/Google_Microsoft_ad_networks_briefly_hit_with_malware
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.
Oh, what's this?
Yes, it's a poster advertising a Bill Hicks tour. Hypocrite that he was.
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.
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
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.
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.
"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.
You know what is funny? I've just checked my settings, and it indeed says that some ads are allowed. Yet I haven't seen any web ad for years (except when not browsing from my own browser). Which must be because RequestPolicy and NoScript are quite effective at blocking the ads which wouldn't be blocked by AdBlock.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
...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
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.
I know. I opted out of GhostRank (never opted in, actually) and I clicked the proper checkbox in Adblock to block everything.
The war is ongoing, and you can expect further moves by both sides.
...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.