16 ms·

Thank you for ad blocking

407 points by nichodges 11y ago

sp332 11y ago
This page is basically unreadable on my phone in portrait orientation. The enforced margins means the text has only a half-inch column down the middle, and often wraps in the middle of long words.
- freshyill 11y ago
  Are you on an iPhone? Then press the reader button. I have to imagine Android has something similar.
  - tamana 11y ago
    I wish :-(
  - sp332 11y ago
    My Firefox on Android does have a readability feature, but for some reason it doesn't activate on this page. Fortunately it looks ok in landscape orientation.
  - bjackman 11y ago
    The reader feature only works on properly structured and modern HTML. Unfortunately I find most of the time when sites look like shit like this one, the author usually hasn't bothered to write good HTML either. Often if you open it in Chrome (as opposed to Firerox Android) it fixes, because people have hardcoded the Chrome UA as their is-browser-mobile check -_- Maybe I should just switch to Chrome on my phone, I only really use Firefox out of a strange sense of loyalty..
    - chris_wot 11y ago
      Works fine for me.
    - glogla 11y ago
      Firefox mobile has uBlock while Chrome has nothing, so there's better reason than loyalty to use it.
- slashink 11y ago
  For someone interested in how bad it is, this is how it looks on a iPhone 6S: http://i.imgur.com/LFL0QgJ.jpg http://i.imgur.com/LFL0QgJ.jpg Content seems nice but I really can't read it on my phone sadly. Hope author can fix it!
  - cordite 11y ago
    That is amazingly beautiful in its own way. For a couple seconds.
  - ZainRiz 11y ago
    It could be worse, like on my phone: http://imgur.com/Ig90s55 http://imgur.com/Ig90s55 In wonder what happens if someone has an even lower resolution phone.
    - chipperyman573 11y ago
      Just open up a browser and make the window smaller.
    - mikkokotila 11y ago
      Very sorry about this guys. I've figured out what was wrong and it should work now for any modern phone. Thank you for flagging this, as otherwise I would have totally missed it.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- jcsnv 11y ago
  When responsive goes wrong :P
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- Animats 11y ago
  The 2,334px × 742px image on the home page is a problem.
- BinaryBullet 11y ago
  There's an inline style on a div that states: margin-left: 150px !important; margin-right: 150px !important; Changing the `150px` to `10%` seems to make the site slightly responsive while looking about the same (on my macbook with a 1440px viewport): margin-left: 10% !important; margin-right: 10% !important;
  - mikkokotila 11y ago
    Thank you very much for everyone who has pointed out the issue with the readability of the content. I'm very sorry for this issue. Clearly your advice (px > %) is the way to fix this. I have to travel in a moment and the wp plugin I'm using did not support this, so will figure it out later today. In the meantime I reduced 150px to 100px, which seems to make the issue a little better for most screens (at least in landscape). Thank you again, this is really helpful :)
- bobajeff 11y ago
  I came here to check the comments. I'd assume the author was trying to make a statement with that. Turns out it's just bad CSS or whatever.
userbinator 11y ago
I'm delighted at the lack of any Google Analytics script on the page. Practice what you preach. :-)
- julie1 11y ago
  lol, just reminded me I had set up a google analytics on my blog a long time ago before thinking about it and that I have been complaining about the idiots putting google analystics for more than one year. Oh gosh. How much google analytics did I put during the 6 months where I thought it was the alternative to parsing logs for stats on my server when I believed in the clown and migrated to it? PS: I try to quit looking at stats as much as I try to quit smoking ; it is the only sensible alternative. I should not care about them.
  - generj 11y ago
    There are good alternatives to Google Analytics that are FOSS and allow you to self-host. Piwik is excellent and simple, and SnowPlow is very powerful if not user-friendly. Server logs are pretty unreliable, and don't give nearly the depth of data that a true analytics service does. I think a self-hosted analytics service does very little harm, as the main danger with Google Analytics is the potential for cross-domain tracking.
    - generj 11y ago
      Also, a very big danger with non-FOSS analytics and ad services is that they are all, in effect metadata for governments to sweep up. It's much easier to log a bunch of Google Analytics requests than to log someone's entire Internet stream; yet capturing analytics gives you a fairly exact view of exactly what they did online by tapping only a few services. The total bandwidth for capturing ALL global analytics requests is fairly small. Officials can then claim with a straight face that it is only meta-data - they only need to log the request with all the data in it, not the response from the server, which is usually a transparent 43 byte GIF. By using your own server, and modifying the default URL structure, a government has to track your site directly, which is unlikely unless your site warrants interest. And if everyone did this and had HTTPS, the NSA's job goes from cracking a handful of provider's HTTPS (Google, Adobe, etc) into cracking hundreds of thousands.
chflags 11y ago
Page looks great in my text-only browser (no ad-blocker needed). Thank you AdTech Operator, even if it was not intentional.
tinalumfoil 11y ago
For a site that hates ads so much, I wonder how many HN readers make a living off them.
- barney54 11y ago
  I for one don't hate ads, I hate bad ads, privacy infringing ads, and distracting ads. And my livelihood had nothing to do with ads.
- mc808 11y ago
  Ads are fine in the right context. For example, I don't mind seeing ads on Craigslist. Or an ad for a blogger's book or consulting services in the sidebar of a thoughtful blog post. But not, for example, affiliate links for a product in a pop-up over an obviously fake "review" consisting of stock photos and published specs and keyword-rich filler text. I would tolerate ads on news and other entertainment sites if they didn't go so insanely overboard. Tracking cookies and beacons are unjustifiable in any context.
- toephu2 11y ago
  technically and indirectly of any Google employee?
  - mschuster91 11y ago
    While Google does make a huge chunk of money off advertising, they're diversifying. Google's cloud computing service and especially Google Apps already bring in monies.
- chippy 11y ago
  Based on previous discussions on HN, it would be incorrect to say that "HN hates ads so much" (1) and that many HN readers do indeed protect their investments in ads - it pays them directly. To attack ads, attacks their wallets and thus it is only natural to protect ones investment. edits: (1) However, its only recently that theres been this major discussion about ad blockers, and perhaps those who are not opposed to them are either changing their view, or are keeping silent as the majority opinion against ads is currently dominating the discussion.
hobs 11y ago
Great article, misspelling "reuqired" only issue I had.
tszming 11y ago
The page can be improved if you remove or self-host your Google Web Fonts.
dbpokorny 11y ago
> In the current situation, it seems that at the very least we are going to see an increased use of ad blockers, resulting in further damage to internet advertising and national economies This is absurd. Destroying my focus so you can sell your product does not "damage the national economy".
- roymurdock 11y ago
  In a weird, perverse way, blocking ads really does damage the economy. Think about what subsidized newspapers, televisions, what drives google, facebook, and youtube - what galvanizes consumption, the great engine of any economy. While ads are annoying, intrusive, and even dangerous at this point, they play a huge role in "subsidizing" important goods and getting people off their couches and into stores, increasing the velocity of money and putting cash back into corporations where it can be pooled and turned into new products.
  - Trombone12 11y ago
    How does internet ads subsidise goods? They can subsidise internet connected services (by serving ads to the users), but physical goods? Do you mean like facebook getting cheaper servers by serving some ads for intel? I have a hard time seeing any reason for the ads on twitch for a free app to subsidize my next graphics card though. There is also the fact that most consumption is driven by individual need, and ads only serve to steer the person towards one or another or another provider leaving the total economy largely the same.
    - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
      Advertising is a form of persuasion, which - if you think about it - is a form of behaviour modification. The traditional ad industry has understood how to modify behaviour since before the days of Bernays. So have politicians, lawyers, religious leaders, and demagogues. Online ads are probably the least effective of the behaviour mod techniques, because they mostly just annoy people. The online ad industry has always been less interested in a measurable ROI - i.e. increased product spend - than the trad ad industry. It preys on ad buyers almost as much as it preys on ad viewers, and I'm not convinced that it isn't a net loss for them. Even so, let's not forget that ultimately the business is all about conditioning people to take action they wouldn't otherwise do so they can "be monetised." I wonder if it's possible to have a win-win online ad industry that treats customers as adult equals instead of prey by giving them something back in return for their attention. The ads on specialist blogs, which are usually sold direct, tend to be far more interesting and clickable than generic banners because they're closer to the ideal trade-off of something-for-something. Most ads just want something-for-nothing, which isn't a great basis for a customer relationship.
quanticle 11y ago
Given that ad networks are the #1 vector for spreading malware, I view ad blocking as basic computer hygiene. To me, it's no more controversial than washing one's hands after using the restroom. I try to stay out of the moral discussions about "consuming" content without "paying" for it. The way I see it, ad networks will regain their rights to run code on my machine when they start taking positive steps to ensure that said code will not cause harm or copy unauthorized information off my machine.
- gboudrias 11y ago
  It's strange too, since ads are mostly pictures (or text) you'd think they could just serve that and prohibit, like, JS, but nope!
  - iofj 11y ago
    Well some can, and do. However the ad business has long since become a race to the bottom. Refusing customer demands is not a way to "win" a race to the bottom.
  - stevesearer 11y ago
    Check out my site and let me know what you think? I serve only images that are self-hosted and have found that my readers really appreciate it.
    - fiatjaf 11y ago
      Doesn't make sense.
      - fiatjaf 11y ago
        http://officesnapshots.com/ http://officesnapshots.com/
    - keithpeter 11y ago
      Looks like your editorial content is in the main left-hand column and the adverts are in the narrower right hand column when viewed on a laptop with a 1280px wide screen (linux/firefox). I have a hosts file that blocks most of the ad servers but do not have any plugins within Firefox that disable js or block adverts. Your page looks complete - i.e. nothing showing 'unable to load' signs as one might expect. Privacy Badger shows 4 trackers (amber)... cse.google.com www.google.com platform.twitter.com syndication.twitter.com The adverts appear to be smallish static images with links back to office furniture companies &c. I found the SpaceStor advert for their 'railway carriage' internal booth quite interesting so I clicked on it and was taken to a UK Web site - are you processing location information or did I just get lucky? Interesting example to pass round.
over 11y ago
The main problem I have with the prevalence of adblockers is that now you have to "block" the meta-advertising people in discussion forums that criticize you or attempt to make you feel guilty for blocking ads on your own property any time the subject comes up, and it's a lot harder since the messages are usually targeted, handwritten, interspersed with useful content, and overall difficult to detect automatically.
iofj 11y ago
This issue really feels like an endgame in chess in a game between good players. 1) publishers can't just switch to serving images with their text and ads, because advertisers do not trust publishers, and this would enable them to cheat. So they can't move, they need the 3rd party tags. 2) browser vendors can't "fix" this, despite several browsers being done by large players in ad selling space (even IE's successor, Edge, seems to be making efforts to support ad blocking). 3) end-users won't switch on ads because publishers are overdoing ads, or they are helping malicious actors, or are simply malicious themselves. 4) advertisers can't switch away from the internet, because the internet is eating the press, TV, radio, ... It just wouldn't work. Everything is stuck and nobody can move. But somewhere in there is the answer.
- intrasight 11y ago
  That is a good synopsis of the situation. Thanks. It also hints at the solution, which is a more trusting relationship between publishers, advertisers, and readers. I'll give The Economist digital edition (native iOS) as an example.
- irascible 11y ago
  The answer is for advertisers to die in a fire. There is no content I need from the web that is worth the cost.
  - a_imho 11y ago
    end users are not stuck in this analysis at all
- _ph_ 11y ago
  The start would be if larger and trusted web publications started to run their own ad department. Like in the times of print advertising. Serve ads from your own server which do not try to create third party servers.
- aninhumer 11y ago
  How about producers advertise by making a good enough product that they don't need to pay people to say so?
chris_wot 11y ago
At this point, I'd seriously like to see that anonymity be built into a network protocol. Like a version of IP where the source field is removed, and the next-hop source is progressively encrypted like Tor does. Then I'd love to see a filtering solution that blocks all third party tracking.
nxzero 11y ago
Wondering if public awareness of how much money is made via malvertising will do more harm than good.
Gratsby 11y ago
>Many think that security’s choke hold on privacy started post 9/11, but this is not accurate. It had started half a decade earlier in the advent of the internet, and the popularization of mobile phones. Edward Snowden’s allegations much later, they too largely were part of the debate that started around 1995. By the time Snowden came around, I felt like the battle over privacy had long since been lost. I felt like every passionate statement was a point in an argument made a decade earlier that lost largely due to apathy from the general community (though the tech community always held privacy at a high level of importance). The way things related to privacy are today, they are irreversible, IMO. Forget governments, private companies have long understood the value of information. Whether it's good or bad, the point is moot. Now we're in the era of figuring out what to do with all the data. Luckily for the world, I feel that the data has much more indirect commercial value than direct. Yes, it's nice to be able to target users with ads about phones when you know they are ready to upgrade. But it's more valuable to be able to answer questions like "what are the top 30 locales in the U.S. where a x business would succeed", or "what elements would provide the most compelling story-line to a high budget movie targeting x customer base". It's not that users' individual privacy is being held in particularly high regard, it's simply that collective information provides the answers to more interesting and more profitable questions. Where government treatment of privacy is concerned, that's a pendulum that sways too far in either direction at any given point. It's a tough debate in general because people are constantly asked to weigh the balance between preventing their worst fear and creating it. You want the government to be able to break down any wall to get your lost child returned home, but you don't want the government breaking in your door because you happened to order pizza from the same restaurant as the kidnappers. At some point the person with the kidnapped child will be the most sympathetic character in the argument, at another the person who ended up in the hospital because of an unnecessary raid. Politics isn't about cooler heads prevailing, it's about garnering support and creating passionate followers. One thing for sure, the U.S. government interest in technology and information has spawned some inventions that otherwise wouldn't exist. Things like realtime translation, advances in battery technology, gps navigation, and the internet itself are all examples where we wouldn't be where we are today without the enormous amount of interest and funding that follows a government project.
- 11y ago
SimeVidas 11y ago
Website protip: If you’re making a dedicated domain for your long blog post, also write a summary (so that all visitors can get something out of it, not just the 5% who are actually going to read the post).
mrmondo 11y ago
FYI the CSS is a bit borked on mobile devices: http://i.imgur.com/bex0Kpa.png http://i.imgur.com/bex0Kpa.png
Trombone12 11y ago
The answer for banner ads is that they should simply be removed, because despite living in the boundless digital space all they can really do within the format is show an oddly shaped image. As is clear by now, the only way for ad networks to provide any sort of extra value to the service is by choosing the exact image very carefully. To choose the ad carefully, the person browsed must somehow be differentiated, and there really isn't anything to do but tracking. So ad networks must by logical necessity turn into unregulated surveillance networks and try to soak up as much data about every visitor, collect and collate this data for the express purpose of tracking individual behaviour and then use this information to choose the image. This creation of a private surveillance network for tracking of individuals is basically the minimum level of sinister an ad network needs to have any sort of "dynamic" product. Yet, at the end of the day, banner ads don't amount to more than very basic content, so it hardly seems justified to create an invasive surveillance apparatus just to serve slightly less irrelevant content. And there doesn't seem to be much at the other end of sophistication: paid sub sites with dynamic recommendations for the visitor based on stated preferences. Banner ads can never amount to more than those small ads crammed into the edges of the newspaper, despite being in a domain where companies can talk to users directly and dynamically. The reason for this is that you don't have a conversation with someone trough a small hole in a newspaper and as long as that is how you serve your ads, spying on the user is the best you can do.
- danieldk 11y ago
  To choose the ad carefully, the person browsed must somehow be differentiated, and there really isn't anything to do but tracking. Why? If I am reading reviews of phones, place offers for phones. If I am reading up on how to set up X on an Y phone, offer accessoires for Y.
- csydas 11y ago
  I've re-read your comment several times and I'm not sure I understand exactly what you're getting at in regards to what ads should be. Advertising for decades has worked without the ability of advertisers to track their viewers or interact with them directly and dynamically, and it relied on exactly what you described in the opening sentence; showing an oddly shaped image in whatever newspaper, magazine, publication, or whatever they could stick the image on. With television, ads became minor productions in and of themselves, and while you could get some statistics as to who actually was putting eyes on your advertisement and when, there still wasn't really a need for a spy network to allow the advertisements to function. As an outsider to the industry looking in, I'm sure there are steps I'm missing and not able to fill in myself, but I'm just not sure why it's essential to spy on people. Targeted advertising, in my anecdotal and admittedly very limited experience, is often little more than just shotgunning ads vaguely related to search results or things I purchased or looked at for whatever reason in the past. There's nothing dynamic or progressive about it beyond just spamming slightly less irrelevant information at me, though I really don't ever recall ever taking the time to actually follow through an ad link prior to adblockers. Ad-sponsored search results very often just get in the way of actual search results. The idea of dynamic and relevant advertising seems completely foreign to me in that I can't really imagine how such a thing would actually look/work. Current advertising online seems to be very little more than a game that ad developers play to see who can trick people into clicking on their ad the most and who can collect the most data. Often times, the purpose seems to be less about the advertisement and more about the data collected via the click, or at the very least just generating the click or follow-through more than anything. It's particularly egregious in mobile spaces and apps where ads almost seem to be built around the imprecision of navigation. In Safari on iOS, I can't think of too many sites that doesn't place their banner of ads right along the bottom where you tap to summon the Safari controls, and it's even worse within apps with random pop-ups and ever-changing locations for the dismissal, which isn't much better in my mind than the pop-up warnings in browsers asking "do you really want to navigate away from this great deal?" Advertising in the digital age, in my opinion, has just gone too far in the interest of what it can do instead of what is actually effectual advertising. The dynamic and progressive evolution of the ads seems less about actually providing and informing about a product and instead about gaming the online advertising market, and the fallout of such a battle is harming users.
recursive 11y ago
What is meant by "third party tracking tag"?
- irascible 11y ago
  A single pixel image loaded from a domain that tracks the ip of the downloader? There are probably lots of variations.
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    Don't forget, that single GET also comes with cookies so tracking isn't limited to a single IP.
irascible 11y ago
When the police get hit with ransomware.. they pay the ransom.. and by they, I mean me.
avodonosov 11y ago
you are welcome!
elcapitan 11y ago
"Rothenberg Says Ad Blocking Is a War against Diversity and Freedom of Expression" That quote was probably the most ridiculous and self-revealing thing I've read in a long time. Are they really that desparate? Good to hear.
- Hoasi 11y ago
  It seems they are, although the ad industry never shied from hurling gross statements either.
generj 11y ago
I've often wondered if an ad blocker more like an anti-virus heuristic system could be created. It would look for suspicious looking JS and block it, as well as ban any code which auto-plays video or fullscreens. Add some machine learning algos with image recognition and the user's ability to mark "Don't display stuff like this again" and there would be a very good compromise between viewing ads and keeping a device secure. More persistent tracking, especially cross-domain tracking, could also be avoided. The alternative is something I've entitled "Enhanced Do Not Track", which consists of setting the DNT header and then maliciously editing advertising information sent by the browser. In time, advertisers would learn to actually obey DNT calls or face the prospect of terrible data.
- Symbiote 11y ago
  As I understand it, that's the aim of Privacy Badger: https://www.eff.org/privacybadger https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
  - generj 11y ago
    Thanks for the heads up! I'm always very impressed with the EFF and what they do with my donations :) I'll install it on my personal computer. An irony I have is that as a worker in the analytics field, I can't block ads or analytics on my work device despite knowing better than most the extent to which they track me. But when doing QA on a screenshare, I can't afford the chance of forgetting I have a blocking solution on and then not seeing any analytics requests pop up.
harwoodleon 11y ago
When you are talking about structural failure of a system - how about an action that fails 80-99% of the time? I'd consider that a failure. Internet advertising as an action created by companies is a complete failed system propped up by players like Google. I bet that as a total percentage of visited sites from webpages, advertising will account for a tiny fraction. The perception by advertisers that this is a product they should buy, even though it fails massively, and is very very hard to attribute value to, means we are only one small hop away from billboard and radio advertising. The illusion of statistical/analytical evidence is so frail without a massive privacy compromise, it makes the whole task seem pointless from both sides. Now that malware is a part of the mix, makes everyone think - lets just block this shit and get on with our lives. The ad business now is like a computerised 80's junk tv ad marketplace. Offering little or no value to anyone. The original instinct by the OP was correct, users are at the heart of the internet - not companies.
- nsns 11y ago
  Well, you could say that advertising companies are actually in the business of tempting their clients into advertising by promising them the ability to tempt the general public into buying their products. The problem imo is that, ever since Google has paved the way, monetizing an online product has become fixed on a single, double-edged strategy: either show ads or sell your users' data to advertisers.
  - pbhjpbhj 11y ago
    Or freemium, or paid subscription ... and then the companies will sell your data anyway because data of people willing to pay off more highly valued.
kyledrake 11y ago
I'm just going to leave this here https://kyledrake.neocities.org/adblockbar/ https://kyledrake.neocities.org/adblockbar/ The bait doesn't work 100% of the time yet, so I wouldn't recommend using it in production. Edit: ooh neat, I just found a few better ways to do adblock detection. Maybe I'll update this code to work better now..
- edwintorok 11y ago
  Why do you link to uBlock instead of uBlock Origin? I thought uBlock Origin from the original developer is to be preferred, and that uBlock is no longer actively developed and the donations for uBlock do not benefit the actively maintained uBlock Origin.
  - kyledrake 11y ago
    News to me. I don't think that was the case at the time. I'll switch to origin. Looks like the link I was using just redirects to the new site.
    - edwintorok 11y ago
      See the explanation on https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#beware-ublock-origin-is-completely-unrelated-to-the-web-site-ublockorg https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#beware-ublock-origin-is-co...
    - gorhill 11y ago
      > Looks like the link I was using just redirects to the new site. There is no redirection: you are using "ublock.org" directly in your source code. I consider "ublock.org" to be a scam[1], and I consider your page to be propping up a scam. [1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/1451#issuecomment-193013783 https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/1451#issuecomment-1...
- kyledrake 11y ago
  Update: I've got it working better now, but the design on the topbar is now screwed up for some reason. I'll debug it sometime in the future.
based2 11y ago
tx for manageable proxies
inglor 11y ago
Nah, we can now formally prove that the code inside an ad is completely safe. So much that this is proposed since a few days ago for direct inclusion in the JavaScript language. This is Mark Miller's work http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/40673.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co... Anyone who wants to hold an educated opinion on the topic should read it. EDIT: sauce for "direct inclusion": https://github.com/FUDCo/ses-realm https://github.com/FUDCo/ses-realm
- justabystander 11y ago
  What code is "safe" isn't necessarily something that's set in stone. Exploits could easily deliver code that looks safe but causes problems. And each new version could introduce a new exploit. And then there's the upcoming WebAssembly, which is bound to be ruined by ad networks in the future.
  - tyingq 11y ago
    I believe it's also common to just create a safe, but high CTR ad (OMG 60% off) and save the malicious javascript for the landing page.
chopin 11y ago
With regard to malware delivery via ad networks I'd think it would help already if web site providers where held accountable for all content delivered via their site. I don't understand that there hasn't been a law suit over this yet.
DanielBMarkham 11y ago
How about this: we make a new tag <advertising></advertising> Inside this tag can only go text-link ads. Ads in any other form on the page will be ignored. But for ads with those tags, the text will be displayed at the top of the browser, in the premium location for users to see it. This allows ads, reduces the impact of ads on visual clutter, eliminates delivery of malware via ads, and drastically decreases page weight and load time. In addition, by enforcing an arbitrary scarcity, advertisers will be forced to bid-up for one spot on the page instead of being lured into more and more complex advertising platforms that are unwieldy to operate and many times have dubious added value.
- a_imho 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_bit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_bit First for not rendering advertising tags. There is nothing inherent about advertising, a unique tag for it feels a bit arrogant.
  - DanielBMarkham 11y ago
    You misunderstood. The point wasn't to make an evil bit. If we're going to have the semantic web, isn't advertising an important part of any page layout. Good grief, we have header, footer, microtags, and god knows what else. Advertising is at least as semantically important as the rest of it. After all, that's all adblockers are trying to do anyway -- identify the semantic purpose of those hunks of code used for content sponsorship. This is semantically important even if nothing else changes in the deliver-render system.
mattkevan 11y ago
I've been thinking this for a while: would it be feasible to create a labelling body for online advertising and privacy? I see it a bit like Fairtrade or FSC certified, but for advertising and tracking - an independently verified set of criteria which must be met to be awarded the standard. As an independent body, it wouldn't have the conflict of interest of, say Eyeo/ABP. And unlike offline standards agencies which rely on self-certification and occasional inspections, the testing would be done at the browser plugin level to filter out any scripts and ads which don't meet the standard. A combination of marketing to end-users as to the benefits of ethical advertising, and real-time feedback to site owners and advertisers as to which ads were blocked, why they were blocked and how much money that cost them could be a powerful incentive to clean things up.
- WilliamOfRolez 11y ago
  There is a non-profit association that is in charge of building standards and regulating (as much as possible) online ads. It's called Interactive Advertising Bureau (http://www.iab.com http://www.iab.com) and they are described as : "The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is an advertising business organization that develops industry standards, conducts research, and provides legal support for the online advertising industry. The organization represents a large number of the most prominent media outlets globally, but mostly in the United States and in Europe." Their cause is great and they have been establishing solid foundations but the very description shows it's limit: "mostly in the United States and in Europe". The shady ad networks are usually registered and host their content in none of those regions which means they are free of any standards and there isn't much the IAB can do about it.
- xorcist 11y ago
  > testing would be done at the browser plugin level to filter out any scripts and ads which don't meet the standard I think you are describing pretty much any ad block plugin. If you serve ads from your own domain with an img tag, they don't be blocked. It's just that very few people do that.
  - mattkevan 11y ago
Moru 11y ago
Adblocking from the small-scale advertiser is a great money-saver. As an advertiser I would feel that the site is stealing from me when I see that they require people to turn off ad-blocking. I know their visitors that use blocking software would never buy from me anyway, so why should I pay to show ads to them?
mirimir 11y ago
> One of the pioneers of Javascript, the most widely used technology in the web today, Douglas Crockford argued that the most reliable and cost-effective method to inject malicious code on to a user’s device is to buy an ad. Wow. Just wow. Worse than email spearphishing, even. Totally automatic. I wonder if anti-malware apps catch any of this.
SixSigma 11y ago
In the old days, advertisers sent ad copy to the magazine / newspaper and they added it to their content. I could turn the page or not read it. Sometimes it was interesting. In specialist magazines, the editorial content is often secondary to the advertising. I read "Professional Builders Monthly" so I can keep an eye on new products being advertised. My experience is enhanced by advertising. The cost of effort is borne by the advertisers and publishers. The production costs are covered by the advertisers and the purchaser of the information (me). On the internet there is significant cost to me. I risk malicious actors, I pay for bandwidth and CPU cycles, my attention is stolen by flashing and sound, data is collected on my habits and traded with who knows who - my experience is degraded not enhanced by advertising.
timonovici 11y ago
One interesting idea would be to move the advertising server-side. Just smash a ruby gem in your project, or a PHP file, and let's see how well you'll sleep when you know somebody can inject code on your server whenever they feel like it. If that would be the standard way to go, I doubt people would just bundle all advertising scripts they can find around the web.
- usrusr 11y ago
  This will be the inevitable outcome of the ad blocker war. The CDN of today will become the ad splicing networks of tomorrow.
st3v3ndungan 11y ago
Third party Javascript is the problem, right? Is it feasible for a domain to only accept ads with static content? Or, for dynamic content, share the relevant portions of their own JS / envelope third party JS into their own code base (and presumably scrub it/test it)?
foobarbecue 11y ago
What is "experdience"?
gumby 11y ago
Quite apart from the malware problem, the privacy problem may be unfixable. I have a friend working at $major-site-we-all-use who is tracking people who don't even log in and who have ad blockers installed. He cares less who they are IRL and just how he can send them "native" content. Bleagh.
paulddraper 11y ago
Isn't Web ad blocking is the equivalent of DVR for TV? Should there be more of a controversy for DVR, or less of a controversy for Web ad blockers?
ngrilly 11y ago
Who is the author?
CalRobert 11y ago
The weird thing about opposition to ad blocking is that downloading a page via curl or wget means I see no ads at all, just links to JS hosted on other servers. But nobody says those tools are unethical (I think). Incidentally, I wonder why we don't see more ad networks implemented server-side as a way to help prevent blocking? Is it too hard to track with reasonable accountability?
rehevkor5 11y ago
Who wrote it? And when?

407 points by nichodges 11y ago

sp332 11y ago

This page is basically unreadable on my phone in portrait orientation. The enforced margins means the text has only a half-inch column down the middle, and often wraps in the middle of long words.

freshyill 11y ago
Are you on an iPhone? Then press the reader button. I have to imagine Android has something similar.
- tamana 11y ago
  I wish :-(
- sp332 11y ago
  My Firefox on Android does have a readability feature, but for some reason it doesn't activate on this page. Fortunately it looks ok in landscape orientation.
- bjackman 11y ago
  The reader feature only works on properly structured and modern HTML. Unfortunately I find most of the time when sites look like shit like this one, the author usually hasn't bothered to write good HTML either. Often if you open it in Chrome (as opposed to Firerox Android) it fixes, because people have hardcoded the Chrome UA as their is-browser-mobile check -_- Maybe I should just switch to Chrome on my phone, I only really use Firefox out of a strange sense of loyalty..
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    Works fine for me.
  - glogla 11y ago
    Firefox mobile has uBlock while Chrome has nothing, so there's better reason than loyalty to use it.
slashink 11y ago
For someone interested in how bad it is, this is how it looks on a iPhone 6S: http://i.imgur.com/LFL0QgJ.jpg http://i.imgur.com/LFL0QgJ.jpg Content seems nice but I really can't read it on my phone sadly. Hope author can fix it!
- cordite 11y ago
  That is amazingly beautiful in its own way. For a couple seconds.
- ZainRiz 11y ago
  It could be worse, like on my phone: http://imgur.com/Ig90s55 http://imgur.com/Ig90s55 In wonder what happens if someone has an even lower resolution phone.
  - chipperyman573 11y ago
    Just open up a browser and make the window smaller.
  - mikkokotila 11y ago
    Very sorry about this guys. I've figured out what was wrong and it should work now for any modern phone. Thank you for flagging this, as otherwise I would have totally missed it.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
jcsnv 11y ago
When responsive goes wrong :P
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Animats 11y ago
The 2,334px × 742px image on the home page is a problem.
BinaryBullet 11y ago
There's an inline style on a div that states: margin-left: 150px !important; margin-right: 150px !important; Changing the `150px` to `10%` seems to make the site slightly responsive while looking about the same (on my macbook with a 1440px viewport): margin-left: 10% !important; margin-right: 10% !important;
- mikkokotila 11y ago
  Thank you very much for everyone who has pointed out the issue with the readability of the content. I'm very sorry for this issue. Clearly your advice (px > %) is the way to fix this. I have to travel in a moment and the wp plugin I'm using did not support this, so will figure it out later today. In the meantime I reduced 150px to 100px, which seems to make the issue a little better for most screens (at least in landscape). Thank you again, this is really helpful :)
bobajeff 11y ago
I came here to check the comments. I'd assume the author was trying to make a statement with that. Turns out it's just bad CSS or whatever.

userbinator 11y ago

I'm delighted at the lack of any Google Analytics script on the page. Practice what you preach. :-)

julie1 11y ago
lol, just reminded me I had set up a google analytics on my blog a long time ago before thinking about it and that I have been complaining about the idiots putting google analystics for more than one year. Oh gosh. How much google analytics did I put during the 6 months where I thought it was the alternative to parsing logs for stats on my server when I believed in the clown and migrated to it? PS: I try to quit looking at stats as much as I try to quit smoking ; it is the only sensible alternative. I should not care about them.
- generj 11y ago
  There are good alternatives to Google Analytics that are FOSS and allow you to self-host. Piwik is excellent and simple, and SnowPlow is very powerful if not user-friendly. Server logs are pretty unreliable, and don't give nearly the depth of data that a true analytics service does. I think a self-hosted analytics service does very little harm, as the main danger with Google Analytics is the potential for cross-domain tracking.
  - generj 11y ago
    Also, a very big danger with non-FOSS analytics and ad services is that they are all, in effect metadata for governments to sweep up. It's much easier to log a bunch of Google Analytics requests than to log someone's entire Internet stream; yet capturing analytics gives you a fairly exact view of exactly what they did online by tapping only a few services. The total bandwidth for capturing ALL global analytics requests is fairly small. Officials can then claim with a straight face that it is only meta-data - they only need to log the request with all the data in it, not the response from the server, which is usually a transparent 43 byte GIF. By using your own server, and modifying the default URL structure, a government has to track your site directly, which is unlikely unless your site warrants interest. And if everyone did this and had HTTPS, the NSA's job goes from cracking a handful of provider's HTTPS (Google, Adobe, etc) into cracking hundreds of thousands.

chflags 11y ago

Page looks great in my text-only browser (no ad-blocker needed). Thank you AdTech Operator, even if it was not intentional.

tinalumfoil 11y ago

For a site that hates ads so much, I wonder how many HN readers make a living off them.

barney54 11y ago
I for one don't hate ads, I hate bad ads, privacy infringing ads, and distracting ads. And my livelihood had nothing to do with ads.
mc808 11y ago
Ads are fine in the right context. For example, I don't mind seeing ads on Craigslist. Or an ad for a blogger's book or consulting services in the sidebar of a thoughtful blog post. But not, for example, affiliate links for a product in a pop-up over an obviously fake "review" consisting of stock photos and published specs and keyword-rich filler text. I would tolerate ads on news and other entertainment sites if they didn't go so insanely overboard. Tracking cookies and beacons are unjustifiable in any context.
toephu2 11y ago
technically and indirectly of any Google employee?
- mschuster91 11y ago
  While Google does make a huge chunk of money off advertising, they're diversifying. Google's cloud computing service and especially Google Apps already bring in monies.
chippy 11y ago
Based on previous discussions on HN, it would be incorrect to say that "HN hates ads so much" (1) and that many HN readers do indeed protect their investments in ads - it pays them directly. To attack ads, attacks their wallets and thus it is only natural to protect ones investment. edits: (1) However, its only recently that theres been this major discussion about ad blockers, and perhaps those who are not opposed to them are either changing their view, or are keeping silent as the majority opinion against ads is currently dominating the discussion.

hobs 11y ago

Great article, misspelling "reuqired" only issue I had.

tszming 11y ago

The page can be improved if you remove or self-host your Google Web Fonts.

dbpokorny 11y ago

> In the current situation, it seems that at the very least we are going to see an increased use of ad blockers, resulting in further damage to internet advertising and national economies This is absurd. Destroying my focus so you can sell your product does not "damage the national economy".

roymurdock 11y ago
In a weird, perverse way, blocking ads really does damage the economy. Think about what subsidized newspapers, televisions, what drives google, facebook, and youtube - what galvanizes consumption, the great engine of any economy. While ads are annoying, intrusive, and even dangerous at this point, they play a huge role in "subsidizing" important goods and getting people off their couches and into stores, increasing the velocity of money and putting cash back into corporations where it can be pooled and turned into new products.
- Trombone12 11y ago
  How does internet ads subsidise goods? They can subsidise internet connected services (by serving ads to the users), but physical goods? Do you mean like facebook getting cheaper servers by serving some ads for intel? I have a hard time seeing any reason for the ads on twitch for a free app to subsidize my next graphics card though. There is also the fact that most consumption is driven by individual need, and ads only serve to steer the person towards one or another or another provider leaving the total economy largely the same.
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    Advertising is a form of persuasion, which - if you think about it - is a form of behaviour modification. The traditional ad industry has understood how to modify behaviour since before the days of Bernays. So have politicians, lawyers, religious leaders, and demagogues. Online ads are probably the least effective of the behaviour mod techniques, because they mostly just annoy people. The online ad industry has always been less interested in a measurable ROI - i.e. increased product spend - than the trad ad industry. It preys on ad buyers almost as much as it preys on ad viewers, and I'm not convinced that it isn't a net loss for them. Even so, let's not forget that ultimately the business is all about conditioning people to take action they wouldn't otherwise do so they can "be monetised." I wonder if it's possible to have a win-win online ad industry that treats customers as adult equals instead of prey by giving them something back in return for their attention. The ads on specialist blogs, which are usually sold direct, tend to be far more interesting and clickable than generic banners because they're closer to the ideal trade-off of something-for-something. Most ads just want something-for-nothing, which isn't a great basis for a customer relationship.

quanticle 11y ago

Given that ad networks are the #1 vector for spreading malware, I view ad blocking as basic computer hygiene. To me, it's no more controversial than washing one's hands after using the restroom. I try to stay out of the moral discussions about "consuming" content without "paying" for it. The way I see it, ad networks will regain their rights to run code on my machine when they start taking positive steps to ensure that said code will not cause harm or copy unauthorized information off my machine.

gboudrias 11y ago
It's strange too, since ads are mostly pictures (or text) you'd think they could just serve that and prohibit, like, JS, but nope!
- iofj 11y ago
  Well some can, and do. However the ad business has long since become a race to the bottom. Refusing customer demands is not a way to "win" a race to the bottom.
- stevesearer 11y ago
  Check out my site and let me know what you think? I serve only images that are self-hosted and have found that my readers really appreciate it.
  - fiatjaf 11y ago
    Doesn't make sense.
    - fiatjaf 11y ago
      http://officesnapshots.com/ http://officesnapshots.com/
  - keithpeter 11y ago
    Looks like your editorial content is in the main left-hand column and the adverts are in the narrower right hand column when viewed on a laptop with a 1280px wide screen (linux/firefox). I have a hosts file that blocks most of the ad servers but do not have any plugins within Firefox that disable js or block adverts. Your page looks complete - i.e. nothing showing 'unable to load' signs as one might expect. Privacy Badger shows 4 trackers (amber)... cse.google.com www.google.com platform.twitter.com syndication.twitter.com The adverts appear to be smallish static images with links back to office furniture companies &c. I found the SpaceStor advert for their 'railway carriage' internal booth quite interesting so I clicked on it and was taken to a UK Web site - are you processing location information or did I just get lucky? Interesting example to pass round.

over 11y ago

The main problem I have with the prevalence of adblockers is that now you have to "block" the meta-advertising people in discussion forums that criticize you or attempt to make you feel guilty for blocking ads on your own property any time the subject comes up, and it's a lot harder since the messages are usually targeted, handwritten, interspersed with useful content, and overall difficult to detect automatically.

iofj 11y ago

This issue really feels like an endgame in chess in a game between good players. 1) publishers can't just switch to serving images with their text and ads, because advertisers do not trust publishers, and this would enable them to cheat. So they can't move, they need the 3rd party tags. 2) browser vendors can't "fix" this, despite several browsers being done by large players in ad selling space (even IE's successor, Edge, seems to be making efforts to support ad blocking). 3) end-users won't switch on ads because publishers are overdoing ads, or they are helping malicious actors, or are simply malicious themselves. 4) advertisers can't switch away from the internet, because the internet is eating the press, TV, radio, ... It just wouldn't work. Everything is stuck and nobody can move. But somewhere in there is the answer.

intrasight 11y ago
That is a good synopsis of the situation. Thanks. It also hints at the solution, which is a more trusting relationship between publishers, advertisers, and readers. I'll give The Economist digital edition (native iOS) as an example.
irascible 11y ago
The answer is for advertisers to die in a fire. There is no content I need from the web that is worth the cost.
- a_imho 11y ago
  end users are not stuck in this analysis at all
_ph_ 11y ago
The start would be if larger and trusted web publications started to run their own ad department. Like in the times of print advertising. Serve ads from your own server which do not try to create third party servers.
aninhumer 11y ago
How about producers advertise by making a good enough product that they don't need to pay people to say so?

chris_wot 11y ago

At this point, I'd seriously like to see that anonymity be built into a network protocol. Like a version of IP where the source field is removed, and the next-hop source is progressively encrypted like Tor does. Then I'd love to see a filtering solution that blocks all third party tracking.

nxzero 11y ago

Wondering if public awareness of how much money is made via malvertising will do more harm than good.

Gratsby 11y ago

>Many think that security’s choke hold on privacy started post 9/11, but this is not accurate. It had started half a decade earlier in the advent of the internet, and the popularization of mobile phones. Edward Snowden’s allegations much later, they too largely were part of the debate that started around 1995. By the time Snowden came around, I felt like the battle over privacy had long since been lost. I felt like every passionate statement was a point in an argument made a decade earlier that lost largely due to apathy from the general community (though the tech community always held privacy at a high level of importance). The way things related to privacy are today, they are irreversible, IMO. Forget governments, private companies have long understood the value of information. Whether it's good or bad, the point is moot. Now we're in the era of figuring out what to do with all the data. Luckily for the world, I feel that the data has much more indirect commercial value than direct. Yes, it's nice to be able to target users with ads about phones when you know they are ready to upgrade. But it's more valuable to be able to answer questions like "what are the top 30 locales in the U.S. where a x business would succeed", or "what elements would provide the most compelling story-line to a high budget movie targeting x customer base". It's not that users' individual privacy is being held in particularly high regard, it's simply that collective information provides the answers to more interesting and more profitable questions. Where government treatment of privacy is concerned, that's a pendulum that sways too far in either direction at any given point. It's a tough debate in general because people are constantly asked to weigh the balance between preventing their worst fear and creating it. You want the government to be able to break down any wall to get your lost child returned home, but you don't want the government breaking in your door because you happened to order pizza from the same restaurant as the kidnappers. At some point the person with the kidnapped child will be the most sympathetic character in the argument, at another the person who ended up in the hospital because of an unnecessary raid. Politics isn't about cooler heads prevailing, it's about garnering support and creating passionate followers. One thing for sure, the U.S. government interest in technology and information has spawned some inventions that otherwise wouldn't exist. Things like realtime translation, advances in battery technology, gps navigation, and the internet itself are all examples where we wouldn't be where we are today without the enormous amount of interest and funding that follows a government project.

11y ago

SimeVidas 11y ago

Website protip: If you’re making a dedicated domain for your long blog post, also write a summary (so that all visitors can get something out of it, not just the 5% who are actually going to read the post).

mrmondo 11y ago

FYI the CSS is a bit borked on mobile devices: http://i.imgur.com/bex0Kpa.png http://i.imgur.com/bex0Kpa.png

Trombone12 11y ago

The answer for banner ads is that they should simply be removed, because despite living in the boundless digital space all they can really do within the format is show an oddly shaped image. As is clear by now, the only way for ad networks to provide any sort of extra value to the service is by choosing the exact image very carefully. To choose the ad carefully, the person browsed must somehow be differentiated, and there really isn't anything to do but tracking. So ad networks must by logical necessity turn into unregulated surveillance networks and try to soak up as much data about every visitor, collect and collate this data for the express purpose of tracking individual behaviour and then use this information to choose the image. This creation of a private surveillance network for tracking of individuals is basically the minimum level of sinister an ad network needs to have any sort of "dynamic" product. Yet, at the end of the day, banner ads don't amount to more than very basic content, so it hardly seems justified to create an invasive surveillance apparatus just to serve slightly less irrelevant content. And there doesn't seem to be much at the other end of sophistication: paid sub sites with dynamic recommendations for the visitor based on stated preferences. Banner ads can never amount to more than those small ads crammed into the edges of the newspaper, despite being in a domain where companies can talk to users directly and dynamically. The reason for this is that you don't have a conversation with someone trough a small hole in a newspaper and as long as that is how you serve your ads, spying on the user is the best you can do.

danieldk 11y ago
To choose the ad carefully, the person browsed must somehow be differentiated, and there really isn't anything to do but tracking. Why? If I am reading reviews of phones, place offers for phones. If I am reading up on how to set up X on an Y phone, offer accessoires for Y.
csydas 11y ago
I've re-read your comment several times and I'm not sure I understand exactly what you're getting at in regards to what ads should be. Advertising for decades has worked without the ability of advertisers to track their viewers or interact with them directly and dynamically, and it relied on exactly what you described in the opening sentence; showing an oddly shaped image in whatever newspaper, magazine, publication, or whatever they could stick the image on. With television, ads became minor productions in and of themselves, and while you could get some statistics as to who actually was putting eyes on your advertisement and when, there still wasn't really a need for a spy network to allow the advertisements to function. As an outsider to the industry looking in, I'm sure there are steps I'm missing and not able to fill in myself, but I'm just not sure why it's essential to spy on people. Targeted advertising, in my anecdotal and admittedly very limited experience, is often little more than just shotgunning ads vaguely related to search results or things I purchased or looked at for whatever reason in the past. There's nothing dynamic or progressive about it beyond just spamming slightly less irrelevant information at me, though I really don't ever recall ever taking the time to actually follow through an ad link prior to adblockers. Ad-sponsored search results very often just get in the way of actual search results. The idea of dynamic and relevant advertising seems completely foreign to me in that I can't really imagine how such a thing would actually look/work. Current advertising online seems to be very little more than a game that ad developers play to see who can trick people into clicking on their ad the most and who can collect the most data. Often times, the purpose seems to be less about the advertisement and more about the data collected via the click, or at the very least just generating the click or follow-through more than anything. It's particularly egregious in mobile spaces and apps where ads almost seem to be built around the imprecision of navigation. In Safari on iOS, I can't think of too many sites that doesn't place their banner of ads right along the bottom where you tap to summon the Safari controls, and it's even worse within apps with random pop-ups and ever-changing locations for the dismissal, which isn't much better in my mind than the pop-up warnings in browsers asking "do you really want to navigate away from this great deal?" Advertising in the digital age, in my opinion, has just gone too far in the interest of what it can do instead of what is actually effectual advertising. The dynamic and progressive evolution of the ads seems less about actually providing and informing about a product and instead about gaming the online advertising market, and the fallout of such a battle is harming users.

recursive 11y ago

What is meant by "third party tracking tag"?

irascible 11y ago
A single pixel image loaded from a domain that tracks the ip of the downloader? There are probably lots of variations.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  Don't forget, that single GET also comes with cookies so tracking isn't limited to a single IP.

irascible 11y ago

When the police get hit with ransomware.. they pay the ransom.. and by they, I mean me.

avodonosov 11y ago

you are welcome!

elcapitan 11y ago

"Rothenberg Says Ad Blocking Is a War against Diversity and Freedom of Expression" That quote was probably the most ridiculous and self-revealing thing I've read in a long time. Are they really that desparate? Good to hear.

Hoasi 11y ago
It seems they are, although the ad industry never shied from hurling gross statements either.

generj 11y ago

I've often wondered if an ad blocker more like an anti-virus heuristic system could be created. It would look for suspicious looking JS and block it, as well as ban any code which auto-plays video or fullscreens. Add some machine learning algos with image recognition and the user's ability to mark "Don't display stuff like this again" and there would be a very good compromise between viewing ads and keeping a device secure. More persistent tracking, especially cross-domain tracking, could also be avoided. The alternative is something I've entitled "Enhanced Do Not Track", which consists of setting the DNT header and then maliciously editing advertising information sent by the browser. In time, advertisers would learn to actually obey DNT calls or face the prospect of terrible data.

Symbiote 11y ago
As I understand it, that's the aim of Privacy Badger: https://www.eff.org/privacybadger https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
- generj 11y ago
  Thanks for the heads up! I'm always very impressed with the EFF and what they do with my donations :) I'll install it on my personal computer. An irony I have is that as a worker in the analytics field, I can't block ads or analytics on my work device despite knowing better than most the extent to which they track me. But when doing QA on a screenshare, I can't afford the chance of forgetting I have a blocking solution on and then not seeing any analytics requests pop up.

harwoodleon 11y ago

When you are talking about structural failure of a system - how about an action that fails 80-99% of the time? I'd consider that a failure. Internet advertising as an action created by companies is a complete failed system propped up by players like Google. I bet that as a total percentage of visited sites from webpages, advertising will account for a tiny fraction. The perception by advertisers that this is a product they should buy, even though it fails massively, and is very very hard to attribute value to, means we are only one small hop away from billboard and radio advertising. The illusion of statistical/analytical evidence is so frail without a massive privacy compromise, it makes the whole task seem pointless from both sides. Now that malware is a part of the mix, makes everyone think - lets just block this shit and get on with our lives. The ad business now is like a computerised 80's junk tv ad marketplace. Offering little or no value to anyone. The original instinct by the OP was correct, users are at the heart of the internet - not companies.

nsns 11y ago
Well, you could say that advertising companies are actually in the business of tempting their clients into advertising by promising them the ability to tempt the general public into buying their products. The problem imo is that, ever since Google has paved the way, monetizing an online product has become fixed on a single, double-edged strategy: either show ads or sell your users' data to advertisers.
- pbhjpbhj 11y ago
  Or freemium, or paid subscription ... and then the companies will sell your data anyway because data of people willing to pay off more highly valued.

kyledrake 11y ago

I'm just going to leave this here https://kyledrake.neocities.org/adblockbar/ https://kyledrake.neocities.org/adblockbar/ The bait doesn't work 100% of the time yet, so I wouldn't recommend using it in production. Edit: ooh neat, I just found a few better ways to do adblock detection. Maybe I'll update this code to work better now..

edwintorok 11y ago
Why do you link to uBlock instead of uBlock Origin? I thought uBlock Origin from the original developer is to be preferred, and that uBlock is no longer actively developed and the donations for uBlock do not benefit the actively maintained uBlock Origin.
- kyledrake 11y ago
  News to me. I don't think that was the case at the time. I'll switch to origin. Looks like the link I was using just redirects to the new site.
  - edwintorok 11y ago
    See the explanation on https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#beware-ublock-origin-is-completely-unrelated-to-the-web-site-ublockorg https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#beware-ublock-origin-is-co...
  - gorhill 11y ago
    > Looks like the link I was using just redirects to the new site. There is no redirection: you are using "ublock.org" directly in your source code. I consider "ublock.org" to be a scam[1], and I consider your page to be propping up a scam. [1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/1451#issuecomment-193013783 https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/1451#issuecomment-1...
kyledrake 11y ago
Update: I've got it working better now, but the design on the topbar is now screwed up for some reason. I'll debug it sometime in the future.

based2 11y ago

tx for manageable proxies

inglor 11y ago

Nah, we can now formally prove that the code inside an ad is completely safe. So much that this is proposed since a few days ago for direct inclusion in the JavaScript language. This is Mark Miller's work http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/40673.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co... Anyone who wants to hold an educated opinion on the topic should read it. EDIT: sauce for "direct inclusion": https://github.com/FUDCo/ses-realm https://github.com/FUDCo/ses-realm

justabystander 11y ago
What code is "safe" isn't necessarily something that's set in stone. Exploits could easily deliver code that looks safe but causes problems. And each new version could introduce a new exploit. And then there's the upcoming WebAssembly, which is bound to be ruined by ad networks in the future.
- tyingq 11y ago
  I believe it's also common to just create a safe, but high CTR ad (OMG 60% off) and save the malicious javascript for the landing page.

chopin 11y ago

With regard to malware delivery via ad networks I'd think it would help already if web site providers where held accountable for all content delivered via their site. I don't understand that there hasn't been a law suit over this yet.

DanielBMarkham 11y ago

How about this: we make a new tag <advertising></advertising> Inside this tag can only go text-link ads. Ads in any other form on the page will be ignored. But for ads with those tags, the text will be displayed at the top of the browser, in the premium location for users to see it. This allows ads, reduces the impact of ads on visual clutter, eliminates delivery of malware via ads, and drastically decreases page weight and load time. In addition, by enforcing an arbitrary scarcity, advertisers will be forced to bid-up for one spot on the page instead of being lured into more and more complex advertising platforms that are unwieldy to operate and many times have dubious added value.

a_imho 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_bit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_bit First for not rendering advertising tags. There is nothing inherent about advertising, a unique tag for it feels a bit arrogant.
- DanielBMarkham 11y ago
  You misunderstood. The point wasn't to make an evil bit. If we're going to have the semantic web, isn't advertising an important part of any page layout. Good grief, we have header, footer, microtags, and god knows what else. Advertising is at least as semantically important as the rest of it. After all, that's all adblockers are trying to do anyway -- identify the semantic purpose of those hunks of code used for content sponsorship. This is semantically important even if nothing else changes in the deliver-render system.

mattkevan 11y ago

I've been thinking this for a while: would it be feasible to create a labelling body for online advertising and privacy? I see it a bit like Fairtrade or FSC certified, but for advertising and tracking - an independently verified set of criteria which must be met to be awarded the standard. As an independent body, it wouldn't have the conflict of interest of, say Eyeo/ABP. And unlike offline standards agencies which rely on self-certification and occasional inspections, the testing would be done at the browser plugin level to filter out any scripts and ads which don't meet the standard. A combination of marketing to end-users as to the benefits of ethical advertising, and real-time feedback to site owners and advertisers as to which ads were blocked, why they were blocked and how much money that cost them could be a powerful incentive to clean things up.

WilliamOfRolez 11y ago
There is a non-profit association that is in charge of building standards and regulating (as much as possible) online ads. It's called Interactive Advertising Bureau (http://www.iab.com http://www.iab.com) and they are described as : "The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is an advertising business organization that develops industry standards, conducts research, and provides legal support for the online advertising industry. The organization represents a large number of the most prominent media outlets globally, but mostly in the United States and in Europe." Their cause is great and they have been establishing solid foundations but the very description shows it's limit: "mostly in the United States and in Europe". The shady ad networks are usually registered and host their content in none of those regions which means they are free of any standards and there isn't much the IAB can do about it.
xorcist 11y ago
> testing would be done at the browser plugin level to filter out any scripts and ads which don't meet the standard I think you are describing pretty much any ad block plugin. If you serve ads from your own domain with an img tag, they don't be blocked. It's just that very few people do that.
- mattkevan 11y ago

Moru 11y ago

Adblocking from the small-scale advertiser is a great money-saver. As an advertiser I would feel that the site is stealing from me when I see that they require people to turn off ad-blocking. I know their visitors that use blocking software would never buy from me anyway, so why should I pay to show ads to them?

mirimir 11y ago

> One of the pioneers of Javascript, the most widely used technology in the web today, Douglas Crockford argued that the most reliable and cost-effective method to inject malicious code on to a user’s device is to buy an ad. Wow. Just wow. Worse than email spearphishing, even. Totally automatic. I wonder if anti-malware apps catch any of this.

SixSigma 11y ago

In the old days, advertisers sent ad copy to the magazine / newspaper and they added it to their content. I could turn the page or not read it. Sometimes it was interesting. In specialist magazines, the editorial content is often secondary to the advertising. I read "Professional Builders Monthly" so I can keep an eye on new products being advertised. My experience is enhanced by advertising. The cost of effort is borne by the advertisers and publishers. The production costs are covered by the advertisers and the purchaser of the information (me). On the internet there is significant cost to me. I risk malicious actors, I pay for bandwidth and CPU cycles, my attention is stolen by flashing and sound, data is collected on my habits and traded with who knows who - my experience is degraded not enhanced by advertising.

timonovici 11y ago

One interesting idea would be to move the advertising server-side. Just smash a ruby gem in your project, or a PHP file, and let's see how well you'll sleep when you know somebody can inject code on your server whenever they feel like it. If that would be the standard way to go, I doubt people would just bundle all advertising scripts they can find around the web.

usrusr 11y ago
This will be the inevitable outcome of the ad blocker war. The CDN of today will become the ad splicing networks of tomorrow.

st3v3ndungan 11y ago

Third party Javascript is the problem, right? Is it feasible for a domain to only accept ads with static content? Or, for dynamic content, share the relevant portions of their own JS / envelope third party JS into their own code base (and presumably scrub it/test it)?

foobarbecue 11y ago

What is "experdience"?

gumby 11y ago

Quite apart from the malware problem, the privacy problem may be unfixable. I have a friend working at $major-site-we-all-use who is tracking people who don't even log in and who have ad blockers installed. He cares less who they are IRL and just how he can send them "native" content. Bleagh.

paulddraper 11y ago

Isn't Web ad blocking is the equivalent of DVR for TV? Should there be more of a controversy for DVR, or less of a controversy for Web ad blockers?

ngrilly 11y ago

Who is the author?

CalRobert 11y ago

The weird thing about opposition to ad blocking is that downloading a page via curl or wget means I see no ads at all, just links to JS hosted on other servers. But nobody says those tools are unethical (I think). Incidentally, I wonder why we don't see more ad networks implemented server-side as a way to help prevent blocking? Is it too hard to track with reasonable accountability?

rehevkor5 11y ago

Who wrote it? And when?