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Yahoo Denies Ad-blocking Users Access To Email (washingtonpost.com)
JoeyRox writes: Yahoo is running an A/B test that blocks access to Yahoo email if the site detects that the user is running an Ad Blocker. Yahoo says that this a trial rather than a new policy, effecting only a "small number" of users. Those lucky users are greeted with a message that reads "Please disable Ad Blocker to continue using Yahoo Mail." Regarding the legality of the move, "Yahoo is well within its rights to do so," said Ansel Halliburton an attorney at Kronenberger Rosenfeld who specializes in Internet law.
Yahoo! think its a player. Good for you Yahoo!.
1) Disable AdBlock
2) Login
3) Set forwarding to other email account / Send all mails to that address
4) Logout
5) Enable AdBlock
Sorry, no profit, but the end result will be satisfactory.
Why would there be any question about the legality of this? Yahoo! doesn't have to allow you access to its service, and its now setting requirements to do so.
This is going to go over like a lead balloon. I know if I was greeted with that on a site I use, I would then start the process of going elsewhere.
They would do far better to just shift to some other way to display the ads using local servers instead of ad networks, if they really find all of this necessary. Oh, and in the process, make sure the ads are small, load quickly, don't pop up or under or on a time delay, have no animation and no sound, and no mouse over effects. Inotherwords, go back to the way things were before people found it necessary to block ads.
A simple hack for ad blockers, though this will require a few hacks to browsers, is to display ads with 0% opacity, and absolute position them in a place that can't be seen. With a few hacks to the browser, what you want to do is to have the rendering engine render everything as usual off screen, and then mirror the elements into a second page with the ads rendered invisible, such that javascript running on the page will see the off-screen page, possibly with simulated mouse and keyboard activity based upon what the actual user is doing (filter out keystrokes other than cursor keys). But sites powered by advertising need to learn that they must adopt conventions that keep advertising reasonable and reasonably unintrusive. If they can't make ends meet doing that, get off the web.
John_Chalisque
It can't. We now start to develop blockers that accept the connection to the ad site, slurp the data, run the JavaCrap that comes with it in a different sandbox with CoW access to the page sandbox, in case the ad wants to cross-check something, and show a blank frame where the ad should show. Arms race continues, problem solved for now.
Soon the ad blockers are going to be simulating that the user saw the ad without actually showing it.
Marissa Mayer was an executive at Google. She went to Yahoo to get all their remaining users to move to gmail (why were they still using yahoo is an interesting question that's not in the scope of this post). Well done Marissa, we hope your bonus will be significant when you'll be back to Google.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
effecting only a "small number" of users
You need to lern some properly English.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Eventually they'll require root access to your computer.
Did they forget this alreay?
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
Or maybe they had an epiphany?
CEO: "What do you mean some of our users didn't get infected?"
I'm stuck with a Yahoo email because of my ISP. I tolerate it, but I'm not overly invested in it.
I haven't seen the blocking ... if they do that to me I'll ignore them.
But what I have seen is them adding to the number of ad-sites embedded in my email by quite a lot lately -- there's now almost 20 external domains they pull in which I'm blocking in just my email. I understand Yahoo is increasingly desperate to pretend they are relevant and to bring in revenue, but it's not my damned problem. I didn't choose to use Yahoo, my ISP made them my email because they didn't want to provide it themselves.
So, Yahoo is something I use at my sufferance ... and my patience with them is growing thin.
They're not that good, I don't use them for anything but that specific email that I'm supposed to keep for my ISP. They keep adding ad sites which I keep blocking. If they block me because of that ... well, they'll cease to exist to me, really.
Yahoo is a company which really only lives on its own inertia of people who already have Yahoo accounts. Their painful decline into oblivion means they're being bigger assholes in trying to keep revenue.
And when that backfires on them, they might just discover how irrelevant they've become.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Hi AC re "Is there a browser plugin that does that already?"
"Six browser plug-ins that protect your privacy" (Oct 17, 2014)
http://www.computerworld.com/a...
"The Best Browser Extensions that Protect Your Privacy" (8/31/15)
http://lifehacker.com/the-best...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
You apparently don't remember that the internet existed in useful form before the prevalence of intrusive advertising.
Another major reason is the speed. So many web sites are so much faster with adds blocked. I am not talking about small change, but something that is clearly visible.
Right. Occasionally I'll see a "please disable your ad blocker" notice on sites that I like and that I use all the time. And I'll say, okay, that's reasonable, they have to make money to keep the lights on. So I'll disable the ad blocker and reload. Aaaand the site no longer loads, not even within (seriously) two full minutes. And so I say, if this is what it takes to keep the lights on, I'd be happier in the dark. So I turn the ad blocker off, and reload the same page, in milliseconds.
I did run for a long time at with a similar solution. I did this up until I installed an ad-blocker for the first time back over the summer. I used the HOSTS file to point a long list of domains to a Linux box on my network that served a page through Apache via the 404 error. The error occured, because the ad's URL was never valid when applied to my server. The page used JavaScript to match the iFrame's parent's background color and showed "AD BLOCKED". While this didn't work for all ads, it did for many and improved my experience.
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Landfill Mining Co.
Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow
my first thought is that this is evidence of a finance department coup meant to oust an ineffective marketing department.
Bad idea that shows no understanding of the marketplace in which they operate. I feel confident that there were better ways that they could have chosen to wind down a non-profitable service that would have had less of a negative impact on their overall corporate reputation.
This will only work if the site has a non-JavaScript version. Most sites that have some sort of anti-adblocking mechanism in place require Javascript to be functional. Without Javascript you get served a page that asks you to enable Javascript or disable adblocking.
What I'd like is ad-capper instead of an ad-blocker. I'm very happy to get some ads. But if the ad-content is more than 50% of the bandwidth to load the page then it's time to block the ad's above that limit. A lot below that then it won't change the page load time.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I block ads, because they lessen too much the user experience. Early on, ads weren't a nuisance, really, because we were only subjected to mostly static banner ads. Ads have evolved to be much more active employing animation, video, and/or audio. They have also gotten larger and incorporate other nuisance-causing tactics like page-over and content-shifting mechanisms to increase impressions. The videos in particular, especially the auto-run videos are the most annoying to me and resource demanding. Ads using audio are the runner-up. I am often listening to music through the computer as I work at the computer, so the audio interferes with this. No, I am not listing to ad-supported streaming services. I actually buy CDs and listen to the ripped MP3s I've created from them.
I wish we'd move away from the free, ad-supported, and data-sharing business model and find a way for the content and services to be pay-access-only without subscriptions. Yes, I do realize that this means many sites and services, especially those catering to a niche, will be lost. I do know that some are subsidized by revenue earned elsewhere. In the end, I may decide the loss isn't worth the improvement in user experience gained through the removal of ads or at least the pull-back of ads. Society is already paying indirectly for all this "free" stuff, because we are paying for something that funds the marketing budgets that are buying the ad space.
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Landfill Mining Co.
Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow