Sorry, if your site needs to track me without permission, consume all my CPU time with ads, and annoy the hell out of me, all just to stay afloat, then you are doing things wrong. If those ad funded sites do not respect their users, then why should their users respect them?
You see, the point of DNT was to give those poor, ad-funded websites a chance to redeem themselves, a chance to respect their users. The other option is to just have ad blocking enabled by default, just like popup blocking is enabled by default. Should DNT fail, should it not be respected by the advertisers, then the browser makers have only one choice, if they do actually care about their users: including ad blocking as a feature, not an add-on, and let users opt-in to advertising if they want it.
Of course, there are plenty of other reasons to install ABP, like the fact that advertisers like to place hover ads over the text you are trying to read, or the fact that modern web ads have this tendency to spin your CPU for no apparent reason. Again, if website operators respected their users, this would not be happening and nobody would have bothered with ABP.
The ball is in the advertisers court; they can decide if they want to respect us, or if they want to face a world of ad blocking and technological arms race.
You may joke about Slashdot editors, but actually, editing user-submitted articles is not necessarily something people need to be paid to do. Many scientific journals are edited by volunteers, and really, why shouldn't a website that people read for the user comments (like Slashdot) be run by volunteers? Users are already moderators on Slashdot, and we have metamoderation to help cope with the miscreants who manage to get mod points.
Playing devil's advocate here: Tracking ads allow lesser and offbeat websites to exist.
I doubt that is the case. Most of the offbeat websites I have seen have pretty low operating costs -- they are mostly run by volunteers, and their costs are mainly bandwidth and hosting. Not only that, but I see other, better solutions:
Offbeat websites can focus on developing communities of users, who will want to buy merchandise with the website's brand. These users know that their website costs at least some money to operate, and those with money will be willing to buy the merchandise. If you spend $100/mo. on hosting, then you only really need to sell 10 t-shirts per month to cover those costs -- if you cannot get 600 people to buy t-shirts over the course of 5 years, you are doing something wrong.
Users can be asked to donate a bit to cover operating costs. It is not asking much for a handful of users to make a small payment. If your website is small and obscure, you will not need to solicit donations on the scale of Wikipedia; 1000 users contributing a penny each month is not that much to ask for.
If all else fails, if there is no reliable way to keep small websites running with tracking ads, then we need to make a new system that is less centralized than the web. Yes, I know, heaven forbid we ditch the wonderful HTTP protocol, but come on -- HTTP is not *that* great, and at this point I think we could do better. Let's revive P2P, and leave the web for things that really do require a client-server model (say, interacting with a central database; banking, shopping, etc.). We could even build it right into our browsers, so that we could have hyperlinks between the P2P network and the web.
Yes, it sounds incredible, but users can participate in keeping their favorite websites running, and they can do so without being highly technical or extremely wealthy. The first thing we need to do is to stop treating users like an exploitable resource; the rest falls into place from there.
We don't deny the right for any site owner to do advertising
Only to a certain limit of annoyance, beyond which we install ABP. We crossed that threshold over a decade ago, when all sorts of nasty tricks to avoid pop up blockers started to appear. My mother could not even read a New Yorker article, because some hover ad kept covering the text; I installed ABP for her, and the problem was solved.
You see, the problem here is that unsolicited advertising annoys people, and it is a terrible way to monetize a product. ABP exists because unsolicited ads had become so annoying on the web, and because those ads were consuming more CPU time than the actual web page they were placed on.
If we don't want to see the adds, we can stop going on the site
Which only works if you are willing to cut yourself off from modern society. How do you check the weather? How do you look up the location of a store? This is the reality of life in the 21st century: to do common activities, you start up a web browser, and if you are not using ABP you will be bombarded with advertising.
But what's not normal is tracking visitors across multiple sites and without their consent or knowledge
Well, here's the thing: unsolicited advertising is not very profitable, so you can expect the most greedy, underhanded approaches to improving profits. That is part of the problem with using unsolicited advertising as a way to monetize the web, and this stems from the annoyance of seeing unsolicited ads.
Basically, if your revenue model is based on exploiting people like they are a resource, you are doing the wrong thing, and eventually you are going to face rebellion. That online advertisers do not realize this is a testament to their general worldview: they do not see people, they only see wallets.
It should be a prominent enable button. However, AdBlockPlus has the right idea: let the users decide if they want advertising, and let them decide if they want to allow tracking.
It is telling, though, that when I install ABP on a less-technical user's computer, I hear no complaints -- nobody seems to miss all that advertising. Perhaps website operators should take a hint.
The issue is not technology, it is teaching methodology. It is not clear if we have developed teaching methods that are appropriate for large online courses, or even for small courses.
So what? That was just an example. Someone who can write a program but who does not know how to use a spreadsheet program is going to be OK, except in cases where their teachers fail them for not using Microsoft's software.
They do all need to write papers
I do not doubt that, but if you have the choice between preparing people for lightweight writing using Word or writing in general using LaTeX, why would you choose Word? Engineers, math majors, etc. need more than what Word gives them; humanities majors need less than what LaTeX gives them. If we are teaching people to use Word, we are not preparing them for technical disciplines or for research; if we teach people LaTeX or something similar, we are not failing to prepare them for non-technical disciplines.
know how to do Boolean searches in google
Which takes all of one day to teach.
insert footnotes in papers
\footnote{Here is a footnote}
Not hard to do, not hard to teach, not hard to learn.
China does not want to keep Tor blocked eternally. They don't want people talking to each other about losing access to Tor; that would just inflate the number of Tor users in the country (see, for example, the increase in Tor use following Tor being blocked). The Chinese government blocks Tor when there is big news that they want to conceal until they get their own propaganda out. They keep techniques of blocking Tor on hand for just such an occasion.
As long as you are not telling other Chinese people how to break through the firewall, I doubt that Chinese government will go after you. They do not need to add stress to their relationship with the USA, and they would probably prefer to sneak something onto your laptop so they can get some trade secrets than to stop you from using a corporate VPN. The purpose of the firewall is to control Chinese citizens, not to harass foreigners.
Well, perhaps people should shell out 1/10 that amount to get a professional certification from a trade school. They can save time, save money, and start raking in cash. I have friends who did that, and they are happy with that choice.
The problem is that treating college as vocational training has ruined higher education for those of us who were hoping to receive a good education. There is too much pressure to make courses easy for people who just want to scrape by with the bare minimum needed to get a job ticket.
You know what I wish my high school taught me? LaTeX, R, Matlab/Octave, and a few other technical packages. Word processors and Spreadsheets are limited and inefficient.
many do not even know about margins or how to use autocalc in excel or even sometimes not even know how to add a formula in a spreadsheet!
So? What if they know how to write a Lisp program instead of entering a formula in a spreadsheet?
They will be clobbered in the real world or when they take statistics as an upper clansman later on.
They should learn R if you want them to be ready for statistics.
Office and general use computing is REQUIRED for any job
"Any" job? I do not see anyone using an office suite where I work (a research lab). I see LaTeX, Matlab, etc.
You can debate all you want but HR looks down on colleges
Screw HR then; college is not a way for companies to offload their job training.
Seriously, statistics in Excel? I cannot imagine a more bizarre way to use a computer...
accounting
There's your spreadsheet use-case.
Infact every major from psychology, to business, to even teaching requires statistics and excel
See above. I have never seen anyone give a more misguided opinion on the utility or purpose of spreadsheets.
Want to know how I learned to make great powerpoint presentations
The best presentations I have ever seen were not made using powerpoint. Many were made using LaTeX, some using Prezi, and so forth. Powerpoint is cheap, and the presentations it encourages people to produce are cheap.
But young 18 year olds take this as well as college survival 101
You would have done a better job if you had told 18 year olds to drink their scotch straight up, to never trust liquor that comes in a plastic bottle, and to politely smoke their cigars downwind of people who are offended by the smell.
Why was this modded down? For some people, this is actually a concern. You cannot say, "Well you can just not view pornography if it offends you" when by default your OS is displaying it.
No, a filter is not the answer. The answer is to not shove advertising into someone's desktop unless they opt in.
Advertising is a terrible way for an OS to make money. Support contracts are the right way, but Ubuntu is not even trying to compete with Red Hat for that sort of thing.
The ads are being shown at times when people are not actually trying to shop. That is also known as "spam."
This opens the door to Amazon controlling Ubuntu. Not at all good, not at all.
I doubt that Fedora, ScientificLinux, Debian, or any number of other GNU/Linux distros or BSDs (or other free OSes that have yet to become popular or newsworthy) will all become ad supported. Believe it or not, some people are willing to volunteer time to help with an open source project. I have done it in the past, and I am not so unique.
The real future of OSes will be free versus non-free. The free OSes will be written by people who do not view their users as an exploitable resource, and those users will be allowed to installed and use whatever software they wish. The non-free OSes will be jailed gardens with mandatory application signing and arbitrary rules and censorship (sound familiar). People will use the jailed OSes because it will be the only way to legally watch movies or listen to music, or in a real nightmare scenario, to use certain websites.
Advertisers had a choice: DNT or ABP. DNT is a lot less damaging to advertisers than ABP, since at people will still see advertisements under DNT. DNT was created so that ad blocking would not become a standard feature in browsers; remember when website owners were calling ABP users "thieves?"
Now we follow the game to its conclusion: the advertisers chose to reject DNT, so now we need to install ad blockers everywhere and make ad blocking a standard feature in browsers.
What measures should we take to stop the browser from leaking our information? Is there any way to do so without losing functionality, such as saved sessions?
Yes, websites like Facebook can still track you, but at least you'll narrow the list of people who can follow you around the web (and at least you'll have to actually sign up for such things; if you are not a Facebook user, then you can and should use your hosts file or firewall to block *.facebook.com and *.fbcdn.com).
How about we just go back to pushing ad blocking software? The point of DNT was to show that ad blocking is not necessary, because advertisers will respect users if they can just get a little feedback. Now we see that that is untrue, so let's ditch DNT and get back to ABP etc.
The whole argument for DNT is that advertisers will be compelled to follow it, because if they do not do so then users will start blocking ads. Advertisers are not respecting DNT, so we have to deploy ad blockers now, or else DNT was truly pointless.
I think DNT is absurd too, but that is because I long ago accepted that advertisers are untrustworthy and not worthy of any respect. However, here is the theory of DNT:
Website operators are increasingly concerned about ABP, because they rely on advertising revenue to pay the bills
Browser vendors have added pop-up blocking support by default; ad blockers may be added by default as well if advertisers do not start respecting users
Advertisers claimed that if people asked not to be tracked, they won't be tracked; users find that asking every advertiser everywhere not to track them is exceedingly difficult.
Advertisers who fail to follow a DNT request would be black sheep, and a country could theoretically pass a law requiring DNT compliance (but how would people know if DNT was being ignored?)
In other words, DNT is predicated on the idea that advertisers will actually respect user wishes, because otherwise users will respond by blocking ads. The point of this article is that advertisers have shown that they do not respect user wishes; the logical conclusion should be that browsers start including things like ABP by default, until advertisers start respecting DNT again (but that won't happen, so we'll just make ad blocking a standard browser feature). Browser makers must include ad blocking or else DNT will truly be pointless; users, by and large, will not install ad blocking extensions on their own.
I'm very carefull with those as I'd like to keep my free ad-financed sites
Well, two things:
Sites should stick to traditional advertising, the kind that does not track you around the web. Assuming they respect you as much as you respect them.
If sites cannot pay their operating costs without intrusive advertising then we need to build a new system that has lower costs. Peer to peer networking comes to mind.
Slashdot Mirror
Just destroying the ad-funded free content sites.
Sorry, if your site needs to track me without permission, consume all my CPU time with ads, and annoy the hell out of me, all just to stay afloat, then you are doing things wrong. If those ad funded sites do not respect their users, then why should their users respect them?
You see, the point of DNT was to give those poor, ad-funded websites a chance to redeem themselves, a chance to respect their users. The other option is to just have ad blocking enabled by default, just like popup blocking is enabled by default. Should DNT fail, should it not be respected by the advertisers, then the browser makers have only one choice, if they do actually care about their users: including ad blocking as a feature, not an add-on, and let users opt-in to advertising if they want it.
Of course, there are plenty of other reasons to install ABP, like the fact that advertisers like to place hover ads over the text you are trying to read, or the fact that modern web ads have this tendency to spin your CPU for no apparent reason. Again, if website operators respected their users, this would not be happening and nobody would have bothered with ABP.
The ball is in the advertisers court; they can decide if they want to respect us, or if they want to face a world of ad blocking and technological arms race.
You may joke about Slashdot editors, but actually, editing user-submitted articles is not necessarily something people need to be paid to do. Many scientific journals are edited by volunteers, and really, why shouldn't a website that people read for the user comments (like Slashdot) be run by volunteers? Users are already moderators on Slashdot, and we have metamoderation to help cope with the miscreants who manage to get mod points.
Playing devil's advocate here: Tracking ads allow lesser and offbeat websites to exist.
I doubt that is the case. Most of the offbeat websites I have seen have pretty low operating costs -- they are mostly run by volunteers, and their costs are mainly bandwidth and hosting. Not only that, but I see other, better solutions:
Yes, it sounds incredible, but users can participate in keeping their favorite websites running, and they can do so without being highly technical or extremely wealthy. The first thing we need to do is to stop treating users like an exploitable resource; the rest falls into place from there.
We don't deny the right for any site owner to do advertising
Only to a certain limit of annoyance, beyond which we install ABP. We crossed that threshold over a decade ago, when all sorts of nasty tricks to avoid pop up blockers started to appear. My mother could not even read a New Yorker article, because some hover ad kept covering the text; I installed ABP for her, and the problem was solved.
You see, the problem here is that unsolicited advertising annoys people, and it is a terrible way to monetize a product. ABP exists because unsolicited ads had become so annoying on the web, and because those ads were consuming more CPU time than the actual web page they were placed on.
If we don't want to see the adds, we can stop going on the site
Which only works if you are willing to cut yourself off from modern society. How do you check the weather? How do you look up the location of a store? This is the reality of life in the 21st century: to do common activities, you start up a web browser, and if you are not using ABP you will be bombarded with advertising.
But what's not normal is tracking visitors across multiple sites and without their consent or knowledge
Well, here's the thing: unsolicited advertising is not very profitable, so you can expect the most greedy, underhanded approaches to improving profits. That is part of the problem with using unsolicited advertising as a way to monetize the web, and this stems from the annoyance of seeing unsolicited ads.
Basically, if your revenue model is based on exploiting people like they are a resource, you are doing the wrong thing, and eventually you are going to face rebellion. That online advertisers do not realize this is a testament to their general worldview: they do not see people, they only see wallets.
It should be a prominent enable button. However, AdBlockPlus has the right idea: let the users decide if they want advertising, and let them decide if they want to allow tracking.
It is telling, though, that when I install ABP on a less-technical user's computer, I hear no complaints -- nobody seems to miss all that advertising. Perhaps website operators should take a hint.
The US could learn a lot from the Finnish approach to education...
The issue is not technology, it is teaching methodology. It is not clear if we have developed teaching methods that are appropriate for large online courses, or even for small courses.
Not even MIT teaches LISP anymore
So what? That was just an example. Someone who can write a program but who does not know how to use a spreadsheet program is going to be OK, except in cases where their teachers fail them for not using Microsoft's software.
They do all need to write papers
I do not doubt that, but if you have the choice between preparing people for lightweight writing using Word or writing in general using LaTeX, why would you choose Word? Engineers, math majors, etc. need more than what Word gives them; humanities majors need less than what LaTeX gives them. If we are teaching people to use Word, we are not preparing them for technical disciplines or for research; if we teach people LaTeX or something similar, we are not failing to prepare them for non-technical disciplines.
know how to do Boolean searches in google
Which takes all of one day to teach.
insert footnotes in papers
Not hard to do, not hard to teach, not hard to learn.
Not play around in the CLI in latex
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LyX
https://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/
http://www.tug.org/mactex/
There are plenty of TeX or similar GUI front ends. Nobody needs to play around; I use AucTeX for almost everything I do.
Wake up
That is an ironic thing to hear from someone who says things like this:
All statistics today is done with Excel
Hm...
http://www.indeed.com/q-Statistics-Spss-jobs.html
http://www.indeed.com/q-SAS-jobs.html
http://www.indeed.com/q-R-Statistics-jobs.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html?pagewanted=all&_moc.semityn.www
In fact, I have several friends who work as statisticians, and not any one of them uses Excel or any spreadsheet package on a day to day basis.
China does not want to keep Tor blocked eternally. They don't want people talking to each other about losing access to Tor; that would just inflate the number of Tor users in the country (see, for example, the increase in Tor use following Tor being blocked). The Chinese government blocks Tor when there is big news that they want to conceal until they get their own propaganda out. They keep techniques of blocking Tor on hand for just such an occasion.
In fact, the war on drugs is more ethically questionable than censorship by a government.
And although I will be going as a tourist, I still need to be able to regularly import large quantities of heroin and cocaine
Charter private jets, then you will not have to deal with airport security.
As long as you are not telling other Chinese people how to break through the firewall, I doubt that Chinese government will go after you. They do not need to add stress to their relationship with the USA, and they would probably prefer to sneak something onto your laptop so they can get some trade secrets than to stop you from using a corporate VPN. The purpose of the firewall is to control Chinese citizens, not to harass foreigners.
I hear that the Chinese won't stop you from SSHing to a system outside of the country. You can turn SSH into an ad-hoc VPN if you'd like:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SSH_VPN
Well, perhaps people should shell out 1/10 that amount to get a professional certification from a trade school. They can save time, save money, and start raking in cash. I have friends who did that, and they are happy with that choice.
The problem is that treating college as vocational training has ruined higher education for those of us who were hoping to receive a good education. There is too much pressure to make courses easy for people who just want to scrape by with the bare minimum needed to get a job ticket.
I wish highschools taught kids how to use...
You know what I wish my high school taught me? LaTeX, R, Matlab/Octave, and a few other technical packages. Word processors and Spreadsheets are limited and inefficient.
many do not even know about margins or how to use autocalc in excel or even sometimes not even know how to add a formula in a spreadsheet!
So? What if they know how to write a Lisp program instead of entering a formula in a spreadsheet?
They will be clobbered in the real world or when they take statistics as an upper clansman later on.
They should learn R if you want them to be ready for statistics.
Office and general use computing is REQUIRED for any job
"Any" job? I do not see anyone using an office suite where I work (a research lab). I see LaTeX, Matlab, etc.
You can debate all you want but HR looks down on colleges
Screw HR then; college is not a way for companies to offload their job training.
use excel (if you take any statistics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_programming_language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matlab
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxima_(software)
Seriously, statistics in Excel? I cannot imagine a more bizarre way to use a computer...
accounting
There's your spreadsheet use-case.
Infact every major from psychology, to business, to even teaching requires statistics and excel
See above. I have never seen anyone give a more misguided opinion on the utility or purpose of spreadsheets.
Want to know how I learned to make great powerpoint presentations
The best presentations I have ever seen were not made using powerpoint. Many were made using LaTeX, some using Prezi, and so forth. Powerpoint is cheap, and the presentations it encourages people to produce are cheap.
But young 18 year olds take this as well as college survival 101
You would have done a better job if you had told 18 year olds to drink their scotch straight up, to never trust liquor that comes in a plastic bottle, and to politely smoke their cigars downwind of people who are offended by the smell.
Why was this modded down? For some people, this is actually a concern. You cannot say, "Well you can just not view pornography if it offends you" when by default your OS is displaying it.
No, a filter is not the answer. The answer is to not shove advertising into someone's desktop unless they opt in.
I doubt that Fedora, ScientificLinux, Debian, or any number of other GNU/Linux distros or BSDs (or other free OSes that have yet to become popular or newsworthy) will all become ad supported. Believe it or not, some people are willing to volunteer time to help with an open source project. I have done it in the past, and I am not so unique.
The real future of OSes will be free versus non-free. The free OSes will be written by people who do not view their users as an exploitable resource, and those users will be allowed to installed and use whatever software they wish. The non-free OSes will be jailed gardens with mandatory application signing and arbitrary rules and censorship (sound familiar). People will use the jailed OSes because it will be the only way to legally watch movies or listen to music, or in a real nightmare scenario, to use certain websites.
Representation of elliptic curves seem pretty bogus to me. How about all software and design patents?
Happy now?
Advertisers had a choice: DNT or ABP. DNT is a lot less damaging to advertisers than ABP, since at people will still see advertisements under DNT. DNT was created so that ad blocking would not become a standard feature in browsers; remember when website owners were calling ABP users "thieves?"
Now we follow the game to its conclusion: the advertisers chose to reject DNT, so now we need to install ad blockers everywhere and make ad blocking a standard feature in browsers.
What measures should we take to stop the browser from leaking our information? Is there any way to do so without losing functionality, such as saved sessions?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_filtering
Yes, websites like Facebook can still track you, but at least you'll narrow the list of people who can follow you around the web (and at least you'll have to actually sign up for such things; if you are not a Facebook user, then you can and should use your hosts file or firewall to block *.facebook.com and *.fbcdn.com).
How about we just go back to pushing ad blocking software? The point of DNT was to show that ad blocking is not necessary, because advertisers will respect users if they can just get a little feedback. Now we see that that is untrue, so let's ditch DNT and get back to ABP etc.
The whole argument for DNT is that advertisers will be compelled to follow it, because if they do not do so then users will start blocking ads. Advertisers are not respecting DNT, so we have to deploy ad blockers now, or else DNT was truly pointless.
In other words, DNT is predicated on the idea that advertisers will actually respect user wishes, because otherwise users will respond by blocking ads. The point of this article is that advertisers have shown that they do not respect user wishes; the logical conclusion should be that browsers start including things like ABP by default, until advertisers start respecting DNT again (but that won't happen, so we'll just make ad blocking a standard browser feature). Browser makers must include ad blocking or else DNT will truly be pointless; users, by and large, will not install ad blocking extensions on their own.
I'm very carefull with those as I'd like to keep my free ad-financed sites
Well, two things: