The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers • Hacker News Board

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#241

Post by darkkindness » Fri, May 11, 2018, 12:36 AM UTC

> Publishers will target Salmela’s software if it becomes anywhere near as popular as AdBlock Plus, says Nicole Perrin, an analyst at researcher EMarketer.

I'd caution about that claim. Google pulled AdNauseam[0], a uBlock Origin extension, from the Chrome Web Store since it was fundamentally disrupting Google's business model via click fraud. (It automates clicking ads in order to create noise in user tracking.) This was far, far before it became as popular as AdBlock Plus.

PiHole takes an even more aggressive stance against ads, blackholing entire networks. It poses as much as a threat to the ad industry as AdNauseam. So I'd wager that PiHole will get shut down long before it reaches the popularity of AdBlock Plus.

[0]: https://adnauseam.io/

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#242

Post by dwaltrip » Fri, May 11, 2018, 12:37 AM UTC

darawk wrote: post #152

dwaltrip wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't correct. I believe there are extensive restrictions on what type of terms are considered "reasonable", especially between consumers and corporations. Arbitrary contract terms aren't automatically viewed as valid and binding by the courts.

You're correct, and this is the path to the primary legitimate argument against the view that you're morally obligated to view ads. None of the things other people are saying in response to me represent correct understandings of the issue. This is its crux: Can users meaningfully agree to the terms of websites they visit?

If the terms aren't legally enforceable, then why is it immoral for the user to ignore the terms? We are certainly not talking about theft anymore.

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#243

Post by darawk » Fri, May 11, 2018, 1:03 AM UTC

keldaris wrote: post #233

darawk wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Okay, so you agree that in the absolute majority of cases users have no legal obligation whatsoever to watch ads, but you're interested in a hypothetical website that has constructive notice for terms of service that specifically include language which says users must watch ads. All right, let's discuss that. I'm not sure exactly how hypothetical it is - I see websites doing this now. But yes, this is what i'm talk…

> I think you can answer this question yourself :). This happens all the time in real world contracts. Some unforeseen, unspecified circumstances crop up, and an arbiter or judge decides whether and to what extent they fall under the existing terms. My personal opinion is that if this happened and it was a condition not explicitly spelled out in the terms, it would not be a breach. Because you basically acted in good…

> It's certainly a moral principle, but I doubt you'd find many people who would agree that principle supersedes every other consideration.

No, it most certainly doesn't. But the burden of proof is very clearly established to be on the side of those wanting to limit private property and contract rights. I see no proof of significant public interest in restricting this right.

> In fact, one could argue that in the case of websites we care so (comparatively) little about the public interest precisely because most websites offer little of significant value.

This is pretty clearly false. Plenty of websites offer enormous value. But even if it weren't, there's a feedback loop here. Content created is influenced by regulatory climate, just as regulatory climate is influenced by content created.

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#244

Post by danShumway » Fri, May 11, 2018, 1:04 AM UTC

darawk wrote: post #205

danShumway wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. https://www.iana.org/assignments/http-status-codes/http-stat... It's hard to describe an HTTP status as anything other than a sign. If it was purely technical, we wouldn't distinguish between 402 (payment required) and 403 (forbidden).[0] While HTTP status codes can be understood by a machine, they're also designed to be highly semantic and understandable by humans. I would argue that the burden is on people who…

> It's hard to describe an HTTP status as anything other than a sign. If it was purely technical, we wouldn't distinguish between 402 (payment required) and 403 (forbidden). I agree that the existence of those status codes does a good job at disambiguating representations of intent regarding payment. However, to my knowledge, there's no status code that means "Ok, as long as you don't use an adblocker". As such, any…

> As such, any such provision has to be layered on higher up the stack. The current solution is to put it in the site's terms of service.

But the problem is that I never signed that TOS. We keep on coming back to this, but putting a TOS somewhere on your site is not binding. You need to get my informed consent. In the same way, if I stuck up a contract on my public blog that said "by fulfilling any HTTP request I make, you grant me license to republish your content," I couldn't steal everyone's artwork off of DeviantArt and claim "well, we did have a contract."

We have a really good solution for this problem - put a 401 (unauthorized) page in front of your content, which is accurate because the site operator has decided that someone who hasn't agreed not to block ads is not authorized to view the content. Then require me to sign the TOS before you authenticate me.

That would be an enforceable contract. Ad blocking is a solved problem for anyone who's really willing to block requests and require authentication.

Of course, the vast majority of sites don't want to do that because it's incredibly annoying to the average user. But that's not a problem with the technology - informed consent is fundamentally annoying to procure in any context. It will always be more work to get someone to voluntarily agree to a set of conditions than it will be to just give them something. On the web, that's just more of a problem because quick, impulsive, uninformed clicks currently form the majority of web revenue.

So site operators have discovered that it is more profitable not to get informed consent and just hope that nobody blocks your stuff. The downside is that you have no TOS to enforce because you never got anybody to agree to it. But, that's a downside many sites are willing to live with.

The conflict comes when courts rule that the implied contract that users believe they're agreeing to isn't the terms that ad networks wanted. I find that often what ad agencies want is to have legally binding implied contracts, but only in one direction and under terms that they can change at any time.

I'm all for contract law, but if it's the users responsibility to understand a site's TOS before they request information, shouldn't it also be the site's responsibility to understand a user's TOS and intent before they fulfill a request?

That's what web authentication does. It gives sites the opportunity to form a contract with a user, and to tell users who don't want to form a contract "sorry, but we have conditions before you view this."

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#245

Post by stepvhen » Fri, May 11, 2018, 1:09 AM UTC

darawk wrote: post #171

alex_young wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The litmus test for stealing here is breaking an agreement. This sounds fine, but how can you break an agreement you haven't conceded to? I cannot see how the simple fact that an ad was offered alongside other content constitutes any agreement from the receiving party. No one owns your attention.

> This sounds fine, but how can you break an agreement you haven't conceded to? I cannot see how the simple fact that an ad was offered alongside other content constitutes any agreement from the receiving party. Indeed this is the question. If you haven't meaningfully entered an agreement, then I don't believe you're obligated to abide this term. However, that's sort of the question. What constitutes entering an agre…

as a baseline, to constitute entering an agreement, each party must have a reasonable idea of what they are agreeing to, as well as the capacity (mental, emotional, physical, rational, etc) to actually make such an agreement. to enforce an agreement, it must be recognized that some term.has been broken by some party.

ad providers, as a collective (that is, no single actor is responsible by themselves, and not every actor is at fault) began breaking the terms of the implicit agreements with Pop-up ads, ads with sound, ads with visual motion, ads with full video, ads that look like real articles, ads that block actaul content from the website you are visiting, dishonest or misleading ads, targeted ads without the users consent, ads that are significantly louder than the video you are watching, ads that hijack your mouse, etc.

each of these phenomena were introduced after previous terms were implicitly agreed upon, that is, they were introduced without informing the user beforehand. and so, as a collective, ad providers have broken the agreement much more and morw often than users who wholesale block ads. in this moral economy then, the users have the high ground.

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#246

Post by politician » Fri, May 11, 2018, 1:17 AM UTC

darawk wrote: post #194

politician wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe the operator is liable for any damages their website causes to computers whose owners disable their content protection software (e.g. ad blockers) in order to comply the the site agreement? Do websites take on a duty to protect visitors from the foreseeable harm that malicious ads cause to unprotected computers by requiring content protection software to be disabled?

Tricky question. I think I would come down on the side that they are liable for that, perhaps unless they very explicitly and clearly disclaim liability before exposing you to the risk.

Product liability disclaimers are often found to be unenforceable; is there a particular disclaimer strategy[1] you have in mind that would effectively shift liability to the presumed counter party?

[1] https://injury.findlaw.com/product-liability/are-product-lia...

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#247

Post by dredmorbius » Fri, May 11, 2018, 1:19 AM UTC

ggg9990 wrote: post #238

mikestew wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's the tracking, privacy, and security aspect I'm concerned about And that's what ads are, per se , in the 21st century. "Ads", as the current implementation defines it from my perspective, are no longer general-purpose and static. No, they chase you around the web and then for weeks will try to sell you the thing you just purchased. They'll load random executable code onto your machine. I, too, have no problem wit…

And websites can sell static JPG ads that are impossible to block.

s/impossible/harder/

One of the first adblock tools I used relied on thevstandard sizes of banner ads to blok them.

Names of selectors, XPATH, explicit element whitelisting, denying all image content, etc, all are possible options.

On desktop I apply a pretty rigorous set of CSS customisations against numerous sites.

Plus the usual adblocking.

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#248

Post by dredmorbius » Fri, May 11, 2018, 1:21 AM UTC

tannhaeuser wrote: post #97

Personally I have no problems with ads per se , it's the tracking, privacy, and security aspect I'm concerned about (and also the unbelievable bloatedness of ad-financed sites lately as ad prices race to the bottom). Personally I'd be fine with ads if we could go back to a content-oriented model where first-party static assets are served as ads rather than the targeted advertising we have now. I know others here who…

Ads, per se, are harmful and dangerous, individually and collectively.

There's an ample literature, in media studies and elsewheere, to this effect.

Mentioned in TFA:

Among other things, the online advertising business model has incentivized clickbait—and worse—at enormous scale. Facebook Inc. and YouTube LLC figure out how to make people spend more time on their sites to maximize ad inventory. This has abetted the spread of fake news, violent children’s content, and Logan Paul.

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#249

Post by dredmorbius » Fri, May 11, 2018, 1:22 AM UTC

m3rc wrote: post #42

gruez wrote: post #3

Is it me, or is pi hole way more popular than it should be? Compared to the alternatives, it's worse in almost every way. It only works on your local network, so good luck blocking ads while you're at work, using mobile data, or at a cafe. Browser based adblockers (which is available on most desktop browsers, mobile safari, and firefox for android) can block elements and url patterns, pi hole can't. Even if you're on…

>Even if you're on a browser that can't use adblock (mostly android) The fuck?

Android Chrome, specifically.

It's maddening.

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#250

Post by fl0wenol » Fri, May 11, 2018, 1:30 AM UTC

darawk wrote: post #172

danShumway wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they put up a public sign in front of it that says "come on in and take anything you want" then... kind of. It's not that access implies consent, it's that the technical standard is the methodology by which a company grants consent. The fact that there's ink on a piece of paper is meaningless by itself, but if it forms my signature on a contract, then it does have meaning. The fact that I can get to a server is me…

> If they put up a public sign in front of it that says "come on in and take anything you want" then... kind of. Do you believe that putting up a website is the equivalent of that sign?

It totally is.