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Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

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Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#121

Post by fredsanford »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #73
iamnotacrook wrote: post #64

It's ok. SO's policy on abusive ads is to mention it on mets and hope a moderator notices and then acts upon it.

Ironic that content moderation is annoyingly aggressive, but ad moderation is annoyingly permissive.

>> Ironic that content moderation is annoyingly aggressive, but ad moderation is annoyingly permissive.

It's not ironic at all if you think about it a bit.

>>annoyingly aggressive,

Volunteer labor from nerds who expect you to match their idea of perfection

>> ad moderation is annoyingly permissive

Done by employees so it costs SO money.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#122

Post by ploxiln »

It's pretty obvious that the only real fix is to accept money in exchange for putting an image with a hyperlink on your website.

Anything involving javascript will do shenanigans for various reasons. Fingerprinting via any means possible is industry standard ad-network behavior at this point. No one in the industry could imagine doing any less - it's impractical, it's absurd. But targeting! But fraud! But the only fix is to just give it all up, go back to how it was done in the 90s.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#123

Post by synthmeat »

jupp0r wrote: post #118
synthmeat wrote: post #33

It's most likely for web scraper detection. State of the art was using video codec availability as fairly reliable data point, and I haven't seen audio being used for this. Quite interesting.

What makes you think it would be for web scraper detection vs user fingerprinting?

Because they had a lot of trouble with sham sites generated by their content.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#124

Post by nerdponx »

minitoar wrote: post #115
jf wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would pay for an ad-free version of Stack Overflow. Take my money, please.

I think the data in aggregate is worth more than people like you would pay for an ad-free service.

This is the actual problem at the heart of it all. And even if it were more profitable to take subscription fees than to serve ads, what's stopping you from "double dipping" and serving ads anyway?

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#125

Post by jupp0r »

EGreg wrote: post #61

I don’t get how it can get the fingerprint to be so unique as to attribute ads. Most mobile browsers are exactly the same, you have the same screen resolution and so on. And most desktop browsers when maximized are the same resolution. I mean there must be groups of thousands of users for each combination of fingerprinted features. So it’s not all the way down to the person, right? It’s just correlations?

You can try out https://panopticlick.eff.org/, which estimates the entropy of information they can extract from your browser. For me it's ~18 bits, which isn't great but probably enough to infer who I am if tracked across multiple sites. They don't even use the more exotic things like audio devices/codecs mentioned in the stack overflow question.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#126

Post by rocky1138 »

keithwinstein wrote: post #16
jackdh wrote: post #2

Has there been any serious thought / discussion about how the cat and mouse chase of the ads vs ad blockers is going to end? It would be interesting to see where we are in ten years.

There's a passage of Carl Sagan's "Contact" that's on point and interesting to read 34 years later. The billionaire who helps to decode the Message (from outer space) and ends up building the working copy of the Machine made his fortune by selling tools to detect and block ads from television. There is some discussion of the technical cat-and-mouse game he has to play as advertisers try to make their content avoid de…

I feel that it may go the other way: that receiving communication from a source that is supported by ad revenue while knowingly and actively bypassing those same ads will be seen as theft. I fully expect lobbyists to push for this and see some success in the next 10 years.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#127

Post by tick_tock_tick »

gdw2 wrote: post #88
colinbartlett wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They realized it was a risk so they built their own browser to have more control. And it worked. Only now, users are wising up and moving to Firefox.

Is firefox less fingerprintable?

Not at all. In many ways since firefox has such a smaller market share you are significantly easier to identify than average.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#128

Post by dorgo »

yellowapple wrote: post #12
jackdh wrote: post #2

Has there been any serious thought / discussion about how the cat and mouse chase of the ads vs ad blockers is going to end? It would be interesting to see where we are in ten years.

I'm hoping in 10 years the world will have figured out that allowing arbitrary Turing-complete code to automatically run on one's personal machine is a terrifically terrible idea, and that the World Wide Web will instead orient itself around something that doesn't make security and privacy extraordinarily difficult to achieve (whether that's still HTML/CSS or something entirely new). At the very least, though, eventu…

> Turing-complete code

You can't build apps without turing complete code. We would be back to downloading and executing applications/programs.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#129

Post by mrosett »

MRD85 wrote: post #114
kylegordon wrote: post #93

And this is why, even with the best intentions of site operators, my browser will continue to use the best ad-block tools I can get, and my networks will be protected by tools like PiHole.

In the 2005 era when I was a young video gamer I used to play World of Warcraft. There was a site, Thottbot, that players would use to find out information about things in game. I picked up a keylogger malware from their adservers. One of the advertisers had been hacked and was serving Malware every few thousand ads. Since that day I've used an adblocker and I'll always continue to do so.

I wonder if that’s how I got hacked....

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#130

Post by jimmaswell »

kylegordon wrote: post #93

And this is why, even with the best intentions of site operators, my browser will continue to use the best ad-block tools I can get, and my networks will be protected by tools like PiHole.

This seems melodramatic for something as trivial as an audio request.
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