I am as down on DoubleClick as the next guy (I have already sent them a complaint, and got their helpful boilerplate response saying that they are misunderstood and it will all be clearer to me once they explain to me what a cookie is).
But it's ironic to see/. posters seriously arguing that Web banner ads are evil and should be abolished. Um, ads pay Cmdr T. and Hemos to do this full-time, and presumably pay for some of the hardware and connectivity making it possible for those very anti-ad rants to be posted. No, I don't think that people are obligated to download ads as "payment" for the privilege of seeing a content site, unless they signed a contract. But in aggregate, that's the money model that supports content sites, and if everybody blocked ads by default, free content sites would largely go away.
Lots of DoubleClick defeating schemes have been posted here (editing cookie files, editing host files, anonymizing browsers, etc.), and also people are encouraging others to opt out.
I think this is almost a negative thing, and practically helps DoubleClick. Does DC care if everyone on Slashdot solves the problem for themselves? Not. The result will be that the very people who are knowledgeable enough to get irritated (a trivial slice of Doubleclick's market) aren't that irritated anymore. DoubleClick will still know who your grandmother is, and you'll be the only person who your grandmother knows that DoubleClick isn't tracking.
If they get away with making it tricky not to be tracked, they just won. So let's write them, write the media, write legislators, etc. (I would of course never endorse tactics like DoS or other attacks... but they do have the virtue that your Grandma might benefit from them too.) -t
I don't think that free-fire zones will work, for the same reason they failed to work on Usenet newsgroups long ago. Newsgroup people thought that it would be great to segregate the flamers and extremely argumentative types in subgroups with "flame" in their names (or "advocacy", or even just.d for discussion), but the discussion in the real groups turned out to be more interesting even for the flamers, and the flame groups generally withered on the vine. Decreeing that certain playspaces are safe and others are dangerous is meaningless without some kind of enforcement. I don't think all this is as huge a problem as Katz does (but then Katz really needs to believe in the Voiceless Oppressed to give his voice a reason for existing). I think that/.-style moderation solves much of it, and self-selection takes care of much of the rest (people who find/. too harsh will just go somewhere else, which is fine). If it were really true that women and minorities were all much tenderer plants than the mean young white males Katz wants to protect them from, this could be a big problem, but fortunately that's not the case. (Hi Troutgirl!)
Slashdot Mirror
But it's ironic to see /. posters seriously arguing that Web banner ads are evil and should be abolished. Um, ads pay Cmdr T. and Hemos to do this full-time, and presumably pay for some of the hardware and connectivity making it possible for those very anti-ad rants to be posted. No, I don't think that people are obligated to download ads as "payment" for the privilege of seeing a content site, unless they signed a contract. But in aggregate, that's the money model that supports content sites, and if everybody blocked ads by default, free content sites would largely go away.
I think this is almost a negative thing, and practically helps DoubleClick. Does DC care if everyone on Slashdot solves the problem for themselves? Not. The result will be that the very people who are knowledgeable enough to get irritated (a trivial slice of Doubleclick's market) aren't that irritated anymore. DoubleClick will still know who your grandmother is, and you'll be the only person who your grandmother knows that DoubleClick isn't tracking.
If they get away with making it tricky not to be tracked, they just won. So let's write them, write the media, write legislators, etc. (I would of course never endorse tactics like DoS or other attacks ... but they do have the virtue that your Grandma might benefit from them too.) -t
I don't think that free-fire zones will work, for the same reason they failed to work on Usenet newsgroups long ago. Newsgroup people thought that it would be great to segregate the flamers and extremely argumentative types in subgroups with "flame" in their names (or "advocacy", or even just .d for discussion), but the discussion in the real groups turned out to be more interesting even for the flamers, and the flame groups generally withered on the vine. Decreeing that certain playspaces are safe and others are dangerous is meaningless without some kind of enforcement. I don't think all this is as huge a problem as Katz does (but then Katz really needs to believe in the Voiceless Oppressed to give his voice a reason for existing). I think that /.-style moderation solves much of it, and self-selection takes care of much of the rest (people who find /. too harsh will just go somewhere else, which is fine). If it were really true that women and minorities were all much tenderer plants than the mean young white males Katz wants to protect them from, this could be a big problem, but fortunately that's not the case. (Hi Troutgirl!)