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Ad blocking is under attack

blog.adguard.com

141–150 of 598 posts

Re: Ad blocking is under attack

#141
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as code is hosted in U.S. (GitHub) the cat and mouse game will continue. If you host your repo in some other country that does not care about U.S. DMCA then it should be fine.

Serious question: what does “hosted” means with a distributed system or repo? Ok, on Github you have the PRs and issues, but in the end it’s just one copy of the repo.

"Hosted" in this context implies the content is served online by another entity than your own organization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_hosting_service

Re: Ad blocking is under attack

#142
So right now this is one of the top stories on HN. How ad-blockers are being threatened and from comments below, "how annoying website subscription requests are."

Later this week, I expect we'll see another post about the derth of quality journalism and the "unfortunate" continued growth of buzzfeed-style and listicles taking over the net, slowly killing off quality content.

Re: Ad blocking is under attack

#143
post #21

Am I the only one who thinks its laughable that adding their domain to a blocklist "circumvents" their protection technology? If I was a content provider I don't think I'd want to rely on something so flimsy.

It's turtles all the way down man, at some point, everyone has to use DNS.

Re: Ad blocking is under attack

#144

It was admiral that did this: https://blog.getadmiral.com/dmca-easylist-adblock-copyright-... They even clearly state they used the only tool available to them, DCMA. From all the current summaries on this, DMCA does not apply to a line entry in easylist. A domain can be trademarked. This should be added back in. And if github cannot standup to DMCA abuse, then well, easylist and all other developers should be giving…

From what I can tell, the DMCA does apply (sort of) Admiral seems to be a paywall server basically. If blocking their domain gave access to paywalled content, then the DMCA seems to apply http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/circumventing-copyright-cont... However, that defense is a bit flimsy to me since the fall back to having the paywall blocked could/should be a "Paywall blocked, please disable your addblocker to gain…

The only hope against the DMCA is that eventually the takedowns get so ridiculous that courts are forced to strike it down as the unconstitutional garbage it is.

Re: Ad blocking is under attack

#145

It was admiral that did this: https://blog.getadmiral.com/dmca-easylist-adblock-copyright-... They even clearly state they used the only tool available to them, DCMA. From all the current summaries on this, DMCA does not apply to a line entry in easylist. A domain can be trademarked. This should be added back in. And if github cannot standup to DMCA abuse, then well, easylist and all other developers should be giving…

So, in that blog post, they state: "We asked them 24 days ago to remove functionalclam[.]com on the original commit."

Their request is here: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/commit/1ba8d4afeec6d562...

And was made by this account: https://github.com/dmcahelper

So, they made a github account the same day they made the "request" with an account that in no way indicates where the request is coming from? The github profile bio reads "Help all parties understand and resolve DMCA issues efficiently and effectively to minimize file and repository impacts."

Perhaps they should have used a bit more transparency when asking for the offending url to be removed from the repo, instead of acting like a spammy copyright boogyman, then immediately resorting to a dubious DMCA takedown request.

Re: Ad blocking is under attack

#148
post #20

Just encode the list of urls with htmlentities, base64, rot13, whatever. Then the DMCA can't be used to attack it. Edit: Disagree? Please comment. It's attackable via the DMCA because the word/brand is in the file in it's copyrighted form. If you encode it such that it isn't in that form, it's protected from that approach.

Encrypted IP is still IP.

a url isn't and can't be IP - otherwise, how would anyone go to any website without violating copyright?

Re: Ad blocking is under attack

#149

I didn't get what the hell happened. So, Admiral—an anti-adblocker company—contacted EasyList and told them to remove a domain from their list. This domain was a server they needed for their anti-adblocker platform to work. EasyList told Admiral that they would only do it if GitHub agreed, so Admiral contacted GitHub and the domain was removed from the EasyList list after GitHub told EasyList they should comply. The…

IIUC, the DMCA says that if there's some technological mechanism X that's used to enforce copyright, and a tool Y that is (or can be) used to circumvent X, then making or distributing Y is itself illegal (as opposed to the act of using Y to circumvent X, which is already illegal even without the DMCA). The DMCA then provides a notice-based method for 'taking down' online copies of Y.

In this case, X is the Admiral technology. Copyright owners use it to control access to content. However, an adblocker with Admiral's domain on its blocklist is a tool Y that circumvents that.

Re: Ad blocking is under attack

#150

There has been a growing trend of websites that will ask me to either: a) whitelist their site in my adblocker b) or subscribe to their monthly subscription and keep reading their site with adblocker

Which results every single time in choosing option C: the browser back button.

I always enable ads on a URL if it asks me to (provided they don't over advertise/have spammy advertisements), kind of already feel shitty about what is effectively stealing content for free so those notices just make me conscious of the guilt.

I wonder how others rationalize blocking ads and not subscribing either but still feeling entitled to access the content.

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