33 ms·

The right to use adblockers

338 points by jrepinc 3y ago

teekert 3y ago
A browser is your car on the digital highway. Said car should have your best interest as priority #1. Not the highway itself, not some company. You. Use Firefox people, before it is too late.
- HenryBemis 3y ago
  The way the interweb currently works is bringing stuff into my computer, and showing it to me here. Even with streaming, I see it 'here'. So My PC, My Rules. If the interweb changes and I see it 'there' instead of 'here' we can discuss again.
- jefftk 3y ago
  And, yet, if Firefox decided to ship an ad blocker on by default they would lose their primary source of funding.
  - oh_sigh 3y ago
    That sounds like Firefox made a bad decision to fund their operations by selling the default search engine space to an advertising company, then.
    - teekert 3y ago
      It’s chicken and egg. Because of their low usage numbers they don’t have much leverage and a deal with devil is the option they’re forced into.
      - lolinder 3y ago
        To date, Mozilla refuses to let me donate to directly fund Firefox. I can donate to Mozilla, but then they'll take my money and pursue whatever their current distraction of the month is. I can pay for Pocket, but then I'm paying for Pocket, which I don't need or want. I can't just give them money and say "I really, really want this money to go directly to Firefox, not to another side project". Until they offer that as an option, they cannot claim to have tried everything.
        JoshTriplett 3y ago
        I'd love to have an option to pay for Firefox Sync. It's by far my favorite Firefox feature, I use it every day, and I'd happily pay for it even if they just said "this just funds ongoing development and offers no added features", though they'd get more revenue if they find something to offer for paying users.
      - jefftk 3y ago
        Firefox has been funded by selling the default search engine for decades, including when it had 30% market share.
  - JoshTriplett 3y ago
    Has that actually been established, or is it still just speculation? I doubt the contract actually says that, though of course it might affect future renewals.
    - jefftk 3y ago
      Sorry, I'm claiming they would lose their primary source of funding in the sense that the next time the contract came up for bid no one would want it.
      - JoshTriplett 3y ago
        I'm at least somewhat skeptical here. The value gained by Google from all those searches is not exclusively in the ads shown. It might lower the value of the contract, but I would be at least somewhat surprised if it lowered it to zero.
        jefftk 3y ago
        There is value from seeing which result a user apparently likes best, which lets you train your search engine better. But Google already has a ton of this and the marginal contribution from Firefox users must be minimal. Instead, probably a different, smaller, search engine would probably pay. Though, even then, simply the cost of serving acceptable search results could be higher than the marginal value of the data? Either way, this goes from a contract bringing in hundreds of millions to maybe tens at best?
        JoshTriplett 3y ago
        There's value in being the one to serve personalized results, get people to sign up for accounts, cross-sell other services...
- evulhotdog 3y ago
  If only it gracefully supported profiles in a similar way to Chrome. Having two binaries running gets real funky when you want to open a page in whatever browser window you recently used, which also happens to be the most recent profile, too.
  - teekert 3y ago
    Is this not a use case for containers? On any other browser I always miss my containers.
  - wjdp 3y ago
    I'm aware it's not the same as Chrome profiles but multi-account containers, where individual tabs can have their own sessions, is a killer feature of Firefox. The ability to have multiple AWS accounts logged into at the same time in tabs side by side is a real time saver.
  - mrj 3y ago
    I use containers with SideBerry for this. I have panels dedicated to google accounts (broadly: work, other and personal). When I'm in a panel and click a link it opens correctly with the right container and corresponding auth. It's the best flow I've found. You can also set rules for domains to always open (or prompt) in a container, but I found that to be too much work for several common domains that I use from different profiles. I do still have rules set up for some things like Github, which should always use my personal container. That's nice since no matter what mode I'm working in, it opens correctly and I don't have to log into Github for each container. And I have stuff like Linkedin and Facebook firewalled into a social container.
  - danShumway 3y ago
    The problem is there's no single right answer about how isolated profiles should be. Firefox offers two options: 1. full profiles, which are almost completely isolated. They're separate processes, the data can live on separate parts of your computer. I do not want that to go away, I like being able to have almost separate Firefox installs on my computer. 2. containers, which are lighter profiles than Chrome and attempt to isolate sites without isolating browser settings. I also really like these, and I don't want them to go away, although I wouldn't mind them getting some additional controls for segmenting more of the browser. What a lot of people want is: 3. Something in the middle between those two things. I'm not opposed to that, but I don't think it's necessarily settled that Chrome's approach is perfect or that different users might not want some things to be less separated than Chrome's approach or more separated. "Something in the middle" can mean a lot of different things, and there are a lot of users that sound like they're asking for the same things (better profiles), when I suspect in actuality many of them have very different ideas about what they want that to look like. I'm down for Firefox offering more options there, but I don't know that there is a singular version of profiles that would satisfy everyone, I suspect the only way this actually works is if it's somewhat configurable. And I definitely don't want the less isolated version of profiles to replace the real actually isolated profiles that Firefox has now. I want at least the option to keep my profiles as separate binaries. Rather than making a completely separate 3rd option, maybe the better option is for containers to have more customization and to allow more isolation? Firefox already doesn't really expose containers without an extension (which is probably a mistake, but whatever) so having different extensions that are hooking in differently and could turn on/off different isolation features might be a middle ground. It does get a little weird if you also want to also isolate addons, but...
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  Firefox has Mozilla Corporation as its #1 priority best interest.
  - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
    Honestly I trust Mozilla more than Google or Microsoft. Not that corporations should be trusted. It's more of a "less bad" situation.
  - roelschroeven 3y ago
    Through the way things are set up, Firefox has Mozilla Foundation as its number 1 priority. Corporation makes money for Foundation, Foundation steers everything.
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      Mozilla Foundation serves the interests of Mozilla Corporation (including Firefox), and Mozilla Corporation in turn serves the interests of its CEO Mitchell Baker.[1] Foundation makes money for Corporation, CEO steers everything (literally, as CEO of Corporation and Chairman of Foundation). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary-achievements_correlation_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary...
      - roelschroeven 3y ago
        In what way does the Mozilla Foundation serve the interests of the Mozilla Corporation? Not financially, that's for sure. How else? That Mozilla Corporation serves the interests of Mitchell Baker, that I can believe. Note that Mitchell Baker is also one of the six members of the board of directors of Mozilla Foundation. > Foundation makes money for Corporation What? No, that's completely incorrect. Corporation makes some money, mainly from deals with search engines, all of which goes from Corporation to Foundation. No money is ever transferred the other way around. Corporation is fully owned by Foundation. Corporation brings in money for Foundation, Foundation steers Corporation.
- InCityDreams 3y ago
  Please, may i use a browser of my choice?
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    You may choose between Chrome, Chrome (Edge), Chrome (Brave), Chrome (Opera), Chrome (Vivaldi), Chrome (Chromium), Chrome (the others), Safari, and the remainder of which Firefox is probably the most known.
  - teekert 3y ago
    I will allow it. But it’s good to know the consequences and take them into consideration.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
kleiba 3y ago
> the court nevertheless preserved Axel Springer’s right to exclude users with an activated adblocker from accessing its content I actually think this is fair, and I say that as someone who has been using adblockers since the dawn of time and couldn't imagine using a webbrowser without it. I believe the court has decided absolutely sanely for one: it should be my choice as an internet user whether I want to be exposed ot ads or not. In my case: no way, Jose. And to those who make the argument that a lot of what the internet offers todays would be unsustainable without the ad revenue, I say that although you may think that you cannot live without this or that or the other on the internet, let me reassure you: you can. Everything on the internet is expendable. Trust me. Yes, even TikTok, son. Heck, most of what you're in love with today wasn't even there 10 years ago. It may come in as a surprise to some but yes, you can have a life without the internet. And to be honest, I'd rather lose some conveniences if the alternative is this absolute insanity that is today's web without an adblocker. But if content providers do not want to give me their stuff unless I watch their ads, I think that's fine. It's your right to do that. Just don't think that I am going to turn off the adblocker for you as a consequence. Much more likely, I'm just going to go somewhere else for my kick.
- Xenoamorphous 3y ago
  > Just don't think that I am going to turn off the adblocker for you as a consequence. Much more likely, I'm just going to go somewhere else for my kick. You’ll be saving them money (less infrastructure costs, like bandwith) without giving a penny to their competitors (because you’re using an adblocker); actually now you’re probably a net loss for their competitors. So they’re happy to lose you, I guess? We’re headed towards a paywalled Internet, I know first hand. And I hate it.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    I'm actually very excited to get back to the point where services compete for my money rather than for my attention. Advertising has created an internet that has an enormous amount of content, most of which is just... bad. It's hard to find good content because almost all of it is engineered to get clicks. A paywalled internet will mean I'll have to be choosier about what I consume, but what's available will hopefully be high quality because it's not competing for my attention when I'm at my weakest at the end of a long day, it's competing for my wallet when I rationally review the budget every month.
alphazard 3y ago
This is ridiculous. We don't need people pontificating about what "rights" exist when I chose to request content from someone else's server. We need better ad-blocking technologies. Let the arms race continue. Haven't had to deal with ads for years now, as a happy Firefox + uBlock user.
- drdaeman 3y ago
  This. Service operators have no saying in how you process the response, as long as it doesn’t violate any laws (e.g. redistribution beyond fair use) But. The end of this arms race is gonna be problematic because of the halting problem. Unlike some other issues, we possibly don’t want to push it too hard here until the society catches up, or we’ll end up with black box programs inside the browsers, handling all aspects of rendering. That would be a wasteful loss for everyone.
  - ilc 3y ago
    The camel's nose is already there. Say hi to DRM.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    If I can't find browsers that help me protect myself from websites, I'll just stop using the web entirely. The web has been getting less useful, more irritating, and more problematic for years anyway. At this point, it wouldn't be a huge loss to me.
- tantalor 3y ago
  > We don't need people pontificating about what "rights" exist While you may prefer anarchy, in the real world courts will make these choices for you, and enforce the rules, putting your property and liberty at risk.
  - alphazard 3y ago
    In this case it's a bit like legislating the weather. Rights are just commitments by a government to ensure certain things do/don't happen within its area of reach. A right is only as good as a government's ability to enforce it. In this case we aren't talking about life or property or physical things in a single jurisdiction. We are talking about information exchanged over a distributed network, that spans nearly every jurisdiction on Earth. Unless you are expecting a single world government, monitoring every network link, and a ban on encryption in the near future, it's unreasonable to expect the "rights" being discussed to materially impact you. Maybe you work in advertising, and this does actually affect some number in a quarterly report.
simion314 3y ago
I can't find the original source, but there are many articles that claim that FBI recommends ad blockers, the ad networks made the internet unsafe so we need to setup ad blockers on our and our family computers.
- josefresco 3y ago
  This piqued my interest and lo and behold they do! "Use an ad blocking extension when performing internet searches. Most internet browsers allow a user to add extensions, including extensions that block advertisements. These ad blockers can be turned on and off within a browser to permit advertisements on certain websites while blocking advertisements on others." https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2022/PSA221221 https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2022/PSA221221
Justsignedup 3y ago
Unfortunately devs don't get a vote, we're just too much of a minority. Remember IE6? It took google literally firing all guns to de-throne it, and they did it because they injected a message with every google search to use chrome. Unfortunately... i don't know what we can do, even if the entire dev community gives google the finger.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- IlliOnato 3y ago
  In Europe, Firefox usage was 30-40% (depending on a country) before Chrome has arrived.
userbinator 3y ago
IMHO this is just a small part of a bigger struggle -- the right to use the browser of your choice (and thus one that also presents content the way you want), and by extension, the rest of your software and hardware environment.
syndacks 3y ago
They have an advertisement begging for money at the top of the page.
- syndacks 3y ago
  Please fsfe.org, I’m dying to know more about “The right not to be advertised to”
  - Bu9818 3y ago
    They aren't preventing you from using a content filter nor are they making it difficult to scrape the site. The counter measures against this are the problem.
- alpaca128 3y ago
  And yet they don't tell you to turn off your adblocker
Dwedit 3y ago
Right to use Adblockers also means the remote server has the right to force you to download and display the ads as a condition of getting the content. Thus begins the arms race. The client can simulate all that happening, but ultimately not actually present the ads to the user (possibly including a blank screen with a timer for enforced video ads). Then the server starts forcing client attestation to make sure their scripts run in a trusted environment. Gets really messy really quick.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  When people make it clear to me the terms of visiting their property, I take care to abide by them or go elsewhere. It only escalates when one side decides they must visit yet not abide by the terms.
- thfuran 3y ago
  >Thus begins the arms race. The client can simulate all that happening, but ultimately not actually present the ads to the user That's trespassing but with a computer.
  - BLKNSLVR 3y ago
    I disagree, because the 'processing' occurs on the local (my) machine. A user is not "visiting" a website, they're not stepping onto their property, they are sending a request for data, and the website is replying to that request. A copy of their data is being willingly sent for display to the users machine. In the case of DNS blocking, requests to advertising addresses aren't made, so no response is received. In the case of in-browser content blocking, the received reply is put through a filter to remove the elements of the reply that the user doesn't want. The concept of trespass just doesn't fit here.
    - thfuran 3y ago
      >A copy of their data is being willingly sent for display to the users machine. Not if you're telling their posted signage to go fuck itself and ignoring the terms under which it was provided.
Manuel_D 3y ago
My go-to analogy: I subscribe to a magazine. It has ads. I pay my butler to cut out the ads. Is that illegal? Now I have a robot butler doing the exact same thing. Is that illegal? The web server is serving you content. Your ad blocker is a robot butler cutting the ads out of the documents you're receiving.
- unshavedyak 3y ago
  Yup. If you reverse the situation it gets even harder to define. Ie to say you're not allowed to automate your avoidance of ads seems to bundle your consumption of content with your attention to ads. How much attention are we required to give these ads? How much annoyance in bypassing them is required? Are we only allowed to walk away from the TV to avoid ads? etc
  - iamacyborg 3y ago
    Not only are you expected to put up with the ad, you’re expected to put up with your personal data being sent to hundreds/thousands of third parties whenever someone wants to show you an ad.
  - userbinator 3y ago
    Indeed, either muting and doing something else or changing the channel was a common thing to do back when TV was an actual tube. From a similar era, it's also worth noting that some VCRs had automatic "adblocking" (pause recording, and resume once the ad breaks were over.) Personally, I think it boils down to: my eyes, my brain. I shouldn't be compelled to effectively lose the right to close my eyes when I want to.
- IlliOnato 3y ago
  The magazine is given to you for free, you don't pay for it. The magazine is able to detect that your butler is cutting out the ads. The magazine decides it does not want to send you its issues any more. Is that illegal?
  - MiddleEndian 3y ago
phailhaus 3y ago
At the end of the day, you have no "right" to a site's content. You have the right to use an adblocker, and a site that depends on its revenue has the right to refuse to serve you.
- lolinder 3y ago
  Yes, that's what the court ruled: > While user freedom means that users are able to use the tools that they wish to when browsing the World Wide Web, the court nevertheless preserved Axel Springer’s right to exclude users with an activated adblocker from accessing its content. This can be understood as an approval on the use of adblock detection tools by companies like Axel Springer. This sounds fine to me. If you want to put your content on the internet for all to see, great, but I'm not going to let my browser render the ads that you suggest that it render. If you want to put the content behind a paywall or otherwise block ad blockers, fine, I'll pay if it's worth my money or I won't if it's not. But I'm not going to turn my ad blocker off just because content publishers whine about it.
  - phailhaus 3y ago
    Yep! I use an adblocker but I can't fault a site for trying to keep me out.
- iamacyborg 3y ago
  I’d happily put up with banner ads on websites, it’s the mechanism that serves that ad that I find contentious and is the reason I personally use an ad blocker.
- simonblack 3y ago
  and a site that depends on its revenue has the right to refuse to serve you. Certainly. But it's dumb on their behalf because you won't see any of their message at all. In practical terms, they might as well not exist.
  - phailhaus 3y ago
    Not at all, because you ended up on their site anyways.
mathgradthrow 3y ago
How you choose to render bits that are served to you is as fundamentally your right as whether you choose to leave your eyes open, or read text that has been put in front of you. Moreover, your right to not be spied on for you browser configuration is the same as your right to not have your irises tracked. This isn't even close.
Havoc 3y ago
This feels off to me. I feel entitled to use an adblocker, but I also feel the site should be entitled to make corresponding choice their side. The reality is much of the web is ad funded, so some sort of ugly compromise is necessary. Allowing both sides to do as they please seems more fair than holding a gun to corporates head and telling them no. That said I reckon news is an exception - it's way too centralized and way to crucial to democracy to let all the big news orgs move as a unit. The way they all moved as a unit & some lead the charge on paywalls knowingly taking a hit felt way too coordinated for my liking.
- InCityDreams 3y ago
  Ads in the street fund...something. I ignore them as they aren't terribly targeting, and I'm not an impulse buyer based on some pic of an overly happy smiley person. Inasmuch as I'm not obligated to fund the advertisers and companies I see in the streets, the same is true of the net. I owe them nothing - especially as they try and track me. I leave my phone in the car when i go shopping so location isn't a thing they can utilise against me, which they would if possible. Having said that, i am looking after a friends dog at the moment. I walked past a store that sells royal canine a few days ago... got an ad for dog food on amazon, and in my gmail. Coincidence? Possibly. Am i nervous? Absolutely you should be too.
  - berkes 3y ago
    Ads in the streets fund surprisingly little. I've spent energy and time finding out how much my local govt got from these ads and learned three things. They don't want to tell, because it's embarrassing small amounts. They don't really know the exact numbers. Many ads on "public spaces" fund private or corporate coffers rather than municipality.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  Streets are a public space. Yet even there access to the street remains free, and ads tend to be on private property. Most of the Internet would not qualify. Though I suppose it could be argued parts are much like a public square.
Conscat 3y ago
All respect to Michael Larabel's reporting itself, but opening a Phoronix article and seeing a dozen ad embeds which constitute most of the page weight is a frequent reminder to me that I live in heck.
- vkazanov 3y ago
  It should be a reminder to just pay for Michael's work.
- JoshTriplett 3y ago
  The ads are nothing compared to the comments section. I'd happily start paying, if they deleted the comments section entirely.
samstave 3y ago
If I cannot use an ad-blocker, then I should be able to have a perfect measurment of what % of my bandwidth, for which I pay for, is consumed by ads, and then charge them a fee for resource utilization, convenience fee, fcc annoyance fee, corrupt-packet fee and dropped-packet waste of resource fee, and congestion fee.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  If you're consuming content on ad supported services and sites, then why would anyone be reimbursement you for bandwidth costs that they have no control over? You could be on a network paid for by your employer, one very frugally negotiated, or a redundant yet costly satellite link you have for vanity reasons.
- thfuran 3y ago
  Why do you feel entitled to send a bill to someone who only gave you what you asked them to give you?
  - asadotzler 3y ago
    The point was, I think, that they're giving more than what was asked for. With an ad blocker a user can opt out of expensive parts of the content and if they're denied that then they're being forced to consume the content they didn't want. A website makes a bunch of files available publicly. My user agent picks a few of those files it wants and ignores the rest. If my UA is forced to acquire all the files or the specific set the site requires, they're forcing me to spend my resources downloading, processing, and displaying files I don't want, at great expense both to my wallet and my time, and my mind. I have a tool that manages this for me and they're telling me I can't engage with some of their content because I won't engage with other of their content. It's like a buffet that requires you fill your plate only the way they want it filled. It's a buffet. It's not a prefix.
    - thfuran 3y ago
      >The point was, I think, that they're giving more than what was asked for. They're not. You just turned out to not actually want what you asked for. >I have a tool that manages this for me and they're telling me I can't engage with some of their content because I won't engage with other of their content. Yes, because they provided the former free of charge solely on the basis that you'd accept the latter as well.
lee 3y ago
I'm totally fine with this. Content is paid with your eyeballs or with money. If you're not willing to pay with your eyeballs, then you shouldn't get the content. I think that's fair. In China where copyright laws aren't enforced, there's simply no economic incentive for producers to create content...let's not go there.
BLKNSLVR 3y ago
Part of the problem is the terminology 'adblocker' is outdated and essentially incorrect. Ads aren't ads. They're trackers, viruses, malware, scams. Even video ads on Youtube, whilst not vectors of viruses or malware, they're advertising literal scams and YouTube are responding saying these ads are 'within' policy guidelines. As I've said a few times before (in various ways), browsing the internet without an 'ad blocker' is like running Windows in the 90's / 00's without anti-virus software when you're a serial downloader of interesting programs / executables (like I was); it's negligent, you're asking for trouble. The advertising industry, Google, Facebook, etc. are hiding behind the terminology "advertising" because it makes it sound a lot more palatable than what the reality is, as I said above: tracking, malware, viruses, scams. If it was just advertising, then I'd be much less rabidly agressive in my defense of blocking it: Annoying is a long way separated from Dangerous. Advertising, as it has evolved on the Internet, is Dangerous.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  >Ads aren't ads. They're trackers, viruses, malware, scams. Even video ads on Youtube, whilst not vectors of viruses or malware, they're advertising literal scams and YouTube are responding saying these ads are 'within' policy guidelines. >If it was just advertising, then I'd be much less rabidly agressive in my defense of blocking it: Annoying is a long way separated from Dangerous. This really needs to be emphasized more, because the problem is that these so-called "ads" aren't just ads anymore as you said. If they were just ads, sure they would be annoying (or hilarious if they are made well!) but ultimately not something that most of us would feel a religious desire to block out of our lives. But no, they aren't just ads anymore. They are malicious in their intent and harmful in their contents. If it's not the "ads" trojan horsing malware onto our computers, it's their contents directing us towards scams and harmful activities. That dangerous bullshit deserves to be blocked out with extreme prejudice. Adblocking is the anti-virus of the 2010s and '20s, it's a defensive measure to keep ourselves safe.
  - anotherevan 3y ago
    I call them HTML firewalls.
ssowonny 3y ago
Adblockers can be likened to piracy, similar to downloading movies from torrents. It's true that service providers should be mindful of ad usage to avoid alienating users. However, using services and bypassing ads equates to appropriating the service's property. If you disagree with a service's monetization methods, it's best not to use it. Don't steal it.
- 627467 3y ago
  How should someone know the terms of use BEFORE being served the data (including the terms)? It's not stealing if you're broadcasting.
  - mynameisnoone 3y ago
    Remember shrinkwrap EULAs? You agree to a EULA you can't read beforehand by opening the box or shrinkwrap. Now, there are perpetually-changing EULAs you don't get to agree to that just change underneath you, and are rarely notified about.
- mynameisnoone 3y ago
  Except you're offering their bullshit Hobson's choice: submit or live like a Mennonite. Anything now that doesn't involve you jumping at the chance to hand over larger and lager piles of money is deemed "unpatriotic" and "criminal". That sort of groomed consumer bullshit can GTFO.
- wolfendin 3y ago
  It can’t be likened to piracy because I am asking the website for a document, they’re giving it to me, suggesting I download other documents, and I am deciding not to. I am not taking something they own by force on a ship. I am not distributing their intellectual property to others without authorization.
- jpambrun 3y ago
  I would first need to see the site to get a sense of if I agree with the monetization, but at that I would have seen the ads. Hence I block all ads,if a site has a nag screen about ad blocker, I block it from my searches with Kagi. I wish it already had a block list for that so I never see these sites at all. Sites who does that are typically of very low quality anyway.
heads 3y ago
It is difficult to take the complaint terribly seriously when part of their case against Adblock Plus is that it “violates the freedom of the press”. Imagine if newspapers were free and supported by ads, but only had ads in the top 2” x 2” corner, on the outside edge of the paper. Imagine also that I sold a kind of square knife-press that you could use to stamp-cut the ads out all in one go. No one would seriously claim I was doing something wrong — just move the ads around to random places on each page! Is it laziness that stops publishers from shipping targeted ads from their own servers, inlined in the content in a way that cannot be distinguished from article images or text?
- jefftk 3y ago
  > Is it laziness that stops publishers from shipping targeted ads from their own servers, inlined in the content in a way that cannot be distinguished from article images or text? No, it's about fraud. With your proposal advertisers have to trust publishers really will show their ads, and unless the publisher is very large and has a reputation to protect advertisers pretty reasonably don't trust them. (We do actually see what you're proposing, with YouTube, Facebook, Google Search, etc) You could do this by having the ad networks serve the pages, reverse proxying to the publisher and inserting the ads. And then the publisher page can run its verification scripts, instead of the ads running verification scripts. But that gives us a web served by Google, Criteo, AppNexus, etc. which would be pretty sad.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
mynameisnoone 3y ago
Unfortunately, there isn't yet a corresponding human right to not being blocked for using an adblocker.
wdr1 3y ago
It's worth noting that Eyeo makes money by being paid to not block ads. This article estimates it at 55M euro in 2020. https://www.startbase.com/news/adblock-plus-mutter-eyeo-waechst-stark/ https://www.startbase.com/news/adblock-plus-mutter-eyeo-waec... I can understand defining a standard for acceptable ads. I can understand allowing ads that meet that standard. What I struggle with is allowing ads that meet that standard AND require payment.
matrix87 3y ago
> According to Axel Springer, Eyeo’s business model constituted: ... a violation of freedom of the press Wah, cry me a river. Some corporation making hundreds of millions of dollars thinks it has a right to run malware on people's computers, just so the executives can line their pockets with more money. Maybe they should spend some of those millions and figure out a less stupid monetization strategy instead of trying to dream up a bunch of laws that suit them
cannedbeets 3y ago
As long as malvertising(1) exists, adblockers are basic security hygiene. You wouldn’t click a random link, so why would you allow an ad server to execute arbitrary code on your computer? (1) https://www.tomsguide.com/us/malvertising-what-it-is,news-19877.html https://www.tomsguide.com/us/malvertising-what-it-is,news-19...
more_corn 3y ago
Advertisers like to claim that their content is speech. While this might be true I’d classify advertising as attempted manipulation. The advertiser only wins when they convince me to do something I wouldn’t have done otherwise. Often that thing is not in my best interest. Buying a new car is great for advertisers. It’s a terrible financial decision for me. Advertisers succeed by manipulating consumer behavior in ways that harm the consumer. Protecting myself from harmful manipulation is not only my right but I’d be an idiot not to do it. Companies that prevent me from protecting myself from manipulation earn my ire. Fighting against Adblock makes you a bad company, and people who do it are doing a bad thing. What do we call people who do bad things? I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
simonblack 3y ago
The way I see it, is that I have a choice whether to pay* for ads that are forced on me without my consent, or whether to block that advertising content. The website owner has the choice to allow me to see his website ad-free, or to refuse my access to his website altogether. That's OK. I can survive if I don't see his website at all. OTOH, if he blocks out too many of us, there won't be sufficient eyes on his advertising anyway. * pay for the ads I see? Yes. I have many times been in the situation where I had a small monthly quota of data such that my total data allowance per day was only 60 MB. It doesn't take many 5 MB advertisements to complete use up my meagre daily data allowance.
Terr_ 3y ago
I'd also raise the issue if liability, for when that advertisement is a scam or a vehicle for malware Javascript or buffer-overflowing media. If I have some kind of legal obligation to permit their system to do stuff on my computer, then surely they must have have some level of liability for what that stuff does or enables.
cdme 3y ago
If you don’t want me using an adblocker, you don’t want me using your site. I’m ok with that. If your site fails because I’ve blocked your analytics suite, you have a poorly developed site.
macguyvermectin 3y ago
I think it should be obvious that I have a right to decide whether server-imposed JavaScript and CSS will run on my computer. If I only want HTML to render, that’s my prerogative. And if a site’s HTML isn’t useable without CSS and JS, then that site is defective and I’ll black hole its domain on local DNS. If this breaks websites’ business models, that’s their problem, not mine. I don’t have bareback sex with strangers and I don’t visit random websites without uBlock Origin.
rldjbpin 3y ago
i have a straightforward principle for using the Web and serving a part of it: both parties have the right to serve and consume the content as they choose to. all this shaming by content owners who tend to continue pushing more intrusive ads is being rather unfair. at the same time, i don't see any issues with them witholding access to content if we try to bypass their intended use. today serving content at a reasonable level has never been this cheap. if you serve a 2MB webpage for 500 word piece, then it serves you right when you complain about how much it costs you to run it. using that argument to moral policing only goes so far.

338 points by jrepinc 3y ago

A browser is your car on the digital highway. Said car should have your best interest as priority #1. Not the highway itself, not some company. You. Use Firefox people, before it is too late.

HenryBemis 3y ago
The way the interweb currently works is bringing stuff into my computer, and showing it to me here. Even with streaming, I see it 'here'. So My PC, My Rules. If the interweb changes and I see it 'there' instead of 'here' we can discuss again.
jefftk 3y ago
And, yet, if Firefox decided to ship an ad blocker on by default they would lose their primary source of funding.
- oh_sigh 3y ago
  That sounds like Firefox made a bad decision to fund their operations by selling the default search engine space to an advertising company, then.
  - teekert 3y ago
    It’s chicken and egg. Because of their low usage numbers they don’t have much leverage and a deal with devil is the option they’re forced into.
    - lolinder 3y ago
      To date, Mozilla refuses to let me donate to directly fund Firefox. I can donate to Mozilla, but then they'll take my money and pursue whatever their current distraction of the month is. I can pay for Pocket, but then I'm paying for Pocket, which I don't need or want. I can't just give them money and say "I really, really want this money to go directly to Firefox, not to another side project". Until they offer that as an option, they cannot claim to have tried everything.
      - JoshTriplett 3y ago
        I'd love to have an option to pay for Firefox Sync. It's by far my favorite Firefox feature, I use it every day, and I'd happily pay for it even if they just said "this just funds ongoing development and offers no added features", though they'd get more revenue if they find something to offer for paying users.
    - jefftk 3y ago
      Firefox has been funded by selling the default search engine for decades, including when it had 30% market share.
- JoshTriplett 3y ago
  Has that actually been established, or is it still just speculation? I doubt the contract actually says that, though of course it might affect future renewals.
  - jefftk 3y ago
    Sorry, I'm claiming they would lose their primary source of funding in the sense that the next time the contract came up for bid no one would want it.
    - JoshTriplett 3y ago
      I'm at least somewhat skeptical here. The value gained by Google from all those searches is not exclusively in the ads shown. It might lower the value of the contract, but I would be at least somewhat surprised if it lowered it to zero.
      - jefftk 3y ago
        There is value from seeing which result a user apparently likes best, which lets you train your search engine better. But Google already has a ton of this and the marginal contribution from Firefox users must be minimal. Instead, probably a different, smaller, search engine would probably pay. Though, even then, simply the cost of serving acceptable search results could be higher than the marginal value of the data? Either way, this goes from a contract bringing in hundreds of millions to maybe tens at best?
        JoshTriplett 3y ago
        There's value in being the one to serve personalized results, get people to sign up for accounts, cross-sell other services...
evulhotdog 3y ago
If only it gracefully supported profiles in a similar way to Chrome. Having two binaries running gets real funky when you want to open a page in whatever browser window you recently used, which also happens to be the most recent profile, too.
- teekert 3y ago
  Is this not a use case for containers? On any other browser I always miss my containers.
- wjdp 3y ago
  I'm aware it's not the same as Chrome profiles but multi-account containers, where individual tabs can have their own sessions, is a killer feature of Firefox. The ability to have multiple AWS accounts logged into at the same time in tabs side by side is a real time saver.
- mrj 3y ago
  I use containers with SideBerry for this. I have panels dedicated to google accounts (broadly: work, other and personal). When I'm in a panel and click a link it opens correctly with the right container and corresponding auth. It's the best flow I've found. You can also set rules for domains to always open (or prompt) in a container, but I found that to be too much work for several common domains that I use from different profiles. I do still have rules set up for some things like Github, which should always use my personal container. That's nice since no matter what mode I'm working in, it opens correctly and I don't have to log into Github for each container. And I have stuff like Linkedin and Facebook firewalled into a social container.
- danShumway 3y ago
  The problem is there's no single right answer about how isolated profiles should be. Firefox offers two options: 1. full profiles, which are almost completely isolated. They're separate processes, the data can live on separate parts of your computer. I do not want that to go away, I like being able to have almost separate Firefox installs on my computer. 2. containers, which are lighter profiles than Chrome and attempt to isolate sites without isolating browser settings. I also really like these, and I don't want them to go away, although I wouldn't mind them getting some additional controls for segmenting more of the browser. What a lot of people want is: 3. Something in the middle between those two things. I'm not opposed to that, but I don't think it's necessarily settled that Chrome's approach is perfect or that different users might not want some things to be less separated than Chrome's approach or more separated. "Something in the middle" can mean a lot of different things, and there are a lot of users that sound like they're asking for the same things (better profiles), when I suspect in actuality many of them have very different ideas about what they want that to look like. I'm down for Firefox offering more options there, but I don't know that there is a singular version of profiles that would satisfy everyone, I suspect the only way this actually works is if it's somewhat configurable. And I definitely don't want the less isolated version of profiles to replace the real actually isolated profiles that Firefox has now. I want at least the option to keep my profiles as separate binaries. Rather than making a completely separate 3rd option, maybe the better option is for containers to have more customization and to allow more isolation? Firefox already doesn't really expose containers without an extension (which is probably a mistake, but whatever) so having different extensions that are hooking in differently and could turn on/off different isolation features might be a middle ground. It does get a little weird if you also want to also isolate addons, but...
Dalewyn 3y ago
Firefox has Mozilla Corporation as its #1 priority best interest.
- I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  Honestly I trust Mozilla more than Google or Microsoft. Not that corporations should be trusted. It's more of a "less bad" situation.
- roelschroeven 3y ago
  Through the way things are set up, Firefox has Mozilla Foundation as its number 1 priority. Corporation makes money for Foundation, Foundation steers everything.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    Mozilla Foundation serves the interests of Mozilla Corporation (including Firefox), and Mozilla Corporation in turn serves the interests of its CEO Mitchell Baker.[1] Foundation makes money for Corporation, CEO steers everything (literally, as CEO of Corporation and Chairman of Foundation). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary-achievements_correlation_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary...
    - roelschroeven 3y ago
      In what way does the Mozilla Foundation serve the interests of the Mozilla Corporation? Not financially, that's for sure. How else? That Mozilla Corporation serves the interests of Mitchell Baker, that I can believe. Note that Mitchell Baker is also one of the six members of the board of directors of Mozilla Foundation. > Foundation makes money for Corporation What? No, that's completely incorrect. Corporation makes some money, mainly from deals with search engines, all of which goes from Corporation to Foundation. No money is ever transferred the other way around. Corporation is fully owned by Foundation. Corporation brings in money for Foundation, Foundation steers Corporation.
InCityDreams 3y ago
Please, may i use a browser of my choice?
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  You may choose between Chrome, Chrome (Edge), Chrome (Brave), Chrome (Opera), Chrome (Vivaldi), Chrome (Chromium), Chrome (the others), Safari, and the remainder of which Firefox is probably the most known.
- teekert 3y ago
  I will allow it. But it’s good to know the consequences and take them into consideration.
deleted 3y ago
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kleiba 3y ago

> the court nevertheless preserved Axel Springer’s right to exclude users with an activated adblocker from accessing its content I actually think this is fair, and I say that as someone who has been using adblockers since the dawn of time and couldn't imagine using a webbrowser without it. I believe the court has decided absolutely sanely for one: it should be my choice as an internet user whether I want to be exposed ot ads or not. In my case: no way, Jose. And to those who make the argument that a lot of what the internet offers todays would be unsustainable without the ad revenue, I say that although you may think that you cannot live without this or that or the other on the internet, let me reassure you: you can. Everything on the internet is expendable. Trust me. Yes, even TikTok, son. Heck, most of what you're in love with today wasn't even there 10 years ago. It may come in as a surprise to some but yes, you can have a life without the internet. And to be honest, I'd rather lose some conveniences if the alternative is this absolute insanity that is today's web without an adblocker. But if content providers do not want to give me their stuff unless I watch their ads, I think that's fine. It's your right to do that. Just don't think that I am going to turn off the adblocker for you as a consequence. Much more likely, I'm just going to go somewhere else for my kick.

Xenoamorphous 3y ago
> Just don't think that I am going to turn off the adblocker for you as a consequence. Much more likely, I'm just going to go somewhere else for my kick. You’ll be saving them money (less infrastructure costs, like bandwith) without giving a penny to their competitors (because you’re using an adblocker); actually now you’re probably a net loss for their competitors. So they’re happy to lose you, I guess? We’re headed towards a paywalled Internet, I know first hand. And I hate it.
- lolinder 3y ago
  I'm actually very excited to get back to the point where services compete for my money rather than for my attention. Advertising has created an internet that has an enormous amount of content, most of which is just... bad. It's hard to find good content because almost all of it is engineered to get clicks. A paywalled internet will mean I'll have to be choosier about what I consume, but what's available will hopefully be high quality because it's not competing for my attention when I'm at my weakest at the end of a long day, it's competing for my wallet when I rationally review the budget every month.

alphazard 3y ago

This is ridiculous. We don't need people pontificating about what "rights" exist when I chose to request content from someone else's server. We need better ad-blocking technologies. Let the arms race continue. Haven't had to deal with ads for years now, as a happy Firefox + uBlock user.

drdaeman 3y ago
This. Service operators have no saying in how you process the response, as long as it doesn’t violate any laws (e.g. redistribution beyond fair use) But. The end of this arms race is gonna be problematic because of the halting problem. Unlike some other issues, we possibly don’t want to push it too hard here until the society catches up, or we’ll end up with black box programs inside the browsers, handling all aspects of rendering. That would be a wasteful loss for everyone.
- ilc 3y ago
  The camel's nose is already there. Say hi to DRM.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  If I can't find browsers that help me protect myself from websites, I'll just stop using the web entirely. The web has been getting less useful, more irritating, and more problematic for years anyway. At this point, it wouldn't be a huge loss to me.
tantalor 3y ago
> We don't need people pontificating about what "rights" exist While you may prefer anarchy, in the real world courts will make these choices for you, and enforce the rules, putting your property and liberty at risk.
- alphazard 3y ago
  In this case it's a bit like legislating the weather. Rights are just commitments by a government to ensure certain things do/don't happen within its area of reach. A right is only as good as a government's ability to enforce it. In this case we aren't talking about life or property or physical things in a single jurisdiction. We are talking about information exchanged over a distributed network, that spans nearly every jurisdiction on Earth. Unless you are expecting a single world government, monitoring every network link, and a ban on encryption in the near future, it's unreasonable to expect the "rights" being discussed to materially impact you. Maybe you work in advertising, and this does actually affect some number in a quarterly report.

simion314 3y ago

I can't find the original source, but there are many articles that claim that FBI recommends ad blockers, the ad networks made the internet unsafe so we need to setup ad blockers on our and our family computers.

josefresco 3y ago
This piqued my interest and lo and behold they do! "Use an ad blocking extension when performing internet searches. Most internet browsers allow a user to add extensions, including extensions that block advertisements. These ad blockers can be turned on and off within a browser to permit advertisements on certain websites while blocking advertisements on others." https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2022/PSA221221 https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2022/PSA221221

Justsignedup 3y ago

Unfortunately devs don't get a vote, we're just too much of a minority. Remember IE6? It took google literally firing all guns to de-throne it, and they did it because they injected a message with every google search to use chrome. Unfortunately... i don't know what we can do, even if the entire dev community gives google the finger.

deleted 3y ago
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IlliOnato 3y ago
In Europe, Firefox usage was 30-40% (depending on a country) before Chrome has arrived.

userbinator 3y ago

IMHO this is just a small part of a bigger struggle -- the right to use the browser of your choice (and thus one that also presents content the way you want), and by extension, the rest of your software and hardware environment.

syndacks 3y ago

They have an advertisement begging for money at the top of the page.

syndacks 3y ago
Please fsfe.org, I’m dying to know more about “The right not to be advertised to”
- Bu9818 3y ago
  They aren't preventing you from using a content filter nor are they making it difficult to scrape the site. The counter measures against this are the problem.
alpaca128 3y ago
And yet they don't tell you to turn off your adblocker

Dwedit 3y ago

Right to use Adblockers also means the remote server has the right to force you to download and display the ads as a condition of getting the content. Thus begins the arms race. The client can simulate all that happening, but ultimately not actually present the ads to the user (possibly including a blank screen with a timer for enforced video ads). Then the server starts forcing client attestation to make sure their scripts run in a trusted environment. Gets really messy really quick.

paulryanrogers 3y ago
When people make it clear to me the terms of visiting their property, I take care to abide by them or go elsewhere. It only escalates when one side decides they must visit yet not abide by the terms.
thfuran 3y ago
>Thus begins the arms race. The client can simulate all that happening, but ultimately not actually present the ads to the user That's trespassing but with a computer.
- BLKNSLVR 3y ago
  I disagree, because the 'processing' occurs on the local (my) machine. A user is not "visiting" a website, they're not stepping onto their property, they are sending a request for data, and the website is replying to that request. A copy of their data is being willingly sent for display to the users machine. In the case of DNS blocking, requests to advertising addresses aren't made, so no response is received. In the case of in-browser content blocking, the received reply is put through a filter to remove the elements of the reply that the user doesn't want. The concept of trespass just doesn't fit here.
  - thfuran 3y ago
    >A copy of their data is being willingly sent for display to the users machine. Not if you're telling their posted signage to go fuck itself and ignoring the terms under which it was provided.

Manuel_D 3y ago

My go-to analogy: I subscribe to a magazine. It has ads. I pay my butler to cut out the ads. Is that illegal? Now I have a robot butler doing the exact same thing. Is that illegal? The web server is serving you content. Your ad blocker is a robot butler cutting the ads out of the documents you're receiving.

unshavedyak 3y ago
Yup. If you reverse the situation it gets even harder to define. Ie to say you're not allowed to automate your avoidance of ads seems to bundle your consumption of content with your attention to ads. How much attention are we required to give these ads? How much annoyance in bypassing them is required? Are we only allowed to walk away from the TV to avoid ads? etc
- iamacyborg 3y ago
  Not only are you expected to put up with the ad, you’re expected to put up with your personal data being sent to hundreds/thousands of third parties whenever someone wants to show you an ad.
- userbinator 3y ago
  Indeed, either muting and doing something else or changing the channel was a common thing to do back when TV was an actual tube. From a similar era, it's also worth noting that some VCRs had automatic "adblocking" (pause recording, and resume once the ad breaks were over.) Personally, I think it boils down to: my eyes, my brain. I shouldn't be compelled to effectively lose the right to close my eyes when I want to.
IlliOnato 3y ago
The magazine is given to you for free, you don't pay for it. The magazine is able to detect that your butler is cutting out the ads. The magazine decides it does not want to send you its issues any more. Is that illegal?
- MiddleEndian 3y ago

phailhaus 3y ago

At the end of the day, you have no "right" to a site's content. You have the right to use an adblocker, and a site that depends on its revenue has the right to refuse to serve you.

lolinder 3y ago
Yes, that's what the court ruled: > While user freedom means that users are able to use the tools that they wish to when browsing the World Wide Web, the court nevertheless preserved Axel Springer’s right to exclude users with an activated adblocker from accessing its content. This can be understood as an approval on the use of adblock detection tools by companies like Axel Springer. This sounds fine to me. If you want to put your content on the internet for all to see, great, but I'm not going to let my browser render the ads that you suggest that it render. If you want to put the content behind a paywall or otherwise block ad blockers, fine, I'll pay if it's worth my money or I won't if it's not. But I'm not going to turn my ad blocker off just because content publishers whine about it.
- phailhaus 3y ago
  Yep! I use an adblocker but I can't fault a site for trying to keep me out.
iamacyborg 3y ago
I’d happily put up with banner ads on websites, it’s the mechanism that serves that ad that I find contentious and is the reason I personally use an ad blocker.
simonblack 3y ago
and a site that depends on its revenue has the right to refuse to serve you. Certainly. But it's dumb on their behalf because you won't see any of their message at all. In practical terms, they might as well not exist.
- phailhaus 3y ago
  Not at all, because you ended up on their site anyways.

mathgradthrow 3y ago

How you choose to render bits that are served to you is as fundamentally your right as whether you choose to leave your eyes open, or read text that has been put in front of you. Moreover, your right to not be spied on for you browser configuration is the same as your right to not have your irises tracked. This isn't even close.

Havoc 3y ago

This feels off to me. I feel entitled to use an adblocker, but I also feel the site should be entitled to make corresponding choice their side. The reality is much of the web is ad funded, so some sort of ugly compromise is necessary. Allowing both sides to do as they please seems more fair than holding a gun to corporates head and telling them no. That said I reckon news is an exception - it's way too centralized and way to crucial to democracy to let all the big news orgs move as a unit. The way they all moved as a unit & some lead the charge on paywalls knowingly taking a hit felt way too coordinated for my liking.

InCityDreams 3y ago
Ads in the street fund...something. I ignore them as they aren't terribly targeting, and I'm not an impulse buyer based on some pic of an overly happy smiley person. Inasmuch as I'm not obligated to fund the advertisers and companies I see in the streets, the same is true of the net. I owe them nothing - especially as they try and track me. I leave my phone in the car when i go shopping so location isn't a thing they can utilise against me, which they would if possible. Having said that, i am looking after a friends dog at the moment. I walked past a store that sells royal canine a few days ago... got an ad for dog food on amazon, and in my gmail. Coincidence? Possibly. Am i nervous? Absolutely you should be too.
- berkes 3y ago
  Ads in the streets fund surprisingly little. I've spent energy and time finding out how much my local govt got from these ads and learned three things. They don't want to tell, because it's embarrassing small amounts. They don't really know the exact numbers. Many ads on "public spaces" fund private or corporate coffers rather than municipality.
paulryanrogers 3y ago
Streets are a public space. Yet even there access to the street remains free, and ads tend to be on private property. Most of the Internet would not qualify. Though I suppose it could be argued parts are much like a public square.

Conscat 3y ago

All respect to Michael Larabel's reporting itself, but opening a Phoronix article and seeing a dozen ad embeds which constitute most of the page weight is a frequent reminder to me that I live in heck.

vkazanov 3y ago
It should be a reminder to just pay for Michael's work.
JoshTriplett 3y ago
The ads are nothing compared to the comments section. I'd happily start paying, if they deleted the comments section entirely.

samstave 3y ago

If I cannot use an ad-blocker, then I should be able to have a perfect measurment of what % of my bandwidth, for which I pay for, is consumed by ads, and then charge them a fee for resource utilization, convenience fee, fcc annoyance fee, corrupt-packet fee and dropped-packet waste of resource fee, and congestion fee.

paulryanrogers 3y ago
If you're consuming content on ad supported services and sites, then why would anyone be reimbursement you for bandwidth costs that they have no control over? You could be on a network paid for by your employer, one very frugally negotiated, or a redundant yet costly satellite link you have for vanity reasons.
thfuran 3y ago
Why do you feel entitled to send a bill to someone who only gave you what you asked them to give you?
- asadotzler 3y ago
  The point was, I think, that they're giving more than what was asked for. With an ad blocker a user can opt out of expensive parts of the content and if they're denied that then they're being forced to consume the content they didn't want. A website makes a bunch of files available publicly. My user agent picks a few of those files it wants and ignores the rest. If my UA is forced to acquire all the files or the specific set the site requires, they're forcing me to spend my resources downloading, processing, and displaying files I don't want, at great expense both to my wallet and my time, and my mind. I have a tool that manages this for me and they're telling me I can't engage with some of their content because I won't engage with other of their content. It's like a buffet that requires you fill your plate only the way they want it filled. It's a buffet. It's not a prefix.
  - thfuran 3y ago
    >The point was, I think, that they're giving more than what was asked for. They're not. You just turned out to not actually want what you asked for. >I have a tool that manages this for me and they're telling me I can't engage with some of their content because I won't engage with other of their content. Yes, because they provided the former free of charge solely on the basis that you'd accept the latter as well.

lee 3y ago

I'm totally fine with this. Content is paid with your eyeballs or with money. If you're not willing to pay with your eyeballs, then you shouldn't get the content. I think that's fair. In China where copyright laws aren't enforced, there's simply no economic incentive for producers to create content...let's not go there.

BLKNSLVR 3y ago

Part of the problem is the terminology 'adblocker' is outdated and essentially incorrect. Ads aren't ads. They're trackers, viruses, malware, scams. Even video ads on Youtube, whilst not vectors of viruses or malware, they're advertising literal scams and YouTube are responding saying these ads are 'within' policy guidelines. As I've said a few times before (in various ways), browsing the internet without an 'ad blocker' is like running Windows in the 90's / 00's without anti-virus software when you're a serial downloader of interesting programs / executables (like I was); it's negligent, you're asking for trouble. The advertising industry, Google, Facebook, etc. are hiding behind the terminology "advertising" because it makes it sound a lot more palatable than what the reality is, as I said above: tracking, malware, viruses, scams. If it was just advertising, then I'd be much less rabidly agressive in my defense of blocking it: Annoying is a long way separated from Dangerous. Advertising, as it has evolved on the Internet, is Dangerous.

Dalewyn 3y ago
>Ads aren't ads. They're trackers, viruses, malware, scams. Even video ads on Youtube, whilst not vectors of viruses or malware, they're advertising literal scams and YouTube are responding saying these ads are 'within' policy guidelines. >If it was just advertising, then I'd be much less rabidly agressive in my defense of blocking it: Annoying is a long way separated from Dangerous. This really needs to be emphasized more, because the problem is that these so-called "ads" aren't just ads anymore as you said. If they were just ads, sure they would be annoying (or hilarious if they are made well!) but ultimately not something that most of us would feel a religious desire to block out of our lives. But no, they aren't just ads anymore. They are malicious in their intent and harmful in their contents. If it's not the "ads" trojan horsing malware onto our computers, it's their contents directing us towards scams and harmful activities. That dangerous bullshit deserves to be blocked out with extreme prejudice. Adblocking is the anti-virus of the 2010s and '20s, it's a defensive measure to keep ourselves safe.
- anotherevan 3y ago
  I call them HTML firewalls.

ssowonny 3y ago

Adblockers can be likened to piracy, similar to downloading movies from torrents. It's true that service providers should be mindful of ad usage to avoid alienating users. However, using services and bypassing ads equates to appropriating the service's property. If you disagree with a service's monetization methods, it's best not to use it. Don't steal it.

627467 3y ago
How should someone know the terms of use BEFORE being served the data (including the terms)? It's not stealing if you're broadcasting.
- mynameisnoone 3y ago
  Remember shrinkwrap EULAs? You agree to a EULA you can't read beforehand by opening the box or shrinkwrap. Now, there are perpetually-changing EULAs you don't get to agree to that just change underneath you, and are rarely notified about.
mynameisnoone 3y ago
Except you're offering their bullshit Hobson's choice: submit or live like a Mennonite. Anything now that doesn't involve you jumping at the chance to hand over larger and lager piles of money is deemed "unpatriotic" and "criminal". That sort of groomed consumer bullshit can GTFO.
wolfendin 3y ago
It can’t be likened to piracy because I am asking the website for a document, they’re giving it to me, suggesting I download other documents, and I am deciding not to. I am not taking something they own by force on a ship. I am not distributing their intellectual property to others without authorization.
jpambrun 3y ago
I would first need to see the site to get a sense of if I agree with the monetization, but at that I would have seen the ads. Hence I block all ads,if a site has a nag screen about ad blocker, I block it from my searches with Kagi. I wish it already had a block list for that so I never see these sites at all. Sites who does that are typically of very low quality anyway.

heads 3y ago

It is difficult to take the complaint terribly seriously when part of their case against Adblock Plus is that it “violates the freedom of the press”. Imagine if newspapers were free and supported by ads, but only had ads in the top 2” x 2” corner, on the outside edge of the paper. Imagine also that I sold a kind of square knife-press that you could use to stamp-cut the ads out all in one go. No one would seriously claim I was doing something wrong — just move the ads around to random places on each page! Is it laziness that stops publishers from shipping targeted ads from their own servers, inlined in the content in a way that cannot be distinguished from article images or text?

jefftk 3y ago
> Is it laziness that stops publishers from shipping targeted ads from their own servers, inlined in the content in a way that cannot be distinguished from article images or text? No, it's about fraud. With your proposal advertisers have to trust publishers really will show their ads, and unless the publisher is very large and has a reputation to protect advertisers pretty reasonably don't trust them. (We do actually see what you're proposing, with YouTube, Facebook, Google Search, etc) You could do this by having the ad networks serve the pages, reverse proxying to the publisher and inserting the ads. And then the publisher page can run its verification scripts, instead of the ads running verification scripts. But that gives us a web served by Google, Criteo, AppNexus, etc. which would be pretty sad.
- deleted 3y ago
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mynameisnoone 3y ago

Unfortunately, there isn't yet a corresponding human right to not being blocked for using an adblocker.

wdr1 3y ago

It's worth noting that Eyeo makes money by being paid to not block ads. This article estimates it at 55M euro in 2020. https://www.startbase.com/news/adblock-plus-mutter-eyeo-waechst-stark/ https://www.startbase.com/news/adblock-plus-mutter-eyeo-waec... I can understand defining a standard for acceptable ads. I can understand allowing ads that meet that standard. What I struggle with is allowing ads that meet that standard AND require payment.

matrix87 3y ago

> According to Axel Springer, Eyeo’s business model constituted: ... a violation of freedom of the press Wah, cry me a river. Some corporation making hundreds of millions of dollars thinks it has a right to run malware on people's computers, just so the executives can line their pockets with more money. Maybe they should spend some of those millions and figure out a less stupid monetization strategy instead of trying to dream up a bunch of laws that suit them

cannedbeets 3y ago

As long as malvertising(1) exists, adblockers are basic security hygiene. You wouldn’t click a random link, so why would you allow an ad server to execute arbitrary code on your computer? (1) https://www.tomsguide.com/us/malvertising-what-it-is,news-19877.html https://www.tomsguide.com/us/malvertising-what-it-is,news-19...

more_corn 3y ago

Advertisers like to claim that their content is speech. While this might be true I’d classify advertising as attempted manipulation. The advertiser only wins when they convince me to do something I wouldn’t have done otherwise. Often that thing is not in my best interest. Buying a new car is great for advertisers. It’s a terrible financial decision for me. Advertisers succeed by manipulating consumer behavior in ways that harm the consumer. Protecting myself from harmful manipulation is not only my right but I’d be an idiot not to do it. Companies that prevent me from protecting myself from manipulation earn my ire. Fighting against Adblock makes you a bad company, and people who do it are doing a bad thing. What do we call people who do bad things? I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

simonblack 3y ago

The way I see it, is that I have a choice whether to pay* for ads that are forced on me without my consent, or whether to block that advertising content. The website owner has the choice to allow me to see his website ad-free, or to refuse my access to his website altogether. That's OK. I can survive if I don't see his website at all. OTOH, if he blocks out too many of us, there won't be sufficient eyes on his advertising anyway. * pay for the ads I see? Yes. I have many times been in the situation where I had a small monthly quota of data such that my total data allowance per day was only 60 MB. It doesn't take many 5 MB advertisements to complete use up my meagre daily data allowance.

Terr_ 3y ago

I'd also raise the issue if liability, for when that advertisement is a scam or a vehicle for malware Javascript or buffer-overflowing media. If I have some kind of legal obligation to permit their system to do stuff on my computer, then surely they must have have some level of liability for what that stuff does or enables.

cdme 3y ago

If you don’t want me using an adblocker, you don’t want me using your site. I’m ok with that. If your site fails because I’ve blocked your analytics suite, you have a poorly developed site.

macguyvermectin 3y ago

I think it should be obvious that I have a right to decide whether server-imposed JavaScript and CSS will run on my computer. If I only want HTML to render, that’s my prerogative. And if a site’s HTML isn’t useable without CSS and JS, then that site is defective and I’ll black hole its domain on local DNS. If this breaks websites’ business models, that’s their problem, not mine. I don’t have bareback sex with strangers and I don’t visit random websites without uBlock Origin.

rldjbpin 3y ago

i have a straightforward principle for using the Web and serving a part of it: both parties have the right to serve and consume the content as they choose to. all this shaming by content owners who tend to continue pushing more intrusive ads is being rather unfair. at the same time, i don't see any issues with them witholding access to content if we try to bypass their intended use. today serving content at a reasonable level has never been this cheap. if you serve a 2MB webpage for 500 word piece, then it serves you right when you complain about how much it costs you to run it. using that argument to moral policing only goes so far.