Adblock Plus Can Now Be Rolled Out To Every Single Employee In a Company

New submitter Mickeycaskill writes: Adblock Plus adds large scale deployment (LSD) to version 1.9 of its software, allowing IT managers to block adverts on thousands of computers in one go, months after a German court ruled the practice was legal. The move is likely to concern online publishers who rely on advertising to generate revenue.

Comments

It's not the adverts in themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

but the fact that you smear them all over my face, and that I can't connect to just YOUR website, but I effectively connect to fifteen OTHER sites to download scripts, just to make YOUR website run correctly. I use Ghostery and Ad-Block not because I am against advertising, but because I want a leaner and more tolerable web.

I understand the web is more complex today than a decade ago, but there MUST be a way to make today's websites better in these regards.

Re:It's not the adverts in themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

Structure them in a way that they cannot be used as an attack vector and only then will I think about removing AdBlock. No Flash, no Java, and if you assault my eyes with flashing GIFs and CSS fly-overs, I'm taking my eyeballs and money elsewhere.

Re:It's not the adverts in themselves

[Runaway1956]

Yes, of course it is. If I'm browsing YOUR site, then I've implied that I have some trust in YOUR site. Cross site scripting demands that I also trust those other ten, twenty, fifty, or maybe even thousand other sites. If you demand that kind of trust, then I don't need your site. Drive-by installation of malware is far to common for us to trust all those unidentified sites.

Re:It's not the adverts in themselves

[DickBreath]

I think advertisers SHOULD NOT BE RUNNING CODE on my computer.

If you must show me an ad, that's one thing. To ask to run code on my computer is quite something else. Malware has been spread through ad networks, and I promise you it will be again. And again.

Advertisers have only themselves to blame that people block ads. At first web ads were more than tolerable. I was happy to see them, knowing they paid the bills. Then it got worse. And worse. Sites started having tiny bits of content surrounded by ads and you had to click the Next button twenty times to read a ten paragraph article that turns out to be devoid of real information. And other things I could go on about.

Online publishers ought to be careful of the ad networks they get into bed with. Those ad networks should be careful about the actual advertisers. Some of these ads are outright deceptive -- trying to imitate the look of a dialog box on a certain widely used OS. That kind of clever behavior turns out to be bad for ALL advertisers in the long run.

I did say I actually liked the idea that ads paid the bill in the early days. Now I view ads as a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Many of the advertisers have absolutely no sense of shame or restraint. They would tattoo advertisements to the insides of our eyelids if they could. Yes, really.

Ugh

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

I'm not looking forward to this arms race. Close one door with advertisers, they open a new one that's more obnoxious.

Re:Ugh

[Blue Stone]

Ad blocking was born in response to the arms race advertisers launched (and lets be fair here, also the websites that hosted them) where their ads became increasingly intolerable, obnoxious, disturbing and disruptive (to simple reading comprehension, never mind anything else). This behaviour *necessitated* a response; intitially simple pop-up blockers (now integrated into browsers AS STANDARD!) and gradually moving forward.

If anything, we've seen a lull in hostilities for the past few years as ad blockers have proved very successful, limited only by their install base.

The next round will probably involve websites refusing to show content until adblocking software is disabled (seen here and there already) and if/as this becomes more prevalent, ad blockers responding with stealthing mechanisms.

Since users ultimately own the rendering device, I'm not certain the advertisers can ever win. And god knows, they lost the moral argument long, long ago.

Contributor

[MSG]

I wonder if AdBlock should refer people to alternative means of supporting web sites that publish useful content. I'd like to see something like Contributor gain widespread acceptance.

https://www.google.com/contrib...

Re:I get that ads are nessesary for websites...

[grimmjeeper]

The few bad apples in the basket resulted in us throwing the entire basket out of the window.

Yeah, it's sad that 95% of the ads out there had to ruin it for the rest of them. ;)

Re:Great timing

[johanw]

What video ad? :-)

Boo hoo ...

[gstoddart]

The move is likely to concern online publishers who rely on advertising to generate revenue.

Boo fucking hoo.

If the ad industry is going to be a vector for malware, then too damned bad. Inside the corporate firewall, the integrity of the systems is all that matters, and your damned ad revenue isn't even relevant.

Yes, your model says you'll make money from ads. But nobody is under any obligation to view your damned ads.

Don't like people skipping your ads? Make it a subscription site with login required.

Between the security risks, and the privacy implications, I will block any and all ads for as long as I have the technology to do so.

There are 8 domains just on this page as I type this whose sole purpose for being embedded in this page is advertising revenue. And that's not my damned problem.

I would love to see more corporate firewalls just straight up blocking ads. Corporations would probably have far less viruses and security problems.

DuckDuckGo

[dltaylor]

When I switched to DuckDuckGo, I was prompted, very politely, to allow their advertising. I whitelisted that site ONLY, and, so far, have not been burned by them (reasonably well-targeted ads, clearly identified, without visual or audible noise, and, AFAICT, no malware).

You want a site whitelisted? Treat me with respect.

This is about "Adblock Plus" not "AdBlock"

[xenoc_1]

Seriously folks, pay some attention to the name of the product and what it means. It's stuff that matters.

"AdBlock": A Chrome, and later other platform, ad blocking extension that has nothing whatsoever to do with "Adblock Plus" either in terms of codebase or project history.

"Adblock Plus" (note no MixedCase): The increasingly-monetizing adblocker which is owned and marketed by for-profit company Eyeo, that Wladimir Palant created to make money with the open source adblocker he took over as maintainer years ago, but did not create. The one that takes money from advertisers to whitelist so-called "Acceptable Ads" and has that feature turned on by default, so most non-techies see ads from Eyeo customers.

"adblock": Not a product at all but a generic term for an advertising, and sometimes also privacy, blocking extension for browsers. There are many competing products which might be generically called "adblock".

"adblocker" A more obviously generic term for the set of "adblocker" products that include, among many others, AdBlock, Adblock Plus, Adblock Edge, Bluhell Firewall, uBlock, uBlock Origin.

"Adblock" One of, if not the, earliest adblocking extensions for Firefox. Long obsolete, it was the inspiration for, and partially the codebase for the first version, of Adblock Plus. The maintainer of AdBlock (note the MixedCase) also claims Adblock is an inspiration for AdBlock but is no part of its codebase.

The article is about only Adblock Plusâ from Eyeo Inc. Which has the most commercialized, most cooperative with advertisers, and some including me would say, most skeevy business model of any of the major adblocker. Though the drama around the creator of uBlock forking it to "uBlock Origin" and the massively overlarge donation-begging by the new uBlock owners are some evidence that new-uBlock is pretty skeevy too. Which is why this tablet has uBlock Origin running in Firefox.

I'd Like the Old Internet Back Please

[lazarus]

I don't care what happens to websites that rely on advertising revenue to stay alive. I preferred the "web" when the content was provided by enthusiasts, not corporate clowns. And yes, that definitely includes this web site.

I don't feel even the slightest bit of shame for blocking ads. You use technology against me. I'll use it against you.

Enough is enough

[raxtich]

You know, I was willing to accept a few ads on a website because I understood the need to generate revenue. But I finally had to resort to installing AdBlock because it seems many websites forgot about actual content in favor of revenue. It got to the point of absolute ridiculousness, there were pages with maybe one or two paragraphs of content buried under tons of zooming, flashing, auto-playing, screen-covering crap that it just wasn't worth the bother, so I would just click away. It also doesn't help that the #1 reason for my browser crashes and lockups where because of some stupid Flash ad.

Your router

[Runaway1956]

Whatever you use for a router can do it. I have a Netgear open source router. Flashed it with Tomato firmware, then installed the MVPS Hosts file on it. A startup script updates the Hosts file at boot, and then every four days after booting. Of course, the concept isn't exclusive to Netgear, or to commercial routers. Install it on your gateway, whatever that gateway may be.

I would be interested to hear how much bandwidth you save by blocking advertising for a company. I'd also be interested in learning how much your internet improves in terms of responsiveness. It made a big difference for me, but I don't administer hundreds or thousands of computers.