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Adblock Plus “typo correction” feature adds affiliate IDs to links

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Re: Adblock Plus “typo correction” feature adds affiliate IDs to links

#101

Post by dbcooper »

angry-hacker wrote: post #99
dbcooper wrote: post #58

Lets try an experiment with Amazon referrers. (a) Take a "randomly" sourced blog post for a book review: http://reason.com/blog/2013/06/14/the-unwinding-is-george-pa... (b) Check links to amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374102414/reasonmaga... (c) Click through and check URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374102414/reasonmaga... Looks OK. Anything I'm missing?

It has something to do with their feature called typo corrections, only available for Firefox right now (I have only ABP for Chrome/FireFox). It has to be enabled, if it is enabled by default for all user or not, I'm not sure. typoRules.js downloads urlfixer.org/download/rules.json?version=2 where the redirect is made if you type for an example: amazon.comm, I get (FireFox only) redirected to their affiliate amazon.c…

I tried with typo corrections on, but did not see any differences.

Re: Adblock Plus “typo correction” feature adds affiliate IDs to links

#102

Post by skue »

cletus wrote: post #86

The essence of this is you need to decide the answer to two questions: 1. What are your personal ethics? 2. Who do you trust? To put (1) in context, the content on the Internet is largely provided free but is ad-supported. When it comes to display advertising, it's sold almost entirely on a CPM basis (it may be resold on an eCPC or eCPA basis). It is at best only partially sold on an intent basis (meaning it's entici…

You mention the privacy implications of "Like" buttons but neglect to mention the privacy implications of the ad networks.

Remember when Double Click started building a database of every Internet user and their preferences (and were foolish enough to mention it publicly)? Your employer now owns that database.

Re: Adblock Plus “typo correction” feature adds affiliate IDs to links

#103

Post by jacques_chester »

ianlevesque wrote: post #88
mtrimpe wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started blocking ads less than a year ago because of YouTube's pre-roll advertisements, since I'm perfectly capable of filtering out text based ads but a format that requires me to watch the ad to be able to view the content without letting me pay them is a deal-breaker for me. Is it really that hard to let me pay a monthly fee to turn ads off? Google is serving the vast majority of ads online and they already have…

Exactly this. Everyone needs to offer the option to pay in some way. If we could pay for a bundle of all sites even better.

I happen to be working on the technology to make this possible.

Re: Adblock Plus “typo correction” feature adds affiliate IDs to links

#104

Post by Tobu »

edwintorok wrote: post #85
Tobu wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay. It seems that if I enable the typo feature (which is disabled by default, I've just checked in a clean profile) and go to amazon.comm, I get redirected to http://amazon.com/?tag=uf024-20 ABP notifies me of the redirection, and I can accept or blacklist it.

Yeah it seems to be default off, and they're not hiding the fact that this is a monetization source: https://adblockplus.org/blog/typo-correction-feature-in-adbl... However it appears to add that tag only if I typo the name, if I follow a good Amazon link (with or without the affiliate) then it doesn't get 'corrected'. Although since the rewrite rules are downloaded from a remote location (over HTTP, not even HTTPS!)…

While they could update the list, it's still typo correction. As implemented, the url needs to be typed in the location bar and the domain can't exist.

Edit: sorry about that last part. http://amazon.co does exist and does get corrected.

Re: Adblock Plus “typo correction” feature adds affiliate IDs to links

#105

Post by jacques_chester »

ianlevesque wrote: post #83
bad_user wrote: post #45

I cannot verify the claims, but I'll state the reasons once again about why I'm not using ad blockers: 1) free websites and web services need revenue and as long as the ads are tasteful, I don't mind them 2) I actually want websites to annoy me with lots of stupid ads, as I want to stop using such websites, because I want to reward publishers that don't do that Ad blockers are trying to fix a symptom of the disease a…

There's a growing segment of users that just don't want advertising in their faces, period. Thankfully a not-insignificant portion of these are willing to pay for it through subscriptions on sites that offer this. Not enough sites offer this. I envision an "ad network" appearing eventually that doesn't display any ads, just distributes revenues from an aggregate subscription. Then sites can still be supported by spon…

This idea has been around for a while; I call it "microsubscription". Several companies have tried and failed to make a go of it. Kachingle is still limping along, though fatally hamstrung itself by picking a dumb, public fight with the New York Times.

As I said in reply to another of your comments, I've been working on the technology to make it possible to do this reliably for some time now. It's harder than it looks.

Re: Adblock Plus “typo correction” feature adds affiliate IDs to links

#106

Post by angry-hacker »

dbcooper wrote: post #101
angry-hacker wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has something to do with their feature called typo corrections, only available for Firefox right now (I have only ABP for Chrome/FireFox). It has to be enabled, if it is enabled by default for all user or not, I'm not sure. typoRules.js downloads urlfixer.org/download/rules.json?version=2 where the redirect is made if you type for an example: amazon.comm, I get (FireFox only) redirected to their affiliate amazon.c…

I tried with typo corrections on, but did not see any differences.

I edited my answer a bit, try for an example amazon.co.ukk, still no difference?

Re: Adblock Plus “typo correction” feature adds affiliate IDs to links

#107

Post by JoshTriplett »

What I find disturbing: the author of Adblock Plus famously went on a rant a long time ago about how people approached him to pay him to do various things with his popular extension, such as change default search engines. He refused, very publically, and bemoaned the likelihood that other extension authors might not.

And then the oxymoronic "Acceptable Ads" happened, and the painfully bad "typo correction" anti-feature (no, I really mean wikimedia, not wikipedia), and now this which ties into the "typo correction" bits. All of which are either on by default or pester the user to turn them on. And every one of these creates a new support issue for me with people I set up Adblock Plus for.

Re: Adblock Plus “typo correction” feature adds affiliate IDs to links

#108

Post by [deleted] »

janfoeh wrote: post #82
edwintorok wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could it be a typo, i.e. that adblock plus charges (money) for allowing people's amazon refs through the filter? Although if you check exceptionrules.txt there are only 3 domains that have amazon links whitelisted. EDIT: apparently the 2nd page of the article writes about the possibility of changing links.

It's not a typo. Here is a manual translation of the paragraph containing the allegation: Schaut man sich den Quellcode von Adblock Plus an, dann stolpert man ueber die “typoRules.js”" welche Vertipper in der Adresszeile des Browsers ueber eine dann nachgeladene Datei http://urlfixer.org/download/rules.json korrigiert. Den Spass gibt es uebrigens auch als separates Add-On http://urlfixer.org, ebenfalls vom feinen Her…

[deleted]

Re: Adblock Plus “typo correction” feature adds affiliate IDs to links

#109

Post by e40 »

cletus wrote: post #86

The essence of this is you need to decide the answer to two questions: 1. What are your personal ethics? 2. Who do you trust? To put (1) in context, the content on the Internet is largely provided free but is ad-supported. When it comes to display advertising, it's sold almost entirely on a CPM basis (it may be resold on an eCPC or eCPA basis). It is at best only partially sold on an intent basis (meaning it's entici…

For me, it boils down to this: every time I turn off AdBlock I have to turn it back on because of the blinking and other very distracting ads. They are so "in your face" that I can't concentrate on the content. I usually last a day.

Perhaps I should just selectively block ads on the sites that do this, but I've found that tedious in the past.

Re: Adblock Plus “typo correction” feature adds affiliate IDs to links

#110

Post by dbcooper »

angry-hacker wrote: post #99
dbcooper wrote: post #58

Lets try an experiment with Amazon referrers. (a) Take a "randomly" sourced blog post for a book review: http://reason.com/blog/2013/06/14/the-unwinding-is-george-pa... (b) Check links to amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374102414/reasonmaga... (c) Click through and check URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374102414/reasonmaga... Looks OK. Anything I'm missing?

It has something to do with their feature called typo corrections, only available for Firefox right now (I have only ABP for Chrome/FireFox). It has to be enabled, if it is enabled by default for all user or not, I'm not sure. typoRules.js downloads urlfixer.org/download/rules.json?version=2 where the redirect is made if you type for an example: amazon.comm, I get (FireFox only) redirected to their affiliate amazon.c…

reply to edit:

If I change the .com to .comm it changes the URL to:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374102414/reasonmaga...

So this is only for mistyped (edit) manually typed referrer URLs?

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