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Ad Tracking: Is Anything Being Done?
bsk_cw (1202181) writes "The W3C's Tracking Protection Working Group has been trying to come up with a way to make targeted ads acceptable to users and useful to advertisers — and so far, hasn't gotten very far. Computerworld's Robert Mitchell has interviewed people on all sides of the issue — consumer privacy advocates, vendors of ad-blocking tools, advertisers and website publishers — to try to unravel the issues and see if any solution is possible at all."
Use noscript , disable cookies. If your tin foil hat is too thick , Tor it out.
The basic problem is that most of the time it works to the detriment of the person viewing the ad.
Captcha: florid, once again unrelated to the topic
to try to unravel the issues and see if any solution is possible at all.
Right, because an interview with the wolves on the one hand, and the sheep on the other, is sure to discover some kind of compromise on the topic of what's for dinner.
Advertisers are parasites, and the only reason they will ever give in to anything is if we threaten them with extinction otherwise. AdBlockers and other defenses caused them to cave in a tiny bit and begin talk about "acceptable advertisement". Don't ever get deluded into thinking they'd give even an inch by themselves.
Solution? Yes, shoot them. That's a solution. Everything else is just a delay in their fight to cover every second of your live and every inch of your attention with their shit.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
a way to make targeted ads acceptable to users
That's like trying to come up with a way to make waterboarding more enjoyable...
Advertising, be it on television, newspapers, the internet or roadsign billboards, feels like mind rape to me.
I'm middle-aged and I remember more ads from my youth than stuff I learned at school. Ads for products that don't even exist anymore, but I can't get rid of the stupid ads in my head. Why do advertisers give themselves the right to pollute people's memory long-term with their shit?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... It just works. Together with old AdBlock, no more tracking of me anywhere.
I will open my door to these advertisers if they will give me the keys and alarm codes to their homes and promise not to prosecute me if I misbehave.
Sounds fair to me.
After all, that's what these people are asking from everyone else. It takes a real psychopath to want to do to other people what they would never want done to them.
The targeted ads are far better then random ones that mean little to the users. Its the shear volume of those targeted ads and the longevity of how they hound you for weeks that is annoying. People can tolerate just so much traffic, bad weather, ads, or many other things in life. After that, it become excessive. As smart as ads are on the internet, they are dumb when it comes to determining when enough is enough. Maybe what can be done is reduce the amount of ads per web page and make them less annoying. I personally don't mind basic targeted ads, but I totally dislike animated and talking ads. That will not make me want anything, and tends to make me gravitate towards a ad blocker.
Then get a new one.
If you can't find a way to fund what you're doing with ads then do something else.
That's a tough thing to ask, as most websites are primarily funded with advertisements.
You have (at least) two sides with irreconcilable goals, so attacking the problem as a technological one, rather than a matter of power (with money sitting in the wings) seems like a category error(unless you count rounding up all the advertisers and rendering them into biodiesel as a 'technical solution', I'll give you that.).
If your goal is either to track somebody no matter what they think about the idea; that is a technological problem (cookies, then flash cookies, then various sorts of browser fingerprinting trickery, statistical system identification, etc, etc.) And, if your goal is to avoid tracking, whether Team Ads likes that or not, you similarly have a technical problem(cookie scrubbing, various sorts of script mitigation/disabling, browser anonymizations, onion routing, etc, etc.) Both of those are, if a continuing arms race, well understood to be technical problems.
A 'solution' or 'compromise' or similar such nonsense, though? Two people want overlapping things, it is not logically possible for them to both get what they want. Period. Not a technical problem, any more than 'peace and love in the middle east' just needs a few more RFCs...
And cleaning that up will take a LOT of effort and a LOT of goodwill.
Ad companies poisoned that well, I dare say for good. After years and decades of more and more (in both quality and quantity) obnoxious, irritating and outright rude in-your-face ads, more and more people were pushed to the point where they went and did something against them. We went and installed ad blockers.
In other words: We found a solution for our problem. Us not watching your ads is not our problem. You, dear ad companies, poisoned your well. You went onto our nerves with increasingly invasive ads. YOU, and ONLY YOU find a way out of that problem.
And if not, well, so be it. Nobody here really sheds a tear if you go bankrupt.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And if your business model depends on sniffing through my surfing habits and otherwise invading my privacy, don't bother finding a new business model.
Just go and die.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You want to know how to make ads acceptable?
Permanent incognito/private browsing mode + Adblock + Ghostery + click-to-play + DNT (yeah, you all ignore it anyway) + a vanilla user agent. Make them the default for every browser.
Marketers take heed: Ads no longer server the purpose they once did. Every time you manage to sneak a clever ad past my technical defenses, you piss me off about your product/company/campaign.
You want to get my to buy Pepsi? Advertise for Coke. Simple as that.
Then most websites have a broken business model because they're being funded not because of what they offer or have but because of something incidental that happens.
How many people now brag about not watching TV? And what is the primary source of funds for TV? Advertising.
How many people now brag about not reading or needing newspapers? And what is the primary source of funds for newspapers? Advertising.
What's the pattern here?
Business models that depend on advertising are fundamentally flawed because they depend on something that is incidental to what they provide.
If I build a popular website that generates 1,000,000 hits a day, but nobody pays to use it, then it could be considered popular but also a money sink.
If I then throw advertising on it to generate money, it doesn't make the website any more worthwhile and it doesn't represent a worthwhile business model.
But what about facebook? Well, how many of us would pay to use facebook? Oh, you wouldn't? In that case what value does it have? Yeah. And people pay to advertise on it? More fool them.
Maybe I'm just a paranoid old crank; but I always have to wonder if the 'browser fingerprinting' guys have started to take advantage of the fact that people at the extreme end of browser-hardening are quite rare and, while their efforts to break some tracking mechanisms that would otherwise provide useful details, they also make them among the most atypical hits a server is likely to see...
advertisements do not have the intended effect on me anymore. Quite the opposite in fact.
The guy that shouts over the teevee that i should buy a pickup truck? He is virtually guaranteeing that i will NEVER buy a pickup truck.
I have never eaten at a Red Robin and I never will. Why? Because I once saw a commercial for Red Robin that i found particularly distasteful. Any time i go to a store, before walking in, if i can remember any particularly virulent ads, i turn around & go somewhere else. Mastercard may be priceless to you, but to me its a lame meme that stopped being funny in 1997.
Eventually i had to quit watching teevee altogether... there were so few places left that i could still shop at.
So when i block your ads, i'm doing you and your client a favor. Do NOT try to stop me from blocking your ads.
The problem is simple.
The user wants the CONTENT to have focus, as that is what they go there to get.
The advertisers want the ADVERTISEMENTS to have focus, so they have "Impact."
That is why advertisements are obnoxious, obtrusive, cover 80 to 90% of the display, hoover around, make blaring noises, flash rapidly enough to induce epileptic seizures in those vulnerable, and overall make users reach for adblock software.
The solution? Advertisers need to pay more for less obtrusive ads.
If a site can get enough revenue to operate on just a simple hyperlinking rotating image banner, they wont need full page flash plague competing with their content.
But advertisers want eyeballs. ALL of the user's eyeballs. If advertisers had their way, people would spend 80 to 90% of their time watching adverts-- both on the internet and on television.
Allowing advertisements to become ubiquitous to the point of requiring brain bleach to control is NOT the answer, and only further increases the "Need" to inject yet more adverts to secure a workable revenue stream for the site/channel operators. Basically, they are saturating the market for adverts, and the price paid out per advert served drops. To make up for that, they have to display more adverts. Works GREAT for advertising companies, but is poison for content producers. It has a double-edge, in that as the percentage of time spent viewing adverts goes up, the number of viewers watching the site goes down.
It should not be any bit at all hard to determine where the two trends meet, especially with the INSANE amounts of analytics going on with advert tracking, and page viewing.
The problem is that the advert companies dont want to pay what the adverts are actually worth, and are driving the price paid per impression into the ground, while making a killing doing so. Users dont want to actually pay a fee to use the internet's various webpage services, which have traditionally always been free. (with a few exceptions.)
The real solution is to keep content as the primary focus, put a fucking ball gag and super glue in the mouths of the advertisers, and cut off the flow of gravy by refusing to plaster wall to wall adverts all over the internet, thus making the internet advert real-estate space a premium commodity, commanding a high price through encouraging scarcity.
Users would easily handle a 30% advert (max), 70% content (min) mix. They will walk away from, or start using adblock to circumvent anything above where the curves meet.
This isnt hard.
Back during the dot-bomb era, all the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs had this business model: start something, get lots and lots of eyeballs by giving away content, and regardless of its profitability, sell out to some very large corporation that has no clue for billions of dollars.
Big corps finding out that you can't charge for something that was free, then decided to use advertising.
And here we are.
You have them. Fuck ads. All of them. Always. Forever.
And if your business model depends on ad revenue. Then get a new one. If you can't find a way to fund what you're doing with ads then do something else.
You don't find it just a teensy bit ironic that you're posting this on Slashdot?
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
I got some websites that now come up with a message begging me to stop blocking their Ad shit, they need to make money.
And those are the sites that I never visit again.
You want to make money? Charge people for whatever it is you have to offer. People spend a few Gazillions of dollars every year paying for things, so it's not like this is a new concept. If people aren't willing to pay for what you have to offer then you have nothing of value and need to die.
And nobody will even notice that you are gone.
> selling all the things I couldn't care less about and they make it hard to actually concentrate on the content I am on the website for in the first place.
Agreed. I much prefer RELEVANT ads. These days, I often see ads that are precisely the type of thing I would buy, and like that. I buy a lot of refurb enterprise storage. If you offer me a great deal on a 16 port 3ware card, that's a lot more useful to me (and the advertiser) than some random ad.
> 2) they're one of the most popular ways of spreading malware on the Internet.
And needlessly so. The ads themselves don't need to be running script or Flash from the advertiser. Text or an image does the job fine. The NETWORK (Google or DoubleClick) may need some scripting to provide the most relevant ads, but they don't need to be presenting script provided by their various advertisers.
> who can be trusted to vet the content they pass on and avoid being a distributor of JavaScript malware?
That's easy - if they only pass on plain text and images, no scripting, they aren't passing on JavaScript malware. I believe Google falls into that category.
Of course Google has their own script. It does "track" you, but it's not malware in the sense of your post.
Advertisers try to sell 'happiness', trying to convince us that if we buy their product (car, soda or laundry detergent), we will be happy. It's all a con job.
I lost interest in internet ads back when they started inserting 'flashing strobe lights' to get my attention, totally annoying! The ad people haven't gotten any better at not annoying me since.
You are not mistaken. Your IP address is basically unique to your neighborhood. So we have "that guy in northwest Billings, Montana who uses Safari version X.Y on OSX version X.Y.z with the screen resolution xXy, media player plugin version x.Y, adblock version x.Y, noscript version x.Y ....". We'll recognize that guy when he comes back.
Google has gotten around it with google.com/analytics it used to be googleanalytics.com
It's the site that sends you your pre-selected ads on a mobile device as defined by where you've been, and who pays them.
Didn't know about Ghostery. Just installed it for firefox and seems to work as, erm advertized. Thanks.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
I haven't or don't recall running across a site with such a message but agree its a site I would never again visit.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
If users don't want annoying ads, instead serve ads that aren't annoying.
If you don't to be tracked from site to site, the ads you see on Slashdot could be based on which stories you read on Slashdot, and based on the comments you post. No cross-site tracking, if that's what users want.
Key to this is something else users want - a ton of free content. You don't want to pay $29.95 / month for Slashdot. You want Slashdot, and you want it for free. Advertisers are willing to help pay the bills to keep Slashdot running (and all of the other sites). That means advertisers are already giving you something you want.
One thing several people posted is that ad relevance is shorter than advertisers seem to think. Don't advertise something I searched for six weeks ago, users say. Advertisers can fix that. People have also complained that ads are often for a product they purchased. Instead, it would be better to have ads for RELATED products and services. That's doable.
I don't think the issue is tracking. People expect that thanks Google, Baidu, NSA... One issue is that advertising has become so good at being evil that people don't trust ads. Think "one weird trick..." that people have a visceral negative reaction to ads. Another issue is that there is so much of it. 20+ minutes of an hour of TV with ads embedded in the show itself. Both are in part a result of consumers not having a vector to correct the market (think invisible hand). Do the advertisers see the results of the no this is not relevant feedback on hulu? Of course not because if the company running the ads knew how disliked their ads were some advertisers would be out of a job and the medium conveying those ads would loose revenue. Which brings us to the central issue, technology has given the advertisers more power and they in turn have became unconstrained psychopaths with said power so why would anyone want to give them more power.
Of course technology has changed consumers too. If I buy something say a magazine, a newspaper or a subscription to a website I feel that I am buying the content not the ads so refraining from sending me ads ought to be part of the deal.
IMHO these websites are examples of bad design .
While that is true, in practical terms it is irrelevant. Websites are now designed with little/no graceful degradation. That is simply the situation as it is, for better or worse. Websites are not designed to gracefully fall back and probably won't ever be designed that way going forward. There is insufficient economic incentive for commercial ventures to be bothered so it isn't likely to happen. Few people turn off Javascript and those that do are probably not of commercial interest so why design for them? Very annoying but I don't see any reasonably likely chance that it will change either.
Then do not go to those websites, no reason to use a website that was built by some kid that does not understand basics of webdesign.
Good luck with that. It isn't "kids" designing these websites and they know exactly what they are doing. It's commercial ventures who know that very few people turn off javascript and those that do are probably not likely to be customers anyway.
After 20+ years of your ads online, stop already!
If we want your product we will buy it, otherwise leave me the fuck alone.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Internet Explorer has a feature called Tracking Protection which allows you to disable third party content on websites. It lists out all third party elements that you frequently see and allows you to disable them. That way you can block Facebook from all websites, which aren't Facebook.
Sure, the current poles of 'no ads' and 'fully personalized targeted ads' are not compatible. That's why we have negotiations. And there is plenty of middle ground. It is just a question of how targeted we are willing to allow to support the free services we all love to use online. For example, an electronics site might feature ads targeted to electronics hobbyists. Is that so bad? Somewhat targeted at least. And it doesn't require any tracking. I know this isn't exactly the sort of thing we are talking about, it is the old way advertising worked.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Sounds like the problem here is advertisers refusing to acknowledge the existence of Nash Equilibrium and operating under the assumption that they can just force their way in whatever way they feel like. The fact of the matter is that a lot of the blocking behavior by web users is the direct consequence of abusive marketing and the failure of the marketers to understand that is leading them to engage in shadier and shadier methods of marketing.
I don't necessarily mind ads, but I'm not interested in getting infected by them, having flash ads crash my browser or obscure content and I'm certainly not interested in that intellitext bullshit that makes browsing a real headache. And let's not forget about those stupid ads that load late and then cause the entire page to shift or are set to autoplay when I open a page.
So the only websites that should exist are ecommerce ones?
(and maybe the internet as we know it)
Here's a crowd-based experiment I've always wanted to initiate: For one day, everyone follows ads and stays on the ad site for a non-trivial amount of time.
If everyone clicks on ads (or even a small percentage of people), monthly ad budgets will be very quickly drained. The companies will have received no value from their ad spend (if they do at all as it is). Google, et al. will get a one day windfall from the ad revenues. It might take a few coordinated "denial-of-ad-attacks", but eventually vendors will start to question the value of their internet advertising budgets and find better ways to spend their money connecting with customers.
Of course, a side effect of this might be killing the goose that laid the golden egg. If Google and Facebook suddenly lose their primary source of revenue, they will have to look for other ways to monetize their services (maybe just asking users to pay? if Facebook's numbers are real (haha), $5/month/user would be ~$5B/month ,which is not bad).
A more devious alternative would be to have ad blockers silently follow the ads and "fake" a user session...
"Advertisers are parasites". That's an interesting choice of words. I guess you're unaware that advertisers pay the bills for this site and almost all sites on the internet.
I am aware of that and those two are not mutually exclusive. Sure I get something for free. If your definition of "free" is limited to the exchange of money. But money is not everything you have that has value. Your time and your attention are valuable too. And they are more valuable than the service that you get for them, because otherwise those inbetween could not make a profit on selling them to advertisers.
Never thought about it that way around, have you? Let me repeat that: There is no "free" in capitalism. You just pay in a different currency. Since people make a profit here, what they get from you and re-sell to someone else is worth more than what you're getting in return. The difference is the profit they make.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
There isn't a purely technical solution to this problem. The only solution is legal: first define a standard do-not-track header for HTTP (done), then impose a legal penalty for anyone who fails to honor it. And by all that's holy, learn from the errors of the Do Not Call list. The ability for individuals to go directly to small-claims court to recover was a good thing, but there's a couple of corrections that need to be made. First, have the law make the penalties mandatory. Don't give the judge the option of not imposing them just because he feels it isn't reasonable to demand that much from the advertiser. He should have the discretion to decide whether the DNT header was sent and whether the defendant tracked the user, but if the header was sent and the user was tracked then it is an abuse of discretion to not impose the stated penalties. Second, dump the exceptions for political and charitable stuff and surveys and the like. Any exceptions that are made should be limited to the site being visited only, even something as benign as "technically necessary" shouldn't apply to third-party sites.
You assert the following:
A person will only trade A for B if A > B.
Someone trades A for B.
Therefore, A > B.
However, you've forgotten that in order for someone to trade A for B, someone must also trade B for A. For every seller there must be a buyer, for every employee, there must be an employer.
Therefore, the full syllogism for the transaction is:
A person will only trade A for B if A > B.
Someone trades A for B.
Someone trades B for A.
Therefore, A > B and B > A.
It is obviously false that A is greater and less than B. Therefore, your whole understanding of capitalism is falsified in seconds. Your mind - blown.
You've missed a couple of important facts, including the very fact that the name "capitalism" comes from.
First, a car is worth about $1500 / year. A teenage employee is worth about $10,000 / year. Ten thousand pounds of water, flour, tomatoes and cheese are worth $20,000.
Total value of these items: $30,500
The value of 10,000 pizzas, each delivered: $140,000
The business person makes a profit essentially by putting the parts together in a way that increases value, not by shrewd trading.
A ship combined with an organized crew, combined with a contract to carry things is (much) more valuable than the value of an empty ship + the value of random people's time + a contract you can't fulfill. That's how profits are made - putting the right pieces together, in the right way, so that the value to the is increased. You must increase the value to the buyer, obviously, but also increase the value to workers. By myself, I can generate $X in a good month, $Y in a bad month. My work, in my employer's office, with my employer's equipment, my employer's team, and my employer's reputation pays me a steady $X every month, which I find much more valuable. My employer can reliably pay me as much as I'd make by myself in a good month because by putting all of the parts together the value of the system is $X * 2.
Yeah, I think that the advertisers (and Google seems to be particularly bad at this) really need to crack down on certain obviously-misleading ads. I've seen a creeping increase in the "Green Download Button" ads, which really serve no other purpose than to mislead people on download pages into downloading and installing the *wrong* product (generally malware).
fark.com is the one that comes immediately to mind. Of course, I then simply need to block the begging as well. Actually I find adblock indispensable not simply for removing ads, but for removing not-exactly-advertising meaningless UI elements that occupy screen real estate. I'm talking about boxes full of 35 different "share this page on these social media sites" icons, and static headers with flyout menus that stick to the top of the browser window, not to mention those goddamn annoying "toasters" that pop up in the lower right corner once you scroll past a certain spot in an article. And reader comment engines like Disqus, not to mention "recommended related content" IFRAMEs (e.g. Outbrain) on news sites. My Internet experience is completely different from that which would be experienced by someone without adblock, it's a lot more than just the absence of ads.
Nobody owes you building free web sites for you.
Facebook is not the freaking commons, it's Zuck's property, and you are an invited guest. Slashdot is not yours. CmdrTaco built it, and he put ads in his house. If you don't like how he (and now Dice) decorated his house, you are welcome to leave.
When I stay up all night building something nice for you to enjoy, that doesn't make it yours, or make it "the commons". I built it, it's my site. If I want to put blink tags on my site I can. If you don't like blink tags, you're free to stay out of the place I built.
Yeah, but that crap is windoze-specific.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Nobody owes you building free web sites for you.
Wow, you went off raging on a tangent there that wasn't even in the room.
"The Internet" is a commons. Facebook isn't and if it wants money then fine with me. This isn't about any right to advertise or some such bullshit, it's about how advertisement poisons everything. It can be perfectly legal and still toxic.
Public space is also a commons, I used the billboard example intentionally.
But I guess this is all a waste of time as you wanted to misunderstand me.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
> "The Internet" is a commons.
No, it's not. It's a collective term for a bunch of people's individual sites, what used to be called "home pages". I won't tell you what to put on your home page. If you want to make a site where you babble about your collectivist nonsense, go ahead. It's none of my business what you put on your site. Your shite is not a commons. Before you build your site, I'd SUGGEST that you first visit one of the many fine sites where you can learn what "commons" means, but it's really none of my business if you want to skip learning the vocabulary and just post gibberish on your site.
A hosts file yes, the update tool the GP posted, no.
Nothing static is acceptable, target is moving too much and I have better things to do with my time than keeping textfiles constantly updated.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You're complaining about ads on "the internet". But "the internet" doesn't mean web pages.
So you're complaining about flyers stuffed into fiber conduits?
You're trying to defend the position that:
"The internet is the place where people put ads are". "The internet is the fiber and routers".
See, you keep contradicting yourself. When that happens, you have several options. A) You can flee to ridiculous ad hominem, B) you can lose your mind struggling to find a way to make all of those contradictions make sense, or C) you be intellectually honest with yourself and recognizing that the position you had been advocating is clearly non-sensical and it's time to step back and see what actually makes sense.
I have no idea what you think you're arguing here. You don't need to explain hostfiles to me, I've patched kernels and maintained Apache modules, I think the difference is quite clear.
Still, any defense against ads needs to be kept current, and unless there's some kind of subscription service as exists with the adblockers, the method itself is pretty much useless.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Oh, okay, I understand what you're saying. Ads on web sites are just billboards - you don't have to be on the site to se the ads that are on the site. Just like a billboard, if Dice puts an ad on Slashdot, people on Techcrunch will see it. Obviously, that makes Techdirt readers unhappy, having their neighbor Slashdot putting up all of those billboards.
You're certainly right. It's not like you only see the ads on Slashdot if you come to Slashdot.
You're a nitwit who intentionally misunderstands things in order to troll. Goodbye.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Are you even reading what I write?
That link you point to is a windows-only software, but I already wrote that like four replies ago. It's useless to me since I don't run windows.
The rest you wrote I don't care about and I have no idea why you even wrote it because it's got nothing to do with what we're discussing.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
omg, are you for real?
First, your number is false. It isn't even true for desktop systems anymore, and has never, ever, been true for servers. 94% my ass. The only place on the planet where 90+% of the servers run windows is the Microsoft headquarters and I'm not even sure of that. But no matter what, it's just completely irrelevant to this discussion anyways.
Second, you don't need an app to build a hosts file, it's plain text after all. Initial building is totally irrelevant, updating is what matters. Some machine somewhere that can do it is worthless. It needs to be a continuous process.
Third, why the fuck are you still arguing about the superiority of host files when that's not under discussion? What's your problem? Not getting enough attention?
You shut down me. What a joke. You don't even know who I am. But since I'm pretty sure your next reply will just be a third repetition of the same nonsense, and you don't even try to comprehend what I'm actually writing, I'm exiting this here.
Damn are there many idiot trolls on /. these days.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
ok, I have to reply on one point here, because otherwise innocent readers are fooled:
Good luck building a hosts file minus repeats
# man uniq
The rest of his drivel - my condolences to everyone who actually read it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Dear readers:
Please don't be fooled by this moron. He obviously has no idea what he's talking about, so beware of his tool, it can't be good.
1.) hosts files don't deal with full URLs, but with domain-to-IP resolution. They don't do "trailing material". Test this for yourself:
# ping "slashdot.org "
ping: cannot resolve slashdot.org : Unknown host
2.) DNS is case-insensitive. Test this for yourself:
# ping SLASHDOT.ORG
PING slashdot.org (216.34.181.45): 56 data bytes
(emphasis mine)
I would beware to install a tool from someone so ignorant about the basic elements of what his tool claims to provide. As he's obviously link-spamming, too, I would strongly recommend running a virus scan on his tool.
Whether or not his tool does anything useful at all I don't know. If you are interested in having a hosts file managed by a 3rd party, there are alternatives, like this one, for example: http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/ho... - and Google will show you more.
No doubt he will respond to this with more nonsense. Caveat lector.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
After an extensive discussion, I must strongly warn against using this tool. In fact, I strongly recommend running several virus scanners on it if you've downloaded.
Follow the discussion in my comments section if you want. The basic summary is that "APK" (always posting anonymously) make several claims that are objectively false and point to a horribly bad comprehension of the whole system, including a claim that hosts files would be case-sensitive (they aren't). With such basic mistakes, one has to doubt the quality of his tool.
In addition, his obnoxious link-spamming to the above comment indicates he's trying to get as many links as possible pointing towards his site, probably to drive traffic, possibly with malicious intent.
If you are interested in 3rd party managed hosts files, there are alternatives available. Google will get you some, this one is just an example and appears to be popular: http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/ho...
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
experiment successful. :-)
Haven't had so much fun on /. in a long while. I could extend this because it's such a laugh, but you're only link-spamming so I'll stop, and no doubt you'll comment on this again with more link-spam and of course you'll repeat that now I shut up and make it sound as if that would prove anything.
So I leave you, laughing all the way, to the misery of your pathetic little excuse for a life.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org