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Editor-in-Chief of the Next Web: Adblockers Are Immoral
lemur3 writes: Hot on the heels of the recent implementation of Canvas Ads (allowing advertisers to use the full page) Martin Bryant, the Editor-in-Chief of The Next Web, wrote a piece that, ostensibly, calls out mobile carriers in Europe for offering ad blocking as a service. He writes: "Display ads are still an important bread-and-butter income stream. Taking delight in denying publishers that revenue shows either sociopathic tendencies or ignorance of economic realities." While referring to those using ad blocking as sociopathic is likely not to win many fans, this mindset seems to be prevalent in certain circles, as discussed previously on Slashdot. Martin closes his piece with a warning: "For all their sins, ads fuel much of the Web. Cut them out and you're strangling the diversity of online voices and publishers – and I don't think consumers really want that."
No. I will not risk the safety and security of my systems by allowing them to display potentially (frequently) harmful ads. Also I don't like being advertised to in general and fuck you anyways.
Shut the fuck up or join Adblock Plus' unobtrusive ads program.
Examples include ads that occupy the entire page, video ads that automatically play and hog mobile data, or broken/inoperable links to ad servers that prevent access to content.
Make ads unobtrusive (think about the way Google delivers ads), and customers won't block them.
While he has a point that ads do fuel much of the content on the Internet, where he goes horribly wrong is to think that it is advertisers RIGHT (instead of PRIVILEGE) to beam their messages into our brains. He probably also thinks you shouldn't go to the bathroom during commercials on TV.
In other news, a psychologist said that idblockers are amoral.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
are the reason i started using ad blockers, i will continue to do so until i'm confident the web has removed 100% of these
There is no right to make a profit. http protocol is displayed by a backend interpretation. I can do what I want with the data I fetch.
In addition I want the concept of ad revenue generated content to die.
Add that to the growing list of things surrounding marketing that are immoral. As immoral as it may be though, it's also very obtuse, self-serving, and irresponsible.
Twinstiq, game news
and I'll keep blocking your ads.
Ad networks have lately been the largest vector for remote exploits. Some very ordinary and mainstream websites have been using ad networks that offer up images/flash with embedded exploits. I will block all ad networks due to this. You want to provide ads? Download the ads locally, vet and display them from your own server like we used to do in the good ol' days of the web. Then I can't block them.
Using an ad network as a webmaster is laziness and immoral.
Being immoral is cool, that's why I use ad-blocking software. And if you lose your job, I don't give a shit either. I want the WWW of the early '90s back: anarchist, unregulated, capitalism-free.
Customers hate them so much that one person started a blog called Tab Closed; Didn't Read highlighting the worst offenders. This has inspired a hashtag #tcdr in microblog posts like this.
"For all their sins, ads fuel much of the Web. Cut them out and you're strangling the diversity of online voices and publishers – and I don't think consumers really want that."
So for all their sins, which include abuses such as embedding malware, unlawful tracking and spying as well as browse hijacking, plus the sheer annoyance of embedded video and flashing content -- the users who have opted out by installing Ad Blockers are the immoral ones. Then again -- rapists often blame their victims.
Ad blockers would not have been necessary if we didn't have ad networks distributing malware.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The war began in earnest when ads became intrusive and disruptive.
I appreciate that someone has to pay for all of the sites that I visit for free. Some are payed entirely out of pocket, a labor of love by the host. And some are fueled by ad revenue. But those that utilize pop-ups, pop-unders, full screen ads, ads that autoplay voice and sound, malicious ads with fake security warnings and fake buttons... I don't feel the slightest bit guilty about denying ad revenue to those sites.
What I am against is the current advertisement industry.
Why do 30 other domains need to know that I visit a site?
Why is profit before security? My security.
Why is there no accountability when malicious is software distributed by the ad networks?
Why are you ruining my browsing experience?
And last but not least: ad-networks: why do you think I am a women in my 30s? Please don't show me another tampax or chanel commercial again.
If web sites can't find a way to pay for the content and hosting then they eventually will go away. The consensus on /. seems to be "paywalls and ads are bad and screw those that use them I have a right to ad free and free access to content..." The problem isn't so much ads as the intrusive nature of some and their increasing use as malware delivery mechanisms. pop ups, self starting, animated ads are a real nuisance and worthy of blocking, as are tracking cookies etc. The advertising industry needs to find a way around that that doesn't annoy users because, while ad blocking users are probably a small fraction of all users currently, as things get worse more and more users will block ads. Whisk they are at it, they need to fix the problem that if I do see an ad I am interested in if I leave the page and come back the ad is no longer there.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
How do I know the next ad rotation won't be a driveby?
Because you've set the the Java applet and Flash Player plug-ins to "click to play" mode. It's sort of hard to catch a drive-by when you've disabled the tech through which drive-bys enter your machine. This used to be a separate extension called Flashblock, but browser publishers have recently started to incorporate this functionality directly into the browser. In Firefox, in Hamburger > Add-ons > Plugins, set "Shockwave Flash" to "Ask to Activate" instead of "Always Activate". This way, you can block Flash unless you're on Newgrounds, Kongregate, Dagobah, Albino Blacksheep, Weebl's Stuff, Homestar Runner, or one of the few other sites that legitimately need Flash functionality.
He has a point. Ads are used to support many free services such as hobbyist forums which would otherwise be unable to run.
That being said, none of us here would be affected by banning of ad-blockers since we all know basic CSS and other ad-blocking techniques. We don't need it, and we can all benefit from others' lack of it.
In addition I want the concept of ad revenue generated content to die.
Slashdot is advertising-supported, and I can see that you aren't posting from a subscriber account. Would you prefer that Slashdot operated like Something Awful, requiring payment up front to see anything past the front page? If you read an article on 20 different web sites, good luck paying for 20 different $5 per month subscriptions.
For all their sins, ads fuel much of the Web. Cut them out and you're strangling the diversity of online voices and publishers – and I don't think consumers really want that.
Actually, consumers want everything, and they want it for free.
Plus a pony.
Consumers are going to go for the absolute cheapest venue right now, and then they're going to complain about the long-term consequences of their behavior. That's just how humans work.
And producers are going to try to maximize the amount they make right now, and then they're going to complain about the long-term consequences of their behavior. That's just how humans work.
Rather than complain about ad-blockers, we're just going to have to accept that much of the content we enjoy nowadays isn't sustainable when your audience is composed of human beings.
For many years, I didn't block ads, viewing them as a necessary part of all the free content on the internet. But starting with pages of animated ads that really slowed down browsers of old, and progressing to ads that play audio by default, ads that play video (with audio!) on even a momentary mouseover, etc.,, not to mention ads containing or linking to malicious content, I have no choice but to block them.
The Church of the Invisible Hand's doctrine on annoying ads are that they are all manifestations of Xiombarg, god-queen of Chaos.
I hate ads, I use an ad blocker, but I'm posting because so far all of the comments have chastised sites for using ads, without providing an alternative.
The summary has some truth when it says, "for all their sins, ads fuel much of the Web". It costs real money to host a website, it costs real money to run a website, it costs real money to produce the content for a website.
So my question to all of those infuriated by those content producers who would "dare" to try to protect their ads is this: what viable alternative do you suggest? Ads work because (a) they generate revenue to cover all of those costs and (b) they don't require any sort of opt-in, and (c) apart from a few places where they are overdone, they generally don't get in the way of the content you're seeking.
(a) is what helps the bulk of websites you frequent stay afloat, (b) is important because the websites don't have to spend considerable resources trying to get you to enter into some sort of financial arrangement with them, and (c) provides a bit of a standard so that a marketplace of ad buyers and sellers can exist.
So again, if we were to get rid of ads, what would we replace them with? Paywalled sites don't get much love on /. so if that's your answer, I'd love to hear how you'd make them tolerable and how you'd get people to sign up.
I hate ads, and I use an ad blocker, but I do so knowing full well I'm being somewhat of a hypocrite and that I'm also relying on the vast majority of people /not/ using an ad blocker, because if a lot more people starting using them then the economics for most websites would fall apart. I don't like ads, but I have to admit that in many ways they seem like the least bad option. It's seems that many people who scream about their "right" to not have ads are being disingenuous or ignorant or both.
...that's because he's an idiot.
I'm even willing to directly kick a few dollars to my favorite small-time interest-specific sites I read.
If anti-ad sentiment grows, you'll end up having to create an account and "directly kick a few dollars" for a month's subscription to read the full text of even one article whose abstract you found through a search engine. Look at newspapers' trends toward making more money from the paywall than they had from advertisers, look at major scholarly journal publishers that continue to resist open access, and look at musicians pulling their recordings off Spotify in favor of subscription-only services like Tidal.
In very black-and-white terms I agree with Martin Bryant.
BUT... to give one example, a lot of web sites (including Slashdot) are unusable on my iPhone nowadays because of ads that either (1) automatically redirect me to a product on the App Store as soon as the ad loads, or (2) try to do that, but do it badly so Safari closes the web page and reloads it.
Maybe if advertisers didn't behave so aggressively, people wouldn't aggressively block them. I block ads on my Mac, and if it was possible (maybe it is?) then I'd block them on my iPhone too. Not because I object to adverts, or even because I want to avoid seeing them, but because they make browsing the web an obnoxious, frustrating and potentially dangerous experience. (The only virus I've ever had was from an advert force-loading a malformed PDF document.)
While I find his preaching about the moral rightness of what he does, and our duty to endure whatever shit he wishes to shove in our faces to be deeply obnoxious; it would not entirely surprise me if this little experiment by the carriers ends up going...badly.
Ad-blocking at the client end('client end' includes routers, filtering appliances, etc. under user control, if the applicable network is large or geeky enough) is simply the right of the individual to run the software of their choice on their hardware, to best serve their interests, in action. Running a public HTTP server doesn't give you some special right to dictate how the output is formatted for display.
Ad-blocking at the carrier level, though, gets risky fast. Whenever an ISP starts deviating from 'dumb pipe' operation, you have to start worrying about whose interests are going to win out, and how dramatically. Especially risky if (as is the case with quite a few cellular companies and ISPs) they also have a side interest in advertising, consumer analytics, a media arm, or other properties that could benefit from a little traffic meddling. We've already seen some of the more obscure WISPs provide 'ad blocking', then inject their own ads over the originals, worst of both worlds.
Ad blocking is well and good(and, frankly, until the advertisers can clean up the ghastly security situation, they have no justification for whining. Ads are easily the most dangerous part of most parts of the web you'd admit to visiting in polite company); but anything that gives ISPs more control over traffic is to be watched with considerable concern. You don't think that a plan to stick it to google is going to stop at blocking google's ads, do you? Not when they could use their privileged position on the wire to achieve the same tracking and advertising that google actually has to offer attractive services to achieve...
I'll be honest.... I won't shed a tear if a good 50 or 60% of the existing web sites die off, due to lack of revenue generation.
Maybe then we'll get back to something more sane? Look, I get that a lot of special interest blog sites would die if they didn't receive ad revenue. I used to write for one of them myself. (And guess what? It died, because they couldn't generate enough page hits to impress enough advertisers to spend a lot of money on it.)
But ultimately, it's survival of the fittest like anything else. I think it would be in the best interest of a lot of businesses to host and pay for sites related in some way to products or services they sell, so that would theoretically keep quite a few of them afloat. (A few of the car related forums I'm on work like that.... They're partially funded by contributions by area car dealerships that want to sponsor them, and they charge annual fees for 3rd. parties to host a message base on the forum where they can advertise whatever they like with new message posts.) This model keeps out the spam/malware and ensures target marketing by default. The users LIKE the sponsors and their marketing because it typically includes discount coupon codes on various products of interest, and ensures good
customer service when a forum "regular" also happens to be the owner of the company you bought your items from!
In other cases, people should just learn to accept that hosting a web site is going to cost them something. It really shouldn't cost much, in most cases. If you're not streaming out a bunch of video content or hosting huge downloads, your blog site just isn't likely to generate massive amounts of bandwidth usage (what most hosting services really bill for, because storage space itself is dirt cheap). Every hobby I ever had cost me some money.... Deciding to run a special interest blog or message forum should be no different.
and it gets worse forcing autoplay of that dancing singing crap, much of which gags my browser. take your Flash and HTML5 and go to hell.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I smell a perverse incentive. The sender of traffic pays, but the last mile also pays for the connection. And in the case of a satellite or cellular last mile, the subscriber pays the most by far: usually $5 to $15 per gigabyte in the United States market. How many of these ad networks happen to own stock in satellite and cellular carriers or vice versa?
So the advertisers (or their mouthpieces) are calling the people that would block ads sociopathic? That's rich.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
I'm assuming that Firefox and Chrome browsers are less likely to have vulnerabilities that are known and exploitable than those in Flash Player. And I'm also assuming that ad networks are going to continue to be as dumb as they currently are, serving up Flash as the preferred ad media type instead of HTML5 with a Flash fallback. So until some of these assumptions become no longer valid, such as if advertisers come to prefer HTML5 over Flash Player, browsers become more vulnerable than Flash Player, browser vulnerabilities become more serious, or zero-day browser vulnerabilities become more widely known to malware authors, blocking Flash will remain effective.
I haven't found display ads a particularly effective marketing tool. Ad blockers are not the only reason their effectiveness is diminishing. Ads are so ubiquitous that we don't even see them anymore. We have several billboards within blocks of our house, I drive past them every day and couldn't tell you what's on them. It's just noise and we tune it out after a while.
At least when it comes to books, paid reviews and blogs are more effective than display ads. Even if the reviews aren't positive, they're useful if they can explain why they didn't like your book.It's more work but better results. That's also life without display ads. More work.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Around 2000 I was playing with a Digital (the computer company) technology where you could do microtransactions on web pages. I forget the exact size but it was as low as something like 1/1000th of a cent. This was pretty cool in that you could charge customers to visit your website page by page or however you would like to structure the transaction. The idea was that an end user would have put, say, $10 in their wallet and each time they would go to a website it would pop up and say, "This site will charge x amount per page" you could also put limits on a given site or have it pop up every so many cents and so on. This way some site couldn't screw you with frames or some such scummery.
I loved their implementation as it was beta but fundamentally clean. They also indicated that they had a handful of major banks onboard so it wasn't DOA. I think the death of Digital itself was what killed it.
But I would love this and would have no problem paying a tiny bit for slashdot, NYT, The Economist, stack-overflow, even reddit. But I would say FO to sites like huffpo who you know would spread their articles out so thin that it would be pretty much one word per page.
Plus it would be funny to watch great site after great site implode after the MBAs took over and just started to try to skin their customers by jacking up the prices over and over and over until the site collapsed. Which is sort of how many sites operate now as an ever higher percentage of their surface area is dedicated to ads and an ever growing percentage of their content becomes clickbait.
But one of the greatest parts in the Digital plan was that they only took a tiny taste, a very tiny taste vs the massive cut that google takes on adsense and most others take on their ad platforms. So when you gave a penny to slashdot they would basically get that penny.
What is even worse was that at this point paypal wasn't the domination machine that it was to become. Thus this platform could have become the defacto payment system for all transactions in that it didn't only do microtransactions but you could do ebay sized ones without any difficulty but at a much lower fee.
I'm either going to [...] make note of the advertiser and NEVER patronize them simply because they forced me to sit thru an ad I had no interest in seeing.
Good luck doing this when the ad is a public service announcement brought to you by your local electric monopoly. Care to join the Amish?
Display ads are still an important bread-and-butter income stream.
Display ads are still an important malware distribution mechanism..
How about they can advertise all they want as long as they can guarantee that the adverts are completely safe for my computer?
Of course, the technology for such a guarantee is probably decades away (if it exists at all), so that would be a big leap forward.
Martin Bryant, the Editor-in-Chief of The Next Web clearly needs to find himself a less public position that does not entail dealing with reality and actual people. What kind of moron goes out calling people they don't know snobs. And pertains to know that everything is fine because it works for him... there is a fantastic TED talk about that. If it is broken for me it is broken for me mister, period!!! I utterly resent your rant sir and all the deapicable thoughts it represents about other people that you do not know and cearly will never know as you have alienated them not just towards you but also towards the publication that you are dragging through the mud. I truly feel sorry for the so called editor in chief it must be hard for him that people don't feel the editors intrusive ads need to splatter on screen and suck away their bandwidth and CPU power if I could I would hand him a napkin to wipe away his tears and then tell him to get a grip... that guy has no shame whatsoever! I truly hope the publication gives him a big boot in his proverbial arse and tells him to go packing for such a display of disrespect is one you as a publisher cannot afford to leave unchallenged. Dear Martin Bryant, Editor-in-Chief of The Next Web go cry somwhere else you are hurting our ears with your high pitched wimpering!
MS, ALS, Aphasia ? http://globability.org - Me http://einarpetersen.com
I was happy with the internet before ads and would welcome the return of an ads-free internet. The only commercial sites that I have any use for, are vendor sites whose products I already use and therefore need support.
What is the difference what beverage an actor is holding in his hand? It could be anything at all, or it could be somebody paying him for it. Movies are not reality.
A flagrant anachronism, such as a bottle of Pepsi in a film set in the 14th century, destroys the film's believability. Only the very oldest brands can successfully push this sort of product placement.
For example, Google owns AdSense, DoubleClick, and Google Fi. It used to own Motorola's cell phone division before selling everything but the patent portfolio to Lenovo.
I'll bend over, you can kiss the imperial throne-warmer;
Damn it I was hoping they were going to be compared to TERRORISIM!
Because I not only run adblockers on my PC's I run Site WIDE adblockers on entire networks. nobody at work sees any ad's.
Until Advertisers and websites Stop serving any ad that is more than text or a jpeg, They are all getting blocked as they are an infection and attacK vector.
Web administrators that allow anything but a safe and small Ad that is flash, Java, or Javascript based are internet TERRORISTS.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Jon Stewart once signed off the Daily Show with "If you used a DVR to skip our ads, you're a thief" or some such - it was a sharp way to highlight the foolishness of these guys. We skipped ads when it was only broadcast TV all the time by stepping out to make a sandwich.
The only thing we're doing is voting with our feet that content providers should find another way to fund their work. It's no more immoral than renting direct-to-video movies were immoral compared to watching broadcast TV.
Your advertisement can be text, it can be a jpeg hosted locally. Like advertisements and banners used to be.
I literally cannot block an advertisement that is hosted locally with all the other image content for the page. I literally cannot block text that is within the body of the page I want to read.
But these methods are not intrusive and obnoxious enough for advertisers, so they don't use them.
That's their problem not mine.
Big words coming from an industry full of click-bait to get views...
Is a privilege, not a God given right. Find a better way to make money than trying to hijack my screen.
I wish I was a neutron bomb, for once I could go off...
Slimy trick showing the full screen ad as the background of the landing page with a hidden side tab that holds the content.
You have to work really hard to piss the general public off enough to take the hassle of: learning about ways to block adds, implementing add blocking, using add blocking.
Joe Public (or my Mother) is not your typical Slashdot crowd. They want just switch on the computer and use it to browse the web. They do not even want to know what is the name of the program they use, let alone the deep magic of add blocking. And it is difficult to incite them to change *anything*. Advertisement specialists worked very hard, using very obnoxious, audio AND video noisy, pop-over, pop-under, pretending-to-be-system-dialog, memory and processor hogging, data-heavy adds. In many cases they prevent people from reading the article at all and often they eat bandwidth like there is no tomorrow. So our dear Joe Public has no choice but to use add blocker.
So do I. I'm just getting too lazy to walk to the toilet.
Have gnu, will travel.
It takes a real sociopath to make that statement with a straight face.
If ads were just annoying, he would have a point. The terms are you get the content at zero cost, but it is being funded by advertising. Violating those terms is a bit immoral.
The flip side is the immoral behaviour of advertising: they track behaviour the reader's behaviour across multiple websites (which is dangerously close to stalking). They behave irresponsibly by not vetting their advertising clients (which can pose security risks). They also don't consider the bandwidth costs for the recipient of the advertising (which is especially relevant for users of mobile devices).
I honestly don't think that they should be talking about morality given the nature of their behaviour.
The idea that the Internet couldn't support itself with ads is a big lie. Would the Internet change if we all blocked ads, yes. Would the Internet go away, no. It was here, shuffling packets for scientists and engineers long before Google and Yahoo showed up. Can useful services be sustained free of charge without ads? Wikipedia is the biggest example of that, but there are other examples.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Based on the threat model you have presented, the appropriate security model would be "click to play scripts from other domains." Or what am I missing?
Ads are immoral. In fact the whole advertising business is immoral, based on nothing but speculation, greed and lies. If what you are hawking over the internet is so devoid of value that you can charge for it and pay your bandwidth costs directly then I have no interest in what you offer. Besides that's a lie. No one has ads to "pay the bandwidth". The ads are "to make me money".
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
If there were moral standards applied to truth in advertising, itself, I might agree. Clearly this is not the case, so tough noogies! I use adblocking indiscriminately because my time and thoughts are mine, and the ecosystem of advertising is a swamp of daemons praying on my consciousness.
I'm not going to trust the word of "editor in chief" of some magazine who probably sells advertising that's being blocked. If the advertisements weren't getting to the point there's more ad content than actual content; no one would run them. If the ad networks weren't allowing just anyone to buy ad space; and allowing hackers to insert malicious advertisements...less people would use them. If they didn't use flash that caused massive CPU usage spikes; less people would use them. They tend to forget, at least in America...we're almost at a tipping point of seeing more ad content than other content. 15 minutes of every hour of television in the US is advertising; and that number is going up. Newer shows are being produced a couple of minutes shorter to cram in more advertising; older shows are being edited to fit more advertising; TBS is time-compressing shows to fit another advertisement or two. We're being screwed by the corporations in an effort to advertise. Pretty soon we won't be talking about minutes of ad's per hour, we'll be talking about minutes of actual programming per hour. You won't take in to consideration how much of the screen is taken up by ads, it will be how much of the screen is taken up by actual content. But..mainly..if I didn't stand a chance of getting infected every time my PC loaded an advertisement; if I didn't have to deal with my browser crashing because this site uses 15 flash ads per page; I wouldn't have to block them. Clickbait is the worst (answers.com lists of crap is 90% flash ads and 10% content); but it's almost at the point where I don't even want to visit legitimate webpages. Everyone's monetizing everything with ads. You can't even use a Slingbox without having advertisements forced upon you. I say screw those people; I skip them when I watch stuff on DVR, I use live TV commercial time as a chance to go do something else...I'm not going to wait 20 minutes to load a webpage because the advertisements are bogging the system down.
The problem is that ads went too far, you got too fucking ballsy, you started faking out download links, spamming ads everywhere you went.
You fucked up son, you got greedy. Now we are taking measures against the ads. Too bad, it's called consequences, sit down and eat your shit pile you made.
No morefunds hidden surprise audio, no more roll over my entire page after reading for a few, no more sudden video ads eating my expensive mobile data, NO MORE ME PAYING FOR THE CABLE, INTERNET, MOBILE DATA FOR /YOU/ TO DISPLAY CONTENT I DON'T WANT.
Once upon a time ads were reasonable, no, get fucked
> "...I don't think consumers really want that."
I can, in fact, name about 300 million people who "really want that," myself included.
The web existed before advertising, and it will exist after advertising, too. People can still create content for the web. Fewer will get paid for it, but so what? Hell, if anything, the web was much more interesting and undoubtedly more human before the commercial bullshit started in the mid 90's.
I don't respond to AC's.
So what? - if I want that info, I'd pay.
Five dollars per site when you're viewing one article on each of 20 sites in a given month ads up fairly quickly.
It never ceases to amaze me the stupidity of people who think that ads make money. They don't. Sales makes money. If you don't get a sale you ain't earned shit. The fact that you show me an ad yields nothing for you. Additionally, if I'm blocking your ads then what the fuck makes you think that if you happen to sneak by the ad blocker and show me your ad I'm suddenly gonna say "Well damn! Got through the ad blocker! Lookie here! New. Shiny. Must buy". Hell no! I just get even more upset and won't buy your stupid product. Why to advertisers insist on attempting to show ads to people who are obviously, demonstrably and actively saying "I don't want to see your FUCKING ADS!!!".
["Consumer" arose] When [viewers] stopped paying up front for the content.
When did original works of authorship become "content" to fill a box?
The polite words are "viewer", not "consumer", and "works", not "content".
I block ads because of three main reasons:
1. I don't like being tracked by a third party
2. I don't like visually annoying ads (blinking, moving, changing, etc) - I can't read a page if it feels like I'm in Shinjuku or Las Vegas.
3. Ads are often destructive, either they popup (in the page, or in a new window/tab) or they contain trojans or worms
Since I block lots of trackers, already there most ads vanish. Domains that serve any of the catagery 2 or 3 are also blocked - actually all third parties are blocked if they are not needed for the page. (RequestPolicy. It's a bit of work and why the can't people make pages without dozens of third parties anymore?)
Pages that don't have third party ads are not blocked in any way.
Pro tip if you want your ads to be viewed:
1. serve them on the same domain
2. don't animate them (maybe don't even use images)
3. don't make them have any sort of script
I for instance see google ad-words. I just can't click on them because it leads to a blocked tracker domain... :p
This is the same asshole who buys a pretty little property out in the countryside, and then after a year or two launches a farm practices complaint to shut down the neighbouring farms (which have only been there for two hundred years) because they smell like farms.
Then he shows up in town council explaining that only sociopaths raise farm animals.
What an incredible self-interest bullshit configurator this man possesses.
Get the fuck off my moral lawn.
Thank you for your concern, we all had a good laugh. But still I feel you are entitled to a response. And that's all you're entitled to. A response. You're not entitled to our bandwidth, you're not entitled to us reading your spam, you're not entitled to steal our time and most of all, you're not entitled to infecting our computers with malware 'cause you can't be assed to check whether your customers are crooks.
And this is why we use ad blockers.
Advertising is something we have come to accept as the price to pay for what we want to have. We have accepted ads as part of our TV viewing experience. And you may trust us when we tell you that we're not too fond of it. It's something we accepted as a price to pay. Not as an "additional experience" or as "valuable information". It's something we put up with to get what we want. nothing more. Essentially, we see you and your product as the necessary evil we have to accept to get what we want.
Just so you know where we are standing, and where you are.
We're not your partners. I think I don't tell you anything new, since we're essentially your product. You sell us, to your customers. You sell our views, our page impressions, our viewing habits, our "eyes" so to speak.
And products are rarely fully on the side of the entity selling them.
We have come to terms with you and your customers. And we have accepted it, as stated above. And we were also willing to do the same with this new medium here. We do understand that someone has to pay money, and if we want to pay with our time, someone else has to do the money part. We do understand that. And we do actually accept that.
What we do NOT accept is when you do not check whether your customers are crooks, we have to defend ourselves against their attacks. And that means that we have to disallow you to show us ads. Out of self defense.
What we do NOT accept is when you try to get obnoxious. When you slap ads over ads over ads before, while and after we have had any chance to see a tiny bit of what we actually want to see, we will defend ourselves. We allow you to use our eyes on our terms. Overstep your boundaries and be prepared to be shown the door.
We do NOT accept hundreds of megabytes of traffic for obnoxious video/sound ads for a few lines of content that we want. If the price (ads) outweighs the product (content), we will not pay that price.
Bottom line, and tl;dr version (we know, your time is valuable, you only deem ours expendable): You're entitled to nothing. You will get what we let you have. Be thankful and you shall thrive. Try to force more out of us than your due and you shall perish.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
TV and radio also use it when they aren't rebroadcasting national broadcast as a local affiliate. These media, no matter how small the companies involved, seem to have a way to communicate with advertisers.
Local TV and local radio have a local audience, and their local programming aimed at that local audience tends to be for local retailers and service businesses that seek to attract local customers. For example, a business located in Fort Wayne, Indiana, that doesn't do mail order would prefer to advertise in a medium that reaches residents of Fort Wayne without having to waste money on reaching residents far from Fort Wayne. The only Internet sites I can think of that are as local as local TV and local radio are local news sites and local classified sites. So unless your site's audience is as local as, say, WANE.com (Fort Wayne's CBS affiliate), you'll have a hard time attracting local advertisers. And to a national advertiser, your site alone would just be small potatoes not worth the money to pay for marketing's time. This is why sites join ad networks: to attract larger advertisers.
Or what am I missing?
Some web site operators would claim that you "signed the contract" when you were born into a country that has signed the Berne Convention. Modifying a copyrighted web page is an exclusive right of the copyright owner.
At least how it is practiced now. Think of it as exploits for the OS of your brain, because that is exactly what it has boiled down to.
They hook people up, read their responses to different stimuli, tweak and repeat until they have something which bypasses your internal firewalls. We are hardwired to respond to some things in particular ways, and that provides an exploit surface. Then we are firmware wired (social level) that provides another attack surface.
They have psychologists on staff for a reason, and it isn't to help you. It is one step down from using psychologists to devise torture, IMO, but in some ways worse because it is so pervasive and affects many more people.
Imagine of all advertising had to be Courier New in 12 point font, black, using the 1000 most common words in the English language.
Well, I've been here the past 10 or so years. And allow me to tell you what made /. so relevant, interesting, insightful and informative. It was not that anything here was "breaking news". C'mon. /. was something like the Reader's Digest of the tech world. That it was devoid of obnoxious ads was certainly a bonus. As was the "old school look". I think we still remember the backlash when you tried to "modernize" it (aka "Beta").
What made this site great was two things: Interesting, thought provoking articles and, even more so, the awesome, insightful comments from various experts in various fields of IT. That was basically what drove /. and what made it an interesting place to stop by and catch up on IT topics. You'd get a quick overview of what's going on, and more important you'd get valuable information from different people who actually know what they're talking about. With a moderation system to boot that managed to keep the quality standard pretty high.
Now, let's take a look at the current "headlines", shall we?
Men's Rights Activists Call For Boycott of Mad Max: Fury Road
Harvard Hit With Racial Bias Complaint
Report: Google To Add 'Buy' Buttons To Mobile Search Results
The Economic Consequences of Self-Driving Trucks
How MMO Design Has Improved Bar Trivia
A Look At GTA V PC Performance and Image Quality At 4K
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Gets Death Penalty In Boston Marathon Bombing
Mechanical 'Clicky' Keyboards Still Have Followers (Video)
News for nerds? Stuff that matters? Really? What I see here is PC bullshit mixed with politics, an opinion piece or two, general news I could get anywhere and stuff of such insignificance that I can only wonder why the FUCK it is on the front page in the first place.
And it's amazing that there's neither astroturfing going on, nor some shamless plug for someone's blog or some new product on there. But I'm pretty sure we'll get plenty thereof again come Fall, it's time for some campaigning!
If you're looking for the reason why /.'s goodwill is in free fall, I think looking at ad blockers might be looking the wrong way. Just saying.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You do not animate - I ignore.
You people have overdone it and are now earning the fruits of your rampant greed and impertinent intrusion. I will go so far as to install firewall rules to get rid of your crap.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
In late 90s the web was better, people tried to keep good content. Web pages were edited manually. Care web into pages. Yes we had young and noons with overused animated gifs and horrible free sites like GeoCities, Angelfire, Tripod.
But the web exited just fine before ads. I had my own domain name back in late 90s when it was $70 a year.
It wasn't a RSS feed AdSense scam site that imported headlines and click bait titles from random RSS feeds.
Folks cared about their web page and took care of it, learning HTML, making awesome designs, the good sites stood out.
Now every damn site is WordPress, Drupal, Loomla, Tumble, Squarespace themed site with RSS feeds to simulate updated content, and AdSense, amazon ads, and more all over it.
Ads killed the web, no more creativity, no more enjoyment of caring for your site, no more original content.
For that my router has adblock add-on. It auto downloads block list every 24 hours. Blocks all ads at the router, no ads on desktop, mobiles, etc.
Let's let all that "content" that is solely ad-fueled die, and we'll see what's left?
See, because I think that's pure bullshit. No, let me amend that: it's bullshit for all the content that's worth seeing.
Because, see, anyone that SELLS anything is going to see the value in connecting to customers more easily and conveniently - ergo, those sites will pay for themselves.
All the hobby sites, where Billy & friends post their dungeons and dragons house rules, well, they'll still do it because they love it.
Media sites, like say popularmechanics.com, etc have the implicit 'trade' that is the same as their physical publication: enjoy our content, and we'll trade your viewership eyeballs for ad revenue. No problem there.
The bulk of the rest of sites "fueled by ads" are none of these. ehow? Fucking worthless. Ads shoveled to me on amazon? Ebay? BN.com? I'll block those, because I'm already paying them for a service in the price of the goods; if they can't support their mechanisms on that, then too bad, they die. (I suspect that they can, and ad-revenue is just another profit-mechanism.) Huffpost? Fuck off, I'd rather read my news from actual news organizations than some shitty aggregator reposting crap.
So no, I think the things that I "need" from the web already have payment mechanisms built into their models. The rest either are labors of love or can die, and I rather suspect we'll be better off.
-Styopa
"If you would not give your body to any passer-by to do with as he wills, why do you give your mind?" And privacy. And integrity. And - ultimately - freedom. (History is pretty clear about this). Epictetus asked a good question 2,000 years ago. It is still a good question. Does "internet user" == prostitute? Is resistance to being prostituted == immoral? Google seems to think so.
Sorry, Mr. Bryant, your right to display advertisement content on my PC ended around the time you started making the damned things talk, or around when the damned things started redirecting to infected PDFs and browser exploits.
If you guys can't responsibly filter your SWF files to prevent audio and redirects, don't expect to enjoy the privilege of being able to display that content on my screen.
I've been waiting for the next logical escalation in the battle between ad blockers and advertisers. Ad blockers were introduced, advertisers put ad-block detecters in place and refuse content. Well how about if we had ad blockers that downloaded that content, just didn't display it. And to take things one step further, how about there being an option for those with plenty of fast bandwidth to do this by default. Now imagine the implications of a few million browsers doing just that.
I don't want ads. I do want to pay the sites that provide content that's valuable, but not necessarily their monthly or annual fees which are far out of proportion to my use.
At least Google is working on an alternative:
https://www.google.com/contrib...
[Charging per site] would reduce traffic no doubt.
It would also put viewers in a bubble where they're unwilling to look at a site with opposing viewpoints because they'd have to pay more. It's similar to the purported drawbacks of the Facebook Zero/Internet.org initiative, where viewpoints expressed outside the zero-rated bubble won't get heard.
Are you okay with advertisements that hijack your browser, track your every move and inject their ads into every single webpage you visit, and install malware on your computer?
No, which is why I block Flash and Java.
Here's an ultra-condensed, slightly re-ordered version of the Q&A:
Q: Isn't this just an interstitial?
A: No. We donâ(TM)t like interstitials either. They sit between you and the content and require another click and new pageload before you can proceed to the article.
Q: How can I skip the Canvas ad and read the article?
A: As soon as the page loads you can move your cursor to the article and it will slide back over the Canvas ad. Pro tip: hit the âcâ(TM) key on your keyboard and the article will move in or out right away. Try it now to see how it works!
I'm sorry, how is this functionally different from an interstitial? And no, Boris, you may not answer "because it uses canvases," because HTML5 and Javascript can trigger reloads on their own.
My current default browsing environment is the following:
- Firefox with NoScript, Classic Theme Restorer, and Status-4-Evar
- Pale Moon with NoScript (I'm heavily considering abandoning Firefox entirely, aside from obligatory browser compatibility testing)
- In ultra-extenuating circumstances, elinks (this is what I have to use for my local newspaper's website when I have to perform the 1 odd search every 3 months for a police blotter story. Their website forces a navigation forward saying that the browser is broken, and elinks handles it in the most graceful fashion when I click the "Back" button. The Boston Globe is far less annoying for odd searches, and if a newspaper truly wants to paywall their content, they can go with the Rupert Murdoch method and refrain from sending the full article text in the base HTML.)
I had the page for the Q&A open, and I went to NoScript and clicked "Temporarily allow all this page"; what a mistake that was. It proceeded to chug, and take almost 25 seconds to load an abomination of 78 scripts among 21 external domains (20 if I count "tnwcdn.com" as internal), and it took 4 different stages of "Temporarily allow all this page" to allow everything. It's a veritable cross-site scripting nightmare, and the end result is a full-page ad (sometimes video or with semi-transparent animated layers) covering 92% to 99% of the page, with the far right edge consisting of the article dangling annoyingly in a sine-wave oscillation on the right half. It was so disgusting, I had to click "Revoke Temporary Permissions" to restore some visual sanity, and make me not want to "kill -9" Firefox out of spite.
I'm going to be brutally honest: this is the kind of website design that led me to browse the web the way I do now: Flash disabled unless I specifically enable it, and NoScript set with its ultra-agressive rules. I don't even need AdBlock, because NoScript takes care of the most annoying elements powered by the reckless abuse of Javascript in modern website design. If there's a regular banner ad that isn't Javascript, I'll see it, and if it's really good, there's a faint chance I might click it. If there's a page whose core content can't be rendered without any of these ultra-annoying elements, I leave, never come back, and tell all my friends how disgusting the page is (as I will do for The Next Web; there are plenty of other tech blogs that don't stoop this low).
I'm also getting really tired of the overuse of slide animations in HTML5/Javascript website design. If I were to make a listicle of the worst HTML5/Javascript abominations, The Next Web's design decisions here would be number 1.
I'm also insulted by TNW's proselytization about ads, because they've been so deep in the marketing tank due to their financial position (they have to get funding to keep their website running, and they're hopelessly stuck in the web ad arms race), their undying love for annoying touch-centric webpage design (their "about" page ( http://thenextweb.com/about/ ) has a static non-scrolling background in the top 20%; that's one of the oldest asinine elements of ultra-touch-hipsterish web design that has been plaguing websites since 2011; Vox i
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Ads are harmful. They are a form of statistically-proven mind control that are legal for free speech reasons. The best thing you can say about ads is "we don't take down advertisers with guns, because we allow free speech". That's the strongest argument they can make. They hurt consumer choice, increase debt, create expectations of products that they don't live up to, push towards a version of society with defective bullshit, hurt popular opinion of home-grown solutions, lower mindfulness, and change the overall discussion to be about "why don't you drink X" instead of that not even being a relevant topic.
It's so insidious that I actually lack the vocabulary to even phrase the previous sentence properly, and it would take a well formed article to even express the opinion. Short version: advertisements already control everything. Even if you don't buy advertised products, that's a deviant choice and you have to defend it.
Now, lets take the tech side, and the property ownership side.
1)- You buy a device capable of doing your bidding.
2)- Instead of that, it tries to control your mind on behalf of third parties, who offer you no compensation, and only seek to harm you.
3)- This idiot argues in favor of you not having control of the device that you paid for, because he wants to control it, and you.
What a scam artist. I celebrate every ad blocked, I cherish every webpage rendered into content instead of horseshit.
NOT using an adblocker is immoral. It hurts you, and by becoming familiar with brands, you unwittingly become their agent- and thereby you hurt your friends and family. If someone were to ask you about some random shit brand whose only merit is that they advertised, your response will be something like "I dunno but their ads are annoying/funny/cute/dumb". That's a huge fucking win for some shit company. It should be "who knows, never used them". But it isn't. Because advertisers won.
Ad blockers are not immoral. The "economic realities" to which you obsequiously collapse before are.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I'm trying to think of how to make advertising work, because I really like all of the free stuff, and I know eventually those media creators need to somehow get paid.
Pages
BAD: Animated, big, or pop-up ads
OK: Text ads, like on the side of Google Search Results. Maybe little bitty, icon-like logos of brands along the side or bottom (a few). Also, somehow the print advertising in paper newspapers was never that annoying. It was even interesting. It's worth studying why and implementing whatever the computer-screen equivalent is.
Video
BAD: 30-second commercials before my 2-minute Youtube video begins
OK: 5-second commercial at the end of the Youtube video
Games
BAD: Full-screen ads between levels, or partial-screen ads during levels.
OK: Little ads at the bottom of the Game Over screen.
Businesses spend millions of dollars to hire a celebrity endorsement, talented graphic designers and filmmakers, and others, to cater to touchy-feely emotional associations. They often focus on just getting people to think the brand is cool or trustworthy in a nebulous way, instead of simply outlining the cold, hard facts about their product. I'm not saying I endorse this way of advertising. I'm saying that the elephant in the room is that they are sabotaging it all by their rude interruptions. What kind of emotional aftertaste will I have for a brand in this scenario: Ah, funny cat video. Click. Hi, I'd like to sell you insurance! Meh, you ruined the moment.
Businessmen might think the limits I've outlined above will make their ads too subtle. But if you cross that threshold of subtlety, you ruin everything. Besides, people are a lot more detail-oriented than you think. In school I remember that Guess jeans were all the rage. The difference between Guess jeans and all of the others was a one-inch triangular patch sewn on the back. I'm even talking teenagers here. They may sometimes seem incapable of remembering historical dates, but man can they spot the difference between the Polo logo and a knock-off. That's why I think little logos will be noticed. They may even be more compelling because they are not chasing you. They're standing back, like they don't really need you, totally cool.
For those that are interested, be a little enticing. For those that aren't, don't be annoying. Because I don't think the tactic is working to hit everyone over the head in the hopes that they'll fall into some kind of stupor and buy.
Oh, and here are the "terms" for getting information from a web server: HTTP. I can do whatever I want with the data.
Here are the terms under which any work of authorship is made available in the United States: Title 17, United States Code. Has a court decided whether removing ads creates a "derivative work"? Or is it more like the Game Genie, where the judge in Galoob v. Nintendo decided that the modified work is not "fixed" enough?
You can just run a web site on any old PC, too.
Not if your home Internet connection is behind a carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT). Instead of giving your PC a world-routable address, your ISP gives your PC an address in a reserved space that is private to your ISP. This has happened in a lot of countries affected by the IPv4 address shortage. Even users in countries where a fairly long DHCP lease of a public IP address is common often can't run servers, as many ISPs have a habit of disconnecting home subscribers who are discovered to be running servers.
I totally agree that ad-blockers are immoral. Realistically how can you support denying a web site ad revenue which is the only reason it can continue to exist?
However, just as immoral are the way ads are tending to be presented now. Full screen ads as noted, or un-avoidable popovers are to my mind a betrayal from the other direction - a web site needs revenue to survive, but that should not come at the expense of the sanity of the reader.
My solution is to simply sop using a site if I find the ads grow too obnoxious. But I also really can't see anything morally wrong with blocking ads from a web site that has gone too far in embracing abusive ads, almost as a form of punishment...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
America is probably the only place in the world where large numbers of people really appreciate advertisements and gleefully consume their content. Hell some people I know watch tv for the advertisements, the program in which the ads are inserted is just incidental, they want to watch the ads. I myself cannot stand advertising, and nothing has swayed me from this stance in the last 30 years. I, unfortunately, remember when I saw the first ads on the web-a part of me died and a I shed a tear in commemoration. But I do believe there is something deeper going on in Americas infatuation with advertisement. There is a certain kind of shamelessness ( think of the phrase: shameless self-promotion) that everyone feels on some level when, in order to sell a product or service, they are actually selling themselves. So on a grander level I believe our fetish for advertising is part and parcel of a mass social shaming ritual where each of us much show ourselves equally willing to sell ourselves. Actually I suspect that that is the real meaning of "All men are created equal". The ritual of american advertisement and advertisement consumption, the ritual of mutual self-shaming renders us all equal, which paradoxically absolves us of the shame by virtue that everyone does it. If everyone is willing to steep to such a level, noone is better than anyone else.
I hope one that my descendants may finally realize what money was actually good for. After thousands of years of misusing currency in order to justify radically unequal allocation and distribution of resources, it might finally dawn on us that currency is a social tech that makes society possible, it enables us generalize and abstract away from all differences and distinctions allowing infinite combinatorics, rendering each and everything thing, person and place interchangeable and substitutable. One day we may grasp that revenue generation is actually a precondition for the social world, but that won't happen until we stop using currency/money as a way to measure the worth of others and get over the notion that there is any relationship of value between supply and demand. Every single thing we know about currency/money is pure form ideology. There has never been anything remotely scientific about economics, since it's inception, yet because all of economics is mathematical in nature (it's all numbers man) it plays on our superstition concerning that nature of the relationship between numerics and truth(fuck you Plato, seriously fuck you). God forbid someone were to ever empirically prove even one of the assumptions which are the foundation of the pseudo-science/religion called economics, like for instance the "law of supply and demand" which everyone knows to be true, being an ideological truism inseparable from our capitalistic identities, yet which utterly fails to account for any real world value phenomena, (every single instance you might be able to conjure up in your head about the law of supply and demand falls apart on closer inspection). "Economics" is the regulation of social arbitrage, nothing more and nothing less, it is what makes the world go 'round, but it has nothing to do with the reason some have superabundance and others are impoverished, or how much of any given resource, product or service is available/accessible. Wenn es nur darum gehen kann, kann es deshalb nicht darum gehen-bad translation, if something can only ever be about something(else), then that something cannot be what it(the other) is about. Again. If everything is about money, then money is not the cause of anything. It is the universal blame,guilt,accusatory object, cause etc. Semantically money is indistiguishable from God in scholastic argumentation. As a repository for inifinite deferement money gathers all the guilt and shame on itself and it can only function this way if everything is about money. Behind every monetary transaction there are values at work that have nothing to do with money at all, therein lies our real justification for the choices w
I tried to create an account on Google Contributor but got "We’ll send you an invite when your spot opens up." In other words, they're not even ready to take my money yet. How many months does it typically take for a new user to become approved?
I rather like the old Internet before it was completely invaded by hoards of "sociopaths" who discovered easy ways to profit by making peoples lives miserable.
Personally, I run flashblock and privacy badger. Java is disabled in my browser. If I'm not seeing your ads it's because of your own wrongdoing. There seems to be a LOT of wrongdoing out there.
Did anyone see that as error-in-chief when they first read that?
If you don't like the ads on a site, don't visit that site. If enough people do that, site operators will figure out the types of ads people tolerate and those they don't. Ad blocking isn't 'stealing', but it is mildly sociopathic: "I want what I want and screw the people providing it."
I find ads as annoying as the next person, but that's how a lot of stuff I want to see is funded, so it only seems fair to accept them. Pretty much every 3+ comment here is pro adblocking.
... also, I can kill you with my brain.
My life is more expensive because of advertisers. The viewers of the ads have to pay for them, and that's immoral. They suck up our bandwidth without asking, they are the primary distributor of malware, they slow down our computers, and so forth. If I turn off adblock my system becomes noticeably slower. If you know someone with dialup internet, ask them how much they like waiting 5 minutes for some ads to load? And don't bitch at dialup users for not being rich like you and getting broadband.
Snail mail never makes us pay extra for the shitload of junk mail and fliers that arrive every day. Instead the advertisers have to pay for it all. Granted they get bulk discounts. However internet advertisers are taking advantage of the system, sending stuff out for a relatively low fraction of the actual cost. This is real freeloading and it is the advertisers' business model.
Next major problem with advertisers is getting all those bloggers to sign up for their ads. No radio or television station ever showed random advertisements that they knew anything about. Every single ad on radio or television was approved of before going on the air. This is extremely rare on the internet. Instead people who want to make some money off of their inexpensive hobby just add some third party script to their site, the dice is rolled and random ads show up along with a few pennies. Those sites should just go away; if they can't be responsible enough to serve up responsible ads then they should go out of "business".
That's the major problem here. Advertisements on the internet are irresponsible. Huge, obnoxious, insulting, clogging things up, delivering malware, and so forth. You'd have no more than a handful of people with ad blockers if the advertisers were responsible human beings.
my response: Flash content that causes CPU overheat is also immoral.
Your move.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Either way, it's only a $10 one-time fee.
The $10 fee allows access only to Something Awful. If I happen to get referred to a post on a different subscription forum, that's yet another $10 fee.
Well how about if we had ad blockers that downloaded that content, just didn't display it. And to take things one step further, how about there being an option for those with plenty of fast bandwidth to do this by default.
Except it's not as easy as it used to be to assume that the whole market has "plenty of fast bandwidth". More and more browsing is moving from home desktop PCs to smartphones, tablets, and laptops with mobile broadband, for which cellular carriers in the United States tend to charge $10 to $15 per gigabyte. A 2 MB video ad for each page would thus add 2 to 3 cents to your bill for each ad, whether you render it on-screen or off-screen. And plenty of rural viewers are still stuck on satellite or harshly capped DSL.
Not everyone has access to high download capacities. I get 20 Gig a month for $100, with a $10 a gig overage charge. I noticed that my usage was about 40% content, 60% ads. Do the math... It adds up quickly. So I use ad blockers now. If they can pay me for the bandwidth those ads use, maybe I will allow ads again.
1.Ensure 100% that the ads can't serve me viruses, worms or any other nasties (and that they aren't trying to get people to install such software via the ad)
2.No ads that play audio
3.No ads that cover the content
4.No ads that contain elements pretending to be UI or otherwise attempting to mislead people into clicking on them. (including things that try to get people to install spyware, adware or other undesirable software)
5.No ads for anything that is illegal, of questionable legality or attempts to defraud or scam people (online gambling, porn, get-rich-quick schemes, questionable weight loss schemes that don't actually work etc)
and 6.Geolocate my IP address and serve me ads for things actually available to me here in Australia. No more ads for US-only things please. (that includes US charities, lobby groups, special interest groups, things like AARP etc)
Of course ad providers will do none of these things so I will continue to block their ads.
I will stop using adblockers only when malware stops using ads to spread their menace
I will stop using adblockers only when they stop they quit with all the flashing, in your face ads
I will stop using adblockers only when they stop placing more ads than content on some pages/sites
I can go on but ...
IMO, is the same as removing the sales inserts in the newspapers - which I have the right to remove before reading.
you can always right-click on the offending part, select 'Inspect element' (In Chrome), wait for the Developer Tools to show up and hit DELETE
Not always. I tried doing exactly this yesterday on Chicago Tribune, but it didn't work. Chicago Tribune's pop-over script actually removes the text of the article from the DOM.
do advertisers accept responsibility and pay for the damages caused by the malware in their advertisements? no? so screw them and block the ads
A Pepsi can in a movie is NOT the same thing as a web page ad (the topic of discussion). If you didn't know that web page ads were what the GP meant, then you're [...] purposefully being an ass.
Perhaps I was "purposefully being" said animal in the sense that a donkey symbolizes hard work and determination. I was trying to encourage phantomfive to define the threat model more thoroughly, and sometimes it takes a bit of donkey work to get someone to clarify his position and reveal his own hidden "ass"-umptions. I was presenting an extreme example of an ad that would be hard to detect, namely a product placement in a video, as one end of a rhetorical bisection search for the line between ads that are and are not worth detecting. Apparently I succeeded at eliciting a practical threat model that boils down to "scripts from another domain are less likely to be safe."
I have every right to control what it is exposed to as much as I can. I feel zero remorse to anyone whose ads I do not see. They have no right to force me to take some action (endure their ads). If they don't want offer their site on terms they can afford without coercion then that is hardly my problem. I actually am somewhat careful to stop types of ads such as the self playing AV ones and especially popup AV ads over the main content when at all possible. That is abuse.
Here is a serious question for those that are asking how sites could obtain revenue in lieu of ad-blockers:
If all websites displayed the simple textual ads that Google does, even if they weren't targeted enough to appear useful, do you think anyone would bother going through the effort of installing an addon to block them?
YaCy looks interesting. But after reading about it, I thought of something: Sleazy site owners could spam YaCy by inserting pages under a particular word that do not actually contain that word. To counter this, YaCy's anti-spam measure downloads all pages that appear on each search results page. But this is slow and costs a lot of bandwidth, especially over a metered last mile such as satellite or cellular, and it discloses to the web site operator that one of its pages has appeared in someone's YaCy results.
when advertisers pay ME actual cash for my bandwidth, my CPU usage, my battery, my time, and my attention then i may deign to consider their offer and agree to view their ad.
most likely not, though, because it would take a huge amount of money to compensate for the annoyance.
But I think if they want an application running in their website it should run on the server side.
Would you prefer to have to reload the whole comment page when you open or close a subtree? Sending only the changes between one state of an application and the next after each action reduces total data transfer compared to re-sending the whole state for every action. If you pay per bit for your last mile to the Internet, which is typical of mobile ISPs, this saves you money. The tradeoff is that doing so requires client-side scripting.
...so long as invasive and immoral ads exist.
That is a sub-set of all ads, by the way, not all ads by any stretch.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Entitled much?
After all, you are going to *them*.
(I accept ad-blocking is a necessary safety measure, but the level of entitled-ness of "how dare they charge!" (in terms of ad-eyeballs) is eye-opening from anyone who is not 16.)
When advertisers serve adverts with static images instead of CPU- and memory-hogging Flash-based video monstrosities, then I'll remove ABP. Until then, I'll gladly keep their shit off my system.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
And part of this philosophy includes identifying which threats are worthy of your effort.
Ads don't "fuel the web." They fuel particular businesses, and most of them I wouldn't be sad to see go. I remember the web before there were ads. It was fun and interesting and helpful anyway.
I've run a web site at my own expense (currently $250/year) for 20 years because it's fun to do so. I like sharing information, just like I enjoy writing open-source code. If the web were just enthusiast sites and shopping, that would be fine with me.
Ad blockers are trivial to detect. If a site really feels offended by an ad blocker, they can refuse to load the content. They just don't.
a guy named Martin Bryant is calling me immoral?
Lol.
if the ads had no reputation of being abusive i would not have been blocking them
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The problem stems from the assumption that everyone surfing the web is a consumer. That is not often the case.
"Not my problem" is a cop-out. I can probably come up with a couple scenarios where it would reasonably become your problem. If somebody desires your opinion about the text of a particular document, but the site hosting the document has gone subscription because off-site ads, the fact that you cannot view the document is your problem. Or if somebody desires your opinion about an interactive document that has been published through a web application, but the scripts powering the document's interactivity happen not to have been vetted by a third party that you already trust, the fact that you can see only the minimal noninteractive fallback version is your problem.
Can your HOSTS solution block the spam you post to Slashdot? No. Get some help, please.
The correct cause of action is:
Common carriers should not be modifying the content of their service.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
I don't think I need to justify running an ad-blocker (and poisoning my home DNS) for any reasons other than the following:
Of course, I also find advertisements annoying - and the more aggressive the advertisement is about demanding my attention, the more annoying I find it. (Indeed, these Canvas Ads seem to be extremely annoying as they demand that I have to click/swipe on a page I wish to visit AGAIN - and the motion is at present sufficiently unfamiliar that I briefly struggle with it.)
I understand that many of the websites I enjoy are supported by advertising - and so by using ad-blocking techniques, I'm denying those sites whatever financial benefit there is of those (valid) advertisements being displayed (that I'll NEVER click on anyway.) But I satisfy myself with thoughts of schadenfreude - that advertisements are (like state lotteries) a tax on the stupid, gullible, poor, and desperate. (Yes, a rather mean spirited attitude, but that's schadenfreude.)
But basically, the whole internet advertising business is so shabbily done that blocking advertisements is only safe computing, like washing your hands after using the bathroom.
But can the APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit block ads in /. comments such as this one for the APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit?
You cannot copyright dynamic.
That's the defense that early video game cloners used, but courts ended up ruling that the copyright in a video game relates to those portions of the program's audiovisual output that are constant across runs.
The page they send me may have copyrighted *content*, which I do not modify, but the ads placed into rectangles of space is not copyrighted by them
I'm no lawyer, but I speculate that the legal theory is that advertisements are incorporated into the site's "collective work" under license from the advertisers.
I see it as closer to "I wear a bullet-resistant vest that is immune to the particular models of bullet included in the most common black market ammo kits." In practice, do more intrusions use vulnerabilities whose existing patches an administrator just failed to apply or vulnerabilities for which a patch does not yet exist?
I wouldn't mind ads if they were mindful of the audience. Instead, they are everywhere and lots of them totally destroying the page content. Why bother with content when the core purpose of a site is apparently serving up ads? Have a few ads on the side that show static images, nothing flashing and by all means please no autostarting videos with sound! The industry first needs to dial their ad insanity down before I am willing to remove ad blockers.
Sorry, I can't hear what that guy was saying over the noise of not seeing ads. If I can ever turn down the volume on these not-ads then I might have some attention to pay to him.
Oh, okay, now I can hear him. Piss off.
Yea, it's called 'search' for a reason, you know. Automated or not.
And the vast majority of users have chosen automated, ad-supported full-text search of the public web over non-automated, non-ad-supported directories. The market has spoken.
And good sites have an index so searching SHOULD get you what you're after.
So how should a user determine which sites in a category contain documents about a particular subject, if the subject is more narrow than the scope of the webring listing? Or are you intending to propose an automated way for a user to submit one query to the index of each of the sites in a category?