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Adblock Plus Reduces University's Network Traffic By 25 Percent
Mickeycaskill writes: Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada claims it cut 25% of its network traffic (40% of video traffic) by deploying Adblock Plus across its internal network. The study tested the ability of the Adblock Plus browser extension (PDF) in reducing IP traffic when installed in a large enterprise network environment, and found that huge amounts of data transfer were saved by blocking web-based advertisements and video trailers. The experiment was carried out over a period of six weeks.
Disclaimer: the study was funded by Adblock Plus.
Even though it's funded by adblock, I still believe it. May not be such high percentages, but it will certainly take a measurable chunk away.
Individual sites cry foul because they cannot meet their advertising targets affecting their revenue, but from the point of view of the user that is active on the net they are bombarded by advertising. Stripping even 10% away can be a good thing...
Slashdot even had an ad that hijacked the browser and kept pulling the page back to the location of the ad on the page.
Disclaimer: the study was funded by Adblock Plus.
Gosh, they must be selling something. It's not as if they'd just give Adblock Plus away for free.
I could see 25% if you handling mostly text/images. But with streaming services, I feel like it'd be a bit less. Though there are naturally going to be diminished traffic just due less content being transmitted.
But it is still perfectly plausible that advertising is what clogs the tubes a lot more than torrents.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
This seems like a "no duh" thing that would have been done long ago.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Sounds plausible to me. Of course, I'd love to see some actual results from an unbiased study, but I don't doubt that by cutting out all the obnoxious and unnecessary ad traffic you'd reduce your network usage significantly.
And that's even aside from the benefits of blocking a malicious vector.
Was this a Flash ad? I save a lot of Internet traffic and CPU time on an Atom laptop by just setting Adobe Flash Player to "ask to activate". In my experience, most major ad networks currently aren't smart enough to sense that the Flash object has failed to load in order to replace it with an HTML5 video ad.
To beomce AdBlock and AdBlock Edge because AdBlock whitelisted some ads by default and made it difficult to remove those whitelist entries?
I heard something to that effect, any way. I can't remember when it happened but I remember a pretty big stink being raised about it and I swapped over to using Adblock Edge.
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
I could see 25% if you handling mostly text/images. But with streaming services, I feel like it'd be a bit less.
What tips the scale is the fact that a lot of sites stick video ads into text/image articles.
until advertisers vet every single advert (like a newspaper) and use static adverts instead of javascript they will remain blocked.
Where does that leave web applications that use scripts for core functionality, such as online whiteboards or even opening and closing comment subtrees in SoylentNews, Slashdot, or another threaded web-based discussion forum? People will end up whitelisting scripts on those web applications' domains to "unbreak" them and getting ad scripts along with them.
Adblock if you use the standard block lists blocks youtube ads.
If it is acceptable for a client-side proxy or browser extension to block the display of preroll video ads, would it also be acceptable for YouTube to retaliate against the user of such proxy or extension by blocking the display of the video that plays after the preroll video ad?
I use noscript and have no ads nor tracking while on slashdot...
Which is why I block known ad servers by their hostnames instead of messign with browser settings. So many things I do for work and school depend on javascript and such working, it is much easier to play with your hosts files (home, single user) or block them at the router.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
And caching HTTP and DNS requests reduces your network traffic.
Especially if you cache the DNS responses in /etc/hosts and forge ad networks' addresses as 0.0.0.0 in the same file.
... if you visit the first article linked in the story, while using AdBlock, you get a giant pop-up complaining about your doing so. :-)
To me, it's both. A disclosure disclaims the implied lack of affiliation to a particular concern.
Even though it's funded by adblock, I still believe it. May not be such high percentages, but it will certainly take a measurable chunk away.
I'm surprised it's not more.
Perhaps that's me, though. My browsing tends to be sites, such as Slashdot, where the meat I'm after is text, and the site's chaff is mainly icons, formatting-prettys, buttons, and other things that are static, image-light, and either susceptable to substantial compression or rendeded by the browser from small descriptions. Ads, meanwhile, tend to be image-rich, moving, and flashy, and designed for the add site's customer (who has litte concern for the viewer's costs) which chews up bandwidth.
I'll presume it's so low either because others browse more bandwidth-intensive sites or site designers, in this age of broadband and optimized-only-for-appearance site design tools, are also not interested in keeping the bandwidth down (and the resulting performance up).
Individual sites cry foul because they cannot meet their advertising targets affecting their revenue, but from the point of view of the user that is active on the net they are bombarded by advertising. Stripping even 10% away can be a good thing...
For reducing viewer distraction, cutting bandwidth costs, and avoiding delays in web-page rendering.
I NEED to suppress the ads when I'm at the ranch, with only slow dialup. A single image can make a page take minutes to load, when it could have been up in a second or less. So imagine one surrounded by banner ads, sidebar ads, embedded ads, footer ads, and so on. One animated ad can make the page take half an hour or more to load, and dynamic content can make it never finish at all, as the content changes outstrip the bandwidth.
I even browse Slashdot with a configuration hack corresponding roughly to enabling firefox's long-lost "delay image loading" option. To do otherwise, even in classic mode and with "patron status or enough karma to disable ads", would be impractical.
Without adblock plus AND noscript, (and maybe flashblock,) I'd be off the web when out of town.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
When I can be bothered to install AdBlock on a machine, the responsiveness goes up significantly. I'm guessing most of the speed increase isn't in the downloading of resources, but the messy JavaScript that has to run in the browser to position everything.
On a related note, I also remember hearing something about when the new CEO of JCPenney took over, his team noticed that almost 1/3 of all network traffic coming out of their HQ was YouTube. That's a LOT of cat videos. It's enough trying to balance control and freedom on desktops; I can't imagine having to police the company Internet connection.
I have Adblock+ installed on my browser, but I only use it on the most obnoxious of sites.
There are 3 ways content sites can support themselves:
1) With payments & subscriptions;
2) With Ads outside of the content;
3) With sponsored content that *is* an Ad
I choose 2. I don't want to have to pay for every site & page that I click on, so the only other option a site has bar explicit ads, is with sponsored content. Content which attempts to look legitimate & impartial, but whose ultimate goal is to influence the reader for financial gain.
I reserve the adblocking only for when I'm forced to use the flashy heavy sites which drag my browser to a crawl. I've even gone so far as to never have used the /. function to disable ads. I use the site, I want to support the site, and I occasionally click through to the ads I personally find interesting.
Adblock plus has a coloured history of cherrypicking advertisers to quietly ignore. It was accused of accepting bribes from google to allow their ads. it has a whitelist of ads it considers tasteful enough to allow as well. Its also been fingered for slowing the browser experience for many users.
try microblock instead. And dont rely on just adblocking plugins to keep the network clean. null route known ad servers at home and work using a blacklist http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/. the same process can be applied to rooted android phones as well, creating an ad-free experience that saves you money.
Good people go to bed earlier.
AdBlock Plus is awesome. Another really useful tool is Ghostery. It might not reduce bandwidth dramatically, but by blocking beacons, trackers, etc. it junks tons of JavaScript content and makes web pages render far more quickly. This really improves the browsing experience.
Adblock Plus is old and busted, uBlock Origin is the new hotness.
It reduced data only 25%? I would have guessed more like 5X
Perhaps I mistakenly inferred recommendation of NoScript from "use static adverts instead of javascript" in comment #50081673.
... if you visit the first article linked in the story, while using AdBlock, you get a giant pop-up complaining about your doing so. :-)
Not if you also use noscript. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Say it costs $20 to provide a service. Advertisers are willing to pay only $10, and subscribers are willing to pay $10. The result is Hulu Plus, which has both ads and payment.
See, this one guy said I should use his custom HOSTS file to block this stuff...
/duck
/run
The first rule of AdBlock Plus is that you do not talk about AdBlock Plus.
THE SECOND RULE OF ADBLOCK PLUS IS THAT YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT ADBLOCK PLUS!
caps filter bypass: lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
In the case of Hulu Plus (or cable TV), subscribers are never offered the opportunity to foot the whole bill.
The subscription + advertising model of Hulu Plus and cable TV are due to the advantages of being able to derive income from two distinct non-communicating parties. Since Hulu is owned and run directly by the media networks, it's not surprising that they're keeping the same business model. Since advertising and commercials are the foundation of their entire empire, I'd be surprised if they ever offered access to their content entirely commercial-free.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
No, they charge you for the channels, which are the content.
YES but we are not allowed the option.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Say it costs $20 to provide a service. Advertisers are willing to pay only $10, and subscribers are willing to pay $10. The result is Hulu Plus, which has both ads and payment.
mmmm not the ones I know.
haha. now THAT is clever
With a total reduction in network traffic of 100%!
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I'd mod you down if I could, stop talking about the fucking hosts file, we hate the fucking hosts file at /..just stop.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion. -- Spazmania (174582)
I wonder if the monthly costs between Amazon (no commercials), Netflix (unfortunately starting commercials), and Hulu (lots of commercials) compare in this way.
http://www.digitaltrends.com/h...
According to this site, Netflix with no commercials (starting commercials sometimes for their own things, before or after the show, not during) costs almsot exactly the same as Amazon and Hulu:
http://www.businessinsider.com...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
There is something wrong with an economy that prioritizes advertising over production. There is so much production capacity that advertising has to absorb excess profits to capture market share from a shrinking group of consumers with enough disposable income. Instead, create money and transfer it to individuals in the form of a Basic income. Stimulate innovation with challenges. Put the basic income financing on the Fed's balance sheet, so there is zero cost to taxpayers. Index all incomes to inflation, with the Fed providing the adjustments, so purchasing power remains constant.
Not sure it's a valid representation.
Maybe HuluPlus just wants $10 more/person?
And next year, maybe it's $15 more...so more/bigger/higher$ ads.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Some of us are willing to pay (with actual money, not eyeball-time or personal information) for commercial-free media. It's only the people that are constantly chasing "free" that should have to put up with the shock-and-awe advertising campaigns.
Paying for access, only to also be subjected to advertising, is bullshit. I would gladly pay Hulu to cover the share that they're getting from advertisers, but I'll pay them exactly nothing if I can't lose the advertising altogether.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
I'm surprised it's not more.
That was my first reaction too, then I remembered how much streaming has taken off. Globally, video streaming accounts for a bit more than 50% of all traffic. Excluding that means that at least 50% of non-video-streaming traffic is caused by ads.
You'd also expect that video streaming was higher among a younger demographic like a University. If removing ads decreased the video traffic by 40% and 25% of total traffic was ads, the non-ad video streaming accounted for up to 62% of the total traffic at the University (depending on what percentage of ads were video). By that number, ads account for at most 67% of non-video-streaming traffic. That number can go up more once you subtract out the 5-10% of traffic caused by Bittorent and music streaming. I was expecting to add in a factor for email, but even given the 80-90% of email that is spam, the total email traffic has been dwarfed by other traffic and is isn't worth including.
Based on all that you could expect ads to account for anywhere from 55-90% of web browsing traffic, which sounds more reasonable.
Does it cost $20 though, or is Hulu gouging their subscribers? I don't subscribe to, say, NBC, yet they and their affiliates manage to turn a profit from advertising alone. Digital distribution is extremely cheap, and yet, it costs more to buy a digital download of something than to buy a physical copy. Something is amiss. Hopefully competition will force downward pressure on prices, but right now it's more of a cartel than a competition. Netflix may be an outlier in that regard, for now, but Hulu and "premium" content providers like HBO and ShowTime trying to charge $10/mo for their limited content is a bit ridiculous. And Hulu doesn't even create original content.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Wouldn't that be the exact opposite of the findings? After all, it is ad networks that carry most of the Internet's malware.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
So you still don't get the user to see the ad, all you've done is waste their *and your* bandwidth.
Bandwidth is a lot cheaper for a server in a datacenter than for a viewer behind a WWAN (cellular or satellite) connection, which tends to have a cap of 3 to 10 GB per month. So WWAN users have a monetary incentive against downloading ads that will not be displayed.
until advertisers vet every single advert (like a newspaper) and use static adverts instead of javascript they will remain blocked.
Where does that leave web applications that use scripts for core functionality, such as online whiteboards or even opening and closing comment subtrees in SoylentNews, Slashdot, or another threaded web-based discussion forum? People will end up whitelisting scripts on those web applications' domains to "unbreak" them and getting ad scripts along with them.
It leaves them mostly unaffected. Adblock Plus is an adblocker, not a javascript whitelist addon. You may be thinking of NoScript.
I use AdBlock frequently to block Javascript that is loading from somewhere other than the page I'm on. This disables a lot of the annoying ads.
No commercials on Netflix here in the UK - I guess having an ad-free public broadcaster of world-renowned quality forces the other market players to raise their game (we have an average of 12 minutes per hour rather than 18 on our other FTA networks).
Given that most of the costs must be for content, imagine what the USA could have with a similarly funded ($19 a month) public broadcaster...
I currently subscribe to none, but I'm told Netflix and Amazon Prime also tend to have older shows than Hulu Plus because the royalties are cheaper. If you want to stay current on watercooler conversation, you may need the service with both revenue streams. From the article you linked on businessinsider.com:
To be honest, my unfounded speculation is that the subscription fees alone are enough to cover the operational costs plus a respectable profit for Hulu Plus (and Amazon/Netflix when they aren't being squeezed by the media companies). I think that the advertising revenue is pure gravy and that they'll never give it up because of the licensing exclusivity that they hold (=they can) and their longstanding partnership with advertisers.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Agree totally. The moment anything includes ads is the moment I stop paying for that thing.
The big problem is that the ability to encounter ads is forced as hard as they can.
"Ok before you can see whatever, watch this ad. Fast forward won't work obviously." -> adblock
"Oh, I see you're using adblock, well whine bitch cry" -> greasemonkey to hide that I'm using adblock
Advertisers see no issue demanding that their clients try as hard as they can to subvert user control of their machine and time. Fuck that bullshit.
uMatrix - gorhill, replaces Adblock, NoScript etc.
I remember a related story a few months ago and I was using Adblock Edge (forked non-sell out version of ABP) and advocating it. People kept spamming my thread saying that uBlock was better. So I tried it out and am now a convert. It is in fact lighter weight and nearly transparent, but since they don't pay for placement you have to search for it 2x in the add-ons to find it.
I primarily use Firefox, with uBlock (you can enable even stricter subsets of rules if you want, I did without issue), HTTPS Everywhere and Privacy Badger (the last 2 are from the EFF). I only see ads at work on other people's machines. There are other good add-ons for other stuff but this + wipe everything on browser close and private windows are nice.
The only memory leaks seem to come from anything Flash based. So I'm forced to kill/restart FF every few days or it gets progressively slower and slower. I've noticed it's not really an issue without something running Flash.
Wasn't the point of targeted advertising supposed to be that you would need fewer ads to support a site? Behavioural marketers argure that if they had to place ads by the general demographic of a site's visitors, rather than target ads to individuals, then there would have to be as many ads as there are in a print magazine. 25% of traffic seems like a lot from that perspective. I realize that the ads are probably not taking up a huge amount of area on the page but I think they are every bit as intrusive as magazine ads, if not more.
Game Of War really bugs me, not because I've ever played it and had a problem with the actual game, or because of the ads, but because of the name. It's just lazy. "Game Of War", really? I imagine the first meeting with the new advertising firm.
"OK, what are we selling here?"
[slight accent]"Well, we've got a game of war."
"And a name! 'Game Of War', got it, let's not spend another second thinking about that, now let's talk about whose boobs we're going to show everyone."
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I can't believe anyone actually uses that to try and guilt people into not blocking ads.
You make a good point. I was mostly thinking of ad-supported sites operated by for-profit companies that may in fact have to pay royalties per play to an upstream licensor. Perhaps a service that hosts videos uploaded by the public should give the uploader (or Content ID claimant) a "Play despite ad blocking" checkbox to allow playback of a "monetized" video when the ad fails to load. Uploaders whose incoming donations exceed ad revenue would turn this on; uploaders without a donation flow might get away with turning it off.
While reading both articles about cell phone data usage and the test of Adblock Plus downstream data transmission reduction, I realized that some of the data transmit ion of cell phone apps and cell phone web browsing goes to the mobile advertisements, then aren’t we paying money to be advertise to. Shouldn’t the advertisers pay us money for our mobile data they use just like they pay for TV or print space?
The cynic in me wonders whether that was calculated marketing sleaze as opposed to laziness, maybe they're targeting people who try searching for Game of Thrones. The various app stores all have auto-suggest, so you start typing in "game of" and get other suggestions including Game of War.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
I doubt that a game with a $40 million annual advertising budget, including Super Bowl ads, would rely on mistaking them for something else. They're obviously trying to spread their name, I just think they chose a really lazy name. From what I hear from reviewers, it also sounds like their gameplay is equally lazy, but put Kate Upton's boobs on TV and they earn $600 million with a shit cash-grab game.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
There is no evidence that new episodes of "New Girl" are available at any price to Netflix
Only because FOX is bigger than NFLX. When publicly traded corporations are involved, everything has a price. Netflix just happens to be at a lower end of the market, buying rights once the royalties are cheap enough. Do you remember second-run theaters? They would show movies at a deeply discounted ticket price because studios charged a smaller royalty to show films that had already finished their first theatrical run. It's a form of urgency-driven price discrimination. In this case, Hulu is to full price theaters as Netflix is to dollar theaters.
Amazon Prime
Amazon's pay-per-episode model.
Amazon has both the pay-per-episode model and the Netflix-clone that Prime subscribers get. I was referring to Prime.
While on the topic of requesting such new features from the video sites, I would also love to see an option added in to simply PAY for the content directly, one that if utilized would disable advertizing.
Google Contributor is supposed to do this, replacing Google ad units with "thank you" boxes. I've been on its waitlist for weeks.
Not everyone has the self control to just say "If the site is only supported by ads, and I refuse to load ads, then I will simply refrain from going to that site"
Especially if the major web search engines refuse to give end users a way to filter out results that are "only supported by ads".
World-renowned developers MPAA and RIAA banded together and are proud to present: TorrentBlock Plus! Download now for Firefox, IE and Chrome! This browser add-on will reduce your network traffic by blocking out magnet links and links ending on .torrent!
An unnamed DOJ government official used a thick envelope that he happened to have in his inside pocket to make a quick calculation that shows network traffic can be reduced by as much as 50% (actual results may vary. See details in store.)
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
A good hosts file would block a lot of these ...
War is a really stupid card game that I used to occasionally play with my sister when we were really bored. (If you don't know it, don't bother. Even an 8 year old thought it was stupid and pointless.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Adblock is awesome at blocking those pesky ads and autoplay videos. Indispensable for modern Web use.
I charge forward recklessly, leaving chaos in my wake.
I wonder how hard it'd be for the cableTV operators to allow not a la carte pricing per channel, but per network. So, if Viacom is a dick and basic cable will cost double for that, make subscribers pay double if they want the optional Viacom package with all the channels that Viacom broadcasts, and if the subscribers don't want to pay double, they don't get any Viacom channels. Then when Viacom doesn't get much revenue because not many subscribers are willing to pay double for their basic cable bill, then Viacom will adjust its pricing.
One of the great reasons to use Adblock Plus or equivalent is that you can write custom scripts in addition to the stock lists that it uses. All mention the Kardashians, Kanye West, and their ilk has vanished from my screens. Life is good.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
We have 12 minutes maximum per hour of advertising on ITV, C4 and C5 because they're regulated by ofcom, not because of competition. They're defined as public service broadcasters, whereas all the other channels aren't. There's actually a limit of 8 minutes an hour on average between 6pm and 11pm, I've just looked this up. What the channels actually do is (essentially) not advertise on less popular programmes, so they can use the 12 minutes per hour later. I'd always wondered why there were so few adverts on the cricket highlights on channel 5. Unfortunately "advertising" does not include self-promotion, or promotion of sister channels, so the cricket advert breaks are mostly filled with that.
I'm not sure what the benefits of being a public service broadcaster are exactly compared to all of the other channels that don't have to abide by these rules and have far more adverts. The channels which show loads of American programmes use the same 1/2 hour slots. The Big Bang Theory, as an example, has a running time of as little as 18 minutes, resulting in 24 minutes of adverts or other cruft per hour.
Disclaimer: the study was funded by Adblock Plus.
Well, they needed the study for that.
You could have also asked any long-term power-users from the times of dial-up Internet.
Back then I ran a NAT + Squid web proxy + custom ad-cutting rules in Squid, and it was reducing the amount of traffic by pretty hefty margin. In fact, it was so much, that some ad-laden web sites were actually becoming responsive. And no endless "Waiting for ..." messages in the status bar. (Granted, pretty quickly the ad agencies invested in the capacities and stopped being the bottleneck, but still they were a huge drain on the bandwidth.)
Today, I use AdBlock with rather long list of JavaScript blocking rules. Makes some unusable web-sites actually useful. Previously it was the limited bandwidth of the modem lines. Today it is literally seconds some websites take to render (while CPU is at 100% load; that actually bothers me more). The only problem that in the past I could reliably block the offenders, today I cannot: JavaScript and HTML5 shit is totally different ballpark and at times I wish all the hipster "web-developers" would just die.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Do even need Flash to be installed any more?
Homestar Runner and Weebl and Bob and animutations are vector animations in Flash format. Rendering them to pixels and encoding the pixels to video is possible but bloats them by a factor of roughly ten. Did the animutation scene ever warm up to Edge Animate?
And I'd mod you up just so the whole thread could appear for those of us who surf at 2 and up...
So tell me *why* you hate the hosts file? For a laptop, what other method exists of making sure a connection to a particular hostname is never made? What about when said hostname has many IPs associated wtih it? Or for a home network, what makes it easier to go to "http://printer" instead of having to remember the darn things IP address?
I can take the negative part, but don't just tell me it is bad, tell me how I can get the same functionality without the bad ...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Who gives a shit about your stupid fucking program? No One.
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
Fuck off you loser
Oh man, You didn't get the joke.
Don't you remember the hosts file guy? The troll who posted an 8 page long comment about hosts file in every single thread...
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion. -- Spazmania (174582)
The cynic in me wonders whether that was calculated marketing sleaze as opposed to laziness, maybe they're targeting people who try searching for Game of Thrones. The various app stores all have auto-suggest, so you start typing in "game of" and get other suggestions including Game of War.
Or Game(s)
(my Windows introduction)
Installed Win95, opened Internet Explorer and went to Microsoft.com searching for games.
Just saying there's a large population that would search for just the word GAME(S). This is the first time I've heard of "Game of War", I thought it a game. I use a large HOSTS file and have no need of an AD blocker. I also have never had a need to use the "disable ADs" option on /. . The resources saved by using a HOSTS file over a program is substantial.
Lynx (and other similar text based browsers) still works as do some for phones and tablets designed to strip out large graphical elements. That's one workaround for newsfeed sites where you just want the text (eg. news stories just in) and don't want to wait for the ads.
"Mobile View" is your friend if offered (eg. this news page):
http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/justin/?pfm=sm
War is a really stupid card game that I used to occasionally play with my sister when we were really bored. (If you don't know it, don't bother. Even an 8 year old thought it was stupid and pointless.)
So the song is right, it really is good for absolutely nothing :)
Nope, sorry. The GNAA super long troll posts got me to surf at 2+, and with a (for me) -1 on Funny, that pretty much keeps me from seeing the trash and drivel...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
I take it one step further and use NoScript with FF. Nothing runs. Sometimes I'll allow scripts to run wide-open and find most of the internet is almost un-viewable by all the clutter. *
Like blocked parts on the web sites, things not working, etc.? I see those often. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The whole world has become advertising! i hate it...
I do desktop support for one of the larger departments on the SFU campus, and this is the first I've heard of it. It is in no way universal to SFU; I'm pretty sure I would have heard about any large-scale test deployments of this nature.
I have pitched this idea a couple times, though. If someone else on campus has approved it, that's a huge boost to getting it done in my department.
This is the goatse.cx of text, lol
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
What the hell is this response? Some kind of attempt at advertising? Made with Borland Delphi? Really? People still use that? lol!
Hi goatse.
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
Copy Pasta much?
You're the type who absolutely, positively "must" have the last word, aren't ya? Replying proves it, lol
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain