The point of DNT was to address the most serious privacy concerns about advertising without simply blocking ads (because people have this idea that advertising is paying for the web; I have my doubts). Supposedly advertisers would be compelled to comply, because otherwise people will see that the advertisers do not respect their wishes and then they will install things like ABP.
Now we see that advertisers are not respecting DNT, so now we should get back to making sure everyone installs ABP.
I would even go back to viewing ads as long as they are not obnoxious
As far as I am concerned, the only advertisements that are not obnoxious are the ones that I specifically ask for. When do I specifically ask for advertising? When I search for products on Amazon, when I go to Craigslist, when I use Google Shopping to compare prices, etc. It is no surprise that those things are so overwhelmingly successful (both in terms of money and in terms of utilization): there is no incentive for anyone to block them, because they are giving people something useful and something people want.
The reason advertisers have such a bizarre interpretation of do-not-track is that they know they cannot make any money by respecting people. That's why I use ABP and NoScript: advertisers do not respect me, so I will not let them consume my screen space, CPU cycles or bandwidth.
As for the poor websites that claim they will go under without advertisers...well, maybe they should stand up for their users and say, "No, obnoxious, disrespectful advertising is not allowed on this website." What happened to just showing me a picture that says, "This product is better than the rest!" and leaving it at that?
That is complete nonsense. I know you are probably just a troll with a remarkably low UID, but here is a brief lesson on Iranian history for you:
In 1906, the Iranian people created a constitutional democracy. They chose to follow Islamic government style in this system, and wrote a constitution that declares Islam to be the state religion. They required the monarch to be a Muslim. In the years that followed, they amended their constitution so that Islamic clerics would review laws to ensure that no harm would come to Islam from the laws enacted by the government.
The 1906 constitution recognizes the "people of the book" as having a right to be represented in parliament. Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians can be elected as representatives of their respective communities. Other religions cannot be elected, and there was systematic persecution of Bahai'i under this system.
In 1951, Mohammad Mossadegh was elected Prime Minister by a landslide. Mossadegh was a reformer who ended indentured servitude, established numerous social services, and pushed for expanded rights for women, universities, courts, and for freedom of religion (all of the above probably led to Mossadegh's overwhelming popularity). Mossadegh also fought against corruption in the Iranian government and was generally viewed as a remarkably honest politician (again, a likely source of his popularity).
In 1953, the US and UK removed Mossadegh and the Iranian parliament from power, in response to the nationalization of Iranian oil drilling. The Shah of Iran, Pahlavi, became an authoritarian dictator, and received full US backing (via cooperation between the CIA and the Iranian SAVAK). Pahlavi was known for executing political opponents and for using secret police to put down dissidents and protests. Pahlavi was viewed by many Iranians as catering to foreigners at the expense of Iran's own culture and interests (and doing so in a needlessly extravagant fashion).
In 1979, the Iranians overthrew Pahlavi's government and sent the Shah into exile. The Iranians established an Islamic republic, with a new constitution that was more Islamic than the 1906 constitution. The new government did not pick up where Mossadegh left off, and the new parliament was left in a subordinate position to the clerics. It is not clear if the Pahlavi monarchy was more or less oppressive than the Ayatollah's theocracy.
Welcome to the real world, where things are not as simple as "those evil Arab Muslims hate us White Christians!"
Except that Microsoft will be locking people in, making it impossible for GNU/Linux to really be a replacement (but maybe iOS will be). See, consumer computing is changing; it is getting restricted, more divisive, and starting to look like a next generation cable TV system. Microsoft knows this, Apple knows this, and very few people are fighting back.
Microsoft knows how to reclaim home computing. They need to make your computer the system that you use to watch TV. It is not hard; cable receivers are already doing it, TiVo already did it, and numerous other efforts exist. The difference is that right now, PCs are shut out -- most people cannot watch cable TV on their PC, because of all the DRM. That is going to change once DRM on PCs because so nasty and restrictive that the entertainment companies start to approve of it.
So here is how a future version of Windows (let's call it Windows 9) will work. You will have a locked-down boot environment that will never allow anything except for Windows to boot up. There will be no physical media; applications will be installed through an "app store" and will be vetted by Microsoft, to ensure that end users cannot install things like debuggers (or that if they can, the debuggers will not allow those users to debug certain software, including the debugger itself). You will no longer use a cable TV receiver; you will install an app from your cable service, which will allow you to record some shows but not others, and to watch recorded shows 3 times before having to pay more, and will deleted recordings after 60 days. Apps will be integrated with web browsing, so that you will get to pause a TV commercial to click on a link, which will take you to a website; your browsing history and TV viewing history will be integrated and full available to advertisers. Microsoft will avoid antitrust by claiming that the restrictions are all about security and by pointing at some Apple device that does the same thing. Android will not even be in this market; it's too open.
Sure, you will be able to install GNU/Linux on some computers, but those systems will either (a) be completely unable to connect to cable services or (b) the moment you install GNU/Linux you will lose the ability to connect to cable services (and you will void your warranty). Thus while people will still be able to use GNU/Linux, they will not be able to replace Windows or iOS with it without sacrificing the ability to watch TV (and perhaps other things as well), which will mean most people will not even try GNU/Linux even if it would save them money (because they will view losing cable service as being worse). We may even reach a point where it will be hard to find an ISP that allows GNU/Linux devices to connect to their networks -- certainly cable services can be expected to do this, but I suspect that there will be so much money in the integration of computers and entertainment that phone companies will try to get in on that game as well.
Of course, this is a nearly-worst-case scenario (the worst case would be laws that criminalize the use of free software; this is not impossible, but I doubt it would actually happen). In reality, things will probably be more tame; you will probably not lose the ability to dual-boot, and determined hackers will still break whatever DRM is worked into future Windows versions. The point is that Microsoft and Apple are positioning themselves to become a critical part of the chain of entertainment providers, which will make them indispensable for most people. People are not going to sacrifice their entertainment to achieve any notion of freedom, and all the more so when they are barely making use of their computers anyway.
Consumers expect free - due to open source movement
What? Consumers generally think that anything that does not cost enormous amounts of money is not useful.
That means we are headed to ad supported model which is BAD.
We are not heading for an ad supported model; we already did that once, and it was a disaster. Remember the days when programs like BearShare would install malicious adware on your computer?
We are actually heading for something much worse than ad supported software: software as a service. You know, that thing where you have no control over your data, no control over your software, where you can be arbitrarily denied access to important documents for any reason or no reason, and where fees can be forced on you without warning. Ads will certainly appear in such software -- and probably will appear in addition to subscription fees (which is what you see on cable television).
When I want something, yes, i go to Amazon to and search for things -- and in that case, their advertising actually benefits me, and there is no issue with it. The problem is that Ubuntu will also include unsolicited advertising e.g. when you try to run Empathy you'll see advertisements that Amazon thinks are related to empathy. That is an annoyance, a waste of bandwidth, a waste of screenspace, and a waste of CPU cycles, and I would remove it right away.
The difference is between advertisements you ask for, and advertisements you do not ask for.
Neither does Red Hat. In fact, Ubuntu is a rare case of someone trying to monetize a GNU/Linux distro with advertising; most distros are either community projects or they are monetized with subscriptions.
I mean come on, a distro as large as Ubuntu is gonna need revenue from places other than donations
Then they should do the one thing that actually turns a profit for free software vendors: subscriptions (for e.g. support, updates, etc.), targeting business users. If Ubuntu is now turning to ad revenue as a way to make money, they must really be in trouble (or they just do not get "it").
Mandriva tried that, and it didn't really work out for them. Really, software is best monetized with subscriptions (e.g. RHEL), but I do not think Ubuntu's users will be willing to pay for subscriptions.
In fact, the British attacked the US in 1812, and did not truly become our allies until the 20th century -- generations after the revolution. We helped to establish democratic governments in Germany and Japan.
When it came to Iran, we went with the opposite approach: the elimination of democracy in favor of authoritarian dictatorship. The Iranians did not rebel against their democratic government, they rebelled against a tyrant who had US backing. There is a world of difference between what happened in Iran and what happened in Germany or Japan.
There is something to be said for "forgive and forget" rather than holding a grudge until the end of eternity.
Chances are that the Iranians would have forgotten their anger, if we did not keep angering them. After they overthrew the dictatorship we created (sadly, only to establish another tyranny), we started giving the Iraqis weapons to kill Iranians with. Then in secret, we also gave Iranian weapons to kill Iraqis with, basically escalating a war that resulted in many dead Arabs and Persians. We also have an embargo on Iran, we have sent numerous, sophisticated, and destructive malware packages to them (and have written those to target their computer systems) and we keep calling them our enemy. It is not as though they are still getting back at us for everything that happened 60 years ago; we just won't leave them alone.
For that matter, were the US to apply the same logic they'd have plenty of reason to hold a grudge forever against Iran
Which is basically what we are doing -- as I said, we are not leaving them alone, we are actively working against Iran. We never had a good reason to get involved with Iran in the first place, and we keep worsening the situation.
try to make progress
Let's start be reevaluating our approach to overthrowing governments. We screwed up with Iran and Iraq; let's try not to screw up again going forward (maybe we should be asking about the escalation of US military activity in South America).
The Persians have a long history of trade with other nations and cultures, and the Iranians have not simply forgotten that history. Iran as it exists today is screwed up primarily because of the US and the UK overthrowing a democratically elected government that was trying to nationalize oil concerns, as well as the US backing the brutal dictatorship that followed that coup d'etat, and the US supplying weapons to both sides of the Iran-Iraq war. The Iranians did not wake up one day and decide they wanted a brutal, rights-abusing government; they rebelled against that sort of thing when it was forced upon them, and like most revolutions, they only winded up creating more of the same.
...except that we are the ones who created that mess. Remember, we overthrew the Iranian government, then they overthrew the dictatorship we created, then created their own rights-abusing government which we gave weapons to. I guess instead of apologizing to barbarians, we arm them.
the kind of thing that has the press running out with cameras to get the dramatic shot
Until a few years ago, tornadoes were a rare event in New York City, something that happened once in a while and made big news.
Now, tornadoes are becoming seasonable for New York. Yes, really, it is frequent enough to be considered seasonal, although I suspect the media won't report it that way for another 5 years. To give you an idea, there were two tornadoes in nearby suburbs this year, multiple strong tornadoes in 2010, a tornado in Brooklyn in 2007, and prior to that, one in 2006 in a nearby suburb, and in NYC in 2003, 1995, 1990, 1985, and 1974, and a few very rare ones before that. This is a becoming a clear change in New York City's weather patterns: tornadoes strike in the late summer and early autumn.
The news has not gotten into a panic over it, probably because it is still being reported as "rare," but it is not really "rare" anymore; it happens, and people in New York City and the nearby areas are going to have to learn how to deal with tornadoes. The tornadoes are also becoming stronger; eventually they will be so strong that the dramatic shots of the storm and the aftermath will be unavoidable.
I here that New York City is getting tornadoes with increasing frequency. I doubt that when New Yorkers look out the window, they fail to notice such a change in the weather patterns...
Claiming that the New Yorker was spamming your mother when she chose to visit their site is unfair - she solicited that website from their servers
She solicited the article, and the advertising made that article impossible to read. It is not as though my mother visited that website expecting to have advertising covering up the text; the advertisement was not only unwanted, it was actually getting in the way. That is where the line is drawn between spam and generic advertising: when advertising is getting in your way, it is spam, regardless of how the advertising is delivered or why it is delivered.
Yes, apparently the website was poorly constructed but that really doesn't really change anything.
Another way to state that is that ABP actually fixes some of the problems with poorly constructed websites. After all, once ABP was installed, my mother was able to read The New Yorker's website without a problem.
Really though, the problem is not The New Yorker's website, which works perfectly fine; the problem is with the advertisers that are using The New Yorker's website as a vehicle to annoy^H^H^H^Hdeliver advertising to people.
Your criticism about ads wasting the users' computing resources is more on-target
Actually, I do not find that to be a particularly good argument, even though I made it. My only point there was that there is a tangible cost to users; however, that cost would exist regardless of the users' computing resources. The amount you pay for bandwidth and CPU time is probably pretty small compared to the value of the time you waste deciding what to do about spam/web advertising. The extra CPU time spent on spam filtering is insignificant compared to the time saved by not having to deal with spam. Time is a resource, and unwanted advertising wastes a person's time (note that there does exist wanted advertising; whenever a person visits Craigslist or uses Amazon's search engine, they are requesting advertisements).
Various companies offer cloud delivery networks to make delivery more distributed. But not all the costs of running a web site are related to delivery (that is, bandwidth). Some are related to creating the works displayed on the site. How do you recommend making it less costly to pay a site's writers without discouraging them from becoming the site's writers in the first place?
The same way scientific journals do it, perhaps (i.e. everything is written, edited, and reviewed by volunteers). There are also plenty of places where the writing is done by the users themselves (like Slashdot), and those users are not demanding payment.
Really though, I am not creative enough to develop an exhaustive list of ways that online publications could pay writers or otherwise get people to write for them without invasive advertising. Maybe there is some mind-blowing model that can completely replace advertising without turning the web into a maze of paywalls, and none of us can imagine what it is.
No they would not; they would host ads in a way that is more difficult for ABP to detect, the most obvious being serving the ads from their own web servers. Telling users to do something technical is a guaranteed way to get most them to lose interest in your site, and unlike the advertisers, a website that only gets 1% of its users to stick around is a website that will ultimately fail.
The argument against spam goes like this: person A maintains an email server that person B uses to send spam. Person A shoulders the cost while person B receives the benefits, this is widely acknowledged as a bad thing.
No, the argument against spam is that (in the absence of filtering) it overwhelms users' inboxes with unsolicited and unwanted messages and makes it exceedingly difficult for email / Usenet / SMS / etc. to be useful. Remember the days of writing your email address like this: email example com? That is not what the administrators or owners of mail servers were doing; that was what users did, to avoid spam in their inbox as long as possible.
Visiting an ad supported website goes like this: person A maintains a web server that person B uses to retrieve content. Person A shoulders the cost but offsets this with advertising money, person B receives the (non-monetary) benefits.
The other day, my mother was trying to read The New Yorker online, but a hover ad kept covering the article -- and there was no clear way to get rid of it. She now uses ABP, because otherwise, some websites would be unusable. That is exactly the same situation as email and Usenet spam, except that this time, it is so overwhelmingly profitable that the people doing it can appear to be "legitimate" (OK, I'll be fair: they usually advertise real products, which adds some amount of legitimacy).
You know whose resources are wasted with advertising on the web? Users', that's whose; CPU cycles, RAM, screen time and space, and so forth. What benefit are users getting? Targeted ads they did not want to begin with? When people need to buy things, they actually do benefit from advertising, but of a much different kind: classifieds like Craigslist, shopping search engines (what, you think that is not a form of advertising?), etc. It is not surprising that Amazon makes so much money in advertising -- not because they track users, but because when people need something, they use Amazon's search engine to find what they need.
Advertising is very important to the web as it exists right now
If that is true (and frankly, I think the web would be fine if everyone used ABP), then it is time to make a better system, perhaps one that is more distributed so that popular online publications are not so costly to operate.
What I'm saying is, and I'm trying to put it politely, people as a whole should be aspiring to a higher level of ethics than douchebag spammers.
How about do not track me as an individual, but here is a list provided by my browser of things of which I'm interested
Better still, use a private information retrieval protocol to fetch ads. Your browser knows what you are interested in, uses PIR to get some relevant ads, and shows them to you.
Slashdot Mirror
The point of DNT was to address the most serious privacy concerns about advertising without simply blocking ads (because people have this idea that advertising is paying for the web; I have my doubts). Supposedly advertisers would be compelled to comply, because otherwise people will see that the advertisers do not respect their wishes and then they will install things like ABP.
Now we see that advertisers are not respecting DNT, so now we should get back to making sure everyone installs ABP.
I would even go back to viewing ads as long as they are not obnoxious
As far as I am concerned, the only advertisements that are not obnoxious are the ones that I specifically ask for. When do I specifically ask for advertising? When I search for products on Amazon, when I go to Craigslist, when I use Google Shopping to compare prices, etc. It is no surprise that those things are so overwhelmingly successful (both in terms of money and in terms of utilization): there is no incentive for anyone to block them, because they are giving people something useful and something people want.
The reason advertisers have such a bizarre interpretation of do-not-track is that they know they cannot make any money by respecting people. That's why I use ABP and NoScript: advertisers do not respect me, so I will not let them consume my screen space, CPU cycles or bandwidth.
As for the poor websites that claim they will go under without advertisers...well, maybe they should stand up for their users and say, "No, obnoxious, disrespectful advertising is not allowed on this website." What happened to just showing me a picture that says, "This product is better than the rest!" and leaving it at that?
The 1906 constitution recognizes the "people of the book" as having a right to be represented in parliament. Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians can be elected as representatives of their respective communities. Other religions cannot be elected, and there was systematic persecution of Bahai'i under this system.
Welcome to the real world, where things are not as simple as "those evil Arab Muslims hate us White Christians!"
Except that Microsoft will be locking people in, making it impossible for GNU/Linux to really be a replacement (but maybe iOS will be). See, consumer computing is changing; it is getting restricted, more divisive, and starting to look like a next generation cable TV system. Microsoft knows this, Apple knows this, and very few people are fighting back.
Microsoft knows how to reclaim home computing. They need to make your computer the system that you use to watch TV. It is not hard; cable receivers are already doing it, TiVo already did it, and numerous other efforts exist. The difference is that right now, PCs are shut out -- most people cannot watch cable TV on their PC, because of all the DRM. That is going to change once DRM on PCs because so nasty and restrictive that the entertainment companies start to approve of it.
So here is how a future version of Windows (let's call it Windows 9) will work. You will have a locked-down boot environment that will never allow anything except for Windows to boot up. There will be no physical media; applications will be installed through an "app store" and will be vetted by Microsoft, to ensure that end users cannot install things like debuggers (or that if they can, the debuggers will not allow those users to debug certain software, including the debugger itself). You will no longer use a cable TV receiver; you will install an app from your cable service, which will allow you to record some shows but not others, and to watch recorded shows 3 times before having to pay more, and will deleted recordings after 60 days. Apps will be integrated with web browsing, so that you will get to pause a TV commercial to click on a link, which will take you to a website; your browsing history and TV viewing history will be integrated and full available to advertisers. Microsoft will avoid antitrust by claiming that the restrictions are all about security and by pointing at some Apple device that does the same thing. Android will not even be in this market; it's too open.
Sure, you will be able to install GNU/Linux on some computers, but those systems will either (a) be completely unable to connect to cable services or (b) the moment you install GNU/Linux you will lose the ability to connect to cable services (and you will void your warranty). Thus while people will still be able to use GNU/Linux, they will not be able to replace Windows or iOS with it without sacrificing the ability to watch TV (and perhaps other things as well), which will mean most people will not even try GNU/Linux even if it would save them money (because they will view losing cable service as being worse). We may even reach a point where it will be hard to find an ISP that allows GNU/Linux devices to connect to their networks -- certainly cable services can be expected to do this, but I suspect that there will be so much money in the integration of computers and entertainment that phone companies will try to get in on that game as well.
Of course, this is a nearly-worst-case scenario (the worst case would be laws that criminalize the use of free software; this is not impossible, but I doubt it would actually happen). In reality, things will probably be more tame; you will probably not lose the ability to dual-boot, and determined hackers will still break whatever DRM is worked into future Windows versions. The point is that Microsoft and Apple are positioning themselves to become a critical part of the chain of entertainment providers, which will make them indispensable for most people. People are not going to sacrifice their entertainment to achieve any notion of freedom, and all the more so when they are barely making use of their computers anyway.
Consumers expect free - due to open source movement
What? Consumers generally think that anything that does not cost enormous amounts of money is not useful.
That means we are headed to ad supported model which is BAD.
We are not heading for an ad supported model; we already did that once, and it was a disaster. Remember the days when programs like BearShare would install malicious adware on your computer?
We are actually heading for something much worse than ad supported software: software as a service. You know, that thing where you have no control over your data, no control over your software, where you can be arbitrarily denied access to important documents for any reason or no reason, and where fees can be forced on you without warning. Ads will certainly appear in such software -- and probably will appear in addition to subscription fees (which is what you see on cable television).
When I want something, yes, i go to Amazon to and search for things -- and in that case, their advertising actually benefits me, and there is no issue with it. The problem is that Ubuntu will also include unsolicited advertising e.g. when you try to run Empathy you'll see advertisements that Amazon thinks are related to empathy. That is an annoyance, a waste of bandwidth, a waste of screenspace, and a waste of CPU cycles, and I would remove it right away.
The difference is between advertisements you ask for, and advertisements you do not ask for.
while posting on ad-supported Slashdot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblockplus
Neither does Red Hat. In fact, Ubuntu is a rare case of someone trying to monetize a GNU/Linux distro with advertising; most distros are either community projects or they are monetized with subscriptions.
Here's a hint: if you're not paying for it, you are the product.
I do not pay for this:
https://www.scientificlinux.org/
Somehow, I do not think that Fermilab or CERN view me as the product.
I mean come on, a distro as large as Ubuntu is gonna need revenue from places other than donations
Then they should do the one thing that actually turns a profit for free software vendors: subscriptions (for e.g. support, updates, etc.), targeting business users. If Ubuntu is now turning to ad revenue as a way to make money, they must really be in trouble (or they just do not get "it").
Mandriva tried that, and it didn't really work out for them. Really, software is best monetized with subscriptions (e.g. RHEL), but I do not think Ubuntu's users will be willing to pay for subscriptions.
The UK, Germany, Japan, and so on
In fact, the British attacked the US in 1812, and did not truly become our allies until the 20th century -- generations after the revolution. We helped to establish democratic governments in Germany and Japan.
When it came to Iran, we went with the opposite approach: the elimination of democracy in favor of authoritarian dictatorship. The Iranians did not rebel against their democratic government, they rebelled against a tyrant who had US backing. There is a world of difference between what happened in Iran and what happened in Germany or Japan.
There is something to be said for "forgive and forget" rather than holding a grudge until the end of eternity.
Chances are that the Iranians would have forgotten their anger, if we did not keep angering them. After they overthrew the dictatorship we created (sadly, only to establish another tyranny), we started giving the Iraqis weapons to kill Iranians with. Then in secret, we also gave Iranian weapons to kill Iraqis with, basically escalating a war that resulted in many dead Arabs and Persians. We also have an embargo on Iran, we have sent numerous, sophisticated, and destructive malware packages to them (and have written those to target their computer systems) and we keep calling them our enemy. It is not as though they are still getting back at us for everything that happened 60 years ago; we just won't leave them alone.
For that matter, were the US to apply the same logic they'd have plenty of reason to hold a grudge forever against Iran
Which is basically what we are doing -- as I said, we are not leaving them alone, we are actively working against Iran. We never had a good reason to get involved with Iran in the first place, and we keep worsening the situation.
try to make progress
Let's start be reevaluating our approach to overthrowing governments. We screwed up with Iran and Iraq; let's try not to screw up again going forward (maybe we should be asking about the escalation of US military activity in South America).
The Persians have a long history of trade with other nations and cultures, and the Iranians have not simply forgotten that history. Iran as it exists today is screwed up primarily because of the US and the UK overthrowing a democratically elected government that was trying to nationalize oil concerns, as well as the US backing the brutal dictatorship that followed that coup d'etat, and the US supplying weapons to both sides of the Iran-Iraq war. The Iranians did not wake up one day and decide they wanted a brutal, rights-abusing government; they rebelled against that sort of thing when it was forced upon them, and like most revolutions, they only winded up creating more of the same.
First of all, "we", the U.S., didn't do anything
I guess someone has not been studying the history of US-Iranian relations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-iraq_war
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-contra_affair
It is not as though the Iranians started to consider us to be enemies without us having done anything to them.
...except that we are the ones who created that mess. Remember, we overthrew the Iranian government, then they overthrew the dictatorship we created, then created their own rights-abusing government which we gave weapons to. I guess instead of apologizing to barbarians, we arm them.
When was the last time tornadoes were a seasonal occurrence in New York City?
the kind of thing that has the press running out with cameras to get the dramatic shot
Until a few years ago, tornadoes were a rare event in New York City, something that happened once in a while and made big news.
Now, tornadoes are becoming seasonable for New York. Yes, really, it is frequent enough to be considered seasonal, although I suspect the media won't report it that way for another 5 years. To give you an idea, there were two tornadoes in nearby suburbs this year, multiple strong tornadoes in 2010, a tornado in Brooklyn in 2007, and prior to that, one in 2006 in a nearby suburb, and in NYC in 2003, 1995, 1990, 1985, and 1974, and a few very rare ones before that. This is a becoming a clear change in New York City's weather patterns: tornadoes strike in the late summer and early autumn.
The news has not gotten into a panic over it, probably because it is still being reported as "rare," but it is not really "rare" anymore; it happens, and people in New York City and the nearby areas are going to have to learn how to deal with tornadoes. The tornadoes are also becoming stronger; eventually they will be so strong that the dramatic shots of the storm and the aftermath will be unavoidable.
I here that New York City is getting tornadoes with increasing frequency. I doubt that when New Yorkers look out the window, they fail to notice such a change in the weather patterns...
Claiming that the New Yorker was spamming your mother when she chose to visit their site is unfair - she solicited that website from their servers
She solicited the article, and the advertising made that article impossible to read. It is not as though my mother visited that website expecting to have advertising covering up the text; the advertisement was not only unwanted, it was actually getting in the way. That is where the line is drawn between spam and generic advertising: when advertising is getting in your way, it is spam, regardless of how the advertising is delivered or why it is delivered.
Yes, apparently the website was poorly constructed but that really doesn't really change anything.
Another way to state that is that ABP actually fixes some of the problems with poorly constructed websites. After all, once ABP was installed, my mother was able to read The New Yorker's website without a problem.
Really though, the problem is not The New Yorker's website, which works perfectly fine; the problem is with the advertisers that are using The New Yorker's website as a vehicle to annoy^H^H^H^Hdeliver advertising to people.
Your criticism about ads wasting the users' computing resources is more on-target
Actually, I do not find that to be a particularly good argument, even though I made it. My only point there was that there is a tangible cost to users; however, that cost would exist regardless of the users' computing resources. The amount you pay for bandwidth and CPU time is probably pretty small compared to the value of the time you waste deciding what to do about spam/web advertising. The extra CPU time spent on spam filtering is insignificant compared to the time saved by not having to deal with spam. Time is a resource, and unwanted advertising wastes a person's time (note that there does exist wanted advertising; whenever a person visits Craigslist or uses Amazon's search engine, they are requesting advertisements).
Various companies offer cloud delivery networks to make delivery more distributed. But not all the costs of running a web site are related to delivery (that is, bandwidth). Some are related to creating the works displayed on the site. How do you recommend making it less costly to pay a site's writers without discouraging them from becoming the site's writers in the first place?
The same way scientific journals do it, perhaps (i.e. everything is written, edited, and reviewed by volunteers). There are also plenty of places where the writing is done by the users themselves (like Slashdot), and those users are not demanding payment.
Really though, I am not creative enough to develop an exhaustive list of ways that online publications could pay writers or otherwise get people to write for them without invasive advertising. Maybe there is some mind-blowing model that can completely replace advertising without turning the web into a maze of paywalls, and none of us can imagine what it is.
No they would not; they would host ads in a way that is more difficult for ABP to detect, the most obvious being serving the ads from their own web servers. Telling users to do something technical is a guaranteed way to get most them to lose interest in your site, and unlike the advertisers, a website that only gets 1% of its users to stick around is a website that will ultimately fail.
Remember the days of writing your email address like this: email example com?
That should read: email [at] example [dot] com
The argument against spam goes like this: person A maintains an email server that person B uses to send spam. Person A shoulders the cost while person B receives the benefits, this is widely acknowledged as a bad thing.
No, the argument against spam is that (in the absence of filtering) it overwhelms users' inboxes with unsolicited and unwanted messages and makes it exceedingly difficult for email / Usenet / SMS / etc. to be useful. Remember the days of writing your email address like this: email example com? That is not what the administrators or owners of mail servers were doing; that was what users did, to avoid spam in their inbox as long as possible.
Visiting an ad supported website goes like this: person A maintains a web server that person B uses to retrieve content. Person A shoulders the cost but offsets this with advertising money, person B receives the (non-monetary) benefits.
The other day, my mother was trying to read The New Yorker online, but a hover ad kept covering the article -- and there was no clear way to get rid of it. She now uses ABP, because otherwise, some websites would be unusable. That is exactly the same situation as email and Usenet spam, except that this time, it is so overwhelmingly profitable that the people doing it can appear to be "legitimate" (OK, I'll be fair: they usually advertise real products, which adds some amount of legitimacy).
You know whose resources are wasted with advertising on the web? Users', that's whose; CPU cycles, RAM, screen time and space, and so forth. What benefit are users getting? Targeted ads they did not want to begin with? When people need to buy things, they actually do benefit from advertising, but of a much different kind: classifieds like Craigslist, shopping search engines (what, you think that is not a form of advertising?), etc. It is not surprising that Amazon makes so much money in advertising -- not because they track users, but because when people need something, they use Amazon's search engine to find what they need.
Advertising is very important to the web as it exists right now
If that is true (and frankly, I think the web would be fine if everyone used ABP), then it is time to make a better system, perhaps one that is more distributed so that popular online publications are not so costly to operate.
What I'm saying is, and I'm trying to put it politely, people as a whole should be aspiring to a higher level of ethics than douchebag spammers.
I agree, but I am not greedy.
That's why ABP etc. should be included by default in browsers. If users actually want advertising, let them disable ad blockers and opt in.
How about do not track me as an individual, but here is a list provided by my browser of things of which I'm interested
Better still, use a private information retrieval protocol to fetch ads. Your browser knows what you are interested in, uses PIR to get some relevant ads, and shows them to you.