How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking • Hacker News Board

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#201

Post by majewsky » Tue, Feb 09, 2016, 9:22 AM UTC

bambax wrote: post #159

fencepost wrote: post #65

I'm generally not inclined to fully whitelist anyplace because even if everything it loads today is safe, who's to say what's going to be loaded after the site gets hacked. That said, I tried to go through and do some allowing of requests and scripts for places I recognized, including whitelisting the site in Ghostery to keep it from interfering. After adding 19 separate exceptions in uMatrix for both whole domains a…

The reason blocking is so easy and works so well is because everyone got lazy. Publishers want ads but don't want to actually do the job of selling them; ads used to be free money, and this is coming to an end. Ads from their own domain would be a little harder to block, especially because blocking would have to be done on a page-by-page basis (or at least, website-by-website).

Personally, I do not block first-party ads (i.e. ad images served from the same domain as the original content). For me, the point of using an adblocker is to reduce attack surface and tracking opportunities.

I see, of course, that I'm likely not representing the majority of adblock users.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#202

Post by majewsky » Tue, Feb 09, 2016, 9:23 AM UTC

sedatk wrote: post #164

fencepost wrote: post #65

I'm generally not inclined to fully whitelist anyplace because even if everything it loads today is safe, who's to say what's going to be loaded after the site gets hacked. That said, I tried to go through and do some allowing of requests and scripts for places I recognized, including whitelisting the site in Ghostery to keep it from interfering. After adding 19 separate exceptions in uMatrix for both whole domains a…

> who's to say what's going to be loaded after the site gets hacked when a site gets hacked, you get malicious content regardless you block ads or not.

Depends on whether it's the site itself that gets hacked, or the ad network. (The latter is going to be a much more valuable target in practice since it allows malware to spread via multiple sites, not just one.)

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#203

Post by ddxv » Tue, Feb 09, 2016, 9:24 AM UTC

I unblocked Wired a few months ago, eventually turned it back on because their popup video ads were so annoying, especially when travelling (slow connections) or on small touch devices.

Also, I just left that article to leave a comment here, since there is no comment section on that article, something else that drives me away from Wired.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#204

Post by mirimir » Tue, Feb 09, 2016, 9:24 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #63

jacquesm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Micropayments would allow me to pay $1 for those articles viewed, or maybe even $5. The difference is that this would not require me to do anything else besides viewing the page, just like on the old prestel networks. But there the 'central authority' was the phone company and the whole tracking saga means that if you want to hit a large enough fraction of the ad blocker users that you'll have to take that scenario i…

All the enthusiasm for micropayments is from people who want to collect micropayments. There is little or no consumer demand for the ability to pay them.

Micropayments can be as automatic as ad auctions. Publishers would just give readers the option of winning the auctions for all ads on the page. Most simply, payments could come from deposit accounts for readers.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#205

Post by kbart » Tue, Feb 09, 2016, 9:32 AM UTC

I wish some company, that could make a difference, pushed for a paper-like ad service -- no tracking, no sounds&video, no JS, just an old school text and picture ad. Such service I would gladly whitelist, but at the current state of advertisement industry whitelisting any site is a no-no.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#206

Post by gcb0 » Tue, Feb 09, 2016, 9:39 AM UTC

the only way out is to get quality content out as much as possible. "portals" like yahoo have tons more of access than weird. they can easily dilute the ad blockers, pay the content creators a cut, and everybody ends up happy

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#207

Post by gcb0 » Tue, Feb 09, 2016, 9:41 AM UTC

thirdsun wrote: post #154

fencepost wrote: post #65

I'm generally not inclined to fully whitelist anyplace because even if everything it loads today is safe, who's to say what's going to be loaded after the site gets hacked. That said, I tried to go through and do some allowing of requests and scripts for places I recognized, including whitelisting the site in Ghostery to keep it from interfering. After adding 19 separate exceptions in uMatrix for both whole domains a…

Agreed. I think Wired, as well as other publishers, are missing the point here. I don't have any issue with ads in general - but if we're talking about ads that Wired has no control over and just fetches from a network, it's a whole different story. The same applies to ads that significantly increase page load times, bandwidth usage (I'm forced to use a metered LTE connection) or privacy concerns. Simple static ads w…

> slow ads

heck i block ads as a side effect of blocking things like Google analytics.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#208

Post by ccozan » Tue, Feb 09, 2016, 9:42 AM UTC

orionblastar wrote: post #96

vinceguidry wrote: post #80

Oh well, there goes another outlet. They can all do this, I don't care. Just won't read their content. Eventually there won't be any good non-paywalled content left, and I'll just figure something else out. They want my money, they're going to have to either pay off the mob (Adblock Plus) or get together with all the other news outlets and give me a one stop shop option. No way am I going to manage dozens of $1 a wee…

Not only that but every site that has your payment information could be hacked and someone steals it along with your password, email, and other information. I like reading sites that don't require a login unless you want to leave a comment. My account was hacked at the Harvard Business Review and I used to leave comments there. They redid their website and limit what you can read now. Sorry to say websites are moving…

I wonder if this would be the case for Paypal Subscriptions. I am already using that for a couple of sites, albeit they are with video content. Each is a couple of Euros a month.

So, you wouldn't need to share your payment details with any publisher, but with just one , that distributes it further. This is really similar with the system in place in some countries, when you wanted to get a subscription to a newspaper, a central collecting money company would take your request, invoice you, etc, and distributed the newspaper to your door.

Again, old business, "but on the internet". And if we don't like paypal, we can always build something better, right?

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#209

Post by majewsky » Tue, Feb 09, 2016, 9:45 AM UTC

marklgr wrote: post #137

aaron695 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are asking, please stop using our content without giving something back. We need something from you to continue. Here are two options. Payment, or ads that we'll try and keep ok. The response is, we'll weaponize and win. Or excuses about how I don't contribute anything but might bring in someone who does, so how dare you. You are going to fail. These are not evidence based arguments. It's not to hard to block Ad…

> Payment, or ads that we'll try and keep ok. The response is, we'll weaponize and win. You really got to realize this is not about showing ads, ie. some plain jpg/gifs--which a lot of people would accept--but loading tons of tracking scripts that slow you down and violate your privacy. So yeah, I'm gonna protect against that, I don't deem it as an acceptable choice.

I'm not sure about that. I'm right there with you, but I'm skeptical whether it's a majority opinion. Does anybody have numbers on that?

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#210

Post by laurent123456 » Tue, Feb 09, 2016, 9:50 AM UTC

vinceguidry wrote: post #80

Oh well, there goes another outlet. They can all do this, I don't care. Just won't read their content. Eventually there won't be any good non-paywalled content left, and I'll just figure something else out. They want my money, they're going to have to either pay off the mob (Adblock Plus) or get together with all the other news outlets and give me a one stop shop option. No way am I going to manage dozens of $1 a wee…

There are more and more websites that try to force users to disable Adblock, but it only means that the anti-ad efforts are moving to anti-anti-adblockers.

For now the easiest way is to use Anti-Adblock Killer[1], which so far works really well. Most likely they will add support for Wired once they enable their anti-adblock policy.

[1] https://github.com/reek/anti-adblock-killer