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Dealing With 'Advertising Pollution'
theodp writes: "Everyone gets that advertising is what powers the internet, and that our favorite sites wouldn't exist without it," writes longtime ad guy Ken Segall in The Relentless (and annoying) Pursuit of Eyeballs. "Unfortunately, for some this is simply license to abuse. Let's call it what it is: advertising pollution." CNN's in-your-face, your-video-will-play-in-00:25-seconds approach, once unthinkable, has become the norm. "Google," Segall adds, "is a leader in advertising pollution, with YouTube being a showcase for intrusive advertising. Many YouTube videos start with a mandatory ad, others start with an ad that can be dismissed only after the first 10 seconds. Even more annoying are the ad overlays that actually appear on top of the video you're trying to watch. It won't go away until you click the X. If you want to see the entire video unobstructed, you must drag the playhead back to start over. Annoying. And disrespectful." Google proposed using cap and trade penalties to penalize traditional polluters — how about for those who pollute the Internet?
Most of Youtube is professionally produced videos where youtube shares the ad revenue with the creator. That's how people make money to be able to produce more videos.
you either get rid of advertising and pay to watch each video, or you put up with advertising. My account is enabled for revenue sharing, but i rarely upload anything and don't rely on it. but if took and produced videos and relied on ad revenue, i would stop very fast if i didn't get paid.
I sat down to watch Paddington Bear with my 19 month old son.
The advert that I couldn't skip was for a horror movie.
Thanks, youtube. That was *fantastic*.
I never watch forced ads. I've yet to see content that's worth it. Pages get reloaded to pass the ads a couple times, failing that I'm off to something else. Oh, and adblockers and outright hostname and IP blocking still works. I'm sure they'll figure out a way to be even more abusive, they're google after all. But even they need to learn that trying too hard easily causes a loss of those precious "eyeballs".
No Advertising does not power the Internet. Bogus assertion to begin the article. The internet ran fine before the ads. It would run fine without them. Advertising is one aspect of the internet. It does not power the internet in any way, shape or form.
I once was serenaded by infomercials (45 minutes long) when I tried to view some videos on their site. Yes, there's a skip buttion.
I installed addblock because videos and streams I watched had add volume loudness so loud that it was a real problem. I often watch videos during the night and when the loudness jumps up for the adds it becomes annoying really fast. And that was the only reason.
I don't really mind adds and I know they run the content creators, but just that one small issue was enough for me.
> "Everyone gets that advertising is what powers the internet, and that our favorite sites wouldn't exist without it,"
No not everyone. This one gets that advertising has filled the niche that micro-payments would have filled if the technology had been advanced enough at the time. None of what exists on the net today requires advertising, except for the ad companies.
Some people will say advertising is what lets poor people use the net. To that I say, not for long. The Big Data trend will enable ad-networks to determine the value of showing you an advertisement. If you aren't the right demographic (the kind with disposable income) they'll know you aren't worth it. Today we have paywalls, pretty soon we'll have ad-walls where sites simply won't let people in unless their ad-network thinks they money can be made from them.
When people say "internet", they mean content showing their favorite celebrities, mainstream news, and the same special-interest articles that used to appear in print manages. They don't mean a bunch of bearded, pasty-faced nerds discussing filk music and making obscure UNIX jokes on Usenet like the "internet that ran fine before the ads" that you are thinking of.
No. The internet was implemented by the federal government, funded by citizen taxes, and later extended as part of the communications infrastructure. The internet was not invented to serve businesses, it was invented to serve the citizens.
For those who voluntarily go to ad laden websites, you can't regulate self harm.
s/manages/magazines/.
This is because most or all website revenue comes from advertising. CBS has ads, but Netflix doesn't. Books don't, and newspapers and magazines have a limited amount, because part of their revenue comes from selling their publications to consumers. (Without ads, a copy of something like National Geographic or Playboy would cost $20 or more.)
The problem is that we don't have a good way of buying small amounts of content online. You can subscribe to some sites by the month or year, or perhaps buy limited access via PayPal, but the cost tends to be $ or $$ or $$$, and nobody wants to subscribe to CNN or YouTube. They want to see that video now, with no registration and commitment. The answer is the great lost Internet opportunity of 15 years ago: micropayments. If there was an easy and universal system for paying (say) a few cents to watch a video, why not? It'd be trivial for viewers, but could add up to real money for sites.
If I were a huge content provider, I'd figure out a way to make it happen, perhaps through ISPs. Subsidize them to give every user maybe $10/month credit. Offer content providers a great deal to install a one-click "Read/Watch Now for 1 cent" buttons. Get people used to paying tiny amounts of money to view content. If something like this could get going, it'd benefit content providers of all sizes. E.g. a comedian who writes one joke a day could make a living with 10,000 readers paying 1 cent per day ($100/day = $36,500/year).
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
CNN's in-your-face, your-video-will-play-in-00:25-seconds approach, once unthinkable, has become the norm.
Why unthinkable? Why should free video be so very different from free TV?
I used the Internet, quite happily and successfully, for more than a decade, before HTTP (curse you, Tim Berners-Lee) began to intrude on the experience. I would be very happy to go back to those days. Throw in an IRC/FTP/RTP+RTSP "subscription" for content, and there's nothing I would miss.
The old adage about TV ("99 channels and nothing on") applies to the web, but with several orders more magnitude of noise to signal.
Ads are spam. Does spam power email? Do pirates power seafaring?
The Internet was vastly better then by any measure. It wasn't used to commit financial crimes, to dupe people, to invade privacy, or to spy on whole populations. It especially didn't destroy more jobs than it's created and eliminate whole industries, and cause the vast amounts of unemployment and underemployment that have resulted from its going mainstream.
What has made the Internet the cesspool it is today is advertising, corporatism, and the kind of control and attempted control that goes with the undereducated being turned loose on something shiny.
Mute the sound and go to another tab for however many seconds. You don't have to watch it or listen to it. Use ad blocker for the rest. You don't have to be bothered with ads if you don't choose to be bothered. There are some serious annoyances in this world, but internet ads aren't a big deal.
I've never seen them, are you a non-tech type who doesn't use adblock, flashblock, and noscript?
I disagree with ads on a very fundamental level. they're manipulative and serve to change and circumvent logic and the decision making process. I don't appreciate anything or anyone that is intentionally trying to manipulate me.
I am still going to go to all the same web sites as I always have but you can bet I'm going to adblock as many ads as tectonically possible. The industry brought it upon themselves by pushing the intrusiveness way to far. I don't feel guilty in the slightest.
Do you remember the Internet before advertising? I do. It was mostly educational, and technical. It was also low bandwidth. The modern Internet is a lot of expensive to produce and deliver content. That money has to come from somewhere, and Universities are not financing it all like they used to.
I just repeat "fuck you, fuck you, fuck you", while the ad plays. If it is especially annoying, I make a note to never buy from the cretins responsible.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
There is a fuckton more content on the internet today than in 1998, so what worked before doesn't necessarily work today and vice versa. To take the YouTube example of the story author, we have two sides to it - those who post the content without having to worry about being hit by a massive bandwidth bill, and those who view the content without having to whip out a credit card to pay for it. In between those sides, we have Google who is paying the infrastructure bill and funding the means to pay that bill by showing ads.
People on here and other open forums regularly bitch about paywalls, so there are only really two other alternatives - find another way to pay the bill, or offer the content completely for free. Offering the content completely for free doesn't work for a lot of companies, because they are there to make money....
You mean you don't want to see a week of ads for something you just bought? Philistine!
And how does that annoying floating "Like us On FaceBook! Please! Someone! Anyone!" pay for servers?
Yeah, just imagine. A micropayment system that worked. 25 cents for a video? 10 cents? 2 cents? I'd go for that in a heartbeat. Sure, have a choice - look at the ads or pay up. I suppose that some smart marketing folks have actually looked at this and decided it 's not worth it, but I for one would welcome our new micropayment overlords.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I've noticed a really annoying trend, where you're on a site for a 10-20 seconds reading their content, when this (presumably JavaScript) box pops in front of the content soliciting for your email address. This is really annoying, since it totally breaks the concentration on what you're reading. Since this apparently done with JavaScript provided by the hosting site, pop-up window blockers and cross-script blockers don't prevent it.
So here's a hint for web designers: THIS IS F***KING ANNOYING! STOP IT!
Thank you.
Ads and marketing in general have evolved from simple, respectful "hey, try this! It's good" into manipulative nonsense. Few people can see through it and the result has been devastating to them. It has shaped and certainly harmed the culture of the US and even results in violence in some extreme cases where people want things so badly they hurt and kill each other to get it. Though most will disagree exactly when things have gone "too far" few will disagree that they have.
The ones that get me are where you go to an ordinary (text) web page, probably news, and there is a flash add on the right side that starts playing instantly, video and sound. OK, bad enough. But to trying to turn it off I move my mouse over it, and the D*** thing expands to half the screen, blocking what I went there to read. And it won't go back to being small!
It is for this reason that I do not have Flash installed on my new notebook computer. Adobe Flash should give the user more power. How about a global option that says "Don't run anything until I click on it." That would be decent. Even door-to-door salesmen are required to knock on your door; they can't use bullhorns from out on the sidewalk, which is what Flash is used for.
If it takes 10 seconds of your time, then you're paying with your time.
If you're a professional making $50/hour, then 10 seconds of your time is worth $0.14. If you're a laborer making $10, then 10 seconds of your time is worth $0.03. That's just the time wasted, mind, not counting the fact that watching ads is essentially subjecting yourself to black magic, attempted mind control, and trying to put a value on your neurological integrity..
And since the Internet as we know it has become, thanks to scum-sucking advertizers, a hive of scum and villainy, little would be lost, and we could go about cleaning out the cruft and building something better. Fuck the online advertising industry with a rusty dildo.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
FTFA :- "Everyone gets that advertising is what powers the internet, and that our favorite sites wouldn't exist without it"
Wrong. My favourite web sites are my own ones, and they have no advertising.
People seem to forget, the internet RUNS on advertising money. It's what pay's the "real" bills for servers, staff & redbull's.
People used to have their own web sites about their hobbies and interests.. they used to actually participate until mass media came along and turned the network into a TV set. It was standard practice to offer users personal home pages when they signed up for Internet service.
IMO, if ads stopped across all internet sites, or the online advertising industry completely collapsed. The internet as we know it, would be gone.
Good riddance.
Case in point, from a customer last week. Legit local radio, click steaming button. Stream controls in pop up from 3rd party. Stream is broken, stars then stops. Ad in same window, from ad choices, plain white misleading ad, "you need to update your windows media player 11". What do people do? Oh I need to update. Boom adware or worse. There need to be laws and real penalties for this, it does real damag.
Silence is a state of mime.
Adblock
NoScript
CookieMonster
And Flashstop
Adblock removes most of the ads. I turn off for sites I want to support or that don't annoy me with obnoxious ads.
NoScript is on for any site I can use without javascript. Java slows a lot of sites down without providing me any useful functionality in most cases. Also most of the annoying things a site can do like throw pop ups at you is done in javascript. So I just keep it off for most things.
CookieMonster blocks cookies which I do anywhere the site I'm interacting with doesn't need me to have a cookie. If I'm not doing anything complicated on a site and there are no logins then there's no need for cookies.
Flashstop stops all those annoying flash animations and videos and audio files that otherwise would auto play when you load a site. Its even good with youtube because you can load up five or six different pages at once without them all auto playing.
This is how I interact with the web now. Come at me.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
...except, of course, for the ad companies selling it to companies who try to get sales. I'm not in marketing, but I got some insider information from people who are, and they all say that about 50% of all the money put into advertisement has basically the same effect on sales as burning it would have. The only reason it is wasted this way is that a) many customers don't know it and - more importantly - b) they don't know which 50%.
But, as in so many things, when something stops being effective, the first answer to the problem is to do more of it. The enemy has built bunkers against our bombs? Drop more bombs! The virus is becoming immune to our medicine? Raise the dosage. People have begun to ignore or block advertisement? Throw more ads their way.
Yes, it is pollution, the term is spot on.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Exactly you nailed it. For those that say that the ads have become manipulative, sorry but how are they different than old TV? Sure we have Tivo like apps but the reality is that commercials have always been in your face. It is just that on the Internet we have become used to non-invasive free Internet (as in free beer). The fact that this has changed does not surprise me in the least. Don't like it, do like the parent poster said, don't vist the site. Or better yet fork over money so that sites don't need ads.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
> It was also low bandwidth. The modern Internet is a lot of expensive to produce and deliver content.
Bandwidth costs have dropped exponentially since then.
We are looking at a 2000x drop in pricing from 1998 to the end of this year.
In 1998 it was $1200.00/Mbps by 2015 it will be $0.63/Mbps
First of all, you're wrong: it was still used to commit crimes, invade privacy, dupe people, etc.* Second of all, if you increase the population of anything by several orders of magnitude, you're probably going to see an increase in crime and bad behavior by several orders of magnitude. Finally, there is simply so, so, so much more quality content now than there was back then. Even in the mid-2000s, there were plenty of subjects were the internet was a near worthless resource.
*I'll give you that it wasn't used to spy on whole populations, but the only reasons are because internet access wasn't nearly as widespread, and storage and processing power would have been prohibitively expensive.
What's even worse is when some insurance company publishes a scare article to Forbes' advertisement program, which publishes stories under the Forbes umbrella while vaguely disassociating themselves from the content. The content looks like it's Forbes. It's really sick. Here's an example.
For those that say that the ads have become manipulative, sorry but how are they different than old TV?
Well for one thing on old TV ads didn't pretend to be part of the show you were watching. Viewing them didn't turn your computer into a botnet, track your every move or adorn your sets control knobs and television cabinet with vendor advertising. TV ads also lack self awareness.
And they continued to do so until well after the explosion of advertising. Blogging through convenient, easy-to-use platforms only became a thing in the early to mid years of the first decade of the new millennium.
At least in some special-interest niches, blogging is now on the wane, with people moving to Twitter or simply falling silent. There are shortening attention spans, plus the fact that sites like StackExchange and Wikipedia are better centralized places to send the content that one creates instead of keeping it on an obscure personal website.
Many bloggers give up because they are unable to monetize their blogging, leaving them wondering what was the point of expending such effort on creating content when they get nothing in return. In fact, deft use of advertising actually helps ordinary people continue to stay focused on a personal website.
Then you're an idiot.
For $20/month you'd more than pay for all the bandwidth you and everyone you know spends on YouTube at the rates YouTube pays for it. Do you have any idea how ridiculously little ads pay the ones who show them?
The Internet 'RUNS on advertising' because they can make more money that way, not because it has to.
You may be too young to remember it, but it wasn't always that way. There was a time before Google turned it into an ad platform. There was content then as well.
Netflix doesn't run on ads. AppleTV doesn't run on ads. My Internet doesn't involve ads, and not because I use adblock, because I pay up front for the services that are worth paying for and ONLY if they allow me to avoid ads by paying for service.
Ignorant people like you are the ones who think its Okay that you get ads on cable TV and Hulu Plus.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
"Also, you don't have to go to the CNN site if you don't like their ads. No one actually forced you to read CNN. It is their media property, they can do what they wish."
Sure, just as it's our right to render on our screens only what we wish.
And we do that.
Really, I don't know what I'd do without them. Probably stop using the Internet as much as I do now, find some alternatives, or do a hell of a lot more bitching.
When running a fresh new installation of a web browser, the first ad I see immediately causes me to halt everything I'm doing and install those three plugins. Annoyingly, I usually don't even hit two consecutive websites before that happens--the wretched fucking things are literally everywhere. Video ads really fucking piss me off, and even more on Android, because the god damn things are *designed* to reduce your access to the system, which effectively prevents installing ad blocking software without gaining root.
I have actually in the past, when confronted with an ad while trying to watch a video, cranked the volume all the way down and turned the phone upside down. If I did happen to see what brand was advertising, I add them to my mental blacklist of products and services to AVOID. Yes, I am so against advertising, it has the exact *opposite* effect on me when it comes to buying things. I'm sorry, but I can think for myself, I can do my own research and come up with an educated conclusion as to what I want or need. I don't fucking need someone spewing bullshit, trying to force me to buy their junk.
These days? When I even come across ONE ad when attempting to watch YouTube, I have zero tolerance. I close it. It is not worth the hassle. If I want to watch something bad enough, it will be on a proper computer with the necessary extensions. Android is one of the worst platforms to visit web pages or watch videos on.
Advertising is also why the Internet has evolved far past Usenet discussions. Ads bring us current TV episodes and today's news. I'll take that over alt.whine.virginity any time.
Not everyone "gets" that advertising is needed. In fact, click-through revenue is so miniscule that it would be more cost-effective to not saturate the Internet with ads, or indeed have ads on the Internet at all. The Internet had no advertising at all until two Utah lawyers invented spam and made a fortune promoting their book on Internet advertising. That was around 5 years after the Internet was privatized.
Almost no site I give a damn about relies on advertising. As advertising on a site goes up, the time I spend there goes down. When in England, I watch BBC almost exclusively, ITV stuff is relegated to whenever it comes out on DVD. That has been the case for much of my life. When moving to the US, I abandoned television entirely simply because of the adverts.
Linux is one of the top Operating Systems and gained almost all of that reputation and awesomeness before IBM started their TV ads.
So if products don't need advertising, the Internet doesn't need advertising and users hate advertising, then who the hell is this "everyone" who "understands" the need?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'm sick of all that advertising on Wikpedia. Oh wait
If these annoying ads did not work better than alternatives, they would not exist. "Working" means they have an effect on some portion of the target audience. Everyone does not hate and ignore ads (although I do not understand this mentality personally).
But, what you are seeing is desperation. Advertising rates are still too high. It is not nearly as effective as advertisers once thought, which is why you have seen rates plummet. And that's why you have seen ads become increasing annoying and obtrusive. The advertising industry is going through a process where they are slowly realizing the true value of internet advertising, and pricing is continuing to adjust accordingly. That said, think of how many sites you use have one business model, which is to rely almost entirely on advertising to cover costs and make a profit. Many of these sites and web applications are not viable and will go away. And people will bitch about that, too.
I haven't seen anything in the last 14 years to make me doubt any assertions in this article, which gives MANY reasons that micropayments won't work. Here's just one short section, but it's one of the key points.
micropayments create a double-standard. One cannot tell users that they need to place a monetary value on something while also suggesting that the fee charged is functionally zero. This creates confusion - if the message to the user is that paying a penny for something makes it effectively free, then why isn't it actually free? Alternatively, if the user is being forced to assent to a debit, how can they behave as if they are not spending money?... Users will be persistently puzzled over the conflicting messages of "This is worth so much you have to decide whether to buy it or not" and "This is worth so little that it has virtually no cost to you."
http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/19/micropayments.html
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
And since the Internet as we know it has become, thanks to scum-sucking advertizers, a hive of scum and villainy,
Headquartered at Mos Eisley, I presume?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
You mean things like internet access and cable tv? those are expensive services and they're full of ads. It's gotten so bad that ads are displayed around the edges of content on tv shows, and sites want internet customers to use their limited bandwidth allocations to download fat flash ads and wait for them to play....on so called 'premium' services. Fuck that.
I have no sympathy for advertisers at this point.
Youtube Center. I run that with Adblock and it automatically makes videos play in the larger window and always sets the volume to 10%. That is just a few things you can fix. The addon has tons of tweaks.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Correction: The Internet as you know it would be gone. The actual Internet would be just fine. Universities, stores, hobby sites, government, and people generally interested in communicating with each other would pay their ISP bills and continue without interruption.
The Internet was vastly better then by any measure. It wasn't used to commit financial crimes, to dupe people, to invade privacy, or to spy on whole populations. It especially didn't destroy more jobs than it's created and eliminate whole industries
AOL introduced flat-rate monthly billing in the mid nineties - coincidental with flat-rate regional calling plans.
Going on-line had become affordable.
The typical Internet suite of that era had its arcane clients for e-mail, IRC chat, USENET, FTP, Gopher, Archie, Veronica, and maybe a primitive web browser, along with zip file compression and a graphics editor.
The AOL client pushed all the geek's beloved tech far into the background, and put an easy to use GUI up-front.
At that point, the only way the geek could have kept the" old Internet" as his private playground would have been by crippling the evolution of the "open" web browse - and praying there wouldn't be too many defections to the commercial online services.
Cable television (paid for monthly by the consumer) has been absolutely raped by advertisers, thus diminishing its value. It's even worse online where it can (and does) affect user's PCs with (at least) reduced battery life and (at worst) tracking mechanisms and malware.
Putting two words together does an argument make.
Pollution is an externality, whereby bystanders are harmed. Technically, it's a form of trespass on those people's property. But advertisement on the internet is no such thing.
YouTube does not belong to you, it belongs to Google. If you choose to use that service, then you don't get to call the costs or downsides "pollution". Similarly, if you don't like the music that is played in a restaurant, or you don't like their drink minimum rule, you do not get to call those parts of the deal "pollution". Either you go there or you don't.
"When words lose their meaning, people lose their freedom." -- Confucius
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
Your entire post is wrong based simply on the fact that soap operas are a thing. Look up the history.
You don't even need Adblock. Two things stop all annoying ads on Slashdot: Flashblock and an account with Excellent karma.
First, when you publicly recommend a brand on an online social network using a Like or +1 control, that brand gets plastered across all of your friends' views of that social network. Second, if one of your friends clicks through to the recommended, he sees the pile of ads. A business often has fixed operating costs that must be recovered with advertising revenue that scales with viewership. Thus increasing viewership can help recover those costs.
Notice that the guy who said it is an advertising guy. That's his whole worldview. That's the way he thinks it is and the way he thinks it should be. Meanwhile for the rest of us, we have lots of alternatives. Paid sites, community-supported sites, ad-blocked sites, sites run by people who love what they are running a site about.
Basically this is a little advertiser wanting us to support clubbing a big advertiser, Google. He'd like us to get mad at his competition. What he wouldn't like is for us to start noticing just how much what he is advocating is in his self-interest.
I recommend we all switch to ad-block and screw them all. If some sites die or have to switch funding models, works great for me.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Buy from stores, unless literally impossible, and place 'phone orders, otherwise, so no ecommerce.
"Literally impossible" is a strong phrase. Using a web browser to buy something not sold in any store near you can be a lot cheaper than paying a buck a minute on hold internationally. Besides, how do you go about learning about the existence, features, and caveats of the product in the first place?
An ad like that has an expected return of about $10 per 1000 views, so it ought to cost you about $0.01 to skip it. Are you sure you would rather watch the ad than pay $0.01 and save 10 seconds? If you watch 10 videos a day that adds up to a mere $37 a year to never have to wait for the ad to end.
There is of course no payment system that would let you pay $0.01, but theoretically speaking, if such a system existed I think a lot of people would press the $0.01 skip button.
If it is especially annoying, I make a note to never buy from the cretins responsible.
Unless all providers of a particular necessary good or service also happen to advertise in such a manner. What if the power company or the water company were to put annoying ads on your screen?
and democrats want expression contrary to their image and ideology censored and punished. We'll probably have both by 2050.
The sites that restart my autoplay preferences constantly. ESPN does this, and others.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
You don't get to decide things you don't pay for. The people that pay for things gets to decide them.
If you ever feel the need to install an ad blocker, you're doing it wrong.
Hence why CNN doesn't get to decide whether their ads display on the computer I paid for or not.
"People seem to forget, the internet RUNS on advertising money."
Only people who have been successfully brainwashed believe this Big Lie. In olden times businesses had budgets for marketing and promotion which included advertising. Selling yourself and your services was an overhead cost.
Along comes the Internet. Personal interest, hobbyist and fan sites then come along, and tech sites that share their knowledge and expertise altruistically, for the common good. Then we hear the magic word 'monetize', and all hell is let loose.
Next is born that spawn of the devil, the notion that businesses have a God-given right to force us to watch advertisements, and fight tooth and nail to stop ad-skipping, ad-blocking, and the like. So don't feed me any crap that 'the Internet runs on advertising money'.
You may be too young to remember it, but it wasn't always that way. There was a time before Google turned it into an ad platform.
Ah, yes, I remember those days well. Those were the days when DoubleClick had tracking cookies on most of the major media sites, and the major sites that hadn't partnered with DoubleClick usually had their own advertising departments, so often their banners were placeholders advertising their advertising ability.
Of course, with decentralized management, all of those major players thought it was a new and innovative idea when X10 started their pop-under ad campaign using the new-fangled Flash thing, so it could be animated, too! Surely that would catch the eye, and they could finally make some steady income from those ads, right?
Then Google came along with its ad program. Simple text ads, tailored to the viewer, and all managed by an upstart company who seemed to be pretty good at managing such things. They didn't do pop-ups (or -unders), and they didn't do sound or video. They did volume. Sure, there are now ads everywhere, but they're not as bad as what we had before. I call it a net improvement.
There was content then as well.
Ah, yes, there was the content of the adolescent World Wide Web, hosted in large part by ad-supported GeoCities (and the like) and grant-supported universities, and consisting of low-bandwidth servers run as an afterthought to a business whose primary business wasn't dependent on having five-nines availability through DDoS attacks and peering disputes. I guess most of those "service unavailable" messages counted as some form of content.
...because I pay up front for the services that are worth paying for and ONLY if they allow me to avoid ads by paying for service.
...Like Slashdot, which offers a subscription that you don't appear to have?
Ignorant people like you are the ones who think its Okay that you get ads on cable TV and Hulu Plus.
Not quite. Ignorant people like me know that different companies are free to pick whatever business model they like, and I am free to use their service if and only if I agree with it. I find that Hulu Plus still offers me more value than they charge (including my time watching ads), so I'm inclined to subscribe to their service.
If only we were all as enlightened as you are, knowing that advertising is all Google's fault, and that all business must be conducted in the BitZtream-approved way.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
IMO, if ads stopped across all internet sites, or the online advertising industry completely collapsed. The internet as we know it, would be gone
Then everyone would be trying SEO, even more than they are now.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Also, you don't have to go to the CNN site if you don't like their ads. No one actually forced you to read CNN. It is their media property, they can do what they wish.
See... that was what we like to call "an example." As in just one of many things which prove the point. CNN is not the only website doing it. It's an arms race for eyeballs. When everyone starts doing it, then the internet as a whole is harmed.
Advertising, whether it's on TV, in magazines, the web, on billboards in public places or anywhere else is offensive to everyone. The idea is to create demand for things we don't need by making us feel bad about not having it. The whole advertising industry's main purpose is to make us feel bad.
Banksy put it best, and Gavin Aung Than did a good job of illustrating it: http://zenpencils.com/comic/15...
There were many people producing their own content on the Internet before big business saw a profit in it. To frame them all as pasty-faced nerds is disingenuous and obviously false. These were ordinary people exchanging ideas and sharing whatever they felt was worth sharing. This was, and still is, the crux of the Internet's greatness. The kind of content you mention is the kind of content that does not utilize the unique interpersonal capabilities of the Internet. That stuff is ordinary mass media content that has moved to the Internet only because the corporations producing it were losing their readership and revenue to the Internet (see previous paragraph.) They came here to fight for our eyeballs and our opinions because we chose to ignore them in favor of communicating with each other. Advertising, as irritating as it can be, can help us to distinguish between content motivated by money (probably distributed by a giant corporation with an ulterior motive of keeping you suckling at their teat while feeding you politically slanted pseudo-news) and content motivated by some other impetus. For me, content that is laden with irritating advertisements practically screams "don't listen to me! I'm a scumbag!" I'd much rather hear from ordinary people who have enough respect for me to tell their story without trying to monetize me. Lucky for us, plenty of those people still exist on the Internet.
There were many people producing their own content on the Internet before big business saw a profit in it. To frame them all as pasty-faced nerds is disingenuous and obviously false. These were ordinary people exchanging ideas and sharing whatever they felt was worth sharing. This was, and still is, the crux of the Internet's greatness.
The kind of content you mention is the kind of content that does not utilize the unique interpersonal capabilities of the Internet. That stuff is ordinary mass media content that has moved to the Internet only because the corporations producing it were losing their readership and revenue to the Internet (see previous paragraph.) They came here to fight for our eyeballs and our opinions because we chose to ignore them in favor of communicating with each other.
Advertising, as irritating as it can be, can help us to distinguish between content motivated by money (probably distributed by a giant corporation with an ulterior motive of keeping you suckling at their teat while feeding you politically slanted pseudo-news) and content motivated by some other impetus. For me, content that is laden with irritating advertisements practically screams "don't listen to me! I'm a scumbag!"
I'd much rather hear from ordinary people who have enough respect for me to tell their story without trying to monetize me. Lucky for us, plenty of those people still exist on the Internet.
(properly formatted this time)
I know that slashdot has windows popping all over with full streaming video sucking away all my bandwidth.
I know that I can't "window" the damn browser because it's busy floating on top of the article.
I know that it doesn't work on firefox on ubuntu.
I not know I will never ever buy a Duralast tire.
So yeah, they're manipulating and screwing up the content. I don't mind a static banner, or sidebar, and have in fact used advertising before. I don't mind supporting sites I frequent.
But this is bullshit. The experience is crap. How can HTML be this fucked up that you don't even test it with the latest, say, top 4 browsers?
I'm a satanic clam.
We pissed and moaned and we still do and what do we do? nothing. using adblock isn't enough, they're always going to find new ways of forcing their ads on us, and there are sites that are starting to block the viewer if they detect adblockers. People shat bricks when they tried that back in the late 00s so how come nobody's giving a crap now? You guys are all like us quebecois, we piss and moan and then proceed to take it up the ass anyway.
I wonder how long before they invent a DRM-based browser that requires a ToS to access restricted web content.
There is a serious bipartisian proposal in Congress to reduce the tax deduction for advertising. Call your Congressional representative and tell them you support the elimination of tax deductions for advertising.
Because the US savings rate is so low (most people are spending almost all they earn), advertising does not increase demand. It just moves it around a bit. All advertising does is increase prices. There are many products, from movies to medications, where the advertising cost exceeds the cost of production. Let's put the brakes on advertising.
I will always use flashblock. I don't use any sort of Adblocking other than that. For websites that complain "please don't block my ads!" I respond "Then don't use flash ads." It's as simple as that.
The internet does not run on ads. It ran fine before ads and it would run fine afterwards.
Besides would it be that bad to pay for YouTube? I can't imagine they get more than a penny or two per view. If I had to pay around that much per view it'd probably be between a half and one dollar a day. Pay that for no ads AND support the content creators I enjoy? Heck yes!
See also the success of many popular youtubers with patreon and subbable and the like.
You would still get ads.
See, you get ads because most people are willing to put up with ads, not because content would be impossible without them. Remember when you just had ABC/CBS/NBC (and maybe FOX) and then cable came around? Oh, we were do dizzy with the promise.. we would subscribe to cable, that would pay for the content, and we could do without advertising, like those Brits and PBS watchers did!
Except that's not what happened. We paid for cable AND we got the ads. Because we were willing to.
You misunderstand my post. I don't mean that bloggers advertise their own site to "bring in eyeballs", I mean that bloggers can get something in return for their hard work by including advertising from other businesses within their blog.
For example, I blog on an academic field and so in virtually every post I mention books. By linking said books to Amazon with a referrer account, I get a decent amount of money each month.
Your entire post is wrong based simply on the fact that soap operas are a thing
That's in the USA. Adverts are confined to their own time slot in the UK, and when that comes around it is generally clearly recognisable. It is the point at which I flip through some other channels and watch the BBC news for a few minutes, or even cat videos (anything is better than ads, and there is a channel that's mostly pets doing funny things).
Funny, but in the UK soap operas are still called soap operas, but most people don't realise how the term originated.
Actually, AOL capitulated to the Mom'n'Pops that were already doing flat rate billing. Those 'arcane' clients were fully GUI in the Windows world. This was in the era when you used Trumpet Winsock to dial the internet because Bill Gates was sure it was a passing fad when Win95 was put together.
And how does that annoying floating "Like us On FaceBook! Please! Someone! Anyone!" pay for servers?
By enabling corporations to spend money on infrastructure that would have normally been paid in taxes.
Why is it that everyone seems to be overlooking one of the most obvious benefits to corporations when they blow millions on advertising? Those tax write offs aren't insignificant when you are a multi-billion dollar corporation.
Correction: The Internet as you know it would be gone. The actual Internet would be just fine. Universities, stores, hobby sites, government, and people generally interested in communicating with each other would pay their ISP bills and continue without interruption.
Did you just suggest I pay for something online? Damn, I've never been more offended in my entire life. I use Facebook for my corporate website, Gmail for my inbox, and YouTube to distribute my advertising. Why the hell would I pay for anything?!?
Sincerely,
(The reason we're here today)
The modern Internet is a lot of expensive to produce and deliver content.
So much! So much expensive.
It is no more expensive to produce the same kinds of content we were producing at the dawn of the web, and people are still consuming it. Indeed, it is less expensive, because if all you want is to share some information you can do it on a free blog. People still read blogs.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There's probably a lot of stuff that you've looked at over time that changes what they think of you. There's really no way of knowing how interested you are in something, only what you've been interested in. Check your Youtube history - I bet there's a LOT of stuff in there that you really don't care about that's skewing the results. This includes any random YouTube link you've clicked.
Related: Tivo Thinks I'm Gay
Failing that, If YouTube actually doesn't know anything about you, or it can't find more appropriate ads, it will default to mass-market ads for things like cars, sugar-water, and new movies.
I lived in Taiwan for year. I loved not understanding the advertisements! It was so relaxing to stroll down a street without being assaulted by a million words struggling to get my attention.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
FTA: "Everyone gets that advertising is what powers the internet, and that our favorite sites wouldn't exist without it,"
And all this time I thought that my paying an access provider, paying for web hosting, paying for email services (in the past), paying people for products through their web-stores, and donating to Wikipedia — I stupidly thought that was what powered the internet.
I will now dutifully watch all banner and video ads to avoid breaking the sacred "social contract" that enables the internet's existence.
Instead of holding the people who commit crimes responsible for their crimes, you blame advertising for making them want to commit crimes. Typical liberal bullshit.
There is such a concept as aiding and abetting, or being an accessory to, a crime. Many people have been tried and convicted who themselves did not directly commit a crime.
If you don't believe that concept is applicable here, I'd like to know why. If someone else believes it does apply, I'd like to know their reasoning as well. I don't see how "liberal" or "conservative" has anything to do with it. It's a question of ethical responsibility, not political ideology. By failing to understand that, you're handwaving and dismissing a valid and worthy question about the nature of pervasive advertising and its effect on the population.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Imagine you are reading a book in the park and I come by and jam a flier in your face telling you your too ugly, your dick is too small, and/or your kids are stupid. This is the state of web advertising today.
I have over 500 items in my google promotional folder, that has save me from 500 stupid interruptions when my phone beeps that an email has arrived. That is priceless too me. Those are advertisers who are convinced they are legitimate, don't even talk about my spam folder.
Cheap storage VM.
Publishers get to allow or block particular types of adverts for their site/app. The degree of control they have is huge, if you're getting intrusive adverts complain to the publisher, not the advertising industry.
I should pay for sex? I should pay so the cops do not beat me? Why are you complaining about complainers on slash. If you are a premium subscriber maybe you should talk to admin.
...not to put ads on during Downton Abbey.
By owning your own DVR you save on monthly equipment rentals
Which customer-owned DVRs work with satellite?
Even TIVO offers a lifetime subscription service which pays for itself over first 2-3 years.
The lifetime sub is for one device. Cable subscribers end up having to replace their devices when the cable company changes technology, such as analog to digital, clear QAM to CableCARD, and CableCARD to SDV. Each such upgrade would require a new box with a new lifetime sub, as I understand it.
None of which can be relied upon by a humble user like myself. I've got the addons. There is no where else I can turn.
And they work.
Between adblock, noscript, cookiemonster, and flashblock I am almost never annoyed by anything on the web. Sites are kept simple by noscript. Adblock blocks out about 99 percent of ads I would see, cookie monster prevents sites from putting tracking cookies on my browser, and flashblock stops autoplaying flash animations, movies, sounds files...
What else is left for me to worry about?
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Windows 95? You kids and your new technology...
It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage. - Colonel Henry Walton Jones, Jr., Ph.D.
May your fixie be run over by a bus.
Ads and marketing in general have evolved from simple, respectful "hey, try this! It's good" into manipulative nonsense. Few people can see through it and the result has been devastating to them. It has shaped and certainly harmed the culture of the US and even results in violence in some extreme cases where people want things so badly they hurt and kill each other to get it. Though most will disagree exactly when things have gone "too far" few will disagree that they have.
I have always subscribed to yahoo.com @ 20/yr. This last renewal, they rejected my visa payment because they were not equipped to have Visa transfer my payment directly to my provider for approval. And there is no way for anyone to contact yahoo.com. No way, I discovered, and no ombudsman, I could not get my payment processed. SHAME
So now I am getting the same repetitive annoying add from a dating service. I will try the following... Edit my profile and change my age to 12 or 13. Just to stop that repetitious dating stuff. I am of the belief that we need a free from adverts NET NEUTRAL internet. If I pay my ISP for a connection, I expect him to not count the adverts in my download allotment. Fortunately, using Thunderbird, I got rid of most of the stupid adverts.
Set your age to 12 for youtube, twitter, gmail, hotmail, and whatever, and see what happens.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
First... your grammatical structure is bizarre... possibly I'm not one to complain but seriously its odd.
Second, I use fast machines so the efficiency is personally irrelevant.
Third, I value customization. I like being able to use odds and ends. Opera is a nice browser but it doesn't do everything I want the way I want.
Forth, I use host file blocking as well which I update through Spybot Search and Destroy which has an "immunization" feature which is little more then a host file redirection of known malicious sites.
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First, I took great pains to NOT insult you for the weird grammar. Nothing I delivered was come back poor or otherwise. I didn't even try to use it as a reason why your post or point was wrong. I just noted that it is weird and then moved on. Try to not be so sensitive. :-) -- This is a smiley face... to express that I'm trying to be nice and am in no way trying to diss you.
Second... alright, tell me how to block everything with the hosts file. Do you have a program that does this?... Sure there's opera, but I've never seen this feature in opera.
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Ads bring us current TV episodes and today's news. I'll take that over alt.whine.virginity any time.
Actually, the only worthwhile TV in a long time has been supported by donations (PBS), subscription (HBO), or taxes (BBC). The rest is dreck.
-- QED
People have been talking about micropayments pretty much since the web was created and enough of the net got off US government noncommercial sites that it was reasonable to put commercial stuff on it. I still don't know of any micropayment systems, which suggests that they aren't all that popular. It isn't that nobody's thought of them, or thought they'd be a good idea, it's that nobody has managed to put one together and gotten it popular.
I'll believe in micropayment systems when I see them being fairly common. Not before.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I take every post as it is... so far he's not been especially rude and seems to be attempting to have a conversation. So I'll continue to afford him common courtesy until I've been satisfied otherwise.
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There's no need to be insulting, sir. Your own odd grammar makes it difficult to understand what you're saying. That is not an insult. Its merely a fact. And you can hold that as a weakness on my part, but your grammar is unusual and it does make it harder for you to be understood.
As to your software, I've never heard of it and I'm a little dubious of using unverified software that has been backed by no one. But I'll give it a look and thank you for your suggestion, patience, and creation of software that you're apparently freely sharing.
Thank you, truly.
PS: You tend to put little insults and barbs in your post and I don't know if that is in your interest if you want people to listen to you. I cannot be offended. That is something specific to my nature. But most people can be offended quite easily. You should try to avoid insults until you've lost interest in convincing people.
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I tried the host file you listed and I couldn't even load slashdot with that host file. Its a giant 18MB host file... which is impressive but it appears to wall off most of the internet including the portions that aren't bad.
I don't know... maybe I did something wrong. But when I removed that host file and went back to the old one... everything started working again.
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I'll monkey with it later... thanks for you input and seriously make an effort to be less abrasive. Its unlikely to make people receptive if you keep rubbing salt in people's eyes.
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As with any other medium, Sturgeon's Law applies to TV. THere's a flood of dreck out there, but the best TV is better than ever. Has your PBS affiliate ever carried "The Wire," "Six Feet Under," "The SImpsons," "Breaking Bad" or "Halt and Catch Fire" ?
I didn't cut down your writing style. I pointed out it was bizarre.
1.biÂzarre
adjective \bÉ(TM)-ËzÃr\
: very unusual or strange
Full Definition of BIZARRE
: strikingly out of the ordinary: as
a : odd, extravagant, or eccentric in style or mode
b : involving sensational contrasts or incongruities
â" biÂzarreÂly adverb
â" biÂzarreÂness noun
Your grammatical structure is bizarre and difficult to read which is my subjective opinion of it and frankly I doubt many would disagree.
That said, I've stuck with it and have not insulted you for it. I have done my best to translate it into intelligible script.
Again, I thank you for your help with this matter and will deal with it later when I have the attention span to go changing system settings.
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Actually, the only worthwhile TV in a long time has been supported by donations (PBS), subscription (HBO), or taxes (BBC). The rest is dreck.
Has your PBS affiliate ever carried
"The Wire," HBO, paid for by subscription
"Six Feet Under," HBO, paid for by subscription
"The SImpsons," dreck after about the 6th season.
"Breaking Bad" HBO, paid for by subscription
"Halt and Catch Fire" ? haven't heard of it. Oh well.
-- QED
I just close everything and skip going to the content.
I just don't buy into that ecosystem.
I've been a big fan of using the host file for security for many years. Though, I've always done it through spybot.
Obviously that list is much more limited and you question the integrity of the people that compile it. That's possible. But you're preaching to the choir as regards host files.
That said, obviously a comprehensive host file is not a panacea. You need many layers to block things out.
For example, I use an addon called Flashblock. I use it because I don't want flash videos to auto run when I load websites. That said, I don't actually want to prevent them from running at all. I just want them to wait until I intentionally trigger them. For example, I might open five tabs on youtube each with a different youtube video. Without flashblock they'll all run at once the instant their pages load. This would then require me to go to each page and pause each video one at a time EVERY SINGLE TIME I open several such pages at once.
Because I have flash block, I can open them all at once and not worry about any of them because none of the videos will play until I trigger them.
That's just an example.
Another example is cookie monster which passively denies all cookies unless specified otherwise. It has an icon I can click in the status bar that lets me grant cookie permissions to a website or revoke it. Generally I forbid cookie access to all websites unless the site is non-functional without cookies. And then I only enable the cookies I have to enable to make the site functional. Its a very easy addon to use and I can effortlessly enable or disable cookie access on any site very quickly.
Then there's NoScript... which I use to disable javascript on most websites. Even on sites I do enable it on, I don't enable the scripts that I don't need. For example, Google Analytics is never enabled.
So there you go. I'm sure you have accomplished some of this natively in Opera but I'm pretty sure you don't have noscript or flash block natively running in opera. I personally am a big fan of addons. yes, my browser does sometimes use excessive amounts of ram. It tends to use somewhere between 1 and 2 gigabytes of ram. But I have lots of ram and it just doesn't matter.
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I too am I a big believer in layered security. I also believe in doing things differently.
I do a lot of things that only I do to enhance my own security. I've written a few simple programs to do a few things in my systems and because they're so simple I don't really feel comfortable sharing them. But they make my systems distinct. I've had infections try to gain control of my systems and they can't because my systems are non-standard.
I also always change my defaults. All my port numbers are different as a simple example. I don't use standard port numbers for any service I host. And then I like to use unusual/unpopular software to host those services. That means attackers, malware, etc simply aren't written for my systems. The hackers I encounter probe my systems. I log the probes... but they don't touch my services. They can't even detect them. They're unusual, often proprietary, secret, and unique.
I'm a big fan of taking lots of simple programs and bits of technology I understand and combining them in elaborate scripting programs to form much more sophisticated programs.
For example, made a very powerful backup script using volume shadow copy, a program to verify and compare files between directories, a compression program, and just plan old copy.
I create a Volume shadow copy of a database, then I verify directories are identical (Volume Shadow copy bugs and does not copy properly sometimes.), then I use a compression program to compress the directory into an archive (I have an archive that is kept in non-solid form that is updated so that only portions of the archive that need to change are changed), then use some simple scripts to calculate the time of day/day of month/year, etc... which determines backup location using a Grandfather, Father, Son backup scheme. Then the script pushes the files around my network. To lose anything 4 separate machines on my network would have to crash at once.
The only thing it doesn't have which I'm still working on is block level copies.
Anyway, the above allows me to do very sophisticated things. I've tried many commercial backup programs and none of them are even close to as configurable or reliable.
I've got detailed logs and statistics of all the activity as well as dead man switch fail safes that cry in the event that something doesn't happen.
Its very sophisticated.
So understand, I appreciate having a layered defense. I am likewise multifaceted. I do not have the same respect for efficiency you might. I praise adaptability over speed or efficiency. But those are simply our divergent biases.
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You've given me a lot to think about. I it will take awhile to properly process all your information and attempt to implement it my own way.
Thank you for being patient and informative.
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Ads bring us current TV episodes legally
Fixed it for you.
"hey, try this! It's good"
When was that? Like 1578 AD?
There's a whole show called Mad Men that 'documents' just how twisted advertising was way back when, and before that, say in the 1920's, I recall hearing things like 'snake oil salesmen'.
In a commercial / capitalistic market, advertising has always been an arms race to manipulative the most people into customers.
For another thing, the TV doesn't display an ad for 30 seconds when I try to change the channel.
The implementation of advertising on the internet is bad. Not the concept of advertising for free content itself.
Unrelated question... what do you think of running your own DNS service?
That would seem to be a superior way to handle this situation. Your host file is very large and user machines are not well disposed to make use of it.
Furthermore, consider that we could use something like this for more then just redirecting bad websites. We could also use it to find good websites.
Consider further the whole "domain" system is limited and there is a lot of demand for certain names. But those names are nothing but DNS association with IP numbers. If you have your own DNS then all the domain names open up again. I could direct "google.com" to my own website or whatever if I wanted to do that.
The point is that you could create distinct internet communities. Sort of like the deep web but with no attempt to encrypt anything.
It seems like your file is so large that simply making it part of a DNS server would make more sense.
Your thoughts?
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As regards anti virus programs, my big problem with them is that they're invariably blacklisting programs which is silly because its easier to keep track of legitimate code then illegitimate code.
That is, better anti virus should rely on WHITE lists.
A company like Symantec could easily catalog all good code and provide an automated mechanism for major vendors to update known good code signatures.
As such, anything not signed and cataloged would be labeled "unknown."
The average user would be encouraged to avoid all unknown code as defined by the anti viral.
This is actually more similar to how biological immune systems work. They don't just look for known viruses. They also on principle attack anything they don't know.
Computer systems should have something of this hybrid response. By all means, identify known bad code and isolate it. But also discourage all but experts from running anything but known good code. Hackers, malware makers, etc can then do whatever they want... their code won't be executed because it won't match known good code.
Doubtless there will be loopholes but I think this would hugely improve security.
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do you know anything about setting up personal DNS servers? I think your idea would be even better as a personal DNS server. This way a whole network could be immunized at once and it would be cross platform. All the computers and smartphones and tablets.
I've never set up my own DNS server but your whole concept seems especially applicable in that application. After all, lets say I have 30 machines. I don't want to install and update all 30 machines with this host file all the time. And I dont' even want to install it on the machine every time I reinstall. And then there are the other platforms that have to be secured as well that won't be compatible with your solution.
If we just have a custom DNS server on our local network then that would provide most of this protection very easily.
We could even put the DNS server into something like a Raspberry pi. A cheap 35 dollar computer that could instantly immunize a whole network. Point the router at the raspberry pi and the whole network is immunized.
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well, one thing is that I like to turn adblock on and off a lot. Some sites won't work with it for example.
Your host file solution would have to be togglable. And it would be nice if it had some sort of context interlink between internet enabled programs so you could easily add or remove entries from the host file from other programs. Say with an addon.
Possibly this ruins some of the efficiency. But ideally the host file shouldn't be a burden to maintain and manage. Integration with browsers etc makes it easier to manage the list.
What is more, you might consider making this effectively a firewall system in that given programs might be subject to different host files.
all this said, I still think the privately hosted DNS server is still more practical.
Again, push your file and update program to a raspberry pi. Plug that into your network, then point the router at the Raspberry pi for DNS resolution.
Is that perfect? No... but its simple and much more scalable for large networks.
If you have 40 machines it isn't practical to go around updating all their host files all the time. You could write a program/script that pushes a current file at intervals but it just seems easier to have a privately hosted DNS server.
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Clarity Ray doesn't even run if you have noscript running. Or at least that has been my experience. I do not get ads on any site unless I want to get ads.
Any site. What. So. Ever.
Now, I am not running javascript on about 95 percent of the pages I visit. I find that most of the scripts serve no purpose for me. They're mostly tracking or ad related. So I just don't enable them.
While I'm sure they'll figure out how to inject ads into the sites eventually, you must also appreciate that they can opt to host the ads on the website itself or use the website as a proxy thus fooling your IP/DNS/Host file solution.
That poses a problem for advertisers in how to affirm that sites are not scamming them with false hits. But that really boils down to which problem is harder to deal with... countering adblock systems or countering fraudster sites that generate false hits.
As to batch files... I'm actually very good with them. I just don't understand why you're so adverse to the DNS server idea. It just seems so much more elegant.
And beyond that, you're missing the whole point about being cross compatible. Your idea doesn't work for ipads etc which are increasingly a part of the office community.
As a network administrator, I need to be able to effect all machines on my network at the same time across all platforms, across all versions of all operating systems... or I will have a disjunction between the way some machines are supposed to interact.
Also appreciate that someone could sit there downloading malware or infected apps to their android or ipad and then connecting to the network (assuming the admin hasn't isolated the wifi network into VLAN2 and not bridged it to VLAN1). I personally always isolate the wifi network from the wired network. It causes some problems when the fuzzy bunnies get a wireless printer and complain about it not working. But I just plug the stupid thing into the wired network and pat them on their silly heads.
I'm not incompetent, sir. Please stop suggesting I am... I hurts my feelings. :D
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Except for the hosts file can only stop communication from stated sources.
If the ads are hosted directly by the website you WANT to see then blocking the ads with the host file would also block the website you wish to access at the same time.
Here is the thing, your host file idea mostly works because its unconventional. And I really like unconventional solutions. In fact, I think the future of REAL security is using a spectrum of varied defensive tactics that are almost randomly employed making it very hard for any one threat source to anticipate all your defenses.
What is more, I think it is especially important for governments and large corporations to use totally custom security procedures to make it complicated for hackers to breach security.
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