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AdBlock Plus Updates Acceptable Ads Policy
AmiMoJo writes: By default the popular AdBlock Plus plug-in allows some "acceptable" ads to be displayed. A blog post announcing updates to policy describes the goals of the update: easier to understand, more robust and more explicit about what is and isn't acceptable. The new criteria are listed on another page, and the option to disable acceptable ads remains.
I don't give a fuck what their justifications are. There are not any ads that are acceptable. That's it. End of story.
I really like this policy. Sites deserve to be able to show ads and make revenue on their content. That is how you get content to stay around and be good. The issue is the terribly intrusive and deceptive ads that suck up bandwidth and annoy everyone. I switched to uBlock Origins a while ago because of the memory AdBlock sucks up, but if they can get that under control I may switch back just for this feature.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
I've moved on to uBlock Origin.
Complete list:
End of list.
Sorry, dear advertisers. You poisoned the well. Now please get lost.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
uBlock Origin is roughly 12 times better than Adblock Plus. It's significantly faster, has less overhead, has a better user interface, and does not whitelist ad sites.
On the new tab page in firefox, click the gear and uncheck "Include suggested sites". That will get rid ""sponsored tiles".
Then:
Users: hey can you give us less intrusive and annoying ads
Advertisers: screw you here is your ad
Now:
Advertisers: hey please don't block our ads thanks
Users: screw you
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Does the adblock team disclose how much money they get from advertisers to allow them through their filters?
AdFilter
I'm using uBlock Origin and think it's better than ABP, because you can easily pick elements of any page for cosmetic blocking. For example, I've created my own rules on the fly to block sneaky ads at Arstechnica and unwanted youtube "recommendations".
However, it seems to me that its easier to detect by anti-adblock services, but perhaps that's also just because the advertisers have improved their techniques. Hard to tell, as I haven't used ABP in a while.
I block absolutely everything that even remotely resembles an ad, and don't want anyone to earn single dime from my website visits.
Does it include blocking third party sites? It's the main reason I block ads - and I'm not using adblocker, but third party site blockers like RequestPolicy and DNS blocking.
I don't mind seeing non-intrusive ads, but I don't like being tracked by third parties.
I run a website that uses ads. It's called The Geek Pub. I make things and I create videos and articles so that others can do it themselves too.
I also sell detailed plan files on the site for anywhere between $1 and $10 depending on how complicated the project is. This is how I would LIKE to make my revenue. But it doesn't work. I have no choice but to show ads. Why? Because I almost daily find a copy of every plan my site sells on bittorrent or file sharing sites. I've even had people post links to them in the comment section of my own site!
The TRUTH: People want everything for free and they have zero desire to actually support the content creators. They steal our content and post it for the world and then complain about the ads we use to make money. We can't win as content creators.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
Why not let the end user decide what level of advertising they wish to accept? Maybe one, ten- second ad per hour that occupies one- eighth of the screen or less would be acceptable to some people whereas others might allow two such ads per hour. Others might wish zero advertising under all conditions. The danger is that advertising will destroy the net much as it destroyed broadcast TV. A 30-minute show, with 8-minutes of advertising, made TV unbearable to the point that people stopped watching broadcast TV and the advertisers became ever more desperate as the number of eyeballs that saw the ads fell.
That's too effing complicated.
Is there any bash/batch script I can copy/paste to automate the process?
Mastering the English language is fucking easy: all you have to do is to put an f* word in every fucking sentence.
GFY
So today I thought for shits and giggles I'll browse at -1.
Only 6 incomprehensible psychobable posts by APK.
Only 1 mention of the size of someone's penis.
Very disappointed in Slashdot, this is a poor effort by shitposters everywhere.
Also, when I can't block, skip or hide ads, I *remember* what product was advertised, and by whom, and I make a mental note never to buy that product, and if possible, any other product from that company.
In my area, the local electric power company runs public service announcements related to safety around its power lines and other facilities. Have fun joining the Amish.
An acceptable ad comes from the same domain as to web page. Simple as that.
I don't respond to AC's.
Content providers are perfectly free to paywall their site.
Which means you won't be able to find anything useful from a web search engine anymore once it becomes common practice for sites to put up a $20 per site per year paywall. Or if not ads and not paywalls, how is a site supposed to pay its writers?
Or just buy some freakin ram you derp. What, are you on 4gb in 2015?
That may be true of desktops. But good luck fitting 8 GB into a compact laptop or a convertible laptop/tablet. A lot of such devices can use only the RAM soldered onto the board, and even those that do take SODIMMs likely have a chipset that limits the maximum module capacity.
By basing the business on ad revenue, the business owner has already accepted the manageable risk of some ads not being delivered.
But as the fraction of visitors using an ad blocker increases, this risk becomes less manageable.
Next, please sue the Lynx users for DMCA violation
Let's propose a hypothetical situation in which user agent and resource download analytics showed that 90 percent of your visitors were on Lynx, w3m, or Links. How would you fund a site with that kind of statistics? If through a paywall, then how would you offer access to first-time visitors who found your site through a search engine or a shared link without excessive payment processing fees?
Popups. Why can't it block popups that popup on damn near every page? Or those freekin' slide overs, or those pictures that jiggle until you want to put your face through the monitor?
use the MVP Hosts file.
Does a hosts file protect from any of these?
1. Randomly chosen hostnames with wildcard DNS (e.g. 88ebaef2.adnetwork.example)
2. Ads hosted on same origin as the rest of the site
3. Slowdowns when hitting a blacklisted site as the connection to 0.0.0.0 times out rather than a NXDOMAIN
4. Slowdowns when hitting a site that isn't on the whitelist at the top of the hosts file nor the blacklist that follows it, while the kernel-mode hosts file parser laboriously re-parses the entire multi-million-line file for every resolution
5. Sites that only one user of a shared PC, not its administrator, wants to block
6. Automatically updating the files across a heterogeneous network including Windows (non-Pro), OS X, and GNU/Linux
7. Ads and tracking on Android
8. Ads and tracking on Windows Phone 8/Windows 10 Mobile
9. Ads and tracking on iOS
10. Ads and tracking on game consoles
One thing that can block most of these threats is running a DNS server on your LAN and running your blocklist on that.
Earlier in your list of 16 things, you said hosts files protect against botnets using DNS-level load balancing, also called fast flux or round robin. That sounds reasonable.
But you also said it protects against botnets using a domain generation algorithm (DGA) and stop their communication with command and control. How does this happen efficiently, especially if command and control can generate one of several million domains?
You also said a hosts file protects against spam. How does that happen? Most of the mail routing that a DNS blacklist could block already happened between the message transfer agents (MTAs, aka "relays") that relay the mail and the message delivery agent (MDA) where your mail is stored for retrieval through IMAP. The only possible hit in your hosts file would be when your mail user agent (MUA, aka "mail client") looks up your MDA.
Furthermore, you said it "Works on anything webbound multiplatform." So how do you install a hosts file on Android, Apple iOS, Windows Phone, PlayStation Vita, Xbox 360, or Wii U? All these devices are known to have web browsers but no end-user write access to the hosts file.
I mean this in the most respectful manner possible.
You produce material that does not generate enough sufficient interest from paying consumers to support its production and distribution. You have therefore accepted remuneration from third-parties in return for providing them access to perform psychological manipulation and subliminal coercion upon anyone who finds your material interesting enough to consume at a market value of zero (as in, free).
Your material has negligible market value. That has no reflection upon you; most art has the same market value but significant social value. That you let those few who appreciate your work be influenced does. Advertising is exceedingly rarely to the benefit of the advertised-to.
I offer this not as criticism of your choice, but food for thought. The starving artist scenario is an age old quandry.
"Oh no... he found the
Not my problem. You want to sell something, find a solution.
The internet was here before commercial interest came. It will be here long after we got rid of them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The criteria are all about what the ad looks like... I care more about if its attempting to get around cookie destruction, doing browser history digging, accepting obfuscated JS from malvertisers, etc. It does say it doesn't allow Flash/Shockwave/etc, which is better then nothing, but not really good enough... I'm going to stick with NoScript (and not running adblock).
That just means more sites should be asking for money directly. I don't mind paying for content at all and I do donate/support/subscribe the few sites I care about.
Say sites suddenly switch from taking ads to "asking for money directly." Then you go to your favorite search engine and you see a credit card number field instead of a query field. OK, so you put in your credit card number, pay $20 for a year's subscription, and then do your search. Then every site in the results wants a separate $20 per year subscription because it costs the merchant 35 cents plus 3.5% for a credit card transaction. Micropayments still haven't been figured out.
In my experience, a lot of YouTube videos with unskippable preroll ads are videos containing non-free music. Would you prefer that videos whose uploader or copyright claimant demands unskippable ads be removed from YouTube entirely?
I pay $12/year for hosting
From which hosting provider? Does it allow Python, or is it just for static files? Does it offer HTTPS, either through Let's Encrypt or through bringing my own certificate? And how do you pay your writers?
Not my problem.
Slashdot's continued existence is a problem for your continued access to the Opportunist (166417) account.
The internet was here before commercial interest came.
Before the Internet was commercialized, it was available only in universities. Only students and faculty had access. Once the advertisement-driven Internet dries up, are you willing to go back for your master's or Ph.D. in order to continue using the Internet?
"psychological manipulation and subliminal coercion"
You come across as a 12 year old who found a thesaurus, nobody talks like that.
Also, you are completely wrong in your base assertion that it's worth nothing. Obviously his content is worth enough to put it up on pirate sites and for the effort to try to find it. If it was worth nothing, then people wouldn't go to the trouble of pirating it. Instead, it's more likely he's simply charging too much for it. But at the same time, it's also possible that it is worth what he charges for it and people are just dicks.
"You pay us enough money"
Please, for the love of fucking God - Go. The. Fuck. Away.
One post is enough. But having to scroll through pages upon of pages to see REAL content is annoying me. What you are effectively doing is creating ads; the very same we all want to block with tools and/or hosts files!, -- way to go. You've become the slimy advertisement person.
Please go shoot yourself after you get through jerking off to pictures of nude children on a beach.
I've decided to write a chrome/firefox plugin that will block ALL posts by APK, as I see this is advertisement and should be blocked thusly.
If you agree, please join the cause. It would make the web (and slashdot) much better.
Btw, apk, I've seen your app and it's a piece of crap. You truly don't know what you're doing when it comes to coding. It looks like you copy/pasted a bunch of snippets you found on google and then stop a bunch of people's block lists. That makes you a script kiddie
1. Hosts will block any host-domain name placed into them as blocked
this works on my DNS resolver, what about your HOSTS file?
(it blocks slashdot.org and tech.slashdot.org etc)
Just because someone shoplifts an item doesn't mean that the price-tag is appropriate.
"Oh no... he found the
Advertising exists primarily for one and only one reason. Commodities.
When a vendor offers a product or service indistinguishable from that of other vendors, he must find a way to make it *seem* special and to justify your purchasing it from him.
Apple, Tesla, Prada, Google, Rolex, Nordstrom, Nike, Facebook, and the Red Cross / Red Crescent offer relatively unique products / services and are themselves respected for that. The burden is on competitors to identify some way that their product is superior. Thus advertising, branding, intellectual property and often irresponsible claims. These famous companies continue to advertise in an inoffensive way not so much to sell you a product but to promote their reputation and the pride you'll have as an owner of their product.
Those are all premium brands & products. When you sell consumer level products at a low price point the problem escalates. How can Dell compete with HP selling nearly identical China made computers? Primarily advertising and hype. How does Chevy compete with Ford? Hype. There used to be a quasi-religious fervor among consumers who favored one or the other. Look at those industries who advertise the most and you will see commodity products and services that are difficult to distinguish. Mattresses. Insurance. Dental services. Investment advisers. Fast food ...
The solution could be an informed consumer. If everyone subscribed to something like 'Consumer Reports', where they could get honest, researched comparisons of products and services, then that would immensely deflate the hype benefit for advertisers. They would be compelled to offer factual information about how their product compares to competitors'--something the consumer advocate overlooked, new features, etc.
Currently there are ways to be informed about most commitments- whether for products, housing, schools, investments, or underwear for the kids. Not everyone has easy access to this information. Not everyone is motivated to seek it. But if and when they do, advertising will change dramatically for the better.
...omphaloskepsis often...
When it was banner I never blocked any. But now it is not anymore static banner but scripts executable for which thee can never be any guarantee. I will never ever allow ads which can execute stuff on my PC ever again.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Bogusly? That's precisely what the down mod system is for, mind you.
I've never down modded him, personally, because they make little difference on him. But down mods are designed to get rid of scum like him. He's a SPAMMER and needs to be treated as a SPAMMER. I cannot fathom why some of you actually put up with his dumb ass.
Looks like APK himself now; "Prove him wrong" -- A famous tag line.
Spamming is spamming is spamming. Go away, shill.
"Recent versions of Firefox have come with shitty built in ads, in the form of "sponsored" tiles on its new tab page.
Do these ad blockers remove those ads, too?"
Irrelevant, because I've removed the New Tab page. There's nothing there of value.
Tab Mix Plus->Events->New Tabs->Load on New Tab: Blank Page.
Your relentless spamming has convinced me- convinced me to never ever try or buy your product. Never.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I don't know this particular site, but just a generic comment. Sometimes the price is more than just the dollar amount, it is the time and effort to go through the process. Click, click, fill out this, accept this agreement, double check to make sure you aren't "opting in" to an unwanted mailing list, and so on. Or, just paste magnet link and wait. This is a big issue for me with various entertainment providers. Sure, I might prefer to pay some small amount to watch Game of Thrones, but the price is too high when I have to go sign up for their service at $2.99 a month, get their advertising emails even though I didn't opt in, support yet another clunky and antiquated browser plugin, and more. Ugh. Yeah, the price is a lot more than the dollar amount.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Mix his other work, uMatrix in with it. uMatrix is like an old-school software firewall except for your browser. It is awesome. It's now available on Firefox as well as Opera and Chromium. There's also HTTP Switchboard which is a bit complicated for an average user but I imagine you'd be fine with it. Here's a list of his work for Opera:
https://addons.opera.com/en/se...
I've offered to send him donations before and he refuses to accept donations. :/ I have no idea why. It's not like I was trying to buy influence and I was only going to send him a couple hundred bucks or something trivial. I just like his software and figured I'd reward him for the effort. I've been using uMatrix for years and I used ABP with it at the same time. I then used uBlock with it for a while but I've taken to not even letting that run as of late. It's installed but disabled. uMatrix seems to catch pretty much everything out there at the sites I visit - I've spent a long time curating my settings as I visit various sites over the years and I just export/import the settings so that I have them on all the computers.
Meh, it works well. There's a slight learning curve, but if you're a Slashdot user, you should be able to figure it out pretty quickly. Basically, anything not from the domain is blocked by default. Cookies are blocked, etc... I just whitelist certain things at certain sites as needed and then save the settings for future use. I've got quite a rule set now but it isn't hard to get started. It makes the web a much more enjoyable place. If a site asks me to disable my ad blocker then I just leave. It's their property, they've a right to make that request.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
"I mean this in the most respectful manner possible. Your material has negligible market value."
I'm sorry. Respectfully, I call bullshit. If my content is worth someone's time to put it on a file sharing site, it is worth 99 cents.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
I knew this was awkward because I really didn't intend to insult you. What you're replying to is the least important part of my point. Thing is, stuff is worth what people are willing to pay for it. If nobody's* willing to pay for it, well, there you go.
Piracy isn't your problem. Not really. Because most/many/some people are absolutely willing to pay for stuff even if it's available pirated, because we see monetary value in what the producer has made. That a think is downloaded off a pirate site doesn't represent a lost sale.
*For fuzzy values of nobody.
"Oh no... he found the
I spent about three days trying to get APK Hosts to work. I downloaded the file, consulted the tutorials, read the not-so-fine manual, and came up bupkiss.
So I downloaded a hosts file from Someone Who Cares and did it myself.
[End Of Line]
ABP, privacy badger, HTTPS, ghostery and other plugins are not protecting you from etag tracking. As far as I know, your only option is to browse full time in private mode and to prevent the browser from caching stuff, which makes the browsing experience awful.
There's limited stuff to be done with etag tracking. It's not as bad as, say, Google Analytics. But it can be used to track your visits without you knowing and identify you as a unique visitor across many visits to a website (or domain), especially if it's done right. You won't see a "tracker.js" or "1x1.gif" coming from a weird domain like you can see with shitty ads or spam. When it's done right, etag tracking comes from valid content like the CSS file or the company logo, and since it's requested by the browser as it parses HTML, the HTTP referer is passed along with the request even over HTTPS.
lucm, indeed.
Try offering it for a penny, as an experiment. I think you'll still find that people will refuse to pay a penny, and it won't be because it's too much for them and it won't be because they don't think your product is worth a penny -- it's just that paying is complicated, dangerous, non-anonymous, and not even available to some (eg children). In fact, odds are less people will buy your file for a penny than for a dollar.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Kinda bored so I tried your HOSTS file engine (x64 version), couple things from trying it out
when I pick normal CPU priority in your program, it keeps resetting to realtime when I change tabs or click a button within a tab (annoying)
Takes a damn long time (more then 10 mins) to process the validity test on an FX 8350 (only uses a single core)
would be a quicker way to remove dupes
Also I messed up my example, it should be
Hosts will block any host-domain name placed into them as blocked
Until you get a bad actor with 4.2 billion hostnames as subdomains.
advertisers rightfully don't trust webmasters on clickview counts
That's a good point. It'd be even better if you could cite some sources.
95++% of the time users will be using their favorites @ the TOP of hosts
But what about those other 5 percent?
I never intend to get to what's blocked SO if I have to parse hosts in RAM (fast in kernelmode) it's fast.
Crunching through 120 MB of data byte by byte (4 million entries times about 30 bytes per entry) for each resolution isn't exactly fast, no matter whether it's in kernel mode or in user mode. If kernels used a Bloom filter, it'd be different, as each query would hit only about 20 bytes at once.
Android & ADB's pull command can migrate hosts to a rooted phone
Which doesn't help if you won't or can't root.
vs. DGA as long as you enter what they use blocked in hosts it works.
If there are 1000++ possibilities of what they're likely to use next, you have to add all 1000++ to hosts. That can add up.
Vs. SPAM [...] I personally go thru junkmails myself viewing their source to determine the payload site
So it blocks the payload, not the spam itself. Thanks for clarifying.
Turn off Java when browsing and you will not get any ads.
I haven't seen a Java applet in months, and I still get ads. ECMAScript and Java are unrelated. And there are plenty of web applications that are broken when ECMAScript is turned off because they rely so heavily on AJAX.
There are a plenty of feelies that a cartoonist can sell, such as printed books, T-shirts, or stuffed toys of the characters. My cousin owns a few Garfield books, I own three Nodwick books and Cracked's The De-Textbook, and I've sent for a stuffed rabbit from Sarah's Scribbles. Even without feelies, there are plenty of electronic bonuses that a cartoonist can give to subscribers, such as the carrot of high DPI viewing, the carrot of formatting an entire month for binge reading on an e-reader, or the stick of putting free readers on a time delay. Even the TV series Sesame Street is moving to that, with a 9-month delay before new episodes hit PBS.
Define internet?
The largest strongly-connected set of computer networks using IPv4 or IPv6. BBSes aren't Internet because they don't use Internet Protocol, though some (especially the big ones like AOL) offered e-mail gateways to other BBSes through the Internet.
Patreon might be a better fit for you. Matters less if people pirate your work, as they are paying to encourage more of it rather than for something.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
To discourage dust spam, the Bitcoin network currently requires the sender to include a "tip" of 0.0001 BTC for a miner who processes a transaction smaller than 0.01 BTC. At the current exchange rate, that transaction fee equals about 4.3 cents for any transaction smaller than $4.31, which is a lot less than what the credit card networks charge but still eats into the feasibility of a pay-per-page scheme. And how easy is it for a first-time Bitcoin user to find a trustworthy exchange and online wallet?
hosts can't block apk's ads. So there's a big flaw right there.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
In what universe is the Red Cross still respected or respectable? At least, when considering the despicably greedy American Red Cross?
(Do your own research, no I'm not providing links, but start with ProPublica or Hurricane Sandy as search terms to use with Red Cross.)
Block their ads. And give your donation dollars to groups that actually deliver services, not fundraising hype, empty promises, and bloated executive salaries.
That a think is downloaded off a pirate site doesn't represent a lost sale.
One download is not one lost sale, but a couple dozen downloads can easily be equivalent to 1-2 lost sales. Especially when the downloaders now learn that the stuff is available on some sharing site, instead of knowing where to download the (paid for) original.
If APK's hosts file could block APK's ads, I would use it.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
You might be right, but my experience tells a different story. I sell LOTS of plan files, every day to lots of very nice people. I also provide some limited technical support to the people who buy them. What you might not be aware of is the number of school children who watch my videos and do my projects as part of a classroom exercise. I get emails from teachers regularly who thank me for what I am doing to help them teach children. Not everyone who does my projects are skilled like me and you.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
Still nothing in the "acceptable ads policy" forbidding tracking cookies, scripts, and other malware-like behavior. ABP still irrelevant.
Privacy Badger has its own "Acceptable Ads" policy, which is as simple as promising to respect the "Do not track" header and supporting HTTPS.
I am an online advertising / tracking company. How do I stop Privacy Badger from blocking me?
One way is to stop tracking third party users who have turned on the Do Not Track header (i.e., stop collecting cookies, supercookies or fingerprints from them). That will work for new Privacy Badger installs.
If copies of Privacy Badger have already blocked your domain, you can unblock yourself by promising to respect the Do Not Track header in a way that conforms with the user's privacy policy. You can do that by posting a specific compliant DNT policy to the URL https://example.com/.well-know..., where "example.com" is all of your DNT-compliant domains. Note that the domain must support HTTPS, to protect against tampering by network attackers. The path contains ".well-known" per RFC 5785.
Privacy Badger currently checks for this specific verbatim policy document, though in the future Privacy Badger may allow content from sites that post different versions of a compliant DNT Policy, and that there may be ways for users to specify their own acceptable DNT policies if they wish to.
Source
Personally, I find the approach to be less naive than ABP's, but only slightly.
I use uBlock Origin and find it to be lighter weight than the old Adblock Plus/edge extensions. Combined with uMatrix, it's a much more responsive and usable combination than the old ABP + NoScript pairing.
Adblock Edge was a fork of ABP created specifically because of the "acceptable ads" policy. It has since been discontinued in favor of uBlock Origin
Until advertisers commit to NOT invade personal privacy, there ARE no acceptable ads. I am all for funding the Internet through advertising revenue, it was a model that worked well for television and with suitable modifications works well for the Internet. But it is an established FACT that people will not make the moral choice when money is involved and that goes double for advertising executives.
It's hard to get viewers to "want to buy" a year's subscription just for one article found through a search engine or through a link shared by a friend. And even if viewers were willing to pay per page, it's hard to charge what viewers are willing to pay because of transaction fees. Bitcoin's transaction fee of 0.0001 BTC (currently 0.043 USD) is less than that of credit cards, but it's still significant compared to, say, 10 cents to read an article.
Well then why not just say, "Early 1990s Internet?"
Because by then it had opened up to commercial entities, which means to advertising.
a video stream (a poor stream but a stream regardless)
Virtually nobody would be willing to pay to watch a feature film over a stream that poor, I'm guessing. This means YouTube, Hulu, Netflix streaming, and Amazon streaming would not be possible over "Early 1990s Internet". Even Netflix's mail service would have failed because postage would have been too high for VHS. One thing that helped increase investment in Internet infrastructure to the point where people could stream standard-definition video at home was commercial involvement, which means advertising.
I had fiber at the office early on, for example.
Which is in fact where Cyber Monday came from. It began when a lot of people had Internet access only on breaks at work.
Most of it is noise. Some is not. You appear to be willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Or what am I missing?
Then who funds the operation of the sites through which you 'inform yourself'?
Sales. Amazon and similar sites that sell products provide information and often, independent reviews.
That's one way. But which "similar sites" host independent reviews for products that are self-sold, as opposed to being sold through Amazon? Is it like Angie's List where people need to pay to view the reviews? Or are you just unwilling to buy any product if it isn't sold through a middleman that also hosts independent reviews?
Perhaps I wasn't explicit enough in my previous post. Once it becomes common to have to "use the other two [o]r look further down the query list", use of search engines will become significantly more time-consuming than it is today.
You seem to be implying that anything on a torrent site is worthless, because nobody pays anything for it. On the other hand, if it doesn't have any value, nobody will put it on a torrent and nobody will download it. There seems to be a disconnect here.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Then let me try again: Without the opportunity presented by advertising-supported publication, how likely is it that companies would have built out infrastructure to bring tens or hundreds of Mbps to the home?
The community donation model works well.
No it doesn't. A cursory search (Google donations vs advertising) turned up Ask HN: How much do you earn with donations vs. ads?, containing an anecdote that someone is earning 20,000% (200 times) more from ads than from donations.
Then let me try again: Without the opportunity presented by advertising-supported publication, how likely is it that companies would have built out infrastructure to bring tens or hundreds of Mbps to the home?
It doesn't matter, it is done.
One can enjoy acres of land in New York due to the subjugation of Native Americans, it doesn't mean that subjugation was right, or that we should continue subjugating peoples to this day in an attempt to reap the benefits. It also doesn't mean I'd begrudge that guy his land or his happiness to enjoy it in 2015.
How did newspapers get people to pay for centuries before the internet?
By taking cash payments. The drawback is that cash works only in person.
LOL. What the hell are you ranting about? I don't demand anything. If you want to visit my site, great, if not great. That's your choice, not mine. I can't make you do anything, and even if I could I don't want. to.
Some answers:
1. Malware... I only use google adsense. Google's network is not full of malware. Yes some people use shady ad nets, I don't.
2. Yes, I do believe people like you want everything for free. I bet you also pirate movies, and make up some excuse about how sucky all the platforms are, so you'd just rather steal them.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
Dude, chill out with the copy-paste
lucm, indeed.
No, I do expect that some piracy does represent lost sales. It's just - unsurprisingly - a complicated topic. At the high-demand end, with popular, commercially-valuable end, it's most obvious but still complicated. Meaning, take a hypothetical perfect BluRay rip of the new Star Wars movie, and make that available Day 1. Sure, it's certain some people who would have gone to the theater to see it will not, because they can watch it in their homes. On the other hand, there will be a number of people who pirate it and decide it was worth the big-screen experience and go to the theater to re-watch, because of the pirated copy. How the numbers break down is unclear and unknowable.
Down in the lower-demand segment, where the audience is in the dozens of people, it gets harder to judge what would've been, could've been, should've been.
Frankly - and I know I'm stirring up a bag of worms here - I believe patronage is the (currently best) answer. Things like Kickstarter allow fans who wish to support a thing to do so. Creators get the support they need (or not, if the project doesn't fund). The product gets made, the backers get theirs, and frankly, if a backer leaks the product (say a PDF) and nobody else ever pays for a copy, well, kind of so be it. The patrons (a.k.a. people willing to pay) have paid. The leeches who pirate it after... likely wouldn't've or could'nt've. I'd personally prefer the creative people I've backed focus on the next wonderful product that I will pay them to create instead of spending any time hand-wringing because someone out there has a copy without having paid for it.
How that fits into your project I don't know. But the easiest way to tell the difference between a paying customer and a non-paying customer is that the paying ones give you money. Focus on them.
"Oh no... he found the
So you're saying you can't pay someone unless you are standing in front of them?
I can't pay someone ten cents without standing in front of them.
Your response is thoroughly off topic.
If "world-class" means you don't listen to potential customers and beat them over the head with a spammy stream of tripe, then I really don't want any part of it.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
advertisers rightfully don't trust webmasters on clickview counts
cite some sources
someone who posted IN FAVOR OF ADVERTISING ONLINE (Lauren Weinstein technologist who submits articles here a lot -> "majority of users are never going to change the ad blocker settings" (You'll Probably Hate this Posting about Ad Blockers and Ad Blocking))
That's a good source for the claim that advertisers and site operators fear a world where everybody blocks all ads. But it doesn't mention advertiser distrust of statistics provided by publishers that self-host ads. I was looking for something to cite specifically about that distrust.
Hosts will block any host-domain name placed into them as blocked
Not if something uses 4 billion subdomains. Your current hosts file blocks about one-thousandth of that figure.
I never intend to get to what's blocked
I was referring to the case when you access something you know isn't blocked but isn't one of your favorites either. Does the registry hack you mentioned elsewhere fix that?
Admins can centrally easy migrate hosts across a LAN via scripts (login or taskscheduled/chronjob work)
I was referring to multiple users of one computer. Say I have a roommate who uses Facebook on her user account, but I want to block all access to Facebook, including tracking through its Like button script, while I'm logged in to my user account. With browser extensions, I could have it block fbcdn.net and facebook.com only for browser processes run under my user account. Is that a job for login scripts?