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Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

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Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#71

Post by ndriscoll »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #62
ndriscoll wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah? People do that for fun. A $160 minipc is capable of serving 1Gb/s of web traffic without breaking a sweat (limited by far by the NIC, and for most people, their Internet connection). At a 20W TDP even at 20¢/kWh you're looking at ~$3/month to drive it full tilt. If I'm reading it right, the wikimedia grafana indicates they're usually under 20 Gb/s for reference.

I suspect there is substantial overlap between those of us who lament at consumers being unwilling to pay trivial sums for ad-free services and those of us who think people will spend even a hundred dollars on web-connected minipcs.

Consumers do pay for services (c.f. Netflix, Spotify, Steam. All are trivial to pirate but do billions in revenue). Some ad-supported services price dump onto the market, distorting it. Others are actually worthless. In any case, my point was these days computers are so absurdly powerful that the resource cost for a distributed web would be trivial. Even bargain bin low-power computers can handle millions of users.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#72

Post by sanswork »

titzer wrote: post #58
binary132 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You joke but it’s actually shocking how often you’ll hear the refrain repeated that without ubiquitous advertising we could not possibly have a free public internet.

And no one stops to ask how the internet sustained itself from the years 1995 to 2005. Or big search engines, for that matter. The answer is that they were smaller and their revenue was based on selling real things, not constant hassle and attention-grabbing. The internet was not an ad hellscape back then simply because every single market and every single sector was smaller. It's big now because tech giants are supe…

The internet sustained itself during those times with Ads. Doubleclick was started in 95. Do you not remember pop ups, pop unders, banner ads on every site?

Ads have always been part of the commercial internet and I'd argue they were far worse back then.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#73

Post by sanswork »

probably_wrong wrote: post #55
portaouflop wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it shocking? It seems to be true - I for one am not ready to pay for most of the online services I use

If advertising were to disappear overnight, I'd argue the internet would go on. First, there was an internet before there were ads. When there's a need there's a way and BitTorrent and Napster taught us that P2P is feasible when the users care about it. Then there's the issue of competitive advantage. If the newspaper from the next town over has a website then my local newspaper has to have a website too. So the ince…

There wasn't really an internet before ads though.

p2p is feasible but you still need someone to produce the content that you're trading between yourselves.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#74

Post by musicale »

cpeterso wrote: post #45
pessimizer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I somehow managed to do it completely and flawlessly in Firefox after a day of effort and sheer hate for the fact that checking the box to keep videos from autoplaying didn't keep any videos from autoplaying. I've now forgotten how I did it and I'm afraid to change any config settings. I think I recall some diffing utility for firefox settings that I could hopefully use to figure out what I did. It burns me up that t…

Firefox is supposed to block autoplay of videos that have audio unless the user has clicked to play a video on the same page. There is definitely an arms race for ads that find holes in the autoplay heuristics. You might try setting the about:config settings “media.autoplay.default” to 5 and/or “media.autoplay.blocking_policy” to 2: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/e24277e20c492b4a78... https://searchfox.org…

> Firefox is supposed to block autoplay of videos that have audio.

I want a reliable way to block autoplay of all videos, whether or not they have audio.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#75

Post by [deleted] »

pessimizer wrote: post #19
musicale wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> between every paragraph is an ad and a video fixed to the top/bottom following you as you scroll and they change once the video ends And of course Chrome, Firefox, and Safari don't provide a reliable way to stop those obnoxious auto-playing videos.

I somehow managed to do it completely and flawlessly in Firefox after a day of effort and sheer hate for the fact that checking the box to keep videos from autoplaying didn't keep any videos from autoplaying. I've now forgotten how I did it and I'm afraid to change any config settings. I think I recall some diffing utility for firefox settings that I could hopefully use to figure out what I did. It burns me up that t…

[deleted]

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#76

Post by [deleted] »

omolobo wrote: post #42
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of that comes down to the ad industry engineering their way around user video playback controls. I’ve heard of them even doing things like displaying video ads as sequences of static image files swapped out with JS.

This. It's not that the Firefox is ignoring your video auto-play settings, it's that it isn't video, courtesy of the industry's greed and lack of any respect for people.

[deleted]

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#77

Post by musicale »

omolobo wrote: post #42
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of that comes down to the ad industry engineering their way around user video playback controls. I’ve heard of them even doing things like displaying video ads as sequences of static image files swapped out with JS.

This. It's not that the Firefox is ignoring your video auto-play settings, it's that it isn't video, courtesy of the industry's greed and lack of any respect for people.

I want to block anything that looks like autoplaying video.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#78

Post by chgs »

myvoiceismypass wrote: post #39
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is nonsense. We all have no choice but to patron many businesses in our lives. We're adults and we understand the information coming from the first party about how great it is is biased. It is still helpful to hear certain facts. Like, a new pizza place happens to exist in town now. The commercial isn't hypnotizing me into going there, I have free will and can form an opinion with information from different sour…

For me at least - it feels like I am now living in a Black Mirror episode and eventually personalized ads are going to be playing inside bathroom stalls when you are taking a dump.

90% of people are probably on their phones consuming adverts while taking a dump. We’re already there.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#79

Post by chgs »

titzer wrote: post #58
binary132 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You joke but it’s actually shocking how often you’ll hear the refrain repeated that without ubiquitous advertising we could not possibly have a free public internet.

And no one stops to ask how the internet sustained itself from the years 1995 to 2005. Or big search engines, for that matter. The answer is that they were smaller and their revenue was based on selling real things, not constant hassle and attention-grabbing. The internet was not an ad hellscape back then simply because every single market and every single sector was smaller. It's big now because tech giants are supe…

Punch the monkey.

The reason Google started off so well was because adverts were non existent, then just relevant text on the side. Compare to altavista, excite, hit it etc it was a beacon of calm.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#80

Post by thewanderer1983 »

JohnMakin wrote: post #34
thewanderer1983 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree in a world of data surveillance, techniques that obfuscate, like you have mentioned are ideal. The problem with this form of obfuscation is it also impacts other industries (legitimate functions) including areas of national security. Therefore I imagine it will be met with resistance, if any useful tools become widespread in use. For example, faking traffic jam data for google maps with phones. https://www.ab…

> The problem with this form of obfuscation is it also impacts other industries (legitimate functions) including areas of national security. I'm aware that "national security" is often invoked in these types of discussions, and a little aware more than I think the general populace at how valuable some of this data is to intelligence operations. However, I would counter that by saying perhaps someone should consider w…

I agree with your conclusion. There have been similar discussions around backdoors and “lawful intercept” systems in the past. The intelligent argument didn't win there either. Then you get Salt Typhoon, and maybe people will rethink them.
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