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Which is better, Adblock or Adblock Plus?

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Re: Which is better, Adblock or Adblock Plus?

#111

Post by lazyant »

ntaso wrote: post #99
heromat wrote: post #63

He surely just forgot to mention that Google allegedly payed 25 million € to Eyeo GmbH, the company behind Adblock Plus, in order to participate in the "acceptable ads" program, a "feature" which is turned on by default and allows users to "surf more comfortably". And that he is (or at least was) one of the directors. I'm most certain that there are people out there who would call this business model "blackmailing",…

Story behind it: AdBlock Plus is installed on an extremely large sum of devices in Germany. I read somewhere close to 25% with non-technical users (!) and 50% among technical users. What they basically did is to approach companies like newspapers (Spiegel Online) and told them: Look, if you pay $LARGE_SUM, we will whitelist you. Otherwise, since 25-50% of Germans use our software, your advertisement won't make you mu…

Not blackmail (threatening to reveal a secret, esp. to the police) but more like extortion.

Re: Which is better, Adblock or Adblock Plus?

#112

Post by coldpie »

diminoten wrote: post #19
Gracana wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like it either, but on the other hand, ABP works pretty well, and I can uncheck the "allow unobtrusive advertising" on the main settings page. Is it worth making a stand on this issue? What should I do or use instead? [edit] Hmm, I'm not just talking to myself here, the post I replied to is gone. Not sure how that happens, but in any case I was responding to a comment about how ABP whitelists certain ads (suc…

Well, I'd suggest using nothing (or noscript if you're actually just concerned about exploits), but if this Internet community is like any other Internet community, I'm probably in a very small minority. I actually have pretty strong opinions on the matter, but they're entirely tangential and irrelevant, and not really in the spirit of HN, so I'll keep them to myself.

FYI you're being downvoted because your comment basically amounts to, "I'm not going to contribute to this conversation," which is self-admittedly worthless.

Re: Which is better, Adblock or Adblock Plus?

#113

Post by robbrown451 »

x1798DE wrote: post #57
billmalarky wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are you saying that adblock allows certain publishers to pay them to have their ads go through adblock? How is that anything other than a extortion racket?

Adblock maintains a curated whitelist of approved, unobtrustive ads that most people don't mind seeing (text ads, etc). Last I heard, big companies wanting to submit their ads to the whitelist pay a fee, while small companies can have theirs added to the list for free - presumably this is justified based on the volume of ads that would be added to the list. There's a setting in the Adblock preferences to block even a…

It's sinister. Sorry. Even as you describe it.

There is a huge conflict of interest with what you described.

Re: Which is better, Adblock or Adblock Plus?

#114

Post by kefka »

cdr wrote: post #93
heromat wrote: post #63

He surely just forgot to mention that Google allegedly payed 25 million € to Eyeo GmbH, the company behind Adblock Plus, in order to participate in the "acceptable ads" program, a "feature" which is turned on by default and allows users to "surf more comfortably". And that he is (or at least was) one of the directors. I'm most certain that there are people out there who would call this business model "blackmailing",…

Corrupt, yes, but blackmail isn't quite right. More like private security offering to look the other way if you can pay enough to make it worth their while.

It honestly looks like a mixture of blackmail and Tortious interference.

Blackmail: pay us or we will cut your advertising revenue. Tortious interference: Your company counts on (double_digit)% ad revenue. We're going to harm you in significant ways... unless you pay.

Re: Which is better, Adblock or Adblock Plus?

#115

Post by iLoch »

heromat wrote: post #63

He surely just forgot to mention that Google allegedly payed 25 million € to Eyeo GmbH, the company behind Adblock Plus, in order to participate in the "acceptable ads" program, a "feature" which is turned on by default and allows users to "surf more comfortably". And that he is (or at least was) one of the directors. I'm most certain that there are people out there who would call this business model "blackmailing",…

I wouldn't call it blackmailing. It's flat out extortion; they build a script that blocks ads for specific domains then tell the owners they can pay to have it removed.

Re: Which is better, Adblock or Adblock Plus?

#116

Post by gorhill »

jafaku wrote: post #88
beaumartinez wrote: post #5

I've posted this on previous ad blocking threads, and I'll post it again because I think it's very relevant— > "Adblock without the plus" isn't the original Adblock (from which Adblock Plus was forked), it's an extension created for Google Chrome once Google Chrome enabled support for extensions. Very disingenuous name. It piggy-backed on the work already done for Adblock Plus (for Firefox). > Adblock Plus for Google…

But HTTPSB is only for Chrome? If so, meh.

HTTPSB is for Chromium, but I expect it to work on most Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Opera, Yandex, Maxthon, etc.)

Edit: I personally block domains in global rules which are rather ubiquitous: `google.com`, `twitter.com`, `facebook.com`, `linkedin.com`, `gravatar.com`, etc. I enable these narrowly using scopes only when on a related web sites. I am pretty confident this cripples severely the ability of these ubiquitous servers to track me, regardless of the browser used.

Re: Which is better, Adblock or Adblock Plus?

#117

Post by Macha »

eli wrote: post #108
conesus wrote: post #87

Adblock is the #1 culprit for bugs on NewsBlur. I get at least one report a day where some functionality is broken (sharing stories, saving stories, loading a user's feed list, etc). First thing I do now is ask them to disable Adblock. Doesn't even matter if they've told me if they have Adblock installed. I just assume if some random functionality is broken on my single-page site, it's Adblock's fault. I suppose I sh…

I wrote a quick and dirty AdBlock detector a while back: https://github.com/elidickinson/ad-block-test Haven't looked at that code in a while. It probably needs some updating, but the core idea is simple: create something that looks like an ad and then check if it's still visible.

Doesn't seem to detect ABP 2.6.4 on FF for me.

Re: Which is better, Adblock or Adblock Plus?

#118

Post by morganvachon »

kefka wrote: post #114
cdr wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corrupt, yes, but blackmail isn't quite right. More like private security offering to look the other way if you can pay enough to make it worth their while.

It honestly looks like a mixture of blackmail and Tortious interference. Blackmail: pay us or we will cut your advertising revenue. Tortious interference: Your company counts on (double_digit)% ad revenue. We're going to harm you in significant ways... unless you pay.

>Blackmail: pay us or we will cut your advertising revenue.

As others have said, not blackmail, but extortion. Blackmail would be the threat of revealing embarrassing or financially harming information.

>Tortious interference: Your company counts on (double_digit)% ad revenue. We're going to harm you in significant ways... unless you pay.

Another name for that here in the US is racketeering, or running a protection racket. It's the classic "pay us X dollars or we'll destroy your store/break your kneecaps/kill your family" only with a digital/financial threat.

Re: Which is better, Adblock or Adblock Plus?

#119

Post by eli »

Macha wrote: post #117
eli wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a quick and dirty AdBlock detector a while back: https://github.com/elidickinson/ad-block-test Haven't looked at that code in a while. It probably needs some updating, but the core idea is simple: create something that looks like an ad and then check if it's still visible.

Doesn't seem to detect ABP 2.6.4 on FF for me.

EDIT: I think it just needed the name of the dummy ad updated. Try it now: http://esd.io/blog/detecting-adblock-javascript.html

I specifically wanted a self-contained solution, but assuming your site has ads in the first place, a better approach would be to see if your actual ads are loading on the page or not. http://www.Fark.com/ does this (load the page with adblock and then wait a few seconds)

Re: Which is better, Adblock or Adblock Plus?

#120

Post by worklogin »

heromat wrote: post #63

He surely just forgot to mention that Google allegedly payed 25 million € to Eyeo GmbH, the company behind Adblock Plus, in order to participate in the "acceptable ads" program, a "feature" which is turned on by default and allows users to "surf more comfortably". And that he is (or at least was) one of the directors. I'm most certain that there are people out there who would call this business model "blackmailing",…

I wouldn't mind unobtrusive ads to be whitelisted, were the man not charging money for the service.

Ads aren't inherently "wrong". people tend to block ads because many are unsightly, bandwidth consuming, etc.

Simple ads that don't have JS, don't have trackers, and blend with a site should be encouraged. But making beaucoup money on extortion payments is pretty bad.

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