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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

#161

Post by anoymous9352 »

claudius wrote: post #117
mjn wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use the venerable (but still actively maintained) Privoxy, which is a proxy but still does most of what I want on HTTPS pages. It can't examine the page contents themselves, but it can block 3rd-party requests by hostname, which gets most of the web-bugs and such.

I had some problems with loading times/pipelining in Opera (12.x) and Privoxy and hence changed to AdBlock (which appears to be the same as AdBlock Chrome referred to above). Browsing became much smoother afterwards.

Privoxy is associated with SPI, which is a 501(c)(3) non-profit. A far cry from that shady AdBlock garbage.

If you sacrifice privacy/security for convenience, don't be surprised when it has later repercussions. Privoxy is also highly configurable unlike AdBlock. I don't know about you, but I don't want to be at the mercy of some jerkoff named Wladimir, who seems to have basically zero accountability and a very lax sense of ethics.

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

#162

Post by anoymous9352 »

izietto wrote: post #54

NoSCript http://noscript.net/ is way better

It's also completely and utterly pointless. Just disable JavaScript and build your own minimal whitelist. Chrome supports this natively, without you having to trust yet another jackass plugin author. Probably 90% of authors will get an instant hardon for "monetization" the second their plugin reaches a million or so users, regardless of it's original premise.

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

#163

Post by andrewflnr »

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…

That would be tricky. People would need to have a good idea of which sites they care about would have ads removed if they pay X dollars/month. Then maybe their favorite sites use three different networks, all of which they have to pay for. Maybe you could do it where the user picks the network, not the site.

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

#164

Post by fhd2 »

nowarninglabel wrote: post #160
fhd2 wrote: post #140

(Edit: The headline used to be "Adblock Plus is changing Amazon refs", but it has been fixed. I commented on the new one below [6].) I'm a developer at Eyeo, working on Adblock Plus. Adblock Plus is not changing Amazon links. TFA is ripe with FUD, but it doesn't even go this far. Maybe this was a major misunderstanding of the typo correction feature [1], which is opt-in, only implemented in Firefox and merely correct…

Thank you for stepping in with some info before the pitchforks come out. Combining your statements with the fact that the js itself shows Amazon URL rewrites are only happening for people who have opted-in to the typo correction feature makes this seem much ado about nothing. The company could have been more transparent to begin with, but you guys have done a lot to improve the online advertising experience.

Thank you for the thanks :) What we do attracts bad press and subsequent flamewars, and I usually shy away from getting into those. But I couldn't bear this unreflected FUD on HN, which is important to me.

I suppose we could have communicated better. Maybe we should have talked more about our employees and their backgrounds, about who is whitelisted and why. We've made mistakes, and we're trying to learn from them.

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

#165

Post by fhd2 »

fhd2 wrote: post #140

(Edit: The headline used to be "Adblock Plus is changing Amazon refs", but it has been fixed. I commented on the new one below [6].) I'm a developer at Eyeo, working on Adblock Plus. Adblock Plus is not changing Amazon links. TFA is ripe with FUD, but it doesn't even go this far. Maybe this was a major misunderstanding of the typo correction feature [1], which is opt-in, only implemented in Firefox and merely correct…

Wow, the headline has been fixed. Gotta love HN. It used to be: "Adblock Plus is changing Amazon refs", now it's "Adblock Plus “typo correction” feature adds affiliate IDs to links". (I'll have to point out though that this is not a major point in TFA, I didn't even see that mentioned in there.)

Yup, that's right. This is the URL fixing functionality only implemented in ABP for Firefox. If you type amazorn.com, Adblock Plus will correct it for you (if you activated this feature, it's opt-in), sending you to amazon.com.

ABP does indeed add an affiliate ID to those links, it was a monetisation idea. We've been open about this [1] (See "Monetization"), nobody's being tracked and nobody's seeing any extra ads.

I had and have some doubts about this making sense as a part of ABP, but I wouldn't consider it shady.

[1] http://adblockplus.org/blog/typo-correction-feature-in-adblo...

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

#166

Post by edwintorok »

fhd2 wrote: post #165
fhd2 wrote: post #140

(Edit: The headline used to be "Adblock Plus is changing Amazon refs", but it has been fixed. I commented on the new one below [6].) I'm a developer at Eyeo, working on Adblock Plus. Adblock Plus is not changing Amazon links. TFA is ripe with FUD, but it doesn't even go this far. Maybe this was a major misunderstanding of the typo correction feature [1], which is opt-in, only implemented in Firefox and merely correct…

Wow, the headline has been fixed. Gotta love HN. It used to be: "Adblock Plus is changing Amazon refs", now it's "Adblock Plus “typo correction” feature adds affiliate IDs to links". (I'll have to point out though that this is not a major point in TFA, I didn't even see that mentioned in there.) Yup, that's right. This is the URL fixing functionality only implemented in ABP for Firefox. If you type amazorn.com, Adblo…

There are some things you could improve about typo correction to make it consistent with how you handle ad-blocking rules:

* Update the rules over HTTPS, not HTTP

* Filter preferences should show the typo-correction-rule URL, just as it does for ad-blocking rules, and it should be possible to inspect them by clicking

* typo correction should probably only be used if the target website doesn't actually exist. See elsewhere in the comments, that is what how one would normally expect it to work.

As it is now the fact that typo correction even uses an insecure, remote list of rules is not at all obvious from the UI, instead its hidden away in the code.

Of course its also a bit confusing on why typo correction is even part of AdBlock Plus to begin with, as there is another extension just for that purpose - urlfixer. If someone wants typo correction you could suggest them to also install urlfixer, but it doesn't really make sense to have two unrelated features in one extension. Don't try to become an extension that does everything...

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

#167

Post by mike-cardwell »

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…

I don't block ads, I block surveillance. The lack of ads that I see is just a side effect of this.

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

#168

Post by nivla »

asb wrote: post #15
ra wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ghostery. Can't recommend it highly enough; also works on Chrome, Safari, Opera and IE.

Ghostery users should be aware of: http://www.businessinsider.com/evidon-sells-ghostery-data-to... (no judgement on the practice implied, just flagging it as something for potential users to consider).

But isn't that only if you enable Ghost Rank, which is disabled by default?

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

#169

Post by [deleted] »

dfc wrote: post #145
ianlevesque wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly this? WTF? The "this" response was bad enough as it was. Now we are lowering the SNR even more by prepending "Exactly"?

[deleted]

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

#170

Post by md224 »

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…

I don't know if you'll see this, but I'm curious: would you prefer to live in a world without AdWords? That is to say, all things being equal, if Google magically had revenue from another source and AdWords did not exist, would you prefer that world?

If not, what value do you believe AdWords brings to the table, beyond the value of organic search results?

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