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Adblocking: How about Nah?

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Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#411

Post by FridgeSeal »

chucksmash wrote: post #106
Swenrekcah wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess they mean purely via subscriptions. But of course Netflix also uses product placement and probably sells all your viewing and behavioural habits as well.

Definitely product placement going on. I'd be surprised to hear they were selling viewing data though. A few years ago, they were making a lot of noise about how that data gave them a unique way to make decisions on what content to produce that other studios lacked. Seems like the kind of thing you'd hold close if that were the case. When you search, it's also clear they have shadow profiles for content they don't ha…

> I wonder how heavily that search data is weighted in deciding how much to offer to license existing content.

Probably quite highly, as it’s well known that Netflix also watches what’s popular on torrent sites to help decide what to licence next.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#412

Post by 1000units »

okr wrote: post #301
chris_wot wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a good question. People do it for free, because they want to contribute to society. That’s why people contribute to open source, or Wikipedia, or write blog articles, participate on StackOverflow or post to HN. Not everything is about the almighty dollar. Did you get paid for participating in this discussion?

Of course they also want to contribute to society. It is a great thing. And behind all this, someone has to pay for the other stuff. Its not only the content creator. On what hardware is this all running on? Who provides for electricity? Who is writing the software? Who makes sure, that we have internet cables deep below in the ocean. Someone has to pay for it. There are people having jobs. So of course i want that p…

Right, but the discussion is about whether that money has to come from (exploitative and invasive) advertising or not. In support of the current advertising model, someone had claimed that YouTube must be compensating content creators well, it is a good thing and so forth, because people still upload videos -- meanwhile, most people upload videos for free. The people doing it for money are uploading things like "CGI Joker Mates With Choo-choo Train Sing-a-long ABC's" and "$30,000 Rolex Watch -- Can We Blend It?"

Exaggerating only slightly for argument, YouTube is presently a great force for evil, actively chipping away at collective privacy and promoting the creation and dissemination of Worthless Garbage so that they can sneak in ten second promotions for Even-More-Worthless Garbage like Grammarly, whatever horror movie's coming out soon, etc.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#413

Post by fencepost »

I don't block ads or set up adblockers for customers and family members because I object to ads. I do it because it significantly cuts down on the number of potential attacks on systems.

Between malicious code ending up on ad networks and ads that take people to malicious sites, it only makes sense to block connections to things that are not actually needed for the display of pages. Most people who get a take-over-the-screen "We are Mikrosoft and have discovred that your computer infected call us helpful people at Mikrosoft and we will fix your comptuer" messages aren't getting it because they're visiting dodgy sites or even ones that have been hacked - they're getting them because either someone got that into an ad network or because they clicked on an ad that turned out to route them to one of those.

I can't babysit everyone and really don't want to, but I can at least cut down on some of the crap that hits their computers.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#414

Post by [deleted] »

ikeboy wrote: post #296
bredren wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have managed to block advertising out of my life so effectively for so long I nearly recoil when a normal tv advertisement at someone’s home or a bar catches me somehow at full volume. That or I marvel to those around me at the amazing production value of some stupid commercial that’s aired to them countless times is. I have no doubt a barrage of ads day in and day out, regardless of economic condition is bad for a…

Perhaps you're free-loading on other people that don't.

[deleted]

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#415

Post by bredren »

ikeboy wrote: post #296
bredren wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have managed to block advertising out of my life so effectively for so long I nearly recoil when a normal tv advertisement at someone’s home or a bar catches me somehow at full volume. That or I marvel to those around me at the amazing production value of some stupid commercial that’s aired to them countless times is. I have no doubt a barrage of ads day in and day out, regardless of economic condition is bad for a…

Perhaps you're free-loading on other people that don't.

I am no martyr of ad viewing. You are welcome to do your part.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#416

Post by ben509 »

TravisLS wrote: post #338

Is it necessary that ad blockers be totally all-or-nothing in their approach? Pop-up blockers didn't kill all ads. They just killed pop-ups. If it's really the privacy violations that are the problem, and not the user experience of seeing a bunch of ads, why not find a middle ground? Make an ad blocker that just dishonors cookies, clears localStorage, etc for the ad domains, rather than blocking the requests altogeth…

Adblock Plus has their "acceptable ads" feature[1] so it's already a thing. But there was some controversy around it, which I don't recall well enough to give a fair hearing.

Also, Firefox has a good deal of tracker blocking[2] built in that tries to go after browser signature recognition. I think the problem with that is it can break some sites, though I have it on and don't see a lot of problems.

Beyond that, many ad blockers let you customize the lists, and there are tracker blocking lists. But I think they all default to standard ad blocking, so the hindrance is configuration.

[1]: https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads [2]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/content-blocking

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#417

Post by fouc »

wybiral wrote: post #67

I don't actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... Good for you. I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash. But these companies are intentionally blurring the lines between advertisement and digital surveillance. You don't need to collect everything about my operating system, browser, monitors, GPU, every click I ma…

We need to abolish user agents. At the most, a universal web versioning or a "release timestamp" would be sufficient.

This is the first step to reducing fingerprinting, remove distinctions between different browsers and only have the level of web version or timestamp they can support.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#418

Post by hermitdev »

wybiral wrote: post #67

I don't actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... Good for you. I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash. But these companies are intentionally blurring the lines between advertisement and digital surveillance. You don't need to collect everything about my operating system, browser, monitors, GPU, every click I ma…

What pisses me off is the intrusiveness of the ads. Auto playing video or audio. The amount of malware attacking browser zero days. Until that goes away, I'm going to run a layer of adblockers. That's a problem the ad networks introduced and allowed. It's not on me, as an end user, to fix. You serve me auto playing audio, video, and malware? I'm going continue to block you until you fix that.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#419

Post by oehpr »

realharo wrote: post #209
jedberg wrote: post #96

For many many years I resisted installing an ad-blocker. As someone who worked at a website that made the bulk of it's revenue from ads, it felt hypocritical, and also, I wanted to make sure that the experience of our website was bearable without ad blocking, by forcing myself to experience it every day. I gave up about two years ago. The web just go so bad I had to install ad-block. My computer would spin like a jet…

If this keeps being an issue, maybe browser vendors will eventually limit website CPU usage by default. For web apps that need it, it could be an explicit permission, like webcam or location access.

Hey I like this idea. This is something that needs to happen. Every website starts with aggressive CPU throttling, and then they can ask for permission to be unthrottled. "Our web page requires lots of CPU to deliver text, for some reason we would prefer you not think about, can you please unthrottle us?". This seems like an action browsers could take to significantly improve the web.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#420

Post by komali2 »

tlibert wrote: post #88

When I loaded the BoingBoing version of the article my browser contacted 53 third-party domains and a grand total of 373 cookies were set. The BoingBoing privacy policy does not mention "Do Not Track", usually a signal it is ignored, and it discloses nearly none of the third-parties. The cookie opt-out link goes to the NAI site which does not work on Safari because Safari won't allow the third-party cookies required…

I emailed him about this, and his response was essentially, it's not within the ability of publishers and their writers to get rid of these kinds of ads. Pop up ads went away because the consumers worked around them - that's why advertisers stopped demanding publishers put them on their sites.

So, wanna get rid of tracking cookies, continue as a consumer to block them and make them pointless. Advertisers will then stop demanding BoingBoing uses them.

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