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Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

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Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#191

Post by strbean »

Reelin wrote: post #143
strbean wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody wants to host ad content / pay for the bandwidth themselves though. I think URL blacklisting will continue to work.

> Nobody wants to host ad content / pay for the bandwidth themselves though. Actually the issue is that the companies paying you to run the ads don't want you to host it yourself. * They're paying for impressions, and they don't trust you to report those honestly. * Real time bidding means the ad to be displayed often hasn't been determined until a few milliseconds before the page loads in your browser. * They can't…

True! More (and more important) reasons why URL blacklisting will continue to work in the WASMy browser-in-browser age.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#192

Post by einpoklum »

Commercial companies being able to force themselves onto our consciousness is unacceptable.

Personally, seeing ads in public spaces feels just like in totalitarian countries you would see large portraits of the supreme leader or government propaganda. Somehow this is legitimized because they're private corporations. Not in my book.

More power to ad blocker authors, and a particular shoutout to:

* Raymond Hill of uBlock Origin fame: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/

* The EFF, for blocking trackers and other 3rd party nasties with Privacy Badger: https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#193

Post by einpoklum »

I wonder if the legal action against AdBlock Plus / Palant made a dent in the download or use of ad blockers in general. The article doesn't provide any evidence of this.

Also - don't get your apps on Google or Apple's app stores! Use APKMirror, APK pure, etc. Some of these even have app-store-like apps to use instead of Google's, that don't need a Google account.

Also, there's at least one app "store" app specializing in FOSS purely: https://f-droid.org/en/

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#194

Post by [deleted] »

SignalsFromBob wrote: post #109

I feel that we've done ourselves a disservice by referring to them as ad blockers rather than content blockers or, better yet, virus blockers. With malicious ads being the primary vector for compromising a person's computer, calling these tools virus blockers would not only be more accurate, but it would make it harder for sites to counter their use from a public relations point of view. Could you imagine visiting a…

[deleted]

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#195

Post by birdyrooster »

birdyrooster wrote: post #151
Blackthorn wrote: post #137

I posted this deep in a thread but feel like it should be a higher level comment so here we go. Websites can be so ridiculously short sighted and just want to squeeze out every penny they can not thinking of the users they end up losing in the process. And they do lose users And fast. Personal experience time! I ran a pretty popular wiki for Dungeons and Dragons homebrew on what used to be called Wikia. At some point…

This reminds me of A/B testing that likely was the method Google unwittingly used to obfuscate sponsored results in Search. The A/B test KPI they were measuring clearly was creating more click through to sponsored properties and it eroded trust and utility in exchange. I am sure they increased their short term Ad Words profits.

Here is the source: https://searchengineland.com/search-ad-labeling-history-goog...

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#196

Post by bad_user »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #114
ukoki wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed. This has already happened: Just look at how many websites pester you to download their mobile app or even block content unless you access from the app. From a user functionality perspective the vast majority of apps do nothing a browser can't do. But the killer fe…

You use a firewall on the device to block requests to the ad server. Most apps will keep working fine. Then all it takes is an OS that lets you revoke permissions on sensitive data without the app knowing.

Ad networks can easily work around this, either by requiring publishers to proxy their requests or by having lots of domain names and proxies, which can be dirt cheap. You can't block requests as fast as ad networks can add domains and ips.

Sometimes I wonder what keeps ad networks from becoming more aggressive. Wonder what keeps them from breaking the content and force users to disable ad blocking. Because I know it can be done.

It's probably because publishers don't want to piss users off. Or maybe it's because on mobile most clicks come from Facebook or Twitter or other apps using web views that don't do ad blocking.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#197

Post by lmm »

jslabovitz wrote: post #15

From the article: > The very beginning of ad blocking is the 90s, just when the ads appeared. In 1993, GNN, the very first web advertising service, was launched. Then in 1994, the first-ever banner was sold. In the blink of an eye, the online ad industry was worth billions of dollars. Double Click emerged, Yahoo started to sell ads. And that's when the very first ad blocker was created. GNN (Global Network Navigator)…

> GNN (Global Network Navigator) was not an advertising service. It was the first commercial online magazine.

Isn't that the same thing? With a couple of exceptions, magazines are advertising services first and foremost, in as much as the overwhelming majority of their revenue comes from ads.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#198

Post by JeremyNT »

phkahler wrote: post #129
mrspeaker wrote: post #4

Great article! It's funny to finally see ad blockers go "mainstream". My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking (and the end of a web of connected web sites). Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed. Then ad blocking (and other customization) will be limited to "the…

>> My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking The answer to that is to disable Web Assembly, much like a lot of people disable JS. The whole idea of running other peoples code on your machine is the problem, and it baffles me that browser companies are still trying to enable more and more of this. I don't want your code running on my computer.

That's great, until all the major corporate sites you actually use stop serving any content in HTML.

This future seems inevitable. The only sites you'll be able to actually use without some custom web assembly renderer will be those which don't serve ads at all now - wikis, open source projects, non profits, corporate web sites, etc. Any site funded by ad revenue will effectively remove itself from the web and into its own web assembly app instead.

We might even see the rebirth of something like AOL, a meta app that will be a portal to render content for others who want to use the platform. It might even just be an upcoming version of amp, or a new feature offered by Facebook or cloudflare...

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#199

Post by Nextgrid »

rstuart4133 wrote: post #183
Blackthorn wrote: post #137

I posted this deep in a thread but feel like it should be a higher level comment so here we go. Websites can be so ridiculously short sighted and just want to squeeze out every penny they can not thinking of the users they end up losing in the process. And they do lose users And fast. Personal experience time! I ran a pretty popular wiki for Dungeons and Dragons homebrew on what used to be called Wikia. At some point…

I occasionally go The Guardian's web site, and they displayed a nag say I should not be blocking their way of making money out of a non-subscriber. I thought "fair enough" and disabled my ad blocker. About 2 minutes later, which is what it took for their web site to load with the ad blocker off, I turned it back on again. In the end solved my attack of the guilts by becoming a subscriber. However, I had no sympathy f…

When I see a site that attempts to stalk me (even if my countermeasures manage to block it) the last thing I would do is to hand them my personal and billing details on a platter, give them money, and act as a "manual" tracking cookie by logging into my account every time I visit the website (to bypass the paywall).

At least beforehand the best they could do is to get pseudonymous network & browser data (if they managed to get past my countermeasures like uBlock and nasty IP ranges blocked at the network level), where as once I pay they now have confirmed billing details they can do whatever they want with. If they don't respect my privacy before I pay then I have no reason to trust they'll suddenly respect it after I pay. Most likely they'll just attempt to have their cake and eat it, aka take my money and still stalk me.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#200

Post by krapp »

JeremyNT wrote: post #198
phkahler wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking The answer to that is to disable Web Assembly, much like a lot of people disable JS. The whole idea of running other peoples code on your machine is the problem, and it baffles me that browser companies are still trying to enable more and more of this. I don't want your code running on my computer.

That's great, until all the major corporate sites you actually use stop serving any content in HTML. This future seems inevitable. The only sites you'll be able to actually use without some custom web assembly renderer will be those which don't serve ads at all now - wikis, open source projects, non profits, corporate web sites, etc. Any site funded by ad revenue will effectively remove itself from the web and into i…

It's funny because all the major corporate sites could already have stopped serving HTML and just gone completely with Flash, Silverlight or Java, and yet the doomsday scenario never happened. Hell, Android apps are basically the closed "meta apps" you're talking about, and have been around for years, and yet corporate, ad-driven sites still use HTML.

I don't see why Webassembly should the inevitable slippery slope to the entire web becoming some kind of closed source binary-only dystopia, other than it being loosely associated with Javascript, which half of HN hates and fears to a degree bordering on mania. The FUD really needs to end already.

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