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The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

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Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#261

Post by darawk »

danShumway wrote: post #244
darawk wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mak…

> 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."

Yep. Totally agree. Consent needs to be informed. In order for anything i'm saying to apply, the agreement must be meaningfully made. Personally, I consider a checkbox saying "I won't use an ad blocker" to be sufficient to declare that agreement valid.

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#262

Post by darawk »

shkkmo wrote: post #235
darawk wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So are you now more, or less sure if you believe it? Haha well....I'm not sure i'm any closer to an answer, other than of course that the label 'theft' is slippery and labeling something "theft" or "not theft" is kind of meaningless [0] (except insofar as the whole prison thing is concerned - it's kind of meaningful there). It is theft in the sense that something has been taken from someone under conditions other t…

> of course that the label 'theft' is slippery and labeling something "theft" or "not theft" is kind of meaningless [0] (except insofar as the whole prison thing is concerned - it's kind of meaningful there). It is theft in the sense that something has been taken from someone under conditions other than those they specified. The label "theft" is not like the label "feesh". Words carry weight beyond the category to wh…

> When you choose to use an morally (and legally) loaded term, you are doing more than just opening up a pointless semantics debate, you are striving for an emotional impact.

I didn't originate the term, the comment I was responding to initially did.

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#263

Post by darawk »

shkkmo wrote: post #221
darawk wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In your scarf example, you gave me the scarf after you gave me the terms. I didn't intend that interpretation. However, if you believe that's the crux of our disagreement, then we in fact do not disagree. If a site does not make clear its expectations, then there's no theft. If they do, then there is. And certainly you cannot be expected to turn off your adblocker before seeing those terms - that's silly. Uninforme…

You must get somebody to agree to the terms, not just state them. If you say "I'll give you this scarf if you go to the store for me" and then drape it over my shoulder, I haven't broken any agreement or stolen anything if i walk away. You gave me your scarf without any agreement on my part and will have a hard time enforcing that agreement in court. Similarly, I suspect that the "by using this site you agree to..."…

> Similarly, I suspect that the "by using this site you agree to..." declaration that is widely used has fairly limited legal efficacy precisely due the the lack of explicit agreement.

The case i'm considering here is one of explicit agreement. E.g. checking a checkbox.

> Even if I do agree to your terms, if I don't go the store it STILL isn't theft. I am merely in breach of contract and you will have to go to court to get them to force me to return the scarf you gave to me.

Breach of contract and theft are often the same thing. I'm not sure what distinction you're drawing here.

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#264

Post by darawk »

shkkmo wrote: post #215
darawk wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does a "check this box to agree to the terms" constitute a wall?

That would be an explicit agreement to a contract and there are still a large number of restrictions as to what a TOS can require from you.

> That would be an explicit agreement to a contract

Indeed it would. That's what i'm talking about.

> there are still a large number of restrictions as to what a TOS can require from you

Yep, there certainly are. And I don't believe the issue of "disable your adblocker" has yet been specifically adjudicated. But it seems like an eminently reasonable request to me.

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#265

Post by darawk »

ggg9990 wrote: post #236
darawk wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as a consumer of content, it is absolutely within your rights to only frequent websites that have that clause.

You seem to consider the consumer the only “agent” — they have to make the decision on what sites to visit, they have to comply with the terms of the implicit agreement... what are the obligations of the publisher?

A publisher chooses what to publish. The agent chooses what to consume, on the terms specified by the publisher. If they don't like those terms, they don't consume. If publishers don't get enough consumers due to onerous terms, they relax their terms. That's how our system is supposed to work.

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#266

Post by stordoff »

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…

It can block ads on devices where I _can't_ use an adblocker (Xbox One dashboard, Windows Phones), and blocks telemetry data from those devices and Windows 10[1]. It's also set and forget - I set it up once, then get "good enough" blocking on _any_ device on that network. I'm also on my home network 95%+ of the time, so I don't really care about mobile usage (for my use case).

[1] Such as the 1450 requests in the last 24 hours to watson.telemetry.microsoft.com

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#267

Post by darawk »

shkkmo wrote: post #225
darawk wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First sale doctrine has nothing to do with this. First sale doctrine applies to resales, not the initial sale.

Nope. First sale doctrine explicitly limits the restriction that the seller of a copyrightable work can place on the buyer. It is illegal for you to sell me a book and say "you can't let any of your friends read this copy of this book" because that violates the first sale doctrine.

I'm aware. But the fact that limits exist to copyright does not in any way show that this particular limit exists or is good.

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#268

Post by ggg9990 »

darawk wrote: post #265
ggg9990 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to consider the consumer the only “agent” — they have to make the decision on what sites to visit, they have to comply with the terms of the implicit agreement... what are the obligations of the publisher?

A publisher chooses what to publish. The agent chooses what to consume, on the terms specified by the publisher. If they don't like those terms, they don't consume. If publishers don't get enough consumers due to onerous terms, they relax their terms. That's how our system is supposed to work.

But couldn't this be framed as: the viewer chooses what to request. The agent chooses how to respond, based on the terms offered by the requestor. They could require a payment, a login, or a promise to view ads before responding.

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#269

Post by matheusmoreira »

darawk wrote: post #44
koolba wrote: post #39

> Only a few years ago, even people who hated ads saw ad-blocking software as akin to stealing. I've been using ad blockers and NoScript plugins for longer than I can remember. Before that I was using /etc/hosts file based blocking. I've never felt like I was stealing nor do I know anyone that feels that way. On the contrary, I've always felt that content to display, and in particular code to execute, on my device is…

Do you not believe that content creators have the right to set the terms upon which their content may be consumed? In other words, if you write an article, you don't believe that you have the right to say "you may read this article, provided that you also display this ad"? If you don't want to see the ad, simply don't read the article. What makes you think you have the right to the content, without abiding its terms?…

>Do you not believe that content creators have the right to set the terms upon which their content may be consumed? >you don't believe that you have the right to say "you may read this article, provided that you also display this ad"?

No.

>What makes you think you have the right to the content, without abiding its terms?

The server has already sent it to me. The data is already in my computer. I can do whatever I want with it. Does a magazine publisher get mad if I rip out the advertisement pages and throw them in the trash?

>You're violating the contract you implicitly agree to when you visit the site.

Nobody implicitly agrees to anything. Is that even a thing? People simply open up sites and consume whatever's on them.

>Of course it's stealing. >it's clearly stealing

That's about as dishonest as claiming piracy is stealing. Making copies of something doesn't subtract the original from its owner, therefore it is obviously not stealing. It's called artificial scarcity for a reason: it doesn't actually exist. Receiving ad-loaded copies of something and then using a computer program to remove the noise is not stealing, it is user experience improvement.

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#270

Post by darkkindness »

lapnitnelav wrote: post #255
darkkindness wrote: post #241

> 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.) Thi…

I disagree with you : 1) Unlike AdNauseam, Google can't do much to get in the way of Pi-Hole. This isn't within its ecosystem. 2) Actually, while it's not great for publishers, it's not that disruptive (at that scale) because it doesn't impact the advertiser's ad spend. No request > No charge. Now if you wanted to create something that would be quite disruptive, you'd need to combine the 2, with a twist : You could h…

1) This is true. Though, AdNauseam was originally a Firefox extension and is still available on Firefox. You can still install it on Chrome from source. Maybe I was too strong saying it was 'shut down' -- I was more referring to the fact that action has already been taken against AdNauseam when it was still small. I'm curious for when Pi-Hole gets the same kind of treatment.

2) If the goal (of PiHole and other ad/tracking blockers) is to encourage a subscription model over an advertising model for publishers, I'd argue that making ads ineffective for publishers is much more important than directly attacking advertisers' profits. Without publishers willing to host ads, advertisers will lose anyways.

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