11–20 of 273 posts
* https://plus.google.com/100667046318444095686/posts/brFPEa1j...
* https://plus.google.com/+SaschaEm/posts/K9Uvc6KCHKx
(TIL: Germans swear by saying "Fuck!!" in English)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I prefer something like ublock as well, but I wouldn't call what AB+ is doing a morally ambiguous question. I think this is actually pretty straight forward all around. I can install or uninstall software on my computer. Websites can serve ads. Websites can block me from viewing their site if I have an ad blocker installed. AB+ can whitelist sites. A website can or can not pay AB+ to be whitelisted.
What you described isn't complex logic, it makes sense, but that's not where the moral ambiguity enters. Abp is basically a cop that allows some criminals to slip through as long as they pay on the side... that's the moral issue. Granting access for paying members simply means ABP has become a gatekeeper with its own power and it is now offering access at a price, unethically
Am I missing something? If Der Spiegal doesn't want people to view their content while using an ad-blocker can't they detect and block those users (assuming those users also allow JS)?
They could check over time if a user has seen as many ads as page views and block them then but users would just need to delete their cookies.
Has Der Spiegel ever distributed malware via ads? I can't find anything solid, I can find a few scattered reports of such ... * https://plus.google.com/100667046318444095686/posts/brFPEa1j... * https://plus.google.com/+SaschaEm/posts/K9Uvc6KCHKx (TIL: Germans swear by saying "Fuck!!" in English)
There were studies about this on HN. Has something to do with foreign words being stored/associated at different points inside the brain and therefor being less offensive to foreign language speakers.
I'm opposed to all tracking that isn't opt-in by default. I haven't thought about the topic at great lengths, so there may be cases which I'm failing to consider, but I've generally found "opt-out by default" to be highly hostile to users. e.g. In the US you're only allowed to digitally opt-out of credit card prescreening [1] for five years unless you're willing to mail something out. This considerably raises the burden on the user, even though I'd conjecture most people are not interested in receiving this kind of mail, and they'd largely consider it spam. I make a point of blacklisting any service that mails me spam, and I encourage others to do the same.
Additionally, I'm also opposed to ads because I've found they're generally against the user's best interests. Humans are more important than companies.
I'm interested in eventual Google's reaction to ad-blocking software. Will they try to weld ads to web technologies or they'll accept the current situation?
I guess they'll just raise inconvenience to block the ads higher and higher, just like they did on Android phones, where Chrome did not have any extensions and apps serve ads that cannot be blocked without you getting root access to your phone (which is another inconvenience) and editing your hosts file or something like that.
One day, some smart people fed up of paying X invent a way of evading. «It's not fair to pay X!» they say. Most people follow them, why wouldn't they?
Next day, same smart people: «Humm, how about people paying X/? to us instead of paying X to the system? Let's make a compelling argument explaining the fairness of it as some people feel that evading is somehow immoral. They will bite.»
-- Devil's advocate
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I prefer something like ublock as well, but I wouldn't call what AB+ is doing a morally ambiguous question. I think this is actually pretty straight forward all around. I can install or uninstall software on my computer. Websites can serve ads. Websites can block me from viewing their site if I have an ad blocker installed. AB+ can whitelist sites. A website can or can not pay AB+ to be whitelisted.
What you described isn't complex logic, it makes sense, but that's not where the moral ambiguity enters. Abp is basically a cop that allows some criminals to slip through as long as they pay on the side... that's the moral issue. Granting access for paying members simply means ABP has become a gatekeeper with its own power and it is now offering access at a price, unethically
Only if ABP states that they block ALL ads, full stop. But their website doesn't say that, it says "Surf the web without annoying ads!" which wouldn't exclude non-annoying ads.
Maybe that's not how the extension/service was initially introduced but at this point they're not lying to new users. The website even explicitly calls out that they do let some non-intrusive ads through. https://adblockplus.org/
If they didn't have the qualification language front and center on their site but rather had a bunch of asterisks to tiny, tiny footnotes hidden on a different page I might lean more towards agreeing with your assertion. But this information isn't hidden, it's readily available.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I prefer something like ublock as well, but I wouldn't call what AB+ is doing a morally ambiguous question. I think this is actually pretty straight forward all around. I can install or uninstall software on my computer. Websites can serve ads. Websites can block me from viewing their site if I have an ad blocker installed. AB+ can whitelist sites. A website can or can not pay AB+ to be whitelisted.
What you described isn't complex logic, it makes sense, but that's not where the moral ambiguity enters. Abp is basically a cop that allows some criminals to slip through as long as they pay on the side... that's the moral issue. Granting access for paying members simply means ABP has become a gatekeeper with its own power and it is now offering access at a price, unethically
I'm interested in eventual Google's reaction to ad-blocking software. Will they try to weld ads to web technologies or they'll accept the current situation?
I guess they'll just raise inconvenience to block the ads higher and higher, just like they did on Android phones, where Chrome did not have any extensions and apps serve ads that cannot be blocked without you getting root access to your phone (which is another inconvenience) and editing your hosts file or something like that.
When it comes to the browser itself, another common method for adblocking was for the adblocker to function as a proxy server that you'd setup in chrome, and you didn't need root for this.
Also, you can just use Firefox for android, which lets you install same extensions as on the PC version, including adblockers.