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German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking software is legal

arstechnica.com

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Re: German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking software is legal

#141

Post by intrasight »

irq-1 wrote: post #129
guntars wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not just about showing an ad to the user, it's about knowing which user to show that ad. The ad networks track you across the web, and in the process learn a great deal about your demographics and interests. This alows businesses to target you specifically. Spiegel can only track you across their own site which might not tell them much about you, making the ad space less valuable.

You're right that it doesn't work for the advertisers. It also isn't a technical solution: ad-blockers don't just use domain names; they also block based on tags, ids and css classes, etc..

I'm sure the advertisers would rather have ads than not, so I'd argue just the opposite - this will work for advertisers. And you can't block arbitrary

and tags, so I don't understand your second assertion.

Re: German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking software is legal

#142

Post by tscs37 »

irq-1 wrote: post #135
tscs37 wrote: post #99

I quite like AdBlock Plus. I've been using it for a long while and I appreciate the Acceptable Ads program, nothing is free and I wish to support websites if I can. It's either that or a paywall. I also use uMatrix, which I recommend to run in conjunction with adblock, it allows for a very finegrained permission control, much more finegrained than uBlock.

> I appreciate the Acceptable Ads program, nothing is free and I wish to support websites if I can. It's either that or a paywall. You can't negotiate with advertisers -- you can't make a bargain between ads or paywalls. Advertisers want it all. Only technical restrictions will stop them. Even then they'll try to use lawsuits, government agencies, moral shaming and worse.

>You can't negotiate with advertisers

Well, seing how websites actually sign up for this and I've personally found it very pleasant, you can negotiate with some advertisers.

Just not the cancerous ones that would shove more malicious malware down your throat than not-malware.google.not-malware.ru using internet explorer 6 on an unpatched Windows XP without Service Pack.

Re: German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking software is legal

#143

Post by dao- »

hueving wrote: post #115
dao- wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the free market can regulate this just fine Except that it doesn't. Not everybody is expert enough to evaluate the risks of trading their data. Even if everybody was an expert, Google and Facebook are quasi-monopolies that are hard to avoid due to network effect and peer pressure. They play major roles in modern society so regulating them /in some ways/ seems warranted.

I have never experienced peer pressure to use Google and have been asked to message someone on Facebook maybe twice. It sounds like you just like both services a lot and want the government to step in so you can have your cake and eat it too.

> I have never experienced peer pressure to use Google

If you read again, you will see that I was making a combined argument about Google and Facebook. For Google mostly the network effect applies, peer pressure maybe not at all. (edit: Google search does get better the more people use it, though. This could be considered hidden peer pressure.)

> and have been asked to message someone on Facebook maybe twice.

So? Obviously it's not equally popular in all areas and demographics.

> It sounds like you just like both services a lot and want the government to step in so you can have your cake and eat it too.

I meant precisely what I said, not what you chose to hear.

Re: German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking software is legal

#144

Post by nicolas_t »

ZoeZoeBee wrote: post #106
staticassertion wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, lower power/memory usage equals better battery life at the cost of performance, This is almost never actually the case. In reality, better performance tends to mean better battery due to improved usage of resources.

This is kind of a ridiculous statement. Not a single category other than energy consumption does Safari benchmark near Chrome, Firefox or even Edge http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/best-browser-internet... Any of you are free to offer actual data proving otherwise

Anecdotical I know but on mac, when using velocityjs to change the css transform value (translate, scale and rotate) of 100+ spans, Safari is faster and the animation is smoother than Chrome. I've tested that on an imac, a macbook pro and a mac pro. Also, they don't mention in the benchmark you've linked if they're benchmarking the windows version or the mac version of Chrome. The windows version is faster in quite a few cases in my experience.

Finally, while Chrome definitely has a better html5 compliance, there's one thing I hate about Chrome. It doesn't keep the state of the previous page when using the back button unlike Firefox, Safari and IE. See this: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=2879

Re: German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking software is legal

#145

Post by pmontra »

joeblau wrote: post #40
pmontra wrote: post #2

Some interesting facts from the article > As of August 2015, Adblock Plus was installed on approximately 9.55 million browsers with German IP addresses. That's about five percent of the computers in Germany used to access the Internet. > About 3,500 websites are on the Adblock Plus "whitelisting" program that allows for "acceptable ads" to be viewed by default. About 90 percent of those sites don't pay, but the large…

I just modify my `/etc/hsots` and block the ad hosted domains at the source. cat /etc/hosts | wc -l 34003

Did you automate that and how?

Re: German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking software is legal

#146

Post by greglindahl »

franciscop wrote: post #49
Throwaway23412 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm struggling to see how that would even be true. ABP literally allows companies to pay to get past their block.

90% of the whitelist is not paid, and that 10% helps develop the program. Not only that, you are asked upon installation whether or not to allow for acceptable ads (which is ticked on by default, but still not such a controversial point as you make it sound).

90% by lines or sites or 90% by money? ABP charges medium-sized websites through the nose -- and most startups qualify as medium-sized. Great business model, especially given that the filter lists are made by volunteers.

Re: German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking software is legal

#147

Post by summarite »

dumb-saint wrote: post #56
franciscop wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

90% of the whitelist is not paid, and that 10% helps develop the program. Not only that, you are asked upon installation whether or not to allow for acceptable ads (which is ticked on by default, but still not such a controversial point as you make it sound).

> and that 10% helps develop the program Develop in what sense? uBlock origin is at least 10% better than ABP just by not doing that. The _only_ thing people want from such a program is to block all ads and trackers. That's it. That's the feature list. You decide to compromise the single goal to fund further "development"? How does that make any sense?

I don't mind paying for a service by letting them show ads, as long as those ads don't feature malware or are otherwise annoying/resource-straining/...

I hate TV ads and never watch TV as i find the ads intrusive. But taking the minor rewards from content creators that my presence can bring - when I'm benefiting from their content and cost them server resources - seems pretty unfair to me.

Here's your reason for populism and the disappearance of good journalism: no one is willing to pay or be even in the slightest inconvenienced.

Re: German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking software is legal

#148

Post by TeMPOraL »

alkonaut wrote: post #79
ThePhysicist wrote: post #74

IMHO, by choosing to provide their content as an HTML data stream via HTTP to the user, "Der SPIEGEL" implicitly allows to consume this content in whichever way the user sees fit, as HTML is simply a markup language that can be interpreted in various ways, and could even be read in a text editor. By trying to force the user to consume this data through a specific channel (e.g. through a standard-compliant browser wit…

A logical step if a news outlet wants to show news+ads is to just offer their paper as PDF on the site. No click bait headlines, no Facebook trackers - just a newspaper, with ads. The catch? The ads in the PDF are images without scripts and tracking. Good. Does the income from such ads not generate enough income? Then GET OFF THE INTERNET or just close down the newspaper and take a long holiday. But don't tell me how…

People would quickly upgrade PDF to support "rich media" and tracking and shitton of new design fads.

But that's ok. Basically, dear newspapers, please invent your own DRM-enabled protocol and enforce your business models all you like. Just leave HTTP alone.

Re: German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking software is legal

#149

Post by shakna »

anonymousab wrote: post #136
matheusmoreira wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, they can detect ad blockers and present a nag screen. The ad blocker can respond by defeating their detection feature. For example, it can delete the detection function before it even executes. They could circumvent that; ad blockers could nullify their fix; they could fix it again... This could go on forever. In my experience as an user, no website has ever beaten an ad blocker. It's like trying to secure a co…

If a site declares that you should not access it without disabling your adblocker, and they go as far as to explicitly try to prevent your access with direct messaging (interstitials, pop-up/light boxes, etc.), yet the user then works around those protections and accesses it - wouldn't that qualify as illegal access in some form?

How so?

A user requests a data stream, and receives it. That the user chooses not to execute or render a part of that stream is up to them - the data has already been delivered.

Interstitials, pop-ups and the like are simply contained within the stream, and aren't even guaranteed to run inside the browser. If the data connection is incomplete, modern browsers often discard data that is incomplete. Is that also illegal access?

The data stream is in the user's hands - and it is delivered before any Terms and Conditions are given.

It's similar to someone giving you a burger, saying it's free, waiting till you take the first bite, and then demanding that you eat the rest whilst they photograph you, and then use said photos to pay for making the burgers.

You could just walk away with your free burger.

Re: German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking software is legal

#150

Post by paulddraper »

morgante wrote: post #84
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #15

Since this submission relates to blocking ads and trackers, I think it's worth bringing up that uBlock Origin [0] is better than Adblock Plus in (all?) ways (see the README for more details). I migrated to it a few years ago and overall I've been very happy with the outcome. I'm opposed to all tracking that isn't opt-in by default. I haven't thought about the topic at great lengths, so there may be cases which I'm fa…

> is better than Adblock Plus in (all?) ways (see the README for more details) That's only if people agree with your ideology. Instead of making blanket statements which are inherently subjective, just explain why you prefer Adblock Plus. Personally, I vastly prefer Adblock Plus. I have no ideological objection to advertising or tracking in general, I just don't want intrusive ads. ABP does an excellent job of filter…

AdBlock plus is intrusive. We had sporadic user complaints of our web SaaS not working. They had AdBlock and couldn't download files from S3 with certain keys.

They key was the hex encoding of the hash of the contents. f4/c0/34/ad/91/... Notice the ad

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