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Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

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Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#541

Post by jsvaughan »

anonx wrote: post #216
jsvaughan wrote: post #74

Surely we are soon going to see server side ad-injection and the end of ad blocking

That doesn't work well with AD networks though. Site owners will either have to use links of the form: siteOfAdNetwork.com?id=smthhere and it still will be possible to block them. Or AD network will be unable to check the number of clicks.

ad links could be via redirects from the hosting site, intercepted by the web server plugin.

personalisation would be a problem, because you won't have a cookie, but there is always device fingerprint etc

I agree it isn't quite as good but it is possible to make ads indistinguishable from legitimate site content.

Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#543

Post by cbd1984 »

dang wrote: post #523
vectorpush wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the prohibition against polygamous or polyamorous marriage is about the imposition of arbitrary criteria placed upon what does or does not constitute a marriage. Once again you're stating the obvious to no logical effect. Some arbitrary criteria is the foundation of every law by definition; the point, which you keep side-stepping, is that prohibition of poly marriage does not meet the definition of discrimination s…

Please stop, both of you.

Why?

Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#544

Post by cbd1984 »

dang wrote: post #451
oldmanjay wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To any downvoters, please feel free to explain what you find objectionable. Is it the dissonance caused by the realization that the political left is willing to use techniques you find angering when they don't support your views?

Pretty sure it's the ideological rant. Those don't belong here.

We get, and upvote, ideological rants every day.

Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#545

Post by erasmus »

hackuser wrote: post #322
BrendanEich wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get your point, and it is a good one. We have a micro payments channel to publishers, frictionless and anonymous, under construction, for folks who want no ads and who will pay. Other users than you will be able to mix and match, too: better and more private ads on sites they don't support, with a revenue share to these users that they can spend on sites they do. We aren't saying "only ads". We do see ads as a nece…

> I would love to see micropayments replace ads. I don't know much about the technical reality of it, but I've thought that an effective micropayments system could be revolutionary, one of thhe most important innovations in tech: 1) It could be a way of financing an incredible amount of essential work that current funding models fail, because the payments are one-off and not worth the high trasaction costs (in fees a…

Micropayments have been the holy grail online for which everybody from the core web protocols working groups, to IBM to Ted Nelson's project Xanadu have been searching. It's a tricky one to solve, but with the emergence of cryptocurrency tech, there seems to be new hope.

I'm currently involved with a project called SatoshiPay (https://satoshipay.io/), which tries to solve just this headache by enabling micropayments (down to fractions of cents) from a Bitcoin wallet that's created automatically straight in the browser. Still early days, but I believe this could be a user-friendly solution to the micropayment problem.

Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#546

Post by cbd1984 »

dang wrote: post #452
radmuzom wrote: post #297

So some bastard who supported anti-gay legislation has built a browser. And that makes the front page in Hacker News?

Comments like this are not welcome here, regardless of one's position on any issue. Please post civilly and substantively or not at all.

Do you disagree that Proposition 8 was anti-gay?

More to the point, do people get flagged for saying it was anti-gay?

Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#547

Post by DonHopkins »

lmm wrote: post #121
strictnein wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad ideas like Javascript and Mozilla.

I think the web would be much better off without either of those. Without Javascript we would have got real programming languages on the web quicker (maybe tklets would have taken off). Without Mozilla we would have got a sensible box model quicker, a sensible way of embedding audio/video quicker, and more development on the open-source-from-the-ground-up (and, not coincidentally I think, higher quality code) KHTML s…

How soon people forget the Great TCL War of 1994. TCL/Tk was vying for a web position well before Java.

Apparently, not a lot of people remember Sun's unilateral announcement that they were going to make TCL the official web scripting language. (I can't even find a link to, unfortunately.) It triggered RMS's "Why you should not use Tcl" response [1], and the ensuing flame war [2].

There was a huge debate about what the official scripting language would be for the web, after Sun hired John Ousterhout [3] and made its announcement that pissed off RMS.

RMS's position was that it should be Scheme, not TCL, of course.

What TCL/Tk had going for it was not the TCL language itself, but that it had a nice GUI system with its own "canvas", much better than anything Java or JavaScript had years later.

It didn't go so well, so Sun changed their mind and decided to de-emphasize TCL, and then tried to make Java the "official web scripting language". And everyone knows how that went.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20141028202423/http://www.vander...

[2] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.tcl/7JXGt-...

[3] http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Ousterhout/index.shtml

Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#548

Post by lmm »

jordigh wrote: post #471
lmm wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The followup article I saw here a few months ago suggested that Sao Paulo hasn't found that entirely successful, and has allowed a significant amount of advertising back.

I tried looking for this, I really did, but I couldn't find it. Can you find this information and put it in Wikipedia? I tried reading both the English and Portuguese articles, and I couldn't find what you are talking about. The only thing I saw in the Portuguese Wikipedia is that 8 years later they're having problems with illegal electoral flyers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa https://pt.wikipedia.org/w…

I tried looking too before posting the comment, honest. But all I've got is a vague memory of reading it on HN a few months ago. Sorry.

Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#549

Post by fwn »

geoelectric wrote: post #475
AngrySkillzz wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not totally convinced that people actually "want" all that ad-supported content, if in this case we're talking about Internet articles and television programs. We consume it when it's there and easy to obtain, but that's a pretty low bar in terms of wanting something. Who's to say that we wouldn't find better uses for our time if all of that content disappeared? Maybe something we actually cared about enough to p…

Find a better use of your time and, for you at least, the content will disappear. Voila.

It happens even faster if you consume it and block all ads embedded. And sometimes there are even hidden gems between crap content!

Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#550

Post by anonx »

jsvaughan wrote: post #541
anonx wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't work well with AD networks though. Site owners will either have to use links of the form: siteOfAdNetwork.com?id=smthhere and it still will be possible to block them. Or AD network will be unable to check the number of clicks.

ad links could be via redirects from the hosting site, intercepted by the web server plugin. personalisation would be a problem, because you won't have a cookie, but there is always device fingerprint etc I agree it isn't quite as good but it is possible to make ads indistinguishable from legitimate site content.

Will the site redirect to AD network? If so, it is still easily blockable. AdBlocker can preload suspicious links and if they redirect to siteOfAdNetwork.com block them.

The only option I see here is to have some kind of click counter both on the web-master's (who monetizes) and client's (who advertises) web-sites. And the counters' numbers will be sent (using server-side) to the AD Network. But that doesn't work if the client wants to advertise not his/her web-side (where AD network's script can be installed) but Facebook profile or something like that.

Alternatively, AD network can charge not for number of clicks but for alternative parameters (e.g., number of days AD is published). Though, still not easy (no guarantees) to check whether web-master who's monetizing his/her web-site doesn't cheat.

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