Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Are AdBlock's Days Numbered?
An anonymous reader writes "This article discusses the ethics and the mechanics of ad-blocking software. Toward the end, it goes into some of the tech that's been built to circumvent ad blockers. Quoting: 'PageFair offers a free JavaScript program that, when inserted into a Web page, monitors ad blocking activity. CEO Sean Blanchfield says he developed the monitoring tool after he noticed a problem on his own multiplayer gaming site. PageFair collects statistics on ad blocking activity, identifies which users are blocking ads and can display an appeal to users to add the publisher's website to their ad-blocking tool's personal whitelist. But Blanchfield acknowledges that the user appeal approach hasn't been very effective. ClarityRay takes a more active role. Like PageFair, it provides a tool that lets publishers monitor blocking activity to show them that they have a problem — and then sells them a remedy. ClarityRay offers a service that CEO Ido Yablonka says fools ad blockers into allowing ads through. "Ad blockers try to make a distinction between content elements and advertorial elements. We make that distinction impossible," he says.' Is this arms race winnable? By which side?"
Beat that, suckers.
Slashdot already makes distinction between content elements and advertorial elements impossible.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
"Ad blockers try to make a distinction between content elements and advertorial elements. We make that distinction impossible,"
So long as you're hosting your ads off-site, or even on a local (ad.example.com) server, we'll be able to block them.
Stop trying to infect me with malware and perhaps I'll stop blocking you from my browser.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
If you want an add to appear on your page take ownership of it. Host it as an image file on your own website that you control and you are responsible for.
Anything else, we intend to find ways to block it, because we have learned the hard way that you cannot trust advertisers to not infect your system with malware (not always intentionally, but lets face it, that's a big source of failure).
I own my computer. I've been convincing every of my friends and family members to adopt a zero tolerance policy toward internet advertizing, partly as it's a huge security risk as seen in all recent stories about malware delivered with ads, and partly to opt out of "big data" collector activities.
Advertizers don't get it. My computer runs what I want it to, not what THEY want it to. They may make polite requests to display things, or to run things, which I can either say yes or no to.
The internet existed for decades before advertizers discovered it, and it'll be just fine - better even! - after they depart. Maybe we'll go back to its roots of crowdsourced content, rather than "big corporate content".
If so many ads weren't obnoxious flash or javascript and simply a hyperlinked picture/text, then I wouldn't feel compelled to block them. But these so-called ads are largely intrusive and annoying and make the web browsing experience suck. Just like email and spam that have tracking linked images in them that I choose to automatically round file instead of at least checking out the content. Make the experience pleasant and controllable by me and I'll play along; otherwise, I take control with tools like adblock.
Host your own ads - make them unobtrusive - people will still see them AND the content.
Being lazy and outsourcing it to others... you get what you deserve.
The people that are using ad-blockers are stating "I am annoyed by adds". These people seem to think it is a good idea to show the people that have flagged themselves as getting annoyed by ads more ads. That seems really really dumb.
These people should be careful what they wish for. There are many, many sites out there for people to browse on. Annoy a "customer" to much and it is very easy for them to go elsewhere.
If I see banner ads or anything else obnoxious, and I can't keep them blocked and still use the site, I'll find what I want elsewhere.
I'm ok with the text-based ads Google is known for, and I'll even click on them when they're relevant to what I'm looking for... because they're not obnoxious! They aim to be helpful!
If people are blocking your ads, it's probably because they're not interested in seeing the god damn ads. Sneaking past the ad blocker won't result in me going "gee, you got me, I'll be good and click on your ad now." More likely it will piss me off to the point where I stop visiting your site.
Stupid marketers and their "arms race" mentality was what resulted in people developing and using adblock and noscript in the first place. "What do you mean people still aren't clicking on our ads? It's got a dancing monkey with a flashing background and it occupies half the browser window! Fine, we'll make it play music too, and pop up fifty windows... maybe THEN they'll realize the error of their ways and click on it."
Procrastination Man strikes again!
Text view is the only thing that renders, mind you.
In single column. I scroll a lot.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
And no goddamn auto-playing sounds either.
AdBlock is something I've started installing for friends and family more as a way to block malware, than as a way to block ads outright. Poisoned ads (malvertising) account for a lot of malware installs. Just Google for iTunes or Firefox and the top ad results are malware infected installers.
Besides the incredible annoyance of ads in the slow downs they cause, they're also a dangerous pathway to malware and viruses. Common methods like embedding an iframe into a page that loads a script that targets a browser exploit to install something nasty (drive-by downloads), oneclick exploits, baiting users to download things, etc.
Ad networks—at least the slimy ones—don't care because they're getting paid.
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
I'll consider abandoning Ad Block when a decade after ads are no longer the leading cause of malware. Until then I consider it a security requirement along with noscript.
Damnit - do NOT invoke that bastard!
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I'd warrant (but don't have the statistics to back me up) that the typical ad-block user would be less prone to click on ads if forced to see them than a typical surfer. I don't see why these crybaby advertisers are so desperate to reach a market that would have low click-through rates. The advertisers win by not needing the extra bandwidth necessary to serve up ads to people that wouldn't click on them anyways.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Several times, in several different ways I found the question asked ... is it ethical to block ad's. My response: You are asking the wrong question: Is it ethical to track me without my permission? Is it ethical in inject mal-ware into my system? Is it ethical to not allow me access to information you claim is about me? Is it ethical to make money on my actions -- without a reward for me?
Stop messing with MY system, and I'll stop messing with your ad's.
They ALL have low CPM. And the more obnoxious and intrusive the ad, the more you're pushing people to ad blockers. (or simply abandoning your site) With the ever increasing greed from ISPs in the form of bandwidth limits and heavy overage fees, **I** don't want to be paying the per-byte costs of completely USELESS content. Go use the internet over dialup for just an hour and tell me how much you like all the bull**** ads, or the overabundance of enormous javascript libraries.
I don't have a problem with javascript, as I do make stuff with it. Done right, you don't have as much impact on the bandwidth as you think. If you have megs of javascript libraries being referenced from external CDN's, you're doing it wrong.
It's going to go down that road anyways till the end. Web browsers have ceased being about document markup and rendering, which is how it started, to running external code in complicated sand boxes. You can't put that genie back in the bottle.
The issue is being able to trust that javascript, which is really about trusting the sandboxes to not allow malicious code to be run. Tracking is a problem of course, but that is mitigated by blocking software that stops those specific scripts and domains from working. Once a Big Data company like that gets big enough, they'll just get shut down by the blockers, which is a very good thing. It protects our privacy as well as our computers.
If you don't want javascript and external code libraries you're only other option is to have a single universal API developed that ALL browsers adhere strictly to. Blocking tracking software is simple as a permissions setting at that point to not listen to any tracking tags or events set up in the page. AJAX type events would need to be classified accordingly and secured. An event going toward a different domain than the page? Blocked by permissions. Image not from the domain? Don't even download it based on permissions. CDN's should be registered in the browser as an alternative for any file that needs to be downloaded for a "page".
Above all, that API should have plentiful RBL's that outright disable all external calls. We want accountability? How about within an hour of malware being downloaded those RBL's are proactive like some email services and browsers start blocking that particular site or CDN automatically? That would make propagation of malware a real bitch in production. Not to mention if you are a big outfit and that happens people will start getting fired till it's fixed. I've been in a major company that got their email shut down by Cisco IronPort (Over half the vendors they dealt with were rejecting mail). Some yahoo in the data center thought it would be cool to run his own little server which got hacked and delivered out 9 tons of spam that shut down corporate email for 4 days till IronPort finally cleared it up.
Can you even imagine what would happen if one of those RBL systems blocked Yahoo by default a week or two ago? Shit storm indeed, but a needed one.
We don't have any of that.
What we *do* have is a clusterfuck of technology that developed from an interesting idea to effectively share a word processing screen at universities that is fundamentally toxic to us. We spend billions cleaning it, defending it, and developing it, etc.
It just needs to be scrapped and start over.
So no, blocking javascript is not the answer either. Unless you want to be left behind with non-working pages because people like me are getting really tired of needing to expend those resources for graceful failure. We don't have the time or the money to do that anymore (not in this economy) and javascript and JQuery (along with the other JS frameworks) are here to stay. So many of the "shiny" features out there only work in an event based framework where I can modify the DOM without reloading the entire page.
The whole mess is just terrible and we keep refactoring code to old email and document markup systems without addressing the underlying issues at all.
The root issue is people are stupid and lazy. If your 250k of JS actually does things, that's one thing. When you include (an uncompressed) version of JQuery to use one tiny function (that you don't JQuery to actually do), or worse don't use any part of it, you're wasting everyone's time and bandwidth.
Every time I research how to do something in a browser, every. single. fucking. time. The top 90 out of 100 answers is to load some enormous bloated framework widget toolkit and kitchen sink replicator. for what has, in every case so far, boiled down to 1-2k of formatted, human readable JS. Apparently, I'm the only motherf***er in the universe that cares if his web page is 3k vs 300k, in 1 file vs. dozens.
no. the toxicity comes from the advertising and the insistence on javascript (and flash and java etc applets).
just displaying documents is harmless. it's the fact that web-dev fuckers (and worse, "designers") want to run arbitrary code on millions of computers belonging to other people that is the source of the harm.
you're making the mistake of assuming those "shiny" features are essential. they're not. in fact, more often than not, they're a PITA and end up being a reason not to return to the site.
if a web site or even just a web page doesn't work without javascript, then it is broken. js can be useful to *optionally* enhance a page, but the page should work (i.e. display the important information and navigation controls) without javascript.
BTW:
so CDNs become a back door for malware because they're all whitelisted/trusted. what's the point of managing permissions for a site if that site can just bypass restrictions by uploading their scripts and malware to a popular CDN?
doing that would also allow CDNs to spy on users as they browse from site to site, linking accounts and IDs and activities - same as ad networks now (which is yet another reason to run adblock).
if ads were just static graphics without any animation and without spyware/tracking and without javascript then most people wouldn't give a shit about ads and wouldn't bother blocking them (it was animated GIFs that motivated me to write my first ad blocker in the mid 90s...the text and static GIFs that were common before then didn't annoy me enough to be worth the bother of eliminating)