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The adblocking revolution is months away

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Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#311

Post by ethbro »

Steko wrote: post #302
ethbro wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Come on, Apple didn't want DRM, labels insisted on it. https://web.archive.org/web/20080107121341/http://www.apple.... > The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly…

I'm not sure what you think this timeline says but it absolutely doesn't say that doing away with DRM on ITMS was something Apple resisted.

Then we can agree to disagree on our interpretations of the facts. :)

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#312

Post by pcwalton »

mschuster91 wrote: post #241
task_queue wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely. A modern octa-core Exynos shouldn't be chugging along to render a blog post. It's absurd.

No matter how many cores are in your phone, web browsing will always be able to use only a single thread. JS is inherently multi-threaded, the only thing that could use multiple threads is the IndexedDB bullcrap (which ain't properly supported by iOS anyway), and background loading of async resources (which is network constrained on mobile, so MT doesn't help).

This is totally untrue. Layout can run off the main thread if engineered properly. Painting and compositing already do in some browsers. Layout, painting, and compositing are inherently parallel problems, so any one of these tasks can saturate all your cores if done carefully. Iframe JS can run in multiple threads if engineered right.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#313

Post by mc808 »

hsod wrote: post #244

A thought experiment for the "there's nothing wrong with AdBlock" set: Imagine a blog with quality original content that is relevant to your interests. Imagine that, the first time you go to that site, you see the following text: "This site and it's content are supported by advertisement. If you would like to read our content the only thing we ask is that you do not use an ad blocker on our pages. If this arrangement…

If the content is that good and I somehow know this before visiting the site, I might put some effort into viewing the content, which might include sitting through their obnoxious, invasive, destructive, scummy advertising if necessary. Otherwise, I will have to settle for a selection from the other 3 petabytes of data coming into existence in the next 60 seconds. If the bandwidth saved by my non-visit is worth more than they could earn by developing a socially responsible business model, good for them, I guess.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#314

Post by eosrei »

Joeri wrote: post #246
interpol_p wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ban flash. Biggest competition to native apps That's not why that happened. Flash wasn't "banned," Apple chose not to allow support for it in Mobile Safari from the beginning. It was never removed or banned. Flash was a dog. Power hungry, slow, inefficient. I recently had to touch the codebase for an Adobe Air iOS app and the runtime is pretty horrific. Adobe never got flash good enough for mobile, and Apple was ri…

Flash was not slow, it's just that flash ads were ahead of their time in abusing the system's resources. The supposed slowness of flash relative to browser api's was a myth, although flash content was bloated, in much the same way that modern web pages are bloated. When flash was killed by Jobs I knew it was just a matter of time until people did the same bad things with JavaScript and CSS as they did with flash, and…

As much as I didn't like installing Adobe's plugin, I have to defend Flash. JavaScript is just recently getting to the speed Flash had years ago. Flash probably still does vector animations better [citation unavailable].

> and lo it came to pass. Yes! Ha!

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#315

Post by kinghajj »

s73v3r wrote: post #307
thatswrong0 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a webpage is served to you, you are under no obligation to not modify that webpage in any way. They gave the bytes to you for free. You can do whatever you want to them once you get them. If my modification of that content is depriving them of income, then that's a flaw in their business model, not my ethics.

No, it's entirely a violation of your ethics. You are explicitly modifying them for the express purpose of denying them income.

> No, it's entirely a violation of your ethics.

Your ethics, perhaps.

> express purpose of denying them income.

No, the "express purpose" is to deny the creator's intent for how to interpret the markup, which has a side effect of denying content. Saying that the "express purpose" is to deny content isn't a fair characterization.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#316

Post by unprepare »

keithpeter wrote: post #299
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it very curious indeed. In my browser on my hardware in my home, the marketing types are insisting that I MUST watch their ads or I am cheating. This is of course a natural impulse, for them. They put a lot of effort into creating manipulative words and images, and there I go ignoring them. Must be frustrating. But to claim I'm in the wrong is a species of hubris I don't subscribe to. When I buy the sunday new…

Actually, I rather like a clever advertising hoarding (aka billboard). Some of the little ads you get on buses can be quite funny. These things occupy a tiny percentage of my field of view for a few seconds. They may leave a trace of positivity about the thing being advertised in a general sort of way. The thing about intrusive adverts in Web pages is the visual noise and the tracking of behaviour across sites. The l…

Great post, i think you just missed one increasingly important aspect:

You dont have a monthly cap on how much of your surroundings you can take in; many people have caps placed on how much data they can download.

There is an actual measurable cost to advertisements over a metered data plan. It literally costs you money to even see an ad.

If it was 50 cents per MB, are you still going to enjoy that delightful little advertisement that just cost you 3 bucks to see? (obviously a hyperbolic price, but its the concept that matters here)

If you are 1MB away from your data limit and you go to some small website that loads 2MB worth of ads - are you going to be okay with paying an overage charge for viewing that advertisement?

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#317

Post by mokus »

jff wrote: post #226
Xophmeister wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I could see happening is premium content being bundled by ISPs. Pay for X package from Y ISP, get content from A, B and C websites. Kind-of like how TV channels are bundled. That's a different can of worms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality

People need to stop using "net neutrality" whenever the idea of paying for something on the Internet comes up.

Paying _ISPs_ for content is exactly what net neutrality is about. I already pay my ISP to deliver bits. I'm not giving them a microcent more for the privilege of having all content that isn't in some "package" blocked or throttled.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#318

Post by robmcm »

mikeash wrote: post #194
robmcm wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please remember that Apple has only said they will support plugins for Safari, no direct mention of ad blocking. If there is ad blocking it will be provided by a third party. If it is then it will be up to the third party if they want to block this kind of advert. By their nature however "install banners" are typically part of the content (if it's for the site's own application) so a typical ad blocker wouldn't catch…

Install banners are built in to the browser, and just show metadata provided by the site. I strongly doubt they will be blockable.

You could ban a scrip loaded from an "ad" domain that modified the host pages HTML to add that metadata.

However I was referring to the pop up, tap intercepting redirects to the App Store.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#319

Post by hsod »

kinghajj wrote: post #308
hsod wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But aren't you entering into an implicit agreement with the site owners? Is it not wrong to intentionally violate an agreement you entered into willingly? Lets take advertisement out of it, since people feel strongly about it. What if the site asked you to donate one dollar to a particular charity? And if you are unwilling or unable, please simply stop using the site, thanks and have a nice day. Again, no enforcement…

So long as their HTTP server responds to requests received from me, then it is "right" for me to perform whichever operations I choose with their response. Once data is on my machine, I get to decide how to process it, not them. If they don't want me to have their data, it is well within their rights not to provide it to me.

Why must the restriction be technical? This is the whole concept of an honor system. Why can't you use someone else's server under their (reasonable and clearly communicated) terms?

I could leave a bowl of candy on my desk with a sign that says "take one"-- there's nothing physically stopping you from taking the whole bowl, but that doesn't make it OK.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#320

Post by Steko »

ethbro wrote: post #311
Steko wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you think this timeline says but it absolutely doesn't say that doing away with DRM on ITMS was something Apple resisted.

Then we can agree to disagree on our interpretations of the facts. :)

Except your facts are incomplete[1] and you've mixed them in with straw men.[2]

[1] Your original claim ("as soon as Apple realized how much money could be generated by adding DRM") that Apple is the one that wanted DRM on music ignores the facts of (a) every other music store that opened at the time also had DRM and (b) the fairly common knowledge that Apple's money business was selling devices and that, in the time frame we're talking about ($0.99 songs), Apple made very little profit on music sales once you factor in the cuts to the label, artist, publisher, credit card fees and store costs (some discussion at http://ask.metafilter.com/23257/Show-me-their-money).

[2] No one said that Apple didn't want DRM for 'altruistic reasons' or that 'Apple fought tooth and nail to remove DRM', these are straw men you injected. I just made the obvious claim that DRM was a label requirement. Apple would have loved to give away the music for free, they would have sold a lot more ipods. Why would Steve Jobs write a letter about DRM at all if Apple secretly wanted to keep DRM?

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