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Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

meta.stackoverflow.com

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Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#171

Post by SilasX »

mikeash wrote: post #139
jimmaswell wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s incredibly disrespectful. Nobody wants some random ad listening to their microphone. That they’re trying it anyway indicates that they’re hoping to get some people with browsers that don’t block it, or trick some people into saying yes. It’s not harmful, as long as you’re not one of the people who gets tricked. But it does indicate that they want to do you harm, and try to. That they failed doesn’t make it all b…

Wait, it was listening in on the microphone too? Doesn’t that break wiretapping laws?

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#172

Post by z3t4 »

I guess it's part of Googles Ads's endless battle against "robot" clicks. A site as big as SO should not use Google ads, but instead use their own ad service. Just make an automated system where people can signup and show an ad. Make it cost 1$ per 100 page views. That would probably earn SO two orders of magnitude more then they get from Google Ads.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#173

Post by manigandham »

mikeash wrote: post #150
nerdponx wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wish I could upvote this 1,000 times. It's ridiculous. It's a text-based ad. At worst, it's a clickable image. At what point did it become okay in your minds to let advertisers run arbitrary code? I've left ads turned on specifically on StackOverflow because 1) I want to support StackOverflow, and 2) I trust them not to run malicious ads. I don't even care that they're running ads network-wide. But if they're going t…

It’s completely insane. Can you imagine a TV station receiving ads on tapes and playing them to their audience without looking at them first? Can you imagine TV stations occasionally showing ads containing porn, urging people to kill, showing extreme violence during cartoons, or containing specially crafted audio that blows out your speakers, and the TV station just shrugs and says they try their best to stop these t…

Tv spots are very limited. Digital ad impressions number in the billions with 10s of millions of ad creatives. It’s not the same situation.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#174

Post by koolba »

mikeash wrote: post #150
nerdponx wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wish I could upvote this 1,000 times. It's ridiculous. It's a text-based ad. At worst, it's a clickable image. At what point did it become okay in your minds to let advertisers run arbitrary code? I've left ads turned on specifically on StackOverflow because 1) I want to support StackOverflow, and 2) I trust them not to run malicious ads. I don't even care that they're running ads network-wide. But if they're going t…

It’s completely insane. Can you imagine a TV station receiving ads on tapes and playing them to their audience without looking at them first? Can you imagine TV stations occasionally showing ads containing porn, urging people to kill, showing extreme violence during cartoons, or containing specially crafted audio that blows out your speakers, and the TV station just shrugs and says they try their best to stop these t…

I bet you could do that with an ad that plays “Alexa- call 1-900-555-1234”.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#175

Post by wlesieutre »

coldpie wrote: post #86
Nick-Craver wrote: post #68

I just wanted to chime in from Stack Overflow here and let people know: we are aware of the issue. And we're NOT okay with it. We're trying to sort out how to kill the audio behavior now. It's not very straightforward to find where it's coming from, but we are working on it. We've also reached out to Google for their assistance in tracking it down. If anyone can offer advice, we'll more than happily take it. - Nick C…

Why are you allowing arbitrary javascript to be served to your users?

Not just arbitrary JavaScript, arbitrary JavaScript where they can’t easily even see where it came from! Sheesh.

Could we require advertisers to sign their ad code to have a trail of where it came from, prevent tampering, and make it easier to pull the plug on bad actors?

The people bearing the costs of the internet ad economy aren’t the people in any position to do anything about it. So there’s very little pressure to fix anything.

Maybe if the US government started threatening to enact something like GDPR unless the a democratic industry gets its shit together.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#176

Post by mikeash »

manigandham wrote: post #173
mikeash wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s completely insane. Can you imagine a TV station receiving ads on tapes and playing them to their audience without looking at them first? Can you imagine TV stations occasionally showing ads containing porn, urging people to kill, showing extreme violence during cartoons, or containing specially crafted audio that blows out your speakers, and the TV station just shrugs and says they try their best to stop these t…

Tv spots are very limited. Digital ad impressions number in the billions with 10s of millions of ad creatives. It’s not the same situation.

The only reason it’s not the same situation is because they’re willing to throw their users under the bus for a little extra cash. If they wanted to exert more control, they absolutely could. Ads would cost more and we’d see fewer distinct ads as a result.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#177

Post by simongr3dal »

manigandham wrote: post #173
mikeash wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s completely insane. Can you imagine a TV station receiving ads on tapes and playing them to their audience without looking at them first? Can you imagine TV stations occasionally showing ads containing porn, urging people to kill, showing extreme violence during cartoons, or containing specially crafted audio that blows out your speakers, and the TV station just shrugs and says they try their best to stop these t…

Tv spots are very limited. Digital ad impressions number in the billions with 10s of millions of ad creatives. It’s not the same situation.

If you can't manage to oversee it because of the scale you don't deserve to take advantage of the scale.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#178

Post by meerita »

chance_state wrote: post #60
meerita wrote: post #55

Did anyone checked how much data from our data plan cede to advertising? I bet it's 30%-40%.

I have been using uBlock Origin for about three years and I browse the web heavily (4-6 hours/day). In that time it has blocked 13% of requests (10% on mobile). I don't have enough info to quantify the amount of data blocked though.

10% on mobile isn't that bad. It's quite a lot!

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#179

Post by JeremyBanks »

Nick-Craver wrote: post #68

I just wanted to chime in from Stack Overflow here and let people know: we are aware of the issue. And we're NOT okay with it. We're trying to sort out how to kill the audio behavior now. It's not very straightforward to find where it's coming from, but we are working on it. We've also reached out to Google for their assistance in tracking it down. If anyone can offer advice, we'll more than happily take it. - Nick C…

I just saw this post, where an potential justification was provided for a similar script in the past: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/335956/adzerk-servi...

It's hard to read the obfuscated code and be sure what's being done with the browser environment information. This script seems to generate some hash and put in some global variables, presumably for some other script to consume. I don't know whether such scripts send it to a server, compare it locally to a previously-known value, or ignore it.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#180

Post by perl4ever »

rocky1138 wrote: post #126
keithwinstein wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When people refuse to watch ads, there is theft going on, but it's theft from the advertisers by the media owners. The viewers aren't guilty of anything.
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