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French Publishers Prepare Lawsuit Against Adblock Plus
HughPickens.com writes Frédéric Filloux reports at Monday Note that two groups of French publishers, the GESTE and the French Internet Advertising Bureau, are considering a lawsuit against AdBlockPlus creator Eyeo GmbH on grounds that it represents a major economic threat to their business. According to LesEchos.fr, EYEO, which publishes Adblock Plus, has developed a business model where they offer not to block publishers' advertisements for remuneration as long as the ads are judged non-intrusive (Google Translate, Original here). "Several criteria must be met as well: advertisements must be identified as such, be static and therefore not contain animation, no sound, and should not interfere with the content. A position that some media have likened to extortion."
According to Filloux the legal action misses the point. By downloading AdBlock Plus (ABP) on a massive scale, users are voting with their mice against the growing invasiveness of digital advertising. Therefore, suing Eyeo, the company that maintains ABP, is like using Aspirin to fight cancer. A different approach is required but very few seem ready to face that fact. "We must admit that Eyeo GmbH is filling a vacuum created by the incompetence and sloppiness of the advertising community's, namely creative agencies, media buyers and organizations that are supposed to coordinate the whole ecosystem," says Filloux. Even Google has begun to realize that the explosion of questionable advertising formats has become a problem and the proof is Google's recent Contributor program that proposes ad-free navigation in exchange for a fee ranging from $1 to $3 per month. "The growing rejection of advertising AdBlock Plus is built upon is indeed a threat to the ecosystem and it needs to be addressed decisively. For example, by bringing at the same table publishers and advertisers to meet and design ways to clean up the ad mess. But the entity and leaders who can do the job have yet to be found."
According to Filloux the legal action misses the point. By downloading AdBlock Plus (ABP) on a massive scale, users are voting with their mice against the growing invasiveness of digital advertising. Therefore, suing Eyeo, the company that maintains ABP, is like using Aspirin to fight cancer. A different approach is required but very few seem ready to face that fact. "We must admit that Eyeo GmbH is filling a vacuum created by the incompetence and sloppiness of the advertising community's, namely creative agencies, media buyers and organizations that are supposed to coordinate the whole ecosystem," says Filloux. Even Google has begun to realize that the explosion of questionable advertising formats has become a problem and the proof is Google's recent Contributor program that proposes ad-free navigation in exchange for a fee ranging from $1 to $3 per month. "The growing rejection of advertising AdBlock Plus is built upon is indeed a threat to the ecosystem and it needs to be addressed decisively. For example, by bringing at the same table publishers and advertisers to meet and design ways to clean up the ad mess. But the entity and leaders who can do the job have yet to be found."
...as someone else will develop a list, and just a list, of hosts serving ads, and someone else will develop a plugin that can read lists of any kind to block content, with claims that the content blocked can be for adult material or any other form of objectionable content. The user will put the location of the list in to the program themselves, and they'll continue to block the content. If the list gets taken down in one place, it'll be propped-up again somewhere else, or even stale, would still be better than no list at all.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
They use my bandwidth (without permission) to peddle me ads for things I don't want and they think the courts should force me to look at their ads by removing my choice? I use ABP specifically because I don't want their invasive rubbish. The courts should be forcing them to ASK me if I want them using my bandwidth if anything as they are effectively stealing it.
IANAL, so I'd like a tort guru to enlighten us on exactly how creation and distribution of a product (AdBlock) that that gives consumers an informed choice over another product (advertising bullshit) is an actionable case. It sounds like a water utility company suing faucet makers for making a device that restricts flow of billable water, or the electric company suing light switch manufacturers.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
I predict these companies will try to make it illegal for users to use any form of ad blocking.
Good luck with that.
Greedy bastards seem to think their desire to get paid means we're legally obligated to do so.
If your site wants to display ads, host them yourselves. But if you think I'm going to allow 3rd party trackers to support your business model, you're horribly mistaken.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
In reality, the French fought hard for 45 days and suffered over 350,000 casualties. France, Belgium and the Netherlands fell because Germany gained superiority in the air and through the use of highly mobile armored divisions.
In reality, the French fought hard for 45 days and suffered over 350,000 casualties.
Was that a whole 45 days, including weekends and holidays?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Is the day I stop browsing the net.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
I use AdBlock not because I believe no one with a website shouldn't have the opportunity to make money via advertising, but because of the METHOD of advertising.
Flashing ads, quick movements, anything with Flash that can crash and stall my use of my browser, or any ad of more than 600 KB in size is intrusive. I don't mind being advertised at, but if you DEMAND my attention via tactics instead of attempting to CONVINCE me to buy a service or product with the facts of that service or product, then I will turn off and walk away.
Example of good Slashdot-based advertising for me: "Newegg - 15% off orders $25 - $100. December 8 ONLY. We know there's a couple things you've been meaning to buy. Be smart about it and buy them now. CLICK HERE to apply coupon." The coupon could take effect only via clicking in from Slashdot.
Also, I pay for my bandwidth and if you want to advertise to me, cool. Just don't take liberties with the size of your advertisement. Keep it small. Maybe a 2-3 frame gif changing every 20 seconds.
Lastly, I don't like the tracker cookies. I know some people say that tracking one's surfing habits enables more relevant ads to be used, but I don't like being tracked at all. Why not just use advertisements relevant to the site content? It's Slashdot -- post tech stuff. Slashdot builder? Then push 3D printer filaments.
As a result of some really BADvertisers, no one gets to put advertisements in front of my web-surfing eyes. I don't even know if a site has changed to less-obtrusive ads unless they tell me. (And if they do, I turn off AdBlock.) It's as simple as that.
There's really no other rational choice than to block most/all ads, in a world where ads can do just about anything they want. The annoyance and performance slowdown are trivial issues compared to the real problems. The same openness that allows Web-based ads to track you using cookies, launch plugins and pop-up windows, and prevent you from viewing content until you watch a video or wait some time, also (fortunately) allows users to fight back as a natural defense mechanism against these predatory tactics. For the advertisers to abuse this openness for their own personal monetary gain, while presuming to control what *I* run on *my* computer, while being appalled at my choice of doing the same, is ridiculous and contradictory.
Far and away the gravest problem with ads today is that the vast majority of them pose *serious* security and/or privacy issues. Most ad networks do very little to prevent bad actors from embedding malicious content that tries to exploit browser zero-days, steal cookies, track your behavior, or trick you into visiting malicious websites. Until website owners and ad networks decide to completely purge all the security and privacy risks, advertising is essentially synonymous with an opportunistic attack on each user who visits an ad-infested site.
On the open web, the only way advertisers are going to get any revenue is through earning the trust and goodwill of their customers. And we ARE customers -- customers who are currently being treated like shit. How would you like it if a car salesman walked up to you and started giving you a tattoo on the arm with the manufacturer's logo, seconds after you get out of your car and step foot on the lot? That kind of intrusive behavior should not be tolerated. And it isn't: users are doing exactly what the advertisers should expect them to do, given how they are being treated.
Ad networks should start by having a manual screening process for each entity that wants to submit ads through their network. The integrity, ownership, and status of each entity should be scrutinized to ensure that they are a legitimate business and are registered with the proper authorities. Additionally, the network should perform constant random sampling of their current ads being run, and employ experienced security auditors or penetration testers to examine the source code and other dynamic behavior of the advertisement payload on various popular browsers, to determine if it is tracking the user or malicious in any way. If it is, all further business with that partner should be stopped immediately, and the advertisement removed from the network. Website owners and users should not be the ones having to push the ad networks to remove these abusers.
The open Web is not going away. Users are in control of what displays in the web browser. Advertisers must either learn to work within a system of reasonable rules that do not attack users' systems or try to compromise their privacy, OR just keep fighting until their revenue stream is slowly strangled to death by their own despicable policies.
Seriously, I *work* for a communications marketing company, and still, I think the whining and gnashing of teeth over plug-ins like ABP is misplaced!
You can't realistically expect to stop people from blocking your ads with software any more than you can stop people from pressing "mute", channel change buttons, or just the "on/off" switch on the television when commercials come on!
The truth is, ad banners, pop-ups, pop-unders, animated page overlays and the rest of it are just distractions. If you create one that's minimal enough so most people can't be bothered to actively use a tool like ABP to filter it? Then you've probably just made an ineffective advertisement that people aren't even paying attention to in the first place. Advertisers who "get" this and have worked hard to build more effective ads are prompting people to "fight back" with these blocking tools. The takeaway we probably all SHOULD be getting from this is that this form of marketing isn't a very good one.
The fact that many site operators out there can barely make enough revenue to cover their costs of hosting means there's a strong interest in keeping the current business model in place and pretending it works. But truthfully, I think things would work out far better if marketers would agree to sponsor web sites likely to have an audience interested in one of their products. Just flat out pay their hosting for them, in exchange for the site making it clear your company is doing that for them. THEN you'd win the respect of the userbase and generate good P.R. and sales.
I like how APK is spamming us to promote his adblocking solution. Buying his solution is in effect supporting spam!
Correct. Then a large fraction of the government capitulated, formed a puppet government, and did the Nazis' bidding, including rounding up people for shipment to concentration camps. And in some cases, like in North Africa, fought (weakly) against the allies.
At the same time, the parts of the government and military that were caught in or escaped to England made themselves royal pains in the ass to the allies, posturing and playing politics to try to claim they were in charge of the government in abstentia, This greatly complicated the invasion planning and led to poor tactical decisions based on maintain the pride of strutting martinets like DeGaulle. This allowed the Germans to escape through the Falaise gap, for example, when they were otherwise going to be caught. This probably extended the war another 6 months.
The ultimate was in the 60s. DeGaulle demanded that all American tropps be removed from French soil. Lyndon Johnson asked him "does that include the 65000 that died lliberarting it*.
That's why we hate the French.
That was quick. An article about ads devolved faster than anticipated. On /. We strive for excellence.
The United States suffered less than 1% of those casualties on Sept. 11th and more or less surrendered its freedom on the spot. Fuck off.
I remember not that long back...early to mid 90's when you rarely ever saw an advertisement.
People need to be reminded that the internet is supposed to basically be a large network, where anyone can connect and set up a peer computer/server and trade information. I wasn't set up for making $$. While business is extremely valid on the internet, that is not the primary reason for its creation, and hopefully...not for its continuance nor regulation.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
France. A country that used to matter.
A whole 45 days? 350,000 casualties?
Such effort.
The Soviet Union fought the Germans for more than four fucking years, suffering somewhere between 20 and 40 million casualties.
The Soviets were very proud of the fact that, having executed all of their competent commanders, they relied on brute-force meat-grinding in place of actual strategy. Make no mistake, it wasn't the Germans that killed all those Soviets; it was their generals and kommissars, sending them into needless suicide. And at the end of the day, they ended up killing as many Jews and enslaving half of Europe in place of the Nazi's.
Fuck the Soviets. It's their own fault. Next time don't trade oil for land to Nazis.
I don't hate the french; I just find them amusing. I find the antics of De Gaulle during WWII absolutely hilarious, as in, Monty Python-esque funny. He would march down the Champs Elysees when he did virtually nothing in the immediate aftermath of D-Day to help liberate his own country. Even Montgomery, who himself was insufferable, found De Gualle insufferable.
The Anti-French sentiment stems from lingering inadequacy on the part of the Americans. France did not give the US the Statue of Liberty just because they thought the US was a bunch of really nice guys.
The American Revolution was a proxy war, by France against Britain. It was very similar in many respects to the Soviet-Afghan War, where the United States funneled arms and billions of dollars to the Afghanis. The French involvement in the American war was of a vastly greater scale.
The French supplied almost all of the gunpowder used through at least the first half of the war, almost all the cannon used throughout the war, tens of thousands of muskets, an army about the size of the Continental Army, military advisors, and vast amounts of money. In total they spent about a billion livres and increased their national debt by a third. The ante-climactic battle of the war involved a massive fleet engagement of French and British vessels and forced Gen. Cornwallis' surrender to the American forces. The Americans had no naval force worth mentioning (the description of a sixth-rate frigate as being "rough equivalent of half of a 64-gun ship of the line" is hilarious), and it is difficult to overstate either the power of a massed group of warships or their impact on warfare. Considered from an objective perspective, the American Revolution was an important but not decisive campaign in what should be known as the Second Hundred Years' War.
Why did Americans turn against the French after the war? It's simple: they wanted to promote their own heroes, and the idea that they had won the war all by themselves. It's really embarrassing to have to teach your children that your country wouldn't exist except that it happened to be a bone of contention in someone else's scheme. Similarly, I spent quite a bit of time down in Panama this last year, and I met very few people who had any idea of the US involvement in the creation of that country. They make anti-gringo jokes pretty often too, and they're funny for the same reason that anti-French jokes are in the US, but in both cases the joke is on the one telling it.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
It's a different web without adblock, and it's not pretty one. It does more than just hide advertisements, it also reduces bandwidth usage considerably. I've been using adblock since I was stuck on dialup. It was critical to me back then to make pages load faster. Then I was on satellite and adblock helped keep me under my data allotment. On the rare occasion that I have to use a computer without it, I'm always taken back by how bad the web is with all the ads. According to some estimates, we're exposed to over 3000 marketing messages every day, on average. I'm all for anything that reduces that number, whatever it actually is. Every person that I show Adblock to, has been very, very happy with the results.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
You gest, but during WWI they actually had a Christmas truce in 1914 where the troops came out to play football. No, the kind played with your feet. The commanders in chief were not amused. In WWII the Germans overran the trenches with armor, so there was no time for that sort of thing. The actual people in the trenches were pretty much the same, called to war because your country asks you to. Cannon fodder meats cannon fodder.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There was another huge contributor to The Fall of France. The french doctrine relied heavily of fortifications in the form of the Maginot Line. It was an impressive installation and would have stopped the German army except for one major flaw; The main fortifications stopped at the Luxembourg border. The French Government did not want to isolate Luxembourg and Belgium. The German forces easily out flanked the static heavy defences.
As well as a complete and utter disdain for the lives of their own troops and civilians.
It has apparently never occurred to publishers to band together and fund the creation of a system for buying content at dirt cheap prices using something like ACH transfers to keep the transaction costs low. How about a one-click purchase model where you pay $0.50/article or $3 for all content published that day?
It's been tried. Nobody bought. Except for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, no news outlet adds enough value that people will pay for it.
Dice. And Bennet Haselton.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
1.) Secure you vs. known malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious adbanners - see 2 thru 6 below next)
2.) Secure you vs. downed DNS servers aiding reliability
I run my own DNS server.
3.) Secure you vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns servers
See the answer to 2 above
4.) Protect you vs. fastflux using botnet attacks and stop their communications back to their C&C servers
Yup. Don't install shit from unknown sources.
5.) Protect you vs. dynamic dns using botnet attacks and stop their communications back to their C&C servers
See Answer to #2 above.
6.) Protect you vs. domain generation algorithm using botnet attacks and stop their communications back to their C&C servers
Again, see #2
7.) Speed you up for websurfing not only by adblocking but also hardcoding favorite sites
Utterly stupid approach since every decent site used CDNs now.
8.) Get you past a dnsbl you may not agree with
See #2 above
9.) Keep you off dns request logs
See #2 above
10.) Do all of those things and block ads (better than adblock) more efficiently in cpu cycles and memory usage
Show me the benchmarks
11.) Work on ANY webbound application (think stand-alone email programs, for example).
See #2.
12.) Give you direct, easily notepad/texteditor controlled data for all of the above
Hmm. vi on my dns server seems to work fine.
13.) Block out trackers
See #2.
14.) Block spam mails sources
Don't sign up for stupid sites using real email addresses and/or use an email specifically for those sites and blackhole the resulting email.
15.) Block phishing mails sources
Have a little common sense and this isn't an issue.
Debating if I should paste this after every one of your spam posts...
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
APK's posts aren't moderated down because people don't want others to know about the magic of hosts files. They're moderated down because they are spam.
The French poured buckets of money into the Maginot line. The Germans just went around it. The Germans had tried the same end around in WW-I (though failed), so the lack of defense at the BeNeLux border was a costly strategic mistake. Hitler had it in for France because of the Treaty of Versailles, and even went so far to track down the rail car that the Treaty in Versailles was signed in, to rub Gallic noses into. Even the new tactics could be seen on their doorstep in the Spanish Civil War. The French should have seen it coming.
I think the part of the "cheese eating surrender monkeys" comes not from the initial invasion, but the puppet government that was Vichy France. The Russians fought to the last man in horrible siege conditions for years. France started to be a puppet regime paying tribute to Hitler and rounding up Jews just a couple months after initial invasion. Only later when Hitler changed terms of the agreement did the French underground resistance really form.
That, and there were two, probably more interesting "surrenders". When the French left the colonies of Algeria and Indochina (Vietnam), there were those that saw that as surrender. I call them interesting because they didn't leave because of being defeated, but they realized that the barbarism that it would take to hold these territories would change the national character. It's hard to talk about "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite" when you're tossing people off of helicopters or torching villages. Was this surrender? Maybe on the ground, but to win a military would entail other surrenders of character, again, an interesting trade off.
In reality (and I'm of Polish descent) the Polish fighters lasted longer. (Compared to the French) the Polish had the disadvantage of being a new country, (re)formed in 1919 after, in effect, disappearing completely for a hundred years or so. Oh yeah, and they got attacked on two fronts.
I don't begrudge any credit to the French resistance. Their fighters fought bravely. The Poles fought just as hard against two armies, with less notice and much fewer resources. I wish they got more credit. Part of the Polish jokes were real - you did have farmers on horseback with single shot rifles going against tanks. But what else are you gonna do, let them roll into Warsaw without a fight?
- Contrary to what you seem to think, as far as we're concerned you didn't really have to come save us, the war was already won by the Russians. (Although I do thank you for protecting us from them).
- Historically, French military fares rather well. I'm not even proud of it, it's just a fact.
- A lot could be said about the reasons for the rapidity of the German invasion in WWII, but cowardness of the soldiers wasn't such an important factor.
- This page should be about the future of ad-blocking, using it to express your negative feelings about the French people is stupid and childish.
The part of this article that has not been mentioned yet is that the developer of Adblock Plus (forked from the original Adblock) has decided to take money in exchange for allowing "non-intrusive" advertising through its lists, pretty much against the interests of it's users who don't want any ads. This puts them directly in the line of fire when media publishers get irate enough to sue, as advertisers see them as a blackmailer. You can see the whitelist of allowed sites here: https://easylist-downloads.adb... - along with Google and it's Doubleclick network, other notables and other publishers and trackers not easily recognized have paid up. Adblock Plus got the install base and trust, then they change the arrangement.
Definition of "conflicted"... trying to figure out which side to support when the French ad agencies sue APK.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
So if you hit a site that has 5-10 of your "blocked" sites, you have to parse that file each time, for each query. Talk about a waste of resources.
Also, my DNS box is doing more than just serving up dns requests. You still haven't shown me any kind of benchmark. Only your made up numbers and statistics.
Come on... Step up. Show me a single study that compares a million+ line host file against a single dns query for the same item.
As for adding complexity... Yah, I guess it does add some. Things that someone that only knows how to parse a plain text file in notepad might not grasp...
Bring it on! Show me the study!
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Read the "Liberation Trilogy" by Rich Atkinson. Brilliant work. The Americans had some good commanders and terrible ones. The Brits were hit or miss, but their men loved them in a way the yanks never could. The French generals hated everyone and each other, constantly vying for prestige and insulting the men whose help they needed. Even in defeat, they could not swallow their pride. But then, there were a number of British and American generals of whom the same could be said. Only the diplomatic genius of Eisenhower and the strong rapport of Churchill and Roosevelt held the operation together.
A buggy whip.
Simply because a product threatens your business doesn't mean you are entitled to get it legislated out of existence.
AdBlock puts out a product that saves people bandwidth and filters out all sorts of noxious, potentially dangerous content.
However, there ARE ways around AdBlock. At the root of it, your ads simply CANNOT utilize any of the aforementioned noxious, potentially dangerous means to FORCE views.
If this breaks your business model?
Get a better fucking business model, as the one you're using now sucks.
Also, end users VOLUNTARILY install AdBlock. It isn't a default install anywhere. So these are people who have made a choice NOT to accept traffic from your crappy ad network. AdBlock didn't FORCE their product on ANYONE. Again, you don't have a right to force people to view your content.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
german had a very good air and tank superiority
You are half right. Many of the French tanks were much better than the German Tanks and Allied tanks outnumbered the Germans 3 to 2. Many captured tanks were used in the German army. Here are a few factors that decreased their usefulness.
1. Organization. Though there were four of armoured divisions (Germany had 10) most French tanks were parcelled out to infantry divisions as support. This caused them to be spread out and unable to react to breakthroughs.
2. Too few radios. Only one in 5 French tanks had radios. A general German tactic was to kill the tank with the antennas and move on. The other tanks would not know where to go or be able to coordinate effectively.
3. Rigid central command. Local commanders were ordered to hold positions and could not react to breakthroughs.
4. Communications were a mess. The French relied on land lines and couriers for communications. One of the first German objectives was to cut communications with higher command. Without orders, out of contact units sat in position, got surrounded and surrendered.
5. Delay. The French armoured divisions were held for counter attack and when they were released it was too late.