Google's Chrome Ad Blocking Arrives Tomorrow (theverge.com)

Google is enabling its built-in ad blocker for Chrome tomorrow (February 15th). From a report: Chrome's ad filtering is designed to weed out some of the web's most annoying ads, and push website owners to stop using them. Google is not planning to wipe out all ads from Chrome, just ones that are considered bad using standards from the Coalition for Better Ads. Full page ads, ads with autoplaying sound and video, and flashing ads will be targeted by Chrome's ad filtering, which will hopefully result in less of these annoying ads on the web. Google is revealing today exactly what ads will be blocked, and how the company notifies site owners before a block is put in place. On desktop, Google is planning to block pop-up ads, large sticky ads, auto-play video ads with sound, and ads that appear on a site with a countdown blocking you before the content loads. Google is being more aggressive about its mobile ad blocking, filtering out pop-up ads, ads that are displayed before content loads (with or without a countdown), auto-play video ads with sound, large sticky ads, flashing animated ads, fullscreen scroll over ads, and ads that are particularly dense.

Comments

Anti competitive

[ickleberry]

Google can basically redefine what they deem as an acceptable ad (ones made by themselves) on the fly. This is bad news.

Re:Anti competitive

[MitchDev]

For annoying ads, yes

Re:Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Google can basically redefine what they deem as an acceptable ad (ones made by themselves) on the fly. This is bad news.

If they start blocking competitors for anti-competition reasons then they will be breaking laws. They have a near monopoly situation and the European Union, as one example of places where laws are still enforced, has already made judgements against them.

The reason that Google is doing this is simple. The advertising industry has become so dangerous and dirty, serving malware and other garbage, that a computer without an ad-blocker installed is a clear security risk and most major companies are coming to realise that. In recent years malvertising has become one of the leading methods to attack companies. As other ad-blockers go mainstream Google's main business, selling advertising space, is being threatened. This is more or less the last throw of the dice for the advertising industry

Re:Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Naturally, the "web's most annoying ads" are the ones they aren't capitalizing on.

Re:Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

The government already sets standards for acceptable advertising - i.e. no subliminal messaging, no false claims, volume of the ad must be at most +3dB louder than the show it's placed in, etc.

Also, no one is forcing you to use Chrome. If you feel that strongly about it use IE or Firefox (or Safari, if you're on a Mac.)

Re:Anti competitive

[Larry_Dillon]

I think the idea here is to undermine more aggressive adblocking software. The adblocking genie is out of the bottle and the only way to combat it is to subvert the whole ecosystem by having a built-in option that's "good enough" for most people, yet leaves Google's ads untouched -- unlike 3d party ad blockers.

So if you don't run an ad blocker (70%, last I checked), it will be seen as an improvement. If you do run an ad blocker, you'll see it as a weak offering.

Re:Anti competitive

[SirMasterboy]

They way I see it, you don't have to use Chrome...

Is there really a law that prevents me from writing my own web browser that blocks all ads except my own?

Re:Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

About time, but not enough.
I would like to see some logic that tricks the page into believing the ads have been served/impressed.
Teasing the ad servers, and feeding them duff information is much better.

Re:Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome and Web in general are Google's vital life space. If tomorrow we decide that web is not what we need, Google will go away from business.
So I consider that HTML, JavaScript and Web experience is as important to Google as Panama to USA.
No web - No Google.

Re: Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

DMCA and CFAA together essentially do, yes.

Re:Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummmm. And I shall call it Firefox with uMaxtix and uBlock Origin.

Re:Anti competitive

[DontBeAMoran]

Internet Explorer is no more, the replacement is called Edge.

Re:Anti competitive

[StormReaver]

They way I see it, you don't have to use Chrome...

That is completely right. Long gone is the era of the browser monopoly. I can choose to use Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, Konqueror, etc. as I see fit. As it stands, Firefox has regained my preferred-browser status with the Quantum release. I had only preferred Chrome for Netflix viewing, since Firefox pre-Quantum was too sluggish. With its recent performance improvements, it is at least as good as (if not better than) Chrome for that purpose.

So it matters not one whit how Google plans to have Chrome handle ads. If its ad-blocking abilities are intended as a poor replacement for proper ad blocking, then users are free to use a different browser if they so choose.

Re:Anti competitive

[jareth-0205]

They way I see it, you don't have to use Chrome...

Is there really a law that prevents me from writing my own web browser that blocks all ads except my own?

That's... not what a monopoly is. There is rarely a law prohibiting competition, but the circumstances, barrier of entry, difficulty to get adoption, for challengers to that monopoly make it unrealistic to happen, and that's bad for everyone. Well, everyone except the monopolies, and free market extremists who don't understand that markets where someone has undue control are not functioning markets.

Should Chrome get into the same position IE did in the 90s, and its arguable that they are there now, then yes the same restrictions on anti-competitive behaviour apply. Monopoly players have to abide by more rules than non-monopoly players.

Re: Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no law (yet) against writing your own software to render the web however you want to render it. Patent trolls might try to stop you claiming a patent on underlining text on the page, but DMCA and CFAA don't say you can't write your own code.

Re:Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot has annoying ads. Will slashdot be unable to pay janitors to censor posts? Great day!

Re:Anti competitive

[SirMasterboy]

I thought IE was a problem because it was a bundled and default browser, and Windows isn't free.
Chrome is obviously a completely free, and completely optional third party web browser.

I guess unless we are talking about Android. I was thinking about Windows and Mac PCs only before.

Re:Anti competitive

[TheRaven64]

Is there really a law that prevents me from writing my own web browser that blocks all ads except my own?

I don't know. Are you in a dominant position in the online advertising market? Are you using income from online advertising to subsidise the development of the web browser and sell it below cost? If the answer to both of these is 'yes', then there are laws in a lot of jurisdictions, yes.

Re:Anti competitive

[AmiMoJo]

Google is using Easylist, the same blocking list that uBlock and most others use. The only difference is that Google only enables blocking on sites that they have determined contain abusive ads. The determination seems to be a distributed thing, based on user's actions and reports. That's usually how Google works for stuff like malware warnings, they don't want to be doing manual checks.

I don't really buy the idea that they will start blocking everything but their own ads. Apart from getting them severely punished by regulators (the EU isn't afraid to hit them for billions of Euros) the same argument could have been made 10 years ago when Chrome launched with malware protection. Google could have marked Firefox as malware, same as Microsoft could mark Linux ISOs as malware in Windows Defender. It just doesn't seem to be an issue, probably because of the previously mentioned consequences.

Re:Anti competitive

[jbmartin6]

I'd rather see them take away the underlying capabilities which are abused by these ads.

Re:Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really.

Although this ad blocker has good intentions, it's likely to be undermined by the very same algorithm bullshit that plagues youtube's demonitization and copyright strikes. Basically it doesn't know shit and expects you to do all the work.

On most sites, all it takes to block ads is to find what script invokes it, and block the address of it. That's what we have all been doing for over 15 years to block ads using the host files. ublock/adblock only started making ad shit worse because the people blocking the ads weren't diluting the ad-display base, and thus all the potential shit ads weren't being noticed by people who could report them, they were simply being blocked silently.

What really created the uptick in shitty ads was a combination of three things:

1. Shitty cloud hosts like Amazon Web Services who don't vet anyone.
2. Shitty CDN's like Cloudflare who don't take down malware.
3. Shitty domain registrars who allowed the all these additional shitty TLD's. Now it seems like all these additional TLD's are good for are are malware because they're so cheap to buy hundreds of them.

Put the three together and you are constantly having to ban-hammer different domains that you can't block the IP address for. Often blocking the DNS is fruitless because another one pops up in it's place in an hour.

Really the right thing to do right now would be for all ad-supported content to quickly move to Patreon/Kickstarter crowdfunding, strip ALL ads and third-party links off their sites, and just let the existing ad business wither up.

Re:Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

If they start blocking competitors for anti-competition reasons then they will be breaking laws.

Silly AC, laws are for little people.

-- Non-silly AC

Re:Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you using both?

Re:Anti competitive

[jellomizer]

However allowing a company who makes most of their revenue from Ads, providing a Ad Blocker while would cut down the Net-Ads would also prevent Content providers from picking alternate revenue options for their sites.

Re:Anti competitive

[sg_oneill]

Its kind of critical at the moment.

A friend of mine is a journalist who makes his living off the website he writes for now that the newspaper it sprung out of has died. That means he's 100% dependent on ads to pay the rent (The sites fairly opposed to paywalls). So understandably he's got a bee in his bonnet about ad blockers.

My self on the other hand actively advocate people using full strength no exception ad blocking, simply because I've had on more than one occasion been pwned by zero days sprung out of advertisements dropping malware on my machines without my consent. In the current deeply unethical state of internet advertising, its just too dangerous to permit ads in my browsers.

And so we have a problem. Because without good writers and content makers being able to make a living off their trade, we're going to lose a lot of the good content on the net to paywalls, and a lot of content makers are simply going to quit. And thats BAD for the internet.

So maybe companies like Google and Apple laying smackdowns on badvertising , despite the conflict of interests involved might be what it takes to save the internets content infrastructure from the slow death that losing advertising might bring

Re:Anti competitive

[jareth-0205]

I thought IE was a problem because it was a bundled and default browser, and Windows isn't free.
Chrome is obviously a completely free, and completely optional third party web browser.

I guess unless we are talking about Android. I was thinking about Windows and Mac PCs only before.

Even if you give something away free you can still get into trouble-- if you use your market power to give something away until all the competition goes bankrupt, then you are able to charge anything for it because there's no competition. It's not only about what you can do as a user, because the exact same thing that happened with IE when it got to 99% or whatever can happen again, websites stop developing for anything else and start to require you to run Chrome to use them. If you want to use your bank or whatever suddenly you have to use Chrome and your choice disappears, even if there still technically exists choice.

Re:Anti competitive

[MitchDev]

Or force them to ditch annoying auto-playing audio/video ads and pop-ups/pop-unders, etc.

Re:Anti competitive

[spire3661]

Tell your friend to stop being a leech and relying on ads for revenue. Get a real job that doesnt rely on polluting the web. and annoying users. Hes a parasite if he cant live without ads, we dont need his work if they are the only way to do it.

Re:Anti competitive

[OneHundredAndTen]

Nobody owns your friend any job in particular. If ads stop working for him, he should move on to do something else - hopefully, something with a better social contribution than just living off ads.

Re:Anti competitive

[Voyager529]

They way I see it, you don't have to use Chrome...

Is there really a law that prevents me from writing my own web browser that blocks all ads except my own?

I'm torn on this topic because auto-play video ads, floating ads, ads with undesired audio, and ads on overlays have made using websites an absolute chore without ad blocking software. uBlock and friends, however, seem to go too far in the other direction and prevent any ads from being displayed, which is not what I want, either. In theory, Google has the balance right, and I think that having such capabilities built into the dominant web browser is going to instill corrective behavior in the same way that integrated pop-up blockers have brought that ad format to extinction.

However, Google is not the company that should be doing this. They are an ad company. This is the definition of 'conflict of interest'. Google also has an overwhelming market share of online advertising. Facebook admittedly rules the roost on their own platform, but it's not entirely apples to apples since they keep their ads in-house, and even though they're the most popular website on the internet, their decline has begun.

Beyond Google, you end up with small percentages in other areas where AdSense doesn't do the trick - the MSN, Yahoo, and AOL homepages (still seen by millions), the sketchy ad networks like Trafficstars and Taboola that serve up ads to torrent sites and porn sites, and places like DDG who run their own ads on principle for whatever they can get.

Ad networks should never have let things get this far in the first place, and shame on whoever thought it was preferential to do this rather than keep ads a 'necessary evil', as if the pop-up blocker battle of the 90's is forgotten history. I'd throw 'government oversight' into the ring as a solution, but if you're left-of-center, Trump and Ajit aren't going to make any decisions you like, and if you're right-of-center, it's more government oversight in general, which isn't desirable, either. Even if somehow there was a sudden outbreak of common sense from Washington, we start dealing with the same "physical jurisdictions don't apply to the internet" problem. Even a perfectly written and enforced federal law is thwarted by an office move and shifting the VMs to Ireland or Sweden.

To directly answer your question, no, there's no law preventing what you state. However, you're not a multibillion dollar company whose primary income is based on ad revenue with a browser commanding over half the browser market share...in which case, the rules are just a bit different. There's nothing stopping you from writing an operating system and shipping a web browser on it, but you're not Microsoft, you're not telling OEMs they can't ship computers with Chrome on it, and this isn't 1997...so context is involved here.

Re:Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

the advertising industry isn't itself "dangerous and dirty".. the problem is they hire equifax i.t. to do their security and ad vetting, so you get compromised accounts on the ad networks serving the malicious ads.

Re:Anti competitive

[nmb3000]

Tell your friend to stop being a leech and relying on ads for revenue. Get a real job that doesnt rely on polluting the web. and annoying users. Hes a parasite if he cant live without ads, we dont need his work if they are the only way to do it.

Harsher than I would have put it, but true nonetheless.

If all advertising revenue were to disappear tomorrow, any industry or product which couldn't migrate to another form of acquiring revenue in a few days probably doesn't need to exist in the first place. People would be able to choose if they want to directly pay for access to sites they like, or to move on and spend their time on something else they value more. Sites that are a hobby or a true labor or love (the way 80% of them were in the early days of the web) would go back to that, leaving a lot of the crap and cruft behind. Buzzfeed and other "TOP TEN WEIRD TRICKS" sites would hopefully just go away. There would probably be less crap on TV, and actor salaries would drop to a more reasonable level to compensate for the lack of an advertiser teat to leech from.

In all cases it's a win for everyone.

Re:Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed! The world would be a better place if ad-supported content went away.

Re:Anti competitive

[wonkey_monkey]

And it defines which are annoying.

Re: Anti competitive

[Cajun Hell]

DMCA most certainly does prohibit writing code of certain functionality. That's one of the reasons nearly 100% of computer programmers hate it. "No person shall manufacture..." I don't think people could make a good case for how it would prevent writing a web browser that blocks ads on pages as we currently know them. But it's definitely illegal to write, say, a DVD player that blocks ads (since your DVD player would need to be able to play the DVDs too). All they have to do is somehow have the ads combined with content within the same DRM wrapper and your web ad blocker would be illegal. You damn well know it is coming.

(BTW, fellow Americans, I just wanna remind you that this is another election year. Last one, almost nobody took seriously. If you also don't take this election seriously too, then that's another 2 years with no chance of repealing DMCA, instead of a terribly slim chance.)

Re:Anti competitive

[AmiMoJo]

If all ad supported services went away tomorrow there would be riots by Friday. Bread and circuses, remember.

Re:Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Google can basically redefine what they deem as an acceptable ad (ones made by themselves) on the fly. This is bad news.

Google doesn't dictate unilaterally what an acceptable Ad is. The coalition for Better Ads does. And it's comprised of more than one member. The summary of the post mentions it.

Seriously, can't we even read a couple of paragraphs?

Re: Anti competitive

[Ken_g6]

He could do what Salon.com is doing and allow visitors to opt in to cryptocurrency mining instead of seeing ads. I really think that's the best way to pay for online content.

Re:Anti competitive

[MachineShedFred]

Why should it be the responsibility of Amazon Web Services to police other people's content, outside of legal DMCA Safe Harbor type exceptions? And what does that look like, anyway? Constantly scanning all of every S3 region for anything you don't like? Or that they don't like? Or that someone arbitrarily decides they don't like? And what does your "vetting" entail? Credit checks? Background checks? What the fuck does that look like?

If they were scanning and selectively blocking stuff being served from S3 / CloudFront you would probably be the first on here bitching about censorship, anticompetitive practices, and all that other rot. And if they denied people service based on some arbitrary vetting process, they would constantly be accused of denying people for unacceptable reasons, which you'd probably be on here bitching about too.

AWS doesn't stick their nose in your business, just the same as if you colo'd your own server somewhere. Do you expect Iron Mountain to constantly scan everything in their data center too? How about Google Cloud Services? Rackspace? DigitalOcean? Azure?

What you've suggested is absurd.

Re:Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because things that haven't been an issue in the past never become issues in the future. See: rampant nationalism in the 1900s

Re:Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, no law against you doing that.

There are, however, antitrust laws aimed to prevent a company with a monopoly (don't know if Chrome qualifies) from abusing that monopoly to stifle competition and create monopolies in other businesses. Example: putting an ad blocking function in Chrome that blocks ads from everyone except Google, in order to increase Google advertising revenue.

You have no monopoly, so code what you will.

Re:Anti competitive

[jellomizer]

Are those still a thing?
The most annoying things I get are the position:absolute divs that has the ad cover my content, having to find where they placed the x button.

Re:Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Good thing you're FORCED to use Chrome.

Oh wait

Re:Anti competitive

[ShanghaiBill]

Or force them to ditch annoying auto-playing audio/video ads and pop-ups/pop-unders, etc.

Not really. According to TFA, ads will have a grace period of 30 days before they are blocked, so plenty of annoyware will get through. Also, the standards are weak: autoplaying videos will be allowed as long as the are silent. Flashing ads are blocked on mobile devices, but not on desktops. Etc.

I'll stick with my 3rd party blocker.

Re:Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the key is to go back to the old model of individual media outlets selling their own ads vs. relying on ad networks. This is what bother's me about Google's move here. They are trying to get people to stop using ad blockers which almost always filter out google ads by giving you tools that would block the sites on full page or pop-up ads. Regular ad blockers can't really separate good content from ads when all the html is coming from the same domain.

Re: Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't want a publication to hog up my system's resources as payment, especially for a publication as terrible as Salon who has given pedophiles a positive platform

Captcha: families

Re: Anti competitive

[AvitarX]

I'm just excited that YouTube ads will be blocked.

Yes, I know they won't, but it's amusing to me that they list count down as a bad thing.

Re:Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the 1990s, a friend tried to use IE to download Netscape. It got to 99% finished then failed, erasing the partially-downloaded file. It did this over and over again.

Re:Anti competitive

[Bengie]

Regardless of Google's definition of an "acceptable ad", it will always be a subset of all ads. If you want more control over your ad blocking, install an extension.

Re:Anti competitive

[larryjoe]

Google can basically redefine what they deem as an acceptable ad (ones made by themselves) on the fly. This is bad news.

If they start blocking competitors for anti-competition reasons then they will be breaking laws.

But what if Google blocks ads based on putatively altruistic standards and the result is that none of Google's ads are blocked but a significant portion of competitor ads are blocked? Can Google be punished for intent or the resulting impact on the market? Or is punishment reserved solely for explicit declarations of anti-competitive behavior, i.e., I know what the law is and I'm going to flaunt that law in your face?

Re: Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

You deride Salon, then link to TheBlaze. Furthermore, that article is about a man who has criminal urges that he tries very hard to suppress. I fail to see how this is in any way positive:

he is "resigned to the fact that I'm basically going to spend the rest of my life alone."

Nowhere do I see anything in that article about providing a positive platform for kiddy-diddlers. All I see is a sad story about some guy who tries really hard not to harm children, and will die alone. If you really want to see craziness, read the comment section. Hint: there are liberal conspiracies afoot!

Re:Anti competitive

[Mashiki]

I guess unless we are talking about Android. I was thinking about Windows and Mac PCs only before.

Now you got it, and now you can see why it's become an anti-trust issue the same as IE.

Re: Anti competitive

[The Snowman]

DMCA most certainly does prohibit writing code of certain functionality.

DMCA prohibits circumventing copy protection, which is an end-around the fair use law. Since a browser plugin runs in the browser, the endpoint that must decrypt and display any encrypted content such as ads, how is the DMCA relevant even if web sites start delivering encrypted content?

(BTW, fellow Americans, I just wanna remind you that this is another election year. Last one, almost nobody took seriously. If you also don't take this election seriously too, then that's another 2 years with no chance of repealing DMCA, instead of a terribly slim chance.)

Please tell me which candidates that have an actual chance at being elected to office want to repeal the DMCA? Which Presidential candidate who actually won at least one electoral vote last election would have signed such a repeal bill had Congress passed it? Considering that the past few decades have given us nothing but a more restrictive IP regime and no serious debate on the topic occurring where it actually matters (Congress), I believe there is approximately a 0% chance of any meaningful copyright reform for the foreseeable future.

Re:Anti competitive

[MitchDev]

Gotta start somewhere

Re:Anti competitive

[MitchDev]

Find those more on my smartphone than on my computer browsers anymore

Re:Anti competitive

[MitchDev]

Yep, don't trust only the source of many ads :)

Third party apps work wonders too

Re:Anti competitive

[thegarbz]

Tell your friend to stop being a leech and relying on ads for revenue. Get a real job that doesnt rely on polluting the web. and annoying users. Hes a parasite if he cant live without ads, we dont need his work if they are the only way to do it.

The irony of you posting this on a service that is highly dependent on ads to survive is delicious.

Re:Anti competitive

[tlhIngan]

If they start blocking competitors for anti-competition reasons then they will be breaking laws. They have a near monopoly situation and the European Union, as one example of places where laws are still enforced, has already made judgements against them.

The reason that Google is doing this is simple. The advertising industry has become so dangerous and dirty, serving malware and other garbage, that a computer without an ad-blocker installed is a clear security risk and most major companies are coming to realise that. In recent years malvertising has become one of the leading methods to attack companies. As other ad-blockers go mainstream Google's main business, selling advertising space, is being threatened. This is more or less the last throw of the dice for the advertising industry

You do realize that Alphabet owns around 95% of the online ad market, right? At least the legitimate ones - we're not talking about those ads that appear on more questionable sites (the ones that are fake download buttons, fake error messages, etc).

I suspect thing is more of a face-saving move - Google/Alphabet knows their ad networks host "bad ads" all the time, so by adding this feature, they hope to have a last minute way of stopping them. After all, there's a good chance if they don't, their ad networks will suffer, and thus, Google's revenue sources.

So it's meant to be a last line of defense from bad ads that creep onto one of their many ad networks before it takes them down.

As for people complaining about ad supported sites - if people are wiling to pay for websites, then why are people complaining they ened to subscribe to Hulu, Netflix, CBS, Viacom, and dozens of other online TV streaming services? It's going to be the same thing - everyone will complain about having to pay for /., the NYT, Reddit, Google, etc. etc. etc.

If you think there are too many streaming services now wanting your money, take away the ads and you'll soon be paying for hundreds of subscriptions to websites.

Then you'll find some aggregator that will bundle a bunch of them so instead of 100 bills a year, you'll have 50, but now have access to a pile of sites you don't care about... etc. etc. etc. If people are balking at paying for 4-5 streaming services monthly, how will they feel at paying for dozens of websites? Same issue.

Re: Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

They are sanitation engineers aka network admins. Same skill set : none.

Re: Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

But he made a list! Itâ(TM)s got to be good.

Re:Anti competitive

[sabri]

They have a near monopoly situation and the European Union

And all they need to do is to have a stand-alone, U.S. based company take ownership of Chrome, and then the E.U. can go F themselves.

Europe should stop trying to regulate U.S. companies. The reason why they don't have similar success in Europe is because of the stupid E.U. commissions that kill every attempt at innovation.

Re:Anti competitive

[Dragonslicer]

A friend of mine is a journalist who makes his living off the website he writes for now that the newspaper it sprung out of has died. That means he's 100% dependent on ads to pay the rent (The sites fairly opposed to paywalls). So understandably he's got a bee in his bonnet about ad blockers.

As far as I know, ad blockers aren't doing any kind of advanced image analysis, they're just going by the domain the ad comes from. So if he wants to sell ads on his site, he can host the ads himself and they won't be blocked.

Re:Anti competitive

[Whibla]

Years ago there was a thriving market in shareware...

Does your friend offer the opportunity for people to donate on his site, or set up a monthly subscription for single figures of dollars?

Sure, most people won't, but then most won't click on the adds the site displays either, assuming they even see them. And, if they do see them, I'd wager the majority of people would rather the adds weren't there.

So, get rid of the adds altogether, offer a subscription / donation option (not a paywall), and if his work is worth reading, and he can market his site successfully, he might, just might, be able to make a living doing it. No adds, no malware, good stories = more unique views and hopefully more revenue. Win - win - win.

If not, well, sucks to be a member of a profession whose numbers are growing at the same time as the opportunities for traditional employment and demand for their services are declining.

Re:Anti competitive

[tohoward]

I know I can't be the first to suggest that if the content producers were willing to source their own ads, and make them part of the articles being published (i.e. conform to a more "print media" approach), then current ad blocking approaches would become obsolete overnight, and the security risks would almost completely disappear.

So if you want content funded with ads, the underlying issue hasn't changed: FIX THE DAMN INTERNET AD MODEL ALREADY. Your friend shouldn't be getting a bee in his bonnet about ad blockers, he should be screaming loudly for an ad model that's workable, and has at least some attempt at security and content oversight from the website he writes for.

Re:Anti competitive

[Dragonslicer]

The legal issue with Internet Explorer was that Windows was a monopoly, and Microsoft was using the Windows monopoly in the operating system market to stifle competition in the web browser market. In order for Android/Chrome to be an issue, it would have to be Android that becomes a monopoly, unless somehow Chrome's monopoly position can be used to force users into buying Android phones, which I highly doubt could happen.

A more accurate comparison would be Chrome/Google Ads, where there would be the potential for monopoly abuse, as many others have pointed out.

Re:Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

there's still people using Windows 7 and 8, you insensitive clod. Edge is Windows 10 only.

Re:Anti competitive

[adamstew]

Pop-up ads in the traditional sense, where a new browser window "popped up" or opened in a new window, have been typically blocked in Chrome for a LONG time.

What is new to being blocked are exactly what you describe, in-window "pop up" ads that use absolute divs and covering the content...Often times with a hard-to-find "X" or other similar close option in a non-stard location or only appearing/enabled after a delay has passed.

Re:Anti competitive

[iamhassi]

Or force them to ditch annoying auto-playing audio/video ads and pop-ups/pop-unders, etc.

But they're not ditching it, they're being forced to use google ads or their ads are not seen. Google is basically saying "use google ads for advertising because our popular browser will block every ad that is not google ads." This is why the company selling the ads should not be the same company offering the ad blocker

Re:Anti competitive

[iamhassi]

Tell your friend to stop being a leech and relying on ads for revenue. Get a real job that doesnt rely on polluting the web. and annoying users. Hes a parasite if he cant live without ads, we dont need his work if they are the only way to do it.

Does his friend run slashdot? Because you sound like you're talking about slashdot

Re: Anti competitive

[Cajun Hell]

DMCA prohibits circumventing copy protection, which is an end-around the fair use law.

More precisely, DMCA prohibits circumventing techological measures which limit access. We lost way more than just fair use copying. Copying involves accessing plus doing something else. But merely making use of something (i.e. reading it), requires access. For example, you can't watch a movie on DVD without accessing the plaintext. With that in mind...

Since a browser plugin runs in the browser, the endpoint that must decrypt and display any encrypted content such as ads, how is the DMCA relevant even if web sites start delivering encrypted content?

If the site delivers encrypted copyrighted content, it is using a "technological measure that limits access to a work protected under this title" in DMCA-speak. That makes it illegal to decrypt the web page without authorization from the copyright owner. Judge Kaplan upheld all of that in the 2600-vs-MPAA DVD CSS case.

The copyright owner can impose whatever conditions that they wish, for granting that authorization. And if they don't grant it, you ain't got it. That's enough to make sure you get the ads (unless you're going to surf the web illegally) and we haven't even gotten to the manufacturing provisions that would outlaw writing or distributing the browser that you'd use.

Please tell me which candidates that have an actual chance at being elected to office want to repeal the DMCA

(Oy. Ok, I'm going to try explaining this a whole other way.)

So far, I haven't found much evidence that America intends to take the upcoming election seriously. I am hoping to persuade people to choose otherwise. Are you running for anything? Need help getting on a ballot? Of course, before I support you, I should ask: do you intend to try to repeal or repair DMCA?

I will admit that I am not running for anything. Shame on me. I suck. What's your excuse? ;-) Know anyone better than us? Know anyone who might want our votes? Join me and start talking shit about everyone who isn't running on this issue. People certainly run on dumber and less important issues than this one. In fact, I'd say they usually do.

Re:Anti competitive

[i286NiNJA]

If ad supported journalism went away tomorrow then we'd be stuck with public media and paid news sites. The morons destroying this country would go back to only pretending to stay informed and go back to watching sitcoms.

Re:Anti competitive

[i286NiNJA]

The irony is there but we'd all be much better off if the news went back to being a buck a day. I would never have thought giving people easy access to information could be a bad thing but it seems to be the case.

Re:Anti competitive

[GuB-42]

No they can't. Not if they don't want a lawsuit they are almost guaranteed to lose.
And this is the reason they probably didn't do it earlier. Google hate bad ads, it causes people to install full ad blockers, and it gives web advertising a even worse reputation than they deserve. But because they are in the ad business themselves, they have to be extremely careful before implementing such a feature.
So here comes the Coalition for Better Ads. A group that includes many major players, including Google competitors. By letting the group decide what should be blocked based on objective criteria, it is harder to accuse them of anticompetitive practices.

Re:Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

The irony of you posting this on a service that is highly dependent on ads to survive is delicious.

Slashdot - this iteration - might be dependent on ads for revenue. The costs of running the core of slashdot - posting stories and letting people comment - are ultra cheap and could be covered without the advertising revenue. Even if this couldn't be sustained, if it died a peer to peer based almost free to run version would appear.

The advertising may move some money around but it adds almost nothing of value to our lives. .

Re:Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

But this is almost entirely Googles fault for allowing js code blocks to be ran with the ad RATHER THAN A STUPID DUMB CODE FREE GIF/IMG ONLY.
Clearly, to me, this is an attempt to combat the adblocking community at large so they can vet ads. Security is just a banner they will wave in the hall of mirrors.

Re:Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you looking at the same Firefox I am? It IS Chrome.

Re:Anti competitive

[DontBeAMoran]

Windows users can still get Chrome, Firefox or Opera. Pick your poison.

Re:Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

YouTube has ads 'with a count down' which block you from the rest of the video until they're done. Google isn't blocking it's own ads.

Re:Anti competitive

[MitchDev]

And what is forcing users to use Google's browser?

Edge
Firefox
Chrome
Safari

and I'm sure there are a few browsers I'm forgetting. There is choice, you don;t like what Google is doing or at least what Chrome is doing, don't use it/them. There are other search engines too. There's no law saying you have to search or advertise through Google. ANd there's no law saying people are forced to put up with your ads either.

Re:Anti competitive

[Mashiki]

Chrome is the only default browser available. Android holds a monopoly position in the mobile OS market. Google also holds a large section of the advertising market.

Re:Anti competitive

[Dragonslicer]

Android holds a monopoly position in the mobile OS market.

I can see how Android could become a monopoly, and I wouldn't be very surprised if it does in the future, but my personal opinion is that it isn't there now. Of course, since neither of us are judges, our personal opinions don't count for much.

Re:Anti competitive

[Mashiki]

One can read prior case law and see the precedents are already there. The only real question, if you've read it and can see the violations is "why isn't the government acting on it?"

Re:Anti competitive

[Dragonslicer]

My guess is that either 1) nobody has filed a complaint, or 2) the FTC doesn't believe that Android is a monopoly. Another point to consider is whether Google requires Chrome to be the only or default web browser or if manufacturers can remove Chrome and install Firefox instead (I don't know the answer).

Re:Anti competitive

[toddestan]

Even without ad blockers, is your friend's business model even really viable? I just don't see any money in online advertising. Is your friend really going to get enough money from his website to support himself and create the content from the website from just ads? At best, I would expect the ads might net him a few extra dollars a month, maybe if he was lucky it might pay the hosting costs.

Of course, the real money is in infecting computers, cryptocurrency miners, ransomware, scareware, and other scams, which is exactly why one should be using an ad-blocker.

Re:Anti competitive

[toddestan]

IE is present in every version of supported version of Windows, and is actively maintained and being patched. It's still popular enough that most websites make sure they work with it.

Not that I advocate using it, but unlike Edge it generally works.

Sounds suspicious

[omfglearntoplay]

Sounds very much like they want to control what you see and who gets paid. I haven't met a single ad I like, so I'm skeptical that any "pro ad" committee is going to come up with a fair list.

If I am wrong, great. Somebody have the scoop on this?

Re:Sounds suspicious

[RazorSharp]

This is exactly what I was going to post. They just want to replace ad blockers with an ad blocker that doesn't block their own ads and whatever other large companies they partner with.

While I agree that many of the ads they want to block are annoying, nefarious, or both; they have a clear conflict of interest in their attempt to police such action. They may be open and transparent about this whole thing now, which allows them to boast about how nice they are while applying lube, but it stands to make them to be the gatekeeper for their competitors in their multi-billion dollar industry. I can't understand how anyone would look at this and not see a glaring anti-competitive move.

Re:Sounds suspicious

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget the consulting fee/ransom they pay certain blockers to be whitelisted by default.

Re:Sounds suspicious

[Anonymous Coward]

Ads must be blocked, not because they are annoying, but because they deliver malware.

It's true, there are legal, social, and technical problems to doing a good job of this. But it must be done to halt the spread of ransomware, spyware, cleptoware, etc. There is no other choice.

I have been using adblock plus for a long time. It allows ads that aren't potential carriers of malware. It's not perfect, but compared to the alternative, it's perfect.

Every time I hit a site that throws up a guilt banner saying "we need to make money, stop being an evil person and turn off your add blocker" I read it as "we want to put trojans on your machine, stop trying to protect yourself."

And I respectfully go somewhere else.

Re:Sounds suspicious

[thegarbz]

I haven't met a single ad I like

I have met plenty that are easy to ignore and I'm happy they subsidise and keep the content on the internet free as a result.

Re:Sounds suspicious

[J-1000]

I think I understand their motivation. I have a suspicion that web ads, even to this day, are valued at a fraction of what print, TV, and radio ads are valued at, despite there being much better data on their effectiveness. And I also suspect that a huge part of this value gap is due to "bad" ads hurting the perception of the audience and of the people buying ad space. Bad ads also drive end users to install ad blockers, which dump all ads into the toilet without regard for quality.

So if Google can improve the overall ad quality across the internet, they A) reduce the consumer push for ad blockers, and B) increase the perception of web ads, thus driving up value. Both of these drive up revenue.

In other words

[rmdingler]

The Coalition for Better Ads:

"While the Coalition’s consumer research was designed to identify the least preferred ad types, it also provides insight into consumers’ evaluation of a far broader range of ad experiences, including those more preferred by consumers.

Google: "We're only tracking your every move and recording your preferences to bring you a better online experience, you ungrateful dolt!"

Sorry, no sale

[Opportunist]

So, in other words, it still lets ads slip past, waste my bandwidth and time?

NEXT!

Re:Sorry, no sale

[tepples]

We noticed you're using an ad blocker. To continue to be able to bring you quality journalism, we kindly ask you to buy a subscription for full access to this website.

Re:Sorry, no sale

[Opportunist]

Close window.
Click next search result.

Re:Sorry, no sale

[tepples]

Next search result states something similar:

You are viewing the abstract for free. To read the rest, log in to your account or get your first week for 99 cents*

* Subscription requires a U.S. checking account, credit card, or PayPal account. Once the trial period concludes, you will be automatically billed at $9.99 per four weeks. Other restrictions apply.

My point is that after the web advertising market collapses, more of the top 10 search results will be paywalled than not. I have already begun to see this effect for some queries on Google Search.

Re:Sorry, no sale

[Anonymous Coward]

If that were to happen, those paywalled results would drop out of the top 10.

Re:Sorry, no sale

[Opportunist]

And you will notice that those paywalled results don't stay in the top 10 google results for long.

For the most part, they become part of my "minus list". You know, the long, and growing, line of "-this -that -whatever -site:paywalled.crp" pasted onto every query.

Re:Sorry, no sale

[Anonymous Coward]

Then from where is the content going to come? Unless some people are going to start sub shares specifically so that articles can be copied to pastebins/archives for all to read, those paywalled options are going to stay bolted to the top 10. And even if such was the case, I'd bet even money that the people running archive.org/pastebin would start expunging infringing content.

Re:Sorry, no sale

[swillden]

And you will notice that those paywalled results don't stay in the top 10 google results for long.

They will when everything relevant is paywalled.

Re:Sorry, no sale

[Opportunist]

Yeah, and if we ALL don't buy at Walmart they will have to...

C'mon, not gonna happen.

Re:Sorry, no sale

[swillden]

Yeah, and if we ALL don't buy at Walmart they will have to...

C'mon, not gonna happen.

Stuff costs. It's gotta get paid for somehow. You're assuming that everything you care about will always be free.

C'mon, not gonna happen.

Re:Sorry, no sale

[laurencetux]

plug the following string into your chosen search engine for the most likely response to this

Millie Jackson Symphony Youtube

Thank You!

Re:Sorry, no sale

[Opportunist]

Two reasons why it works. One, there's always people who enjoy doing what they're doing, even without money. And Two, there's always idiots that think if they start something for free they can later charge for it.

Re:Sorry, no sale

[Anonymous Coward]

When was the last time the news had a direct impact on your life? The only thing the news gives the vast majority of people is increased stress and some small talk topics to bullshit about.

And you'll always have hobbyists doing things for free and people working for reputation rather than direct pay. Sure the total content will go down, but the total content has already been massively inflated for ad hits.

Re:Sorry, no sale

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen plenty of top-ranked results on Google that go right to paywalls, and it's pretty obvious that Google is indexing and returning results based upon what's behind the paywall. Or at least they used to do that - I don't use Google much anymore for searching because of crap like that.

This is mostly the case for things like scientific journals, though it wouldn't surprise me in the least if other content was the same.

Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Google (a company that live out of ads) is going to add an adblock to Chrome (also from Google) ? I don't believe it.

Fox guarding the hen house?

[sjbe]

Naturally Google won't block any of their own ads...

I'll keep blocking all ads insofar as I can find the tools to do so. If google wants to actually pay me cash money to watch ads then we can revisit this discussion. I pay subscriptions for services I like. Ads just waste my bandwidth and time so companies that rely on them for their business model can die in a fire as far as I'm concerned.

Re:Fox guarding the hen house?

[ScentCone]

Naturally Google won't block any of their own ads...

Are you saying that Google actually runs ads like those being discussed?

Re:Fox guarding the hen house?

[dromgodis]

Are you saying that Google actually runs ads like those being discussed?

Youtube has "ads that are displayed before content loads (with or without a countdown)".

Re:Fox guarding the hen house?

[ScentCone]

Youtube has "ads that are displayed before content loads (with or without a countdown)".

Not really. The web page that they're showing you does NOT do that. Inside of that page is some video content that YouTube is providing to you free of charge, and attached to that content is (sometimes) an ad. That ad does NOT prevent the page from loading, the page's navigation from functioning, etc.

Not the same thing at all. And of course you can choose to be an actual customer of YouTube and have that content appear without those ads that pay for the service and the people who create the content. But the web page itself? Come on, don't pretend you don't know the difference between an in-line ad with the video itself and those "curtain" ads that take over the actual page.

Re:Fox guarding the hen house?

[Anonymous Coward]

You said it yourself, the web page loads but there's an ad before the content. Pages are supposed to exist to serve their primary content. YouTube's unskippable video ads block access to the only important content on the page. The sidebars are ads for other videos, then there's the ads for the items in the videos, then there's the video metadata, then there's the comments about the content.

You have to watch the video ad before the real video and you have to scroll through the item ads before you can see the comments. Everything is fronted by ads, are ads themselves, or provide navigation options to pages that have ads before their content.

For those curtain ad sites: The web pages fully load before the ad is displayed (YouTube's content doesn't fully load until after the ad). The ad doesn't prevent you from using your browser's navigation abilities. The site is provided free of charge. You can sign up for a subscription to remove the curtain. Same traits as YouTube. In fact, YouTube is worse because I can close a curtain ad faster than the timeout on the video ads.

The worse offenders are companies like Facebook which fill up the bottom third of your screen with an unremovable Create An Account ad. You can close the curtain but the other 'ads' force you to browse the content in a tiny window even if you have a high* resolution screen.

*Which is a sad joke because CRTs had standard resolutions higher than all the common displays people use today.

Translation

[sjbe]

"While the Coalition’s consumer research was designed to identify the least preferred ad types, it also provides insight into consumers’ evaluation of a far broader range of ad experiences, including those more preferred by consumers.

"More preferred" actually translates as "less hated". Nobody actually prefers ads, they just hate some types more than others.

Re:Translation

[DontBeAMoran]

I prefer static images ads or text-only ads. If that's the end result of Google's filtering, I'm all for it.

Ads with scripts, plug-ins, videos and animated GIFs should be banned.

Re:Translation

[tepples]

People prefer ads to the other two possibilities: having to buy a 1-month subscription for $5.99 just to read one article, or the article not existing in the first place because the publisher went bankrupt. (I'm interested to read your fourth option.)

Re:Translation

[TheRaven64]

Back in the day, Google Ads were plain text, usually advertising content directly related to the page that I was viewing. I clicked on a few, and I actually liked them because they introduced me to products that solved problems that I had identified that I had. People liked them because they were a lot less intrusive than the animated banner ads that they were competing against, and also far more likely to be relevant. Now, they are based on a crappy model of me, which is either creepy if it's accurate, or annoying if it isn't (yes, I did want one of those last week. Then I bought one. Now I am looking for something else), and they're as likely to contain video as anyone else's.

Re:Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

They will *never* ban The Scripts.

The scripts are part of their massive, next-gen ad-selling framework. For those who don't know: ads are sold on-the-fly -- auctioned off to the highest bidder, then loaded into the page within milliseconds, in a deranged kind of advertising arbitrage done on the backend. Where they trade your "profile" and make sure it fetches the highest market price.

The scripts are integral to this little dance, so they are here to stay, even if it means a permanent security hazard.

Re:Translation

[phantomfive]

or the article not existing in the first place because the publisher went bankrupt.

It's amazing how much time this would give me back in my life.

Re:Translation

[Zocalo]

My fourth option is the same as the one I use when I come across a site with an anti-adblock script where the effort to work around it outweighs my desire to read their specific take on the content. See if that content is available elsewhere, with a side-option of probably not returning to that site again if it's a high-enough profile to enter my conciousness or particularly obnoxious about the detection. There are already far too many instance of ad-providers serving up malware to make not blocking ads across the board a remotely sane thing to do from a security perspective, and given the recent abuse of a popular script-hosting site to mine crypto-currency it seems like only whitelisting scripts is a pretty damn good idea too.

Of course, I do have the advantage of knowing what I'm doing with script- and ad-blockers so a whitelisting is a viable option. The average Joe's PC, on the otherhand, is probably going to be spending a lot of its time sending spam, mining crypto currency, or acting a a proxy for random script kiddies to do whatever they want. If Google really wants to make a difference with Chrome's ad-blocker (and AMP, for that matter), they could start right there and insist that all pages and content, including any ads, will still render a usable page without any scripting support. I'll still be blocking the ads though. :)

Re:Translation

[tepples]

or the article not existing in the first place because the publisher went bankrupt.

It's amazing how much time this would give me back in my life.

What do you do for a living, and to what sources do you refer if you have a question about something? Would you prefer that, say, Server Fault and Photography Stack Exchange and Ask Ubuntu go out of business?

And I worry about what effect a worldwide shutdown of ad-supported sites would have on subscribers to home Internet access. Without ad-supported sites, there might not be enough demand for home Internet access to allow home ISPs to continue to offer Internet access at affordable rates.

Re:Translation

[phantomfive]

What do you do for a living, and to what sources do you refer if you have a question about something?

I get paid because I am able to read documentation. There are programmers who would be lost without Stack Overflow, but the world would be far better off if they learned how to read documentation.

Also I want to point out there were forums and such, without ads, before Stack Overflow.

Re:Translation

[wbr1]

4th option - Coinhive: https://arstechnica.com/inform...

Re:Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

by tepples ( 727027 )
People prefer ads to the other two possibilities: having to buy a 1-month subscription for $5.99 just to read one article, or the article not existing in the first place because the publisher went bankrupt. (I'm interested to read your fourth option.)

This completely depends on what form of ads are being discussed.

The topic at hand, script/flash ads with malware in them, no I suspect not only are you wrong but you are 100% wrong.
I doubt a single person on earth would prefer having their computer locked down with ransomware or to become a spam-relay, over any of the options you list.

But, as you are tepples and have a long history of intentionally misrepresenting what is being discussed, it's exceptionally likely you are changing the subject to the completely off-topic form of regular ads that consist of text or an image.

Despite that being off topic and not the kind of ads being discussed, that Would at least make your statement true.

Re:Translation

[jeti]

Ads pay so little that many websites would make more money with a $5.99 per year subscription. Maybe they should try that instead of trying to charge $10 or $20 per month.

Re:Translation

[karlandtanya]

Fourth option is I block ads and enough* of the rest of you don't--either because you don't know how or you don't care.
Yes, "Everybody else can block them, too", but that's irrelevant; as of today, you don't.

Before you cry "no fair", know this: It's too late for "fair" in advertising, and has been since *long* before there was an internet.
To the degree that it's profitable to abuse the public- producers, sellers, and advertisers have done exactly that. For millenia. Absent confiscatory fines or jail terms, regulations (and regulatory capture) are simply part of the business. "Fair" in this context is simply an opportunity for the enemy to exploit.

*Enough so it's the operator doesn't care about the last few users.

Re:Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

If the web only had text-only ads without scripts or tracking I probably wouldn't even bother blocking them. Right now ads are a security nightmare and way too intrusive.

Re:Translation

[tepples]

I get paid because I am able to read documentation.

Would you still be able to do your job if you had to pay for access to said documentation? Or for help interpreting documentation, particularly to resolve discrepancies between the documentation and the behavior of the software or workarounds for functionality that the documentation acknowledges is missing?

Also I want to point out there were forums and such, without ads, before Stack Overflow.

With what source of money did the operators of said forums pay for hosting and moderation?

Re:Translation

[kqs]

Fourth option is I block ads and enough* of the rest of you don't

Ah, the "I got mine, Jack!" strategy.

Before you cry "no fair", know this: It's too late for "fair" in advertising, and has been since *long* before there was an internet.
To the degree that it's profitable to abuse the public- producers, sellers, and advertisers have done exactly that. For millenia.

And the time-honored "but Billy started it!" defense.

I happen to like the free (except for ads) nature of the web. Now I tend to buy subscriptions for sites I like, but when I was a poor student "free" was all I could afford, and I don't believe in an internet "by the wealthy for the wealthy". So I feel that it is my duty to block or avoid the truly awful ads but otherwise allow ads. Google's plan seem to do just that, for which I am rather happy.

Re:Translation

[swillden]

My fourth option is the same as the one I use when I come across a site with an anti-adblock script where the effort to work around it outweighs my desire to read their specific take on the content. See if that content is available elsewhere, with a side-option of probably not returning to that site again if it's a high-enough profile to enter my conciousness or particularly obnoxious about the detection.

There's an implicit assumption underlying this option which should be made explicit: You're assuming that the content you would like to see/read is available for free somewhere. In a world where everyone used the same strategy you do, that would almost certainly not be the case. It takes time and effort to produce content, and it takes space, labor, hardware, power and bandwidth to serve it. Outside of whatever hobbyists are willing to do for free, all of that costs money. Without ads, it either wouldn't happen, or everything would be paywalled.

Re:Translation

[Zocalo]

There is that assumption, yes, but it also ties into the desire the read the specific content. The scarcer the content is, the more likely it is I'm going to work on getting to see it on the available sites, including potentially temporarily whitelisting some elements of a site with the anti-adblock script. That is an *awfully* rare occurance though, and such content - at least for me - tends to be found on sites that I'm likely to revisit so that too tends to increase the effort I'll put into making it work.

I call bullshit on the "without ads there would be no content" argument though; there was plenty of quality content on the Internet before ads came along, and there's still plenty of quality content out there today on sites that don't use ads or require loading a plethora of third party scripts that aren't as profit driven as the likes of Forbes and the Murdoch family who are pretty much the poster children for anti-adblocking. That ad-supported is the only viable business model is a fallacy peddled mostly by those that want to sell the ads in the first place; other revenue generation models exist, and can work very well, but they do require a little more effort than a copy-pasta of a bunch of ad-scripts and a good understanding of your readership though.

Re:Translation

[swillden]

I call bullshit on the "without ads there would be no content" argument though; there was plenty of quality content on the Internet before ads came along

Nothing remotely like there is today. Either you didn't actually use the pre-ad Internet (meaning before about 1993), or you have forgotten.

Re:Translation

[Morgon]

With what source of money did the operators of said forums pay for hosting and moderation?

And more saliently, where are these entities now?

Re:Translation

[tepples]

there was plenty of quality content on the Internet before ads came along

Nothing remotely like there is today. Either you didn't actually use the pre-ad Internet (meaning before about 1993), or you have forgotten.

Technically, MAKE.MONEY.FAST began to circulate in 1988. But let's explore the middle of the range for a moment. When did the pre-animated ad Web end?

Re:Translation

[Strider-]

Also, adds served from domains outside the main source of the page. if you're going to send me adverts, at least serve them yourself.

Re:Translation

[phantomfive]

Yeah, you're trying to justify advertising. Either you really suck at programming (and need to get better at reading documentation), or you need to find a better way of making a living.

Or not, you can just keep being a sucky person. That's fine too, I don't care.

Re:Translation

[Zocalo]

@GP - for the record, I compiled the code for a beta release of Mosaic in early 1993 to supplement (read "replace") Berners Lee's code we'd been using on my university's systems until then. Other than those actually working with Berners-Lee at CERN, I've probably been on the current web about as long as it's possible to be (ignoring all the time I spent on Gopher and other WWW precursors based off Ted Nelson's ideas for Project Xanadu before then - one of which was used for my thesis).

Getting back to the question about when animated ads arrived: 1993. It didn't take long, but that was more a matter of timing, I think - all the necessary pieces came together around the same time. The Web was "born" at CERN in 1990, but even in academia didn't really get much traction for a couple of years and I don't recall much in the way of graphical ads (animated or not) on content available via Gopher except for some basic in-line ASCII art level stuff and some very limited use of GIFs. Lots of spam on Usenet and some IRC channels, of course, but that's purely text and attachments. It wasn't until Mosaic v1.0 in 1993 that the web really entered into the public conciousness and, as the first browser capable of handling in-line graphics, it wasn't really possible to even *have* ads until then (before Mosaic any graphics were viewed in a new, dedicated window), and even then it was limited to locally hosted content with IMG tags embedded in HREFs - there was defintely no ad-revenue model in place; purely attempts to get a click-through. Eternal September was also 1993 though, and the proliferation of ads (still just click-bait) started up pretty soon after, so that would have caught the attention of the marketing types too - there were definitely animated ads on the web before then, but they *really* took off after the unwashed masses at AoL arrived.

Not good enough.

[lfp98]

All self-playing video ads need to be blocked. Otherwise users are going to resort to 3rd party blockers. So many sites, including New York Times (which I pay for!) are practically unreadable without a blocker, due to animated ads.

And...

[Anonymous Coward]

And their own ads will somehow slip through. Because somehow all Google ads are good and non-intrusive. Totally no conflict of interest there.

Will websites start blocking Chrome?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I was a webmaster of a major site, I would be blocking Chrome users from my website and force people to use browsers like Internet Explorer that don't have adblocking on them. It will be interesting to see how this plays out market share wise. Will webmasters force a great switch in browser choices to advert friendly browsers.

captcha: adapted

Re:Will websites start blocking Chrome?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I was a webmaster of a major site, I would be blocking Chrome users from my website and force people to use browsers like Internet Explorer that don't have adblocking on them.

Which explains why you are not webmaster of a major site.

Re:Will websites start blocking Chrome?

[phantomfive]

Forbes does that (if you have adblocker installed, you can't visit their site). They seem to be happy with it.

For me the end result is that I don't visit their site. And nothing of value was lost.

Re:Will websites start blocking Chrome?

[DontBeAMoran]

Internet Explorer died a few years ago, Microsoft replaced it with Edge.

Also, requiring people to use Edge would be a big fuck you to users of other browsers and to Mac and Linux users, which is a sure way of losing users for your website.

Re:Will websites start blocking Chrome?

[tepples]

Internet Explorer isn't available for any of the following operating systems:

Fedora
CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux
SUSE
Debian GNU/Linux and Raspbian
Ubuntu
Linux Mint
Slackware
Android
FreeBSD

What error message do you plan to display to users of Chrome or Chromium (which comes with an ad blocker) or Firefox (which blocks only those ads that fail to respect users' privacy) on those operating systems?

Re:Will websites start blocking Chrome?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why I keep a Sun Ultra with Solaris 2.6 - just to run IE

Re:Will websites start blocking Chrome?

[BronsCon]

Alternately, you could, you know, like, maybe, think about displaying ads that aren't a potential vector for scams and malware and don't start making noise unexpectedly and startle your users. Maybe? Just a chance?

Re:Will websites start blocking Chrome?

[Mike Van Pelt]

I don't run an ad blocker, but I do use NoScript, and a while back, Forbes would not load at all. Now, there's a splash page with a "click to enter site" link, and on the rare occasions I follow a link to Forbes, it displays fine.

I'm not sure about Wired. At one point, they refused to show anything if they thought you were using an ad blocker, and even "temp allow all" in NoScript wouldn't get past this. Their "help" link for this said about NoScript "It's too complicated. Don't use NoScript", to which my reply was "Oh **HELL** no!" and I put Wired on my personal index expurgatorius.

I think I may have seen a Wired article recently by accident; if so, I didn't run into this again, so maybe they changed their mind about that.

Re:Will websites start blocking Chrome?

[Anonymous Coward]

...but that would be hard.

a few brain cells short of a load

[Anonymous Coward]

the only way to combat it

your tiny brain can't even conceive that google could just release a browser that did't allow ad blocking software to be installed

Re:a few brain cells short of a load

[Anonymous Coward]

Difficult to enforce that. You can always block it before reaches chrome with several technologies that already exist.

Re:a few brain cells short of a load

[Anonymous Coward]

And yours apparently hasn't heard of proxies.

Really, how do you think AV software blocks malware hmm?

Re:a few brain cells short of a load

[Anonymous Coward]

Which means not allowing many popular extensions, which means nobody goes out of their way to use that browser.

Who has the tiny brain?

gmail app when using gmail website on mobile

[Anonymous Coward]

does that mean they will remove the full screen gmail app ad when you open gmail on your mobile device, that conveniently puts the skip button under the navigation controls on some mobile devices?

Google can CMA

[phantomfive]

Skip Chrome and use Firefox with full ad block. If you don't have unlimited data, this is the wisest option (those ads aren't free for you, and they are heavy).

Since even 'approved' ads can contain malware, it is foolish to not block all the ads. Block them all (and if you must use a hosts file, why not?)

Re:Google can CMA

[DontBeAMoran]

What if approved ads cannot contain any scripts whatsoever? In an ideal world, Google would only approve static images (JPEG and PNG only, no GIF) and text-only ads.

Re:Google can CMA

[phantomfive]

That is probably acceptable (although JPEG and PNG can still contain malware, it is a lot harder).

I really think advertising has been a net negative thing for the internet. It causes so much trash content to be created, content whose entire purpose is grabbing your attention, even if it has to deceive and abuse you in order to do so. Advertising just pushes the quality of everything down, I say that both as a user and having worked for an advertising company. They don't care about the content, they care about making advertisers happy.

Re:Google can CMA

[Anonymous Coward]

Skip Chrome and use Firefox

Firewhat? Oh, you mean that thing Waterfox is forked from?

Re:Google can CMA

[theweatherelectric]

Well, that thing that is now two releases ahead of Waterfox. Waterfox is stuck at Firefox 56. They say they'll be developing a "new" browser, but it's unclear what that means exactly.

Youtube ads

[Anonymous Coward]

and ads that appear on a site with a countdown blocking you before the content loads

Isn't that what Youtube does?

Re:Youtube ads

[Anonymous Coward]

I have not seen youtube adverts for years now. Blocking works pretty well.

And with the arrival comes...

[Travelsonic]

Bitching and moaning from advertising companies, and media outlets that use outlets, and are too stupid, apparently, to see how their lack of vetting ads, the rise of malvertising, te increased annoyance of ads, pushed the increased use of ad block, and how actually combatting these problems, while no panacea outright, would help loads. And don't give me that "Oh, but they have to make ads annoying now that people are using adblock," not only does that feel like utter BS, ads were getting annoying BEFORE adblock became popular. I was browsing the internet in the early 2000s, and had to deal with the same sort of SHIT - popups, popunders, auto-playing media ads, etc - the number, and annoyance level have only gotten worse since then.

Could it get any more hypocritical?

[hoblabobla]

Youtube (brought to you by Google) does two of those no-nos: 1) It displays ads that appear on a site with a countdown blocking you before the content loads. 2) It auto-plays video ads with sound. So Google should, by definition block Youtube ads, which it won't. So cynical! How long until Google loses all the sympathy it gathers in its young years?

Re:Could it get any more hypocritical?

[BronsCon]

The page content loads before the video player, so they're not actually doing #1. #2, the auto-playing video, fails the obnoxiousness test on a site intended to display auto-playing video. I don't see the cynicism.

All ads = bad ads

[sjbe]

Are you saying that Google actually runs ads like those being discussed?

I'm saying I don't care what kind of ads they run. Just being less overtly obnoxious doesn't make them any less creepy to me. In fact it's the ones who quietly try to track my every movement on the internet and who try to profile me that offend me the most.

No ads

[sjbe]

I prefer static images ads or text-only ads. If that's the end result of Google's filtering, I'm all for it.

I prefer no ads of any sort and no tracking. Google's preferred style of ads may be less obnoxious but it's more creepy.

Good start but not enough

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Must block all video. It is very distracting and muted video distracts and irritating. Videos with floating frame that relocates on scrolling are particularly bad. They also must be blocked.

I would not mind accepting some irritating ads from sites that I want to support. I would like the ability to whitelist the sites.

I would not mind giving Google some keywords to tailor their targeted ads. One mistyped or misclicked site, and forever I'm getting ads pitching stupid things like Beechcraft jet for 2 million dollars. What Artificial Stupidity would think I'm in the market for a jet plane?

Looking forward to our corporate overlords

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I am quite happy about this. Living with and being a caregiver for someone with Photosensitive Epilepsy, any and all reduction in flashing advertisements and autoplay anything is something we are ecstatic about. The few plug-ins that attempt to make the web safer for people like my SO are easily outpaced in the arms race of pushing adverts in front of us.

Ad blocker can only work so well, and it doesn't come close to catching the more dangerous things.

CSS can animate a JPEG

[tepples]

Blocking animation in ads isn't a very easy problem for two reasons. First, how would you distinguish desirable animations, such as the main video on the video's description page, from ads? Second, CSS can animate a JPEG.

Re:CSS can animate a JPEG

[DontBeAMoran]

No scripts, no CSS. The ads could only be static images.

Re:CSS can animate a JPEG

[tepples]

no CSS.

Now you appear to want to take us back to the days of <table> layout and <font> tags. I don't see anybody being impressed by that.

Re:CSS can animate a JPEG

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm impressed. Your idea sounds awesome!

Re:CSS can animate a JPEG

[Mitreya]

desirable animations, such as the main video on the video's description page, from ads?

There is no desirable animation. Pages should not be playing videos unless I explicitly activate it. There are very few cases I want a video on my webpage and none of them call for auto-play
I have abandoned several news sites (such as Salon.com) because each article insisted on a video, which would jump down to bottom when you scrolled and would try to auto-play and to re-open itself.
It wasn't even an ad, I think it was part of the news or some other news or something. I guess I'll never know for sure.

Re:CSS can animate a JPEG

[tepples]

There are very few cases I want a video on my webpage and none of them call for auto-play

Say I were to link to some cartoon on YouTube. What benefit is there of requiring an extra click to start it playing?

Re:CSS can animate a JPEG

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a piece of foreign content being injected into an area of known size.
I don't want it to be animated. I don't want it to be "interactive". I don't want it to ever interact with the rest of the page.
I don't see any reason that it shouldn't be pre-rendered and static.

Re:CSS can animate a JPEG

[Anonymous Coward]

What benefit is there of requiring an extra click to start it playing?

Giving me time to adjust volume/plug in headphones/mute other audio sources, being able to load up the video on a new tab with the intent of watching it later (or showing it to someone else) without having to stop the autoplay, and in the case of YouTube URLs, checking out if I've already watched whatever cartoon (or rickroll) you've linked without having it download & play if I've already done so.

Re:CSS can animate a JPEG

[DontBeAMoran]

We're talking about ads here. There's nothing wrong with limiting them to static images. In fact they should be grateful that they're using up our ressources such as bandwidth, memory and display for their own benefit.

No tracking

[Anonymous Coward]

How about they stop tracking people and only show static ads (as JPGs or PNGs)?

If that was a thing, I would never use an ad blocker.

And lose access to Partner or claimed videos

[tepples]

All self-playing video ads need to be blocked.

I fully agree on text articles and on the videos that some news sites have started to use to decorate their text articles. But preroll ads on sites like Dailymotion and YouTube are also "self-playing video ads". Would you prefer not to have access to Partner videos and claimed videos at all, especially outside those few countries where YouTube offers YouTube Red service?

So many sites, including New York Times (which I pay for!) are practically unreadable without a blocker, due to animated ads.

At this point, I endorse ad blocking on subscription websites. The dynamic there differs greatly from websites offered to the public without charge, as you are the customer.

Re:And lose access to Partner or claimed videos

[BronsCon]

I think it's a fine line but allowing auto-playing video ads on pages where auto-playing video is expected is the right side of the line to fall on, from the perspective of a company who makes money from those. It also seems reasonable from the perspective of the intelligent user who is annoyed by auto-playing video ads on pages where they're not expecting video; I'm much less likely to be startled and (overly) annoyed by an auto-playing video on a site where watching auto-playing videos is the whole reason I'm there than I am on a site I went to in order to read something.

That means there is some context involved in deciding whether a particular type of ad is obnoxious (and should be blocked) or not. On a page intended to display text, auto-playing videos are obnoxious (whether they're ads or not); on a page intended to display auto-playing video, they're not.

Re:And lose access to Partner or claimed videos

[knorthern knight]

> But preroll ads on sites like Dailymotion and YouTube are also "self-playing video ads".

I run Pale Moon with 2 changes in about:config. I've set

media.autoplay.allowscripted;false
media.autoplay.enabled;false

That blocks autoplaying... period... end of story. If I want a video to play on Youtube, I click on it, and it plays, sometimes with a pre-roll ad. But the pre-roll add only plays if I click to play a video.

The only downside is that I sometimes have to click 2 or 3 times on a video "Play button " to get Youtube/etc HTML5 videos to play. I've long since done away with Flash on my machine. As long as the ad isn't ridiculously long and/or allows me to skip after a few seconds, I have no problem.

just use uBlock Origin

[sproketboy]

ntr

Already using Brave

[bradley13]

I've long since switched to the Brave browser. Negatives first: Brave supports the idea that it can serve as a payment conduit, so that you can make micropayments to publishers. While not a bad idea, the implementation is unrealistic. But you can turn it off and ignore it.

On the good side, it already blocks ads, 3rd party cookies, and (some) fingerprinting.

The only thing remaining - and this is missing from every browser I am aware of - is to stop auto-download (and auto-play) of multimedia. Even if a browser doesn't auto-start some stupid html5 video, it is still downloading the damned thing. A switch to control that behavior belongs right next to the 3rd-party-cookie switch.

Two excuses YouTube would use for preroll ads

[tepples]

I can see two ways that the Chrome team might consider it "technically correct (the best kind of correct)" not to block preroll ads on Dailymotion and YouTube.

Ad Experience: Auto-playing Video Ads with Sound The ad format's page states: "The Better Ads Methodology has not yet tested video ads that appear before ('pre-roll') or during ('mid-roll') video content that is relevant to the content of the page itself." This alone would get sites like DM and YT off the hook until such time as CBA gets around to testing prerolls. Ad Experience: Prestitial Ads with Countdown The ad format's page states: "In desktop environments, prestitial ads that can be dismissed immediately did not fall beneath the initial Better Ads Standard for desktop." The illustrative animation on the page implies that this refers to a modal lightbox, not an ad confined to the video's own play area. So technically, the user can dismiss the ad by navigating to another video or by pausing it and scrolling to the comments.

This will only

[DarkRookie]

This will block only non Google ads to leave the Google ones alone.

Is that any better than plain old ad blocker?

[aglider]

I mean, I have this "uBlock" thing that's working fine with Chome and Firefox.
They have both basic blocking *and* custom blocking.
And they also block Google ads which chrome won't be blocking.
How is supposed the Chrome builtin blocker to be any better that a more general solution?

Hell not freezing over in 3... 2... 1...

[fahrbot-bot]

On desktop, Google is planning to block ... ads that appear on a site with a countdown blocking you before the content loads.

Like the ones on many YouTube videos?

Re:Hell not freezing over in 3... 2... 1...

[Anonymous Coward]

On desktop, Google is planning to block ... ads that appear on a site with a countdown blocking you before the content loads.

Like the ones on many YouTube videos?

I came here to post this, but see you already did.

Sounds like Google is about to make Youtube ad free!

An Act of Desperation

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is an ad company, and this is an act of desperation. They are throwing some ads under the bus in an effort to save the rest.

Plenty of options

[sjbe]

People prefer ads to the other two possibilities:

There are FAR more than just two possibilities.

having to buy a 1-month subscription for $5.99 just to read one article

So buy one subscription that aggregates articles. That's basically what the Associated Press is anyway. Or buy the article piece-rate. Maybe the value of that article is only $0.01 or less per read. Advertisers have to guess how much it will cost to get someone's attention so I see no reason why content providers should be unable to figure it out. Or give the article away and make money on something else like merchandise sales.

If no readers are willing to pay you for your article then maybe that says something about its market value and your business model.

or the article not existing in the first place because the publisher went bankrupt.

Someone else's bad business model is not my problem. I'm not about to relax my grip on my time and personal information just because someone else feels entitled to make a profit from it. If the advertiser wants my attention they can pay me cash money for it. Otherwise they can fuck off and I do not care at all if they go bankrupt. Your assumption that they are somehow entitled to profit from information about me is an assertion I reject completely.

But they still allow javascript in ads

[Anonymous Coward]

Their own ad networks allow advertisers to include arbitrary javascript (slashdot story a few days ago about their doubleclick ad network serving ads with cryptocurrency mining code for example). Maybe they should just stop allowing ads with javascript in them before they pretend to be protecting us from the "most abusive" ads with a built-in ad blocker.

Youtube is going to hate this

[Cajun Hell]

Google is planning to block .. ads that appear on a site with a countdown blocking you before the content loads.

Let's see if the people at Youtube are outraged enough at this change to take action against the makers of Chrome. These companies' struggle might be the next big war. Who will win?

Re:Youtube is going to hate this

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummmmmm.... Isn't Google the "maker of Chrome"? Isn't YouTube a Google company?

Re:Youtube is going to hate this

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoosh.

Low-power CPU; hacked sites; NoScript for security

[tepples]

I see at least three practical problems with Coinhive. First, if the viewer is viewing the article using a low-power ARM or Atom CPU, the viewer is unlikely to finish mining enough blocks to pay for one article view by the time the viewer finishes reading the article. Second, the Coinhive brand has been tainted by widespread installation of Coinhive on publishers' websites by intruders without the publisher's permission. Third, Coinhive relies on JavaScript, which some users (especially those who regularly read SoylentNews, Slashdot, or other more technical websites) disable by default as a means of blocking phishing, malware downloading, and other attacks on the browser.

Adult Check was sued out of business

[tepples]

So buy one subscription that aggregates articles.

A service called Adult Check tried that business model in the late 1990s. But its "grown-ups can pay $10 per month for nice things" business model ran into two problems. The first was that the publisher of Perfect 10 magazine successfully sued Adult Check out of business when it was discovered that several publishers (website operators) accepting Adult Check had displayed infringing copies of photographs from Perfect 10. The second is that if different publishers are on different subscription aggregators, viewers are back to the same situation they're currently in.

Or buy the article piece-rate.

I fail to see how would such an "a la carte" model work. Payment processors charge on the order of 0.30 USD per transaction, which greatly exceeds the 0.01 to 0.05 USD asking price for a single article.

Advertisers have to guess how much it will cost to get someone's attention so I see no reason why content providers should be unable to figure it out.

The logistical difference between an advertiser and a subscription aggregator is that only the publisher, not the viewer, needs to establish a business relationship with the advertiser.

If no readers are willing to pay you for your article then maybe that says something about its market value and your business model.

If readers are willing to pay for one article but not 100, does that say the same thing?

"The coalition for enriching Google"

[Anonymous Coward]

FTFY

Switching from abusive ads to static images

[tepples]

Nor is my comment history the topic. So ad hominems aside:

Your comment appears to promote "regular ads that consist of text or an image" as an alternative to the script-driven ads responsible for the abuses that Google Chrome will block. For example, Daring Fireball runs "regular ads that consist of text or an image" and are hosted on Daring Fireball's server (source). But that model requires each publisher to staff an ad sales department in order to advertise the site's ad space to advertisers, and advertisers are likely to pay far less if they can verify only clicks, not views.

So let's say a publisher that doesn't get quite as many views as the Markdown documentation on Daring Fireball wants to switch from abusive ads to "regular ads that consist of text or an image." How would such a publisher go about marketing its ad space to advertisers in a cost-effective manner?

Does your minus list hit the term limit?

[tepples]

And you will notice that those paywalled results don't stay in the top 10 google results for long.

I wouldn't be so sure of that. Subscription websites, such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and closed-access academic journals, tend to rank consistently high in many of my Google Search queries. This goes double since October 2017 now that Google Search no longer imposes a cloaking penalty if a paywall is marked as such with JSON-LD.

For the most part, they become part of my "minus list". You know, the long, and growing, line of "-this -that -whatever -site:paywalled.crp" pasted onto every query.

How often do the terms in your minus list cause you to hit Google Search's limit of 32 terms per query? (Before 2005, it was 10 terms.)

Re:Does your minus list hit the term limit?

[Anonymous Coward]

If this ever becomes a real problem, I'm sure that paywall-blocking browser extensions will come to existence much like ad/tracking blockers did (and people like me will start using them).

The barrier to pulling out your card

[tepples]

It's not the amount* as much as needing to whip out the payment card in the first place. If you read three or fewer articles on a particular site per year, arriving at them from Google Search or Slashdot or whatever social network you use, how likely are you to pay $5.99 for a year's subscription and create yet another line in your password manager?

* Except that the payment method charges a transaction fee on the order of 30 cents.

does that mean youtube will...

[Anonymous Coward]

stop carryng ads that force you to watch them of watch them for 5 to 10 sec before being able to play the damn thing you want to watch?
Im sure not.. double standard....

Will they block adverts on YouTube? Doubt it.

[Anonymous Coward]

>> "...and ads that appear on a site with a countdown blocking you before the content loads."

Oh, you mean *exactly* what Google does on YouTube?

Sometimes I can skip the advert after the first five seconds to start the video but sometimes I must wait until the advert is finished.

Yup, people who applause Go

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, people who applause Google for this don't really think longer than their nose and don't give a fuck about site owners.

There's tons of sites out there that just aren't allowed to run Google's ads and have to rely on cancer ads like popups. They CANNOT adapt. RIP those sites.

A better solution

[Big Bipper]

A better solution would be to allow adds only in a sidebar ( user selectable width ), only download adds up to a ( user selectable ) percentage of the total page data size ( say 15 percent of the total bandwidth used ), and only download after the content has been downloaded so we don't have to wait while some damned flash downloads to see we need to click on the next page button. I recognize that many sites are supported by adds and I'm willing to give them a percentage of my attention, bandwidth, and browser space, within reason, to support site content.

GOOD. Publishers are pointless bullshit business

[Anonymous Coward]

The only and exclusive purpose of publishers, is to be leeches. They don't work, but let others do the actual work, and then all they do, is offer us to do basically Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, to get a mere copy, but they demand real actual original money in return, that *we* HAD to work for in each and every instance.

Which is the exact same thing, as me making copies of my cash, buy worth with those worthless copies, and call people seafaring rapist thugs who don't accept that shit. ... No wait, not even my own cash! But the cash that others have given me to buy work with. I'd buy work once, and give it to those who gave me money. Then buy more work with more copies of the money, and keep it all for myself.

And all because they can't be bothered to use the same damn business model as every other service industry since the dawn of mankind, but want to act like information is a "good", so they can act like it is possible to have a monopoly on information, in order to create some imaginary artificial scarcity.

It is a crime scheme to steal money. Nothing else. Period.

We noticed you want money. Yet offer nothing.

[Anonymous Coward]

I would pay a subscription, if I would get actual work in return! I mean one unit of work for one unit of my money!
Because *I* had to actually *work* for each unit of my money!
I couldn't just lay it on the copier, and demand that people give me free work in return for my mere copies. That would be stealing.
Yet you put your articles on the copier, and demand that people give you free money in return for your mere copies. And that is stealing too.

Information is not a good! That directly contradicts the laws of nature! Get a fucking proper business model, like every other SERVICE business since the dawn of mankind, you leeching criminal pieces of shit! (Or should I say "seafaring rapist thugs"?)

Re:We noticed you want money. Yet offer nothing.

[tepples]

I'm interested to read your proposal for a more service-like business model for journalism.

Will it block... Google Doodles?

[Anonymous Coward]

Full page ads, ads with autoplaying sound and video, and flashing ads will be targeted by Chrome's ad filtering, which will hopefully result in less of these annoying ads on the web.

It was quite annoying this week when Google Doodles started playing (loud) sounds whenever you opened the Google search page, e.g. https://www.google.com/doodles.... I notice that the sounds don't play by default from the Google Doodle archives so clearly the archives are not a true and accurate representation of what was actually posted.

Given that Google gets most of its revenue from advertising I'll lay odds that the Chrome Ad Blocker will only ever block adverts from competitors.

Ads should be signed

[aberglas]

Just like anything else.

Then, when you use Google to query, it should trigger a pop up along the lines

"Do you want to accept Content from Google, press OK to continue."

99% of people will click yes. Google ads are through on all platforms. Other ad vendors need to figure out their own way of tricking people to accept them. And of course, the accepting message has to come from a page on the same site as the signature cert.

An no Google specific monopoly hard coded.

Re:GOOD. Publishers are pointless bullshit busines

[tepples]

The advertising industry uses the term "publisher" for anyone who operates a website. Even a website offering its text under a license for free cultural works, such as Stack Overflow and the rest of the Stack Exchange network, is considered a "publisher".

Re:Low-power CPU; hacked sites; NoScript for secur

[wbr1]

Yes to all of the above, but asking permission and then using the viewers computing resources for whatever makes the most sense for the content distributor is an interesting model. Does not have to be coinhive, also if you block the script, you could be blocked from the site, just as forbes and others do with adblockers now.

NoScript for accessibility testing

[tepples]

also if you block the script, you could be blocked from the site, just as forbes and others do with adblockers now.

If a website displaying essentially static articles fails to render for users who completely turn off JavaScript before visiting the site, could one make an argument that the site is inaccessible to users with disabilities and that its publisher is probably in violation of applicable disability discrimination laws?