Adblock Plus Victorious Again In Court

New submitter Xochil writes: AdBlock Plus has successfully defended itself in court for the second time in five weeks. The Munich Regional Court ruled against media companies ProSiebenSat1 and IP Deutschland. The companies sued Eyeo, the company behind Adblock Plus, asking the court to ban the distribution of the free ad-blocking software, saying it hurts their ad-based business model. An Eyeo release says in part: "We are elated at the decision reached today by the Munich court, which is another win for every internet user. It confirms each individual’s right to block annoying ads, protect their privacy and, by extension, determine his or her own internet experience. This time it also confirms the legitimacy of our Acceptable Ads initiative as a compromise in the often contentious and rarely progressive world of online advertising."

Comments

Wonder if

[Anonymous Coward]

The same verdict would have been reached in a U.S. courtroom.

Re:Wonder if

[grimmjeeper]

In theory, it should be the same verdict. In the US, the right we have is for free speech. You can say and publish anything you want (with reasonable restrictions regarding slander/libel, etc.). But the first amendment right to free speech is not the same as the right to be heard. Just because you can publish what you want doesn't mean you have any guarantee that anyone has to read it. You are not guaranteed an audience for what you say. The only right you have is that the government cannot shut you up without a damn good reason.

Will the courts continue to rule this way is the real question. After all, the courts do seem to be trending towards shills for corporate interests. Because of that, there is a chance they would ban ad block software if their benefactors wished it. It's hard to say for sure.

Re:Wonder if

[Anonymous Coward]

This has nothing to do with free speech.

Re:Wonder if

[Lumpy]

Depends on how much the US judge would have been paid off.

Re:Wonder if

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it the new hip ad blocking software the kids use these days? Back in the day we used hosts files and self written scripts.

Re:Wonder if

[Anonymous Coward]

In the US, Adblock Plus would already be scheduled for execution, assuming the police didn't shoot them to death while arresting them.

Re:Wonder if

[Anonymous Coward]

after the cops shoots out all the ad's getting in there way.

Re:Wonder if

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop splitting the damn comment between the subject line and the body of the post.

Scanning the thread, your comment reads "The same verdict would have been reached in a U.S. courtroom" (complete with "starting" capital letter). I thought that was an unconvincing conclusion to have jumped to until I read the subject too and realised that wasn't what you were saying at all.

Re:Wonder if

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not free speech, it falls under the commerce clause and the US government can really do whatever they hell they want about it!

Re:Wonder if

[Anonymous Coward]

In the US it couldn't even go to court. It's your computer, after all. In order to have a chance, there would have to be some license in place to show violation of or some crap. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure some people will be pushing to try to eliminate any way around advertisements, but currently? No chance. You can't even point to harm.

Re:Wonder if

[KGIII]

It reminds me of this:

"We want to rape some kids and there are people who are stopping and punishing us, take them to jail!"

I hate ads. I will give you money if you need it and you do good things with it. It is simpler and I do not get annoyed.

Re:Wonder if

[0111 1110]

Yeah. Some plaintiffs are not aware of the true cost of the litigation they pursue. Paying off the judge is step one. Why bother to sue if you are not guaranteed to win?

Re:Wonder if

[epyT-R]

The adblock plus lists are nothing more than a collection of regex filters. It's more efficient than having the system parse 500kB+ host files every time there's a dns lookup.

Re: Wonder if

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a obviously a semi-joke. Btw, regexing in the browser isn't faster in this case.

Re:Wonder if

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true:

http://superuser.com/questions/686041/which-leads-to-faster-browsing-an-ad-blocker-or-an-edited-hosts-file

It may be more convenient, but it *definitely* isn't faster. If you have the right tools to dynamically configure your hosts file to block certain domains, it's absolutely faster (though obviously might not be more convenient).

Re:Wonder if

[Anonymous Coward]

So wait, you were able to understand what he was saying, yet you decided to whine about it anyway?

Re:Wonder if

[CauseBy]

With this Supreme Court, it would depend on whether the advertising was religious or not.

"Annoying ads"

[mlw4428]

Except those defined by Adblock as being "acceptable" (ie, they get paid).

Re:"Annoying ads"

[Ostrich25]

Not true. You can block all ads. https://adblockplus.org/accept...

Re:"Annoying ads"

[Firethorn]

Personally, I allow the adblock allowed ads. Not many sites use them.

Sites I frequent that give me the 'Please disable your adblocker' I tend to respond with(and yes, I've used their forum/webmaster address to do this) 'Then use adblocker approved ads'.

After about the 3rd time the ad sites tried to serve me malware it became more about protecting my computer than anything else. The fact that many sites are unusable to the point that I wonder if their web-admin is even testing the sites without an ad blocker doesn't help.

Re:"Annoying ads"

[Anonymous Coward]

So much this.
I visited one site that had the "please disable your adblocker if you like illegally downloading copyrighted materials" and meanwhile firefox is telling me it's blocking popups and stuff. Yeah sure I'll get right on unblocking you. Not.

Re:"Annoying ads"

[ShanghaiBill]

Except those defined by Adblock as being "acceptable" (ie, they get paid).

Fine with me. They are unobtrusive, contain no malware, and don't blink or beep. I don't block them, and I occasionally even click on them.

Re:"Annoying ads"

[JMJimmy]

Except those defined by Adblock as being "acceptable" (ie, they get paid).

I don't see a problem with Adblock getting paid to be a part of their "acceptable ads" program. The rules are clear & open to all, Adblock has to pay people to administer the program & enforce compliance with those rules. The larger the site, the more staff they need to ensure compliance/handle complaints/etc so larger sites pay more than smaller ones. And in the end, it's still up to the user whether they participate or not.

Re:"Annoying ads"

[hairyfeet]

Actually their acceptable ads (which you can turn off with a single checkbox and they even offer the option on first install) is exactly what I've been saying for years should be the only ads allowed due to security concerns,

1.- Static only (no Flash or Java, but they go one further and put no animations like GIFs), 2.- No "pop up/ under" ads blocking content (which is more likely to cause the user to click to try to move it, thus making it a good target for a malware link) but again they go farther with actual size requirements, 3.- Ads have to be clearly labeled as ads (so no fake security dialog boxes or images the user might click on concealing ad links) and yet again they go farther than I came up with by rules for borders and a bunch of rules for hyperlinks.

So as long as advertisers follow these rules? The odds of an ad based malware attack drops right off the chart. All your usual threats, third party flash, fake links, etc are removed from the equation. Most of us have no problem with the sites we use having a few adverts to stay afloat but what we DO very much have a problem with is putting users at risk for the profit of website owners. the ABP acceptable ads rules seems to address this concern and goes above and beyond so ATM I can really find no fault with the system.

Re:"Annoying ads"

[Anonymous Coward]

Because if adblock becomes too big or popular, it is arguably a protection racket in that they are selling a solution to a problem they created. "Don't want us to damage your store, pay us money," vs, "Don't want us to block your ads, then pay us money," (or as they see it "Don't want us to cut off your primary source of income, pay us money").

Re:"Annoying ads"

[maugle]

I can see no downside to a hypothetical scenario where every user has Adblock installed, such that every advertising company needs to go through Adblock's acceptable ads program to be seen.

If the ads conform to what's "acceptable", then all ads seen are non-intrusive and free from malware, which is a win for users.
If Adblock raises the price of being allowed on the list in an extortion-racket type scheme, then fewer advertisements are seen overall, which is again a win for users.
If Adblock gets greedy or gets lax with its policing, and begins to allow bad ads through, people will dump it for the next generation of ad-blocker and we're back to the situation we have now.

Re:"Annoying ads"

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel a similar way to you.
If the ads are unobtrusive (no pop over/under/in), silent, flash/silverlight-free and do not take up most of the page, I don't really mind.

Re:"Annoying ads"

[Tom]

Actually their acceptable ads

The real kicker (and why I switched to AdBlock Edge a long time ago) is that they ask for 30% revenue share on those acceptable ads, and with that they got too much into bed with the advertisement industry.

Especially given that AdBlock now belongs to a group of advertisement companies, and they whitelist all the ads from their network by default.

They sold out, simple as that, and they fight in court not for the good cause (though that is a side-effect and a very good one) but to protect their revenue stream.

Re:"Annoying ads"

[JohnFen]

Actually their acceptable ads (which you can turn off with a single checkbox and they even offer the option on first install) is exactly what I've been saying for years should be the only ads allowed due to security concerns,

I disagree. The "acceptable ads" rules that Adblock Plus uses allow the very thing that I object to the most about online ads: the tracking. So their "acceptable ads" are completely unacceptable to me.

Until ads stop spying on me, I will block every single one of them that I can.

Re:"Annoying ads"

[CauseBy]

I think you're being a little too forgiving to ABP's standards. Specifically, this:

If the ads conform to what's "acceptable", then all ads seen are non-intrusive and free from malware

Don't you mean, if the ad conforms to what's acceptable, then all ads are approved by an organization which is paid by advertisers to approve their ads? I can't possibly think of a way to do that without a conflict of interest. The only solution to adblocking, in my opinion, is community based, so that "what gets blocked" is the same as "what most people think is annoying".

Love it

[JMJimmy]

"Today is also a sad day for internet users, because AdBlock Plus jeopardizes the financing options for all free internet sites. We still feel it is inadmissible under copyright and antitrust laws, and it is an anti-competitive attack on media diversity and freedom of the press. Therefore, we will review the options for appeal and further legal action against Eyeo.”

I don't think they understand that they are free to publish whatever they want... but we are also free to ignore/cut up/block the stuff we don't want. I call that a win. If it means a bunch of publishers go out of business and the internet gets less commercial, I'm fine with that too.

Re:Love it

[Coren22]

As this is the forth lawsuit, it may just be Eyeo that goes out of business due to the lawyer fees.

Re:Love it

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with you, but let's make it easy for everyone. Have the ads display on an alternate hidden page (canvas) so the website has no way of knowing that they are not being displayed. You don't see them unless you want to, the website cannot tell that you are not seeing them. Everyone wins.

Re:Love it

[danbob999]

Blocking is still better because you save download time and resources (RAM, CPU)

Re:Love it

[Frobnicator]

As this is the forth lawsuit, it may just be Eyeo that goes out of business due to the lawyer fees.

Germany is one of several nations that adopted a "loser pays" civil litigation model. I think they recovered all legal costs in another case, but don't recall which one and don't feel like looking it up.

The ruling likely specifies that ProSiebenSat1 and IP Deutschland are liable for all or nearly all of the costs in this case, and Eyeo is likely have only the cost of their time.

Re:Love it

[Anonymous Coward]

This same logic has been applied to lawsuits against spam blackhole lists. The lists themselves are not subject to lawsuit, because the users of the lists are free to do what they want with them. AdBlock stands on pretty firm ground legally, since there is pretty much zero difference between filtering spam from compromised sites, and unscrupulous ad sites trying to use browser add-ons to install Trojan droppers.

If a bunch of clickbait sites hit the dust, c'est la vie.

Blocking ads is not a matter of convenience, it is a security issue. The Web browser is a significant, if not the #1 source for infections, and it isn't uncommon to read or hear about ads as a source of infection.

Re:Love it

[Your.Master]

Audio ads kill that.

Re:Love it

[Coren22]

Thank you for the correction. How I wish that was the case in the US.

Re:Love it

[TheCarp]

Very much so. Just because their business model requires people to make bad decisions, doesn't mean they have a right to enforce bad decisions.

The web browsing they want is like, if you walked into a reseraunt to meet a group of 10 people, 1 of whom you know, and are told in this circle, we greet eachother with unprotected anal sex....at which point, everyone at the table stands up to "greet you".

Re:Love it

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, it is such a sad day that I am jumping up and down with joy. Message to the plaintiffs: I am still using AdBlock everywhere, and you are a bunch of clowns.

Re:Love it

[kinarduk]

Problem is that it doesn't necessarily cover all your fee's just those the court finds reasonable. Also it doesn't compensate you for all the lost time preparing your case with your lawyers and worrying about it.

Re:Love it

[Anonymous Coward]

And malware gets blocked.

Re:Love it

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you ad lover

Re:Love it

[Anonymous Coward]

That's true, but constantly getting sued even if the costs of the lawyers are paid by those who sue you, is still a depressing and stressful situation. Don't forget that you are never sure you will win the case, and the loss of productivity because you are in court or are in very stressful mood are costly too. And not only costly to your bank account, also to your health and for your social relationships.

Maybe the people behind Eyeo are different and want to fight the status quo, but maybe they are just 'honest workers' who one day will just give up and stop with their add on while they still can get away with it.

Re:Love it

[Anonymous Coward]

How so? They won all cases.

Re:Love it

[Lumpy]

90% of those publishers either publish tripe, or rip it off from elsewhere. in fact a LOT of those sites simply rip off other people's work and pass it off as their own. LiveLeak for example steals stuff from Vimeo and youtube.

Re:Love it

[pr0fessor]

You forgot that if they detect that the ads are being blocked they don't have to supply the service there are already sites that do this. If their services are good enough they may be able to provide a paid ad free experience and just not provide ad supported services to those with adblockers.

Re:Love it

[Anonymous Coward]

What about bandwidth? Is that free where you live?

Re:Love it

[JimSadler]

The internet was not established to allow or promote businesses. Capitalism is like a cancer that oozes its way into places that it should not touch. Perhaps we could set up a special suffix that any business looking to sell or recruit anyone for any purpose would be open fopr such purposes. I wonder how many eyeballs would be on such a channel. I suspect very few.

Re:Love it

[MechaStreisand]

Save the image link posts for reddit. That's idiotic here.

Re:Love it

[JMJimmy]

Save the image link posts for reddit. That's idiotic here.

It summed up the concept far better than I could with words.

Re:Love it

[Anonymous Coward]

How would you feel about the situation if you were wronged by a company, sued them, but lost, then got stuck footing their enormous legal bills. If that's the risk you face, you might not sue even if you've been legitimately harmed by someone else. It's not so simple.

Re:Love it

[rtb61]

The one thing I would really appreciate is Eyeo providing a list of all the web site serving companies that sued them along with their ad serving domain addresses. They are crying out for scripts and cookie blocking, lets defund that particular capital assault upon the rights of internet users.

Re:Love it

[Anonymous Coward]

The previous case was about the acceptable ads feature alone.

Re:Love it

[Jack Griffin]

But the more cases you go through, the more prepared you are, so those costs diminish with each case.

Re:Love it

[Jack Griffin]

Or maybe setup a suffix for any sites completely and utterly devoid of any capitalism whatsoever. I know which would have less hits.

Re:Love it

[Tom]

There used to be a time when it was easy: .com was for commercial purposes and that's it.

If only we had an organization that manages the TLDs and makes some rules about them... It would be so easy to say that if you have a .com domain you can buy and sell and do whatever you want, and if you have a .org domain you can not.

I would even welcome a seperate non-profit TLD where any and all advertisement is strictly forbidden. I would instantly switch all my domains and if Google gave us an option to prioritize results from that TLD I would turn it up to the highest setting.

Re:Love it

[Tom]

That is what you have insurance for. This really is one of the insurances that pays for itself.

Re:Love it

[Tom]

It is also a lot of free public exposure due to the newspaper articles, so I don't think they are very unhappy about it.

Re:Love it

[gnupun]

The internet was not established to allow or promote businesses. Capitalism is like a cancer that oozes its way into places that it should not touch.

That's naive and retarded. If capitalism is so evil why don't we try an experiment: integrate adblock within all browsers and it should be hard to disable this integrated adblock. Then wait and see how much of the internet survives, since most of them will have put "GOING OUT OF BUSINESS" signs and left.

What will remain of the internet after the experiment is not what you, the internet viewer, wants but rather what the person posting on the internet personally cares about. That typically would be cat videos, their selfies, their inane opinions about stuff you don't care and boring details of their personal life you don't care about. That's the vision of your capitalism-free, socialist/communist utopia.

Capitalism is better than freeloading-communism because it serves the customer in exchange for some form of payment (ads).

Re:Love it

[nosferatu1001]

Yes it does. Litigants in person in the UK can claim £18 per hour for their time. If you hire legal representatives they can claim for their time

Costs also depend on parties being reasonable; court should be a last resort, so even if you win if you are unreasonable you may not get any costs awarded, or a nominal amount.

Re:Love it

[sjames]

Not if the alternate page actually "plays" the audio to /dev/null.

Re:Love it

[kinarduk]

You've contradicted yourself. You say in the first breath "Yes it does" then you go on and place a limit. Exactly what I said.

Re:Love it

[Paradise Pete]

That is what you have insurance for.

There's litigation insurance that covers losses on suits the policy holder initiates?

Re:Love it

[Anonymous Coward]

That's naive and retarded.

Oh the irony!

What will remain of the internet after the experiment is not what you, the internet viewer, wants but rather what the person posting on the internet personally cares about.

Since you're clearly too young to remember, let me point out this was exactly how the Internet worked in the early 90s, before advertising everywhere all the time. News flash: The Internet was about 100 times better then and had plenty of useful content. I don't buy for a second this FUD that advertising funds the whole Internet and we're screwed without it; that's just a load of revisionism and lies designed to protect their profit. Don't buy into it.

Re:Love it

[pakar]

Forget about that... it would not die.. they would switch to another way of operating, like subscription/micropayment-based or maybe donation-based..

Re:Love it

[gbjbaanb]

and don't forget the slow loading pages that always seem to get stuck on google analytics or similar that it insists on loading first before showing you what you went to see.

Re:Love it

[Merk42]

I don't think they understand that they are free to publish whatever they want... but we are also free to ignore/cut up/block the stuff we don't want. I call that a win. If it means a bunch of publishers go out of business and the internet gets less commercial, I'm fine with that too.

And the ones that don't go out of business are behind a paywall.
I welcome that endgame because then self-entitled millennials can no longer hide behind the veil of "ads are bad for privacy/performance" as an excuse to get content for free.

Re:Love it

[meta-monkey]

Egg them on them. We should start a letter writing campaign to ProSiebenSat1 and IP Deutschland DEMANDING they continue litigation against Eyeo AT ALL COSTS.

"Oh puuuuhhhhllleeeeeeease Brer Assholes, wuteeeeeevah yew dew, don't throw me in that briar patch!"

Re:Love it

[Anonymous Coward]

the court doesn't have to find anything "reasonable." There are standard rates for lawyers, for civil cases based mostly on the (alleged, but the amount may be corrected by the court) disputed damages. It's usually no problem to find a lawyer who is willing to work at those rates.

Re:Love it

[JMJimmy]

I don't think they understand that they are free to publish whatever they want... but we are also free to ignore/cut up/block the stuff we don't want. I call that a win. If it means a bunch of publishers go out of business and the internet gets less commercial, I'm fine with that too.

And the ones that don't go out of business are behind a paywall.
I welcome that endgame because then self-entitled millennials can no longer hide behind the veil of "ads are bad for privacy/performance" as an excuse to get content for free.

I can walk across the street to get content for free. It's called a library and it's wonderful. They even give passes to the science centre, museums, zoos, etc. for free. None of it is free and we pay with taxes/donations/etc but it gives free distribution of information to all. It's existed far longer than your so called "self-entitled millennials" and is still packed despite the internet.

Re:Love it

[RavenLrD20k]

Which, for the very large portion of us on firewalled connections (Work, school, etc), was useless anyway. Congratulations, your lack of communication skills and attempt at using an external image to convey it meant that a good portion of your audience has no idea what you were trying to say. May as well have said nothing at all and we'd have just as much understanding of your position on the matter as we do right now anyway. Hence MechaStreisand's statement that "[image link posts are] idiotic here."

Re:Love it

[RavenLrD20k]

So in your experiment we'd have either inane stuff that people would put up as part of their side hobby and funded by their day job, or sites that make money directly by showcasing the site owner's product or service without hosting intrusive ads from 3rd parties, and the only "advertising" would be what I would directly and knowingly subject myself to by going to the URL or clicking a direct link in a search engine? I can live with that.

Re:Love it

[JohnFen]

Then wait and see how much of the internet survives, since most of them will have put "GOING OUT OF BUSINESS" signs and left.

Which, on the whole, would be an improvement.

Re:Love it

[gnupun]

I can live with that.

Then start working building these ad-free sites. Find other volunteers who will code, host and maintain many other sites, for free. Nobody's stopping you... your ad-free utopian websites are only a few thousand lines of code away.

That is, unless you are one of those commies, who wants other people to build you these free sites, for free.

Re:Love it

[RavenLrD20k]

Find other volunteers who will code, host and maintain many other sites, for free.

Why do you say it has to be for free? If I'm running a site as a hobby or to showcase my hobby, the cost of running that site would be part of the cost of the hobby. If I can't afford to showcase it that way - whatever the associated costs for operating are - and still do my own hobby, I don't need to be on the web.

The same goes for selling a product or service on the web. If my product isn't bringing in enough where I can pay for the costs of the server, domain name, and someone to put the site together for me (if I don't do it myself), then I'm not ready for the web and shouldn't be there, yet. Simple. The only reason for me to have ads displaying on my site is if I want to give a friend or direct affiliate exposure.

These rotating ads where you just run a script for an ad hosting service and you have no idea what the real ad source is...they need to die a fiery death and there's no legitimate excuse for their existence.

Re:Love it

[Tom]

There's litigation insurance that covers losses on suits the policy holder initiates?

As long as you had a reasonable expectation of winning, yes it does. I have one. They decide beforehand if they're going to cover this case or not (if it's a bullshit case where you don't have a snowballs chance in hell, they don't have to), and after that it doesn't depend on winning or losing anymore.

Re:Love it

[Anonymous Coward]

How the fuck did this get modded to +5 Insightful? Who cares what it was established for? Business over the internet is great - I know I enjoy Netflix and Amazon. If you want to banish capitalism from the internet, you're going to get rid of ads, sure, but also most of the sites with content, including /. and pretty much every search engine. It would become just government sites and forums, which is a huge loss of functionality.

Even ads would be fine if they weren't as annoying - pop-ups, auto-playing videos, etc. I use adblock unless it's a site I trust not to pull that shit.

Websites are slowly catching on

[OzPeter]

Over the last few weeks I have started to notice messages from various websites along the line of "It looks like you are using ad blocking software. Do you want to contribute to this site in another way?" Meaning do I want to give cash directly to the site.

At the moment I am a bit divided over this issue. I understand their desire to collect revenue to fund a site. But I do need to balance that against the opening up of my system to all sorts of tracking. And at the moment my privacy trumps the websites revenue.

And then you get sites like Slashdot, which have this wonderful checkbox that says because I am such a good user, that they will disable advertising for me if I want. Which even if I do, I still get ads served up to me - hence another reason for ad blocking software.

Re:Websites are slowly catching on

[easyTree]

In the future humanity will evolve a specialized subclass along the lines of the worker bee; it will be their role to watch all ads across available media: print / screen / roadside / building projection / contact-lens projection on inner eyelids / etc.

Re:Websites are slowly catching on

[ArcadeMan]

Over the last few weeks I have started to notice messages from various websites along the line of "It looks like you are using ad blocking software.

I also see those messages, but I don't use any ad blocking software. Java is disabled, plug-ins are disabled, javascript is enabled and cookies are limited to the same domain. Whoever wrote those "ad blocking detection" functions is an idiot.

Re:Websites are slowly catching on

[OzPeter]

Over the last few weeks I have started to notice messages from various websites along the line of "It looks like you are using ad blocking software.

I also see those messages, but I don't use any ad blocking software. Java is disabled, plug-ins are disabled, javascript is enabled and cookies are limited to the same domain. Whoever wrote those "ad blocking detection" functions is an idiot.

Or are very smart .. because I assumed that they actually worked.

Re:Websites are slowly catching on

[Rasperin]

"Do I want to contribute to this site in another way?"
No
"But I've designed and made this content for you to enjoy, should I not be paid?"
No
"Okay, don't use my site then"
Okay

The sites that I want to use I donate to if given the option. They tend to not be overfilled with ads, but I will always look for the least annoying while most useful alternative to your content. If this makes you sad, that's fine with me.

"What about the quality, it'll go down if there are no incentives."
No, it won't.

Re:Websites are slowly catching on

[Falos]

> the opening up of my system up of my system to all sorts of tracking
This is a thorn in my side beyond the PaypalDonate? pleading out there.

Time and again I'm quite willing to spare a dollar or ten on a product or service, or even simply hand it out, but I don't have a means. I'm not signing up for $stupidshit or supporting $IoTcloudshit service or announcing the details of my private transaction to every fucking ear that wants to harvest it for a penny.

I'll probably resort to cash-bought prepaid cards. With bills not obtained from a bank/ATM, if I'm in the mood to act on sheer fucking principle.. Or hell, maybe bitcoins will catch on.

Re:Websites are slowly catching on

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, that is becoming more common. It isn't perfected yet but it is clearly the future direction.

You are welcome to install an adblocker, and internet sites are welcome to tell you to take a hike if you do.

Re:Websites are slowly catching on

[tlhIngan]

I also see those messages, but I don't use any ad blocking software. Java is disabled, plug-ins are disabled, javascript is enabled and cookies are limited to the same domain. Whoever wrote those "ad blocking detection" functions is an idiot.

it's most likely using the JavaScript detection - if you don't run the ad javascript, then you're most likely blocking it (are there any modern browsers that don't support javascript?).

Of course, it's a basic check - there are more advanced checks that could be done. But right now, few enough people do extensive ad blocking to matter.

Eventually you'll probably see things alone the lines of "use an adblocker and it's paywalled" scheme - so if you have an adblocker, you have to pay to view the content, or you can view the ads and get it for free.

The real concern though is that these websites use some sort of common paywall system, which may not have the best privacy protections and is vulnerable to hacking.

Re:Websites are slowly catching on

[Anne Thwacks]

If they are the kind of scum that go for this approach, do I want to give them money? Hell, no!

I am a pickpocket, but you outwitted me, so do you want to give me money so I can afford to pick someone else's pocket?

Surely these are the kind of people law enforcement should be dealing with.

Re:Websites are slowly catching on

[Darinbob]

And never actually buy any of the products.

Seriously, the advertising model on the internet is very screwed up at a times. Like a Buick advertisement on a cycling site. Too many sites just accept random ads that are provided by a third party advertising service. Ie, they've got a blog, they want to make some money to pay for hosting their blog, so they accept scripts from someone they heard about then sit back and wait for money to roll in. And the advertisers who are not paying their fair share of the cost of providing the ad, instead of paying third class postage they pay almost nothing and instead rely on the viewers' own ISPs to deliver their crap for free.

Re:Websites are slowly catching on

[Darinbob]

This reminds me of the giant blow up over paid mods to Skyrim. The player community went nuts. But the modding community also went nuts and split a bit, some still wanting to treat their modding as just a hobby same as any other open source, but others who stopped modding altogether because "we deserve to be paid", "no one ever voluntarily donates", "you're a bunch of freeloaders". Ugliest mess you ever saw.

All because it was a system that worked well for a very long time, and then one day money entered the picture.

Re:Websites are slowly catching on

[Anonymous Coward]

And even if quality were to go down slightly, being free makes up for that mostly.

Re:Websites are slowly catching on

[Anonymous Coward]

Also this exact same hilariously wrong logic is used by movie studios.
If you keep pirating people will stop making movies.
So stop then. See if I care at all.
At this point there are so many movies from the past 40 years that I could probably find a good movie to watch every week for the rest of my life without anything new being made.

Re:Websites are slowly catching on

[LVSlushdat]

And then you get sites like Slashdot, which have this wonderful checkbox that says because I am such a good user, that they will disable advertising for me if I want. Which even if I do, I still get ads served up to me - hence another reason for ad blocking software.

Yeah.. I noticed that.. Rightt now, here on Slashdot, where I'm such a good user, I get to have ads turned off, uBlock is reporting 2 ad networks are *still* trying to put their shit on my system.. Good job, Dice.. Good thing I use Linux instead of Windows...

Re:Websites are slowly catching on

[Anonymous Coward]

You're missing the point. Current adblockers are so great because they just don't even request the shitcontent. You don't have to piggy it along, display it, it doesn't get to hack your visual cortex. But you could easily create one that would do all the remote work- request the stupid flash, emulate it, whatever- and never display it to the user. Some sites already throw up some shitbanner if you have adblock, but any of the Remove It Permanently variants just erase those turds.

The remote side always loses, because the client can always tell it what it wants to hear.

And that's amazing.

Re: Websites are slowly catching on

[Anonymous Coward]

I figured that they just put the text behind the ad in some way, so that if the ad is there no one sees the text but if the ad is blocked the text appears automatically. I'm not sure if that's how they do it but that would be would I'd try to do first if I was trying to implement something like that.

Re:Websites are slowly catching on

[jandersen]

At the moment I am a bit divided over this issue. I understand their desire to collect revenue to fund a site. But I do need to balance that against the opening up of my system to all sorts of tracking. And at the moment my privacy trumps the websites revenue.

Well, look at it this way: This is Capitalism, right? We're told that under Capitalism, the value of any product or service is whatever you can persuade others to pay. If nobody wants to pay, then it is worthless. If I come across websites that refuse to serve their content unless I allow adverts, I just move on; there are plenty of sites to choose from, usually, and often the ones with the best information are the ones with the least pollution.

And then you get sites like Slashdot, which have this wonderful checkbox that says because I am such a good user, that they will disable advertising for me if I want. Which even if I do, I still get ads served up to me - hence another reason for ad blocking software.

Well, that's the thing - how can one enter into any sort of trust-based relationship, when the other party so clearly can't be trusted?

Re:Websites are slowly catching on

[JohnFen]

Seriously, the advertising model on the internet is very screwed up at a times.

I agree, if by "at times" you mean "nearly all the time."

Boo hoo for your business model ...

[gstoddart]

Why the hell do corporations think their business model is a guaranteed right, or that it confers any obligations on anybody else?

My business model involves being given millions of dollars to engage in acts of debauchery with college girls.

So far I've been having a hard time coming up with the millions of dollars. Or the college girls. Or the acts of debauchery. Most of them seem awfully complicated and there's stuff on TV.

Who do I sue about that? (No, really, I need to know this. ;-)

I should be given my millions of dollars to commit debauchery with college girls ... because ... business model!!

Re:Boo hoo for your business model ...

[Coren22]

Can I come work for your company? I suggest we start by sending our bills to ProSiebenSat1 and IP Deutschland, they after all feel it is other's responsibilities to support a business model, therefore they should be more than willing to cut a check.
 

Re:Boo hoo for your business model ...

[JMJimmy]

Patents & copyrights are some of the most idiotic guarantees of our time.

Re:Boo hoo for your business model ...

[rubycodez]

You are greedy. I, on the other hand, do not need nor covet millions of dollars. Just send the college girls over.

Ahh

[easyTree]

The Munich Regional Court ruled against media companies ProSiebenSat1 and IP Deutschland. The companies sued Eyeo, the company behind Adblock Plus, asking the court to ban the distribution of the free ad-blocking software, saying it hurts their ad-based business model.

At last I'm catching on. I see how it works now. The laws against distributing others' IP for profit are hurting my proposed business model of selling other people's IP for profit. Using the same logic, I'd like them repealed.

Re:Ahh

[Darinbob]

However part of the ruling says that there were so few adblock users that it was not a serious concern. If adblock suddenly showed up on 90% of all viewers the courts might have to rethink it...

Re:Ahh

[Opportunist]

Why? Since when is it a court's business to protect some business model that doesn't work out?

Re:Ahh

[Darinbob]

Quoting from the BBC (I didn't read the German ruling):

"However, as part of its ruling the court in Munich said that too few people were using Eyeo's products for it to be judged to have a "dominant" position that might justify an antitrust intervention."

Re:Ahh

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Since when is it a court's business to protect some business model that doesn't work out?

It happens all the time in the USA. Examples galore, just look at almost every court case where the MPAA/RIAA sues grandmothers or children under ten for millions of dollars in damages when actual damages is more like a $1 (or whatever iTunes sells tracks for now).

Re:Ahh

[Mr. Shotgun]

However part of the ruling says that there were so few adblock users that it was not a serious concern. If adblock suddenly showed up on 90% of all viewers the courts might have to rethink it...

Freedom of speech do not confer a promise of an audience. If %90 of the users are blocking your ads, it's not about them it's about you.
I run adblock open, I don't subscribe to lists because I do realize ads are how a good portion of websites make money. But if an ad is irritating or annoying enough that it disturbs my viewing experience enough I will search out who the provider is and block them. So if advertisers want to reach folks like me, here is a tip: don't be a pain in the ass!

Re:Ahh

[Opportunist]

So that's what we need TTIP for? To finally get the same shady practices that undermine laws over here too?

The US court system already rivals that of the average banana republic. But hey, if their movies are anything to go by it's the best in the world, what could possibly go wrong?

Re:Ahh

[jandersen]

Why? Since when is it a court's business to protect some business model that doesn't work out?

What you seem to fail to understand is that there is a difference: rich people DESERVE to be rich and therefore DESERVE a better standard of legislation that doesn't interfere unfairly with their right to further enrich themselves. Plebs on the other hand are lazy and probably communists or worse, and should be kept down with any means possible. Surely you can see that?

Re:Ahh

[Opportunist]

All I can see is that I should expand my business to include pitchforks and rope.

Re:Out of curiosity

[ArchieBunker]

Hey if you feel guilty you can always cut them a check...

Re:Out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

1: Stop using them to track users, you want to show a text ad, fine Ill deal with it, but if you're going to track me across multiple sites then I block you.
2: Make them text based, or at least no flashing colors etc..
3: Stop using Flash, which is another attack vector
4: Stop selling our personal information to every single spammer that offers you money for our info
5: Make the site more than 75% content to 25% ads
6: Secure your servers so we aren't being attacked from letting your ads through

When you accomplish those simple things you may see a difference in the amount of people letting ads through, till then, go to hell.

LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hilarious any advertising agency thought this would work. Any here ever got any branded products for free? T-Shirts, screwdrivers, network cables, whatever, but with a company's logo stuck on them.

If you decided to scrape the logo off, should you go to jail? No? What is the difference between that and scraping the ads off their websites?

(Of course, you don't feel the need to remove the logo from that lovely knapsack XYZ corp gave you. If we compare it to the web, it would be a 30 lb ball and chain with blinking lights, sirens, with free herpes).

Re:LOL

[Darinbob]

I think the expensive clothing items with the giant company logo on them are hilarious. Pay extra to wear an item that is essentially a billboard, what an ingenious business model!

Re:LOL

[rastos1]

If you decided to scrape the logo off, should you go to jail?

Of course. For sure they will come up with some BS reasoning such as: The product design is copyrighted and by removing the logo you modify the design hence violating the copyright. Or something like that.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Holi]

You post a sign on the side of the highway do not think others owe you anything to read it.

Duh

[PvtVoid]

Why would anyone, ever, think that me not looking at their ad should be illegal? I mean, are we that far gone that it's even conceivable to have the courts forcing me to view ads?

I look forward to the day when somebody makes augmented reality glasses that block meatspace advertising like billboards, TVs in airports and bars, logos on clothes, all it. I'll be the first in line.

Re:Duh

[tomhath]

Why would anyone, ever, think that me not looking at their ad should be illegal?

That wasn't their argument. Their claim was that the web page should not be altered before it is rendered in the browser. Sort of like saying your TV remote control shouldn't have the capability to mute the sound during a commercial.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Increasingly, sites are starting to detect ad-blockers and refuse to serve content to those people.

So just like you don't have to view their ads, they don't have to let you view the bulk of the internet if you don't.

See who wins that battle, shall we? And don't pretend you'll just "download but not display them". That's just about as good, as far as they are concerned, because all the same tracking
still applies.

Re:Duh

[PRMan]

Or like the courts would say that Hollywood could stop Christian groups from editing their movies down to a more acceptable level...

Oh wait, that actually happened... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

> That's just about as good, as far as they are concerned, because all the same tracking still applies.

If this were true, they could monitor download statistics of the link itself to accomplish the same goal.

Re:Duh

[tomhath]

Or like the courts would say that Hollywood could stop Christian groups from editing their movies

Nobody can edit a movie and redistribute it without the copyright holder's permission, that's an entirely different scenario. That's not the same as editing your own personal copy before letting your kids watch it.

Re:Duh

[spire3661]

I really liked the idea of dynamic edits, even if the methods this group had in mind sucked.. We could have had The Phantom Edit much sooner. It would be awesome to have the whole original *The Phantom Menace* file and then add a text file that says only play The Phantom Edit, or any other fan edit without actually spicing and re-rendering the whole thing.

Re:Duh

[SmaryJerry]

I can't even remember the last time an advertisement online compelled me in favor of buying anything. Usually the only sponsored link I click is the one that is the number one search result in google anyways because I know what I need before I searched.

Re:Duh

[Scottingham]

That'd be a pretty impressive piece of kit, I'd definitely buy that app for my set of AR goggles.

We just need the virtual retinal display tech for AR to take off...staring at a tiny screen, regardless of lensing, is bad news.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...

Re:Duh

[Em Adespoton]

Increasingly, sites are starting to detect ad-blockers and refuse to serve content to those people.

So just like you don't have to view their ads, they don't have to let you view the bulk of the internet if you don't.

See who wins that battle, shall we? And don't pretend you'll just "download but not display them". That's just about as good, as far as they are concerned, because all the same tracking
still applies.

No, what I'll do (and what I DO do) is stop visiting that site. So what battle was won and by whom? Ad agency gets less of a chance of getting a hit, site loses a viewer, and I have more time to do other things (one guarantee in life is that you won't have enough of it to do everything you want).

Re: Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. I want an all Darth Maul edit quickly followed by an all Jar Jar edit to screw with people!

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, someone did come up with a wearable computer/glasses that put a white rectangle over ads in public bathrooms, etc. Search for it. It was probably 5-10 years ago, and had nothing to do with Google Glass.

Re:Duh

[Just Some Guy]

Why would anyone, ever, think that me not looking at their ad should be illegal?

It goes a lot deeper than that. I am running software on a device I own. That software requests a resource from a remote service. After receiving it, the same software manipulates that resource in ways I have specifically asked it to in order to meet my needs.

The plaintiff's case is that they have a legal right to tell me how to view a resource once it's on a machine I own. Copyright etc. isn't involved; I'm consuming a properly licensed copy of the resource that they sent to me. I'm not distributing it, either in original or modified form.

There are already a million other ways I might modify that content today. I can apply my own CSS so that font sizes and contrast are to my liking. My web browser may actually be a speech synthesizer or braille reader. I may be viewing it on a mobile device that simply can't render it in its original form. But according to the plaintiffs, none of that matters: either I view it as originally intended or not at all.

If they're going to assert insane things like that, I suggest they form a W3C working group to publicize a standard way of describing what uses are acceptable for that content. Then my web browser could parse it, see "ADS_MAY_BE_REMOVED: FALSE", and give me a popup saying "This page is published by sociopaths. Continue?".

Re:Duh

[Opportunist]

You mean that's different from TV networks cutting movies left and right to make NC17 movies suitable for broadcast or "trimming" them down so they can squeeze in another ad break? Oddly, this seems to be a-ok with the studios.

Re:Duh

[Opportunist]

We will win this battle.

I can live without their content.
Can they live without my money, or the revenue from ads?

Re:Duh

[Oligonicella]

Problem with that argument is the site's code is shipped pristine to your browser which is on your machine. Once inside your domain, you are free to make footnotes, comment out, etc. Then the browser interprets what *you've* done. No infringement involved.

You can do exactly the same thing with a book or movie you have acquired legally. You just can't redistribute, which the browser does not.

Taken to it's logical conclusion, their view would prohibit you from using ctrl-scroll to enlarge the text for viewing, as that isn't the font size they specified.

Re:Duh

[Opportunist]

Sooo... our browsers will honor the ADS_NOT_TO_BE_REMOVED flag as much as they honor our browser's DO_NOT_TRACK flag and we call it even?

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

2 weeks ago I needed breaking pads for my bike but my local bikeshop was closed because they were on a vacation. So I ordered a set of pads online for 7 euro and got them next day. But since I bought those cheap breaking pads I'm constantly getting ads to buy breaking pads from various webshops, not only at home, but also on my phone and at work.

I don't know how much it costs to advertise , but if everyone who buys something online gets bombarded for weeks afterwards when you no longer need the product, because you already bought it, how much money is leeched from the buyers of the ad space by the advertisers?

It think it is worse that the advertisers actually take money from businesses and bombard people with ads that no longer matter to them than it is for people to block those ads that annoy them.

I would even suggest companies who pay the advertisers to group up and sue the advertisers to get their money back because 90% of the ads are useless and have annoyed potential customers so much over the years that they even started to block them.

Re:Duh

[Just Some Guy]

Works for me.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

probably because they get paid for those edits.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean that's different from TV networks cutting movies left and right to make NC17 movies suitable for broadcast

Of course it's different. Networks paid the copyright holder for the rights to broadcast an edited version.

Re:Duh

[Ol Olsoc]

Why would anyone, ever, think that me not looking at their ad should be illegal? I mean, are we that far gone that it's even conceivable to have the courts forcing me to view ads?

I think some of these adagencies saw the opening of Robot Chicken and thought it was a how-to plan.

Re:Duh

[Tom]

I look forward to the day when somebody makes augmented reality glasses that block meatspace advertising like billboards, TVs in airports and bars, logos on clothes, all it. I'll be the first in line.

Only if you bring me a couple, otherwise you'll have to fight me for it.

Every time I have to use the Internet on someone elses non-adblocked computer, I'm shocked and I wonder how people can possibly use this shit at all. And in meast space, it's becoming worse and worse. Since they've started putting ads into toilets, you can't even take a piss anymore without someone staring at you.

Re:Duh

[dcollins117]

That wasn't their argument. Their claim was that the web page should not be altered before it is rendered in the browser.

And that's a terrible argument made by clueless people. I'm surprised the court let them get away with wasting their time. No one could or should expect to control exactly how a web page is shown to the end user because you don't know their presentation requirements. I probably need new glasses and turn my browser's font size up to what is probably an absurd degree. If the day comes when I'm totally blind I'll use text-to-speech or some other accessibility tool according to my needs. And I'll stop using Adblock Edge when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Re:Duh

[Opportunist]

In other words, screw art, content or "message", money is what matters.

Ok, not really a surprise.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, they can. Name just one site that collapsed because people blocked ads.

Re:Duh

[sjames]

Personally, I found that ruling objectionable even though I had no use for the edited movies personally. But I see that a new service is now available that instructs a modified DVD p[layer to skip the scenes considered objectionable. The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act explicitly authorizes that model.

So by analogy, instructing the browser to skip unwanted bits on the fly should pass muster.

Re:Duh

[sjames]

That is the law, but it makes little sense as long as the rights holder gets their bit. Why shouldn't it be OK for me to buy a full copy of a book, mechanically black out words here and there and then resell it?

If that's OK, why shouldn't I be able to print pre-censored copies as long as I buy and destroy an unaltered version for eaach one I sell?

Since that isn't terribly environmentally responsible, perhaps I should be able to send the publisher the profit from their sale and then print and sell the modified version as long as I keep accurate count of the sales.

At no point is the author deprived of the fruits of his/her labor.

Re:Duh

[AmiMoJo]

They would love to just send you one large .png image of the page so that it renders exactly as they want it to, complete with ads. Well, it would probably be a seizure-inducing animated GIF actually.

The reason they don't is the same reason people don't make "websites" that are actually just big Flash animations any more. Search engines can't properly interpret them and tend to give them a low ranking. So they want it both ways - a high ranking for usefulness and information/bullshit ratio, but also total control over the display.

Re:Duh

[AmiMoJo]

Didn't some cable TV company already disable the fast forward button during ads? DVDs don't let you skip ads most of the time. I'm surprised that the mute button still works.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

those glasses already exists, check out the work of Steve Mann, he's already doing that (I believe he published the specs for his hardware to)

Re:Duh

[XxtraLarGe]

Didn't some cable TV company already disable the fast forward button during ads?

Comcast disables fast forward on some OnDemand content, but works for DVR recordings.

DVDs don't let you skip ads most of the time.

This is one that really irritates me. Usually if we rent a new release video, i don't mind watching the trailers to see what new stuff is coming out. However, for the movies I buy, I don't want to have to watch them at all if I don't feel like it. Taking away the skip/menu capabilities on privately owned discs is pretty messed up.

I'm surprised that the mute button still works.

Don't give them any ideas. although it would seem to be difficult to implement, since the TV & the media player are typically two different pieces of equipment.

Re:Duh

[Opportunist]

But isn't that their argument? That they will have to die if they cannot force their junk on us.

Re:Duh

[Benwick]

I look forward to the day when somebody makes augmented reality glasses that block meatspace advertising like billboards, TVs in airports and bars, logos on clothes, all it. I'll be the first in line.

I believe they're called Hoffman Lenses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://www.nuskool.com/learn/w...

Re:Duh

[JohnFen]

I can't even remember the last time an advertisement online compelled me in favor of buying anything.

Not only have I never bought anything through online ads, I try to avoid purchasing products that I see advertised through online ads.

Re:Duh

[vakuona]

If you are not viewing their ads, you are not making them money.

You are as much a loss to them as I would be to BMW if I wanted a BMW but didn't want to pay for it. No loss.

Re:Duh

[jimthehorsegod]

Well, not a meeeelion miles away from that thought: http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

Re:Out of curiosity

[OzPeter]

Those of you who block ads but still consume the services of sites that run them without paying into any subscription fee, why do you freeload?

Leaving aside the technical issues for blocking ads (EG taking up *my* bandwidth for things I have no interest in, nefarious tracking schemes and their ilk, etc), your argument seems to be predicated on an RIAA lost revenue model.

If I "freeload" now in order to view content a website, I severely doubt that I would buy a subscription to view content on that website if it became closed. Therefore if the website can't survive without monetizing all 100% of their viewers, why do you think it can survive with monetizing 100% of a smaller pool of viewers? IE I am not a "lost" sale - I was never a potential "sale" in the first place.

very clever

[oldmacdonald]

"protect their privacy and, by extension, determine his or her own internet experience. "

I see what they did there!

Re:Out of curiosity

[lister king of smeg]

Those of you who block ads but still consume the services of sites that run them without paying into any subscription fee, why do you freeload?

If you like something you support it, right?

I still have not figured out the bizarre-o world of the internet where some people want something for free, block any attempt to pay for it via ads, refuse to pay subscriptions, won't buy the T-shirt, etc., but still want it to be there tomorrow for them when they wake up.

I'm addressing now folks who do that - who do you think pays the bills on sites? Who do you think puts the work in? Do you get paid for doing YOUR job?

Questions ever unanswered..

The problem isn't not wanting to pay the site maintainers its not wanting to be subjected to potentially malicious code embedded in attack ads. And as this same subjects comes up ever couple of weeks now I am just going to copypaste my response to this same objection from a little over two weeks ago.

I trust Slashdot not to attack me. But Slashdot is paid by "acme ad company" to insert their ads. Acme will pipe through whatever code crackers and malicious operators gives them as long as they get their money. I don't trust acme because of this and I certainly don't trust the person placing the ad. But here is the problem acme doesn't care as, I am a product not a customer. They only have to appease Slashdot and who ever is placing the ad. In fact their is a disincentive to scrutinize the content on the ads they are selling as they get paid either no matter the content and passing up bad operators is lost money. They can get away with it because if Slashdot viewer complain then they can say they will look into it opps one got through our system and nothing happens. So the only way to be safe is to block ads.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Coren22]

7. No more video ads
8. Quite autoplaying
9. No audio ads overwhelming me when I am trying to read a text website

Re:Out of curiosity

[edawstwin]

Those of you who block ads but still consume the services of sites that run them without paying into any subscription fee, why do you freeload?

If you like something you support it, right?

I still have not figured out the bizarre-o world of the internet where some people want something for free, block any attempt to pay for it via ads, refuse to pay subscriptions, won't buy the T-shirt, etc., but still want it to be there tomorrow for them when they wake up.

I'm addressing now folks who do that - who do you think pays the bills on sites? Who do you think puts the work in? Do you get paid for doing YOUR job?

Questions ever unanswered..

Those of you who fast forward over ads but still watch the TV shows, why do you freeload?

Re:Out of curiosity

[Falos]

Put your services behind the subscription fee, then.

Deliberately giving it to public access then whining when it's accessed is bullshit.

Re:Out of curiosity

[JMJimmy]

I'm going to feed the troll. Seems like he's starving

Those of you who block ads but still consume the services of sites that run them without paying into any subscription fee, why do you freeload?

Because information ought to be freely distributed. Just because you have the possibility of making money one something does not mean you have the guarantee of it.

If you like something you support it, right?

No, no I don't. As much as I would like to murder all the stupid people in the world, it's just not something I'd support. I like going to the movies, but I don't support them in their attempts to gouge me on ticket/concession prices. I like seeing dolphins & whales doing tricks but I don't support Seaworld. etc.

I still have not figured out the bizarre-o world of the internet where some people want something for free, block any attempt to pay for it via ads, refuse to pay subscriptions, won't buy the T-shirt, etc., but still want it to be there tomorrow for them when they wake up.

I'm addressing now folks who do that - who do you think pays the bills on sites?

Nope, I could not care at all if some of the sites I visit were there tomorrow. In fact I would probably have a more productive day if they were not. There's very little on the internet that I need, some that I may want, but mostly it's stuff that I don't need or want, like ads for stuff I'm not going to buy. If they can't find an honest/reasonable/unobtrusive business model it's not up to me to make sure their bills get paid.

Who do you think puts the work in?

Did no one teach you about volunteerism? Sharing? Community? Donation? Betterment of humanity?

Do you get paid for doing YOUR job?

Out of university, 2 1/2 years of unpaid internships. Nuff said.

Questions ever unanswered..

Not unanswered, just that you don't like the answers because you've got a myopic view of the world.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

i read the news from dagens nyheter and svenska dagbladet because i pay for them with tax money (press subsidies) and i block all their ads

Re:Out of curiosity

[easyTree]

I still have not figured out the bizarre-o world of the internet where some people want something for free, block any attempt to pay for it via ads

Umm, it's better for everyone this way (non-exhaustive list follows):
  * People who don't want to watch ads don't have to
  * These same people are not candidate customers so why bother advertising at them?
  * By blocking the scripts, the media / assets are not downloaded, thus reducing bandwidth charges which are essentially wasted.

One might wonder if organizations might use whatever means possible to drive people to use ad-block =D

Re:Out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

I go to casinos as well. They're great places for overnight RV parking. As I'm not addicted to gambling, the most they get out of me is $20, and that's only if I'm bored enough to find something to waste my time with. Obviously, with freeloaders like me, the Casino industry is ruined.

Guess what? As I'm not a masochist, I scrub ads. I feel like a freeloader the same way I feel like a freeloader at a Casino. ie: I actually don't feel any emotion at all other than being happy that I don't have a mental disease.

I know who pays the bills for both places (Addicts and masochists). Not sure why I should feel bad for not joining them. Also, yes, if all Casinos went out of business because everyone was like me, I still wouldn't feel bad about it, though it would mean a bit less convenience for me. And if all ad-laden websites disappeared because everyone was like me, I also would not feel bad about it, though I'd have to work harder to get the info I want.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

Those of you who block ads but still consume the services of sites that run them without paying into any subscription fee, why do you freeload?

If you like something you support it, right?

I still have not figured out the bizarre-o world of the internet where some people want something for free, block any attempt to pay for it via ads, refuse to pay subscriptions, won't buy the T-shirt, etc., but still want it to be there tomorrow for them when they wake up.

I'm addressing now folks who do that - who do you think pays the bills on sites? Who do you think puts the work in? Do you get paid for doing YOUR job?

Questions ever unanswered..

Do YOU stare at the TV during ads, listening just as you do to whatever it is you tuned in to watch?

No, you don't.

So just STFU you hypocrite.

Re:Out of curiosity

[easyTree]

10. No more "32 top reasons to click through 32 pages of eights ads" - type BS; thank you so much in advance.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

10. No interstitial ads
11. No ads that steal focus when I accidentally hover my mouse over them

Re:Out of curiosity

[easyTree]

Here in Manchester (UK), there are an increasing number of HUGE eye-searingly bright digital displays on buildings, roadsides, on the sides of bridges under which the road passes... They are generally the slightly more upmarket version of the flash ads begging you to click - irritatingly distracting. I find it interesting that whoever grants these licenses would so casually prioritize ad revenue over driver safety. It's almost as if they don't actually care.

Re:Out of curiosity

[easyTree]

I am not a "lost" sale - I was never a potential "sale" in the first place.

Omg, communist! By using AdBlock you have robbed the advertising ghouls of the opportunity to perform a non-customer to customer conversion against your will, using their superior ad-fu. It's just not something that should happen in a free and democratic police state. Shame on you =S

The missing difference

[s.petry]

What neither side pointed out in their statements was that there is a huge difference between companies creating ads and adblock. Primarily, that Adblock does not come to users by default. People have to find, download, and install Ad-block. It does not come pre-installed on anything I have ever seen.

Now compare that to the ad companies complaining who give you ads without your consent, and where you can not block them without an application like Adblock. You have to see their crap until you can figure out how to block it.

I have nearly the same amount of respect for these "advert" companies as I do for spammers. I think there is a spec on the bottom of my shoe someplace... er wait, what did I step in??

Re:The missing difference

[JMJimmy]

Yup. Android & the "Adblock Plus Browser" is about the only example I can think of that is sort of pre-installed... in the browser anyway.

Re:The missing difference

[s.petry]

I don't have an Android, so correct me if I'm wrong.. The 'AdBlock Plus Browser' does not come pre-installed does it?

Re:The missing difference

[JMJimmy]

I don't have an Android, so correct me if I'm wrong.. The 'AdBlock Plus Browser' does not come pre-installed does it?

It was on the front page last week... http://news.slashdot.org/story...

Re:The missing difference

[s.petry]

According to that article, it does not come pre-installed. It still requires a user do something to get the ability to block ads.

Re:The missing difference

[JMJimmy]

According to that article, it does not come pre-installed. It still requires a user do something to get the ability to block ads.

I re-read the article and I'm not seeing what you're seeing (unless you're referring to the browser itself not being pre-installed?)

What I am seeing is:

Adblock Plus says its app is the first mobile browser to offer users ad blocking as an integrated, out-of-the-box feature. More people are using ad blockers, according to the company, and so moving to the mobile space automatic ad blocking at the browser level is a natural extension.

Re:The missing difference

[s.petry]

(unless you're referring to the browser itself not being pre-installed?)

Obviously, I don't believe this requires a large leap on logic. I said users need to intervene to stop ads, you pointed to a browser which meets the exact criteria I gave.. that a user must intervene to stop ads. The browser only changes what a user needs to install to intervene and block ads.

Re:The missing difference

[drinkypoo]

Hell, I just updated my Titan to a new SOKP based on 5.1, and I had to manually set my proxy settings... which are per-connection, so I will have to set them all over again if I roam.

Re:The missing difference

[Tom]

I have nearly the same amount of respect for these "advert" companies as I do for spammers.

Nearly? You mean that there is a difference between them? I'd be curious to find out what that is, because I really don't see any difference whatsoever.

Re:The missing difference

[Anonymous Coward]

and where you can not block them without an application like Adblock

Use a scriptblocker instead, it's not really at all like Adblock and has largely the same effect. With other security benefits as well.
Use Adblock if you want, but frankly speaking I prefer to manage my hosts file myself instead of letting a 3rd party like Adblock or A.P.K. do it for me.

compare that to the ad companies complaining who give you ads without your consent

Look, I really don't care if you block ads or not, but get over yourself. Don't go to their site voluntarily and then cry about ads being forced on you by the ad companies. It's the site owners forcing them on you, and even then considering it's their site and you went their on your own nobody forced you at all.

Re:The missing difference

[Anonymous Coward]

They might not have forced you to their site... But since there are many cases where ad-networks starts pushing out malware via ad's it more like.. "Feel free to go into this room." and then later realize that you where infected with some nasty virus..

I do not like advertisement, but sure i can accept it as long as it's secure and does not cause popup's and does tracking of me without my explicit consent. I would not even mind if they introduced micro-payments for web-content instead of advertisement.. like 1 cent per page-view on a news-site, but that would then have to be a generic solution instead of site-specific subscription.

Re:The missing difference

[AmiMoJo]

Advertisers pay to display their ads, spammers usually don't.

Re:The missing difference

[JohnFen]

OK, that's a difference. But it's a meaningless difference.

Re:The missing difference

[Tom]

They don't pay me, so I fail to see the difference.

Actually, there isn't one. Spammers pay their ISP, too. Advertisers pay the people who own the cinema, or the radio station or the billboard. So the means of delivery gets paid for in both cases.

Sorry, no difference at all.

Re:The missing difference

[AmiMoJo]

Advertising subsidises the services you use. Spam makes them more expensive.

Re:Out of curiosity

[spire3661]

Find a better business model. This model you are championing sucks, you brought this upon yourselves. Monetization is important, but the directions ads have gone broke decorum in every possible way. I dont feel guilty about idiots wasting their money trying to use a shitty model

Re:Out of curiosity

[Oligonicella]

I agree with a lot of what you said, but these two are pretty lame:

Who do you think puts the work in?

Did no one teach you about volunteerism? Sharing? Community? Donation? Betterment of humanity?

The context is business. None of your counter examples were.

Do you get paid for doing YOUR job?

Out of university, 2 1/2 years of unpaid internships. Nuff said.

You either considered those internships worthwhile for that foot in the door (making them a transaction not altruistic) or you were an idiot to work for free for 2.5 years. Pray tell, which?

Re:Out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, you mean like Cable Television?

Re:Out of curiosity

[RavenLrD20k]

When I've run my sites in the past, I've never put a single banner on that page that wasn't my own... except for a single page that was specifically built just to allow access for my users to make use of my affiliate programs. That one page had one affiliate block each for Amazon, DigiKey, NewEgg, and TigerDirect. The rest of the page was banner links to friends' pages where they were selling their own products or services. I made dick on running that entire ad page (maybe 60 cents over the course of that 2 year run), and I never expected to make any money off of it. It was only there as a side service to customers that were already cruising the rest my site for my products/information. My direct revenue at that time was only ever from whatever product or service I was using that site to sell, not advertisements from 3rd party sources. If I was running a blog on a page of the site, I wasn't making money off of it. That was just a way to put my own opinions out there. If you went there, read through it, maybe left a comment... great. Not once on that page were you going to be subjected to any kind of advertising. The #1 compliment that my customers and site visitors gave me on the site design? It was a refreshing break from the rest of what they had to deal with on the web. Simple, sleek, great use of colors, and the fastest loading pages that they've ever seen since the inception of the commercialized web.

If you are a large syndicated news site, charge a subscription fee. That's fine with me. If I like a sampling of your articles, I'll probably pay for a subscription. If enough people feel you're worth the subscription fee...great, you get to live. If you're Joe Sixpack running a personal blog and putting your opinions out there with a ton of clickbait ads all over your page... Guess what; opinions are like assholes: Everyone has one and every single one stinks. You want to support yourself by putting yet another source of near useless information out there and rely on that for your only bit of income? You deserve to flounder when no one clicks your ads, blocks the ads, or just doesn't visit your site after the first go. If you're not truly insightful, you're offering nothing for society. If you were truly insightful, you'd be able to put your money where your mouth is and make something of all those wonderful ideas you have, and use that to make your money on...instead of bombarding me with garbage ads for enlarging my dick or what ever one neat trick pony they put up on your piece of shit site.

Basically it comes down to this: do something useful that I'm willing to buy into? I'll go to your site and buy all day. Use your blog to bullshit me like a damn street hawker and then flash all kinds of ads in my face? Fuck you, goodbye. I listen to enough bullshit all day, I don't need yours too.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Firethorn]

Interesting how governments sometimes differ. USA, supposedly land of the free, would quickly have the Department of Transportation having a word with the owners of said billboards, as you describe them.

Things like lit scrolling marquees are fine - most gas stations show their prices using a digital billboard today, and rolling time/temperature/ad is common,

But there are rules in place about potentially 'distracting' displays.

death to bandwidth hogs!

[Presto Vivace]

people would not use adblock if advertising did not suck up so much bandwidth.

Re:death to bandwidth hogs!

[Opportunist]

I don't mind the bandwidth. What I do mind, though, is that they don't even bother checking who's advertising with them and whether they use this vehicle to spread malware. As long as they pay, who gives a shit about the visitors of their pages?

Showing ads to me is a privilege. Earn it!

Re:death to bandwidth hogs!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not even bandwidth. It's latency. How many times have you been waiting for a page to load and you look down at the status bar and it's waiting for "ad.doubleclick...." to respond.

Um, nope. Not going to have my time wasted by advertising any more than it already is.

Re:death to bandwidth hogs!

[radarskiy]

I use Adblock Plus to block plenty of things that are not ads for this very reason. For example, CNN has autoplay news videos... or at least I presume they still do. Their ads I do't mind.

Re:death to bandwidth hogs!

[Anonymous Coward]

What about CNN's canvas tracking?

Re:death to bandwidth hogs!

[Fear the Clam]

That's not true. I use adblock because I just want the content I came for and not a bunch of other stuff taking up my screen. If it weren't for adblock's advanced settings, sites like LinkedIn would be unusable.

Re:Out of curiosity

[tlambert]

Those of you who block ads but still consume the services of sites that run them without paying into any subscription fee, why do you freeload?

I already paid for my internet service. Why should I have to pay again?

You are advocating the Verizon/Netflix model.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Darinbob]

Adblock is used as a self defense mechanism. If we keep getting punched in the face then we're going to start wearing head protection, no matter how much someone whines that they make their living by punching me in the face.

If your livelihood depends upon annoying your customers, or even harming them, then you need a better job. If it's just a hobby then stop demanding that we pay for it.

Seriously, who is the freeloader, me for protecting my computer and my bandwidth, or the advertisers who use my bandwidth without permission and sites who offer up any ads without testing for malware first? Try living for a month on dialup only or pay per megabyte, then see how much you learn to hate advertisers.

- Treat your viewers and customers with respect
- Be responsible
- Stop tracking viewers
- Stop stealing their bandwidth.
- Provide the ads from your own server, not from a third party provider that you have no control over.
- Stop annoying users with ugly crap, stupid animations, pop ups, pop unders, blaring sound, etc.
- No videos!
- Provide relevant ads
- Stop sending out malware - if you do not vet your ads then you are at fault if malware gets through.

If you have an advertisement that you feel is appropriate, then submit it to adblock and see if it gets on their whitelist.

Payback

[Anonymous Coward]

The ad companies did this to themselves with overly annoying and obtrusive ads.

Which is also why people are not watching network TV and not going to the movies as much as they used to. Too many obnoxious ads.

That's the good news...

[XxtraLarGe]

The bad news is that they had to defend themselves in the first place.

Re:That's the good news...

[Jack Griffin]

No it isn't. In a free world we each have the right to question the status quo. So in this case it is preferable that one business questions the practice of another in a court, than to not have that choice. The fact that this happened, and with the right result, is a good thing as it confirms that the system is working.

Re:That's the good news...

[XxtraLarGe]

The fact that this happened, and with the right result, is a good thing as it confirms that the system is working.

No it isn't. This would be like a malware company going after Norton or Kaspersky because it hurt their distribution model, or if ammunition manufacturers sued bullet-proof vest manufacturers because it makes their product less effective. Yeah, the good guys win, but they ended up having to spend a lot of money to defend themselves unnecessarily.

Re:That's the good news...

[Jack Griffin]

Ah so you prefer a world where someone (who?) declares who the good guys are and who the bad guys are and that's the end of it? I think we've already tried that model, it didn't work out so good.

Re:That's the good news...

[XxtraLarGe]

So you prefer a world with patent trolls? That seems to be what your nonsense argument is implying. The system you appear to be in favor of allows the use of the courts by bullies to intimidate anyone they don't like.

Re:That's the good news...

[Jack Griffin]

It only seems that way because you're too stupid to understand what I wrote.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

ALMOST right.

If the site gets paid x amount per 1000 ad impressions and you block the adverts, you have removed some of the income from the site.

It did NOT require you to buy anything, nor click on any adverts, it was passive participation.

Re:Out of curiosity

[TheCastro1689]

Bing, bing, bing, we have a winner. They don't care, it's all about the almighty Dollar/Pound.

I'll Bet THIS Story Doesn't Get FP'd on SlashDot:

[Anonymous Coward]

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/sourceforge-grabs-gimp-for-windows-account-wraps-installer-in-bundle-pushing-adware/

Re:Out of curiosity

[MozeeToby]

No ads designed to mislead. If you are a download page and you have dozens of "Click here for your download" ads you are getting adblocked or simply not visited. If you care so little about your website that you can't be bothered to protect it's users from malicious and misleading ads, you don't get my ad views.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I ask you "6 Ways to Burn Your Belly Fat Fast", do you like visi"Work at home mom makes $8,795 month working part time"ting sites that be"CR7 Driven to Perfection Thanks to Herbalife"come unusa"Napoleon Games Play When Feeling Lucky"ble because of al"McDonals I'm + Lovin' + It"l the unrela"15 Downloads That Will Block Annoying Ads and Pop-Ups"ted advertentions? Do yo"The “Ordinary” Mom’s Discovery That’s Making Botox Doctors Furious!"u? Do you re"KFC It's Finger Lickin' Good!"ally like these 'free' ser"Can you hear me now?" vices?

Re: I'll Bet THIS Story Doesn't Get FP'd on SlashD

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if you would just click the ads on the site instead of blocking them, they wouldn't have to do this, now, would they?

You reap what you sow.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey! Have you forgotten to apply your eyelid tape again?? How many times have you blinked and not watch or ad, you freeloader?!?

Re:Out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

You are correct, I work in digital signage and the states DOT have specific rules for LED billboards. An example (from Iowa, the first i could find, but these are fairly standardized).

    Each change of message must be accomplished in one second or less.
    Each message must remain in a fixed position for at least eight seconds.
    No traveling messages (e.g., moving messages,animated messages, full-motion video,or scrolling text messages) or segmented messages are presented.
    The intensity of the illumination does not cause glare or impair the vision of the driver of any motor vehicle or otherwise interferes with any driver’s operation of a motor vehicle.
    LED displays must be located a minimum of 500 feet from any other LED display facing the same direction within cities. LED displays must be located a minimum of 1000 feet from any other LED display

Banksy On Advertising

[houghi]

âoePeople are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from the buses that imply youâ(TM)re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. Itâ(TM)s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially donâ(TM)t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, donâ(TM)t even start asking for theirs."

â" Banksy

Re:Banksy On Advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

Not exactly Bansky's quote. (Tejaratchi)

Re:Banksy On Advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, except that's wrong. It's not trademarks, intellectual property rights, or copyright law that lets them say those things. It's the fact that they paid for the advertising space - they paid money to make a billboard and put it up, or to put up posters, bought air time on the TV/radio, whatever. You don't have the right to destroy someone else's property just because you don't like how it looks or makes you feel.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

And why are they willing to pay for that?
Because they want to infect your computer with malware, or they want to invade /steal your privacy.

screw that.

Re:Out of curiosity

[bmo]

The world does not owe you a living.

>internet will die if ads don't exist

I pretty much preferred the old Internet when the NSF was the backbone.

Go cry more.

--
BMO

Dear corporations

[Opportunist]

Courts are not here to protect your failing business model. But it sure shows a certain kind of feeling of entitlement that you think they are.

Ad blocking

[Chas]

Blocking of ad content on the internet is a problem that the internet advertising community brought upon itself.

Huge, messy, obnoxious high bandwidth, sometimes even dangerous ads.

If the entire playing field of internet advertising wasn't as toxic as it is, we'd see a wider array of people running without adblockers.

AdBlock is not the root of the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Laws of supply and demand apply to ad blocking too. AdBlock didn't just suddenly appear and create the markets it operates on; it responded to a genuine problem and subsequent demand that people had. Web advertising quickly evolved into malware packing show that severely hindered the use of the WWW and performance.

There is a bit lot of ignorance on the part of the advertisers and people getting revenue out of them. It reminds me a great deal of the music industry: they blamed piracy for their outdated business model and it was only after they looked into the mirror that they prevailed the problem. The same applies to advertising too. There are plenty of ways to incorporate advertising in an ingenious manner that can't be blocked (nor would be needed to) in an easy manner. As a start, I'd advise companies to start implementing locally served customized ads that are inserted into the content, get sponsors and whatnot. Also, implement a backend tracking API that gets its data from normal content.

Re:Out of curiosity

[JMJimmy]

I agree with a lot of what you said, but these two are pretty lame:

Who do you think puts the work in?

Did no one teach you about volunteerism? Sharing? Community? Donation? Betterment of humanity?

The context is business. None of your counter examples were.

The internet is not a guarantee of being able to operate a business. Sure, some have figured out how to make a business out of it, but many are simply getting information out there. Be it for their business, politics, religion, science, history, etc. the internet's primary function is communication & the dissemination of information to anyone who wishes to access it. If your business model doesn't work unless you obstruct that access, either by ads/malware/paywall or some other form, then you can expect to lose audience to someone who finds a way to provide it with less/no obstruction. If you don't lose that audience, you can expect them to attempt to remove/mitigate the obstructions.

All that said, how many internet "businesses" are simply users doing the heavy lifting while the business merely provides the forum to do so. Facebook is nothing without users giving up their information. Google is nothing without something to search. Youtube is nothing without people uploading their (cat) videos.

Do you get paid for doing YOUR job?

Out of university, 2 1/2 years of unpaid internships. Nuff said.

You either considered those internships worthwhile for that foot in the door (making them a transaction not altruistic) or you were an idiot to work for free for 2.5 years. Pray tell, which?

Internships are not a transaction because it's not A for B. A "foot in the door" is worthless when there's no job at the end of it. It's A (work) for the possibility of B (a job), which amounts to gambling. One could easily make the argument that gambling is an idiot's pursuit. That said, the last stat I read was that 55% of university grads were doing at least 1 unpaid internship after they finished their education.

The intertubes

[Snufu]

is a public communication network, like a phone network. It was developed by public research dollars. I pay for my own bandwidth. I have ZERO obligation to tolerate your ads polluting my communication network.

If you don't want people downloading your 'content' for free, put up a paywall.

P.S.: F off and dye.

Re:The intertubes

[onepoint]

did you ever really study the internet... and how public funding works?
Arpanet ( which I still recall using ) was a simple packet network,
shared lines between universities and some military computers ( I think )
public paid for the lines, but the hardware was built by the geeks in the lab

Public funding... apply for a grant, then you'll really see what and how grant money works
the idea for grants is to make a problem more manageable or new solution of efficiency or come up with something new ( like darpa asks )
it's all for the greater good. happens to be that the creator of the solution get's to make money off it. and consumer get the discount.

think about it, many new traffic algorithms are being developed due to research done 10 or 20 years ago and published in journals

Acceptable Ads my a**

[Hohlraum]

Taboola is on that list. The kings of click-bait. They use about 4 million different domains to avoid being blocked outright as well. BS. The crappy part is I actually value Googles Ads but if you disable all acceptable ads you disable all sites.

Re:Out of curiosity

[mujadaddy]

consume the services of sites that run them

I made a request for some HTML from one domain.

why do you freeload?

I'm cheap. And paranoid.

If you like something you support it, right?

Not particularly financially, no. See above.

but still want it to be there tomorrow for them

I want a lot of things.

who do you think pays the bills on sites?

Obviously, self-evidently, I don't care about the financing of my diversions, or I'd have ads turned on. You're not very good at this.

Who do you think puts the work in?

H1B's? Am I close?

Do you get paid for doing YOUR job?

The website I develop for actually sells a product.

Re:Out of curiosity

[JimSadler]

Sadly advertising is not simple. It often involves forms of brain washing. The notion of creating a market is just an insidious way of trying to make someone desire something that they probably should not. There is a certain very lusted after American sports car that in reality is a high priced, rolling death trap that has no reason to exist at all and is a menace to public safety. But ask every high school senior if they want a Corvette and it will get almost a 100% positive response. We see the same in motorcycles. Just why do young people want or even imagine they can handle a stock street bike capable of going 237 mph? Even professional racers are highly frightened to drive these machines but do so as they get huge pay checks. But because of advertising the kids don't want a 100 mpg. motorcycle. They want a bike that can go zero to sixty in two seconds. Yet the human eyeball flattens enough under that kind of acceleration that vision is severely limited. Some modern motorcycles accelerate faster than a military jet accelerates launching off of an air craft carrier. And kids try this with zero training.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

You can see it that way, but I'd like to stress that if you couldn't compare ads to an assault on your person, it would still be your own decision what you have your browser show you and what you block. If someone then decides they don't want to show you their site, that is their decision, but not what software you use on your computer.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

Please let this Internet die. I prefer the old days too.

Shouting "Communist!" is so dated...

[xski]

Everyone knows the new Boo word is "Socialist!"

Re:Out of curiosity

[xski]

I had never thought of it that way before... advertising as a means to help clean the gene pool.

Re:Out of curiosity

[CrimsonAvenger]

They want a bike that can go zero to sixty in two seconds. Yet the human eyeball flattens enough under that kind of acceleration that vision is severely limited.

Interesting theory you have there, Butch...

0-60mph in two seconds is 1.37g. Which is comparable to the acceleration you'd experience landing after jumping to the ground from a height of three feet or so....

Re:Out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

The funny thing is is that the most conservative, free-market, types are usually the worse. The best example is my neighbor who was ranting up and down about how the government shouldn't be telling him about what he should be doing on his property and how they sent him a bill for wasting the time of the police (he and his grandson were target shooting with a rifle in his backyard; the average distance between homes is maybe 50ft). This is the same guy who literally walks around the neighborhood with a ruler and calls in people whose grass is too long, which they also send out bills for BTW.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Ol Olsoc]

The website I develop for actually sells a product.

THIS! A thousands time this! I buy thousands of dollars every year - and multiple tens of thousands before retirement.

And not once have I "found" a place through a web ad, Not once have I even ever clicked on a web ad.

Granted, by this time I block them all, so for the last 5 years, it's a given.

Last time I saw an ad, I had searched for something, a tire from TireRack, and the next dozen pages I went to had - the tire I had searched for on Tire Rack. Stalking me like no one's business. It would be like going into Sears to check on a tire price, and someone from Sears follows you to every store you go to for a week afterwards.

But I still buy thousands each year online. At least for me, present day ad stalkers paradigm is, what's the word?.....Oh yeah, fucking stupid.

Re:Out of curiosity

[penguinoid]

Here in Manchester (UK), there are an increasing number of HUGE eye-searingly bright digital displays on buildings, roadsides, on the sides of bridges under which the road passes... They are generally the slightly more upmarket version of the flash ads begging you to click - irritatingly distracting. I find it interesting that whoever grants these licenses would so casually prioritize ad revenue over driver safety. It's almost as if they don't actually care.

Sounds like a case for civil disobedience (eg vandalism for the public good). Save lives, and low risk -- they'd need to get a jury of non-drivers who like advertizements to secure a conviction.

hey ad companies...

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck yo' couch!!!

Re:Out of curiosity

[sootman]

> 6: Secure your servers so we aren't being
> attacked from letting your ads through

Dear advertisers: Start with that. I will absolutely continue to block as many ads as possible until you fix this. If you're going to annoy me, at LEAST don't potentially harm me. It's like walking through a department store and getting sprayed with perfume which might also contain anthrax.

Ad Saturation

[Irate Engineer]

How many people mentally tune out radio, TV, and online ads these days? When ads come up, that is the cue that paying attention is not important. It's a trained response to a lot of people. Advertisers don't get this and think more is better, because more! Deliberately trying to think back to the last ad that made any sort of impression, the only one I can recall was one a few months ago; a poster ad in San Juan PR which had a picture of a fine looking woman with a very nice bottom holding a plate with a delicious-looking juicy steak on it. But I'm damned if I know what exactly was being advertised or by what company. Even though I remember that, was that successful advertising?

Re:Ad Saturation

[Jack Griffin]

It's gotten so bad that I've given up on participating with society. I'm lucky enough to have a decent national radio which is commercial free, but it's mostly talk, so if I want music I have ad-free Spotify. Commercial radio is unlistenable due to the ads and other mindless drivel. TV is gone, however I do record all show (yes all of them) and watch later to be able to fast forward ads. Even that's getting unbearable due to those popup ads they use now, so increasingly turning to BT. Even live sport, I'll lock myself away, record and start the game an hour later to have the ability to FF ads.
I have Ad Block so nothing comes through the browser, so really the only ads I see are billboards and on buses when out driving, or pamphlets in the mail. I don't actually mind this type of advertising because it's passive and I can choose to see or not.
The shock is when you re-build your PC and forget Ad Block, or are at a friends house and they sit through ad after ad after ad on TV. It really is quite appalling when you've gone ad-free to see how pervasive it is. I honestly can't see how such attack on your brain is legal.

Freedom is important in its own right.

[jbn-o]

People should keep that in mind when they argue for non-free browsers over Free Software browsers such as Firefox, GNU IceCat, and others. Being free to control your Internet experience is critical, being free to decide what you want to take in is never totally in your hands when you run non-free (proprietary, user-subjugating) software. The proprietor always has the upper hand even if they don't use that power right away or in ways you don't see or understand.

Re:Out of curiosity

[mjwx]

I find it interesting that whoever grants these licenses would so casually prioritize ad revenue over driver safety. It's almost as if they don't actually care.

I think you'll find that definitely is the case because the people who approve these billboards will have nothing to do with the Ministry of Transport.

Not sure about the UK but in many countries including Australia most of the billboards are privately owned and only need approval from the council to be put up, after that the owner can advertise what they like and are only bound by the advertising standards code (erm... so no hardcore).

A bigger issue I have are with advertisements on buses. Unlike the billboard owners these guys definitely have a vested interest in road safety yet tend to big bright ads with scantily clad ladies or small text. Its a shame Google Glass didn't take off, I would like adblock+ for real life.

Autism speaks

[Anonymous Coward]

and clearly needs to go back in their hugbox and take a nap

Re:Out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

11. Stop reloading the fucking pages, changing both the content and the ads before I've even read half way down.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

11. No ads at all. Are you kidding? Why would I want to look at ads. There are no acceptable ads. I just don't want them.

Attorney's fees

[triclipse]

I practice law in California in one of the few areas where the prevailing party as a practical matter is entitled to recover it's attorneys' fees and costs. It is the best possible method to discourage meritless litigation as people generally think very carefully before filing a lawsuit. This should absolutely be the norm for most civil cases.

Re:Attorney's fees

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

This should absolutely be the norm for most civil cases.

An interesting twist we have here in Sweden is that for purposes of determining who pays cost, even if you win the case but is awarded less than half of what you originally claimed, you're counted as the loser when it comes to paying cost of litigation.

Keeps down frivolous claims quite nicely. However, I doubt this way of running civil cases would serve well if we didn't also have the system of ombudsmen, i.e. in any case where the little guy would face interests with big pockets (including government) there's an ombudsman to hear you case and litigate on your behalf, providing both the expertise and funds. (They can also fine directly.)

Re:Attorney's fees

[triclipse]

There is a similar procedure in California called a "998 Offer" (based on Code of Civil Procedure sec. 998) whereby one party can make a binding settlement offer to the other party. If the other party refuses the 998 offer but at trial fails to do better than the 998 offer, then even if they technically win the case the offering party will be awarded costs.

It's a very good procedure to induce parties to settle and avoid further litigation.

Re:Out of curiosity

[NixieBunny]

The part about the website viewer being the product rather than the customer is lost on most people. I'm just being a clever mouse, eating the bait without springing the trap.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

Those of you who fast forward over ads but still watch the TV shows, why do you freeload?

I go further than that. I get the entire season on DVD and never have to bother seeking past the crap. Additionally, I don't have to find out a show I enjoyed is cancelled with out tying up the loose ends.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Tom]

Talk to your government and convince them to follow the example of Sao Paulo. They did what every city should do: Ban outdoor advertisement.

https://www.adbusters.org/maga...

Re:Out of curiosity

[Tom]

If you like something you support it, right?

So if you like my home, you should pay me for inviting you?

Outside the crazy world of advertisement, it doesn't work like that. You can offer a good or service for money, or you can offer it for free, those are two very simple choices everybody in the world understands.

Advertisers are trying to have the cake, and eat it. They understand that more people take a free offer. Check what sites run on advertisement. Mostly those where large numbers of customers by themselves are a KPI. Media sites, social networks, such like.
They could easily paywall themselves, but they choose not to, because in their sphere they are more important if they have more visitors. So they lure visitors in with the appearance of free service, but actually it is not for free, because ads. That's a bait-and-switch, if not for the fact that we all know the game.

If you post your newspaper online, I am free to read it. If you try to collect money for it, I am free to ignore you. The same as if you go to the park and make a public performance and then pass a hat around. I can decide to give you money or not, but you don't have a right to my money. If you want to have a right to my money, play in a hall and sell tickets.

Re:Out of curiosity

[gnupun]

Sadly advertising is not simple. It often involves forms of brain washing.

Such is life. Can you prove your boss or company, the ones paying your salary, don't engage in brain-washing ads? No, you can't. So some of your salary is due to brain-washing.

Unless there are laws against manipulating viewers, there will always be brain-washing. I mean even slashdot has tons of brain-washing. For example, the /. groupthink thinks they have a legal and ethical right to deprive website owners of income by adblocking their ads, because it's their god-given right to not care about anyone but themselves.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Morgon]

Uh, no. They're simply paying for their message to be heard (seen), just like every other advertiser in existence. It's not a difficult concept to grasp.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Morgon]

Because information ought to be freely distributed. Just because you have the possibility of making money one something does not mean you have the guarantee of it.

I often hear 'information [ought|wants] to be free', but not 'ought to be freely distributed'. These are two very different concepts. I can't agree with your wording simply because datacenters, servers, and bandwidth just aren't free. I'm not arguing that someone's political rant blog, or chronicles of their cat herding should/shouldn't be plastered with ads - that's a semi trivial operation (though I would say that labor shouldn't be free - and at least to me, writing regularly and coherently is labor).

But not every website is like that. I once ran a service that had hosting costs close to $1K/month, simply because it became popular. It was useful to the people who used it. But I was unable to introduce a subscription at the time (reasoning irrelevant), and even if I could, it's not always practical for the audience I had. Advertising was literally my only way to try to break even. I wasn't trying to live a lavish lifestyle, I was just trying to make sure the lights stayed on. But they didn't, due to the set-and-forget nature of Adblock extensions (and admittedly the economy at the time, which had just crashed, taking along much of the ad revenue that was still being generated). I was willing to give my time away for free, but there were still costs to distribute the information that my site provided - bandwidth, hosting/co-lo, and scalability (e.g. consulting, hardware) during many of the site's growth spurts.

I'm completely on board for a utopian TNG society where we freely do things for fun and the betterment of our society/species, and all of our basic wants and needs are generally taken care of. But until then, people who - for whatever reason - have infrastructure costs shouldn't be condemned for using advertising as a way to accomplish that. I agree wholeheartedly that there are a lot of things that need to be done within the ad industry (security, aggressiveness) to improve its reputation, but it actually is a reasonable business model, despite your (and others') ill-reasoned crusade to eradicate them.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Morgon]

I'm quite interested in your thoughts of a better way.. certainly you must have put thought into this, given your blanket opinions on advertising.

If you were going to create a website that you knew would incur non-trivial costs, how would you pay the bills? Assume you are not a corporation and that you are not using the site to sell a product - in other words, the site itself is the product/service.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Morgon]

There are many more types of websites than the two you described. Sometimes, advertising really is the only way.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Morgon]

Except no - your internet service is not paying for [my] hardware, hosting, and bandwidth. That'd be a fantastic thing, if your ISP subsidized all of the infrastructure needed to serve the content you're requesting... but I'm sure you could work out the likelihood of that ever happening.

It's really nothing like the VZ/Netflix issue at all.

And if AdBlock couldn't afford to appear in court?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a STRONG implication in this DICE propaganda piece that courts have the 'right' to permit illegal persecution of legal activity under the concept that EVERYONE is obliged to waste time and money 'defending' themselves against TROLLS that choose to take them to court.

AdBlock is legal, and does NOT need any form of court 'victory' to affirm this. The abuse of process is identical to this analogy...

Imagine a male goes to court to DEMAND the right to have sex with a named female. If the female doesn't appear in court, he wins a DEFAULT judgement confirming his 'right' to take the woman. Now everyone of you can see why THAT would be OUTRAGEOUS- yet you allow DICE to imply, via propaganda like this story, that everyone LOSES their RIGHTS if they don't defend themselves in court.

We should not be surprised. DICE is currently taking control of major open-source software projects on SourceForge, and wrapping their installers with ADWARE. Dice's excuse is exactly the same as in this case- namely if one party fails to 'OBJECT', another criminal party wins the default right to carry out whatever crime they so wish.

PS will Slashdot be covering the scandal of Dice's sickening abuse of third-party open-source projects on SourceForge? Hahahahahahahahahaha!!! I think will all know the answer to that question.

i dont care about the adds

[Anonymous Coward]

but if i can get viruses from them i will block them all, and on this day an age, you infect yourself from an add somewhere, The day they compensate me from those viruses their adds launch to my computer is the day i will stop blocking them, until then they can suck a dick

Acceptable ads

[xenobyte]

There are no acceptable ads. Use Adblock Edge or uBlock.

Re:Out of curiosity

[RavenLrD20k]

Wanna play a game? Find me a site where you think advertising is the only way and I'll tell you whether it could find a better way to monetize the info it has, should be a side site for a hobby, or if the example is good enough, I'll concede the point.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't watch the TV show either.

AdBlock = Inferior + 'Souled-Out' vs. hosts

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> AdBlock does FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

AdBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apk

AdBlock = Inferior + 'Souled-Out'... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> AdBlock does FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

AdBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apk

AdBlock/ABP = slower, inferior + 'souled-out'

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> AdBlock does FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

AdBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apk

AdBlock = slower, inferior + 'souled-out'

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> AdBlock does FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

AdBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apk

AdBlock+ = slower, inferior + 'souled-out'

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> AdBlock does FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

AdBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apkb

AdBlock = Slower, Inferior + 'Souled-Out'

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> AdBlock does FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

AdBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apk

AdBlock = Slower, Inferior + 'Souled-Out'

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> AdBlock does FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

AdBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apk

AdBlock = Slower, Inferior + 'Souled-Out'

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> AdBlock does FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

AdBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apk

AdBlock/UBlock = SLOWER + INFERIOR

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> AdBlock does FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

AdBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apk

Adblock variants = slower, inferior + soldout

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> AdBlock does FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

AdBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apk

AdBlockEdge = Slower + Inferior vs. hosts

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> AdBlock does FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

AdBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apk

Both = Slower, Inferior vs. hosts

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> AdBlock does FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

AdBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apk

AdBlock = Slower, Inferior + 'Souled-Out'

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> AdBlock does FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

AdBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apk

AdBlock+ = Slower, Inferior & 'Souled-Out'

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> AdBlock does FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

AdBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apk

AdBlock = Slower, Inferior + 'Souled-Out'

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> AdBlock does FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

AdBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apk

Adblock = Slower, Inferior + 'Souled-Out'

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> AdBlock does FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

AdBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apk

Adblock = Slower, Inferior + 'Souled-Out'

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> AdBlock does FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

AdBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apk

Hosts = "The Superior Warrior" in adblocking

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> AdBlock does FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

AdBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apk

Re: I'll Bet THIS Story Doesn't Get FP'd on SlashD

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't do either (click or block).

Well...occasionally click, but my corporate filter blocks the CDNs for lots of sites, so I get circa 1994-like pages.

GIMP is kinda pathetic, but what SF did was also fairly scummy.

Since Dice owns both SF and /., I'm not surprised that it never made it to the FP (I see it has been given above the fold on some other big sites, though).

In fact, I was surprised to come back here, and find the comment still there. They have nuked comments before that mentioned undraped monarchs.

Hosts = "The Superior Warrior" in adblockers

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> AdBlock does FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

AdBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apk

Adblock = Slower, Inferior + 'Souled-Out'

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> AdBlock does FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

AdBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apk + it 'souled-out'

Hosts = "Superior Warrior" vs. competitors

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> AdBlock does FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

AdBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apk

Hosts = "The Superior Warrior" vs. Adblock

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> AdBlock does FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

AdBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apk

Adblock = Slower, Inferior + 'Souled-Out'

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> AdBlock does FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

AdBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apk

Adblock+ = Slower, Inferior + 'Souled-Out'

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> AdBlock does FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

AdBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apk

Re:Out of curiosity

[JMJimmy]

That's why I chose those words actually. I'm not ignorant of the economics and I know nothing is free. Freely distributed, to me, means the same as talking to someone, a library, a public domain film, etc. They take resources in terms of time, money, effort, etc. but they result in free distribution. In terms of the problem you're referring to P2P browsers will have a part to play and new solutions need to arise (P2P obviously doesn't solve dynamic content/database interaction/etc) but I think it's really important to keep the distribution of information free. If it means ads, that's fine too but "Acceptable Ads" is a very reasonable program that allows you to advertise without compromising & pissing off the people you're advertising to.

To be clear, I'm also not saying that free distribution is the only way. There is room for it all, just not at the scale that everyone would like. It may mean that if you want a free encyclopedia you go entirely P2P and limit the number of editors. It may mean your business will be limited to the 2/3rds of people who don't use an ad blocker. Like your site, instead of going to a $1k/month solution you couldn't afford, did you consider going to a solution you could afford but may not have served as many people? ie: limit it to your state, country, hemisphere or merely the number of users at a time? It's not ideal, but if it meant you could keep the lights on while you grew it to serve more?

Re:Out of curiosity

[Morgon]

Had you asked me a few years ago, I would have shown you my own site (but is now defunct due to adblock + the economy at the time). I ran a gaming website that started out as a small hobby, but ended up being incredibly popular within its audience.

The primary/initial function of this site was to serve up dynamic images that depicted a user's activity on the gaming platform it catered to, for use on Forums, blogs, and social networks. I went on to serve other data-based content, such as extensive leaderboards (globally, as well as searchable by game, by country, or both), user stat profiles, and other platform-specific info.

In return for access to the platform's data to make this all possible, I had a legal agreement with that company that said that I could not directly charge for access to the features of my community site. Advertising was the only viable solution for maintaining it. While there were a few missteps on advertising (Yahoo (for its short-lived ad platform) sometimes pushed adult-oriented ads), I was generally good to my users in that regard, eventually becoming popular enough to serve relevant ads from gaming companies and related lifestyle products (they won't talk to you unless you have x number of users/page impressions).

My costs were infrastructure. I had several servers creating/serving those remote images, handling static site images, storing and organizing user/gaming history in the databases ... I had to hire consultants when the site outgrew my limited-at-the-time knowledge of data modeling and querying. Advertising helped me scale both up and out, and I ran it for nearly 6 years. By necessity, I gained a LOT of skills during that time.

About 5 years in, Adblock had started to become popular beyond the technical crowd. It's always been a set-and-forget thing, and we didn't have a lot of the fancy detection tricks we do now, so there was little I could really do. I was breaking even for my hosting (several hundred dollars a month for nearly a dozen servers; and that's WITHOUT bandwidth costs, because I had a great relationship with my hosting provider)... but couple that with the economy crash, where the advertising that WAS getting through wasn't paying much, and I ended up paying out of pocket for nearly a year before it was just too much.

What started as a small project in which I expected just a couple of people to use ended up with 5 million users, and small notoriety within that gaming circle (including several magazine stories). Advertising directly enabled me to scale. I was unemployed when I had first started it, and had to hop a number of inexpensive hosts (which weren't inexpensive when you have no income) because I'd outgrow their limits in a week or two. Sometimes, advertising is simply the best/only option available.

Advertising is not inherently evil; people have been paying to get their message out for hundreds of years. Actively boycott the sites/networks taking advantage of its users, but don't damn the entire system.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Morgon]

I just don't think it should be up to AdBlock to define what's 'acceptable'. What if they change their tune one day and consider 'Punch the Monkey' as acceptable? I'm all for setting standards (though my definition will greatly differ from yours, as I don't think gifs/movies are blanket-unacceptable, given the proper context/audience), but just be careful who you allow as the gatekeeper.

To answer your second question, limiting the site was not really an option. It had become a cornerstone of the community it served, which is without borders. Locking people out would have killed the site faster than it happened naturally.

Re:Out of curiosity

[JMJimmy]

The industry has had numerous attempts at self-regulation and failed. AdBlock may not be the 'right' ones to determine what is acceptable but they've taken up the responsibility and have done it in a way that seems acceptable to consumers. So while they may not be 'right' in the long run, they're 'right for right now'.

The larger point about the second one was that sacrifices can be made to make things affordable. Not every site needs every feature or the ability to do what the big boys do. Or identifying the level of interaction you can support and limiting users to that amount of interaction (ie: only so many comments per month or whatever)... there's a lot of solutions to resource issues but most people just see the basic in/out calculation and none of the possibilities in between.

Re:Out of curiosity

[RavenLrD20k]

You probably could have gotten away with organizing under a 501c7 and set up a donation link on your site. You wouldn't be directly charging your users for access (as was against your agreement), you'd be giving your user-base a way to assist you with the operational costs of the site. If enough of your users found a substantial enough value in what your site offered, you would have been paid, even if you had to periodically send out help requests.

You could also have taken advantage of affiliate programs as I once did and display those links. I found that they quite often managed to get around AdBlock simply because they were generally static images or gifs located locally with a href pointed straight to an affiliate page on that remote site. The site would operate exactly as if the user went to the remote site's main URL, but depending on the affiliate agreement they had, you'd get paid a few cents for the user making the initial click, and if they bought anything through your affiliate link, they'd cut you a check for a small percentage of what that user spent

The community site I had back then made more than enough to cover monthly and yearly hosting costs using the affiliate method, though I concede that at its most popular I didn't have nor need more than 4 servers (one DB server, 3 redundant web servers) behind the domain. I also didn't have to go the 501c7 route since the site wasn't considered large enough to be more than a hobby. The site and community collapsed more for political reasons than financial (several of us got tired of the bullshit from trolls and felt it better to disband entirely).

Hindsight is 20/20, but there were ways you could have made money to support the site without necessarily resorting to ads that Adblock would have been able to block.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Morgon]

I tried the donation route; twice, actually. The first time (when it was still very small) it worked very well, but when I tried again years later, towards the end, it did not. I know you're suggesting that the site wasn't 'useful enough', but it wasn't that the users didn't enjoy/appreciate the site, it's just a similar mentality to the vocal folks on every story on ./ about advertising: "I don't want to pay, in any form".

The only 'affiliate link' requests I got were from shady folks. I tried to be good to my users. There really weren't many relevant affiliates I could have. I wanted to get Amazon links up, so I could eventually link to games/peripherals and make a few cents on purchases, but just didn't get an opportunity to do so. It's hard to maintain a 5-million-user website when you have to have a day job to fund it.

I still believe advertising is a valid method of monetization; but we have to start educating end-users on whitelisting. The set-and-forget nature/mentality is dangerous.

Re:Let me help you out (in many ways) then

[CauseBy]

So, I see this troll on a lot of Slashdot stories. Can anybody explain the purpose? Is this software he's pimping malware? spyware? Does he profit somehow when we install it? Is it just old-school forum trolling for lulz?

Re: Let me help you out (in many ways) then

[Anonymous Coward]

He's a loser who has nothing better to do than troll the internet and he's been doing it for better than a decade now.

Re:Adblock = slower+less efficient+soldout

[Anonymous Coward]

Why's parent post to mine downmodded? It's factually solid. Moderate on content people, not personal bias.

Re:Let me help you out (in many ways) then

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it was a well done post with facts backing it up nicely actually.

Re: Let me help you out (in many ways) then

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it was a solid post with facts from good sources backing him up in it actually.

AdBlock's massively inefficient (proof inside)

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> AdBlock does FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

AdBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apk

Re:Adblock = slower+less efficient+soldout

[Anonymous Coward]

epyT-R didn't want his lie exposed on adblocks inefficiency proven by https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth...

UBlock = Inferior+Slower (Adblock = soldout)

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock/ublock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock/UBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> BOTH do FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

BOTH add complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apk

Who wins if "best ya got" = a bogus downmod?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The LORD of Hosts" https://answers.yahoo.com/ques... with rank after rank of protective power I can summon @ a word: Hosts

PERTINENT QUOTE/EXCERPT:

"The image this title brings to mind is of a mighty military commander, one who can at a mere word summon rank upon rank of protective power" via hosts/custom hosts files use

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

APK

P.S.=> "And the world wondered after the beast saying 'Who is like unto the beast, & who is able to make war with him'?" - Revelations Chapter 13 verse 3-4

I'm DEFINITELY "not that guy", however: It's certain no "Almost ALL Ads Blocked" & its variants, or even DNS servers locally installed fans can after this -> http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...

One thing's also SURE on that note: It's been YOUR "APKOLYPSE" (misspelling & pun DEFINITELY intended after the above + the results here, lol!)...

... apk

Who wins if "best ya got" = a bogus downmod?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The LORD of Hosts" https://answers.yahoo.com/ques... with rank after rank of protective power I can summon @ a word: Hosts

PERTINENT QUOTE/EXCERPT:

"The image this title brings to mind is of a mighty military commander, one who can at a mere word summon rank upon rank of protective power" via hosts/custom hosts files use

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

APK

P.S.=> "And the world wondered after the beast saying 'Who is like unto the beast, & who is able to make war with him'?" - Revelations Chapter 13 verse 3-4

I'm DEFINITELY "not that guy", however: It's certain no "Almost ALL Ads Blocked" & its variants, or even DNS servers locally installed fans can after this -> http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...

One thing's also SURE on that note: It's been YOUR "APKOLYPSE" (misspelling & pun DEFINITELY intended after the above + the results here, lol!)...

... apk

Who wins if "best ya got" = a bogus downmod?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The LORD of Hosts" https://answers.yahoo.com/ques... with rank after rank of protective power I can summon @ a word: Hosts

PERTINENT QUOTE/EXCERPT:

"The image this title brings to mind is of a mighty military commander, one who can at a mere word summon rank upon rank of protective power" via hosts/custom hosts files use

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

APK

P.S.=> "And the world wondered after the beast saying 'Who is like unto the beast, & who is able to make war with him'?" - Revelations Chapter 13 verse 3-4

I'm DEFINITELY "not that guy", however: It's certain no "Almost ALL Ads Blocked" & its variants, or even DNS servers locally installed fans can after this -> http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...

One thing's also SURE on that note: It's been YOUR "APKOLYPSE" (misspelling & pun DEFINITELY intended after the above + the results here, lol!)...

... apk

Who's a loser? "Best ya got" = bogus downmods

[Anonymous Coward]

You fail vs. "The LORD of Hosts" https://answers.yahoo.com/ques... with rank after rank of protective power I can summon @ a word: Hosts

PERTINENT QUOTE/EXCERPT:

"The image this title brings to mind is of a mighty military commander, one who can at a mere word summon rank upon rank of protective power" via hosts/custom hosts files use

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

APK

P.S.=> "And the world wondered after the beast saying 'Who is like unto the beast, & who is able to make war with him'?" - Revelations Chapter 13 verse 3-4

I'm DEFINITELY "not that guy", however: It's certain no "Almost ALL Ads Blocked" & its variants, or even DNS servers locally installed fans can after this -> http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...

One thing's also SURE on that note: It's been YOUR "APKOLYPSE" (misspelling & pun DEFINITELY intended after the above + the results here, lol!)...

... apk

Adblock+ = Slower, Inferior + 'Souled-Out'

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> AdBlock does FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

AdBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apk

WRONG! I'm Manchester too!

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't know as much as you think you do bruh. Roll out here to beautiful Manchester TN next week for Bonnarroo and you'll see all of the same disgustingly bright and annoying flashing signs on all the hotels and gas stations that the guy in Manchester UK is seeing. It's like a real life 1996 Geocities page. You have disconnected theory and reality. It's an easy thing to do.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

And Manchester TN gives you the middle finger as does Kimball TN, locally known as Kim Vegas. If there is a standard, it isn't like Iowa. It's more like, MUST BE 75% THE LUMINANCE OF THE SUN AT NOON ON THE EQUATOR.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

You are correct in your observations. Being conservative means that you believe in telling everyone what to do but that you are free to tread on whomever. Freedumb and all that bullshit.

DarinBob = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!"

[Anonymous Coward]

See subject "Forrest" & this -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...

DarinBob = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!"

[Anonymous Coward]

See subject "Forrest" & this -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...

AdBlock = slower, inferior + 'souled-out'

[Anonymous Coward]

Can adblock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious ads: See 2-10 next)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop communication to C&C servers
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up websurfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on ANY webbound app (think stand-alone email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily texteditor controlled data for the above
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage

* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on AdBlock doing it as well or at all!

APK

P.S.=> AdBlock does FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU usage flooring inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... + ClarityRay defeats it + it 'souled-out' & is crippled by default paid off to not do its job http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... & ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...

AdBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

AdBlock's SLOWER than hosts: http://superuser.com/questions...

For the BEST hosts file?

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

... apk

DarinBob = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!"

[Anonymous Coward]

See subject "Forrest" & this -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...

DarinBob = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!"

[Anonymous Coward]

See subject "Forrest" & this -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...