Google Chrome Starts Testing a Built-in Ad Blocker on Windows, Android (mspoweruser.com)

You mean... by TFlan91 · 2017-08-01 04:01 · Score: 5, Insightful

You mean, Google will block adds not owned, operated by or sold by Google.

Re:You mean... by Vlad_the_Inhaler · 2017-08-01 04:10 · Score: 4, Interesting

Speaking strictly for myself, its worthless if it does not stop one particular set of Ads which appear to be hosted by Google - at least I get the "Ad closed by Google" when I "X" the ad. Its the Battleships ad, ubiquitous and intensely annoying.
So what does it mean if Google has the only browser which is prepared to natively block Google ads? Are there not antitrust implications there?

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Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Re:You mean... by Dwedit · 2017-08-01 04:12 · Score: 2

They're totally gonna get sued for this.
Re:You mean... by AmiMoJo · 2017-08-01 04:14 · Score: 5, Insightful

It's easy to be cynical, but if they can stop the worst abuse then advertising might remain a viable way to pay for web content.

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const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Re:You mean... by Solandri · 2017-08-01 04:15 · Score: 4, Insightful

To be fair, Google has been pretty good about keeping their ads unobtrusive. If this coalition publishes a standard for acceptable ads which any advertiser can follow, and Chrome's ad blocker adheres to that standard, then I don't really see a problem if most or all of Google's ads also adhere to the standard and thus aren't blocked.

I've had to resort to a strict ad blocker (uBlock Origin), but I'd really like to support the sites I like by allowing their ads through. But it seems every time I try that, I get bombarded with obnoxious or intrusive ads which force me to block them again. I think Google may be on to something. Blocking ads on a site-by-site basis doesn't give advertisers any incentive to clean up their ads since they don't really control the sites where the ads show up. But blocking ads on the basis of how intrusive they are creates a clear incentive for advertisers to move away from obnoxious ads.
Re:You mean... by omnichad · 2017-08-01 04:16 · Score: 1

Only if someone can convince a judge that they have a monopoly. They're definitely anything their position, but they're doing it as part of an oligopoly and it seems to be perfectly legal right now (in the US).
Re:You mean... by omnichad · 2017-08-01 04:17 · Score: 1

Abusing their position, that is. Android swipe keyboard is biased.
Re:You mean... by Opportunist · 2017-08-01 04:25 · Score: 5, Informative

Sorry, but they poisoned that particular well by dumping too much toxic trash into it, so nobody wants to drink a drop from it anymore.
You want to advertise, fine. You want me to read them, no. No chance. The advertising industry abused us far too long to be granted ANY kind of tolerance anymore.
Advertisers, to play with something poisonous!

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We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Re:You mean... by x_t0ken_407 · 2017-08-01 04:31 · Score: 4, Interesting

Agreed 100% with this. I'd be really open to have ads that follow a standard. I use uBlock Origin in conjunction with uMatrix and so I really don't have an issue if nothing is ever developed, but having a view of "behind-the-scenes" and knowing that ads are how some sites are paid for, I'd be willing to relent -- given there is a standard that is followed.
Re:You mean... by SeaFox · 2017-08-01 04:53 · Score: 1

You mean, Google will block adds not owned, operated by or sold by Google.
I don't think they will add them. Being a blocker, I'm sure the content will be subtracted instead.
Re:You mean... by AvitarX · 2017-08-01 05:04 · Score: 1

This would actually be really smart for Google.
They're particularly good at matching ads to viewers (which is why they were able to make so much money with text only ads when everyone else was losing money on obnoxious stuff).
By making obnoxious ads worth less money (blocked by a large percentage of viewers), they can choke the revenue from companies selling them, and increase their own value as an advertiser.
Other companies with inferior matching will no longer be able to be obnoxious to make more money, advertisers will go where the simple ads are more effective, and Google wins.
It makes their strong point (data collection and matching) the only differentiation between advertisers.

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Re: You mean... by fubarrr · 2017-08-01 05:04 · Score: 3, Informative

I checked their Canary build... Google's "intrusive" ads are defined not per ad, but by a list of ad servers pretty much all belonging to an Eastern European ad syndicate
Re:You mean... by mapkinase · 2017-08-01 05:07 · Score: 1

That's why I will never switch to Chrome. Firefox became almost completely unworkable (both on mobile and desktop), but this is the only browser that allows me to fend of all ads.
Once Firefox becomes a complete crap, I will switch to lynx.

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Re:You mean... by apoc.famine · 2017-08-01 05:09 · Score: 4, Insightful

I disagree completely. Ads need to be obtrusive to be effective. If they don't steal your attention away from what you were doing, than they are not doing their job. Ads which blend into the background are not ads that anyone wants to pay for. It was demonstrated a long time ago that subliminal advertising doesn't work.

There are no ads which are unobtrusive, and there never will be.

I'd really like to support the sites I like by allowing their ads through.

Not me! If I'm on a site I'm there to enjoy the site, not have that enjoyment interrupted by parasites trying to separate me from my money. If I like a site enough that I value it, I'll give them money if they set up a convenient way for me to do it. What I won't do is allow them to use virtual carnies to distract me from why I'm there in an attempt to get my money. That's a really asshole way to run a business.

Between the malware, auto-play shit, overlays, content jumping around the page, and simple breaks in the content I'm actively trying to consume, I see no reason to see any ad ever. They are almost all abusive in one way or another, and websites need to figure out another way to keep the lights on. The core of the web is that my device gets sent content, and it figures out how to display it. I choose not to display the ads, and until everything is app-ized, that's the way it's going to stay for me.

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
– Banksy

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Re:You mean... by I'm+New+Around+Here · 2017-08-01 05:38 · Score: 1

Oh, you admitted it. You want to see weiners. Here's one. http://i.bnet.com/blogs/weiner...

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If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Re:You mean... by jellomizer · 2017-08-01 06:04 · Score: 2

Well just as long as Google stays responsible on their adds then I am good with it.
The problem I always had with adds on the internet ever sense 1994 were adds that just got overly aggressive. The adds help pay for the content people want to see, however they shouldn't prevent people from being able to access the content, or just disrespectful to the cost of bandwidth, and time on the peoples devices.
We use to had popup windows, message box loops, full screen thick box adds, adds that use a ton of resources, that slows your pc to a crawl. Adds that have malware attachments to them....
In short if we stuck with the small banner add I wouldn't have that much issues with them.

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If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Re:You mean... by KiloByte · 2017-08-01 06:58 · Score: 1

You're forgetting the one quality without which an ad can't be unobtrusive.

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The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Re:You mean... by JohnFen · 2017-08-01 07:10 · Score: 1

But blocking ads on the basis of how intrusive they are creates a clear incentive for advertisers to move away from obnoxious ads.
Unfortunately, what the CBA (and Google) considers "acceptable" includes ads that spy on you, so it's a nonstarter for me personally.
Re:You mean... by tlhIngan · 2017-08-01 07:31 · Score: 1

To be fair, Google has been pretty good about keeping their ads unobtrusive
I've never seen a Google ad in recent history.
I've seen lots of popups and pop unders though, all by ad networks owned by Google's parent, Alphabet. (DoubleClick, anyone?)
Re:You mean... by apoc.famine · 2017-08-01 07:33 · Score: 2, Interesting

I posted pretty much the same thing a thread or two below. I'm a decade and a half into an all-out war with advertising. And outside of a few apps on my phone, I'm largely winning. If you want my money, interrupting what I'm doing, pissing me off, and begging for it is not the way to get it. Bogging down my computer and infecting me with malware is definitely not the way to do it. Provide a product I want and a convenient way for me to pay for it, and I'll fork over the cash. This is not rocket science.

From this standpoint, I really like what Patreon is doing. I support a dozen or so content creators on that site, because it's easy for me to do. I go there, get the content they produce with no advertising, and I throw them a few dollars every month/video/podcast/etc. for their troubles. My social contract is between myself and the people producing content that I'm interested in. It doesn't include aggressive digital carnies trying to abuse me and scam me out of money standing between myself and the content creators.

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Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Re:You mean... by ChatHuant · 2017-08-01 07:48 · Score: 2

if they can stop the worst abuse then advertising might remain a viable way to pay for web content.
The issue I have is that advertising (especially Google advertising) has become so mixed with tracking and egregious privacy invasion that I don't see how the two can be split apart again. I have no guarantee the ad slinger won't also drop a cookie, log my IP or use any of so many other mechanisms to follow me around the internet and spy on all my actions.
If companies (again, especially Google) wouldn't track, I would probably be fine with simple non overly annoying ads or with "sponsored links". Since they do, I won't accept any ads, period.
Re:You mean... by Anonymous Coward · 2017-08-01 08:21 · Score: 3, Insightful

Ads need to be obtrusive to be effective. If they don't steal your attention away from what you were doing, than they are not doing their job.
There are non-obtrusive ads that manage to steal my attention, namely those where the companies are politely and informatively telling about their new products which already interest me and about which I want to read on a special interest site focusing those products and their objective comparisons and trends related to them. Too bad many marketing communications professionals don't know how to do that yet with their products.
Re:You mean... by antdude · 2017-08-01 08:50 · Score: 1

What are adds? :P

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Re:You mean... by AmiMoJo · 2017-08-01 09:19 · Score: 4, Insightful

Don't get me wrong, I'm not turning off my ad blocker either. But like it or not, a lot of internet services are ad funded, including Slashdot.
At least with Google they are regulated by the EU and other governments. The situation isn't great, but maybe it can get better, and it's worth at least trying to come to some kind of truce.
Some way we can continue to enjoy Slashdot.

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const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Re:You mean... by Trogre · 2017-08-01 11:47 · Score: 1

True, but with one large, trumplet-blaring exception:
Google lets uploaders insert video ads into YouTube videos, making playlists next to impossible with an ad-blocker.

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"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Re:You mean... by Trogre · 2017-08-01 11:53 · Score: 1

Crap.
Inline ads in news feeds (such as Slashdot), coloured differently and clearly marked as Sponsored Content, are not in the least obtrusive.
I even occasionally look at them too.

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"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Re:You mean... by Opportunist · 2017-08-01 18:25 · Score: 1

I am not here to prop up a business model I do not support. Get one that I do support or make room for someone that does.

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We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Re:You mean... by AmiMoJo · 2017-08-01 19:21 · Score: 2

What would you suggest for a site like Slashdot?
I wish they would fix subscriptions, but I don't think they would be enough to run the site.

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const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Re:You mean... by wvmarle · 2017-08-01 22:01 · Score: 1

I disagree completely. Ads need to be obtrusive to be effective. If they don't steal your attention away from what you were doing, than they are not doing their job. Ads which blend into the background are not ads that anyone wants to pay for.
Then why are so many people paying big bucks for advertisements in newspapers and magazines?
Those ads don't play music, they don't move around, they don't put a floater in front of whatever you're doing, they can't even pop up from the page. Yet it's where still a big part of advertising money goes to.
Re:You mean... by AmiMoJo · 2017-08-02 00:21 · Score: 2

The best ads are independent reviews of products. I read tech news sites which tell me about new products and review them. If multiple reviewers that I think are reasonably objective bring it to my attention and say it's good, I'll consider it.
The problem for marketing departments is that their products are often total crap. Junk that only sells if they can trick you into buying it somehow. Thus they need advertising to either con you or make you want the new shiny. And I'm gonna block that rubbish.

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const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Re:You mean... by beastofburdon · 2017-08-02 05:45 · Score: 1

You forgot about youtube.
Re:You mean... by martinfb · 2017-08-02 09:13 · Score: 1

Of course not. It will de-intrusify their own ads thus allowing then through!

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Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
Re:You mean... by Baki · 2017-08-03 19:22 · Score: 1

Funding through advertising, in general, is wrong.
Advertising costs are recouperated via product prices, i.e. everyone who buys goods (such as food in supermarkets) pays a small extra cost to fund the advertising. I.e. everybody is funding a waste of time and resources, to provide false information to the population.
Advertising is like a tax that you cannot avoid. The proceeds of this tax are used to waste everyones time, and to exert bad influence over people, to make them buy things based on skewed information.
Re:You mean... by Baki · 2017-08-03 19:24 · Score: 1

We need a standardized micropayments system. I'd be prepared to pay the equivalent of advertising proceeds per page view, directly through such a system.
Advertisements have reduced the need for such a system, and thus held up its development.
The more disruption to the web-advertising system, the sooner we'll see a working micropayments system.
People must be taught that they'd better pay a little bit directly and realize that "free" via advertising, isn't free at all.
Re:You mean... by AmiMoJo · 2017-08-03 20:49 · Score: 2

A micropayment system would be great, but the transaction cost is always too high. Even with virtual currencies like Bitcoin the transaction fees make very small payments impractical.
Maybe we could pay with work done. Have some kind of client in the browser that mines cryptocurrency for a pool which is distributed to participating sites. Mining only happens when you are browsing participating sites. That has issues though, like what constitutes "browsing" and what crypto coin is easy enough to mine that phones can do it without a big battery life hit and yet people can't GPU mine the hell out of it to get rich.

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const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC

Thanks but no thanks by fred6666 · 2017-08-01 04:02 · Score: 2

I'll stick to ublock. Which means using Firefox because Chrome for Android doesn't support it.

Re:Thanks but no thanks by bhcompy · 2017-08-01 04:11 · Score: 2

Brave is Chrome for Android with a real ad blocker built in. Firefox has issues that hurt it in Android(comparative battery drain, zoomed out touch recognition, etc)
Re:Thanks but no thanks by fred6666 · 2017-08-01 05:10 · Score: 1

I don't use the browser for more than a few minutes so I don't think I would see any battery life difference.
But does it sync passwords and bookmarks using your chrome account?
Re:Thanks but no thanks by fred6666 · 2017-08-01 05:11 · Score: 1

it's on chrome, but not android
Re:Thanks but no thanks by bhcompy · 2017-08-01 06:06 · Score: 1

Currently it does not, but since it is Chromium based, it probably will in the future. It's definitely a highly requested feature on the forums
Re:Thanks but no thanks by fred6666 · 2017-08-01 07:36 · Score: 1

Passwords syncing and ad blocking are much more important to me than performance or battery life. To me, the only downside of Firefox right now is that it has become increasingly buggy especially with large numbers of tabs.
It's still the only major cross platform browser with syncing on all devices and good ad blocking support, so I'll continue to use it. The fact that it is open source and not owned by an evil corporation trying to spy on me (Google, Microsoft or Apple, mainly) is a bonus.
I'll watch Brave but it currently still sounds like yet another chromium (or could be webkit or firefox) clone/fork/derivative/rebrand that may or may not exist next year, and who may or may not have the resources to release security updates on a timely manner.

Opera Browser by darkain · 2017-08-01 04:04 · Score: 3, Interesting

Opera Browser - practically the same thing as Chrome, but has a full featured built in ad-blocker already AND VPN client. Google is just now playing catch-up.

Re:Opera Browser by x_t0ken_407 · 2017-08-01 04:32 · Score: 1

Google hasn't even caught up to Opera 12 yet. But then again neither has Opera.
Vivaldi FTW :) Hasn't caught up to Opera 12 either but...closer than everything else.
Re:Opera Browser by wvmarle · 2017-08-01 22:05 · Score: 1

More likely: Google considers Opera's couple dozen faithful users as a nice testing ground. They keep an eye on what new ideas Opera comes up with (maybe they even send some of their wildest ideas to Opera), look at how Opera implements the feature, watch what the user base thinks of it, and then takes the good bits, drop the bad bits, and add it to Chrome.
Re:Opera Browser by samwichse · 2017-08-09 00:09 · Score: 1

uBlock Origin installed on Vivaldi here.
Works great.

An interesting development by dirk · 2017-08-01 04:06 · Score: 5, Interesting

This will be a big test for all those people who claim to block ads because they have gotten so bad. Yes, this will let google's ads through, as well as other well behaving ads. This is what many people claim they have wanted for a long time. Now that they have it, will they actually allow these ads through? I will happily jump on this train simply because there are too many problems with the other adblockers. There are too many time things won't load or play because the ads are blocked that I welcome a way to block only the unruly ads and let the others through. Plus, I have always felt bad about blocking ads on sites I like since I know it is a revenue source for them. But if this really works like they claim it does, it will be an easy way to stop the bad ads and leave the rest, which is really what I think people should be striving for. But I have a feeling people will block all the ads and say screw the sites.

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"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"

Re:An interesting development by Opportunist · 2017-08-01 04:27 · Score: 5, Insightful

There is no such thing as "well behaving ads". At the very least, they cost my bandwidth. If I am interested in your products, I will go and search for them.

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We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Re:An interesting development by erapert · 2017-08-01 04:35 · Score: 2

Precisely.
Google just needs to limbo under the lazyness bar such that users aren't annoyed enough to block all ads.
Re:An interesting development by bluefoxlucid · 2017-08-01 04:37 · Score: 2

Your bandwidth is enormous and ads which aren't enormous don't cost it significantly. Some of these things are 30kB images or even text ads.

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Re:An interesting development by Zxern · 2017-08-01 04:50 · Score: 4, Insightful

I block ads because they're malware vectors and not worth the risk. How obtrusive they aren't doesn't really matter anymore. Until they actually look over the code of all ads before they offer them up, I'm not going to allow them.
Re:An interesting development by Kjella · 2017-08-01 05:05 · Score: 1

Now that they have it
That is very premature. From past experiences with similar systems the content got through, the "good" ads got through... and a whole lot of the "bad" ads too. So I installed an hyper-aggressive ad blocker to get rid of the bad ads and the good ads disappeared too. If and only if Google blocks bad ads with a vengeance and shit list sites for trying so there's some real incentive to not try might this be successful. Meanwhile you have a lot of once bitten, twice shy people who'll continue to use the other ad blockers and they'll get really good as the good ads are usually easy to block. It's not easy convincing sites to use ads that are easily blocked and it's not easy convincing people to stop using what's working. This is not the first time it's been tried.

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Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Re:An interesting development by DRJlaw · 2017-08-01 05:06 · Score: 5, Interesting

There is no such thing as "well behaving ads". At the very least, they cost my bandwidth. If I am interested in your products, I will go and search for them.
There is no such thing as "free content." At the very least, content costs their bandwidth. If they were interested in serving you content without ads, they would offer a subscription (that you wouldn't pay for).
It's a two-way street.
Re:An interesting development by mapkinase · 2017-08-01 05:08 · Score: 2

>This will be a big test for all those people who claim to block ads because they have gotten so bad
These stupid, stupid, stupid people. ALL ads are bad, without any exception. It's junk, it's propaganda. Kill advertisement industry with fire. I do not care if this will be a radical economical revolution.
A person has a right not to be harassed. Period. That includes ads.

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Re:An interesting development by fred6666 · 2017-08-01 05:13 · Score: 1

You must be the kind of person never muting/fast forwarding ads on TVs or doing something else. Otherwise, you wouldn't get that free content, isn't it?
Re:An interesting development by tepples · 2017-08-01 05:33 · Score: 1

The majority of sane people would rather put up with some well-behaved ads
So long as ads remain well-behaved, the banner blindness effect will continue to ensure that their revenue is not sufficient to fund writing and editing articles and serving them to readers.
What workaround for banner blindness would you recommend?
Re:An interesting development by JohnFen · 2017-08-01 07:14 · Score: 4, Insightful

This will be a big test for all those people who claim to block ads because they have gotten so bad
No, it won't, because it does nothing about the worst abuse that ads engage in: tracking.
Re:An interesting development by DRJlaw · 2017-08-01 07:44 · Score: 2

Strawman argument.
You still see the ads when you mute or fast forward. The ads are still displayed as you wander off to do something else, and you also risk missing the return of the program.
Likewise, as the technology catches up and advertising adapts you'll get advertising one way or another, or be restricted to paid content. In-line ads and anti-adblockers are just the start.
Re:An interesting development by ChatHuant · 2017-08-01 10:10 · Score: 2

There is no such thing as "free content." At the very least, content costs their bandwidth. If they were interested in serving you content without ads, they would offer a subscription (that you wouldn't pay for).
First, it's not my obligation to support their flawed business model. If their content was interesting enough, I'd pay for a subscription. And I have no sympathy for complaints about the cost of bandwidth either, when it's 99% the web developer's fault. A simple page on a news site may have one or two kilobytes of useful text; however, it downloads megabytes of unnecessary frameworks, scripts, CSS, images, videos, and kitchen sinks. Lazy or incompetent coders cost the content provider, but I don't see why it's my problem.
Second, I believe your argument boils down to an implicit contract that exists between me and a web site, where the site provides some content, and I pay for it by viewing some ads. But ad networks (and therefore the websites showing the ads) are abusing the implicit contract: instead of limiting themselves to showing ads, they double dip by tracking me over multiple sites, logging any and all of my data they can get their grubby hands on, and selling it to all and sundry. This was certainly not part of my understanding of the implicit contract. So, sorry, I'm not buying into your argument (and not allowing any ads either).
Re:An interesting development by DRJlaw · 2017-08-01 12:50 · Score: 1

First, it's not my obligation to support their flawed business model. If their content was interesting enough, I'd pay for a subscription.
Then don't go there at all. It's interesting enough for you to use an adblocker, but not to buy a subscription? Sorry. That's what brought you the current incarnation of Forbes.com

Second, I believe your argument boils down to an implicit contract that exists between me and a web site, where the site provides some content, and I pay for it by viewing some ads. But ad networks (and therefore the websites showing the ads) are abusing the implicit contract: instead of limiting themselves to showing ads, they double dip by tracking me over multiple sites, logging any and all of my data they can get their grubby hands on, and selling it to all and sundry. This was certainly not part of my understanding of the implicit contract. So, sorry, I'm not buying into your argument (and not allowing any ads either).
Pot, meet kettle. Blocking ads while continuing to go to the sites was not part of any implicit contract either. You've surrendered any moral ground that you had to complain, and by continuing to visit sites while using adblockers, justify their collection of anything that they can get. They now owe you nothing.
Re:An interesting development by Opportunist · 2017-08-01 18:26 · Score: 1

I also make "enormous" money (compared to someone in, say, Bangladesh), that doesn't mean I throw silver dollars around when I walk down the street.

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We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Re:An interesting development by Opportunist · 2017-08-01 18:27 · Score: 1

Let me pay for the content I like.

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We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Re:An interesting development by Opportunist · 2017-08-01 18:30 · Score: 1

What makes you think I wouldn't pay for content? Actually, I do.
Believe it or not, in the old days, when content was delivered on this stuff called paper, that was generally the way you got information, by paying for it. And believe it or not, back then they even had the audacity to make you pay for it AND stuff it with ads, too.
Now I can actually pay for content and not be subjected to ads, and funny enough it seems to be working out still.

--
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Re:An interesting development by wvmarle · 2017-08-01 22:11 · Score: 1

ABP added this option quite some time ago, and afaik even has it enabled by default. I wonder how well that works, overall.
I have the "Allow some non-intrusive advertising" check box ticked, yet I don't think I ever see advertising, other than the search ads on Google.com (which I already had explicitly enabled - they're often quite useful for the commercial links). Those ads in part may stay because they are non-intrusive.
Then this site has the "sponsored links" banner at the bottom, I see the same in other sites. Clearly marked as advertising, not intrusive, no problem with me.
Re:An interesting development by fred6666 · 2017-08-02 00:51 · Score: 1

Strawman argument.
You still see the ads when you mute or fast forward.

Not really, some DVRs have a skip 30 (or more) seconds button. By your logic I should feel guilty for using that button just like I should feel guilty to use an ad blocker.

Likewise, as the technology catches up and advertising adapts you'll get advertising one way or another, or be restricted to paid content
So be it. I'll be free to pay for that content or not. Most probably not, as it won't be worth it. Major web sites such as Wikipedia are doing just fine without ads or mandatory payments.
Re:An interesting development by bluefoxlucid · 2017-08-02 02:01 · Score: 1

I do.
Do you know how much it costs to buy a bottle of Gatorade or some kind of juice versus making half a gallon of FCOJ? A 10oz bottle of Minute Maid OJ costs like $1.89; a half gallon made from FCOJ costs $2.50.
Sometimes I go out to get food. I can get a double cheeseburger for $1.25 from McDonalds, but sometimes I spend $15 on something like Lamb Saag, which has 2-3 times the calories in total.
I throw $20s around willy-nilly. I've been using Mint for years to track my expenses and curtail a lot of that. You know I used to spend $670/month on food in 2008? I've had it as low as $120/month, but these days I spend around $300.
Tightening my budget up has allowed me to pass like 2/3 of my income to debt remediation and savings, although my personal accounts are a bit of a mess... I decided to put $18,000 into 401(k) last year so I can give myself an emergency loan in a pinch, and had a room that was uninsulated and had open airflow to the outside rebuilt; now I have a loan source in emergencies, I cut my utility bill by over 10%, and I'm trying to drive down cash advances on credit cards (plus a car loan, because my car broke and I bought a used Volt for $12,000). That doesn't mean I don't still leak money like a sieve.
Are you sure you don't throw silver dollars around when you walk down the street?

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Support my political activism on Patreon.
Re:An interesting development by tepples · 2017-08-02 03:40 · Score: 1

What do you plan to do when all of the top 10 results for a particular Google search are pay sites? Would you find it reasonable to pay $4 each, or $40 in all, for a month's subscription to each site just to read one page on each?
Re:An interesting development by Opportunist · 2017-08-02 03:54 · Score: 1

If I find out that a page is very often one of my top 10 results, 4 bucks a month is a bargain! I would probably not pay it for a page that is only once the top result for something I just wanted to know out of curiosity and don't really need the info, but if a page is often what I'm looking for, why not pay for it?

--
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Re:An interesting development by tepples · 2017-08-02 05:52 · Score: 1

I would probably not pay it for a page that is only once the top result for something I just wanted to know out of curiosity and don't really need the info
But once pay sites to which you do not already subscribe begin to dominate search results, you'll end up disappointed more often when searching "out of curiosity". This means you will search less often "out of curiosity", causing search engines to receive less money from advertisers for impressions and clicks on ads in search results. Therefore, it's in Google's best interest to tread carefully with this change lest it encourage even more publishers to put everything past the keyword-rich abstract of an article behind a paywall.

What a nightmare by omnichad · 2017-08-01 04:08 · Score: 1

I don't use an ad blocker, but even if I did I wouldn't want one enabled by default - especially not one created by a marketing company.

I do a fair bit of front end web development, and I don't like the possibility that this could cause rendering errors when it falsely detected an ad.

Re:What a nightmare by OhPlz · 2017-08-01 04:22 · Score: 1

You'd prefer that your customers hit the problem?
Re:What a nightmare by omnichad · 2017-08-01 04:32 · Score: 1

I'd prefer that they're not unknowingly using an ad blocker that can break rendering of any site without warning due to a false positive. If you intentionally install one at least there's a chance you know it did something. These problems can come up at any point down the road, but worse would be during active development.
Re:What a nightmare by Anonymous Coward · 2017-08-01 04:53 · Score: 1

Just because you design a certain website to look a certain way doesn't mean I have to see it that way. It is my computer afterall.
Re:What a nightmare by omnichad · 2017-08-01 06:15 · Score: 1

Yeah, I'm talking about broken rendering - not missing ads. Most people don't choose broken rendering for no reason.
Re:What a nightmare by omnichad · 2017-08-01 06:17 · Score: 1

In adblocking, false negatives are far far far worse than false positives.
Absolutely wrong. A false positive means that important content doesn't appear at all - and if you're doing a bank transfer, that could be potentially disastrous. This is much worse for your average user than an occasional ad slipping through. The same is mostly true for antivirus - how many times in the past few years have parts of the OS been flagged as a false positive and broken Windows installs? That is not better than a false negative either.
Re:What a nightmare by JohnFen · 2017-08-01 07:20 · Score: 1

A false positive means that important content doesn't appear at all - and if you're doing a bank transfer, that could be potentially disastrous.
I disagree, based on the fact that I don't use an adblocker, I use NoScript to block anything Java/Javascript/Flash/etc., ad or not.
Sometimes, this causes sites to break, but not that often. And it's never caused a failure on a bank site that led to anything remotely like a disaster. It's been, at worst, an inconvenience that is fixed in a couple of mouseclicks.

Feels kinda dodgy by rsilvergun · 2017-08-01 04:11 · Score: 2

Doesn't this border on Anti-Trust? Maybe not since it's not like Google's the only game in town.

--
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Re:Feels kinda dodgy by Aristos+Mazer · 2017-08-01 04:26 · Score: 1

As long as they adhere to a 3rd party standard of what ads to block, I think they're in the clear. They make sure their own ads meet that standard, so they're fine, and then if they let users block additional ads, those additions have to include Google's ads. Now, if they start getting involved with the 3rd party group and lobbying for ruling changes, that's where they'd have a problem.
Re:Feels kinda dodgy by JohnFen · 2017-08-01 07:21 · Score: 1

Under US law, they're fine as long as they hold to the same standards for everyone, including themselves.

The only good ad... by Anonymous Coward · 2017-08-01 04:12 · Score: 1

...is a dead ad.

EU lawsuit in ... 3 ... 2 ... 1 by houghi · 2017-08-01 04:13 · Score: 4, Insightful

Seriously. How could this NOT lead to a lawsuit? Blocking the competition is something that is frowned upon, no matter the intentions.

--
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.

I'd be happier with no auto-play video by yorgasor · 2017-08-01 04:26 · Score: 5, Interesting

The worst thing about using Chrome is the inability to disable HTML5 video autoplay. It's either ads that start running automatically, or videos that they stick to the top of every !@#$ news story on CNN. I've been using Chrome from its early days, but I'm honestly starting grow weary from videos that just play all the time. Yes, there are add-ons that supposedly block them. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. But if software won't let the user be in control of what's displayed on his computer, it's really time for that software to go.

--
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Re:I'd be happier with no auto-play video by rikkards · 2017-08-01 04:33 · Score: 1

I would prefer the ability to pick and choose embedded objects from specific sites. i.e don't embed youtube links.
Re:I'd be happier with no auto-play video by mark-t · 2017-08-01 04:53 · Score: 1

Auto-play is annoying, but it may not be possible to entirely prevent without also turning off all javascript that runs when the page is loaded as well, since the play functionality could be activated under program control, and if you simply disallowed that as well, then even when a user *tries* to play a video and clicks an on-screen button to start it, the js code that would otherwise start the video playing would not be able to do so.
I'd personally settle for simply not allowing any videos to play at all if they are not entirely inside of the currently visible browser window, or are in any other tab than the current one.
As a minor addendum of a more personal note, if one will forgive the brief OT comment, while I could say that I am deeply flattered that one or more people that reply as AC's to virtually every single one of my posts on any story here in the past few weeks are apparently so interested in everything that I have to say that they don't miss a single comment I make here, I would rather that his/her/their comments be more relevant to what I was saying or the subject at hand instead of repeating the same non-sequiturs every time. That is all.

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File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Re:I'd be happier with no auto-play video by apoc.famine · 2017-08-01 05:18 · Score: 1

I have stopped going to CNN because of how shitty their site is. It's been a shitshow for a long time, but the auto-pay videos and related scrolling issues were the absolute last straw.

Disable HTML5 Autoplay extension.

It's a little quirky and sometimes requires you to hit play twice or advance the time 1 second to make a video start, but I much prefer that to autoplay. (The advance 1s quirk may also be related to my adblocking - quite possible it's waiting for an ad to load which never will.) Works on most websites.

--
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Re:I'd be happier with no auto-play video by dugancent · 2017-08-01 05:44 · Score: 3, Informative

Safari in the next version of macOS will block all autoplay videos unless you whitelist the site. I tested the beta and it seems to work well; CNN being the biggest offender.
https://www.cnet.com/news/wwdc...

--
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
Re:I'd be happier with no auto-play video by mark-t · 2017-08-01 06:01 · Score: 1

How does safari define "autoplay"? If the web page contains js code that tries to play a video, does it block it? If so, what if this js code was being invoked in an event-handler, in response to clicking on a custom js video player widget's "play" button? How can safari tell the difference between a video playing that the user wanted to watch vs one that they didn't intend on?
Or does the user have to then whitelist every website that uses custom js video players?

--
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Re:I'd be happier with no auto-play video by JohnFen · 2017-08-01 07:25 · Score: 1

Auto-play is annoying, but it may not be possible to entirely prevent without also turning off all javascript that runs when the page is loaded as well
Firefox manages it, so it's obviously possible.
Re:I'd be happier with no auto-play video by Tony+Isaac · 2017-08-01 15:29 · Score: 1

Firefox lets you do this.
Go to about:config, then search for "autoplay" to find the relevant settings.
This was enough to get me to switch to Firefox, after years of using Chrome!
Re:I'd be happier with no auto-play video by strikethree · 2017-08-02 02:56 · Score: 1

Firefox with NoScript is the only reasonable way to use
'The Web'.
If the information I am looking for can not be found in that configuration, then I simply do without. There are important things to me, like breathing, eating, sleeping, fucking... and then there is everything else.

--
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Re:I'd be happier with no auto-play video by toddestan · 2017-08-04 16:27 · Score: 1

Well, it's not totally immune to the problem the parent described, but I can handle having to click twice to get some videos to play.

Fails to deliver by Opportunist · 2017-08-01 04:28 · Score: 1

The new ad blocker inside Chrome won't block every ad you see on the web

Stopped reading there. Not good enough.

NEXT!

--
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.

Re:Fails to deliver by Kiuas · 2017-08-01 05:37 · Score: 1

The new ad blocker inside Chrome won't block every ad you see on the web
Stopped reading there. Not good enough.
NEXT!
Well I don't know, we'll see if it's good enough. I use adblockers as well because as we all know so much of the ads currently online are utter shit and annoying, but honestly static text ads and short video ads before video content I don't have a problem with.
I generally keep adblock disabled while watching youtube channels/content from streams that I like because it's a way of giving at least some support to the content creators. Sure the alternative way which I've experimented with is to provide support to channels via say, Patreon, but while that's doable for a few channels, not all of them have patreon accounts plus doing it for several channels involves too much micromanaging. I'd actually be willing to try out youtube red if it was available in Europe.
Generally speaking the problem with the internet as it now stands is that everyone wants everything for low cost or for free, yet the ad-culture of the net has (rightfully) turned people so much against advertisements that it's becoming increasingly difficult to fund anything by ads. Google is at heart and advertising company that also happens to own and operate a search engine and a lot of others stuff, but they have run their business quite successfully with ad-driven content throughout the years and most people don't find the google ads that appear next to searches and in gmail too annoying.
If everyone started using effective adblocking the industry would likely react by making the ads more intrusive. "It looks like you're trying to view some content but have adblock enabled, please watch this video before proceeding, pay us 5 cents or exit the site." Either that or, what to a limited extent is already happening on youtube, which is that the ads are moved to within the content itself. So you have no ad before the video, but the 6 minute video is preceded by a 2 minute intro of "Hey it's [insert content creator here], before I get to the video I want you guys to know about this awesome deal the folks at [company] told me about..." This is done because both advertisers and content creators are keenly aware of the increasing ease and rate of adblocking, so they will find ways around it, and I consider these much, much more annoying than just watching a straight out 30 second ad before the video during which I can go grab myself a beer from the fridge anyway.
While some people may think microtransactions are the way to lower the amount of ads and move away from the ad-funded model of websites, I think it makes sense for large players like Google to try and find the middle-way between 'no ads and you pay cash for everything' and the flashing beeping hellscape of noisy ads that's currently used. It's clear that the advertising industry is so huge that it won't be going anywhere, and its clear that the consumers are not happy with the current model of advertising online, so this arms-race of 'you make a better ad-blocker, we're going to sneak the ads inside of your podcasts' is not a beneficial route to take for anyone. Not for the consumers and most certainly not for the content creators who then have to choose between taking annoying brand deals and shilling shitty products or alternatively begging for donations from the viewers.
While I don't think very highly of the marketing industry, I do appreciate the fact that ad-revenue driven models have allowed for individual people to be able to sustain themselves with their own content. If you told someone 15 years ago that in less than 2 decades we'll have people who make their money by playing games and letting other people watch while they run a few ads on the side, nearly no-one would've believed you.

--
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead

The market at work by erapert · 2017-08-01 04:33 · Score: 3, Interesting

Other browsers (i.e. Opera) feature built-in ad blockers just like this. Chrome must compete. They're doing pretty well, having captured the majority of the market, but one does not stay in the lead by standing still.

Also, by making this feature optional and culling the most obnoxious and egregious ads Google alleviates some of the friction from their users. Most slashdotters are probably already using an ad blocker and blocking all ads by default. I started using an ad blocker because of auto-playing video ads and other obnoxious time wasters that I kept running into.

Ad blocker usage seems to be increasing. Building this feature into Chrome allows them to help control ad blocking-- block the most obnoxious stuff and make it all totally optional in order to help dissuade users from blocking all ads. Better some ads, thinks Google, than none.

But let's say Google does block all ads. They still make their money because Chrome could just track everything the user does anyway and they could just sell that data instead of old fashioned "look look click click".

Re:The market at work by Voyager529 · 2017-08-01 05:42 · Score: 1

I don't think Opera is a good point of comparison. Opera blocks ads, but they don't make money through advertising on web pages. Google does. Google having the dominant browser and using it to block its competitors out of the market is basically 90's Microsoft, and likely an easy target for a lawsuit from a competing ad network.
Some other people in the thread said that it would probably evade the ire of antitrust litigators if it's a third party set of standards. I don't think that would be enough simply because of the market share they have. "If you owe a little bit of money, the bank owns you. If you own a lot of money, you own the bank." They would have to conclusively prove that the standards created by the independent standards committee aren't unduly favoring Google. Quick example: How does one block 'autoplaying video ads' on a webpage that doesn't also prohibit video ads on Youtube? "Because it is a page with video content" leaves open those clickbait sites that write a paragraph of text around a Youtube video and plaster it with other ads. "Because it has a skip button" doesn't help resolve the issue with the off-page, delayed-autoplay video ads that do technically have a 'skip' button. "prohibiting autoplay" isn't a bargain either, because that would inhibit a convenience of Youtube, but a situation where such functionality is acceptable and implied. This is just one such situation where either Youtube would get special treatment, or a consistent rule would inhibit Youtube to the point where there would be a desire for pressure on the 'independent party' to give special treatment to Youtube. Other situations I could think up would be the use of a service like AMP be a requirement (conveniently offered by Google), lacking third party tracking (potentially needed by others but not Google since its first party), or requiring less bandwidth than the primary content (easy for Google to put video ads on Youtube, difficult for blogs to put even a static image banner ad).
Now, let's discuss the current state of ad blocking. It's gotten to the point where Tomato and Untangle are able to block ads at the router level with zero config at the client level. uBlock is a super common Chrome extension, and even Edge is making them available in the next service pack. I don't think Google is super concerned because of all the information they're still ultimately getting. Ad blocking on Android is less pervasive than it used to be, and will continue to dwindle as it becomes progressively more difficult to root Android phones. Even users that block browser ads are still valuable to Google because keeping people in the Google ecosystem ensures the continued revenue stream from the Play store. Third party ad networks are far more susceptible to ad blocking, because again, their ads flow through Google.
I don't have a good answer, because after many attempts to hold out, I finally went down the ad blocker route and frequently apply one for others. That's not fair to the 'good' sites and it doesn't solve the real problems with web-based advertising. However, I'm hard pressed to point to a company other than Google who can actually make positive changes in this space, but the reason they can make the change (a positive one!) is because they have more power over the web than any one company probably should - and that is the bigger problem.

Make ads STATIC! by p51d007 · 2017-08-01 04:34 · Score: 5, Insightful

If they would make ALL ads, 100% static, UNLESS you click on them (and I don't mean a mouse over), I would stop using ad blockers. This also goes with the stupid auto start videos, that wait 10-20 seconds to start automatically after you've scrolled down a page, then have to look around to find the bloody thing to turn it off. I whitelist /. because their ads are STATIC.

Re:Fuck. by __aaclcg7560 · 2017-08-01 04:41 · Score: 1

I doubt that. I've been reassured that EVERYONE on Slashdot uses an ad blocker. Based on my data for Slashdot traffic to my websites, that's not true at all. Unless the ad blocker is enabled by default, most users probably won't turn it on.

Which Slashdot ads will this block? by mykepredko · 2017-08-01 04:43 · Score: 1

If I had more time, I'd boot my old Win7 machine with Canary to find out (and I probably will tonight).

Anybody comment on whether or not Slashdot ads meet the standards of the Coalition for Better Ads?

--
Mimetics Inc. Twitter

Probably not the right solution by LeftCoastThinker · 2017-08-01 04:48 · Score: 1

An add blocker designed by an advertising company... Does anyone else see the problem here?

Though on the one hand I don't actually want to block every ad, especially on sites I actually get use out of, but OTOH, ads have become an assault these days, with pop overs, pop unders, autoplayed videos with cranked up sound, viruses, malware, etc. Just the other day on a site that I use regularly, a so called acceptable ad (based on ABP settings, yes I know I know) tried to serve me a zeus trjoan... The only way to really bring advertising under control is if the big advertisers like Google band together and form a non-profit that must review all ads before they are trusted, and ads must be reviewed for placement, content, viruses, and acceptable practices and then use a certificate process to track those ads and screen out any ad that doesn't have a valid certificate. Any ad company that tries to circumvent the ad standards gets banned from online advertising for 12 months (and thus goes out of business).

I know the complaint will be that kind of human review will add cost. Well tough shit, the ad industry created this problem by taking advantage and treating potential customers like shit, so they get to pay to fix it.

--
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like

Re: Probably not the right solution by fubarrr · 2017-08-01 05:10 · Score: 1

>An add blocker designed by an advertising company... Does anyone else see the problem here?
Yeah, it is "bees against honey," "flies against shite," and Google against ads
Re:Probably not the right solution by ravrazor · 2017-08-01 06:21 · Score: 1

Likely this will be framed in a way that will appeal to the regular chrome user, allowing Google to " reverse" profile everyone:

Chrome/Google: Would you like to block ads? click the following categories that you don't want to see:

Microsoft Windows [x] (this means user is likely interested in Linux)

Honda Automobiles [x] (user more likely in automakers X, Y and Z)

McDonalds [x] (user more likely interested in fast food maker X, Y and Z)
All of a sudden, Google knows a lot more about your preference in operating systems, car buying and takeout than they knew based on what you type into a search box.

Re:Fuck. by __aaclcg7560 · 2017-08-01 04:54 · Score: 1

Yes, your amazing 60 data points.

Six months of website data, four months of Amazon data, and my 10,000+ comment history (3,000+ comments this year alone).

not all by mapkinase · 2017-08-01 05:05 · Score: 1

The new ad blocker inside Chrome won't block every ad you see on the web -- instead, it'll only block ads that are considered intrusive

K'bye.

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What other sites are included with my payment? by tepples · 2017-08-01 05:26 · Score: 1

If I like a site enough that I value it, I'll give them money if they set up a convenient way for me to do it.

And back in the late 1990s, there was such "a convenient way": federated subscription networks. Back then, they were called "adult verification systems", on the theory that grown-ups can pay for nice things. Someone could subscribe to (say) Adult Check and get access to thousands of participating publishers' sites for $10 per month, with much of that going to the publishers. But now, without any sort of cross-site subscription, a user would end up having to pay $4 or more per month times the number of domains in his browsing history for the past 30 days.

Chrome for Android doesn't do extensions by tepples · 2017-08-01 05:29 · Score: 1

Last I checked, Chrome Web Store extensions ran in Google Chrome for Windows desktop, Google Chrome for macOS, and Google Chrome for GNU/Linux, not Google Chrome for Android/Linux.

Satellite and cellular are harshly capped by tepples · 2017-08-01 05:31 · Score: 1

Your bandwidth is enormous

Not at $5 to $10 per GB for a satellite or cellular last mile. So technically, peak throughput may be "enormous", but not sustained throughput.

Re:Satellite and cellular are harshly capped by bluefoxlucid · 2017-08-01 07:47 · Score: 1

Ads should be a few kilobytes. The average Web user visits 1,200 pages per month; the top trend was 2,600 per month in 2010, and can be around 5,000 per month today.
If the ad is a 32kB image, that's 160MB per month, which is pretty significant at per-GB costs like that, but not for your standard broadband at all (you know, the stuff that keeps getting 200GB caps). If the ad is text, it's like 40-50 bytes, probably wrapped in 400 bytes of JS calls because why not, so 2MB per month.
Facebook is full of ads, but not really dense: Facebook users chew through tons of news feed, encounter videos getting shared around, and generally consume a lot of content. Ads are relatively-rare, but when you pull that much content... yeah.
Likewise, YouTube and Twitch belch the occasional video ad (!), but those come from places shoving video down your pipe anyway. The content is also a lot bigger than your pipe. For stuff like CNet, I find this obnoxious; and when Fark and Slashdot had video ads (!!!) that was unacceptable. For YouTube... you're on YouTube; a 15-second ad before your 5-minute video isn't going to kill you. If your bandwidth is that expensive, you should probably avoid YouTube.
So, no, ads aren't a great deal of people's bandwidth and have a relative cost of about zero. They have an absolute cost of zero except under extremely-special circumstances. There are ads that try to break this mold with enormous flash downloads and HTML5 video; those ads need to die. What we need are more text ads.

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Support my political activism on Patreon.
Re:Satellite and cellular are harshly capped by tepples · 2017-08-01 08:38 · Score: 1

Ads should be a few kilobytes.
They're not.

If the ad is a 32kB image
Nowadays, ads even on text articles are often video, which is much larger than that. I'm glad that you agree that they need to die, but they haven't yet.

160MB per month, which is pretty significant at per-GB costs like that, but not for your standard broadband at all (you know, the stuff that keeps getting 200GB caps).
I'll answer that once "your standard broadband" becomes more widely available out in the country. Rural areas are more likely to be unserved by fiber, cable, and DSL ISPs than people who live in more densely populated areas. If everybody living in the country were to move to the city for "your standard broadband", nobody would be left to grow the food that city dwellers eat.

What we need are more text ads.
In theory, I agree. In practice, the banner blindness effect is likely to depress the click-through rate (CTR) of text ads, which diminishes the achievable cost per thousand impressions (CPM).
Re:Satellite and cellular are harshly capped by bluefoxlucid · 2017-08-02 01:53 · Score: 1

Rural areas are more likely to be unserved by fiber, cable, and DSL ISPs than people who live in more densely populated areas.
They're also not served by a lush economy of widely-available, high-subscribership satellite and 4G LTE Internet.

the banner blindness effect is likely to depress the click-through rate (CTR) of text ads
I only notice ads when they show me something I just browsed to. I otherwise get that blindness effect. On the other hand, I have a slight compulsion to take in information, and text ads are of a structure where they convey their information meaningfully in the same spatial format. In other words: I notice there was an ad, and that it had a picture or is colorful, but wasn't attention-grabbing; if the ad has the same information (product name, quick description, price, Web site) in the same place, I pick up a full understanding of everything in the brief milliseconds it takes for me to realize the thing I'm looking at is an ad. Image ads can shove enough information down my visual pathways to satisfy me before I even get to reading the pitch.
I can see how an image ad can stand out more and make a powerful impact, but only if someone looks at it. Putting charts, graphs, and bullet-point lists flying around in front of someone can just relay that there's shapes and colors and some objects of no contextual importance there; putting these into a body of information they're trying to take in can relay huge amounts of information, and is a great way to convey ideas. People don't sit down to do a hard study of your ad, so the nice, easy, 10-second flash loop isn't necessarily going to have the same effect as a graphical diagram of some physics bullshit they're trying to study.
It's possible that they'll get more people like me with text ads, and that a lot of people will actually stop to ingest an ad for a few dedicated seconds if it's there, thus the image ads are more-effective in total. Those of us with ad blockers and complaints about all these ads might be a loud minority.

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Re:Satellite and cellular are harshly capped by tepples · 2017-08-02 03:36 · Score: 1

Your bandwidth is enormous
Not at $5 to $10 per GB for a satellite or cellular last mile. [...] Rural areas are more likely to be unserved by fiber, cable, and DSL ISPs than people who live in more densely populated areas.
They're also not served by a lush economy of widely-available, high-subscribership satellite and 4G LTE Internet.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Once subscribership increases, sat and cell carriers tend to make caps even tighter so as not to crowd out new subscribers.

It's possible that they'll get more people like me with text ads
When AdWords first appeared, it was all text ads all the time. The format was effective at first because of its novelty, but banner blindness eventually set in for it. In the long term, the only way to get text ads noticed is to make them "native", or nigh-indistinguishable from the part of a document that isn't advertisement. Lately, Google Search has done this by putting them directly above search results with no distinctive styling other than a discreet "(Ad)" before the URL.

a lot of people will actually stop to ingest an ad for a few dedicated seconds if it's there
The featured article states that the new feature of Google Chrome will block ads that appear for "a few dedicated seconds" before allowing the user to dismiss them.
Re:Satellite and cellular are harshly capped by bluefoxlucid · 2017-08-02 07:28 · Score: 1

I'm not sure what you mean by this.
Well, in cities, there are millions of internet subscribers on cable or DSL lines.
There are not swaths of land where everyone living there has a satellite or 4G hookup that they use to sit around browsing the 'net like normal people. Typically those people just don't get the Internet. They're a small part of the country, but an important part, and Congress or the FCC occasionally make a show of promising to fix it so they all get high-speed broadband cable, and then go back to talking about other stuff in hopes that people forget why they have this warm fuzzy feeling about voting them back into office. It's not a conspiracy to keep broadband out of run-down rural areas so much as it is that you need to say something, and have a stance, but not necessarily have a (viable) plan, and so they step up and say yeah, that would be nice, we should look into doing stuff.

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Re:Satellite and cellular are harshly capped by tepples · 2017-08-03 13:26 · Score: 1

There are not swaths of land where everyone living there has a satellite or 4G hookup that they use to sit around browsing the 'net like normal people.
One of my friends on a chat server lives on a mountain. He and his neighbors all use satellite Internet. But if you have data better than my anecdata, I'd be interested in reading it.

Activate a video with a user gesture by tepples · 2017-08-01 05:41 · Score: 1

the play functionality could be activated under program control, and if you simply disallowed that as well, then even when a user *tries* to play a video and clicks an on-screen button to start it, the js code that would otherwise start the video playing would not be able to do so.

Then gate a site's play function behind the same "user gesture" that pop-up blocking uses. I concede that I've seen misuses of "user gesture" where any click on a page will pop up the ads. So don't allow video to start unless the video's center is within the screen and within half a screen size of the center of the control on which the gesture was activated.

Re:Activate a video with a user gesture by mark-t · 2017-08-01 05:57 · Score: 1

Then you would be forcing absolutely anything that wanted to play videos into using that gesture... disallowing any kind of custom controls. That's too restrictive. What if the video was simply a cut-scene in a game that the person was playing on the website? Should the user be forced to use this "standard" gesture every time the game is playing some video?
I can appreciate the intent in your suggestion, but in the end, I believe it is simply too restrictive, and pushes programmers into a corner by telling them that they aren't allowed to innovate in this one particular area because anything that you haven't foreseen when imposing this notion would be disallowed.

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File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Re:Activate a video with a user gesture by tepples · 2017-08-01 08:31 · Score: 1

Then you would be forcing absolutely anything that wanted to play videos into using that gesture... disallowing any kind of custom controls.
After the user has activated the video using the standard gesture, the custom controls would begin to work for the specific video that the user had activated.

What if the video was simply a cut-scene in a game that the person was playing on the website? Should the user be forced to use this "standard" gesture every time the game is playing some video?
First, why is the cut scene a video, as opposed to being made in the game engine? Second, why is a game with FMV cut scenes a web application, as opposed to being a native, downloadable, installable, offline application for Windows, GNU/Linux, Android, macOS, iOS, and whatever other platforms to which the game's fans can crowdfund ports? Third, yes, as this gives the user the opportunity to instead activate "skip" in case the user is behind an ISP that bills for data transfer at the $5 to $10 per GB typical of the satellite and cellular markets.
Re:Activate a video with a user gesture by mark-t · 2017-08-01 08:43 · Score: 1

So you propose to lock every developer into this allegedly "standard" UI gesture, preventing any and all possible attempts that programers might make to innovate. I came up with what might have been a plausible example, and you challenge the entire notion by suggesting that basically no reasonable person would ever have a reasonb want to do that... without justification, I might add. If your imagination is really so poor as to be incapable of thinking outside of some preconceived box, or to imagine that there are ideas to be discovered in the future that have not yet been conceived, it's unsuprising that you would expect all programmers to conform to your box as well.
I mean, why bother having a Turing complete language at all if you are just going to end up restricting what the developer is allowed to do?

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File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Re:Activate a video with a user gesture by tepples · 2017-08-01 12:45 · Score: 1

I mean, why bother having a Turing complete language at all if you are just going to end up restricting what the developer is allowed to do?
First, Turing completeness makes no claim about I/O capability. Second, unlike a computer in the physical world, a Turing machine has unbounded memory and execution time, which are resources that a user may want to conserve.
Re:Activate a video with a user gesture by mark-t · 2017-08-01 17:02 · Score: 1

I mentioned Turing completeness because it best describes why the number of different possible ways that a program might potentially receive such an input from an end user is not bounded, and so any restrictions you impose upon it such as requiring specific UI gestures to activate videos could very easily wind up hampering innovation as well.
Fundamentally, it's not an entirely dissimilar attitude from those of certain politicians that would suggest that no "normal person" would ever want to use end-to-end encryption as a justification for disallowing it.

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File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Re:Activate a video with a user gesture by tepples · 2017-08-02 03:49 · Score: 1

any restrictions you impose upon it such as requiring specific UI gestures to activate videos could very easily wind up hampering innovation as well.
Internet access subscribers with a high price per gigabyte of data transfer want to hamper what the advertisement industry has referred to as "innovation".

Fundamentally, it's not an entirely dissimilar attitude from those of certain politicians that would suggest that no "normal person" would ever want to use end-to-end encryption
The difference is that politicians want to ban end-to-end encryption in all applications. People who want to block automatic playback of streaming video from web applications, by contrast, do not want to block automatic playback of downloaded video from native applications. There are two differences: the user makes the user gesture when downloading a native application in the first place, and the user can arbitrage the download of a video, downloading it over a connection with a low price per GB and using it later while away from that connection.
Re:Activate a video with a user gesture by mark-t · 2017-08-02 08:12 · Score: 1

You are still forcing the developer to conform to a single pattern for playing any kind of video, and as the number of useful ways that a computer could be programmed to plausibly do that is not bounded, it is an arbitrary limitation that can only stifle innovation.
The first step, of course, is to disable all html5 video autoplay capabability... I'm completely on board with you on that one, but since you can programatically bypass this by starting the video from jajvascript, where a programmer could do literally anything, it is only a first step, and the remaining steps may not fully lead to where you want to be.
The most you might be able to do is make sure that no video playing through a standard api ever gets launched by inline javascript code in the web page, by a method invoked through the window's onload event, or by a timer event that was scheduled by either of the two unless there was at least one UI gesture event on the stack as well, regardless of what the UI event is.
Anything more and you'll just end up arbitrarily limiting what developers are allowed to do, and essentially preemptively censoring any potentially innovative ideas that may come in the future.

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File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Re:Activate a video with a user gesture by tepples · 2017-08-02 15:32 · Score: 1

It's tricky. If you allow just any UI gesture to activate a video, then the moment the perform the UI gesture on a scroll bar, a high-definition video advertisement begins to stream from the website, covering the article, playing sound, and consuming the user's monthly data transfer quota. How can a web browser tell "I want to play this" from "I just wanted to scroll"?

Expect paywalls by tepples · 2017-08-01 05:45 · Score: 1

Of course a web without ads could be made to work. First, sites will start rearr...

To read the rest of this comment, log in or subscribe to "Comments by Damian Yerrick".

Re:Expect paywalls by Opportunist · 2017-08-01 18:32 · Score: 1

Great idea. That way we will finally get to see whether people actually want to see the shit that BLOWS YOUR MIND or whether they just click it because it's free and they got time to waste.

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We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Re:Expect paywalls by tepples · 2017-08-02 03:37 · Score: 1

How many different domains have you visited in the past 30 days of browser history? Multiply that by $4 for how much each site would expect you to pay per month even for a first page view.
Re:Expect paywalls by Opportunist · 2017-08-02 03:52 · Score: 1

And every file ever downloaded in a torrent would have been bought.
You think people would visit the pages they visit if they had to pay for them?

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We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Re:Expect paywalls by tepples · 2017-08-02 05:47 · Score: 1

The difference breaking this analogy is that people generally don't illegally download an artist's entire discography just for one song. Under presently used payment methods, a user would have to buy a subscription to a whole website to view one article. Pay-per-page is impractical because of credit card processors' fee per transaction in addition to their 3% cut.
Re:Expect paywalls by Opportunist · 2017-08-02 23:29 · Score: 1

Such models will simply not fly. Instead what you'll probably get to see is pages where you can buy a contingent of pages of various sites. Content providers would become members of these content payment services and you could buy subscriptions to tens, hundreds or thousands of pages to read from participating content providers.
Such a model could actually more easily fly than you'd probably expect, considering that most content providers are already concentrated in very few corporations providing them.

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We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Re:Expect paywalls by tepples · 2017-08-03 03:28 · Score: 1

Content providers would become members of these content payment services and you could buy subscriptions to tens, hundreds or thousands of pages to read from participating content providers.
Sort of like Adult Check, I guess. So what makes you think such services will survive lawsuits alleging vicarious copyright infringement, the way the publisher of Perfect 10 magazine successfully sued Adult Check out of existence in the early 2000s?
Re:Expect paywalls by Opportunist · 2017-08-03 22:55 · Score: 1

Putting the service into a country with sensible laws might help.

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We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.

Unobtrusive? Re:You mean... by rcharbon · 2017-08-01 05:52 · Score: 2

Unobtrisive? You mean like "Taking up the first 3 results on any Search Results page? That 'unobtrusive'?

Oxymoron by Cro+Magnon · 2017-08-01 05:55 · Score: 3

The new ad blocker inside Chrome won't block every ad you see on the web -- instead, it'll only block ads that are considered intrusive

Um, that IS every ad.

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Ads are OK, Block Clickbait by northerner · 2017-08-01 06:07 · Score: 1

I want a filter that blocks all clickbait article images and headlines. They are really annoying. I'm OK with most ads.

Re:Fuck. by __aaclcg7560 · 2017-08-01 06:15 · Score: 1

None of which has anything to do with the fact that you have very few data points.

I have enough data to make an marketing intern blush.

Why don't you also throw in your weight and granola bar brand name into your "firehose of bullshit" Trumpian response?

My current weight is 358 pounds. I was 370 pounds 12 weeks ago or so. I'm losing one pound per week.

https://www.kickingthebitbucket.com/2017/07/18/losing-ten-pounds-with-a-digital-bathroom-scale/

As part of my diet, I eat two bars per weekday (ten per week): Clif Bars, Fiber One Bars and Power Bars.

APK's ads are dangerous by Anonymous Coward · 2017-08-01 06:20 · Score: 1

Your ads are dangerous. Why you may ask? Because you're worse than a regular advertising company! You keep a dossier on people, tracking all their posts, trying to find out their Internet history and keep records, you've been known since the 90s on the Internet as someone who contacts people's ISPs if you have sufficient details, you contact their web hosting providers, people's companies where they work to make a scene because they dared to disagree with you on the Internet.

You ironically are the antithesis of safety online, you harass, provoke, stalk and it often starts with one of your advertisements. You have people tell you to go away and leave them alone, but you continue to pursue them, make legal threats etc. until you are satisfied. You are one of he few advertisers out there that I can actually point at and show that you are using information gathered against other people!

Add in that your method of blocking is easily circumvented and provides very little in the way of real security and everyone would be better just to ignore you. Your security solutions don't stop real threats but might put up a very minor road block that a 10 year old script kiddie could work around in a few minutes.

In summary, the most dangerous advertisements people need to be weary of is yours, APK. Your adblocking solution does nothing to stop them either. Your other security advice is just as dangerous and should never be taken as it leaves people with a false sense of security while leaving them vulnerable.

No Google ads blocked of course by WCMI92 · 2017-08-01 06:48 · Score: 1

Since they must meet "acceptable" standards... Right?

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Corporatism != Free Market

Re:Fuck. by __aaclcg7560 · 2017-08-01 06:55 · Score: 1

You're so easy to trigger into your bullshit mode.

That's funny. All my asshole critics are posting more comments than I'm posting each day. Almost three to one. Annoying — for everyone else.

I would like... by Thad+Boyd · 2017-08-01 06:57 · Score: 1

Now that modals are behaving exactly like popups, they should be treated like popups: if they're triggered by anything other than user action, they get blocked. (Look for functions that create elements with a fixed position and a high z-index.)

And I want my mobile browser to give me the option to ignore position: fixed. There is not enough room on my fucking screen for a site to overlay a navbar, social buttons, etc. on top of the content. (Firefox's Reader button is great but doesn't work everywhere.)

Pointless by JohnFen · 2017-08-01 07:07 · Score: 1

it'll only block ads that are considered intrusive and go against the standards set by the Coalition for Better Ads

The standards set by the CBA are so low that I consider them pointless. They don't even reject the worst sort of "bad" ad: the ad that tracks you or collects information about you.

javascript and other tracking by mange · 2017-08-01 07:49 · Score: 1

You want me to run $script from [adserver] when I visit [contentsite]. Go pound sand. #noscript

That said, I'd load visible images from [contentsite] that advertise for their clients. I'd probably also load visible images from [adserver], right up to the point the images interfere with the content.

At least flash crap is less common these days! Or is that #noscript working)

Re:javascript and other tracking by JohnFen · 2017-08-01 08:27 · Score: 1

I'd probably also load visible images from [adserver]
Not me. Accessing those images will still give the ad company more data about me than I'm willing to trust them with.

/. liking this? by SpaghettiPattern · 2017-08-01 08:09 · Score: 1

/. liking this? It hosts the crappiest I have ever seen.

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I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)

Please don't by rebelwarlock · 2017-08-01 16:46 · Score: 1

I use Chrome for development because I like the dev tools. Anything that fucks with the page is not helpful to me. Ad blockers aren't smart enough to know when something is or isn't an ad.

Slashdot Mirror

Google Chrome Starts Testing a Built-in Ad Blocker on Windows, Android (mspoweruser.com)

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