Slashdot Mirror
Forbes Asks Readers To Disable Adblock, Serves Up Malvertising (engadget.com)
Deathlizard writes with a report at Engadget that when this year's "Forbes 30 Under 30" list came out , "it featured a prominent security researcher. Other researchers were pleased to see one of their own getting positive attention, and visited the site in droves to view the list. On arrival, like a growing number of websites, Forbes asked readers to turn off ad blockers in order to view the article. After doing so, visitors were immediately served with pop-under malware, primed to infect their computers, and likely silently steal passwords, personal data and banking information."
And with laws like the DMCA you can be sued for telling other how to bypass the ad block block.
Seriously, this is why we run ad blockers, and why I stopped reading Forbes. They need revenue, and I don't trust them to vet their advertisements, so I get my news elsewhere.
Which is sad, because I like a lot of their articles.
Never underestimate the stupidity inherent in all human beings.
What's a redear?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Adblock ain't going anywhere.
If you're unable to protect the users on your site because the ad revenue from the malvertising is that much tempting to you, then screw your site, we're just going to go elsewhere.
Man this place going to the dumps...
Jack of all trades,master of none
Matter of fact they do it in the story just below this one
http://politics.slashdot.org/s...
Seriously I know for some reason they have relentless need to plug Ask Ethan but seriously could they at least do it by posting a link to an archive site. Archive.is comes to mind as a good alternative to links to Forbes
When all it takes is someone to make a ruleset/filter to bypass the Adblock blocker.
I hate the DMCA as much as the next guy but there's no DRM involved in blocking ads. Now, if you told people how to get around a paywall (even a trivial one) then you'd have a point.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
is convinced the ads just got too annoying, but in my experience there's no amount of annoying in ads that makes Joe or Jane average run screaming from them. I'm guessing it's relatives sick of cleaning malware. I run some ads on my site to pay for bandwidth and what have you and I've stuck with plain Google ads even though other folks might pay more because I can't be bothered dealing with serving up malware to my users. Both AVGN & Penny-Arcade have seen their sites taken down by Malvertisements and now even Forbes?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I'll accept content from the domain that's in my address bar, and that's it. If somebody wants to show me ads, it's going to have to be from their own domain.
I don't respond to AC's.
There was a time before advertising infested the internet. Then the first ads started to appear, and many of us warned, "If you support those sites, soon the whole place is going to go to shit. The internet will turn into a clusterfuck of excessive commercialization, fake reviews, astroturfing, and meaningless click-bait content designed to sell eyeballs to advertisers". But did people listen? No, because there were dancing monkeys.
When javascript-infested sites first started appearing, many of us warned, "Are you people fucking insane? Giving random sites the ability to run imperfectly sandboxed code on your computer is going to be a disaster. It'll result in horrifically annoying behavior like pop-unders, unclosable windows, auto-playing audio, and most likely malware. It'll result in behavioral tracking on a scale you can't imagine. It'll result in wholesale transfer of control away from the owner of each computer, to ad companies. Is that what you fools WANT?"
But did people listen? No. Like mice hooked on opiates they pushed the lever and and again for the next hit, without considering the long term ramifications, until it's become hard for most people to use the web without javascript, because we let it become so ubiquitous that nothing fucking works without it. We were too stupid to say "no" when the camel's nose first entered the tent. Now, here's the camel!
The same WILL happen with sites that refuse to serve content if you block ads. A few of us see where that road goes and will say "no thanks", but most of us are far too stupid. The end result will be a web completely unusable if you don't want to let the ad-men control your computer. The end result is TV 2.0, rather than what the internet used to be: a democratic medium where everyone had a voice. It's a wholesale transfer of control from everyone, to a few.
We all get what most of us deserve. Unfortunately, most of us are drooling mouth-breathers.
I've rarely seen a website so encumbered with shit, like Forbes'. Not only should one not stop using ad-blockers when visiting them, one should simply never visit Forbes at all. Add it to the list of blocked sites.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Fucking shills.
https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=145194#p145194
HTH! And fuck Forbes!
Thank goodness I don't turn off my adblocker for either of them.
The irony-clad hypocrisy engaged by all parties are just too damn laughable.
By Ghostery count, Engadget serves only 16 trackers on its website, whopping one less than Forbes.com. Engadget is accusing Forbes for malvertising.
Ghostery itself appears to be a remedy for the rampant tracking problem, but it's real business model is to sell user blockage data to the trackers so they can optimize for more intrusive tracking.
Slashdot, an active shilling-out place for Forbes trolls like Ethan Siegel (the "starts with a bang" guy, marketing droid for Forbes), is linking to the Engadget report.
You guys all are too damn high on the hyperreality scale.
But in conclusion, I agree that Forbes is among the worst. Fuck Forbes and the horse he rode in on!
I wonder if them asking you to turn off your adblocker and then serving you malware (an acknowledged reason people use adblockers to avoid) makes them at least partly culpable for any resulting infection?
If not then next time I see one of these notices I will drop them an email with my Terms Of Servicing for them to agree too before I disable my malware protector (adblocker).
I never went back to forbes when they demanded adBlock removal. Since they are serving advertising and charging you for it, can I serve them an invoice and charge them for reading it.
I am considering setting up a disposable Linux VM for reading sites that won't show you content with AdBlock on. But there's no content worth risking your machine. And there are multiple sites for news articles - Forbes isn't unique - and their articles are sometimes quite poor.
Adblock plus is telling me it's blocked 13 ads on this page and that's with the excellent karma opt-out.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Now is a good time to ban StartsWithABang.
And it was with no sense of irony that I report the very next Slashdot story, about the North Korean Nuke, links to Forbes' story that asks me to what? Disable my Ad Blocker.
Perhaps one thing sites like Slashdot can do about websites that encourage people to disable their adblockers is to not link to them? Maybe?
Now stop linking to Forbes, slashdot. Archive.is if you need to. That website has been a steaming pile of shit since they started demanding what you think and see, of course they think nothing of demanding what your computer processes and does. They are tyrants, STOP LINKING FORBES
uBlock doesn't appear to be affected on Forbes. Read articles, see no ads.
People like slashdoters need to make sure every idiot and their mother has an adblocker installed - and take out any ability to disable it.
If even %70 of people out there would turn away from sites that refuse to serve up content when ad blockers are on, then perhaps they would get the message to fuck off and die.
Note that browser makers Google, Microsoft, and Apple have continually pushed for DRM to become part of web standards.
And that they obtained considerable financial influence over the browser maker thought most likely to resist (Mozilla).
And that Mozilla gave in on DRM and continues to make inexpicable blunders and lose market share.
After such a relentless campaign to ensure all available browsers contain DRM, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see DRM used to protect ads, particularly in video. Stopping you from reading/recording a video stream necessarily stops you from altering it.
Damn, am I ever so happy (as always) that the proven tech leader was ousted as Mozilla's CEO in favor of the former head of marketing.
So I'm waiting for his comments to mine..."Forbes has ZERO right to complain about this! They've already been shown very recently to have advertisers that are serving up malware using pop-unders. So if Forbes can't get their act together and actually do proper due diligence, their response is instead "turn off your protection"? Pretty lame, and this policy is actually really poor for a "business magazine" to do. Luckily there are plugins for stopping the adblock checks...Forbes "right to profit" is not greater than my need to protect myself.".
Whenever I encounter a page that requires me to turn off adblock: I close the site.
Hosts files do a better job for less and apk proved it repeatedly on slashdot and here on tepples' website in the opening line on.
I went ahead and went to the Forbes site (which it says I'm "still" using an adblocker, in the same sense that I'm "still" a carbon based life form), and then I went and grabbed one of the scripts that they serve on the main page in lieu of fucking content.
Here's a link: I originally put a TINY amount of it here, but it was SO shitty than even after cutting it down it would just ruin you.
view-source:http://i.forbesimg.com/welcomead/scripts/12662fd2.vendor.js
Just go read that script. It might make you cry.
blah blah blah just megabytes of this shitscript to push through an article that maxes out at a kilobyte. It's fucking ludicrous.
And that's without all the ads (which are meant to own your head, and of course maliciously own your computer, and DO YOU THINK THEY ARE LIABLE FOR SERVING ADS THAT TURN YOUR MACHINE INTO A RUSSIAN SERVER?)
Stop. Linking. Forbes.
It's a pile of shit website. If you must, EACH link should go through archive/is or some other service to neuter the malware and bullshit. Stop enabling these fucks. If you need to serve megabytes of malware and bullshit just to put text on the screen, drink bleach kthx
AdBlock Plus will let advertisements through (by default anyway) if you comply with there reasonable policies and in the case of large companies cough up some cash.
Fuck Forbes, they supported SCO back in the mid-00s and portrayed Linux users and supporters as a bunch of communists. Forbes gets filtered by my mental adblock way before it gets loaded by my browser.
And it's a fucking dupe.
The only reason it went green was because it's Ethan "Startswithabang" Siegel's blogspam. He's gotta be paying Slashdot to link to his shitty corner of Forbes' malware-delivery agent. Even Slashdot's editors can't be this dense.
(Oh, wait, I said "dense." I guess we'll get another StartsWithJonKatz2.0 blogspam with the stunning revelation about how black holes are so dense that light can't escape them. And that, too, will go make the front page of Slashdot. Sigh.)
They deserve what they got then.
Is it known how the exploit worked?
Did it depend on Flash, or on a specific browser and OS?
"Forbes Asks Redears To Disable Adblock..."
(sigh)
Oh wait, is "Redears" the name of some guy that uses Adblock?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Reddit has a solution that is reasonably easy to google:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Adblo...
These instructions are for Chrome. The only thing you need (besides an adlbocker!) is a cookie editor that can import JSON. For Chrome, EditThisCookie works.
Here's the cookies:
[ { "domain": ".forbes.com", "hostOnly": false, "httpOnly": false, "name": "dailyWelcomeCookie", "path": "/", "secure": false, "session": false, "storeId": "0", "value": "true", "id": 3 }, { "domain": ".forbes.com", "hostOnly": false, "httpOnly": false, "name": "welcomeAd", "path": "/", "secure": false, "session": true, "storeId": "0", "value": "true", "id": 9 } ]
I tested this with Chrome and uBlock Origin. I'm willing to bet it works with adblock (based on the URL) and likely hosts based solutions as well.
For Firefox, you just need to be able to edit the cookies with either the above string or a similar one. I couldn't (in about 2 minutes) find the interface for Edit Cookies+, but if you can find it, it should work.
When Forbes dicks around with their shit again in a month, to reduce functionality further, rest assured that there will be this as a solution, or a tamper/grease/violent monkey script, or whatever. They'll never win. But they will gladly load up the machines of any less technical users with malware, just as often as they can, given that the law seems to allow it. Somehow.
in court. Again, it's a bad law, but it's not a "Do any evil thing you want" law. If a company dumps toxic waste they don't get to say "You can't complain, the DMCA says so!". Now, the law _has_ been abused to silence critics. But again, completely different from what you or the Grandparent are suggesting.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I'm using Adblock and I can all the articles on Forbes without any problem. (??)
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
My response when I first ran into this a couple of weeks ago: "Fuck you Forbes. Bye."
There is nothing on their site that can't be had elsewhere, there is nothing special about them at all.
If it is true that they really are serving up malware, then perhaps the resulting lawsuits and bad reputation will take them down.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
There is more to the story than the initial tweet and, unfortunately, as the tweet's author, I wasn't aware that article was written or published or else I could have elaborated some more in it.
It needs to be clear that Forbes was not compromised and there is no technical wrongdoing on their part in this matter. This is an advertisement network issue. Forbes has been very responsive to communications and have worked continuously to follow up on this. This incident does, indeed, show negatively on them and they were very quick to try and locate the incident to pass on to advertising networks.
Their major issue was in the requiring of users to disable ad blockers. That's where the focus should be as it opens a possible attack vector into your system.
The Java Update page was configured to download a "setup.exe", which raised every red flag there is. However, at the time of this ad appearing, setup.exe soft-failed to a download page for Java 8u25. Soft fail meaning that "setup.exe" returned an HTML page instead of the executable. This likely means that the ad page wasn't "activated" at the time. Additional Javascript I uploaded to the link below shows that it did have code to rotate between multiple executables, as well:
http://pastebin.com/raw/KwKxek...
I also posted a URL trace of the events around that time, if anyone likes to dig into those things. It's basically a reverse chronological list of every URL Chrome made:
http://pastebin.com/raw/wsiD1v...
So, unfortunately (or fortunately), there was no zero-day drive by attacking my system. But, the capability was there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Apk post from the start on tepples site shows hosts do more for less (addons are all beaten by clarityray https://pineight.com/mw/index.... ) Hosts itself is multiplatform so his program's outputs would do the job there on that account. Earlier on that site's pages apk admits what hosts can't stop in bgp which nothing can (I looked it up to find out) and ads served on the same site (which isn't practical for advertisers verifying view counts since a webmaster could lie about it and they couldn't prove it. Makes sense because you don't see much of that at all being done). Nothing does it all but it convinced me hosts do much more for much less.
If I absolutely have to read Forbes, I use lynx and set the user-agent to be googlebot. Then if you read source ('\') the article kind of shows up.
Of course, posting to slashdot in lynx has gotten trickier over the years.
And the elsewhere site is going to somehow support itself without any revenue from ads? How?
By being a public benefit corporation and accepting donations from its readers. One example of a public benefit corporation is SoylentNews, and that's where a lot of us will end up should Slashdice go full betard or put up anti-adblock measures.
Say you run a site that serves ads on your own domain. Now someone wants to advertise on your site but wants accurate reach metrics. How are you going to convince an advertiser that you are providing view counts and click counts that aren't inflated?
Interesting claims. Visitors were "immediately served with pop-under malware", although there is only one citation given, which is a link to a picture (presumably a screenshot) on @bbaskin's private Twitter account, which can only be seen by a "confirmed follower". Uh, okay. Nonetheless, this malware was "primed" to infect their computers and "likely" to do a lot of horrible stuff. Having run out of conjectures (let alone facts) about Forbes by the third paragraph, the rest of the article is padded out by a list of past incidents involving DailyMotion and MSN, followed by some bloviating which even Bennett Haselton might be ashamed of.
I'm totally sure that this isn't just attention-whoring from a litigious sex columnist who, after publishing The Adventurous Couple's Guide to Strap-On Sex and her second edition of The Ultimate Guide to Cunnilingus, apparently ran out of ideas and re-styled herself a computer security journalist.
Yes, I know malware is served through advertising, but this article is about a specific claim of Forbes being used as an injection vector with literally nothing backing it up. Also, let me note that there's nothing wrong with being a sex columnist. I just don't think that automatically means you should write about computer security.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
A paywall could be practical if it were possible to pay per page. But right now it's not because the credit card networks charge a swipe fee far too large for that to be practical. Even Bitcoin imposes a transaction fee of 0.0001 BTC (about 4.5 cents) payable to the miner who verifies your block.
scripts are fundamentally broken.
Then what means of deploying an application across platforms isn't fundamentally broken? Or should anyone who makes an app expect to have to make it six times, once for each platform (Windows, OS X, GNU/Linux, Android, iOS, and Windows Phone)?
I'm using Adblock and I can all the articles on Forbes without any problem. (??)
I too "can" all the articles on Forbes. I put them in the can, the trash can.
As in, have to watch the ads before you can see the ads.
That's nothing. The trailers before The Force Awakens are also ads before ads. Like Transformers and The Wizard, it's a two hour toy commercial.
I do not use ad blockers, I block at the DNS and firewall. If source it not from same site and is not id else where are a tracking site, it goes though. It not does not,
I do it in DNS and firewall so there is no silent disable or kids having a new software that can get around it. I have 17,000 addresses blocked at this time.
YES, does not prevent again VPN tunnels from desktop to foreign site but last virus on the netowrk was 9 years ago. And that was the first since having first 486 computer!
I hypothesize we are at the beginning of a bifurcation of the WWW. Websites are going to have to decide how many potential users they are prepared to forego to try and force compliance. Users are going to have to decide how many websites they are prepared to forego in order to respect themselves, their time, their privacy, and their personal security.. Especially on my smartphone I had already gotten to the point where the pain of dealing with all the crap popups was discouraging me from using web (as opposed to the internet) at all. So the availability of solid ad-blocking was finally enough to induce me to upgrade to an Apple 6S. Now I'm noticing that a lot of websites, including slashdot, don't load at all. How do I feel about that? Well, it would have been nice to be able to visit slashdot from my mobile but, frankly, I'm already writing it off. There are plenty enough other sites on the web and I expect I will eventually reconcile fully to not going to certain sites -- just as I avoid porn sites. The toughest thing? it would nice to have a browser that didn't even waste my time taking me to sites which were going to block access. Hopefully that will come out as a feature in new ad-blocking software. All in all, I have to say the fresh air from not having to deal with the endless shit thrown up by the 'advertisers' (pimps) is more than worth the price of admission...er, being denied admission! :-) This is something everyone is going to have decide on their own. And I guess, from time to time, I may be tempted to drop my shields so I can let a site molest me in return for letting me see their "content". But probably not very often and maybe not at all. Fuck Forbes, along with the Times, etc. If 3/4 of the websites disappear from my web I think I will be just fine with that in the longer run. All the browsing was giving me ADHD anyway.
Why can't websites just put up static ads instead of all this privacy-invading, abusive advertising? Yeah, I'm sure they will say there isn't enough money in that. But if enough people refuse to go along with the compliance training, I expect they will rethink that. If nothing else, websites which don't block me and put up static ads know a little about me just on the basis of my voting with my feet. That ought to be some sort of a differentiation. Eventually, I expect the differentiation will be between low class people (who allow themselves to be abused in return for candy) and those of higher class who actually think longer term and respect themselves a little more. We'll see. I don't expect it to take that long, really.
My experience is that most ads are abusive in some way. I use these add-ons in Firefox: uBlock Origin ad blocking, NoScript, and Ghostery.
It amazes me that, when I go to the Ally Bank web site to see my accounts summary at the following URL, Ghostery says "Ghostery found 8 trackers":
https://securebanking.ally.com/#/accounts/summary
The Ally Bank URL contains the words "secure banking"!
Here are the trackers:
Advertising.com
Google DoubleClick Floodlight
Google DoubleClick Spotlight
Google Dynamic Remarketing
MediaMath Advertising
Omniture (Adobe Analytics)
Qualtrics
RUN (https://match.rundsp.com/)
There is nothing "secure" about notifying other companies that I am looking at a summary of my bank accounts!
Can we enumerate the reasons why the the browser needs to run with the same user ID as the person that owns files?
I can think of one: access to local files for upload or download. But it seems like there could be a mechanism to hand off files to and from the browser that doesn't give it direct access. Some IPC mechanism or a filesystem-based dmz.
At this point, I really do not understand why the industry is not moving to make the browser an untrusted entity on the computer. Taking away its ability to access files, navigate the filesystem, or run programs.
Your claim that you never had a problem could end tonight, tomorrow, or the day after. Then what? Are you going to apologize to everyone for failing to understand the problem and telling them it was safe. Esp when professional security researchers are telling you its NOT safe?
The www is a infinite bag of untrusted/untrustworthy data that your your flawed browser sifts through. Its was already a disaster waiting to happen. The problem is, the disaster has become automated, financed, and profitable.
Compared to the crap we get now, I'd take Jon Katz any day :(
More likely, you don't know you have a problem. Just because you're unaware of it, doesn't mean there's isn't all kinds of cruft and malware lurking on your machine, doing .. fun things, behind your back.
Yes, and slashdot linked directly to Forbes earlier today. The warning looked suspicious, so I didn't fall for it.
Get off my lawn.
Yes, anything is possible, just as it is possible the sun will super nova tomorrow and destroy the earth... or the planet will get hit by an untracked meteor; or how about the nemesis theory?
Obviously you don't know how the typical advertisement scheme on most websites work. Almost always, the website you visit has very little to do with the advertising they serve you, as it's provided by a third party, outside their control. This is why adblockers are almost mandatory now a days, since you have little control over what the advertisement network is going to shove in your face, nor does the website you are visiting. Most ads might be ok, but are you really willing to risk the security of your system on the chance someone slips in malware, which does happen, into a advertising network, of which the site you're visiting has no control over, or knowledge of happening. It's not their fault.
If advertisement networks would better vet what gets served, they might be trusted.. some day.. but they can't be trusted to not serve obnoxious or malware ads. If we were still in the days of simple banner ads, without sound, pop-overs, pop-unders, and all kinds of obnoxious advertising, less people would feel compelled use adblockers in order to get a pleasant webserfing experience without junk spamming their browser, obscuring the content they want to actually see.
Internet advertisement has really shot itself in the foot with how obnoxious advertising has become. If they kept it under control and un-obtrusive, people wouldn't block it so much!
Yes, anything is possible, just as it is possible the sun will super nova tomorrow and destroy the earth... or the planet will get hit by an untracked meteor; or how about the nemesis theory?
This is a prime example of someone who gets their computer taken over by a botnet.. doesn't care, don't even look. Just merrily goes about their life oblivious while their computer is used for nefarious purposes, like serving malware to other idiots.
I thought the only reason Forbes existed was to suck up people's frequent flier miles when they are about to expire. Every issue of Forbes I get immediately goes into the recycling bin because it fails to have any actual content. It's just one advertisement after another or another page of poorly cobbled together words they try to pass as articles....
You haven't had a problem that you know of because you are oblivious and don't realize that your computer is now serving spam to others.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Next to nobody is willing to pay for a whole month just to read one article found through a search engine or through a citation shared by a friend. Imagine having to do this to read one article from each of ten different publications in a month.[1]
[1] "Adblockers say, 'Find a better business model.' But can you really?" posted on 2015-10-12
Okay, I DO understand the point that content producers make that it cuts into their revenue. And I DO believe they should be paid for their labors.
But that doesn't mean I'm going to work a second job just to turn the proceeds over to them.
Malvertising is a ubiquitous, ongoing problem. And I'm not exposing any systems I have control over to that. Because the amount of work it takes to clean up from that sort of infection is VERY non-trivial. And if it causes me to lose data on a business machine? Oh HELL no!
Current internet advertising is a dirty, disease-ridden whore, and ad blockers are condoms.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Why are all the posts now by Timothy? And what happened to the science post that linked to Forbes and was posted by a Forbes shill?
UBIK is a very prescient novel by Philip K. Dick published in 1969. It is coming true.
Adblock alone has reduced my need for family-based PEBKAC support by nearly 95% in the last five years. Provide content thats worth paying for without ads, and people will come.
It's the same as with dead tree magazines - if you don't pay for it then that magazine is dead.
Which means the majority of articles would be dead to the majority of people, as the majority of people would not have the resources to maintain a subscription to the majority of periodicals, including the effort to obtain back issues. How does it benefit the public to make the majority of articles dead to the majority of people?
A redear is a half assed redneck.
One side effect of moving to closed access, where articles are spread out across several publications each with its own monthly or annual subscription, is that it'll become cost prohibitive for an individual to sample the viewpoints of several different publications. This means people will end up sucked into the echo chamber of one single publication's editorial bias.
Also, for what it's worth, the MOAB hosts based ad blocker doesn't seem to trigger their advertising popup. Though if you're running a hosts based ad blocker, you could just add their site to it, and that'd solve your little Forbes problem, too.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I run uBlock Origin and I cannot fault how well it works. As stated above and I quote, "Adblock alone has reduced my need for family-based PEBKAC support by nearly 95% in the last five years". This is true for me also. Ads are a plague on the internet and are the root cause of nearly all the issues in my view from personal experience. If a site asked me to disable my ad-blocker, I'll take my business elsewhere and I don't give a flying s**t what else anyone else has to say, (any negative comments suggest user is in the ad industry).
Access to the website requires making a copy of the content. The "license" to do so is via accepting ads. So copyright is definitely in there. This may not be DMCA, but computer hacking: unlawful access to a computer is a serious crime too, and they can definitely get you for decades. Or at least threaten you with decades in prison until you suicide.
Is this the same Forbes that StartsWithABang is always linking to? I think timothy should find the person who keeps posting his stories and totally fire his useless ass.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
...and Forbes have some serious damage control to do. A good start would be to recommend that all users install and ad-blocker, as their own public blunder has demonstrated is absolutely necessary.
Get on ABP's acceptable ads list. Done.
They put readers at unnecessary risk causing readers to become infected. All this with one motive only. Financial gain from crap displayed at users computers
That doesn't work when the same address serves both content you want and content you don't want. Like single signon tokens and tracking cookies.
Or when the serving site isn't static. Especially with IPv6, you have a problem. Imagine a /64 block where every odd numbered IP serves content and every even numbered IP serves ads or tracking cookies.
And it doesn't work through proxy servers, which by their very nature fetch content for you and serve it all down the same pipe. You never know the remote IP addresses at all.
A lot of adblockers will let you click on the "please dont block us" nag and create a new rule to block the nag.
Let's see that COMPLETE LOSER APK's malware do that shit.
They are of course reliant on Google page rank so the Googlebot gets special treatment.
I can survive without you. Can you without me?
Oh, you cannot survive with me blocking your ads? Ok. Accepted. Die.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You have a reading comprehension problem.
I disallow third-party links and if things break, they keep the pieces.
When you discover that the first several results from a search on a search engine "break", good luck letting sites "keep the pieces" while keeping some sense that search engines are still useful. Imagine performing some random web search, but you discover that the first five results on the page that look relevant are broken due to your ad blocking policy. But you don't know they're actually broken until you've already spent time viewing them. Your back button is going to get a lot of workout, and you'll spend a lot of time looking at broken pages.
But an anti-ad browser can download the shit without actually rendering it.
Which defeats the use of content blocking tools to prevent extra usage charges from the user's Internet service provider. This becomes important when satellite and mobile ISPs are charging $5 to $15 per GB.
Render the ad in a memory bitmap, and pass it back to the checking sw. But don't actually display it.
Solve Media defeats that by requiring the user to type in text from the ad.
and if facebook/newspapers breaks on a work computer then it is a good thing for productivity!
But potentially a bad thing for employee morale, as blocking newspapers affects what an employee can do during 10 minute breaks. That which negatively affects employee morale eventually affects employee retention.
I recently came across this phenomenon when clicking on links to a FORBES article. Very simple solution. Close the tab (or window) and forget about it.
I don't even have time to send them an email explaining to them how such an action of asking me to turn off my adblocking software has removed all credibility associated with their brand.
The best solution to these problems is very simply boycott and use word of mouth to spread the boycott.
The site does not choose the ads based on safety. The site sets aside space that is sold to different ad brokers who use brokers who have no idea what ads are going to be run. It is dangerous by design.
Until websites stop running content provided by other (anonymous) people, there ARE no safe ads. Its broken by design.
You're playing quite the troll in this thread, are you ? Enjoying yourself ?
#1: The actual "entire page" size normally dwarfs against that of the new photo that needs to be retrieved (the rest is already cached).
#2: From the top of my head there are at least two ways to create a "sub page", which pretty much only needs to contain the image and the next and previous buttons. Guess which two ...
Your example of usage of scripting is solving a problem that does not exist. Unless ofcourse you reject all other solutions because of ... reasons.
Add the following filters to ABP to disable Forbes adblock plus detection:
@@||forbes.com^$generichide
@@||forbes.com^$genericblock
||moatads.com^$domain=forbes.com
||sharethrough.com^$domain=forbes.com
||amazon-adsystem.com^$domain=forbes.com
I predict this is going to get ridiculous... Sor of like radar detector detector detectors...
http://bit.ly/medium0109
Hell, even If I disabled Adblock on my computer, Forbes still wouldn't work.
Looks like I'll never need to visit Forbes again.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
In the other chain of replies, you cited names of logical fallacies. This indicates to me that you desire a more rigorous argument rather than a casual one. Per your request, I will attempt a more rigorous argument. There are two options for a third business model: it can be one for publishing information, or it can be one for something other than publishing information. I will handle each of these possibilities:
Assume the third business model is a business model for publishing information Both advertising and subscriptions existed for decades before the Internet. It is possible for a third to be discovered in the remainder of your lifetime, but because it has not already been discovered, I don't see it as likely. Probability matters because a rational investor shuns a business whose revenue source is unlikely to be discovered. Assume the third business model is a business model for something other than publishing information If an existing business publishing information in exchange for advertising were to switch to such a business model, such as a news site becoming a butcher shop, it would not be able to repurpose a substantial fraction of its existing assets for the new line of business.As for the "side door" business, I can express the idea that I believe the author was trying to get across in terms of butcher shops. Like web sites that publish information in exchange for a subscription fee, butcher shops typically have a minimum order size to account for the overhead of processing the payments of its customers.
In this comment, I shall address your "not my problem" angle.
Like if someone said no car exists, and I point out a Toyota Camry "car" going past. Toyota Camry is not an analogy.
The argument in this case would be "no such car exists", with the scope of "such car" defined implicitly by the rest of the paragraph.
they can suck it. I never assumed the role of godfather for the "information publication" industry
Yet as a user of Slashdot, you presumably use the products and services of said industry and would thus be affected by the drastic contraction that you propose. Once you need to buy a year's subscription for Google Search, another for Slashdot, and another for each site linked from Slashdot, where do you plan to hang out on the web? And with the end of ability to find professionally written material through a web search at no additional charge, how will there remain enough demand for home Internet connections to sustain a market for affordable home Internet connections like yours?
A "news site" has no right to exist. Human members of that organization can be said to have the right - and they can join existing butcher shops, or start new ones.
Thank you for clarifying the extent of the changes that you wish would happen to the web. Just to be absolutely sure that I understand, would you agree with the following summary of your central thesis?