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French ISP Blocking Web Ads By Default
New submitter GavrocheLeGnou writes "The french ISP 'Free.fr' is now blocking ads from Adsense and other providers by default for all its subscribers. The option can be turned off globally, but there's no whitelist (Google translation of French original). From the article: 'Because the service doesn’t offer a whitelist (contrary to Adblock, a service I’ve used for years), this means that it is an all or nothing choice, activated by default to block everything. And since it is not only internet, but TV and phone lines running through the FreeBox, it’s possible that, if left unchecked, Free could beginning blocking TV ads, or phone calls from known spam hotlines. While this seems like a potentially beneficial service, there’s no doubt that it’s biting at the heels of several sectors who rely on advertisement to make money, let alone the advertisers themselves who pay to reach an audience, and are blocked at the door.'"
They should advertise more on the internet.
About bloody time, too. The Internet is not for advertising.
The adblocking war just went nuclear!
I wonder what the media/advertising uber-cartel's response will be? "No media for you!"? Lawsuits galore?
I'm gonna pop some popcorn and pull up a comfy chair. This...could...be...AMAZING.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
The ISP gets its money by selling Internet access to his paying customers, not by allowing all the ad crap to sneak through.
Blocking the crap is just value added to their clients service IMHO.
I certainly wish there was such a convenient ISP service near home.
I would pay additional money for services like this, in the US. Maybe not for internet, since adblock does a fine job at preventing my consciousness from being polluted by bullshit. But for things like Hulu, or TV...
My wife watches Hulu when she wants to see something that I haven't set up to be auto-pirated with sickbeard/sabnzb/couchpotato. It amazes me the crap people will allow into their brains. "You could save fifteen percent on car..." "FUCK OFF, I'm already a Geico customer, WHY DO I HAVE TO HEAR THIS SHIT?!"
I won't pay for Cable TV but I probably would if I could get TV without advertising.
Yeah, yeah, the industry is driven by advertising, blah blah, guess what, I don't give a shit, totally not my problem, if they want my money, they can start by providing a service that I want. TV with ads? Do not want. I'll keep giving my money to a premium usenet provider, thanks.
If you are a water vendor and it begins to rain, you need a new business model.
I fail to see the downside.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Hope we get these with our porn filters in the UK
Free is a major French ISP, also just breaking into the mobile phone market with rock-bottom prices. They've always been at the forefront of the price war, and without them we probably still wouldn't have $40 ADSL with unlimited phone, TV..., nor $27/month for mobile with unlimited data/voice/texts, and no restrictions on VOIP, tethering... full net neutrality in fact. So up to now, they've undoubtedly been Good Guys.
They have a long-standing dispute with Google though, about who should pay for bigger tubes between their servers and YouTube, which is unusable at peak time for Free subscribers. Free have been advising their clients to use Dailymotion instead, and don't want to pay for extra bandwidth. Free users are very dissatisfied, and this is becoming a *major* issue.
The ad-blocking move, which seems right now to target mainly Google, is probably mostly a bargaining chip to get Google to pay for better YouTube access for Free.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
This probably cuts the ISP's network traffic in half.
There will be screams from advertisers. Tough. Nobody is forcing you to run a web site supported by third-party ads. This doesn't affect web sites that sell their own products, from Amazon on down. It doesn't affect search much, although it may impact Google's AdSense business. Bing; not so much. Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Dell, HP, etc. don't run third party ads on their own sites. Facebook runs their own ads on their own site.
It might impact low-rent sites like Slashdot, bloggers who want to get paid for their blithering, and other minor annoyances. But the web can run just fine without third-party ads.
Even advertisers may benefit. About 80% of third-party ad clicks come from a small number of users, under 20%, who will click on anything and buy almost nothing. Many SEO experts advise their Google advertisers to opt out of the "Google content network" and just run ads that appear with search results. Search ads appear when someone is looking for the item of interest and likely to buy. AdSense ads are just noise.
the injected ad can be instead injected at the sever? Done so the ad will become part of the actual content and adblock can do nothing about it...
Free.fr wants google to pay for the Youtube content going through its pipes. As google refused they went nuclear, quite a clever move thus dangerous for the net neutrality
While all the posts here so far are in favor of this move, it is a very bad thing, and not just for the publishers that depend on ad revenue. If my browser has requested data from the internet, by default the ISP's job is to faithfully forward those requests and the responses to me, not to selectively block, modify, or even inspect the packets I have sent. To do otherwise is a violation of network neutrality.
This is bad because it can be abused by the ISP to serve their goals, and not that of the user. For example, in this case the founder of Free, Xavier Niel, is also a partial owner of the newspaper Le Monde, and by some reports ads are not being blocked on that site, while they are on others. Other accounts give different results with ad blocking, so that may not be intentional, but regardless it is a good hypothetical example of why this can be a very bad idea. It is one thing if the ISP offers additional services that the user can opt-in to use, but very different if they require users to opt-out (many of whom may not even know/understand that the ISP is modifying their traffic).
It seems that at advertising based culture is willing to tolerate advertisements in exchange for content. Coming from a non advertisement based culture and based on what I've seen I'm prepared to consume free culture and do without the rest.
I like sharing what I do and sharing what others wish to share. I'm not interested contributing to... well whatever you call everything that isn't that. However they seem to get a bit bolshy when you say so.
What would be the point of blocking TV ads? Unlike on web sites there's no other content when ads are being broadcast (some might say there's not very much content between the ads on most channels anyway...). And presumably TV channels would be much happier not to be available on Free than websites would, so it would likely backfire anyway. The spam hotline idea should be the default! Do ad companies really complain about people's evil spam filters on their email accounts?
My town recently passed a law blocking people from defecating in peoples yards and spitting in their faces at random. One can opt out of the new law (and continue being spat at) completely, however there is no whitelist for white listing positive spitters and defecators that I do want to receive spit from. This means that its either an all or nothing choice, activated by default to block everything.
While this seems like a potentially beneficial service, there's no doubt that it's biting at the heels of several sectors who rely on cleaning up shit and spit to make money, let alone the spitters and defecators themselves who try hard to eat and drink as much as possible to reach an audience, and are now blocked at the door.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Which i have to pay as well to receive. Even if don't want their crap, it eats at my bandwidth cap, and if i go over, i have to pay actual cash just to get their garbage..
It would be trivially easy for a large content provider (Disney, News Corp, Time Warner, etc.) to simply say "you block my ads, I block your customers" and proceed to block access from any IP addresses within this ISP's allocated range.
This would be far more interesting if the ISP in question had a significant user base (to the point where the game of chicken would have consequence for both parties).
A niche ISP such as this with a globally insignificant user base can't survive with such a policy in place unless their users don't care about accessing big media sites. They will hemorrhage users until they remove the ISP-level blocking feature and the large content providers unblock their IP block.
Sites could still have sponsorships and/or ads without the ad-network, and the only way to block that is if the ad is in the same box all the time.
Big sites can afford to do that, small sites that just join the ad-network and can't find interested companies on their own will hurt.
We don't have a real answer for how to properly fund websites yet.
I cannot help but feeling pissed of each time I buy one film and am forced to endure minutes of ads against pirating (But I even paid the bloody thing!) or for films I will not see or for violent films when the DVD contains a cartoon for the kids.
And have you noticed all those films on the walls for things you do not want nor ear about? They have been flourishing in Paris lately. They catch your eyes, because your eyes will look at moving things, however hard you try to ignore them. The ad industry has become a sheer nuisance.
Meanwhile, as a Free.fr subscriber, I am not so sure the move is smart, especially since it would be activated by default (one has to reboot the box to upgrade the firmware, and I do it twice a year or so, haven't done it yet).
I do accept some dose of advertisement on sites, but no flash by default, Flashblock is my friend. That suffices me up to now. Manwhile, I would appreciate Porn blocking, by default. All ads? Perhaps too bold a move.
I am not Remy Mouton, unfortunately: http://remy.mouton.free.fr/art/
Opt in if you want ads
I would not use an isp that thought they had the right to alter my free and unfettered access to the internet in a y way shape or form.
The internet would be awesome without ads.
EVERYTHING EVER turns to crap once the advertising shows up and becomes a major player.
newspapers, radio, tv, cable tv, magazines, movies, dvds, the internet, my motherfucking phone with the spam sms and calls.
Fuck them and everything about those advertising assholes. Nobody wants that shit. We don't need that shit. And we WERE better off without it. Every single fucking time. Does nothing but drive people away. Everything you touch turns to shit and a chore to find the content thru the garbage.
It's just so bizarre we havent outlawed it yet. Instead of letting them ruin everything that comes along.
Too bad Comcast doesn't offer packages like that...
Use a VPN. Don't let your ISP screw with your traffic.
Not that I support it, but it shouldn't be much problems to stop delivering to the IP range from this ISP for french newspapers. It's really a short-lived story for the customers of this ISP.
I assume this is some sort of attack on Google given they're the biggest advertiser on the internet. Does anyone know more about the reasoning behind this? I can't believe it's just to help their customers.
You can turn adblocking off. Versus a non-neutral net where you can't do a damn thing over how your ISP shapes your traffic. Big difference. Or would say Dish networks recent attempts to automatically remove ads is not neutral?
Like to confuse the issue, huh? I swear some of you people are just astroturfers with a brain. Half a brain though.
Offtopic.. mod me to oblivion.. but has everyone else noticed all the new ads on slashdot since the buyout? In Opera, I even get a popup download warning from some push file ad something.. the load time has gotten spam-crazy-3rd party-riffic.. and yes.. I have all the requisite add-ons.. I just watch the status bar going nuts while the page loads..
As long as the end user gets the choice whether to use the service or not I'm 100% behind this. The internet is not "Web TV". It's not "Web newspapers". It's the internet. The user gets to decide what to see.
Don't like it ? Don't put your stuff on the internet. We won't miss you. Bye.
...France is a 1st world country. Finally, they no longer have to endure the mockery and stand proud in
their 1st class citizenship with other world class countries in this world we live in.
What?
They didn't meat to?
Nevermind.
As soon as you have convinced everyone that ads on the Internet is a good thing, the spammers will come knocking on your door asking for the same treatment.
Checkout adtrap:
http://www.getadtrap.com/
You missed the kickstarter for it, but I think still available for pre-order?
Complexity Happens
But... Advertisement (Marketing) is what drives the (global) economy. The economy runs on marketing creating a "want" out of thin air which creates commerce. Everything else just supports that consumerism.
Even toilet paper is advertised (Charmin Bear Commercials, as an example) but it doesn't need to be because you need to wipe your *** everyday you stay alive to get that next thing you don't actually need. Same with toothe paste, electric bills, and *credit cards*... all things we may not want but *need* in western society, to at least maintain our current lifestyle. Food? You need so McD's actually gets a pass as they are trying to shift your pre-existing need in their favor. But if you want to enjoy your crappy McD's you better brush often and stock lots of toilet paper. If you are using a credit card to buy food, you are already a victim.
So, yeah, this seems like a great idea but on a large scale its going to disrupt economies.
What's the big deal? If people don't mind getting phone calls during dinner from telemarketers pushing the latest "male enhancement" scam, they can always uncheck the box.
France is now a communist state, so don't be surprised with all We Know Better, censorship and Internet regulating stuff.
Blocking the crap is just value added to their clients service IMHO.
I'm not so keen to have my ISP define the word "crap" for me, but since it's an opt in thing all it will do is cut out 5% of the advertisers audience who would do it via their own ad-blockers anyway, sending ads to that 5% is counter-productive. It's like delivering junk snail mail to a "no junk mail" box, you know the recipient will just get angry at you. Advertisers (as opposed to ad distributors) may actually benefit from those people excluding themselves from that particular medium, it will be the middle men like Google who have to work a bit harder.
A similar thing exists in many countries in the form of government mandated "child friendly filters", schools, libraries,etc are compelled to use the filter, ISP's are compelled by law to offer it to subscribers who want it. The filter here in Oz sees about 5% of internet subscriptions opting in (about the same percentage who wanted it to be mandatory), that figure is pretty stable from one country to another in the western world. I suspect this scheme will see a similar uptake from their subscribers, so I doubt it will ever have a major effect on the advertising industry, even if it becomes the norm for ISP's to offer that kind of service.
OTOH, if it was opt-out, they really would be inviting a corporate bitch fight rather than simply offering a service.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Site operators will block content if ads aren't served. Today, some sites will deliberately not function when ad blocking is detected, but this is not yet wide-spread. That policy is going to become ubiquitous if ISPs start blocking ads for all users.
Right now the arms race between advertisers and ad blockers is low intensity because ad blocking is limited to a small fraction of content consumers. Now that ISPs are monkeying around with ad blocking the race will escalate. The advertisers are going to demand that sites withhold content to ad blockers. They are paying the bills so one guess how that's going to go.
Enjoy your advertising-enforced interwebs.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
They just did!
Remember good French Slashdot readers, it is the French ISP Free.fr that is doing this! What Free.fr is doing might be controversial! But never ever forget that Free.fr is innovating in the internet marketing space!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
... for paid DVDs?
This should be taken care of by the Doctrine of First Sale. Someone should be able to buy the DVDs, strip out the annoying bits (e.g. by restamping them on a new 50c disk and destroying the original), and reselling them. If someone sold an intentionally defective product in any other industry, this is exactly what would happen (and, because of this, no one would try in the first place). But somehow, copyright has been expanded to prevent this sort of free-market solution...
Is it possible to block that ISP from visiting your site?
Adverts are little attention-getters that push buttons to make you do things you don't want to do. It could be that they're causing us to do a number of other weird things too as a side effect - like get unreasonably violent and agressive. This is of particular suspicion in the US where foreigners meeting US advertisements for the first time get a big culture shock. Could this "Shock! Get yours now!" subliminal message be driving roberies, greed, rape and other undesirable behaviour, which let's face it is over-abundant in the US?
The more that is done to supress them the better.
Not getting rich on advertising by far, but if they're that determined on being overt and callus freeloaders so much as to prevent any chance of revenue that helps support my costs, I am not interested in having them visit my sites.
Free doesn't block ads served by the hosting site, only cross site ads. I believe many big newspapers host their own ads, right? Le Monde's ads are likely viewable for that reason.
Any idea if Free is blocking the user tracking sites used by Le Monde? I'm counting 4-5 trackers on lemonde.fr, way less than the NYT's 12-15, but still some revenue.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Ad networks should be considered hostile and blocked at all opportunitie. Why?
Take *one* look at any download service and the massive amounts of fake "Download" buttons you can press. Adware. Spyware. Malware. It's all there, unless you have the technical wherewithal to separate the good from the bad... Something most people don't.
So for the average user the choice comes down to this: Adblock or infection.
Clearly, the only responsible choice is to block ads.
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
You are the product!: re side business vs. main business
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Sometimes, people forget the obvious because it is well hidden from us with shell games. (Q1) Why are google and its googlicious products free of cost to use? (Q2) If newspapers cost so much money to buy, then why do they tend to give them out for free just before Thanksgiving and the Christmas holidays? (Q3) What do magazines really sell if not the content which is in them?
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(a1) -- Google sells an advertising service: their ability to connect your eyeballs to the advertisers selling their product.
(a2) -- Newspapers sells an advertising service: their ability to connect your eyeballs to the advertisers selling their product.
(a3) -- Magazines sells an advertising service: their ability to connect your eyeballs to the advertisers selling their product.
(a4) -- (not that you/I asked but also) Television sells an advertising service: their ability to connect your eyeballs to the advertisers selling their product.
;>)
All of these products exist in order to market things or services available for purchase to you who thinks you are the consumer. You are not the consumer in these equations for Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4. You are the product (the eyeballs connected to desire and to a wallet to be emptied) that is sold to the advertisement makers who sell the advertisements to the merchants and makers of these things and services for sale.
You are the product!: re side business vs. main business (You actually wrote "Advertising should just be a side business"
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Sometimes, people forget the obvious because it is well hidden from us with shell games. (Q1) Why are google and its googlicious products free of cost to use? (Q2) If newspapers cost so much money to buy, then why do they tend to give them out for free just before Thanksgiving and the Christmas holidays? (Q3) What do magazines really sell if not the content which is in them?
.
(a1) -- Google sells an advertising service: their ability to connect your eyeballs to the advertisers selling their product.
(a2) -- Newspapers sells an advertising service: their ability to connect your eyeballs to the advertisers selling their product.
(a3) -- Magazines sells an advertising service: their ability to connect your eyeballs to the advertisers selling their product.
(a4) -- (not that you/I asked but also) Television sells an advertising service: their ability to connect your eyeballs to the advertisers selling their product.
;>)
All of these products exist in order to market things or services available for purchase to you who thinks you are the consumer. You are not the consumer in these equations for Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4. You are the product (the eyeballs connected to desire and to a wallet to be emptied) that is sold to the advertisement makers who sell the advertisements to the merchants and makers of these things and services for sale.
Never has been, never will be.
It makes so little money, that many users could just pay a single cent a year, and be done with it. And most ads that are counted, are fake anyway: Generated by a bot, counted despite never having been visible on the screen, counted despite the user never seeing it, or when it just had a negative effect It's utterly stupid.
It would cost about $5 a month more on your Internet plan, to pay the equivalent of every ad you will ever see in that month, plus more. And everybody would be happy. Plus, nobody would have to be the advertisement companies' bitch. It's a win-win.
My deal to you, web site operators, is: If providing me your services costs you money, or is worth something, then demand that money from me in exchange for using it! Or go die in a hole with your blocked advertisements. Your choice.
(And don't worry about others offering that service cheaper. They will go bankrupt pretty soon, without advertisements or any other form of income.)
(And if your "services" are really just displaying copies of a work you did once, and so everybody is free to make a copy and offer it himself, then *your offer is worth nothing*! Don’t blame it on others! You failed! You fell for the lie that is imaginary property. It obviously didn't work. Because it never does. Boo-hoo, go fuck yourself a river!)
So what? Companies who do deals with third parties about my behaviour can kiss my ass. I have no compunction about blocking anything whatsoever I don't like to see myself. As one among a legion of open source programmers, I have no qualms about spending hundreds of hours writing, totally for free, software that enables _anyone_ to block any ads at any and every point they would like within the network.
Fuck third parties who make deals about me. I have no responsibility to honour those deals, and neither do you.
whoops! Please see my other response entitled "Re:Network Neutrality Violation" for what I really meant to say. The above response was actually meant for a reply to another poster, not to this poster about Network Neutrality. My apologies!
Last I checked newspapers cost money. We'd get ads in them but they were often useful ads, came with coupons, and many readers actually looked forward to the advertising supplements. Newspaper ads were never popups, the newspaper kept them out of the way of the stories, and the advertisers paid the newspaper for the service (unlike freeloaders who piggyback on ISPs).
Magazines I don't understand. If I pay $8 for an issue I want to see zero ads or else have the magazine be free.
Cable television charges you to receive channels and then shoves ads at you as an extra revenue, that's just plain wrong.
I repeat this every time we talk about ads on the web, but I'll say it again: It's bullshit that the web can't survive without ads.
People that insist they depend on ads, and go "Wouldn't you miss our web if we went out of business? Click our ads!" remind me of some pirates. Not the ones that just post content on bittorrent ... no, I'm talking about the ones that run a blog with movie or music downloads, and put captchas and other measures to make sure you don't crawl their DB. Some watermark their movies. They put their download links behind adfly. And insist you turn off adblock! They say you are stealing from them by not watching their ads. Oh, the hypocrisy!. So, the studios, the directors and the actors do all the work and spend all the money, but you think they should get nothing, and you come along, download a rip, reupload it somewhere, and think YOU are the one that deserves compensation?
I feel exactly the same way about idiots with a website that say the web wouldn't be the same without them, therefore we must either pay for their content or swallow their ads. The reason why you can run a website so cheaply is simple: WE created GNU/Linux, apache, PHP and MySQL! And also the Webkit and Gecko engines, and the Free browsers that use them to display your content, and Wordpress, joomla, mambo, etc. Even the free templates you use, and the free iconsets.
Most people don't realize this, but what made the Internet so fucking HUGE was Free Software. Cisco is fucking expensive, So is IIS, and Windows, and Unix. If we wanted to replace all of the free software supporting the internet for their paid counterparts, all the money in the world wouldn't be enough.
If we removed GNU/Linux and Apache from the internet, 70% of all servers would go down, and there would be nobody to visit them anyway since 99% of all SOHO routers run GNU/Linux. Without GNU/Linux there would most likely be no Google, and therefore no adsense. If Google or Facebook had to pay licenses for every server they run, they wouldn't be profitable. If most websites had to pay for a CMS, then host it on a server with Windows, IIS, Oracle, and fucking winzip, they wouldn't make money selling ads anyway! That is, the cost of delivering each ad would be HIGHER than the revenue.
So, what you guys are telling me is that we as a community where able to create the most amazing software ever created, and use it to power the most incredible network the world has ever seen, FOR FREE, but the dick jokes and cat pictures you post are priceless works of art and require endless streams of ad-money to be generated? I say go away, and take your content with you. Or find a better revenue stream. Or do it for free. If you don't, we certainly will.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
I cannot help but feeling pissed of each time I buy one film and am forced to endure minutes of ads against pirating (But I even paid the bloody thing!) or for films I will not see or for violent films when the DVD contains a cartoon for the kids.
The obvious solution is to rip the DVD and reburn it to a blank DL disc. DVDFabDecrypter even has a preset specifically to rip just the movie portion, removing all previews and piracy warnings. Replace the original clamshell case for the DVD with a two-disc one and stick your original on one side for safe-keeping (and to prove you actually paid for the content if the MPAA ever gets those gestapo search squads they've always wanted), and put the new disc on the other side. Play only the burned disc.
Bonus: If your DVD gets scratched up by frequent use/kids you still have the original disc to make new copies from.
Alternatively, build an HTPC and rip the movie portion of the DVD to computer files and play as-is. You can retain the original VOBs for 100% DVD quality or encode to an MKV file and save lots of hard drive space by using a more efficient codec like XviD or h264. An MKV would allow you to keep all the audio tracks, subtitle tracks, and even the chapter markings from the original DVD.
Probably not a lot of people thought about it, but blocking adds like this is saving free.fr a lot of bandwidth. I'm sure it's quite significant.
I run several Wiki's and Blogs myself. I provide content completely free of charge to over 1 million unique visitors every 3 days. I rely on Adsence and donations alone to pay the hosting costs, Take this away and along with my websites, millions of others full of good useful information will cease to exist.
Adsence ad's don't bother me, nor does tracking for targeted advertising. Why does everyone feel the need to scream bloody murder at their rights violations simply because content publishers use ad's that are targeted to their browsing habbits and needs.
Welcome to the internet, one of the biggest adverts in the world. Did I mention its free?
Blocking YouTube would also save them bandwidth.
Do you think before you argue?
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
Re: Last I checked newspapers cost money.
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That's why I specifically mentioned the free paper giveaways before Thanksgiving and Christmas, when you get papers that are as thick as the Sunday weekend editions even on Thanksgiving thursday because they're chock ful o' advertisement fliers.
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Newspapers are sold at way below cost of production (as are most magazines) because they are conveyances for advertisements. They can usually make enough money to cover their production costs from the advertisements alone. Most women's magazines (Vogue, Elle, other fashion mags) are greater than 80% advertisement pages (some are closer to 90% near key season times)
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They get paid by the advertisers to put advertisements on the page, and they get paid by subscribers or the "man on the street" when they buy it from a news-stand or a box.
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In answer to your "Magazines I don't understand" comment: think of it instead as the magazines are the delivery vehicle for getting the advertiser's pages and ads and perfume samples in front of your eyeballs and your nostrils. They make a lot more money from advertisers than they do from you, the dear reader. Source: look up almost any issue of "Adweek" magazine or "Advertising Age". to get the business side of things. And google, well you can google it and you can see that google's business is really selling ad impressions and learning everything it can about you helps it sell the ad impressions to the advertisers and marketers.
damn, forgot to close my italtics bracket indicator with the corresponding !!! Sorry for the overly emphasized paragraphs. :>(
I've been blocking ads on the Internet since they became a nuisance, first using The Proxomitron, later AdBlock and Adblock Plus. I block all ads. Too many are blinking, jumping, blocking, noisy or otherwise extremely annoying, so they gotta go - and stay gone.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
This service exists: VLC.
I am glad if the system of advertising is being disrupted. Lets hope this is real and is the next step in an ongoing trend of advertisement avoidance (adblock, tivo, now this IPS)...
If people think advertisements pay for their services such as free TV, they are fooling themselves.
Budgets for advertisement, i.e. for subjective bad information wasting your time, is paid out of a part of the profits of sales by companies.
I.e. every consumer, whether he uses the advertisement sponsored services or not, is paying a kind of tax upon most product prices to pay for themselves being misinformed and having to sit through irritating commercials, waste of bandwidth, time and resources.
It would be better if people directly pay for what they use (fair prices of course), and do not have to finance misinformation anymore.
When it comes to getting good and objective information about products: there are many non-profit organisations (sometimes state funded) around the world that test and review new products. If you want you can become a member and/or subscribe to their publications. And of course, the Internet itself is a great means of getting objective (at least less subjective) information if you know where to find it.
the Kickstarter AdTrap project attempts to do essentially the same thing with a $150. device that connects between your DSL/cablemodem and your router.
see: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/600284081/adtrap-the-internet-is-yours-again
What would be the point? If you want to block ads but not all of them, just disable their filter and use your own.
Google Analytics are blocked too: http://www.numerama.com/magazine/24672-free-ne-bloque-pas-que-la-publicite.html (in french, Free only operates in France)
-- p a n a p i c - panoramas des alpes: Mont-Blanc, Mont-Rose, Cervin, etc...
Pity I am not in France, otherwise they would have one more customer. I very much suspect the ones complaining here are advertisers...
... It was a warning message for Google. They're in negociations right now.
Link (in french) : Adblock to be deactivated on monday.
Or use AnyDVD (for Windows PCs and HTPCs) - it dynamically filters out the crap on DVDs so you can skip right to watching the movie. Doesn't require you to rip the DVD first.
let alone the advertisers themselves who pay to reach an audience, and are blocked at the door.
MY door, who did they pay to let them through? Not ME. This is important because EVEN in the "free tv with commercials" scenario, there is NEVER an agreement that I must watch the commercials. No, THERE IS NOT Fox. The TV stations offers but there is NEVER an agreement made. Not in writing, verbally, implicitly or morally. Advertising sponsoring content is a one way street, the content owner and advertiser push it to the viewer who can then do ANYTHING he wishes with it.
Take for instance a promotional mug, am I free to grind the logo of it if I so choose to? Yes. The advertisers has NO more power then to combine his message with content and hope I will consume both. He can't force me to consume both. If you hand me a piece of chocolate wrapped in logo, I am free to eat the wrapper and throw away the chocolate if I choose to. I am free to wipe my ass with your logo or put you pamphlet in the cat box.
With the Internet, I pay for access and because of the way the Internet is setup, I pay my share of my ISP's bandwidth costs who uses that to create a network and then create peering contracts with other networks so that everyone can reach everyone else. It is an amazing system and worked perfectly fine for years with next to no commercial content. Hundreds of people ran their own sites at their own expense and welcomed any visitors as proof they had something interesting to say.
Some sites saw a way to turn eyeballs into money and started to sell advertising space THINKING they were the new TV. They are not. TV is unique (well radio too) in that broadcasters can stop you consuming the content while they send you ads. The Internet doesn't do that, I can read an article with a hundred imbedded ads without every looking at said ads and I can do that without an ad-blocker simply by steering my eyes around the ads. The only way to achieve the same is with those "watch this ad for 20 seconds before continuing with doing what you came here to do".
AND THAT IS THE WHOLE PROBLEM. TV ads get in the way but we didn't have an easy way around and cheap tv is nice so we accepted it in the passive mode that watching TV promotes.
BUT when browsing, I am ACTIVELY trying to do something (find cat pictures) and advertisers get in the way, doesn't really matter how annoying their ads is or isn't, I AM ACTIVELY trying to do something ELSE then reading your ad. Ads on the internet are even worse then ads in a magazine (who opens a magazine to scan some ads, why should I spend ANY time looking at two full page ads when the articles I picked the magazine up for are on the next page) because they make websites slower and are upsetting the general simply layout of the text. If they are to the side and out of the way... GOOD... that was nice of you, now I don't even need to read around them. Take Gmails ad bar. Nice to have it so discreet but I got so used to it being total crap (I travelled to the US often but migrating there has no appeal so why keep telling me about green cards, I am a socialist, I would sing the "De nationale" and strike down the imperialist interviewer!) that I had to have it pointed out to me it doesn't appear anymore.
So ads get MORE intrusive because people don't watch them and so people block them. And that is perfectly legit, morally and legally because I never signed an agreement to the contrary.
The funny thing is that a LOT of sites, like slashdot where users make the content allow good users to turn OFF the ads. That's right, you can blocks ads on ad-revenue sites by being a good user. So annoying are ads EVEN in the eyes of those who make their living because of them, that they block ads FOR you themselves.
The biggest downloads for Chrome and Firefox and Opera are the ad-block plugins.
Shoe stores only put either the LEFT or the RIGHT shoe out on a street display, they do this because if they put both out, the police would slap them when
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I cannot help but feeling pissed of each time I buy one film and am forced to endure minutes of ads against pirating (But I even paid the bloody thing!) or for films I will not see or for violent films when the DVD contains a cartoon for the kids.
That's why those sections of the DVD are marked with the "auto-skip" flag, so your DVD player will avoid showing them. Although for some reason I think the DVD spec calls this a "must not be able to skip" flag or somesuch :)
http://blog.nexusuk.org
... for paid DVDs?
The pirates already do. You can buy the DVD, then download a fixed version. Or you can use a player tat can skip those unskippable ads.
Well of course, and that's why they've been throttling it for a long long time! Why? Because they didn't succeed in having a satisfying agreement with Google...
The often mis-applied tragedy of the commons does describe quite well what happened with advertisement:
Since the scarce resource - attention, screen space, however you want to quantify it - is free to the advertiser, it gets overused to the point of destruction. In this case, destruction comes in the form of users fighting back.
All those poor sites that survive thanks to ads are just the collateral damage. Don't point your fingers at people using ad blockers - point them at the advertisers making ads so obnoxious and everywhere that sane people have no other choice but to block them.
If you think that advertisement has its place, how about doing the work yourself? Fork ADB and release a version that displays the first ad on every page but blocks all others, or some other filtering option besides all-or-nothing. Then, watch the advertisers play the whole game again by making that first ad a full screen overlay that contains all the other ads. Wanna bet?
These people are parasites, they don't care for the common good, sanity or a reasonable compromise. If they think they can replace the space characters in articles with micro-ads, they will.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Solution to DVD problem: stop buying them. That solution works and no other one does.
You probably don't like the solution but that's just something we all have to go through, for now. That makes a new problem, but it is someone ELSE'S problem: "why are we telling our customers to go away?"
Well, YouTube is something their customers want. Ads isn't.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Maybe the problem that was you paid for the DVDs in the first place. No, I'm not advocating copyright infringement here, I'm just hinting at the simple truth that this bad behavior of the DVD makers won't stop as long as people continue to reward them with real money.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
If you are searching something for which there will be a lot of advertising , like a car, furniture information you have to be pretty precise to avoid all ads. If you are searching for which there won't be much advertising, like say, "bose einstein condensate" or "walkthru of KoTOR 2" you will pretty much find what you want top link.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Some newspapers cost money, but many others do not. I live in the Washington, D.C. area, and we have four daily newspapers. The two broadsheets cost money: the Washington Post and the Washington Times. The two tabloids are free: the Washington Examiner, and Express (a tabloid-sized subset of the Washington Post). The Post even pays people to stand around at Metro (subway) stations entrances and hand out copies of the Express to commuters.
Perhaps for only a little while.
APK Hosts File Engine 5.0++ 32-bit & 64-bit:
http://start64.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5851:apk-hosts-file-engine-64bit-version&catid=26:64bit-security-software&Itemid=74
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Custom hosts files gain me the following benefits (A short summary of where custom hosts files can be extremely useful):
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1.) Blocking out malware/malscripted sites.
2.) Blocking out Known sites-servers/hosts-domains that are known to serve up malware.
3.) Blocking out Bogus DNS servers malware makers use.
4.) Blocking out Botnet C&C servers.
5.) Blocking out Bogus adbanners that are full of malicious script content.
6.) Blocking out known spammers &/or phishers.
7.) Blocking out TRACKERS.
8.) Getting you back speed/bandwidth you paid for by blocking out adbanners + hardcoding in your favorite sites (faster than remote DNS server resolution).
9.) Added reliability (vs. downed or misdirect/poisoned DNS servers).
10.) Added "anonymity" (to an extent, vs. DNS request logs).
11.) The ability to bypass DNSBL's (DNS block lists you may not agree with).
12.) More screen "real estate" (since no more adbanners appear onscreen eating up CPU, Memory, & other forms of I/O too - bonus!).
13.) Truly UNIVERSAL PROTECTION (since any OS, even on smartphones, usually has a BSD drived IP stack).
14.) Faster & MORE EFFICIENT operation vs. browser plugins (which "layer on" ontop of Ring 3/RPL 3/usermode browsers & are generally written in slower INTERPRETED languages (e.g. AdBlock = python/perl/javascript)- Whereas by way of comparison, the hosts file operates @ the Ring 0/RPL 0/Kernelmode of operation (far faster) as a filter for the IP stack itself which is written in C & Assembly language...).
15.) Custom hosts files work on ANY & ALL webbound apps (browser plugins do not).
16.) Custom hosts files offer a better, faster, more efficient way, & safer way to surf the web & are COMPLETELY controlled by the end-user of them.
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So - how can I say that? Well... as an end-user of the internet myself is how - perhaps, rather than ME saying it (since I wrote that program)? I'll let your /. peers state it, in what they see in speed-gains alone, along with a security expert from a division of SYMANTEC:
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SLASHDOT USERS EXPERIENCING MORE SPEED USING HOSTS FILES QUOTED VERBATIM:
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"I want my surfing speed back so I block EVERY fucking ad. i.e. http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ and http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm FTW" - by UnknownSoldier (67820) on Tuesday December 13, @12:04PM (#38356782)
"this is not a troll, which hosts file source you recommend nowadays? it's a really handy method for speeding up web and it works." - by gl4ss (559668) on Thursday March 22, @08:07PM (#39446525)
"I actually went and downloaded a 16k line hosts file and started using that after seeing that post, you know just for trying it out. some sites load up faster." - by gl4ss (559668) on Thursday November 17, @11:20AM (#38086752)
"I'm currently only using my hosts file to block pheedo ads from showing up in my RSS feeds and causing them to take forever to load. Regardless of its original intent, it's still a valid tool, when used judiciously." - by Bill Dog (726542) on Monday April 25, @02:16AM (#35927050)
"I have several notorious slow adservers in my /etc/hosts" - by jandrese (485) on Friday August 17 2007, @01:00PM (#20263547)
"They're visually annoying and distracting. They're a waste of bandwidth. Sometimes they're even noisy. I block them with a hosts file" - by Kris_J (10111) on Monday October 10 2005, @11:12PM (#13761572)
"I was on a roll and obtained hosts files. It start
Have the ads "do something" when they are viewed, such as load additional content from somewhere else.
It will be difficult - not impossible, just difficult - to block ads in a way that the ad-provider can't detect.
Then, if the ads are being blocked, either refuse to deliver the content or take some other action, such as delivering lower-quality content, e.g. not including the latest headlines or only showing the first half of articles if you are a news site.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You are wrong sir. The OBVIOUS solution is to boycott the whole thing altogether until: a) they dont put adverts there; b) they sell them at no more than a Mac burger; c) they dont forbid me from skipping chapters on a thing I bought and is MINE.
I agree with blocking ads, and trackers. If that would ever make some sites unsustainable, then so be it. Asking for donations is fine with me, forcing me to see annoying ads of things I'll never buy is not. And if i ever want to buy something, i read reviews on-line from many sources first, ads mean nothing to me (can even steer me away from a product, just because of annoyance).
The amount of bandwidth this could save is pretty much well the effort. It's ridiculous how much these third party connections make a page lag, and if your net is capped, blocking 'em is a must have.
It also reminds me of cable tv. Once upon a time, the idea of paying to watch tv seemed weird, but there were no ads and that seemed like a decent trade-off. Not anymore, you pay, AND are given ads, screw it; Internet access is not free either.
Ads are the same as spamming, unsolicited and massive, and should be treated as such. AdBlock is one of the most downloaded plugins for good reason, the fork Ad Block Lite instead of Plus, just to make sure that default option to "allow unobtrusive ads" never exists. And ghostery to get rid of trackers, they are no laughing matter, many sites are using too many of them. I also use noscript to avoid anti adblock measures, (with greasemonkey standing by as ultimate defense). Controlling cookies with cookie monster and referrers with refcontrol puts me back in control.
This is not a TV and you can't force me to see things the way you want. I hate white/bright backgrounds, Stylish to the rescue, etc.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
Both true and completely wrong.
All of the services you mentioned (and you missed Bing, Yahoo, Amazon, and many other internet advertisers) only work because they also produce content that people like. I assume you use Google search and have watched TV and read papers and magazines at some point. Demonizing these providers is pointless.
But they only can sell ads if people want to see their content. So they need to keep both their customers (people who buy ads) and their users (people who view content) happy. Spend too much effort in pleasing advertisers and users leave so you go bankrupt. Spend too much time pleasing users and you make no money. So users matter as much as advertisers, but not more than advertisers.
Ads are the product. You are a user.
Has /. became the hive of socialo-communist crazies?
How is this a good move? I don't F*CKING want an ISP which I pay for *bandwith* to start to change the HTML I'm supposed to receive from the big bad Internet.
There are others programs allowing to do that.
I'm using amazing services on the Internet, like GMail, Google Docs, YouTube (yes, with that many videos hosted I can tell you that there are some real gems in there).
I'm paying my ISP for bandwith and then *I* decide to use AdBlock or not. Not my ISP.
This is very worrysome especially coming from a pro-socialist ISP like free.fr, run by someone partially owning the socialist and very politically-driven newspaper site lemonde.fr.
How can you guys not see this is not good at all?
It's not just violating net neutrality. It's a f*cking socialist move against U.S. companies.
And, no, I'm not american. But I do own Intel hardware, I do use Google services, I do use OS X and a MacBook Pro.
I know who I must thank the Internet for and the last thing I want is a f*cking pro-socialist french ISP to try to kill an american company like Google.
I hope Google shall retaliate both legally (taking the matter before european courts) and technically (for example by encrypting more and more trafic: yes, I know it has a cost, but end-to-end encryption would a good countermeasures to deal with shaddy ISPs).
I the excuse is for free to save lots of bandwith, then f*ck them: users pay a price for a guaranteed amount of bandwith and it is their f*cking duty to provide their users said bandwith.
There's no excuse for such a move.
It's a political move because they're pissed off at Google: free.fr are *already* throttling YouTube videos for their users because their SHITTY network cannot handle the load their users paid for.
This is not freedom at work.
This is slavery at work.
5.5 million users is tiny... But others may be tempted to do the same.
Note that free.fr is already under investigation from french telecoms regulator ARCEP to determine whether or not Google’s YouTube service is being inappropriately throttled by free.fr (it definitely is: free.fr cannot deliver the service they promised to their users in exchange for their users' money, so they're throttling YouTube).
But I'm sure the solution for Google here is technical: free.fr cannot block ads delivered on HTTPS, for example.
So people using GMail (but it's possible free is going to try to harm GMail too, after YouTube and adwords, it's quite clear they're on a rampage against Google) shall still see Google ads inside GMail.
You could very well imagine a way for Google and people using Google's adwords to determine automatically if ads are allowed or not... Then, if a rogue ISP modifying the HTML or blocking some IPs is detected, the site should start serving that content over HTTPS for these users. Hence free.fr and other rogue ISPs couldn't block ads.
There are other ways to deal with this that said.
One would be for Google to detect users coming for free.fr on *any* of their service and to display, for 24 hours, in french:
"You Internet service provider free.fr is taking measures preventing Google from operating correctly. You GMail account is hence temporarily unavailable. We suggest you switch to another ISP or sign the following petition to ask free.fr to respect net neutrality"
No more GMail. No more GoogleDocs. No more YouTube. No more Blogger. etc.
Who's in trouble now?
Nice band-aid.
Free is asking Google to grant them the right to have local cache of video on their system so that the bandwith will be factorized.
They have any facilities that Google might require them to.
Google is not keen on delagating such right to anybody.
Actually, this is not the first time Free is putting pressure on others company. Last big push was toward Orange (France Telecom, at that time Wanadoo division). The problem was that the pipe between Free and Orange was too slow (peering link). Orange did not want to pay for upgraded equipment at all. Free then simply shut down the link. After a couple of weeks, Orange agree to pay its part of the equipment to have an upgraded link. Why ?
Well, it's turn out that free.fr is also hosting hundred of thousands of website (for free as in beer), tons of gigabits that Orange subscribers (mainly DSL) use daily. By blocking the peering link, Free has forced Orange to deroute user thru much costly aboard transit route ! So after some quick math, the solution was quick for Orange : get an agreement with Free ;-)
Here this is the same chess scenario, Free is only showing to Google : look, you earn a lot from this. They tried to do it the easy way : throtle the youtube.com bandwith. But this has raised lots of customer complains and has damaged Free's QoS image. At the end, they have decided to escalate the problem to the money ground. "Ok, you don't want an agreement. So you will not get any moyen from our customer either". The next move might come from French Advertisers (small businesses & al) that might complain to Google for not beeing able to pin up the agreed market.
I am pretty sure Google will come with a possible agreement scenario soon ;-)
What is funny at the end is that here is a fight that link two of the main actors that have boosted the IPv6 momentum : Free by enabling IPv6 to masses 5 years back (thanks to 6rd) and Google by activating Ipv6 on their major services. To quote Cisco rep : "thanks to them, sudently the traffic was there !"
Now they fight for bandwith ;-)
Or buy the DVD and store in in a shelf then download the movie from a torrent website.
No, they might still come after you for illegal downloading. There was some rich guy who did this on purpose to take them to court (he pirated a movie he literally had on his shelf) and what happened was once the MPAA figured out he had enough spare time and money that he actually was going to go to trial they dropped the whole thing. I guess they didn't want to set a precedent where they had to start proving a person didn't already own a movie they had been caught downloading.
Meanwhile rip-yourself is all done in the privacy of you own home and you can be as anal (or not) as you want to be about quality and the end-product. So many Hollywood movies are only available in crappy 700 MB AVI files on TPB, why accept that as the version you'll be watching?
LOL. Boycotts only work when a critical mass of consumers are participating. You'll never get that many people to do it at once. Even if you get close to that the entertainment industry is good about putting blinders on and factoring the lost sales to "filthy pirates" stealing the movie and watching it instead of folks actively doing without and trying to send a message.
A more likely result of a boycott will probably be new laws railroaded through Congress of blank media taxes or harsher fines for copyright and more lax evidence needed to convict. Anything to funnel some money the studios' way to help prop up their balance books when their sales are falling.
Funny point about the Big Mac: Lots of the movies I've bought on blu-ray I've purchased at sales or in collections where I end up spending $5-8 a film. That's getting down there to the price of a Big Mac the way McDonalds has been raising their prices the last few years.
And why not boycott? The media is overpriced and obsolete, and they have got no incentive to embrace new technologies, instead shifting their energies to antagonise their customer base. Where do you find blu-rays at 5-8? Recent movies? meh The physical shifting of DVDs across the globe and the real estate they occupy at stores, and at homes is stupid and obsolete. Just a waste of space and natural resources. And they are not pretty to showcase by any account.