Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Why Stack Overflow Doesn't Care About Ad Blockers

Posted by timothy on from the just-wish-it-was-easy-to-block-the-clickbait dept.

Press2ToContinue writes: Forging a bold step in the right direction, Stack Overflow announced today that they don't care if you use an ad blocker when you visit their site. "The truth is: we don't care if our users use ad blockers on Stack Overflow. More accurately: we hope that they won't, but we understand that some people just don't like ads. Our belief is that if someone doesn't like them, and they won't click on them, any impressions served to them will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads to people who won't click on them harms campaign performance. ... Publishers can't win by forcing ads — especially low-quality ads — in people's faces. Think scantily-clad women selling flight deals, weight-loss supplement promos or wacky waving inflatable arm-flailing tube-men promoting car dealerships." It's possible that this declaration by SO might help to clarify to advertisers that it is the overabundance of low quality ads that practically force the public to seek out ad blockers. But seriously, what is the likelihood of that?

287 comments

  1. Hear hear! by rmdingler · · Score: 5, Informative
    Also, too, and neither: figure out a way to separate me from the paper in my wallet without making my machine load slower.

    Write your ads in a language not quite so notorious as an infection vector.

    Good start, though.

    --
    Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

    Ernest Hemingway

    1. Re:Hear hear! by amicusNYCL · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's definitely a good start.

      Our belief is that if someone doesn't like them, and they won't click on them, any impressions served to them will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads to people who won't click on them harms campaign performance.

      This is a really good point that I haven't seen other sites make. They're right about it, especially the "campaign performance". If 20% of the user base is not going to click on an ad anyway, then why bother padding the numbers to say you served ads to that additional group? Just don't serve them ads, and then your click-through rate improves because you've cut out a chunk of people who aren't going to click on them anyway. That might make the numbers for the overall ad campaign better, which may increase the rates that they can then charge for ads in the future, because they have a higher clickthrough rate.

      Therefore: allowing ad-blockers onto your site increases your advertising revenue. Suck it, Forbes.

      --
      "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
  2. it's not "low quality ads" that are the problem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's ads that pop up and interrupt the browsing experience.

    It's ads that masquerade as "facebook notifications" on your phone.

    It's ads that start playing a video at fucking maximum volume while you are trying to work.

    But most importantly, its ads that are made entirely out of javascript running on MY computer by another entity who has not been vetted or trusted by me. You do not need to run a program on my computer to sell me something.

    It's the ads that are for all intents and purposes, malware. Adblocking+Noscript is the most effective antivirus. Accessing the internet without them is negligence. This is what stackoverflow and other sites need to start saying.

    1. Re:it's not "low quality ads" that are the problem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      To quote from a previous slashdot article on this:

      Browsing without an adblocker is like fucking without a condom.
      You should only do it with someone you really, really trust.

    2. Re:it's not "low quality ads" that are the problem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Which is precisely the problem. I run Ghostery among a few other apps. Do I dislike Ads, yes but that's not my motivation for running an Ad blocker.

      I'm a web programmer and I work in the industry. Not only does my surfing harm Ad performance but I provide Ad services with my own sites. Now taking somebody who is not me running Ad blockers and live by the "fucking without a condom" perspective more so than I do. And well StackOverflow which would be perhaps the most successful point of presence for web industry people (namely programmers) to go to for help. They have just declared that "we" the majority user base simply don't provide significant revenue in the first place and its the standard run of the mill traffic from non professionals that are the ones that click the Ads anyway.

  3. Ad icon in banner? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Does the "AD" icon in the story banner mean this story is an ad? That seems like an unprecedented level of honesty for Slashdot!

    1. Re:Ad icon in banner? by desdinova+216 · · Score: 1

      no, I think it's a sign that it's talking about the internet advertizing industry.

  4. Advertising Bubble by monkeyxpress · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think the whole advertising situation will get better once the tech bubble bursts. Just look at many of the tech companies now - they are giant advertising platforms, but spend most of their revenues and investor money on user acquisition through advertising. This is like a giant ponzi scheme really.

    Google worked, and will probably keep working for some time now, because one of the main use cases for search is to find stuff you want to buy. When you go to the site and start searching for a particular product, it isn't a big deal (and sometimes is useful) when ads come up for that product or equivalents you might not have heard off. The advertising has actual value in informing you about what is available. Other sites, such as Facebook, might have more information on me, but I go there to look at pictures of my friend's dogs and kids, not when I want to find something to buy. For that reason I find their ads incredibly annoying, and despite Zuckerberg going on about how they make them relevant, he would only be true if I was some kind of consumption machine that wonders around the internet like a virtual godzilla eating up every product that is shoved in my face.

    My prediction is that eventually the industry will fall apart as companies realise the ponzi nature of current advertising prices, and that much of this expenditure is not converting in to sales. In that regard, the better tracking/conversion tools that the internet allows may be the industries own downfall.

    1. Re:Advertising Bubble by alvinrod · · Score: 1

      I think part of the reason is due to Google having a near monopoly in terms of search and online advertising. There's no competition to drive prices down, but even still the costs are lower for many companies than advertising with traditional media which is why so many companies will gladly line up to let Google make a substantial profit.

    2. Re:Advertising Bubble by mlw4428 · · Score: 0

      But wait, all these marketing people keep telling me that they're important. That they know how to make people buy something that they don't want or care about! Oh think of the advertising budgets why don't you!?

    3. Re:Advertising Bubble by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Google is not the one creating pointless "content" just to serve adverts. Pick any subject, and you'll find hundreds of "sites" copy/pasting the same PR announcements as news, pretending they're covering something important or interesting. Chances are many will have forum/comment sections against these so-called articles. Their sole purpose is to hold eyeballs on the page to serve adverts. Rarely will you find anything critical, thoughtful or analytical. It's all pseudo news being spread on behalf of those behind the adverts.

      Google has nothing to do with this, neither are they the ones service the adverts. They can be blamed for returning these crap pages in their results, though. And they should be doing more to filter out the place-holder pages from wankers like gawker which strangely get top tank despite being shells.

      The public does not need adverts - ever. Brands use them to push up the prices on ever single thing we buy. The entire advert industry could cease to exist this very second and we'd all be better off for it (other than the liars, shysters and tossers that waste our money and resources of their bullshit).

    4. Re:Advertising Bubble by Nidi62 · · Score: 0

      But wait, all these marketing people keep telling me that they're important. That they know how to make people buy something that they don't want or care about! Oh think of the advertising budgets why don't you!?

      Whenever a marketing person asks for and tries to justify a budget, just remember that their entire job is predicated on overhyping a product and talking people into spending money on something they don't need, so what makes you think they are being honest when they are coming to you?

      --
      The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
    5. Re:Advertising Bubble by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Facebooks idea of "relevance" seems to be to try to sell me the exact same thing I bought yesterday. Like I need two dishwashers.

    6. Re:Advertising Bubble by kilfarsnar · · Score: 1

      That they know how to make people buy something that they don't want or care about!

      This part is actually true, for the good ones.

      --
      "What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
    7. Re:Advertising Bubble by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      people who don't like being tracked can't get good ads that pay for people interested in the stuff being advertised

    8. Re:Advertising Bubble by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Insightful

      they are giant advertising platforms, but spend most of their revenues and investor money on user acquisition through advertising. This is like a giant ponzi scheme really.

      That's actually a really good analogy.

      Twitter is a great example of this -- they went IPO at $28 billion freaking dollars.

      They had no business model, assets, or revenue to support that valuation. It was all hype and "ZOMG, the Twitterz". Now, fast forward, it it loses ... what, $150 million per year? How do you do that on almost $600 million in revenues?

      Tech companies have pretty much been starting out as grossly overvalued, by the end of the day when the big investors have laundered their profits, and the little guy is left holding the bag ... the stock is never worth the same again, at least not in the long run.

      The value of tech stocks relative to actual value has rarely held up. Essentially they're all over sold as ad platforms, which in the long run never actually justify the original stupid prices they fetched.

      Over the last 20 years (at least), tech companies have been a series of giant ponzi schemes of grossly overvalued companies which ultimately can't deliver on the bullshit hype.

      Honestly, I don't understand how the financial industry works if it's all wishful thinking, bad math, and funny money. Oh, wait, they make their money up front, and then pass the shit on to the next suckers in the scheme, of course.

      It just transfers money into the hands of big investors who buy in first, and leave everyone else wondering how they got fleeced. Exactly like a ponzi scheme.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    9. Re:Advertising Bubble by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Have you ever tried actually selling anything? You don't just build it and they come - 20,000 broke-ass app developers can tell you that for nothing. 90% of marketing is building awareness. It's just you've only heard the part where they're marketing something everyone is already aware of, like Coke. There's a reason that shit takes up most of the time of the best marketing companies in the world - it's a touch job marketing something everyone already knows about and already has a preference for or against. Meanwhile, there are plenty of good products that don't need overhyping and that people actually need, and they still need marketing spend otherwise nobody buys them because nobody knows they exist. Calling both things "marketing" might be the problem, but I thought nerds were supposed to be smart enough to see the differentiation between two different things that happen to have the same name. Then I joined Slashdot.

    10. Re:Advertising Bubble by gurps_npc · · Score: 0
      You gave a bad example. Twitter is a service that is still trying to establish a real revenue stream.

      A far better example is AMAZON.

      Amazon, which put large Book sellers out of business (Just as they put small book sellers out of business). has never established a truly profitable business. They want to own the market, so have profit margins of less than 1%.

      It's a great success in terms of internet companies, but a total failure from any reasonable business perspective.

      --
      excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
    11. Re:Advertising Bubble by Shortguy881 · · Score: 2

      I'm not sure you understand the simple concept of ROI. You mentioned better tracking and conversion tools and any marketing team worth their salt is using these on a daily bases. Our team can track the effects of micro changes in ad campaigns on our visitor traffic and conversion rates. As we can quantify the value of a customer, its quite easy to do the math: X more dollars in advertising results in Y more customers. Simply stated, is X less than Y times customer value.

      Obviously, this is a watered down, back of the napkin version. We use far more analysis in making these types of marketing and advertising decisions. Your assumption that all of these companies out there are being taken advantage of by online advertisers is rather naive.

      --
      Brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
    12. Re:Advertising Bubble by ceoyoyo · · Score: 1

      There is certainly a place for marketing in the world. The web in particular seems to have gone over the top abusive though. And the maxim "it's easier to sell a good product" seems to have suffocated beneath the gelatinous buttocks of "I can sell anything."

    13. Re:Advertising Bubble by ceoyoyo · · Score: 2

      Many studies have shown that much of the financial system is essentially random. It's just that everyone else is making random decisions too, so the pigeons all do their dances. There was one study that actually had monkeys pick stocks. They did as well as professional traders.

      Then there are the actual criminals, of course. Such as those who manage IPOs.

    14. Re:Advertising Bubble by Jason+Levine · · Score: 1

      You'll also find plenty of blogs posting PR content verbatim. I get requests from PR companies all the time for my blog. They want me to promote their product using their words and I'll get "paid" in high resolution images of their product or to be entered for a chance to win one of the products. I ignore/delete these requests (after all, my credit card company doesn't let me pay off my bill using high resolution images) but too many people jump on board and do whatever the company says. They mistake company-provided content with quality content and hurt their blogs in the process.

      --
      My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
    15. Re:Advertising Bubble by gstoddart · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You gave a bad example. Twitter is a service that is still trying to establish a real revenue stream.

      Twitter is a great example of what I was giving an example of.

      Twitter is, essentially, an advertising company .. that's the revenue model. It just piggy-backs on inane garbage like when the Kardashians shit.

      Twitter went IPO for $28 billion dollars, in the 10 years since Twitter has been operating, they've lost $2 billion dollars.

      You'll note that the poster I replied to, and quoted, said tech companies are basically ad companies, and essentially ponzi schemes. Here it is again:

      they are giant advertising platforms, but spend most of their revenues and investor money on user acquisition through advertising. This is like a giant ponzi scheme really.

      So, in terms of an example of a company which is essentially an ad platform, which has failed to make any money, and which was overvalued from the start and is losing money ... exactly like a ponzi scheme ... I didn't give a "bad" example.

      I gave an example of exactly what I was trying to give an example of, and in agreement with the poster I was responding to.

      Twitter is a bullshit vehicle which collected $28 billion of other people's money at IPO, has lost $2 billion dollars flailing about trying to have a business model, and whose stock keeps losing value.

      Giant. Fucking. Ponzi. Scheme.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    16. Re:Advertising Bubble by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This already happened back in first tech bubble burst, and again after the 2008 crysis, but now it's bursting again. Other crap those companies are bragging about is how they loose money to adblockers. In this way they find an excuse for not having growth they promised to the (fooled) investors. Actually it's same as game piracy. majority of pirate copies wouldn't translate to game sale, people just wouldn't shell out money for that.

    17. Re:Advertising Bubble by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      My prediction is that eventually the industry will fall apart as companies realise the ponzi nature of current advertising prices, and that much of this expenditure is not converting in to sales.

      Much like the broadcast industry fell apart "as companies realise(d) the ponzi nature of current advertising prices"? Oh, wait, that didn't happen. Radio and TV advertising is as prevalent and pricy as ever.

    18. Re:Advertising Bubble by Irate+Engineer · · Score: 1

      For that reason I find their ads incredibly annoying, and despite Zuckerberg going on about how they make them relevant, he would only be true if I was some kind of consumption machine that wonders around the internet like a virtual godzilla eating up every product that is shoved in my face.

      I think this is the core problem; this is exactly what advertisers want their clients to believe - if they see it they will buy! EYEBALLS! MOAR EYEBALLS!

      Uh, no...it doesn't work like that, it never worked like that. Yet the advertisers blindly press on with more and more aggressive attempts to force people to see things they do not want, and use eyeballs as a metric of their "success". Advertisers don't have to prove that their advertising actually works to increase sales - they generally just have to spin enough FUD to frighten their clients into believing that reducing advertising will reduce sales. If more advertising is correlated to increased sales, correlation == causality, the ads worked! If sales are dropping off, the remedy is automatically more advertising.

      I'd be interested to see if any connection between adblocker use and sales has been or could be documented. My gut tells me that lost eyeballs does not equate to lost sales - people merely go Google to target what they are looking for, gather information, and buy what suits them. How many people are buying stuff based solely on ad exposure?

      --

      Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!

      Vote for Bernie in 2016!

    19. Re:Advertising Bubble by gstoddart · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Many studies have shown that much of the financial system is essentially random

      Once set in motion, the financial system is essentially random. I will believe that.

      But, increasingly the entire premises are just a pure con job -- from valuations of stocks at IPO being magical thinking, to the expectation companies will grow 10% year over year forever, increasingly the entire financial industry sits on a foundation of complete lies and bullshit.

      The value of a company is no longer tied to its assets or revenues, but the hope that unicorn poop will create billions of dollars out of thin air, despite there being no rational reason to think that.

      WHY was Twitter ever valued at $28 billion? Unicorn poop.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    20. Re:Advertising Bubble by monkeyxpress · · Score: 1

      Step back and look at the wider picture though. What sets the price of X? Why is it, say, $1 to get 1 more customer and not 1c? If all the advertisers were companies that built fridges, then the value of X would settle at a price at or below the profit on every fridge they sell. If they go any higher they will be paying people to buy fridges which is not sustainable. However, if the advertisers are companies that are trying to acquire users so that they can make money from advertising, then each time they spend some more of their investor's funds on advertising, their revenue projections, which are the other side of X, go up. This makes their business plan look more viable and draws more investor money into the market. If these companies come to dominate the market, then you essentially have a ponzi scheme developing.

      The only guard against this should be fiscal prudence by VCs and investors, but interest rates are zero the stock market is so awash with money it doesn't matter if this is all unsustainable as long as you exit through an IPO/sale before the music stops. In fact, it is an ingenious way to make obscene profits in an otherwise moribund economy.

    21. Re:Advertising Bubble by SvnLyrBrto · · Score: 1

      Amazon's margins are so small because they invest the bulk of their profits back into the business in order to grow it. If, at some point, they were to decide: "Okay, we're as big as we want to be. Let's stop growing.", they'd be much more "profitable".

      And really, what IS the better alternative to using the profit to expand? You could throw it all away in the form of dividends. That would make assholes like Carl Icahn happy. But what good would it do for Amazon? Or you could sit on a cash stockpile of a couple hundred billion like Apple and... what... earn interest?

      --
      Imagine all the people...
    22. Re:Advertising Bubble by henni16 · · Score: 1

      There are different kinds of advertising:
      On the internet you often have "Buy OUR crap. Now." ads which hope people click on them and buy stuff. But for the reasons you stated, most ads outside of search engines won't lead to direct sales that way because people rarely come to websites like Facebook looking to buy stuff *right now*.

      Another kind of ad are more about brand recognition, about getting your name out. So that people who aren't looking to buy something *right now* will either remember your name or at least recognize it again on a more subtle level.

      I mean, it's not like a company putting an ad for a lawn mower in a magazine or airing one during the Super Bowl expects people to jump up and run out to buy a lawn mower right after they see it (i.e. offline they usually don't expect the equivalent of a click-through leading to a sale when someone views their ad).
      BUT: the next time you need to buy a lawn mower, you might remember their name and make sure to look at their products before coming to a decision what to buy.
      Or, if you are in the store in front of a line of lawn mowers and have to make a decision between a few models which are similar on features and price, a lot of people won't toss a coin, they'll often - maybe just subconsciously - favor the manufacturer whose name rings a faint bell over ones they've never heard of before.

      This probably becomes more important the cheaper and harder to distinguish the products are.
      When buying a car, there's lots of stuff you can look up to compare or have preferences for.
      When standing in front of a wall of unknown toilet cleaners with tiny price difference and your usual one [ how did it become your usual..?] is out of stock, name recognition or the design of the bottle might influence how "randomly" you select one of the other options.
      And if your random(?) pick works for you, it might become your new usual product.

    23. Re:Advertising Bubble by wvmarle · · Score: 1

      You gave a bad example. Twitter is a service that is still trying to establish a real revenue stream.

      After all those years it's operating, and a $28 bln IPO, it's still searching for a way to make money. And you say it's a BAD example of an overvalued company?

    24. Re:Advertising Bubble by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You don't get it. Amazon was/is at the forefront of a fundamental shift in the way goods are sold for the foreseeable future. The current value of their profits from now until society collapses or becomes post-scarcity (what stock prices are theoretically based on) make this years profits utterly irrelevant. That's what the original dot com bubble was about, just the small chance that company X would eventually become Amazon. Amazon won and Pets.com lost but that stakes are at least potentially real.

    25. Re:Advertising Bubble by wasteoid · · Score: 1

      What's your twitter id?

    26. Re:Advertising Bubble by gstoddart · · Score: 1

      LOL ... nonexistent?

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    27. Re: Advertising Bubble by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Is Amazon not profitable in the same way as Hollywood films are not profitable, ie more to do with financial engineering than 1% margins?

  5. Malware by HeNkarid · · Score: 2

    Personally I would never click ads, but even if I wanted to, the possibility of potential malware or other nefarious deeds would still stop me from clicking it.

  6. And I don't really care about ads..... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I never installed an ad blocker to get rid of adverts. I installed an ad blocker to block the domains of all those pop over/pop under type ads that appear when I'm browsing my favorite purveyors of pornography. Also those noisy ads that start playing videos and then I have to hunt down the tab they are in. Or those flash ads that pop up when I scroll over words and I have to keep closing, or pop up over the whole screen till I close them.

    I installed an ad blocker for annoying as hell adverts.

    If sites didn't want users to sever all their revenue, maybe they should look at being more picky as to how their adverts impair their users use of their sites. When the ads are more consuming of the users time and attention than the site content itself then the site becomes useless.

  7. Ah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Finally someone who gets it. I've been running no script, as well as ad-blocker in Firefox. For a while I'd load what I needed to in order for the site to work, but lately I just move on. If it doesn't work without that crap I'm not taking the security risk to view that site. No content is worth it, and there's so much malware and shady stuff out there now days that it just doesn't make sense to take the risk.

  8. Solution: static ads from 1st party by DriveDog · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you're complaining about me not watching ads on your site, how about showing me ads FROM your site, not a third party's; and static images and text, no video, no animation, no scripts, no multipage GIFs. Certainly never popups/unders/etc. I do NOT object to static images and text, for which I'm already paying the bandwidth to download.

    1. Re:Solution: static ads from 1st party by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Static ads from the first party don't work, unless you're already a major player. Who is going to pay me to show ads for my thirty occasional readers? It works in the "real world" because you see it where it works, e.g. a newspaper. But if you try to make your own magazine funded by ads, you won't go far. In the internet we're often talking about self-made content. You have your own web server and people come to read your content. In the real world, the most independent you can be is self-publishing, but we all know how well do websites that are behind paywalls go.

    2. Re:Solution: static ads from 1st party by ceoyoyo · · Score: 1

      It works just fine. I have a friend who streams. He has sponsors who pay him to endorse their product to his small audience. The sponsor watches his viewer numbers and those come into play when they renegotiate. I know of several niche websites that do similar things: instead of just slapping up a Google ad they make deals with relevant sponsors and show their ads.

      Web ad services are so successful because a) they're the lazy solution for both advertisers and hosts and b) they give the marketers low effort data so they can say "see, we're all quantitative!"

    3. Re:Solution: static ads from 1st party by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Appropriately chosen banner ads will have a much higher clickthrough rate than any lazy dynamic ad-space filler. As someone who won't pay Slashdot to hide (some of) their ads, the latest round of corner ads are quite tolerable. They are ads to buy things through some Slashdot affiliated commercial interface, but they are things that visitors to the site might be thinking about sometime during a read. I am not inclined to buy anything I have yet seen through those corner/footer ads, but the fact that they are civil makes me more curious to read what is being advertised each time I check the main page.

      In relation to the complaint from someone about dynamically resizing pages in response to advertising image loads, I have frequented a few sites that comfortably work with a standard-height banner ad (no popups, no popouts, no popovers, no interruptions, just a banner that randomly or cyclically picks from a list of sponsors) and the image size is build into the html correctly.

    4. Re:Solution: static ads from 1st party by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 1

      If you're complaining about me not watching ads on your site, how about showing me ads FROM your site, not a third party's

      The infrastructure required for a high-traffic web site of media company with a number of high-traffic sites is not insignificant, and like mail servers it's often a better idea to farm it out so as to be able to focus on content.

      --
      If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
    5. Re:Solution: static ads from 1st party by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm perfectly ok with that, as long as they don't want me to see them, which SO apparently is.

  9. I support ads... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ... but, only from sites like expertsexchange, that have content relevant to my interests.

  10. Re:Too Bad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'd rather they stopped cluttering up search results and disappeared.

    I know it! Geeze, I just had a problem this morning and when I searched for a solution, all these Stackoverflow hits showed up with posts by people solving my problem.

    The nerve of these people! BTW, their SEO optimization company is just brilliant!

  11. I wish it was only 'low quality' ads. by oneiros27 · · Score: 1

    How about the ones that start windows popping up all over the place? Or start playing at obnoxiously loud levels? Or the four videos that start sucking down cpu.

    And it doesn't help that I tend to pop open a few articles to read (or questions on StackExchange (disclaimer: I'm one of the moderators on Open Data)), and if a video starts playing, I'd have to look through all of my tabs and figure out which one it was to shut it down.

    And that's not the disturbing ones that seem to be tracking other sites I've been to (we saw you were shopping for (x), so now it's going to follow you around for the next three months).

    ... and then there's the malware.

    A few years ago, there was an article about the FBI spoofing websites to foist their spyware on people ... and I commented that it'd be easier for them to start up their own ad network, and they'd be able to just wait for the right person to visit. I have no idea if law enforcement is doing it, but I'm pretty sure that the criminals are.

    --
    Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
  12. Advertising ROI by sjbe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think the whole advertising situation will get better once the tech bubble bursts.

    You seem curiously convinced that A) we are in a bubble and B) that advertising will go away or "get better". You can't really know A for certain by definition because bubbles generally can only be identified in retrospect and B will never ever happen. It's unclear what "get better" means to you but I'm pretty sure whatever it is won't happen.

    My prediction is that eventually the industry will fall apart as companies realise the ponzi nature of current advertising prices, and that much of this expenditure is not converting in to sales.

    I think you don't understand the advertising business. You think that companies are naively throwing money at advertising because they don't know any better. While there are some out there where that is true for the most part buyers of advertising understand very well the relationship between advertising dollars spent and the returns they get. It's not at all hard to get a pretty solid idea of the correlation between ad spend and revenue.

    1. Re:Advertising ROI by ceoyoyo · · Score: 1

      It seems like advertising is backing away a bit, with the notable exception of the web. Ad-supported cable is dying but the no-ads premiums channels like HBO are doing well, and zero-ad subscription services like Netflix are cleaning up. The tech industry does seem to have more than it's share of advertising companies masquerading as something else. And the number of multi-billion dollar acquisitions for things like chat platforms, many that have subsequently been sold at a fraction of their purchase price, is suggestive of a bubble.

    2. Re:Advertising ROI by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You seem curiously convinced that A) we are in a bubble and B) that advertising will go away or "get better". You can't really know A for certain by definition because bubbles generally can only be identified in retrospect and B will never ever happen. It's unclear what "get better" means to you but I'm pretty sure whatever it is won't happen.

      No. The shibboleth that bubbles are only identifiable after the fact is junk economics spewed out by incompetent and corrupt central bankers and asset managers. The tech stock bubble and the housing bubble were very obvious to anyone who is actually capable of thinking. Not having ever taking a class in economics or finance, I called the tech stock bubble in 1997 and the housing bubble in 2003. Far more illustrious people than me, such as Jeremy Grantham, have it on written records that they called those bubbles well before they popped.

      I think you don't understand the advertising business. You think that companies are naively throwing money at advertising because they don't know any better. While there are some out there where that is true for the most part buyers of advertising understand very well the relationship between advertising dollars spent and the returns they get. It's not at all hard to get a pretty solid idea of the correlation between ad spend and revenue.

      That said, I generally agree with you here. It's not clear to me that there is an advertising bubble but there is a bubbling (not a full-blown bubble) of sorts in companies that hope to make a living selling advertising. WhatsApp for $20 billion? Instagram for another few billion. This is the "buying eyeballs" game all over again. There's likely money to be made running those businesses but I seriously doubt there will be enough money to justify the valuations at which they were bought.

      The advertising industry will be fine, for better or for worse. I'm far less sanguine on the future of many of the unicorns.

    3. Re:Advertising ROI by monkeyxpress · · Score: 0

      You think that companies are naively throwing money at advertising because they don't know any better.

      I think companies are throwing money at advertising because they are using advertising revenues to construct their business models. So the more they collectively spend, the higher advertising prices go, and the better their business models look.

    4. Re:Advertising ROI by tlhIngan · · Score: 2

      It seems like advertising is backing away a bit, with the notable exception of the web. Ad-supported cable is dying but the no-ads premiums channels like HBO are doing well, and zero-ad subscription services like Netflix are cleaning up. The tech industry does seem to have more than it's share of advertising companies masquerading as something else. And the number of multi-billion dollar acquisitions for things like chat platforms, many that have subsequently been sold at a fraction of their purchase price, is suggestive of a bubble.

      Ad supported cable is dying because a la carte is forcing what was once subscription based revenue (and thus concentrating on programming for a niche) is turning into ad-based revenue (and thus programming must attract eyeballs). So programming that could count on steady subscription revenue and concentrate on the topic at hand must now switch models and alter their presentation to go after what attracts eyeballs. This is a complete change and it's why ad supported cable channels added a bunch of "drama" and other things to formerly fact-based documentary programming. That drama (faked or scripted) attracts eyeballs. The more eyeballs, the higher the ad revenue.

      Subscription based services like HBO and Netflix only care about growing subscription revenue, which means they don't care about eyeball quantity - they care about attracting subscribing eyeballs only. Their programming will be directed at what their subscribing public wants and what kind of subscribing public they want to get the dollars from.

      So Netflix and HBO will be making programming aimed towards that demographic. You and I feel they're "winning" because we currently are in that demographic - the people who will likely see that programming and subscribe to the service.

      But the market is still ripe for ads - the Superbowl for example, gets so many eyeballs its ratings are stratospheric. Which is why it costs over $100K per SECOND of ad time during it (that's $3M for an ad spot). For comparison, a prime-time 30 second ad spot generally commands $80-150K.

      Sports, in general, are the highest rated programming on TV which is why they generally pre-empt other programming - the ad dollars spent is immense.

    5. Re:Advertising ROI by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You seem curiously convinced that A) we are in a bubble and B) that advertising will go away or "get better". You can't really know A for certain by definition because bubbles generally can only be identified in retrospect and B will never ever happen. I

      Companies with no model for profits getting millions or billions of dollars is exactly what a bubble is, and it's popping now.

    6. Re:Advertising ROI by ceoyoyo · · Score: 1

      When a significant number of people cut their (ad supported) cable and subscribe to Netflix (no ads), then ad supported programming is decreased. All the stuff about the channels pandering to their audience may be true, but it's irrelevant. Note that, despite the existence of Hulu (apparently, I'm in Canada) Netflix continues to expand. There is a growing market for ad-free television.

      The super bowl is a special event that happens for a few hours every year. Yes, ads for the super bowl cost a lot. But they also cost a lot last year. We don't know how well an ad-free Super Bowl would do, because it simply aren't offered that way. The super bowl is also a bit of a special case because the ads cost so much that advertisers put more effort into making them entertaining. How well would an ad-free Netflix-like sports service do against regular ad supported sports?

    7. Re:Advertising ROI by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      When companies that have been on VC life support get acquired for billions of dollars you are in serious trouble. If the ratio of share price to earnings gets over about 20:1 that bubble by definition. Take Twitter. You can't even calculate it's P/E ratio because you have to divide by zero. That's a bubble my friend.

  13. Security-minded too by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    It isn't just about low quality advertisements, but the fact that advertisers have abused trust one too many times serving malware/spyware/adware. Advertisements are a security risk in and of themselves, and increase page loading times quite a bit.

    1. Re:Security-minded too by SoftwareArtist · · Score: 1

      Exactly. I have NoScript installed. That isn't an ad blocker as such, but it does end up blocking a lot of ads. But that's the advertisers' fault, not mine. There's no reason ads should need scripting or plugins. If you can't make your ads work within reasonable security constraints, that's your problem.

      --
      "I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
  14. It's the malvertising by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    For a time I would white list sites which I liked and which asked politely. But after the third case of click-jacking/mousetrapping which made my machine unusable while shouting "Your computer is infected with malware! Call..." I stopped doing that.

    If you want people to white-list your site:

    1) Police your advertisers and kick the abusive.
    2) Respect your viewers' time and bandwidth.

    1. Re:It's the malvertising by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      1) Police your advertisers and kick the abusive.
      2) Respect your viewers' time and bandwidth.

      That's nice. But it isn't going to happen. It's nice that Stack Overflow "gets it", but they are the exception, quite literally one in a million.

      It used to be that ads were just annoying. But the number of people who want to make money by putting ads on their website far exceeds, by many orders of magnitude, the number of people who have a legitimate product or service to advertise. This has created an enormous market for fraudulent/malware ads which now make up the vast majority of Internet advertising. And the people putting the fraudlent/malwares ads on their websites truly don't don't care. They just want to make money. More ads means more money and they don't care where that money comes from, as long as it keeps coming

  15. ...and cause page-loads to hang by coats · · Score: 1
    If an ad-site causes page-loads to hang for 30 seconds or more, its IP address is well-worth black-holing.

    Or if you want me to look at it, pay me my fully-loaded rate for that wasted time (note that there is a 0.25-hour minimum).

    --
    "My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
  16. Re:Too Bad by SQLGuru · · Score: 1

    At least it's not Expert Sex Change links where people have a similar problem and people post answers, but you can't see them because you don't pay for their service. Those days were the worst.

    [Actually, today what sucks is all of the foreign sites that are scraping forums and Stack Overflow and just reposting the exact same content. You think "oh, another place that might have a different answer than the one on SO that wasn't quite what I wanted" when in reality, it's just some hack taking revenue away from SO.]

  17. I agree with them by koan · · Score: 1

    I think I may actually be allergic to ads, at least my lawyer thinks so. (cha ching!)

    But they hit the nail on the head here: "Our belief is that if someone doesn't like them, and they won't click on them, any impressions served to them will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads to people who won't click on them harms campaign performance. ... Publishers can't win by forcing ads — especially low-quality ads — in people's faces. "

    That sums me up and the schadenfreude exuding from me over the death of Flash is palpable.

    --
    "If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
    1. Re:I agree with them by swb · · Score: 1

      While their belief that people who don't like them won't click on them is true, advertisers are kind of like proselytizing religions. Their deepest motivation isn't to convert the mostly converted, but to reach those who are the hardest to convert. Marketers are convinced of the idea that selling to the man who doesn't want to be sold to is only a matter of reaching him with the right campaign.

    2. Re:I agree with them by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 1

      stackoverflow cannot block people with ad-blockers, because then they are blocking the people who answer questions and build their content.

      Most other sites don't have 100% of their value coming from powerusers.

      --
      Your ad here. Ask me how!
    3. Re:I agree with them by CastrTroy · · Score: 1

      Actually, if you're a power user on stack overflow, or any sites on the stack exchange network, then they cut down the number of ads they show you. When I go to their sites, I never see any ads. I just see links to other sites on the network or "careers" ads. I don't see any links to any third party sites.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    4. Re:I agree with them by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The majority of their sites don't show third-party ads to anyone. It's only something like the three biggest ones which have third-party ads. (Note that for the purposes of this post, "third-party ads" doesn't include the ads which are proposed and voted by members of each site's community in the corresponding meta site).

  18. advertising done right would get better results. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    agree, agree, "wacky waving inflatable arm-flailing tube-men"... strongly disagree, those things are cool.

    so why are they cool but not the cheap flashy overly distracting ads for other random stuff?

    I think any level of decoration for the brand you are currently interested in is valid BUT for cross-promotion, a certain level of professionalism is expected.

    Ads can be acceptable in small controlled doses in expected areas and should never overshadow or pretend to be part of the source content.

    It's when the invasiveness of the ads reached a saturation point that I made (little) effort to install an ad blocker.

  19. Your deals page by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I often go to your deals page and look around.If I want to buy somthing then I go there. To be honest it needs work though, advertise there. I really do think adverts should be kept on a page of their own... a store like the one here.

  20. Flash Ads by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Slashdot is in fact the ONLY website I have AdBlock blocking. Its only because of repeated problems of Flash causing the tab in Chrome to freeze and prevent me from enjoying the content (or the ads).

  21. Worth repeating... by QuietLagoon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...Our belief is that if someone doesn't like them, and they won't click on them, any impressions served to them will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads to people who won't click on them harms campaign performance. ... Publishers can't win by forcing ads — especially low-quality ads — in people's faces. ...

  22. I havve older pc's by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    that can't handle today's web pages, err advertising sites. The pc hangs and I will use task manager to kill the browser and process. So, by using an ad-blocker, I'm not maliciously killing ads. The never show up anyway. I have one quad core Win7 that can handle all but the worst ads and scripts, dual core pc's just crash. To me, ad-blockers are crash-preventers.
    Oh, and those embedded videos with max volume should have their corp offices hacked with ransom-ware. Several times.

    1. Re:I havve older pc's by avandesande · · Score: 1

      I hope you have disabled Flash. Trust me, it is a huge upgrade for your computer.

      --
      love is just extroverted narcissism
  23. Ad is not the problem, intrusive ad is. by zijus · · Score: 2

    FTA on SD : "it is the overabundance of low quality ads that practically force the public to seek out ad blockers"

    IMO it is missing the point : intrusiveness is the problem. Overabundance is just one type of intrusiveness. Intrusive means : consuming the resources I own ( cpu, mem, disc) or that I pay for (bandwidth). Putting my very own resources at risk with the malvertising. Rendering my interface slow. But mostly : too big, too visible, too noisy, flashy. AFAIK it's one of the points fought by AdBlockPlus : Ad is not the problem, intrusive ad is. It is enough to have one single intrusive ad - the contrary of abundance - to make me install all I can (ADB+, etc file, FlashBlock, etc). Z.

    1. Re:Ad is not the problem, intrusive ad is. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Intrusiveness is simply one component of "low quality".

  24. Happy(-ish) SO user by codeButcher · · Score: 1

    I've been happily using Stack Overflow for a couple of years now. I've learned a lot, despite many participants often being at the school/junior professional level, thus only regurgitating the stuff from tutorials without necessarily much depth of insight or practical use experience. I've also been able to contribute some things, which seem to be helpful to a number of people.

    I never realized there were ads on the site until this article. But then again, I've had AdBlock / hosts file since before I signed up...

    I always imagine that it is fair that when people contribute some original content, if the site does not remunerate them (in money) for it, some other incentive might be in order - e.g. free use and option out of advertising (kudos Slashdot). (And unlike e.g. Facebook, to which I've contributed countless translated words and phrases in the beginning years... and where the translated interface's overall impression is still that of a million unpaid monkeys typing away at a million keyboards even today.)

    --
    Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
  25. Considerate adds What a concept by n2hightech · · Score: 1

    Absolutely Right! I do not mind adds served considerately. On the side or below. When an ad pops up over my screen I close the window and go somewhere else. Most content is not worth being annoyed over. If the publishers want people to look at their pages impose some limits on what the advertisers can do. I would like to see a web browser designed so popups and pop overs are not possible and a filter that makes all links to sites that do not impose considerate advertising standards just disappear. In other words every link on a page is previewed if it is found to contain crappy adds and maybe even paywalls that link is either removed or replaced with a warning saying bad ad Pay wall etc so you do not even have to click it to find out. When traffic to those sites dry up they will begin to act better.

  26. The problem with ads is the browser/network by sinrakin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's not ads per se that are annoying, it's how they affect the browsing experience. Reading Slashdot a few seconds ago - I read one or two sentences of an article, then an image loaded and reformatted the page and the paragraph I was reading disappeared. Found it again, read half a sentence and another image loaded and it disappeared again. I don't have time to chase my article all over the screen. On other sites, I'll read half a paragraph, then it will suddenly wipe everything out (not just scroll it off the screen) while it tries to load some huge object from the network. Or half the page will come down, then stop while it hangs trying to do a DNS lookup or load a giant Flash video from some ad network that's not responding, but none of the remaining text will load while it hangs. This happens so much that I've either stopped reading some sites, or installed ad blockers on computers that I use often. I don't hate the ads - I maybe click on one or two a year - if that's enough to keep things profitable I have no objection. What's unacceptable is the way they negatively impact what I'm actually trying to do.

    1. Re:The problem with ads is the browser/network by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      People who use "per se" are annoying.

    2. Re:The problem with ads is the browser/network by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not as annoying as the ones who use "per say".

    3. Re:The problem with ads is the browser/network by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      FUCKING THIS!

      some anti lameness lame crap ...

  27. what is the likelihood of that? by Chas · · Score: 2

    It's possible that this declaration by SO might help to clarify to advertisers that it is the overabundance of low quality ads that practically force the public to seek out ad blockers. But seriously, what is the likelihood of that?

    I'm not sure. The number is a negative value somewhere between googolplex hypercubed and infinity...

    --


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!
  28. Re:Too Bad by N1AK · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's also a pretty naive position. As things stand the difference between people with ad blockers and without isn't how much they hate advertising, it's how tech savvy they are. If IE came with ad blocking by default then (assuming it worked) it's not like its users would be rushing to turn it off, and it's not like those users suddenly went from loving ads to hating them.

  29. Timing and frequency by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    So this is the, what? Sixth time an article in this vein has appeared on /. in the past two weeks maybe? Around about the time ownership of the site moved from to a company that mainly deals in ads. At this point I'm getting a little irked of seeing the same story and starting to wonder if maybe Whiplash and Co. are hoping to glean some insight from the comment section of how to overcome the stain that ads have left. Perhaps it's a sign some companies are willing to adept and get on board with what works and what doesn't, but what are the odds of that?

    1. Re:Timing and frequency by jafiwam · · Score: 1

      They would just post a thread to ask that. People are offering up solutions. Desperate to have a solution even. As a user, I don't want the content to go away, but on the other hand, I am not tolerating asshole ads either. If someone can take the asshole part out and find a happy medium then I wouldn't complain about it.

  30. Conversions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    plus, serving ads to people who won't click on them harms campaign performance. ... Publishers can't win by forcing ads — especially low-quality ads — in people's faces.

    I work in ads. One of my minor fears is that our currently-stupid clients will start giving a fuck about conversions (or even click-throughs, but conversions are the real thing) instead of impressions. As long as it's about impressions, I have a job here. I can deliver impressions. But if the people who write the checks ever start to think, though, I will have to go get a better job doing something useful instead, because the whole house of cards will crash down.

    1. Re:Conversions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I work in ads.

      Where did your life go wrong?

  31. Re:Too Bad by emho24 · · Score: 1

    I use Chrome and the Personal Blocklist (by Google) extension to block them from appearing in Google search results. I will *not* run an installer that does who knows what to my pc, so they get the blacklist. The fact that they are changing their practices is too little too late, the trust was murdered forever ago.

    --
    You must gather your party before venturing forth.
  32. Re:Too Bad by Jason+Levine · · Score: 2

    It used to be that ExpertsExchange would show the answers but hide them under a "pop-in" window that wouldn't go away unless you paid... Or unless you used developer tools to remove the elements causing the popup. Then you could read the content for free. Sadly, they've caught on to this and now don't even serve up the answer on the page. (Which, to be honest, is the proper way of doing things. Not that I agree with their business model, but if you're going to do that you don't put the content on the page and then hide it since it's trivial to reveal it.)

    --
    My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
  33. Re:Too Bad by jafiwam · · Score: 1

    At least it's not Expert Sex Change links where people have a similar problem and people post answers, but you can't see them because you don't pay for their service. Those days were the worst.

    You are right, site-scrapers are annoying as hell. I don't get why the search engines don't completely blacklist them. They must not ever use their own search tools to solve problems.

    Experts Exchange is easy to beat. Just scroll down past the ads and junk on the page and the actual conversation is there.

  34. Re:Too Bad by CastrTroy · · Score: 1

    I personally don't use an ad blocker on my machine. I do use flash block. Most of the sites I visit just don't have that many ads. If a site has so many ads that it becomes annoying, I don't go back to that site so much.

    --

    Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
  35. Stackoverflow had ads? by Rinikusu · · Score: 1

    Hrm.. Never knew.

    --
    If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
  36. Re:Too Bad by operagost · · Score: 1

    I didn't realize there even was a flash blocker. I just have my flash plugin set to "Ask to Activate" in Firefox.

    --

    Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
  37. This is exactly what ads on the Web feel like by U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M · · Score: 1

    Ads on the Web really feel like this.

    Now imagine that stupid ad playing multiple times on top of the TV show you're trying to watch, including the audio. That's what the Web feels like with most ads.

    Please note that I really don't mind the text-only or static image ads. But I despise the animated, dynamic, auto-playing video ads. Those things waste my bandwidth and my CPU cycles. It's also wasting the battery power of people using mobile devices.

  38. Pay-per-click is a broken model by countach44 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If I see an ad for something, it had served its purpose. If a buy a Honda partly because of an ad I saw two weeks ago, but didn't click on, it still worked. Maybe the idea of measuring clicks is that clicks and ad effectiveness are well correlated... but I'm too lazy to find any studies.

    1. Re:Pay-per-click is a broken model by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Disclaimer: I work for an ad agency.

      The company I work for "has ways" to determine ROI; If you buy a car based on an ad you saw a couple weeks ago, they are fairly good about linking those two events in some fashion or another. People smarter than me are working on it. I just work on some of the mundane configuration side of things. It's a bit frightening how good it is.

      I work there because it's a good gig - I despise the industry, but it's a secure paycheck, and the people I work with are good folks. And yes, I run ad-block on my personal machine.

    2. Re:Pay-per-click is a broken model by Infiniti2000 · · Score: 1

      I think the method is a very strongly motivated post-purchase questionnaire type of thing. Basically, they pay something like a $25 gift card, wherein at least one of the questions helps link the purchase to the ad that motivated it. I think they must get enough responses from such measures to justify it.

    3. Re:Pay-per-click is a broken model by spads · · Score: 1

      Ok, but then you are missing out on the (supremely) empowering experience of actually ~~clicking~~ on the ad.

      --
      Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
    4. Re:Pay-per-click is a broken model by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If I see an ad for something, it had served its purpose. If a buy a Honda partly because of an ad I saw two weeks ago, but didn't click on, it still worked. Maybe the idea of measuring clicks is that clicks and ad effectiveness are well correlated... but I'm too lazy to find any studies.

      A few years ago I was reading up on "banner blindness", which eventually lead me to some research on how effective advertising actually works. The short version is that you are right about buying a Honda. Ads work to build brand awareness.The more you see a logo, the more likely you are to internalize its legitimacy and recall it when you actually want to buy something. If you are trying to gain market share through advertising, what you want is your logo to be everywhere. Not to induce people to click on hard-sell pitches, just to become a familiar part of their media landscape.

      If your ad impressions are of the annoying sort, it it counter productive. This is where current online advertising fails miserably. It seems to adhere to the "no such thing as bad publicity" ethos (tell that to Chipotle).

      People value what they can measure. Its easy to measure clicks and impressions. Much harder to connect advertising to actual sales (unless you can get an honest answer from people when they are buying).

      I'm lazy too, but if you look into "banner blindness" you will probably end up finding the same info.

    5. Re:Pay-per-click is a broken model by T.E.D. · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The company I work for "has ways" to determine ROI; If you buy a car based on an ad you saw a couple weeks ago, they are fairly good about linking those two events in some fashion or another. People smarter than me are working on it. I just work on some of the mundane configuration side of things. It's a bit frightening how good it is.

      But are you sure those "ways" are actually effective? I've talked to quite a few laymen recently, including last week a successful marketing professional, who were convinced that read-receipts were an effective way to judge when and how many people read the emails they send. The marketing person was even quoting me general statistics based on this.

      But of course not all email clients honor, or even support read receipts. I'm not even sure most of them do. Some folks try to get around this by embedding externally-hosted images, but any good email client shouldn't automatically present those either. So while a "read-receipt" can (probably) be used to tell that some person has at least glanced at your email, they don't really tell you anything about who hasn't.

      What I'm at getting here is that marketing people have a nasty tendency to have completely unwarranted blind faith in their tools, when they don't really understand how those tools work and what their actual limitations are. So I really would take any info from them about tech with a grain of salt, no matter how certain they are about it. In fact, the more certain they are, the more suspicious you should be.

  39. Why I use an ad blocker by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There are two reasons why I use an ad blocker:

    1) It speeds up a lot of news website load times greatly. Some web sites I'm talking about a 10 second loading/rendering time down to a few milliseconds.
    2) Get rid of crap third party javascript that causes my browser to crash or slow down your site.

  40. Re:Too Bad by legoleg · · Score: 1

    I think you're talking about sourceforge... this was about stackoverflow.

  41. Re: Too Bad by slazzy · · Score: 1

    It's not easy to spot scraping sites so easy, they can "spin" the content to make it all a little different programmatically.

    --
    Website Just Down For Me? Find out
  42. Agreed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Adblock Plus will allow unobtrusive ads by default. These are still ads, but they don't pose infection risks. I always allow those. Want more people to see ads? Make them unobtrusive. It is as simple as that.

    1. Re:Agreed by malditaenvidia · · Score: 2

      Which is one of the many reasons why Adblock Plus should be deprecated in favor of Ublock Origin.

    2. Re:Agreed by BronsCon · · Score: 2

      Why? Because it encourages the ad industry to change for the benefit of all of us, including those who don't use an ad blocker? I fell that's a damn good reason to keep using it, myself, and just turn off the whitelist if you don't like it. Yes, you can do that, it's one checkbox in the config.

      --
      APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
    3. Re:Agreed by malditaenvidia · · Score: 1

      No, because it doesn't do what it's supposed to do and it wastes cycles while not doing it.

    4. Re:Agreed by allo · · Score: 1

      And fails to do so.
      Even without this feature, for example the easylist privacy contains unreasonable exceptions for fucking GOOGLE ANALYTICS on some sites. I guess they payed to be able to track their visitors while others cannot (because its a damn privacy list).

    5. Re:Agreed by eric_harris_76 · · Score: 1

      Depends on who's doing the supposing.

      People vary.

      --
      There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
  43. Re:Too Bad by SQLGuru · · Score: 2

    In the "times long ago", the answers were only available for paid access (or changing your User Agent string).....but Google started ranking them lower for serving up different content to the spiders than to the real people, so they moved the answers all the way to the bottom and just obscuring them. So it isn't as bad now as it used to be.

  44. Re:Ghostery = 'souled-out' & inferior vs. host by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Surely there's a simple Regex or something that could uniquely identify APK's ads and remove them from Slashdot?

    APK, dude, doesn't matter if your thing is the best thing ever. I'm not using it on principle. An adblocking solution should not advertise in this way.

  45. Re:Too Bad by Luthair · · Score: 1

    I rarely to never find useful answers on StackOverflow, further many unrelated issues appear and often end up ranking higher on search engines than the actual documentation or bug report for the project. I wouldn't have an issue with the site if it didn't completely pollute search results, its 'network' is a forum and should be treated as such (being present only once in a search engine results page).

  46. Re:Too Bad by Luthair · · Score: 1

    Why? I don't find the site useful and would be happy to not have it wasting half the entries on search results for any programming topic.

  47. Re:Too Bad by Luthair · · Score: 1

    The trouble with the blocklist plugins is that they simply remove the entries from the view and you don't get more results.

  48. Re:Too Bad by avandesande · · Score: 1

    Unfortunately though with flash block a lot of sites will think you have flash installed and will dish up flash instead of html 5... I believe youtube does this. I disabled flash completely a few months ago and have been pleasantly surprised- very few site are flash only. My number one beef with flash is instability and slowness and this is gone now.

    --
    love is just extroverted narcissism
  49. Ads are dead by OrangeTide · · Score: 1

    I hope everyone uses ad blockers and squeezes ads out of existence entirely. Businesses will have to find new ways to promote themselves. For example, I like reading product reviews or getting referrals from friends. Referrals alone can scale huge for a business given the way we are all connected through facebook, google+, twitter, whatever.

    As annoying as APK's post are, he is still right, a hosts file really does work. It even blocked a some of the video ads that were inserted into a stream. For almost zero effort on my part.

     

    --
    “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    1. Re:Ads are dead by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      a hosts file really does work.

      If all you're trying to block are TLDs, sure.

    2. Re:Ads are dead by hawaiian717 · · Score: 1

      the way we are all connected through facebook, google+, twitter, whatever

      If ads go away, how will Facebook/Google+/Twitter pay to operate their servers? No social network, no connectivity to build referrals.

      --
      End of Line.
    3. Re:Ads are dead by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > If ads go away, how will Facebook/Google+/Twitter pay to operate their servers? No social network, no connectivity to build referrals.

      You say this like it is a bad thing ...

    4. Re:Ads are dead by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If ads go away, how will Facebook/Google+/Twitter pay to operate their servers? No social network, no connectivity to build referrals.

      someone might have to invent and popularize a decentralized social network.
      I don't think people reaching out to other people over the internet is ever going away, that seems related to some pretty basic parts of human behavior.

    5. Re:Ads are dead by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      As long as advertisers are running their own companies and buying their own TLDs, it will continue to work.

  50. Don't want to discourage posters by randomlygeneratename · · Score: 1

    Some good coders who post good solutions may stop posting if ad-block is not allowed. The people reading the answers will probably still go, regardless of ads. So, it would hurt the community. Not that all good coders block ads, or all people in search of answers don't mind ads... but there's a diversity of personality types required to make Stack Overflow work.

  51. Data Cap Annoy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    All Ads do is eat up my data on useless information i don't want to see. 18GB a month between 4 is ate pretty quickly when u don't use adblock. If they could arrange ad to not count on my data cap but that is nonsense that won't ever happen.

  52. Re:Opinions vary among /.'ers (quoted)... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    APK you are a prolific spammer, and you are part of the problem that you claim your hostfiles solve!

    stop advertising your software in this sleazy manner and i bet more people would take you and your software seriously.

    do you have a hostfile that will let us block you?

  53. its not the adds morons, its the malware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    i dont give a flying fuck about the adds themselves, its just that i dont enjoy malware, even people with adblockers and script blockers will see some adds, we dont go crazy when we see one, we block shit because of the malware

    do i like refreshing a site 3 times because im trying to figure out how to watch a video while keeping your other potentially harmful scripts at bay? no, id rather load the whole thing and be done with it, but since you are not responsible if your shitty website infects me, in fact, since aparenty no one in the whole fucking planet is responsible for that, id rather block all kinds of shit by default

    in fact, if it were not for addblockets and script blockers, the amount of infected pc would be higher than a rock musician in the 60s

  54. Re:Too Bad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Stackoverflow isn't a forum, it's more like "the programming FAQ of the internet". The focus is on questions and answers, not discussion.

    Forums are about discussion. Stackoverflow is not.

  55. Re:Ghostery = 'souled-out' & inferior vs. host by cybordeath · · Score: 1

    Everyone also knows you're APK, do you think putting your initials in lowercase makes people think you're someone else?

    Why don't you do us all a favor and go back to spamming ars AlecStarr?

  56. Re:Best adblock & more 4 speed/security by cybordeath · · Score: 1

    At least advertisers don't spam us like you do. I take it your vacation is over, and you're back in full force?

  57. Re:Ghostery = 'souled-out' & inferior vs. host by djkrogoth · · Score: 1

    y?

  58. Re:Best adblock & more 4 speed/security by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So you have nothing valid vs. what apk put up in real /. users not advertiser or inferior competitor sockpuppets http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... liking or using his ware - NEXT off topic easily defeated troll from you know who noted above, lol!

  59. Re:Best adblock & more 4 speed/security by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Brand new advertiser or inferior competitor sockpuppet account on /. to troll apk eh? Your post history gives it away http://slashdot.org/~cybordeat... - you FEAR apk.

  60. Re:Ghostery = 'souled-out' & inferior vs. host by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Brand new advertiser or inferior competitor sockpuppet account on /. to troll apk eh? Your post history gives it away http://slashdot.org/~cybordeat... - you FEAR apk.

  61. Re:Too Bad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    For years you used to be able to just scroll down and see your answers. I was away from IT for awhile and have noted that that is no longer the case.

    I've also noticed that Expert Sexchange links don't seem to be nearly as prevalent as they used to be.

  62. Re:Too Bad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Then you get HTML5 video/audio ads instead of a blocked Flash ad. I think I'll take the latter.

  63. Re:Too Bad by BronsCon · · Score: 1

    Of course they're not, they no longer have the answer in the content that gets indexed by search engines, so they no longer show up near the top of the results.

    --
    APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
  64. Re:Too Bad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I didn't realize there even was a flash blocker. I just have my flash plugin set to "Ask to Activate" in Firefox.

    Ask to activate is a relatively new feature, isn't it? Flashblock has been around for more than a decade.

  65. Re:Opinions vary among /.'ers (quoted)... apk by BronsCon · · Score: 1

    Your application could be the best thing ever written but you are still toxic which, by association, makes your application toxic. Period. I hope Whipslash deals with you as he's promised, and soon.

    --
    APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
  66. Opinions vary among /.'ers (quoted)... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "his hosts program is actually pretty good" - by xenotransplant (4179011) on Monday August 10, 2015 @03:34PM (#50287195)

    "his hosts tool is actually useful for those cases in which one does indeed want to locally block stuff outright while consuming minimum system resources" by alexgieg (948359) on Friday September 25, 2015 @09:57AM (#50596461)

    "I like your host file system." - by Karmashock (2415832) on Wednesday September 09, 2015 @03:57PM (#50489401)

    "No complaints from me, I like APK's spam. Reminds me to use a host file. Also, his stuff is free." - by aaaaaaargh! (1150173) on Tuesday November 17, 2015 @09:31AM (#50947415)

    "APK is kinda right... I've given up on JS based adblocking and gone to blackholing in /etc/hosts, just like it was back in the 90s. The computational load has gotten intolerable for any ad-blocking using JS. I've tried his hosts file generating software. It works." - by bmo (77928) on Thursday October 15, 2015 @11:30AM (#50736071)

    "Actually, APK is totally right on this count. Adblock Plus on Firefox mobile is a dog on older, or lower end, phones. A hostfile based adblocker makes for a much better experience in this context. Of course, your phone has to be rooted, which isn't the case with Firefox + adblock." - by chihowa (366380) on Saturday May 16, 2015 @11:40AM (#49705641)

    "In a footnote, I would like to note that I find your hosts file admirable." - by vel-ex-tech (4337079) on Tuesday November 24, 2015 @10:27PM (#50999097)

    ---

    * REAL /. users quoted who use my ware & like it + my posts - not sockpuppets of inferior competitors & advertisers like you obviously!

    APK

    P.S.=> The list below doesn't though - which of these I wonder do YOU really represent?

    1.) Advertiser
    2.) An INFERIOR competitor (e.g. - AdBlock & variants like AdBlock Plus or AdBlock Edge, Ghostery, & UBlock)
    3.) Webmaster profiting by ads
    4.) Malware maker &/or Botnet Herder

    ... apk

  67. Re:Opinions vary among /.'ers (quoted)... apk by BronsCon · · Score: 1

    5.) Someone who hates having a product crammed down my throat. Especially the way you do it.

    --
    APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
  68. No surprise here by wwalker · · Score: 1

    Stack Overflow's main value is in user-generated content. The users are the ones who write questions and answers, and rate them to filter out garbage. It's no surprise that they would rather have 20% of users block ads, than to lose that 20%. When someone comes to Stack Overflow with ads blocked, the site will still potentially gain something from that user, in the form of a question/answer/rating. Wired, on the other hand, has very little user-generated content, as far as I know. So if someone browses Wired with ads blocked, the site has absolutely nothing to lose by kicking them out (or asking to pay). Along the same lines, Slashdot would probably not care about blocked ads (if the new owners are smart), New York Times -- very much so.

  69. Re:Too Bad by amicusNYCL · · Score: 1

    Sadly, they've caught on to this and now don't even serve up the answer on the page.

    Is that why I don't see them on Google any more?

    I seem to remember blocking experts-exchange.com from appearing in my search results on Google if I'm logged in, but I don't even see a place where I can manage that list now.

    --
    "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
  70. Re:Too Bad by avandesande · · Score: 1

    Then use ad block

    --
    love is just extroverted narcissism
  71. Re:Too Bad by amicusNYCL · · Score: 1

    I don't think their position is naive. People who block ads might be more savvy than the general population, but those people have also gone out of their way specifically to block ads. It's true that they do hate advertising, or at least the practical effects of it (slow page loading, possible malware, etc).

    --
    "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
  72. Re:Opinions vary among /.'ers (quoted)... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Nobody forces you to use it. You don't like apk's posts on his program as whoyou really represent's scared shitless of it as apk's not bought up\souled out to not work right like almostalladsblocked and ghostery.

  73. Best adblock & more 4 speed/security by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-4 32/64-bit http://start64.com/index.php?o...

    -

    FREE, not 'souled-out' to advertisers, adds speed, security & reliability.

    Does far more w/ far less more efficiently vs. addons (clarityray blockable, redundant + RAM/CPU wasteful & 'souled-out' crippled by default) & local DNS servers @ home.

    Fixes DNS' security issues & stops tracking @ webpage + DNS levels via 1 file you NATIVELY have!

    (Firewalls do rest on FAR less used IP address trackers/threats vs. host-domain names).

    -

    Obtains data vs. online threats & ads via 10 reputable security community sites - easily edited by you using my program.

    -

    SPEEDS YOU UP 2 ways:

    Adblocking ALL ads + local RAM cached favorite sites @ TOP of hosts for faster resolution vs. remote DNS (for reliability + speed) vs. other "so-called security 'solutions'" SLOWING YOU!

    -

    All via what you already have vs. illogically "bolting on browser addons 'MOAR'" (clarityray detected/blockable + usermode slow & increased messagepassing, cpu + ram overheads)

    -

    MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee verified it's source as safe http://forum.hosts-file.net/vi... ) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl...

    &

    MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus per a VERY recent testing of them all http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

    &

    It's safe proven by 57 antivirus programs in BOTH its 64-bit model https://www.virustotal.com/en/...

    +

    32-bit model https://www.virustotal.com/en/...

    &

    Installer-> http://f.virscan.org/APKHostsF...

    -

    * "The premise is quite simple: Take something designed by nature & reprogram it to make it work for the body rather than against it..." - Dr. Alice Krippen: "I am legend".

    APK

    P.S.=> By "yours truly" - "The Lord of Hosts" so-to-speak:

    "The image this title brings to mind is a mighty military commander who can at a mere word summon rank upon rank of protective power" -> https://answers.yahoo.com/ques... & THE WORD = hosts!

    (Accept NO substitutes)

    ...apk

  74. Re:Ads steal our speed & infect us #2/2... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    do you really have to post this 5 times in the discussion for this topic?

  75. Re:Opinions vary among /.'ers (quoted)... apk by BronsCon · · Score: 2

    Who do I really represent, then? I'll answer for you, since you're too full of shit to answer for yourself: I represent myself as an end-user. Period. My real name and identity are attached to this account for public view, you can see who I am and what my affiliations are, so I suggest you take a look for yourself and stop talking out of your ass; everyone else can see the truth, as well, so your bullshit just becomes stinkingly obvious to the world when you try to shovel it toward me.

    I don't like APK's posts about his program because he has made several personal attacks against me, continuously spams multiple-page ads into forums I participate in (yeah, that's what someone who doesn't want to see ads wants to see... really?) and just generally seems to be somewhat of an entitled and egotistical dick. I don't like his posts because they're precisely the kind of shit I use an ad blocker to avoid seeing. They're ads.

    --
    APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
  76. Re:Best adblock & more 4 speed/security by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    do you really need to post this three time within a half hour.

  77. Re: Opinions vary among /.'ers (quoted)... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Actually, unless my APK blocker is active, I DO end up seeing those self-promoting posts... I have to take action to avoid it.

  78. Close, but no cigar... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    More accurately: we hope that they won't, but we understand that some people just don't like ads.

    It isn't really about people not liking ads; unlike virtually any other advertising media, computer ads have the capability to compromise your computer. Since a computer is more than an entertainment/ad delivery system, a person has more to lose if they come across a malicious ad.

    Imagine if non-computer ads bricked your radio/television/cellphone. I'm sure you would be doing everything in your power to negate that attack vector.

    Unfortunately, with smart technology we are now starting to see this as well. The more computer technology you put in devices, the more vulnerable they become to people with malicious intentions.

    If you still feel like supporting sites with ad revenue, you basically have to delegate a computer to be the entertainment/ad delivery system device. Isolate it from the rest of your computing systems and use it exclusively for your web surfing and internet entertainment activities.

  79. Re:Opinions vary among /.'ers (quoted)... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You always attacked apk first like you are now which your post history shows. Quit the fake butthurt victim shtick when you're the victimizer. Go away liar.

  80. Re:Ads steal our speed & infect us #2/2... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Then stop downmodding it and posting ac to hide you did. We know you did. We know you're an advertiser or webmaster too trying to hide your misdoings and negligence.

  81. Re:Opinions vary among /.'ers (quoted)... apk by BronsCon · · Score: 1

    Calling out a spammer for spamming is not an attack. Spamming, on the other hand... But yes, my post history is there for all to see, unlike yours; who's trying to hide their lies?

    --
    APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
  82. Re:Too Bad by Jason+Levine · · Score: 1

    You can always add "-site:experts-exchange.com" from your search if you get too many of their listings in your browser.

    Of course, if they're providing full results to Google, you might be able to spoof being GoogleBot to see their full content.

    --
    My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
  83. Re:Opinions vary among /.'ers (quoted)... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    APK,
    the sad part is you actually believe your own drivel you somehow believe that your spamming is better than the advertisers that you claim your software can block, when are are actually part of the problem.

    I will debate with you the merits of your own advertising methods if you think you can justify them, but i refuse to look at your software until you clean up your act and stop peddling it in such a sleazy and annoying manner. how can it be trusted if this is the way is the way you advertise it?

  84. It's the UE, not the ad itself by TheKarelian · · Score: 1

    I don't mind ads per se. I mind ads that play noise, play video, and seize control of my mouse focus.

  85. Re:Too Bad by jthill · · Score: 1

    Yay for the personal blocklist.

    --
    As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
  86. My ad blocker use by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I really don't care about them on screen. The reasons I do use ad blockers are due to ads that are not content to just be ads on the top, sides or bottom of the screen. Redirects to google play, malware, pop unders, pop overs, scrolling ads that hover over what you are trying to read. I don't mind an ad here or there, some are even useful. But thanks to the bad ads I gotta block all ads.

  87. Re:Too Bad by Lotana · · Score: 1

    I am forever grateful to the people that developed Flashblock. Without that handy plugin the web is an unbearable place.

  88. Re:Too Bad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    There is that, but there is also the fact that Google took action against that specific site and reduced it's relevance in search results.

  89. Re:Opinions vary among /.'ers (quoted)... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    BronsCon you admit to starting up with apk first and have to. Your post history exposes it. You fail voluntarily you advertiser crony (it's so obvious).

  90. Re:Ghostery = 'souled-out' & inferior vs. host by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Modding down apk's posts with concrete verifiable undeniable data on ads infecting users by advertiser negligence is reprehensible. It's all through this page and no denying it on your part troll. Even modding down the last time I posted this. This stinks of an organized conspiracy to hide things that are nothing more than verifiable fact and truth.

  91. Re:Opinions vary among /.'ers (quoted)... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Mod downs of apk's posts with concrete verifiable undeniable data on ads infecting users by advertiser negligence is reprehensible. It's all through this page and no denying it on your part troll. Even modding down the last time I posted this. He didn't even put his program in those links. This stinks of an organized conspiracy to hide truth about advertiser and webmaster negligence.

  92. Re:Opinions vary among /.'ers (quoted)... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Don't like apk's posts? Don't attack him first like your post history shows you do even admitting it here. Slashdot provides methods to browse above ac post mod levels which is where apk posts. Do it and stfu.

  93. Re: Opinions vary among /.'ers (quoted)... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Dear advertiser: Slashdot provides means to browse above apk's ac mod level and you downmod to hide his posts so use it and please: STFU with your utter bullshit lies and subterfuge wording crap. We're well aware of your province of 1/2 truth your "job" entails. Go away. Shoo!

  94. Re:Opinions vary among /.'ers (quoted)... apk by BronsCon · · Score: 1

    Because I moderate, I browse at -1 in order to look for abuses, so I ca counter them. This is even Slashdot's suggested way to browse when modersting. To add to it, I see the value in AC posts, just not in APK's ads.

    Care to quote where I ever claimed to have attacked APK in any way? My posting history is visible the the entire world, should be easy, right?

    The real question is why I keep referring to you in the 3rd person as though I don't know I'm replying to you, APK. You toxic bastard.

    --
    APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
  95. Re:Opinions vary among /.'ers (quoted)... apk by BronsCon · · Score: 1

    On the off chance that you're not actually APK...

    When and where do I ever admit to starting with APK? Show me. Link to the post, it's gotta be that simple if it ever actually happened.

    As for how obvious it is that I'm in bed with advertisers, provide sources for this? Keith Bronstrup. Look me up. Find the association between me and advertisers, go ahead. Post all the details, go for it, it should be easy since it's so obvious.

    HINT: You'll find it impossible to legitimately post such information, because no such association exists. The only way to make it easy on yourself is to make shit up, which you're clearly good at.

    You see, some of us don't hide behind anonymity because some of us have nothing to hide. You, on the other hand, refuse to show yourself for what you truly are: a spammer and a troll. I feed you because it's entertaining and I've got plenty of karma to burn.

    --
    APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
  96. ./ doesn`t care because by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They can do this:
    http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/02/10/2128204/dell-packs-xeon-and-quadro-gpu-in-4lb-laptop

  97. Evidence from your post history as asked by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Moderate above it. Nothing stops you. Use facilities available to you no more problems of apk stomping you for starting with him first http://slashdot.org/comments.p... or lying like you did here http://tech.slashdot.org/comme... trying to put words in his mouth he never said.

    1. Re:Evidence from your post history as asked by BronsCon · · Score: 1
      What stops me is, as I said:

      I see the value in AC posts

      Sorry, APK, I'm not going to throw out useful contributors just because you insist on advertising your "ad blocker".

      Further, your first example of an attack was a joke, not an attack. If you took that personally, APK, that's on you; you clearly went looking for it, as I didn't seek you out to say it. Unlike you, who often seeks me out to reply to me directly, in an attempt to start shit. Your second example was simply you responding to me asking what words I put in your mouth be again claiming that I put words in your mouth; you never did demonstrate me actually having done so. In fact, you put words in my mouth in that reply.

      So, then...

      --
      APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
    2. Re:Evidence from your post history as asked by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      BronsCon no denying you started with apk. He was there first and you came in with bullshit. You also put words in his mouth he didn't say. You got what you asked for, now go away now. Shoo. You've beaten yourself as usual. Mod above where apk posts as ac and you advertisers and webmasters profiting by them downmod him all you want to anyway even HIDING HIS POSTS THAT SHOW ADVERTISER NEGLIGENCE INFECTING US TO HIDE IT FROM READERS SHOWN HERE http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... and there are many more like it on this page. Is your favorite color transparent, advertiser or webmaster? Yes.

    3. Re:Evidence from your post history as asked by BronsCon · · Score: 1

      Here's the thing: In your first link, APK... err... you didn't show up until I had posted, he... err... you most certainly were not "there first" as you claim. And you still have not shown me where I put words in your mouth. I did not get what I asked for, because you can not give it to me, because it does not exist. You go away no. Shoo. You've not only beaten yourself, but driven your failure into the ground. As for moderation, I have never moderated one of your posts, APK. Not once. By the time I see them, they're already -1, so why would I waste the points? As I've said in the past, you're right about ads and advertising practices; I've never disagreed with this. However, you and your approach to social interaction are toxic and that makes everything you touch toxic by association. Your hosts file engine is not the massive accomplishment you claim it is, it is built on the POSIX implementation of the hosts file, which you had no part in, and simply compiles lists that many other people have worked hard to assemble, something else you had no part in. I could write it in a few hours; less competent developers could do it in a day or so. Get over yourself and quit seeking me out to reply to me, it's a waste of your time.

      --
      APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
    4. Re:Evidence from your post history as asked by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      BronsCon - 6 nodes above yours here http://slashdot.org/comments.p.... Which is yours before apk's there? Is MightyMartian your sockpuppet? Is FireballX301 your sockpuppet there? Is Sarusa your sockpuppet? Has to be. They're the ONLY ones before apk, not you. Quit lying. You're busted.

    5. Re:Evidence from your post history as asked by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hahahahaha BronsCon the man with integrity and a fake name online busted lying again. Good job.

    6. Re:Evidence from your post history as asked by BronsCon · · Score: 1

      There's always the AC I replied to, as well. Unless that was you attacking yourself, Alexander. But you're right in this case, you had posted in the thread before me; my mistake for not fully expanding the thread to see this. There is huge difference between lying and being mistaken and I was certainly the latter in this case and you certainly didn't bust my for anything. I still wasn't replying to, or attacking, you; I was making a joke. That you took it personally speaks volumes about you.

      --
      APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
    7. Re:Evidence from your post history as asked by BronsCon · · Score: 1

      Enough integrity that I gave my real name and don't hide behind anonymity. You busted nothing, Alexander, there was no lie. Good job.

      Sadly, I'm running out of troll food for the day, so the fun will have to come to an end shortly.

      --
      APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
    8. Re:Evidence from your post history as asked by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You lied, now admitting it BronsCon. You lost any credibility doing it like all advertisers cronies do. Not that you ever had any integrity with a fake name online. You did it to yourself admitting it no less now finally once your ass is in a sling you put it in though only, advertiser crony or webmaster that you clearly are profiting by them but in massive fear of apk.

    9. Re:Evidence from your post history as asked by BronsCon · · Score: 1

      Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. BronsCon is a shortening of Bronstrup Consulting, the name of the business I operated when I created this accoung, Bronstrup being my real last name, Keith (and I've given you this at least 4 times now, Alexander) being my real first name. And, again, there is a huge difference between lying and being mistaken. Where are the ads on my site? Nowhere, there are none, I'm not making money on ads, and I'm not selling them either. And I'm clearly not fearing you, Alexander, but you go right no and think that. In reality, I'm laughing at you. Laughing hard.

      --
      APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
    10. Re:Evidence from your post history as asked by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You lied BronsCon http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... admitting it finally. You lost credibility doing it like all advertisers cronies do. Not that you ever had any integrity with a fake name online. You did it to yourself admitting it no less now as your ass is in a sling you put it in though only, advertiser crony or webmaster that you clearly are profiting by them but in massive fear of apk. Sadly you beat your own ass and are running like usual.

    11. Re:Evidence from your post history as asked by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You lied BronsCon http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... admitting it finally. You lost credibility doing it like all advertisers cronies do. Not that you ever had any integrity with a fake name online. You did it to yourself admitting it no less now as your ass is in a sling you put it in though only, advertiser crony or webmaster that you clearly are profiting by them (probably on other website you have right?) but in massive fear of apk.

    12. Re:Evidence from your post history as asked by BronsCon · · Score: 1

      Third copy of this same shitpost. Speaking something you believe to be truth it not a lie; notice how, once corrected, I stopped making that claim? Yeah, because I wasn't lying, I was mistaken. If I claim that again in the future, go ahead and call it a lie, because then it will be. Meanwhile, your claims that I have ties to the advertising industry are flat out lies, Alexander, as is any claim you make, while posting anonymously, that you are not, in fact, Alexander P. Kowalski, and any claim you make that I fear you in any way. All lies. Every bit of it.

      --
      APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
    13. Re:Evidence from your post history as asked by BronsCon · · Score: 1

      Post delayed because I hit my posting limit...

      Shitpost copy #4. Beautiful.

      I wonder... do you waste so much of your time on me because you haven't yet figured out how to beat me? Here's a helpful hint: we need not be enemies and you need not beat me. Just stop. You've been entertaining and, because of that, I'm willing to forgive and forget. So just... stop. You won't win, because there is nothing to win; you'll never prove what you're trying to prove because there is nothing to prove. Yes, my wife's blog has ads on it, she's made a grand total of $3.24 in the past 4 years. Oh, you got me, I'm making so much bank on ads. Yup. Really profiting, since hosting for 4 years clearly cost less than that.

      Honestly, I've been telling he to just lose the ads, as they cost more (in terms of the time I spend helping her with them) than they bring in, but several orders of magnitude. But you're clearly right, I'm profiting from those ads. Pity me, looks like I lost.

      Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

      --
      APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
    14. Re:Evidence from your post history as asked by BronsCon · · Score: 1

      Wow, I had all that time to proofread that post and I didn't. That's a fail in my part and I'll own it (because that's what I do when I fail; notice how I haven't owned any of the "failures" you keep trying to point out, Alexander). The last paragraph should read:

      Honestly, I've been telling her to just lose the ads, as they cost more (in terms of the time I spend helping her with them) than they bring in, by several orders of magnitude. But you're clearly right, I'm profiting from those ads. Pity me, looks like I lost.

      And the last two sentences are dripping with so much sarcasm you should need a towel after you read them, in case you didn't notice.

      --
      APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
    15. Re:Evidence from your post history as asked by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How's his post a shitpost if you admit you messed up lying BronsCon http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... ?

    16. Re:Evidence from your post history as asked by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How's his post a shitpost if you admit you messed up lying BronsCon http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... ?

    17. Re:Evidence from your post history as asked by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How's his post a shitpost if you admit you messed up and lied BronsCon http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... ?

    18. Re:Evidence from your post history as asked by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      BronsCONMAN is trying to bury being caught lying here http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... is why. All his doubletalk isn't changing the fact he lied that he starts things up with apk not the other way around.

    19. Re:Evidence from your post history as asked by BronsCon · · Score: 1

      Haha, you speak just like one of the advertisers you claim to despise. Doubletalk. Seriously? You have proven nothing, you can't prove anything, because there is nothing to prove and I'm not convinced you even know what a fact is, Alexander. Just. Give. Up.

      --
      APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
    20. Re:Evidence from your post history as asked by BronsCon · · Score: 1

      You talk about integrity, Alexander, but then you masquerade behind the Anonymous Coward moniker and pretend to be other people, using a network of "bridges" (not that you know what those even are or you'd know, simply, that the term you are looking for is "proxy") to evade an ever-growing collection of IP bans in order to post your messages. Yeah, that's integrity, and just the kind of ethics I like to see displayed by the people whose software I allow to run on my system. Yup.

      No, wait, actually, it's unethical, disingenuous, and toxic behavior. Alexander, just leave it alone, lest I start campaigning for your Hosts File Engine on your behalf, pointing would-be users of your software to threads like this where you show your true colors. And there won't be a thing you can do about it because, legally, facts are fair game, and the written record of your words here is a matter of fact.

      I'll advise you once more to just leave it alone. Here we are, both acting like 5 year olds, the difference is I'm admitting it; I'm openly admitting that I'm not letting this go until you do, simply because it is for your own good. Seriously. This is for you, not me; it is only with people like you that I get like this, and people like you aren't the type of people I'd ever have as clients, so I'm not concerned with my reputation here, but you should certainly be concerned for yours.

      --
      APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
    21. Re:Evidence from your post history as asked by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      BronsConMan is trying to forums slide bury being caught lying here http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...

    22. Re:Evidence from your post history as asked by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Delusional fake name online BronsConMan further proves his lack of integrity caught lying here http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... admitting he did here http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...

    23. Re:Evidence from your post history as asked by BronsCon · · Score: 1

      :)

      --
      APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
  98. Re:Opinions vary among /.'ers (quoted)... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    BronsCon you've fried yourself publicly with what you ask for and you post behind a fake name online? Please http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... you came in starting crap with him in the first link and in the second you definitely tried putting words in apk's mouth he never said. Yes like here, you started your crap to fall flat on your face again, liar.

  99. Re:Opinions vary among /.'ers (quoted)... apk by BronsCon · · Score: 1

    What fake name? And if the name I gave is fake, what is my real name? You can find my birth certificate held with the City of Cleveland - Division of Vital Statistics. As for how badly I "fried" myself, well, I'm glad you linked back to your own post rather than posting it again, as I address those claims in response to that post.

    I didn't start crap, APK, you came looking for crap. The truth I am pointing out is backed by my posting history, there for all to see. Your bullshit, however, is masked by your anonymous posting; but we all know you're APK, nobody in their right mind would defend your behavior, even if they agree (as I do) with you that the hosts file is actually a useful tool. You remain toxic and so does anything you touch.

    --
    APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
  100. BULLSHIT BronsCon by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    BronsCon is the name on your birth certificate? No. It's fake.BronsCon no denying you started with apk and also put words in his mouth he didn't say. You got what you asked for, now go away now. Shoo. You've beaten yourself as usual. Mod above where apk posts as ac and you advertisers and webmasters profiting by them downmod him all you want to anyway even HIDING HIS POSTS THAT SHOW ADVERTISER NEGLIGENCE INFECTING US TO HIDE IT FROM READERS SHOWN HERE http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... and there are many more like it on this page. Is your favorite color transparent, advertiser or webmaster? Yes.

    1. Re:BULLSHIT BronsCon by BronsCon · · Score: 1

      No, BronsCon is not the name on my birth certificate, the Bronstrup (as visible in the email address just to the right of my username) is the last name on that piece of paper. As for you, APK? Hiding behind anonymity while calling me out for using a false name? BronsCon identifies me in many places on the internet, and I've given you (and the rest of the world) my full name in this very conversation and at least once in the past. As for the rest of your post, Alexander, I replied to it the first time you posted it, no need to repeat myself like you do.

      --
      APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
    2. Re:BULLSHIT BronsCon by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nobody believes you after this BronsCon: It's impossible for you to deny http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... and you lied about posting there in that specific discussion tree BEFORE apk did. You came in after with off topic bullshit trolling. You're flat busted lying or those posts before apk's which is before yours are your sockpuppets. Take your pick. Either way you fail. Another advertiser LIAR busted as usual.

    3. Re:BULLSHIT BronsCon by BronsCon · · Score: 1

      As I said in my reply to your other AC post, Alexander (and you can call me Keith, by the way, I feel we should be on a first name basis at this point and I've given you that information at least twice now), I was mistaken, I did not expand the thread fully to see that you had posted there. I was also not replying to you.

      And you still have yet to prove that I have any ties to advertising. You won't, because you can't, because I don't. But go ahead and prove my "lie", Alexander.

      --
      APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
    4. Re:BULLSHIT BronsCon by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You lied BronsCon. You lost what any credibility doing it like all advertisers cronies do. Not that you ever had any integrity with a fake name online. You did it to yourself admitting it no less now as your ass is in a sling you put it in though only, advertiser crony or webmaster that you clearly are profiting by them but in massive fear of apk.

    5. Re:BULLSHIT BronsCon by BronsCon · · Score: 1

      You just shitposted this same post twice. My response is attached to the first copy, Alexander, so you can read it there.

      --
      APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
    6. Re:BULLSHIT BronsCon by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You lied BronsCon http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... admitting it finally. You lost credibility doing it like all advertisers cronies do. Not that you ever had any integrity with a fake name online. You did it to yourself admitting it no less now as your ass is in a sling you put it in though only, advertiser crony or webmaster that you clearly are (on your many websites no doubt) profiting by them but in massive fear of apk.

    7. Re:BULLSHIT BronsCon by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      you are a liar, because i believe BronsCon

    8. Re:BULLSHIT BronsCon by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You can believe him: He admitted he fucked up and lied http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... like the fuckup he is!

    9. Re: BULLSHIT BronsCon by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Holy fucking shit, how old are you? Keeping claiming that he "lost all his credibility" when to me he never had any. But I simply believe him because he has damn good arguments, which you don't. For fuck's sake Alex, fucking go away.
      I don't know your tool, but I am feeling a lot less like trying it now.

    10. Re: BULLSHIT BronsCon by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You lied BronsCon caught in it here http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... + admitted it here http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... how old are you and who are you trying to fool but yourself? You came in here doing the same trolling and you're caught in the act yet again. Hilarious. What a lying bullshitter.

  101. BronsCon: Man w integrity behind a fake name by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Nice ac threat too to apk there in that same discussion tree BronsCon http://slashdot.org/comments.p... (BronsCon the man with honor and integrity BEHIND A FAKE NAME ONLINE hahahahaha) and lo and behond it came JUST before YOUR POST too. Will wonders never cease!

  102. Witness the "FoAmInG RaGe" of BronsCon liar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    How's it a shitpost proving you lied BronsCon http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... admitting it finally. You never had integrity with a fake name online to begin with. You did it to yourself admitting it no less now as your ass is in a sling you put it in though only! Your massive fear of apk is too apparent liar. Rage all you want to liar. You've done wonders for apk.

    1. Re:Witness the "FoAmInG RaGe" of BronsCon liar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hahahahaha the little lying bastard BronsCon got caught like all these sockpuppet fake name multiple account using schmucks do. Good job.

  103. BronsCon = THE BOY WHO CRIED WOLF! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Then why'd you admit you lied here BronsCon http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... ?

  104. Ads steal our speed & infect us #1/2... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Here's a SMALL partial only sample of OpenBid/realtime bidding & other ad networks malware makers have taken advantage of to infect you with:

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.wired.com/techbiz/m...

    http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023...

    http://news.slashdot.org/story...

    http://www.itworld.com/securit...

    http://nakedsecurity.sophos.co...

    http://www.zdnet.com/ad-exec-o...

    http://search.slashdot.org/sto...

    http://nakedsecurity.sophos.co...

    http://www.securityweek.com/ea...

    http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    APK

    P.S.=> See subject & those links (+ ads not only INFECT US, but STEAL BANDWIDTH & SPEED WE PAY FOR MONTHLY+ track us too)

    ... apk

  105. Ads steal our speed & infect us #2/2... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Here's yet another SMALL partial only sample of OpenBid/realtime bidding & other ad networks malware makers have taken advantage of to infect you with:

    http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...

    http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://it.slashdot.org/story/0...

    http://it.slashdot.org/story/0...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://apple.slashdot.org/stor...

    APK

    P.S.=> See subject & those links (+ ads not only INFECT US, but STEAL BANDWIDTH & SPEED WE PAY FOR MONTHLY+ track us too)

    ... apk

  106. Ghostery = 'souled-out' & inferior vs. hosts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Can ghostery do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:

    1.) Protect vs. malicious sites (past ads)
    2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop C&C server talk
    3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop C&C server talk
    4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop C&C server talk
    5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (reliability)
    6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
    7.) Protect vs. trackers
    8.) Protect vs. spam
    9.) Protect vs. phishing
    10.) Protect vs. bandwidth caps
    11.) Get dns blocks
    12.) Keep off dns request logs
    13.) Speed up surfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
    14.) Work on anything webbound multiplatform.
    15.) Ez data control
    16.) Block ads more efficiently in cpu + memory use vs. addons

    * ANSWER ="NO" to each on Ghostery doing all or @ all + hosts = on devices natively.

    APK

    P.S.=> Addons do FAR less than hosts do & FAR less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):

    Ghostery (Advertiser owned) - "Fox guards henhouse" -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

    ---

    Addons add complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).

    ---

    ClarityRay defeats addons like Ghostery via native browser methods.

    ---

    Better than ghostery by FAR = APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-4 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...

    MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee who verified its source is safe http://forum.hosts-file.net/vi... ) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

    &

    GUARANTEED safe & clean per 57 antivirus programs recently in BOTH its 64-bit model https://www.virustotal.com/en/...

    +

    In its 32-bit model also https://www.virustotal.com/en/...

    So is its installer -> http://f.virscan.org/APKHostsF...

    ... apk

  107. Opinions vary: Real /. users quoted... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "his hosts program is actually pretty good" - by xenotransplant (4179011) on Monday August 10, 2015 @03:34PM (#50287195)

    "his hosts tool is actually useful for those cases in which one does indeed want to locally block stuff outright while consuming minimum system resources" by alexgieg (948359) on Friday September 25, 2015 @09:57AM (#50596461)

    "I like your host file system." - by Karmashock (2415832) on Wednesday September 09, 2015 @03:57PM (#50489401)

    "No complaints from me, I like APK's spam. Reminds me to use a host file. Also, his stuff is free." - by aaaaaaargh! (1150173) on Tuesday November 17, 2015 @09:31AM (#50947415)

    "APK is kinda right... I've given up on JS based adblocking and gone to blackholing in /etc/hosts, just like it was back in the 90s. The computational load has gotten intolerable for any ad-blocking using JS. I've tried his hosts file generating software. It works." - by bmo (77928) on Thursday October 15, 2015 @11:30AM (#50736071)

    "Actually, APK is totally right on this count. Adblock Plus on Firefox mobile is a dog on older, or lower end, phones. A hostfile based adblocker makes for a much better experience in this context. Of course, your phone has to be rooted, which isn't the case with Firefox + adblock." - by chihowa (366380) on Saturday May 16, 2015 @11:40AM (#49705641)

    "In a footnote, I would like to note that I find your hosts file admirable." - by vel-ex-tech (4337079) on Tuesday November 24, 2015 @10:27PM (#50999097)

    "APK isn't wrong" - by cfalcon (779563) on Sunday October 04, 2015 @05:11PM (#50657891)

    ---

    * REAL /. users quoted who use my ware & like it + my posts - not sockpuppets of inferior competitors & advertisers like you obviously!

    APK

    P.S.=> The list below doesn't - which of these are you modding this down?

    1.) Advertiser
    2.) An INFERIOR competitor (e.g. - AdBlock & variants like AdBlock Plus or AdBlock Edge, Ghostery, & UBlock)
    3.) Webmaster profiting by ads
    4.) Malware maker &/or Botnet Herder

    ... apk

  108. Ads steal our speed & infect us #1/2... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    SMALL partial only sample of OpenBid/realtime bidding & other ad networks malware makers have taken advantage of to infect you with:

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.wired.com/techbiz/m...

    http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023...

    http://news.slashdot.org/story...

    http://www.itworld.com/securit...

    http://nakedsecurity.sophos.co...

    http://www.zdnet.com/ad-exec-o...

    http://search.slashdot.org/sto...

    http://nakedsecurity.sophos.co...

    http://www.securityweek.com/ea...

    http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    APK

    P.S.=> See subject & those links (+ ads not only INFECT US, but STEAL BANDWIDTH & SPEED WE PAY FOR MONTHLY+ track us too)

    ... apk

  109. Ads steal our speed & infect us #2/2... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Another SMALL partial only sample of OpenBid/realtime bidding & other ad networks malware makers have taken advantage of to infect you with:

    http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...

    http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://it.slashdot.org/story/0...

    http://it.slashdot.org/story/0...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://apple.slashdot.org/stor...

    APK

    P.S.=> See subject & those links (+ ads not only INFECT US, but STEAL BANDWIDTH & SPEED WE PAY FOR MONTHLY+ track us too)

    ... apk

  110. Ads steal our speed & infect us #1/2... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    SMALL partial only sample of OpenBid/realtime bidding & other ad networks malware makers have taken advantage of to infect you with:

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.wired.com/techbiz/m...

    http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023...

    http://news.slashdot.org/story...

    http://www.itworld.com/securit...

    http://nakedsecurity.sophos.co...

    http://www.zdnet.com/ad-exec-o...

    http://search.slashdot.org/sto...

    http://nakedsecurity.sophos.co...

    http://www.securityweek.com/ea...

    http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    APK

    P.S.=> See subject & those links (+ ads not only INFECT US, but STEAL BANDWIDTH & SPEED WE PAY FOR MONTHLY+ track us too)

    ... apk

  111. Ads steal our speed & infect us #2/2... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Another SMALL partial only sample of OpenBid/realtime bidding & other ad networks malware makers have taken advantage of to infect you with:

    http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...

    http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://it.slashdot.org/story/0...

    http://it.slashdot.org/story/0...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://apple.slashdot.org/stor...

    APK

    P.S.=> See subject & those links (+ ads not only INFECT US, but STEAL BANDWIDTH & SPEED WE PAY FOR MONTHLY+ track us too)

    ... apk

  112. it worked before without ads by pereric · · Score: 1

    I wouldn't be too sad if Facebook or twitter went away. Facebook is basically blogging and blog syndication plus chat / calendar and such. Ad-supported and super invasive. Being popular because it's popular ("everyone else is using it"). It's a one-provider system. Without facebook (you could hope) we would perhaps get a multi-provider system for social networking, event invitations and such - where you can choose different client software and providers (or perhaps operate your own server) with UI, feature set, and privacy policy that actually suit your needs.

    Anyway, ads are not needed - it has been done before without ads. You could get the social network - e-mail, a good NNTP newsfeed and perhaps some web space as part of the deal with your ISP. Or perhaps from a separate paid provider, or from your university. There are pros and cons - but you sure *can* do without ads.

  113. Ads steal our speed & infect us #1/2... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    SMALL partial only sample of OpenBid/realtime bidding & other ad networks malware makers have taken advantage of to infect you with:

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.wired.com/techbiz/m...

    http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023...

    http://news.slashdot.org/story...

    http://www.itworld.com/securit...

    http://nakedsecurity.sophos.co...

    http://www.zdnet.com/ad-exec-o...

    http://search.slashdot.org/sto...

    http://nakedsecurity.sophos.co...

    http://www.securityweek.com/ea...

    http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    APK

    P.S.=> See subject & those links (+ ads not only INFECT US, but STEAL BANDWIDTH & SPEED WE PAY FOR MONTHLY+ track us too)

    ... apk

  114. Ads steal our speed & infect us #2/2... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Another SMALL partial only sample of OpenBid/realtime bidding & other ad networks malware makers have taken advantage of to infect you with:

    http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...

    http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://it.slashdot.org/story/0...

    http://it.slashdot.org/story/0...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://apple.slashdot.org/stor...

    APK

    P.S.=> See subject & those links (+ ads not only INFECT US, but STEAL BANDWIDTH & SPEED WE PAY FOR MONTHLY+ track us too)

    ... apk

  115. Ads steal our speed & infect us #1/2... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    SMALL partial only sample of OpenBid/realtime bidding & other ad networks malware makers have taken advantage of to infect you with:

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.wired.com/techbiz/m...

    http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023...

    http://news.slashdot.org/story...

    http://www.itworld.com/securit...

    http://nakedsecurity.sophos.co...

    http://www.zdnet.com/ad-exec-o...

    http://search.slashdot.org/sto...

    http://nakedsecurity.sophos.co...

    http://www.securityweek.com/ea...

    http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    APK

    P.S.=> See subject & those links (+ ads not only INFECT US, but STEAL BANDWIDTH & SPEED WE PAY FOR MONTHLY+ track us too)

    ... apk

  116. Ads steal our speed & infect us #2/2... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Another SMALL partial only sample of OpenBid/realtime bidding & other ad networks malware makers have taken advantage of to infect you with:

    http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...

    http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://it.slashdot.org/story/0...

    http://it.slashdot.org/story/0...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://apple.slashdot.org/stor...

    APK

    P.S.=> See subject & those links (+ ads not only INFECT US, but STEAL BANDWIDTH & SPEED WE PAY FOR MONTHLY+ track us too)

    ... apk

  117. Re:Too Bad by Luthair · · Score: 1

    Sorry but its a threaded discussion starting from a single post. You can gussy it up with voting, checkmarks and gamification but its still a site that is over represented in search results.

  118. AdBlock+ = inferior & 'souled-out' vs. hosts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Can adblock+ do 16 things hosts do 4 speed, security & reliability:

    1.) Protect vs. bad sites (past ads)
    2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop C&C talk
    3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop C&C talk
    4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop C&C talk
    5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (4 reliability)
    6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoning
    7.) Protect vs. trackers
    8.) Protect vs. spam
    9.) Protect vs. phish
    10.) Protect vs. caps
    11.) Get past dns blocks
    12.) Keep off dns request logs
    13.) Speed up surfing (adblock & hardcoded favs)
    14.) Works on anything webbound multiplatform.
    15.) EZ data control
    16.) Block ads better vs. addons more efficiently

    * ANSWER ="NO" on ab+ doing it as well or @ ALL + hosts = on devices natively.

    APK

    P.S.=> Ab+ does less vs. hosts less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN operation (as 1st resolver).

    ---

    Ab+'s a 128-151mb memory hog http://cdn.ghacks.net/wp-conte... (hosts use 3-11mb w/ my program initially). Even FireFox 41 adblock eats 65++mb http://www.ghacks.net/2015/06/...

    ---

    ClarityRay defeats it seeing addons via native browser methods!

    ---

    Ab+'s bribed not to work by default http://www.businessinsider.com... & ABP bought out adblock http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    ---

    Ab+ adds complexity in slower usermode (w/ more messagepassing overhead + context switch vs. hosts in kernelmode).

    ---

    AdBlock's SLOWER: http://superuser.com/questions...

    ---

    What's best?

    APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-4 32/64-bit http://start64.com/index.php?o...

    MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee who verified its source is safe http://forum.hosts-file.net/vi... ) hosts & recommends it http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

    &

    It's safe per 57 antivirus programs in BOTH its 64-bit model https://www.virustotal.com/en/...

    +

    a 32-bit model too https://www.virustotal.com/en/...

    & Installer -> http://f.virscan.org/APKHostsF...

  119. AdBlock+ = inferior & 'souled-out' vs. hosts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Can adblock+ do 16 things hosts do 4 speed, security & reliability:

    1.) Protect vs. bad sites (past ads)
    2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop C&C talk
    3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop C&C talk
    4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop C&C talk
    5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (4 reliability)
    6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoning
    7.) Protect vs. trackers
    8.) Protect vs. spam
    9.) Protect vs. phish
    10.) Protect vs. caps
    11.) Get past dns blocks
    12.) Keep off dns request logs
    13.) Speed up surfing (adblock & hardcoded favs)
    14.) Works on anything webbound multiplatform.
    15.) EZ data control
    16.) Block ads better vs. addons more efficiently

    * ANSWER ="NO" on ab+ doing it as well or @ ALL + hosts = on devices natively.

    APK

    P.S.=> Ab+ does less vs. hosts less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN operation (as 1st resolver).

    ---

    Ab+'s a 128-151mb memory hog http://cdn.ghacks.net/wp-conte... (hosts use 3-11mb w/ my program initially). Even FireFox 41 adblock eats 65++mb http://www.ghacks.net/2015/06/...

    ---

    ClarityRay defeats it seeing addons via native browser methods!

    ---

    Ab+'s bribed not to work by default http://www.businessinsider.com... & ABP bought out adblock http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    ---

    Ab+ adds complexity in slower usermode (w/ more messagepassing overhead + context switch vs. hosts in kernelmode).

    ---

    AdBlock's SLOWER: http://superuser.com/questions...

    ---

    What's best?

    APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-4 32/64-bit http://start64.com/index.php?o...

    MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee who verified its source is safe http://forum.hosts-file.net/vi... ) hosts & recommends it http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

    &

    It's safe per 57 antivirus programs in BOTH its 64-bit model https://www.virustotal.com/en/...

    +

    a 32-bit model too https://www.virustotal.com/en/...

    & Installer -> http://f.virscan.org/APKHostsF...

  120. Best protection vs. malware + ads there is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Can adblock+ do 16 things hosts do 4 speed, security & reliability:

    1.) Protect vs. bad sites (past ads)
    2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop C&C talk
    3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop C&C talk
    4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop C&C talk
    5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (4 reliability)
    6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoning
    7.) Protect vs. trackers
    8.) Protect vs. spam
    9.) Protect vs. phish
    10.) Protect vs. caps
    11.) Get past dns blocks
    12.) Keep off dns request logs
    13.) Speed up surfing (adblock & hardcoded favs)
    14.) Works on anything webbound multiplatform.
    15.) EZ data control
    16.) Block ads better vs. addons more efficiently

    * ANSWER ="NO" on ab+ doing it as well or @ ALL + hosts = on devices natively.

    APK

    P.S.=> Ab+ does less vs. hosts less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN operation (as 1st resolver).

    ---

    Ab+'s a 128-151mb memory hog http://cdn.ghacks.net/wp-conte... (hosts use 3-11mb w/ my program initially). Even FireFox 41 adblock eats 65++mb http://www.ghacks.net/2015/06/...

    ---

    ClarityRay defeats it seeing addons via native browser methods!

    ---

    Ab+'s bribed not to work by default http://www.businessinsider.com... & ABP bought out adblock http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    ---

    Ab+ adds complexity in slower usermode (w/ more messagepassing overhead + context switch vs. hosts in kernelmode).

    ---

    AdBlock's SLOWER: http://superuser.com/questions...

    ---

    What's best?

    APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-4 32/64-bit http://start64.com/index.php?o...

    MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee who verified its source is safe http://forum.hosts-file.net/vi... ) hosts & recommends it http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

    &

    It's safe per 57 antivirus programs in BOTH its 64-bit model https://www.virustotal.com/en/...

    +

    a 32-bit model too https://www.virustotal.com/en/...

    & Installer -> http://f.virscan.org/APKHostsF...

  121. Take responsibility for your advertisements !!!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Nobody bothers blocking *reasonable* advertisements. The problem and reason for the blocking is the abuse of users reasonable expectations on user experience. While large sites do have to pay for Ad Block Plus to white list them you can only be white listed if you implement a reasonable advertising policy. That means no pop-ups, no pop-unders, no auto-playing audio, no flashing graphics, etc. It's not unreasonable to charge a small bit of cash [if your a big company] to be white listed. There has to be a revenue stream to those developing the software and this is essentially a tax on access to these users screens by the users themselves.

  122. Re:Ghostery = 'souled-out' & inferior vs. host by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Dude are you the programmer of inferior GhosteryOfItsOriginalSelf, AlmostALLAdsBlocked, or UBlockNothingComparedToHosts? Plenty of people use APK's fine program that does more for speed, security, reliability and even anonymity than all of the above do put together. It is the best thing hands down!

  123. Re:Ghostery = 'souled-out' & inferior vs. host by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    No he's an advertiser or webmaster crony profiting by ads that steal our speed and infect us. The real ones in fear of apk. Who do you really think is downmodding apk's posts and organizing this all against him? Everyone knows those don't work as well as hosts for more speed, security, reliability and anonymity online and are redundant, wasteful of resources, inefficient, sold out to advertisers to not work right (except ublock for now), and clarityray/blockiq detectable and blockable (unlike hosts) operating in a slower mode of operations in usermode vs. hosts in faster more cpu serviced kernelmode as part of the ip stack itself and native to your system doing a better job than illogically bolting on "mOar" stupidly that doesn't do a fraction of what hosts do for far less.

  124. Ads steal our speed & infect us #1/2... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    SMALL partial only sample of OpenBid/realtime bidding & other ad networks malware makers have taken advantage of to infect you with:

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.wired.com/techbiz/m...

    http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023...

    http://news.slashdot.org/story...

    http://www.itworld.com/securit...

    http://nakedsecurity.sophos.co...

    http://www.zdnet.com/ad-exec-o...

    http://search.slashdot.org/sto...

    http://nakedsecurity.sophos.co...

    http://www.securityweek.com/ea...

    http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    APK

    P.S.=> See subject & those links (+ ads not only INFECT US, but STEAL BANDWIDTH & SPEED WE PAY FOR MONTHLY+ track us too)

    ... apk

  125. Ads steal our speed & infect us #2/2... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Another SMALL partial only sample of OpenBid/realtime bidding & other ad networks malware makers have taken advantage of to infect you with:

    http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...

    http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://it.slashdot.org/story/0...

    http://it.slashdot.org/story/0...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    http://apple.slashdot.org/stor...

    APK

    P.S.=> See subject & those links (+ ads not only INFECT US, but STEAL BANDWIDTH & SPEED WE PAY FOR MONTHLY+ track us too)

    ... apk

  126. Re: Ghostery = 'souled-out' & inferior vs. hos by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    As FDR said, "The only thing to fear is ending up on apk's personal stalking and abuse list".
    (Different ac here).

  127. Re: AdBlock+ = inferior & 'souled-out' vs. hos by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Go away APK. If we wanted to see adverts we wouldn't be discussing ad blockers.

    The irony of you incessantly posting your adverts to discussions about ad blockers is obviously lost on you.

  128. Best adblocking (& more) condom by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Can adblock+ do 16 things hosts do 4 speed, security & reliability:

    1.) Protect vs. bad sites (past ads)
    2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop C&C talk
    3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop C&C talk
    4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop C&C talk
    5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (4 reliability)
    6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoning
    7.) Protect vs. trackers
    8.) Protect vs. spam
    9.) Protect vs. phish
    10.) Protect vs. caps
    11.) Get past dns blocks
    12.) Keep off dns request logs
    13.) Speed up surfing (adblock & hardcoded favs)
    14.) Works on anything webbound multiplatform.
    15.) EZ data control
    16.) Block ads better vs. addons more efficiently

    * ANSWER ="NO" on ab+ doing it as well or @ ALL + hosts = on devices natively.

    APK

    P.S.=> Ab+ does less vs. hosts less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN operation (as 1st resolver).

    ---

    Ab+'s a 128-151mb memory hog http://cdn.ghacks.net/wp-conte... (hosts use 3-11mb w/ my program initially). Even FireFox 41 adblock eats 65++mb http://www.ghacks.net/2015/06/...

    ---

    ClarityRay defeats it seeing addons via native browser methods!

    ---

    Ab+'s bribed not to work by default http://www.businessinsider.com... & ABP bought out adblock http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    ---

    Ab+ adds complexity in slower usermode (w/ more messagepassing overhead + context switch vs. hosts in kernelmode).

    ---

    AdBlock's SLOWER: http://superuser.com/questions...

    ---

    What's best?

    APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-4 32/64-bit http://start64.com/index.php?o...

    MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee who verified its source is safe http://forum.hosts-file.net/vi... ) hosts & recommends it http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...

    &

    It's safe per 57 antivirus programs in BOTH its 64-bit model https://www.virustotal.com/en/...

    +

    a 32-bit model too https://www.virustotal.com/en/...

    & Installer -> http://f.virscan.org/APKHostsF...

  129. Re:Too Bad by N1AK · · Score: 1

    I don't think their position is naive. People who block ads might be more savvy than the general population, but those people have also gone out of their way specifically to block ads.

    You entirely missed the point, which is that the people who haven't blocked ads don't necessarily want to view ads either but most don't even know blocking exists. If 100% of browsers came with ad blocking on by default then I doubt more than a couple of percent of users would turn it off.

  130. Re: AdBlock+ = inferior & 'souled-out' vs. ho by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The comment is a bit over done (maybe). But I do appreciate the hint. This is, unlike most, a context-aware advertisement that is actually useful. This is the one kind of ad I actually appreciate (I still don't see how anything else would make money).

  131. Re: Ghostery = 'souled-out' & inferior vs. hos by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    HOLY FUCK ALEX

    As great as your tool may be, everyone hates you because you are just being a piece of shit spamming a comment section and stopping actual discussion and keep pretending like you're winning anything.

    Fuck off. You will never be respected like this.

    However I do think the people here are quite generous. Just post an apology and your tool might be respected.

  132. Re:Too Bad by amicusNYCL · · Score: 1

    You're right, I read that backwards.

    --
    "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
  133. Re:Opinions vary among /.'ers (quoted)... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Apk's not forcing anything down anyone's throat and you came in here trolling. You the guy with nothing to show better than apk's program.

  134. Eat your words troll: 10++:1 odds against you by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "his hosts program is actually pretty good" - by xenotransplant (4179011) on Monday August 10, 2015 @03:34PM (#50287195)

    "his hosts tool is actually useful for those cases in which one does indeed want to locally block stuff outright while consuming minimum system resources" by alexgieg (948359) on Friday September 25, 2015 @09:57AM (#50596461)

    "I like your host file system." - by Karmashock (2415832) on Wednesday September 09, 2015 @03:57PM (#50489401)

    "No complaints from me, I like APK's spam. Reminds me to use a host file. Also, his stuff is free." - by aaaaaaargh! (1150173) on Tuesday November 17, 2015 @09:31AM (#50947415)

    "APK is kinda right... I've given up on JS based adblocking and gone to blackholing in /etc/hosts, just like it was back in the 90s. The computational load has gotten intolerable for any ad-blocking using JS. I've tried his hosts file generating software. It works." - by bmo (77928) on Thursday October 15, 2015 @11:30AM (#50736071)

    "Actually, APK is totally right on this count. Adblock Plus on Firefox mobile is a dog on older, or lower end, phones. A hostfile based adblocker makes for a much better experience in this context. Of course, your phone has to be rooted, which isn't the case with Firefox + adblock." - by chihowa (366380) on Saturday May 16, 2015 @11:40AM (#49705641)

    "In a footnote, I would like to note that I find your hosts file admirable." - by vel-ex-tech (4337079) on Tuesday November 24, 2015 @10:27PM (#50999097)

    "APK isn't wrong" - by cfalcon (779563) on Sunday October 04, 2015 @05:11PM (#50657891)

    "I've never tried to belittle (APK's) work, I've flat out said it's good" - by BronsCon (927697) on Thursday February 11, 2016 @06:48PM (#51491263)

    APK

    P.S.=> See subject & tell us: How did eating your words taste? Like your FOOT in your MOUTH, washed down by the BITTER taste of SELF-defeat perhaps? Outnumbered 10++:1 as the ratio against you: You fail! apk

  135. Re: Ghostery = 'souled-out' & inferior vs. hos by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Bullshit you're a different ac. How stupid do you think we are? BronsCon you've been caught lying about trolling apk once http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... admitting it here http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...