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Chrome AdBlock Joining Acceptable Ads Program (And Sold To Anonymous Company)
basscomm writes: Hot on the heels of the formation of the independent board to oversee "acceptable ads", users of the popular Chrome ad blocking extension, AdBlock, got notice that AdBlock is participating in the program, and that acceptable ads are being turned on by default. At the bottom of the announcement, buried in the fine print is word that AdBlock has been sold, but nobody will say to whom.
Sorry, adblock, time to let your product die and we will go on to a product that actually blocks ads
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
The cow is of the bovine ilk;
One end is moo, the other, milk.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
ABP was born out of the endless frustration of unwanted banners and spam. So once they start allowing it back in then i am betting someone will take over the torch and build a new blocker.
If you want your products sold, then make a good product! The forums and people will take care of the rest.
When you solely really on spam then your product must be crap or overpriced or redundant.
Seriously, if pages are annoying then there are 10.000 others to choose from. These guys need another business model..
I use uBlock Origin. Works better than adblock. Flashblock, uBlock, and Ghostery. Nice fast load times.
They were sold to Adblock Plus.
Take the money and run - don't blame him
In the early days of Chrome one of the reasons I stayed with Mozilla was ad blockers. When Adblock Pro tried that trick on Mozilla I switched to Adblock Edge. I assume Chrome users will do the same or if they can't find a proper ad blocker will then switch browser.
I started blocking ads because animated GIFs were too distracting to my thought processes. Now blocking ads is simple Internet security 101, just way too dangerous not to, and despite 'acceptable ad' programs is still an attack vector with no benefits if left open.
The ad industry probably believes it can stop the growth of ad blocking by consigning the big ad blocking apps and hoping users either wont notice 'approved' ads creeping into their browsing experiencing or that they'll be too lazy to find a replacement. But this is not like changing the default search engine of a browser to increase search traffic - ad blocking users are a much more motivated group. Not to mention that waving greenmail in the front of AdBlock will only encourage other developers to create their own software to cash in on the largess.
Aside from being defeated by loads of different adblock blockers (as well as the standard http://blockadblock.com/ generated scripts) there are loads of networks like PageFair that bypass AdBlock anyway. So "letting" acceptable ads through strikes me as a best option in a losing battle.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Considering that most video content I see on the internet is from some self-loading player that I don't want, I hope YouTube passes around the technology as much as possible. I don't mind watching a short ad for a video I want to see, but most video is stuff I don't want. Slashdot started doing this shit recently so I turned on the disable ads feature for the site. The lightweight, graphic ads never bothered me, but anything that makes noise or eats up a lot of bandwidth or CPU can piss off. I wonder how popular a campaign to promise advertisers who use those annoying ads that we will never buy their product again until they quit would be.
https://github.com/chrisaljoud...
faster, more efficient, and doesnt have a guilty conscience about blocking ALL the ads.
while you're at it,
http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/ho...
block advertisers by null routing them.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I'm all for acceptable ads and acceptable tracking, afterall we all liked the benefit we got from durable cookies in the early pre-cancerous stages of the internet. that sort of tracking is not inherently bad by itself. But then it metastisized and it became neccessary to block it. So yay for ad blockers.
But that just becomes an arms race. So enter "acceptable ads" in which certain ads are allowed in hopes of creating a viable not escalating equilibrium where the commercialization model of the internet is not soley based on pernicious forms of advertising. I don't know if this new equilibrium can be forced but as the new york times demonstrated the tracking and targeting consumes at least 1/3 of the web bandwidth we pay for, so it's worthy just to check that aspect.
But when it becomes commercialized like ad block or ghostery one feels like it's a symbiotic parasite. It leaves you vulnerable to smaller subset of actors who did nothing more than pay to have access to you, the meat being sold by ghostery and ad block. it's like paying off the somali pirates or highway robbers to let coiaches pass. I became the product. yet at the same time it gives me a free benefit.
Should I like this tapeworm that helps me shed unwanted pounds of bandwidth destroying ads and infective tracking systems? At the moment, the answer is there is no other answer.
Either way, letting in the big corp. ads deemed acceptable-for-cash or going nuclear on all ads indiscimiately, ultimately narrows the information I get.
However in one case, it limits which ads I see, and in the other it limits the profitability of sites trying to make a living with ad based bussiness models. I'd not want to choke off the free content I get, just to see fewer ads.
I think think acceptable ads, as competition heats up for the service will let me pick gate keepers that force advertisers not to chew up my bandwidth or "excessively" track me.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Adblock and Adblock Plus will now both ultimately take money in exchange for allowing ads. You can tell the agenda from the "default on" position.
So, can we get a list of stuff that DOESN'T do this? Maybe with links to the developers saying why not?
We can't edit posts on slashdot, normally for better, but this means I can't add to this list with responses. Still, respond please if you got'em!
The ONLY ones I know for sure are:
** uBlock Origin **- For Firefox and Chrome, this blocks a lot of privacy related things. This one seems like you can customize it, and the addon page tells you about other ad lists you can also apply. Importantly, the developer (gorhill on github) has had to deal with "acceptable ad" beggars, and shuts them down. The odds of this addon staying clean seem very high based on this.
Chrome store: https://chrome.google.com/webs...
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...
I don't know if this works with popular privacy or usability forks of Firefox and Chrome, and maybe some Palemoons and Comodos and Waterfoxes and whatevers can chime in with details.
The old Adblock Edge was a solid Firefox addon, but discontinued with a message to use uBlock Origin. The somewhat similar dramafilled uBlock (without the "origin") I think has no acceptable ads either, but I have a hard time googling that stuff.
** uBlock ** - This and uBlock Origin share a relatively recent codebase, but there are some developer disagreements. I couldn't find any evidence that uBlock uses acceptable ads, however, so definitely listing it:
Chrome Store: https://chrome.google.com/webs...
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...
*What else has no acceptable ad option*???
I'd even be ok counting ones that have one that is disabled by default, something that uBlock Origin has fought off successfully.
The best option, IMHO, is the hosts file, frankly. Be nice if we could work out some solid collaborative way to make my block discoveries help you with yours, etc., but it's just fraught with too many problems and potential black hat undertakings.
Still, it's pretty easy to just have a little app you can paste domains into that just appends your hosts file with Yet Another Reference to the Black Hole Of Data.
Well, under OS X and Linux it is. Not sure about Windows. But years ago, when I was using Windows, it did have a hosts file you could get at. Still true?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Why is APK so fucking obsessed with host files? Is this a rolling gag or something that I'm not aware of? Or does he just have a severe case of OCD and/or Asperger's?
I'm voting OCD/Asperger's. If he'd post once per thread, the idea might even be on topic and insightful. The idea, while not the intended use of /etc/hosts, isn't intrinsically bad: it's his relentless spamming of it, dozens of times times per thread, that's the problem.
Can APK Hosts File block APK Hosts File spam comments?
Perhaps there is a way to put the load, and the expectations, on the user.
You go to a website. If you desire a personalized experience, "click here" and then bookmark.
Resulting page is site.tld/longRandomGeneratedUniqueThing/restofurl.whatever
All links on the resulting page are set that way now. The site is responsible for keeping that "thing" associated with your preferences and etc., as well as generating the right links on all the pages you visit there. That's doable.
As long as you come and go from such a formatted URL, the site knows it's the same person.
If you don't do this, you get a non-personalized experience.
No cookies required. But it does require the user to be a little bit proactive if they want the experience to span multiple visits, because they'll have to bookmark. Otherwise, this visit will know it's them all the way across the visit, but when they leave... the info is either gone or buried in their history.
It's a bit clumsy, and it certainly isn't secure in the sense of others not being able to appear as that person and so forth, but "secure" surely isn't a word I'd use for cookie technology, either. It does allow for basic identity, and it does put control of it in the hands of the user. So for cases where the limitations are acceptable, seems like a reasonable approach.
If not this, then something else. But cookies and forwarding the browser all over creation should die in a fire. Somehow.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Is there some kind of hosts tweak I can use to block APK's spam?
Requiem for the American Dream
I don't know. I don't prefer host blocks because they break a lot of the web, and if they become ubiquitous they will be very easy for advertisers to work around in ways that make content retrieval very difficult. A programmatic solution has a lot of problems, but ultimately represents a more customizable way of getting the web the way the user wants to view it.
But APK isn't wrong. He's on a crusade, which makes him a giant sink of wasted text and nonsense, but he's not wrong. Deus Vult!
Even if they turn acceptable ads on, I wouldn't see the difference, because I only use adblock for the element blocker. The ads themselves are blocked directly in my router using a custom firewall script and a bunch of HOSTS lists.
So... yes or no? :D Your posts are a little tl;dr with too many transitions between bold/non-bold.
Requiem for the American Dream
slashdigg is tired of your shit. seriously just fuck off.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
For your sake, I hope this is all part of some elaborate joke :D
I'm going with "no there's no way to block slashdot spam via hosts files."
Requiem for the American Dream
Added to that, his posts look like standard spam. Where did he learn to write posts just like spammers?
Yah, your host file software (30k lines of code to manage a text file? WTF?) obviously doesn't work or it would be blocking you. You post more spam and ads for your software on here than other 3rd party ads. If your goal is to help cut down on spam and such, you're doing a really shitty job of it.
You've posted your stupid shit in here 25 times and counting (as of this comment's writing). Just get off the internet already apk.
Copy/Pasting your drivel over and over again doesn't make it any more true.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
You seem to have let trying to block advertising define your life a hell of a lot more than dealing with a few ads might have. Frankly, a loony for a loony cause. But hey, I guess if it helps you feel like you're contributing to something important ..
"Old man yells at systemd"
Cows shit milk?
Prior to the rise of advertising, almost all sites were 'independent.'
---- and you discovered them by thumbing through the printed pages of the modestly sized Internet Yellow Pages, guide books and magazines of the era..
It was a geek paradise defined off-campus by the limits of the dial-up modem, arcane and frustrating client software and services that were only beginning to offer affordable flat-rate monthly billing,
I said "spamposting". The word has more meaning than just marketing. Certainly, on most forums you get IP banned for posting the same text over and over again, and the offense is called "spamming".
My main concern with a hosts based method is that if *everyone* moved to that, advertisers would sidestep around it. Already they are looking for ways to avoid the existing generation of ad blockers by injecting ads that appear to be served from the main server- once the ad servers solve "trust issues" with the "content" guys, they'll be able to have the server you think you want data from scoop an ad up and serve it with the content. While that will require the addon guys to do more work, it will shut down the hosts solutions completely.
That being said, obviously hosts solutions are effective. I never disputed that. But I made a post saying "list things with no acceptable ads", and there's a lot about the apk engine I can't easily google. I have no idea what is (and is not) added to its blocklist, for instance.
You sure advertise a lot. You're worse than a full-screen flash ad.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Wait what? You crushed me? http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...
Looks like you're the one that got "crushed". You never answered any of my reasons why your system is better than DNS except that having a dedicated DNS server will use more electricity. All your rants and more were completely "proved wrong" in that post.
Unfortunately, some people just can't learn from their mistakes. You think your solution is so damn good that you sound like a kid screaming "gimmie my ball back!" at the top of his lungs in the kindergarten playground.
Host files have their place. Sticking millions of entries in it is not use, it's abuse. DNS won. Hosts lost. Get over it.
Too bad you're just going to copy/paste your reply after this again and call everyone trolls.
I feel sorry for you. You've taken something that was good and destroyed it. I'm sure that if you redirected half as much energy into something worthwhile that you do into posting spam all over slashdot that you could accomplish something noteworthy other than being the butt of jokes.
You're terribly easy to provoke, and provably wrong to boot.
Good day.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Ads. Switched to a combo of privacy badger & Adguard.
You're obviously APK, but try this:
One of his points is that a hosts file can protect against spam, which is about as likely as aspirin protecting against spam unless you're hosting your own mail server (and who the hell would run a mail server on Windows?).
As for the rest, hosts blocking can't block the "please donate/subscribe to us" banners on sites, and blocking trackers can break various sites. That's fine when you're using something like Ghostery/uBlock, where you can temporarily turn it off for a specific page (or even whitelist just one tracker on one site, i.e. whitelist New Relic on New Relic). A hosts file is a sledge hammer approach.
APK's standard response (those bits that are comprehensible) seem to revolve around these plugins using too much memory/CPU time. If I was concerned about that I'd still be using a green screen terminal. The standard solution doesn't require administrative rights, can block more, and can be turned off if it breaks a site (which means the lists can be very expansive if you want).
APK's solution is like looking at a light bulb and deciding what the world really needs is a brighter candle.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
more likely advertiser will buy all adblock stuff around and slowly expand the acceptable ad programs until it becomes useless. If I learned one thing from history is that advertiser will go nuclear and escalate very quickly to the point of self destruction by obnoxiousness (pop up and pop under came relatively quickly in existence and became the plague they are, same with audio video ads).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I have learned, it is just best to ignore him. He uses our +modded posts to be visible, every time we respond to him, it is his way of getting around being an AC with 0 or -1 modding.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Yeah, all it takes is the ad networks to use IPs in sites instead of DNS, and APKs hosts files can't block it anymore.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
This needs an upmod, that is at least funny if not also insightful.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
...when he said "another one bites the dust."
Can't even have a reasonable discussion with you, it's just spam spam spam. You're just as bad as the advertisers you fight against. I'd add you to my host file if it would block your posts but it can't, have to use a browser plugin for that.
That doesn't block spam itself, and I've seen plenty of links in spam that do point directly to an IP address, it's probably the most common place I see such links.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
He's obviously also got enough sock-puppets to keep everyone who criticises him modded down..
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
If we could hunt him down skin him and gut him we could stop that... Damn police always protecting the parasites.
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..