Slashdot Mirror
ASUS To Include AdBlock Plus On All Phones and Tablets In 2016 (betanews.com)
JoeyRox writes: Starting in 2016 Asus will ship all phones and tablets with AdBlock Plus integrated into their mobile browser. The ad-blocking software will not only be pre-installed but enabled by default as well. The move to include ad-blocking software on mobile devices is significant because unlike desktop users the percentage of mobile users presently employing ad-blocking software is very low at approximately 2%.
The sorts of politically incorrect software that Asian electronics companies can ship is sometimes funny. I'm sure there are a few smaller vendors that even ship a Torrent app with the explanation being up front "the customer wants to download pirated movies". I love it.
Baking in an adblocker will certainly raise eyebrows in Google and other big advertising syndicates.
This is an interesting move.
Will others follow suit and a crisis in online advertising ensue?
Or will ABP leverage this to extract gobs of cash from the ad industry to allow a lot of ads through, rendering it relatively useless?
I shall remain behind my DNS-based ad blocking here at home and watch with interest.
On a side note, some YouTube ads are sneaking through on a mobile device. Anyone know what domain(s) they're being served from? It's a fairly recent phenomenon; something's changed on their end it seems.
It blocks all the crap without any automatic whitelisting.
It's starting to feel a bit like the end of an era for the advertising-based business model for the web. Almost everybody I know now uses an adblocker on their desktop/laptop PC. My employer recently switched on adblocking-by-default on our office PCs, due to concerns over the number of malware-spreading adverts. Meanwhile, adverts while mobile browsing have become so disruptive (it's virtually impossible now to browse certain websites on an iPhone) that I'm strongly considering adblocking on my phone as well.
The web-advertising industry is on the verge of suicide. Few people had a problem with the static banner ads and most tolerated the animated .gifs, but the video-ads were a further intrusion and, for many people (self included), the auto-playing video-ads were the tipping point. The increasing prevalence of ads as a means of pushing malware and the failure of the advertising networks to screen them out seems to have been the tipping point for a lot of Government and corporate networks as well.
So the question is, what comes next and what does it mean? The strangulation of advertising income is going to fundamentally change the way a lot of sites operate. The pace at which newspapers and magazines are paywalling formerly free content is accelerating. In other cases, the content is free but subscription plans are available for an enhanced service, or even required if users want to leave comments or participate in forums. Are we moving towards a world in which only sites with a product to sell and small-scale operations will be free to browse?
If so, there might be upsides as well as downsides. One product of the advertising model has been the clickbait-culture. That's not just about "10 shocking things you won't believe" and "this one neat trick" headlines, it's also about deliberately provocative content. Stories which get people riled up are great business, if your business model is based on page-views and ad-views. Give people an interesting article that they enjoy reading and they will view the page once then move on. Give them something that makes them angry and they will leave an angry comment, then refresh the page 30 times over the course of the day to argue with other people leaving angry comments. Just look at the stories on Slashdot which get the highest number of comments...
Slashdot is a long way from the worst offender (even though, in the DICE-era, it undoubtedly is an offender). The advertising web model has turned the angry fringe voices, whether the ultra-conservative demagogues of the right, or the "ban everything I don't like" Angry Campus Narcissists of the left into a profitable business model and in doing so has arguably coarsened public debate and poisoned the wider political sphere.
So maybe the death of the advertising model and the move to a subscription-based web might be a good thing.
The APK guy's a bit late today.
The new competition is between brokers - ad "blockers" are used NOT to block all ads, but to block the ads of competing broker networks. This is why Adblock Plus was chosen: it isn't an ad blocker, but an ad broker-broker, the product of a company which requires a fee to be paid to let your network's ads through.
Oh, and before apk appears: your HOSTS solution is useless because I can't use it to block the advertising for your product that you spam over this site.
If it defaults to not allowing them, this could be a good thing. Otherwise uBlock would be the better choice.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
That's the obvious question. By installing ad blocking software by default they're creating a market (for themselves) where advertisers pay Asus to get their domain white listed and thus their ads allowed.
But your phone has to be rooted to use it. Adaway can be downloaded from D-froid [ http://f-droid.org/ ]. Each known ad web url is redirected to 127.0.0.1, really rocks :)
It will also have a custom whitelist that will allow ads approved by ASUS, so their "partners and affiliates" will still be able to bombard you with ads. Of course, ASUS will collect a fee for the privilege.
There is no such thing as corporate altruism, folks.
Don't poke the bear!
Let's just pretend that no one is using AdBlock instead of essentially *forcing* people to use it.
That way they won't try to find ways around AdBlock (I hope).
Its really great step from the user's point of view. Ads really irritates and after removing it, the user can freely access whatever they want. Basically they will enjoy to work on ASUS.
Not with AdBlock but with Ads
The first is that since they started Ads have gotten bigger, flashier and just generally obnoxious over the years which has caused people in general to start taking measures to actively avoid them. I sure as hell don't want or need to see a 2+min movie that takes up half my screen and PURPOSEFULLY blocks its own close button by pushing it up out of the frame. Forcing you to sit there and listen to whatever, every other time you click on an article on the same #$^!#$^ site. Something relatively small and unobtrusive I'm fine with, hell if it looks interesting I might even..... click on it.....
The second is that since every website and their dog, outsources to third party ad companies instead of handling things more in house. What you have seen is that more and more ad. There used to be a time when being a trusted site meant you could let your guard down to some degree and give them a bit more leeway. However since sites have taken to outsourcing and cross linking to everything under the sun, you just can't trust them anymore. I mean hell it wasn't too terribly long ago that YAHOO was serving up malware through some advertisement.
Then they take the attitude that you are stealing from them and are worse than pond scum, because they have made their sites both unpleasant and unsafe to view without AdBlocking of some form or another. When in all actuality they are the ones who brought this on themselves. All they needed to do to avoid AdBlocking was to slow their roll and keep things simple. Instead they doubled, tripled and quadrupled down on the very things that where driving AdBlocking. When what they need to do is take a step back, push simple ads that don't pollute websites to the point that it makes them flat out unpleasant to visit and prove that they are capable of policing their content so those ads are not going to be a vector for malware.
When I have FIOS and no data limit, the ads don't bother me too much. Video ads do still SUCK. On my phone where I have monthly limits, I don't want some BS video add sending me huge amounts when I am looking for directions to the discount store.
They should use an adblocker that really blocks ads, with no whitelists. The only acceptable ad is a blocked ad!
Consider it a bit like the Geneva Conventions, they don't make war a good thing but maybe we could get a ban on the worst forms of advertisement until we all hold hands and sing kumbayah.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
At that point why not just use lynx to browse the web.
The majority of the adblockers are very heavy handed. They break webpages. ABP is one of them.
It will also do one of two things to sites (regardless of content) that mainly rely on advertising. It will make them go under or the sites will insert javascript for adblocker detection and force you to disable it to use the site. So it will be a near zero-sum game.
What we need is an HTML firewall to block all of the third-party advertising and scripting. This gives sites better control on what shows on their site. Luckily there is a great piece of software for this very thing. Take a look a uBlock Origin. Don't mistake it for uBlock which is a different product. Don't just take my word for it, Steve Gibson has given it a glowing endorsement too. You can checkout how it works here: https://twit.tv/shows/security-now/episodes/523
No good deed goes unpunished.
Does it have a manually editable hostsfile (no, I'm not the AC posting that stuff over and over again but it does work). I had limited adblocking that way even on Symbian (it could not handle a huge hostsfile but I could block the most important ad and trackingservers), but Symbian had of course much more users than windows phone will ever have.
Wrong attitude. The use of an ad blocker which defines "acceptable" ads sends a clear message on what we can tolerate, and quite frankly I'm quite happy to tolerate ads that are not obtrusive, animated, or include any multimedia other than text or even a very small static picture.
What I don't want is a world where I have to make a micro payment to every bloody page I visit.
The number of blocked ads on mobile devices would be higher if:
a) we had blocking software which didn't rely on rooting.
b) we had universal browser plugins that worked with the popular browsers
c) Firefox Mobile wasn't such an incredibly intolerable piece of shit.
As i mentioned before, uBlock and uBlock Origin are not the same product. my uBlock Origin was running about 40MB verses the 63MB of uBlock in that screen shot. Also RAM isn't a usually an issue for most people. That RAM could be used for caching and making lookups and checks faster. The big issue is CPU and any disk I/O that the extension uses.
Also constantly editing the hosts file, especially on windows boxes, is a PITA. Regular users wouldn't be able to do it and those who can just may not be bothered. Also diagnosing and issue because of a previously blocked site is real pain in the butt too. On mobile devices, you probably can't even edit the hosts file without rooting you phone.
No good deed goes unpunished.
What I don't want is a world where I have to make a micro payment to every bloody page I visit.
You're likely already doing that, albeit indirectly. Who pays for the ads? You think businesses just grow their money on trees to pay out that money to website owners for serving ads?
No -- those ads are paid for by businesses, who must extract more profits from customers to pay for those ads. With the increase in "targeted advertising" where you tend to see advertisements for products you've been shopping for recently -- you're already making a "micropayment" for that business serving up that ad for that product you're interested in, which adds some small amount onto the cost of that product.
If you want to support that system, that's your choice. Personally, I'd rather see the ad-supported web die completely. I was around before it existed. It was fine. There are only a handful of sites I actually find valuable on a regular basis, and I'd gladly pay to support them if I had to. (And I actually have already subscribed and/or made donations to some of them.)
"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs."
Gonna have to post AC here...
It definitely, as a solid fact, does do that. I work in ads. We recently made sure all our ads were "acceptable" (and they previously hadn't been) per the adblockplus guidelines, in the hopes of getting onto their optional whitelist.
This came down from above; it wasn't my decision. I see it as pointless, because I personally use adblockplus too, and I sure as fuck don't enable the "acceptable" whitelist. I infer, then, that nearly everyone else does that too. But it doesn't matter; the strategists above said let's try to "work with it" and who knows, maybe some people do enable the whitelist.
And strategic wisdom aside, the consequences are that our ads are now less annoying for the people who don't block them. "Less annoying enough?" you might ask and that's a whole other debate. But the effect is exactly as you describe: it got us to limit our excesses. IMHO we did it for the wrong reasons, but it happened.
And we're not even on the whitelist yet. I think very few advertisers ever will be, but many of us want to be on it, or want to keep that option open if our numbers suddenly start falling (they actually haven't; even still, as of late 2015 I am convinced that a supermajority still aren't blocking).
Give adblockplus some credit, everyone: with this "sellout" move of the "acceptable ads" whitelist, they really did do the whole world some good.
Well they are better at gaming than OTHER laptops but.....
I use Adblock Plus and I never see ads, and it's a simple plugin. Fire and forget.
Host files can't block everything. Here's a real world use case for you. I like youtube, I visit it all the time so I can't block it with a host file. However there are hundreds of sites that embed youtube videos. Google can use this to track your browsing so I block them with a browser plugin. Host files don't let you do that kind of fine grain blocking, it's all or nothing. Youtube isn't the only site with this issue, all social media sites have link back widgets these days. The widgets use the same domain names as the main site which make host file blocking useless.
Host file blocking is a simple solution that uses minimal resources. It is not a silver bullet that will solve all the worlds problems like you make it out to be. It has its uses but it can't and shouldn't be your only line of defense.
P.S. The reason why people call you a troll and a spammer is because you're just going to copypaste the same reply to me listing the same old false 16 points without addressing or even listening to anything I just said.
Hopefully this will make things better as (at least on the versions before adblock) on ios many sites are completely unusable start to type in the search box Appstore redirect.
try to scroll the page? Appstore redirect. Try to click a link Interstitial and then appstore redirect. Try to close a page what do you think happens? app store redirect.
Don't have much experience with android tablets but most of what i've seen hangs on the ebay homepage.
Either way in my experience advertisers treat mobile users much worse than desktop users so this is much needed.
I suppose they could double down on devices without adblock but at this point the only thing they could do to be more intrusive would be to install something like cryptowall on your tablet.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
I think this is excellent. While AdBlock Plus might not be perfect, having it installed by a major manufacturer is an important milestone in stopping the business of intrusive advertising. One must consider that most of the general population does not care enough to install an adblocker. This is especially true for mobile devices. These same people are also not going to care enough to uninstall one, either. The more companies that start doing this, the less profitable serving insecure and invasive advertising becomes.
This will force more and more advertisers to instead switch back to normal, acceptable, responsible ads.
Wrong attitude. The use of an ad blocker which defines "acceptable" ads sends a clear message on what we can tolerate, and quite frankly I'm quite happy to tolerate ads that are not obtrusive, animated, or include any multimedia other than text or even a very small static picture.
What I don't want is a world where I have to make a micro payment to every bloody page I visit.
If you're using a wireless gadget, chances are that most of your bandwidth is taken up by those ads. And actually, just blocking them may not help your bandwidth much, because by the time your software figures out that a given download is an ad, all it can do is not display the ad. But its byte count has been added to your account by your ISP/cell provider. So you're paying for it whether or not you actually see it.
At least, that's the way it mostly works here in the US. Yes, if it's from a known ad server, it's possible to block its address and not download it at all. But advertisers are getting pretty good at avoiding this, setting it up so that if your software blocks by address, it'll block the content you want along with the ads that come via the same server.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
You currently have two choices if you want ABP on mobile: 1) you can install the ABP browser (which isn't Chrome or Firefox), or 2) you can can set up an ABP proxy to use your normal browser. Both options are slower and less reliable than a "real" browser.
They might start installing ABP, but does this mean they'll stop installing crapware (that you can't uninstall) on their devices? I doubt it. This gives Asus the monopoly for advertising on your device--only the ads that come through their own software will get through.
Plain image ads (hosted on your own site not 3rd party-provided)
How would that work? If a site hosts its own ads rather than entrusting that to an ad network, how will its advertisers trust that they're being fed accurate view and click statistics and not a line of bull$#!+?
Put up a paywall - subscribers only.
Say you open a search engine, and you find ten pages, one on each of ten different web sites. But each web site wants $20 for a year's subscription. I don't think most people are willing to buy a year's subscription just for one article from each of these sites.
Increased interest in micro-payment options.
I'm not sure how pay-per-page will work as long as credit cards still have a swipe fee on the order of 33 cents plus 3.3%. And I'm not sure how Bitcoin is a viable alternative when it still has a fee of 0.0001 BTC (currently 4.3 cents) per transaction to discourage dust spam.
What used to buy you a few GB hosting traffic per month, may now by you 1000x that amount.
And what used to buy you ten articles' worth of writing now buys you five.
Does ABP turn Craigslist into a blank page? That site is 100 percent ads apart from its help pages.
You can live in denial all you want but when you copypaste the same post over a dozen times in every thread about add blocking you are spamming. People have proved many (but not all) of your claims wrong but you don't listen, you just spam spam spam in reply. There's a reason why you have to post as AC and we all know what it is. You post this stuff so many times in each thread that people are actually asking for something to block you. That should tell you something but instead you keep spamming away. Talking to you is an exercise in frustration because you refuse to concede any point, refuse to admit you could be wrong in any way, refuse to listen to other people's input, you act like you're the all mighty authority on blocking that knows all and anything anybody else says must be wrong by default. etc. etc. etc.
Why should such statistics actually matter? If you don't measure the success of an ad campaign purely from sales numbers, you aren't measuring actual effectiveness.
...ads are much more disruptive and costly to the recipient on mobile devices. I'm glad they are doing this, it's long past time.
Without statistics, how would an advertiser go about determining which ad buys within a particular campaign were more likely to have contributed to sales? Or are you recommending cost per action (CPA) advertising, such as referral programs where the publisher gets a percentage of the advertiser's directly related sales? One problem with CPA is that it disregards customers who see an ad now and then decide to buy later. The other is CPA's association with CPAlead, a company offering a "content locking" service that requires viewers to take a survey or complete installation of a native application in order to be able to read a web page.
I'm frustrated that we have a high profile spammer on /. and no way to block him. Isn't that ironic, an unblockable spammer spamming about blocking software?
"micro-payment" has a definition. That is not the same as bartering or providing something for something else. Yes I am bartering, no I do not want to switch to micro-payments, mainly because currently advertisers super-massively overvalue knowledge about me.
I'd rather see the ad-supported web die completely. I was around before it existed. It was fine.
A disperse set of hobby sites run by a few highly dedicated nerds loosely collected into groups or rings, often out of date or a one time only publication, tiny user bases, static content with bugger all server / bandwidth requirements. Yeah I was there. I don't miss it one bit. The internet today is (IMHO) far better than it ever has been in the past with the exception of what is happening in the media industry with paywalling content. I would sooner have the internet of old than paywalling everything, but I would greatly prefer the internet of now over either of the above options.
But its byte count has been added to your account by your ISP/cell provider. So you're paying for it whether or not you actually see it.
Are you saying websites push ads into HTML in your browser, that your phone downloads images without actual HTTP requests?
I think you may need a better ad blocker.