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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

#171

Post by fhd2 »

edwintorok wrote: post #166
fhd2 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 else…

Frankly, I have no idea why it's not being served over HTTP (there must be a technical reason, Wladimir is a HTTPS zealot), and I'm not sure why the corrections URL is not configurable. I bet we discussed that in the blog or the forum, but unfortunately the site's down right now :(

As for correcting URLs that do exist, I think the idea was to avoid phishing sites and parking sites. But IIRC we did have a considerable number of false positives, so it's a questionable approach.

I'll argue for removing it from ABP now. URL Fixer is from us as well (it's the same code we have in ABP), so anyone who liked it can just install that. I'd rather have ABP do one thing, and do it well, feature creep is a thing...

Edit: It's decided, we'll remove the feature.

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

#172

Post by foobarqux »

foobarqux wrote: post #157
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…

The defense of advertising is the desire not be coerced.

*The defense of ad blocking

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

#173

Post by [deleted] »

fhd2 wrote: post #171
edwintorok wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 else…

Frankly, I have no idea why it's not being served over HTTP (there must be a technical reason, Wladimir is a HTTPS zealot), and I'm not sure why the corrections URL is not configurable. I bet we discussed that in the blog or the forum, but unfortunately the site's down right now :( As for correcting URLs that do exist, I think the idea was to avoid phishing sites and parking sites. But IIRC we did have a considerable…

[deleted]

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

#174

Post by jacques_chester »

ianlevesque wrote: post #116
jacques_chester wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 loo…

Very interesting. I figured someone must have tried it but hadn't found examples. Kachingle looks like a deeply flawed implementation of it. What were the others?

From memory there was a few, but I've lost the links file I had. Contenture was one of them. There was a project at one of the journalism schools trying to push the same model too.

It's a good idea on paper, but actually making the market-building side work is really hard.

I've been focused on the technology side because hey, that's how I'm wired. Essentially, you can't rely on standard web bugs or javascript approaches; they're much too easy to subvert.

In my honours dissertation I identified 9 distinct attacks on the "naive" protocol and developed countermeasures for each. But that design is fatally flawed too. I have another design which ... well, watch this space: http://robojar.com/

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

#175

Post by jacques_chester »

lifeformed wrote: post #128
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.

Someone should make a paid adblocker service that shares revenue with site owners. Site owners can opt in to get a share of the revenue, so that each time a visitor using the adblocker visits their site, the site owner gets paid an amount equivalent to the potential ad revenue from that visit. That means they could serve up a custom ad-less page that's designed to look nice sans ads. Users get a good adblocker that t…

The tech I'm developing makes this possible. The basic model is subscription sharing based on views, but it can be adjusted for time on-site etc. My intention is that the agreement with publishers is that they won't show ads to subscribers.

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

#176

Post by jacques_chester »

andrewflnr wrote: post #163
ianlevesque wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having looked at this for a while, the show/not-show needs to be decided at the publisher's server based on input from an authentication service.

eg.

    if ( auth.is_subscriber )
      puts advertisement_block
    end

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

#177

Post by mdip »

ljoshua wrote: post #153
mdip wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with both of those principals, but I continue to run an ad filtering proxy on my home network. I don't do this because ads annoy me (of course they do, but for the above reasons, it feels wrong). I do this because a few years ago, certain less technical members of my family received a nasty bit of malware/rootkit combo delivered -- as best I could discern -- via a song lyric look up site. Another laptop picke…

Out of curiosity, how did the experience go for the non-technical Ubuntu user? Did it work out well?

I ended up switching to openSuSE because she was having a difficult time remembering how to connect to our network shares and I didn't have the spare time to sort out what it took to get Active Directory membership working. After the switch, though, we never went back. This was 4 or 5 years ago, and she's now my ex- (unrelated to software choices), but for what she used it for -- e-mail, basic document creation, YouTube (Flash at the time), music organization (I believe we used SongBird? ... whatever it was, she was happy with it), and (at the time) a SageTV client. Aside from having to learn what did what, where (which was pretty minimal, she was already using OpenOffice on Windows, and Firefox was Firefox, SageTV was SageTV, most things were familiar), it was great. She figured out, on her own, how to customize the background and some of the other user settings.

And I had fun from time to time connecting via SSH and making a song or two play when I knew she had to be cheered up. She thought that was a little creepy, but hey.

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

#178

Post by dombili »

nivla wrote: post #168
asb wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's correct.

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

#179

Post by andrewflnr »

jacques_chester wrote: post #176
andrewflnr wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having looked at this for a while, the show/not-show needs to be decided at the publisher's server based on input from an authentication service. eg. if ( auth.is_subscriber ) puts advertisement_block end

Right, my idea is that the user gets to pick which auth object to check against on the server

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

#180

Post by jacques_chester »

andrewflnr wrote: post #179
jacques_chester wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having looked at this for a while, the show/not-show needs to be decided at the publisher's server based on input from an authentication service. eg. if ( auth.is_subscriber ) puts advertisement_block end

Right, my idea is that the user gets to pick which auth object to check against on the server

My design is authenticating per-request, so the publisher's server is the one that would decide what to query. From the user perspective it's opt-in.
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