21 ms·

The next version of Safari will let users block ads on iPhones and iPads

494 points by IBM 11y ago

MichaelCrawford 11y ago
I'm completely cool with ads; what I'd like to see is the ability to block analytics, for example one-pixel transparent gifs as well as javascript "sources" consisting of one character of whitespace. I can do this with the hosts file but that requires that I jailbreak my device. Most are not going to want to do that. I'm also concerned about "mobile analytics" in which SDKs are offered free of charge to app developers so they can determine how users operate their apps. However the data centers are quite costly to operate; _someone_ must be paying for all that. I expect mobile analytics can be blocked in the hosts file as well but it isn't so straightforward to determine the hostnames to blackhole.
- walterbell 11y ago
  > I can do this with the hosts file but that requires that I jailbreak my device. Most are not going to want to do that. Alternatively, VPN to a home router and filter all traffic there, for TV, desktops, laptops, mobile.
  - Abundnce10 11y ago
    Do you find your browsing speeds increase when you do this? I ask because I'm assuming the page loads faster without the ads but it must be offset (to some extent) by the VPN connection. Also, can you link to any examples on setting this up on an Android device?
    - walterbell 11y ago
      Here's an example: pfSense 2.1.5 (which can be run in a Xen VM) with Android, iOS, Windows and Linux clients, https://blog.andregasser.net/how-to-configure-ipsec-vpn-on-pfsense-for-use-with-iphone-ipad-android-windows-and-linux/ https://blog.andregasser.net/how-to-configure-ipsec-vpn-on-p... I'm still setting this up so don't yet have field data on performance, but 4G LTE ping times are about double the latency of home broadband, http://blog.catchpoint.com/2014/01/15/theres-no-avoiding-network-latency-on-4g/ http://blog.catchpoint.com/2014/01/15/theres-no-avoiding-net....
    - click170 11y ago
      Filtering in this way does provide a significant speed hit if you choose to use your home router but nothing is stopping you from using a VPS instead. For me the primary concern is privacy and security and using the always on VPN is the best way I've found to protect what I value. Nothing gets out without my expressed consent, just the way I like it.
      - walterbell 11y ago
        Are you using Android or iOS? There seems to be flakiness on iOS8 where the VPN gets disconnected during a change between WiFi and Cellular, or if the device is locked.
        click170 11y ago
        I'm using android. The VPN can drop out when I change networks, but it reconnects in less than a single second under good conditions, and that's not an exaggeration. I use a plain ipsec xauth VPN. Having tried both ipsec with l2tp and openvpn SSL VPN, ipsec is the only one I can get to reconnect in under a second. All the others take at least 5 seconds to complete a handshake.
  - 0942v8653 11y ago
    You don't need to VPN. A DNS server works as well as a hosts file and is much faster than putting every request through your network.
    - walterbell 11y ago
      Good point. VPN can be used to deliver the ad-blocking DNS server to multiple mobile devices, enabling access to VPN-hosted files while leaving most traffic on the cellular network.
- davidgerard 11y ago
  http://lwn.net/Articles/646339/ http://lwn.net/Articles/646339/ privacy.trackingprotection.enabled Works on Firefox on desktop and Android. Speeds up browsing 40% on particularly obnoxious sites. (AdBlockPlus also works in Firefox Android.)
- popcornarsonist 11y ago
  > The new Safari release brings Content Blocking Safari Extensions to iOS. Content Blocking gives your extensions a fast and efficient way to block cookies, images, resources, pop-ups, and other content. It seems like this feature isn't really just "ad blocking", it's the ability to write any kind of blocking extension. So a plugin that blocks analytics should be pretty doable.
- morgante 11y ago
  Why do you think creators shouldn't be allowed to know how many people are reading their content?
  - MichaelCrawford 11y ago
    I'm completely cool with the analysis of one's own web server logs. What I'm not cool with is Hacker News knowing that KindGirls is my favorite website of ill repute. Consider the challenge faced by closeted homosexual presidential candidates. Analytics is also used for credit scoring. That is, suppose I were to hang out at sites that covered asset protection, bankrupcy. There are all kinds of ways to beat debt collectors, most of them perfectly legal and while well-documented they are not well known. Were I to apply for any manner of loan after hanging out at all these sites, my loan would not be approved. If you don't believe me I can dig up the specific company that offers this "service" however not just now as it will take me some time to find it again.
  - pdkl95 11y ago
    Why do you think you need anything other than the HTTP server logs to find out that number?
    - morgante 11y ago
      > Why do you think you need anything other than the HTTP server logs to find out that number? All server logs tell you is that some user agent loaded the page. They tell you absolutely nothing about whether that computer was actually a person, or if that person actually read the article. I don't understand all the hate around analytics. Data is how better decisions are made.
      - pdkl95 11y ago
        Tracking that kind of information is the worst kind of surveillance there is. You see it as profitable data, but lots of things are profitable or useful, and sometimes society sees things as going too far and those things get restricted or banned. Breaking into people's homes is useful, even if you don't take anything; this distinction is so significant that just the violation of someone's property was made into it's own, separate crime. The problem is that technology has made the personal boundaries somewhat harder to define, and this is being made worse by the fact that there are a LOT of people that are ignorant about how that technology actually works and a lot of businesses that are finding it really profitable to take advantage of this ignorance. Analytics, for example. Baring any specific contracts[1], the transaction that is implicit when someone clicks on a link is that their computer will request some other computer (identified by the host in the URL they clicked on), with the expectation that the other side may (or may not) send a document (or document-like thing) back in reply. Unfortunately - and unknown to most people - the technical nature of HTML and especially Javascript have made it easy to include 3rd parties into construction of the page, and for the transaction to continue FAR longer than the initial click+download. As part of that increase in scope, many people have now decided that they have some sort of right to this extension, a right to run Turing complete code on other people's CPUs, and a right for 3rd parties to be involved. None of that exists - we haven't signed a contract - and just because you found a technical trick that lets you accomplish this kind of surveillance doesn't mean you should do it, or that it is morally right. Asking you for a page obviously consents to you knowing about that request. Logging information about people without their knowledge or consent makes you an overly-nosy neighbor at best, and a stalker that should face criminal charges at worst. The truth is probably somewhere in between those extremes. Why does this matter? Because as you say - data is how decisions are made. Data wants to be aggregated and aggregated data is an attractive nuisance to people that want to exploit that data. Do you really want to have the fact that you spent N hours reading on some topic to be known whatever government we end up having in the future? Do you think your insurance companies are interested if you read various topics that interest them? There are incalculable potential problems with storing personal data, simply because we cannot predict what subset of that data will be problematic in the future. By logging data at all, you are creating this future - and that makes you an enemy of those of us that still value privacy. I suggest that your business model needs updating. Maybe it only requires being clever and finding a socially-responsible way to make those same decisions. Maybe some business models are pathological, and need to go away. I don't think those lines are perfectly clear yet, so I wish you luck should you choose to pursue a different path. Oh, and because this is about analytics, that means Google in most cases. A single party. One would think the potential monopolistic issue would be enough to stop using their analytics services. Anyway, if you truly want to learn about what this backlash is about - which is a backlash against all aspects of "surveillance as a business model" - then I recommend watching the link I have posted here several times recently of Aral Balkan's recent talk[2], as he explains things in far more detail. If you have any sense of privacy left, it might just terrify you. [1] if one side is highly ignorant of what the contract's consequences are, I consider that a contract made in bad faith [2] https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html#balkan https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html...
untog 11y ago
This is a fantastic development for users. That being said, hopefully you can permit me being a grouch: Apple hasn't done this entirely out of the goodness of their own hearts. After all, this isn't going to filter ads in native apps, is it? If you're a site that relies on ad revenue you've just been given another reason to live in app-land, not web-land. Imagine you're a publisher. With one OS release Apple has provided the ability to block ads on the web and Apple News, a charming new platform for you to publish your articles, complete with iAd integration. Which one are you going to prioritise? Not that this is an either-or thing: just like Google vacuums up your personal data and gives you Google Now in return, Apple will push publishers towards iOS apps while also giving you a great web experience.
- briandear 11y ago
  Anything that stops the obnoxious redirects to the App Store would be awesome. I started turning off JS on mobile today simply because most news sites I read had become unusable. This is great news and an ideal way to punish publishers that bombard my experience with giant turds. I will gladly pay for content that doesn't suck.
  - untog 11y ago
    Anything that stops the obnoxious redirects to the App Store would be awesome. Except that you're going to get a lot more of them, pointing you towards native apps that serve you articles with unblockable ads.
    - mhurron 11y ago
      Or you stop going to those sites. Though I don't browse on my phone so I don't have this problem.
      - manigandham 11y ago
        This is the real answer to everything: if users dont like the ads, then dont go to the site.
dj_doh 11y ago
May be it's a good thing for the news/media industry. Why rely on flimsy ads. If your news contents are credible and important to users they'll subscribe to it a la Netflix or HBO Go.
- threeseed 11y ago
  It's going to be increase the polarisation of the media that's for sure. In order for subscription models to work you have to either (a) focus your content on a specific target e.g. Huffington Post or (b) be eminately respected like the NY Times. The real company to watch is News Corp. The Sun in the UK was just eclipsed by the Daily Mail largely as a result of The Sun having a paywall on their website. This meant more web traffic to Daily Mail which then brought in new customers and translated to more newspaper sales. Likewise in Australia the paywall sites e.g. The Australian have been struggling. Making the subscription model work is turning out to be a lot harder than it looks for many.
- erickhill 11y ago
  That's an extremely naive attitude, IMO. To this day, the vast majority of publishers who rely on traffic and ad revenues simply can't afford to create subscription walls and stay in business. In addition, Mobile Web revenues are a tiny shred of revenue compared to desktop experiences. It isn't a huge leap to expect this type of behavior in a future release for Safari in OS X, too.
  - Retric 11y ago
    The vast majority of publishers are terrible and I have no issue with them disappearing.
  - douche 11y ago
    Desktop Safari has such a minuscule market share that it doesn't really matter.
  - eli 11y ago
    Go check the comment thread on any HN link to a paywalled article like WSJ. Users really don't like paywalls. > Mobile Web revenues are a tiny shred of revenue compared to desktop experiences That's already changing and will continue to change.
threeseed 11y ago
This is extraordinary news. There has been an overwhelming shift from web to mobile advertising in the last few years and the prediction is for this to increase significantly. For the largest traffic producer to allow the blocking of ads is going to completely upend the economics of many web sites. I think it is very telling that Apple is doing this right when they have announced a News app. Clearly they want to direct publishers and bloggers into that app and away from mobile sites. All in all this could be devastating for companies like Google.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
bsaul 11y ago
I don't think a combo of dns aliasing to the ad network, plus better embedding ads in the dom to make them look like a site's regular content, plus random ordering of news and ads to prevent any kind of static css rules matching can be countered. Now of course that means ads will require a bit more work to integrate to a website, and probably move integration deeper in the server side, but technicaly i don't see any major issues. Am I missing something ?
- rblatz 11y ago
  Most ads that pay the highest are retargeting ads. Meaning you went to an online store looked at gadgets, that site included a snippet of js that said to the ad network, "hey he looked at gadgets". Now the ad network shows you ads for gadgets from that site. There isn't a good way to build that deeper into the server, cookies don't work that way.
  - bsaul 11y ago
    You could configure the js to use another domain name to talk to, ( the same as the original site), that would be just an alias to the ad network. Ad blockers work on the http level, not on the dns one, so there's no way for them to know the redirection did happen. Or you could make it all happen on the server side. Just have the ad network provide a server side plug in that would analyse incoming http request for user blueprinting, and ask the ad server what ad to display. Then you'd just have to include that content in your response.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
endymi0n 11y ago
Here's what's going to happen. Just a little while longer: nothing. As soon as one big party will try to make a significant impact on the ads market (more than 20% at once), a big shift will happen, uniting Publishers all around and shutting adblocking visitors out completely in a coordinated manner. Just like Microsoft's opt-out only DNT-Field, the tide will quickly turn against Apple, as soon as you can't read 50% of all web pages anymore because ads are blocked by default (or a majority). Same thing with this Filter startup that wants to block ads on a mobile provider level (forgot the name). As soon as people realize that all the stuff on the internet isn't "free", but ad financed, they will finally have to make the real choice themselves by opting in or paying.
- threeseed 11y ago
  There are some problems with this theory though. (a) On average iOS users have more disposable income than Android users, (b) iOS users have shown a proclivity for spending that money on mobile content and (c) iOS are responsible for more web traffic than Android. So if publishers adopt a freemium model (the most common) and they present a crappy experience to users who block ads then they won't be willing to buy a subscription. That's why most websites today don't punish users who block ads and that position will likely continue on mobile as well.
  - endymi0n 11y ago
    True. But don't underestimate the efforts of a multiple billion dollars content industry with their back against the wall (a lot of them ads only without any freemium option). Robbed of any monetization strategy for a whole segment (unlike the ads vs. paywall wars between publishers), I see much more collaboration coming against a too invasive force with their own objectives.
  - lelandbatey 11y ago
    Your third point is completely false. According to Opera Mediaworks, as of Q1 2015, Android makes up 65% of mobile traffic, 3x more than iOS with 22%, as well as beating iOS out of the top spot for ad revenue. You can read this report here: http://operamediaworks.com/sites/default/files/file_attachment/sma_q1_2015_compressed.pdf http://operamediaworks.com/sites/default/files/file_attachme... (page 2)
cwyers 11y ago
And this is why Google moved heaven and Earth to get Android out the door, even when it stalled all the momentum for its own ChromeOS.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  Yet you'd still see users flock to iOS if Apple lowered the device price. Disclaimer: Ex-Android user.
  - cwyers 11y ago
    I don't know if that's true. I don't know that it's not true either. I don't say that to claim superiority for Android, that's for sure. I would probably be an ex-Android user if the app situation on Windows Phone wasn't so dire. It's just a pretty clear example of the reason that Google doesn't want Apple (or anyone, really) to be able to control the platform they use to reach people.
  - recursive 11y ago
    I'm skeptical of that. I've got zero to back it up, which is the same amount as you, but I can say I'd pay a premium for Android over iOS if necessary.
  - dublinben 11y ago
    The success of premium devices like the Galaxy Note and Galaxy S6 undermines your argument that Android only succeeds based on price. Many consumers prefer Android over iOS, and deliberately choose not to buy iPhones.
    - jay_kyburz 11y ago
      I bought my Nexus 4 on the promise of Android. Damn thing crashed and rebooted when I was trying to answer a call the other day. There are so many UI issues. Material design might look nice, but sux in so many other regards. I will not buy another Android phone that's for sure.
mmanfrin 11y ago
This feels like a broadside attack at Google.
- baldfat 11y ago
  Just like the Apple Now clone with no tie in with Apple ID (Not like other Companies) Also anti-competitive US Government will go nuts on them. I could see companies blocking iOS as a protest if ads were blocked by Safari. Edit for grammar.
- bb0wn 11y ago
  Came here to say just that. Apple seems to be trying to make the case that users don't necessarily need to get in bed with creepy, data-mining-for-profit platforms to receive good service. Whether that's really true, or just good rhetoric...
Osmium 11y ago
Interesting that, at the same time, Apple is actively promoting iAds for people to monetize its new news service. On the one hand, if you have to have ads, it's probably better to have an ad platform under your control (where you can enforce privacy and safeguard against performance issues), but it's still not ideal (slippery slope later on?). I wonder if Apple's News app takes off if, at a later date, they could introduce a paid tier Spotify-style to let people read its news content without ads, and distribute the funds accordingly to news providers who've signed up for it?
- justaman 11y ago
  There are numerous issues with this business model. If we examine the parallel of the app store. Many smaller app developers are frustrated with the "large cut" Apple takes per download. Similarly in the music world, you have Tidal(failing) and artists like Taylor Swift upset.
  - Osmium 11y ago
    For sure, but it could still be better than what publishers currently have, which is basically nothing. Especially for smaller sites. Very few succeed individually on a subscription basis, and micropayments haven't really taken off. I was wondering if they could calculate the cut they have based on the length of time a person reads a given news source, which would promote long-form content.
pasta_2 11y ago
Tech/media companies dependent on advertising should just adapt. As techies told a complaining music industry, just do concerts and sell t-shirts. Now maybe this won't be as profitable as the current business model, and maybe the industry will be smaller and more consolidated, but that's capitalism. No one guaranteed you would keep growing and making more money. Perhaps you'll have to stop using third-party ad networks and start selling and creating your own ads. Native ads like Buzzfeed's sponsored posts could work. It'll probably require more capital and won't scale as well, but you'll just have to deal with that.
guelo 11y ago
FYI, Firefox for Android has had ad blocking extensions since it came out.
- jusben1369 11y ago
  <insert snarky comment about the 12 people that's helped and get downvoted>
  - guelo 11y ago
    <insert comment about how it would be way more people if Apple wouldn't block iphone users from running browser apps>
  - kibwen 11y ago
    Firefox for Android has been downloaded between 100 million and 500 million times, which is a bit more than your estimate. :P See https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.firefox https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fi... -> "Additional information" -> "Installs". And given that AdBlock isn't available for Chrome on Android, I wouldn't be surprised if AdBlock for Firefox was a large motivator behind this statistic.
- EpicDavi 11y ago
  Also FYI, there are no extension enabled versions of FireFox on iOS because Apple requires all web content to be rendered in their specified engine (WebKit IIRC) and Mozilla is not allowed to use their own.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
    They could still allow extensions for WebKit.
learc83 11y ago
I wish there was a service that integrated with the major ad networks that allowed you to pay money not to be show ads. Something were the majority goes to the owners of the websites who's ads you're blocking.
- scottfr 11y ago
  https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/
- anuragbiyani 11y ago
  https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/
- karmelapple 11y ago
  1. Pay to block ads 2. Choose a couple types of ads that I would be okay to see, either by companies or topics, reducing the money I pay
- manigandham 11y ago
  The issue is that this is a global business with hundreds of companies and publishers and not much regulation (which is what I think is the real solution), plus people aren't interested in subscriptions when they can just download an extension and block everything for free. Unfortunately, while I think the reasons for adblock can be valid, it's allowing people to effectively take content without letting the producers earn anything in return. Just because something is easy doesn't make it "right".
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - learc83 11y ago
    >Unfortunately, while I think the reasons for adblock can be valid, its allowing people to effective take content without letting the producers earn anything in return. Just because something is easy doesn't make it "right". Do you feel the same way when someone mutes the TV during commercials? What if I put a piece of tape across my monitor to block an fixed location add? I don't feel morally obligated to view ads on publicly accessible internet sites in the same way that I don't feel obligated to stay in the room during commercials. I'll happily pay content providers if it's easy, but it's a utilitarian decision for me not a moral one. If you put information in public, I don't feel bad about viewing only the portion of that information that's useful to me.
niccaluim 11y ago
His list of arguments for using ad blockers left out what I imagine is the #1 reason, which is "you're filling my eyeballs with garbage."
- hellbanTHIS 11y ago
  The new thing they're trying is what you could call "gross-bait" ads, one gem that comes to mind is the girl's legs with indentations in them and white things coming out. I'm not even sure they're selling anything anymore, most web ads seem more like psychological warfare. How about a subscription service - and it could be a voluntary honor system thing - where you pay something each month and it gets distributed to websites you visit, and in order for a site to register with the service they have to forgo advertising. I'd pay $10 a month to do my part to rid the world of web ads. Somebody steal that idea.
  - lewisl9029 11y ago
    > Somebody steal that idea. Google already did: https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/
    - hellbanTHIS 11y ago
      Well, shit.
  - antimatter 11y ago
    Also, Readability tried something similar. Didn't work. https://gigaom.com/2011/02/01/419-readability-intros-subscriptions-to-pay-publishers-for-focused-readers/ https://gigaom.com/2011/02/01/419-readability-intros-subscri... https://gigaom.com/2012/06/13/readability-ends-publisher-payment-program/ https://gigaom.com/2012/06/13/readability-ends-publisher-pay...
    - hellbanTHIS 11y ago
      Sounds like Readability was blocking all ads and then saying "come find us so we can pay you, even though we never told you we were doing this, oops too late". Plus since then there's been the invention of these Taboola and Outbrain type ads which are like the ISIS of advertising. Because of them I'm sensing a lot more people are ready to declare war on web ads.
egwynn 11y ago
I’ve started running a local instance of dnsmasq that returns NXDOMAIN for a giant list of ad servers. For anything not in the list, it tosses the request up to the real DNS server. I’ve found it to be a simple and effective way to block lots of ads for all local network traffic.
Adaptive 11y ago
I'm in way too late on this thread for this comment to be noticed, but this is so absolutely self-serving for Apple. DO NOT LAUD APPLE FOR THIS. If Apple were doing this for any reasonable purpose, they'd do it on Safari on the desktop as well. Almost every sane reason for blocking ads is as pertinent there. They are simply trying to force content providers to go native app and become part of the Apple revenue stream. That's it, pure and simple.
- IBM 11y ago
  You've been able to install ad blocking extensions for Safari on OS X for a while now.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
    - integraton 11y ago
      > But not everyone installs extensions... All of that seems to be besides the point with regard to the parent's comment. Based on what the documentation seems to be saying [1], iOS Safari ad-blocking would require third party extensions, like OS X Safari. 1. https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/releasenotes/General/WhatsNewInSafari/Articles/Safari_9.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40014305-CH9-SW9 https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/releaseno...
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - sjwright 11y ago
      The new "in-browser option" is available for both mobile and desktop Safari. It also requires user actions equivalent to selecting and installing an extension.
popsaraivah 11y ago
@Popsaraivah
popsaraivah 11y ago
Qr hackear
popsaraivah 11y ago
@Popsaraivah
guptaneil 11y ago
I think everybody is missing the point here. Content blockers are nice for ad blocking, but an even better use case here is websites knowing whether or not you have their mobile app installed. Imagine a website that has an "Install our app" script that normally runs when you view it on mobile, but that script gets blocked by their own app when it's installed on your device. With a bit of creativity, you can do even cooler things than that once you think about content blockers like this. It's kind of the inverse of extensions, where websites can define various extensions that are enabled or disabled accordingly by your installed apps.
- douche 11y ago
  I would pay money for an extension that would prevent websites from redirecting me from the full desktop version of their site to the crippled "mobile-optimized" version. Especially when the full site has to load completely, before a jQuery onready function fires to do the redirect...
  - alttab 11y ago
    This is temporary. Unfortunately, news sites have to get a clue...
  - hayksaakian 11y ago
    get an extension to change your user agent change it to the desktop version of your browser (eg. chrome desktop instead of chrome mobile). you may need root/jailbreak to do this
  - kzahel 11y ago
    In Chrome on android this is an option in the dropdown menu "request desktop site"
  - mkskm 11y ago
    You can do this now by tapping the address bar > Request Desktop Site in Safari on iOS 8. Would be nice to have it be automatic though.
- 11y ago
d_luaz 11y ago
Wikipedia could survive with donation. If AdBlocker is detected, website should prompt for donation (like Wikipedia) until a certain yearly amount is reach.
- cooper12 11y ago
  Personally, I don't feel like the payments should be called donations. It's like saying "please give us money out of the kindness of your heart or else we'll die" instead of "please acknowledge the value of the content you consumed so we can create more".
- profmonocle 11y ago
  Wikipedia's donation banners last year were more intrusive than paid ads on a lot of sites.
notNow 11y ago
Apple is basically sticking it to Google here. They want to weaken their competition in the ad space to have more room and leverage for its products. Time for the anti trust bodies to look seriously into their practices.
dvhh 11y ago
This move would give a lot of legitimacy to "native advertising" or "advertorial", so yes I am glad we would give up the garbage of page filled with banner/popup/redirection to buy your app to get manipulated by article that will show me the truth about Scientology
unholiness 11y ago
I posted this on an earlier thread about the morality of AdBlock, but it seem relevant to the discussion: There is a huge irony in that fact that AdBlock's function of keeping ads away from our content will eventually do the opposite. The alternative to ads alongside my content is ads inside my content. Let's face it: paywalls don't work. The alternative on the horizon is native advertising. Buzzfeed is now famously refusing to host ads. Instead they sustain themselves by publishing content that subtly supports the agenda of any company with deep enough pockets to pay for it. A viewer's ability to distinguish between native ads and regular articles is small and quickly vanishing. If separate ads stop reaching people, the path to monetization remaining is to change your content to reflect someone else's agenda. I keep AdBlock off by default because I prefer a world where creators can make a meaningful articles and a useful apps without caring about who they are supporting, and can, as the price tag, separately attach an ad. I do see it as a moral issue. There are good people making content that's being sustained by ads. I am never going to remember to give them my modicum of support if I don't consider them innocent until proven guilty. It's worth the small annoyance. It's worth the 2 seconds it takes to turn it on for the problematic pages. Hell, you can even map it to a shortcut[1]. It sucks, but the alternative is positively bleak. . TL;DR: The bathroom may be dirty, but at least no one's taking a shit in my kitchen. [1] https://adblockplus.org/en/faq_customization#shortcuts https://adblockplus.org/en/faq_customization#shortcuts
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 11y ago
  I see your point, but the the alternative is we need a better solution; blocking ads doesn't mean the writing becomes corrupt and we give up and that's it. Adblocking will lead to content creators finding a better revenue source; there are a lot of people that don't want to compromise themselves by being a paid voice for corporate interests. Buzzfeed is a poor example; it's just garbage content that is being re-circulated by many different places. There are TONS of sites that have paywalls and/or ads on their sites and their writing is still compromised. So I think paying for content and getting advertisements out of good content is the solution to restore independence, but the price point needs to be right. I hate blocking ads (I whitelist sites I visit frequently with reasonable ads) but ads have become obnoxious, so AdBlock is a natural reaction to site owners treating users like shit. Sadly, a lot of reasonable sites with unobtrusive ads have gotten caught up in blacklists. I would pay for good news content if I could pay for a bundle of good content at a fair price. Even something like the NY Times is a hard sell; it feels weird given the wealth of sources and information we have access to these days. NY Times is a great source, but I don't want to only read a single source. And it quickly becomes unaffordable if you want to pay for a lot of sources of information. Spotify and similar providers solved this with music and I still think a better solution will come out eventually for news. There are a lot of people that want to pay a fair price for good content, but the current options are not very good.
joesmo 11y ago
This is a step in the right direction but falls short of being the right direction. An ad blocker built into a major browser and turned on by default should long ago have been available. This will hopefully push websites, especially news websites, to figure out some other monetization strategy, one that's not based on ads and therefore doesn't undermine the credibility of the news and the site. So it's a win for consumers as no one wants to see ads as well as hopefully taking consumers closer to ad free, unbiased news sources.
- alogray 11y ago
  The next obvious target for monetization by news organizations are sponsored articles. I've started to see them in certain San Francisco specific news websites. It's not exactly the sort of thing we want to push these sites toward.
  - kibwen 11y ago
    Press releases masquerading as news have been a tradition since time immemorial: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- jay_kyburz 11y ago
  A fools errand. The only news sources that can ever be trusted are publicly funded organisations like Australias ABC. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Broadcasting_Corporation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Broadcasting_Corpora...
joeblau 11y ago
This is interesting. Does Googles mobile chrome browser have something similar on Android? I'm not really a huge fan of advertising but this seems like a feature that would make a certain group of users choose one browser over another and I can't really see Google not adding mobile plugins to allow this as some point.
- throwaway2048 11y ago
  chrome on android has no plugin support, firefox does however.
raquo 11y ago
Apple killing off publishers' revenue streams that it doesn't get a cut from? Big surprise.
wnevets 11y ago
such an innovative move.
markbnj 11y ago
How long have "ads" been around in the modern form? By which I mean "visual content embedded in some medium that is viewed by significant numbers of people." If you include storefront signage in that then a long time, I suppose. But in terms of reaching anything like a mass audience I assume it essentially began with the advent of print publications. Maybe the time of mass visual advertising is just over? It reached its peak with network and cable television and radio, and now that those mediums are evaporating there is nothing to replace them that offers the same characteristics. Maybe the next model will be something entirely different.
- morgante 11y ago
  Advertising as a business model was in place as far back as the Roman empire. [0] [0] http://purplemotes.net/2009/09/20/mass-media-in-ancient-rome/ http://purplemotes.net/2009/09/20/mass-media-in-ancient-rome...
- tribe 11y ago
  There are examples of medieval books with ads in them, so it seems such advertisements are older than mass media or the printing press. http://medievalbooks.nl/2014/12/05/medieval-spam-the-oldest-advertisements-for-books/ http://medievalbooks.nl/2014/12/05/medieval-spam-the-oldest-...
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  Advertising is as old as business and writing. The modern form of advertising however relies on a few specific developments: 1. The printing press. (1450) 2. Widespread literacy. (18th / 19th century) 3. Consumer products. (mid 19th century) 4. Consumerism, generally. (early 20th century) 5. Mass media. (early/mid 20th century) Much of this converged in the 1920s as mass-market consumer culture really started to take hold, though it was interrupted by the Great Depression and WWII, re-emerging in the late 1940s and 1950s. The latter were the heyday of the large magazine publication (arguably the Web content of its day), with both nonfiction and fiction carried prominently. Both faded as TV replaced reading as a pastime. Adam Curtis's 2002 BBC documentary, The Century of the Self details much more of the history of advertising and propaganda, particularly the role played by Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays (who arguably made Freud as well). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self
jay_kyburz 11y ago
Attention somebody looking for their next startup idea! Content publishers need an innovative way to serve ads in a way that cannot be distinguished from the content. Perhaps by acting as a proxy for ad networks, perhaps by hosting the ads directly. I guess publishers will need to collect their own demographic information and make it available to the advertisers.
nickhalfasleep 11y ago
This and HTTP2 for content aggregation point to embedding advertisements deeper within the main content provider. Look for plugins to popular web servers to make a side pull and injection of content before it leaves the server, not in the browser DOM.
tuananh 11y ago
This would hurt Google so much.
cttet 11y ago
This is why Google developed Chrome and Android, in case of these things happen..
- zodiakzz 11y ago
  It's gonna happen there as well once they add support for extensions ;)
Sideloader 11y ago
I use dedicated Ad Block software (or a customized host blocker) on all my internet enabled devices. I have no moral qualms whatsoever about doing so. Why do I block ads on the Internet? They are annoying and detract from my browsing experience. In addition to serving distracting ads that I never click on, online advertisers want to "hijack" and redirect my browser to sites I had no intention of visiting not to mention throwing up pop-up banners that I didn't ask to see. These tactics are the Internet equivalent of shop owners and proprietors grabbing people off the street and forcing them into their stores. I wouldn't put with it on the street and I won't put up with it on the Internet. This is hardly proof of anything but in my experience the vast majority of people do not use ad blocking software of any kind. The people who do make use of such software tend to be slightly more savvy than the (usually older) people whose Internet experience consists of browsing the surface of the surface web (Yahoo!, Facebook, first page of Google search results etc). This demographic also tends to leave default settings unchanged unless there is significant hype or FUD to make them pay attention, e.g., Facebook privacy settings. The people installing ad blocking software or writing their own host blockers are specifically seeking out ways to limit their exposure to advertising. They are not likely to be enthusiastic ad clickers and likely do not make purchasing decisions based on sponsored text or images shown next to their search results. Really, how valuable are potential customers that go out of their way to avoid being exposed to advertising? Advertising companies - Google and Facebook being the most ubiquitous and powerful examples - are already data-mining every piece of information they possibly can and finding new ways to collect ever more intelligence. Never in human history has mass surveillance been practiced on such a large scale. Google and Facebook then sell or auction amalgamated data bundles to a robust industry of data brokers who in turn attempt to monetize the information they have paid for. The end user (whose attention is the product being sold by the providers of "free" content) has no control whatsoever over their data. More than a few large SV corporations have a close relationship with the state. Google being the most notable here...Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen wrote a book that was, in part, about the company's partnership with the DoS. These same companies despite some impressive lip service often roll over very quickly when the NSA and its pals come knocking. When state intelligence agencies and a handful of powerful corporations collect and store massive amounts of citizens' data without any meaningful oversight or checks and balances we have a problem. Oh sure they all say "trust us" and "your privacy is"...wait for it.."important to us" (do a search for that phrase) but were it not for the painless under-the-radar data collecting methods employed, and the amount and content of information harvested and stored was made obvious, many more people would give more of a shit about what kind of future we are building. And it is advertising that drives the corporate data-mining industry. So all y'all will excuse me if I laugh out loud when some random forum poster launches into a stern lecture about the immorality of blocking advertising on the Internet and on mobile devices. Oh, and I also block as many trackers as possible and am absolutely okay with that, too. I should add that I am not opposed to all surveillance. Indeed, many of the benefits the Internet has brought would be impossible without it. Government surveillance, in specific instances, is also justified. However, ever increasing mass surveillance with little or no oversight controlled by some of the most powerful entities on the planet is definitely cause for concern.
emehrkay 11y ago
Did Google recently say that most of their mobile ad revenue comes from iOS users? I could see this prompting a Apple/Google cold war that would go as far as iOS including ad blocking by default in a few years.
Sideloader 11y ago
Mobile Safari sucks compared to Mercury browser, which already has built in ad blocking and a host of other awesome features. And it is fast...really fast. I barely use Safari on my (jailbroken) iOS devices and don't miss it at all.
epc 11y ago
This will be the toehold DoJ and the FTC need to file antitrust charges against Apple, if it’s true that iAds cannot be blocked, and continue to be only acquirable through Apple’s process and not on the various ad exchanges.
- colinbartlett 11y ago
  I don't think Apple would be that dumb. Is iAd even available for websites? I doubt it. Also I doubt they even care about iAd, I imagine it's such a tiny part of their revenue.
  - epc 11y ago
    The value of the feature to the alleged monopolist is irrelevant to the FTC/DOJ, solely the impact on competition. If the primary way consumers consume information is shifting to mobile, and the premier mobile platform inhibits mobile advertising except their its own built-in advertising system, then the FTC/DOJ can use that as the start of the investigation. Given the speed DOJ and FTC move for monopoly investigations I doubt anything will happen before the market is already significantly changed and/or damaged.
oldpond 11y ago
I can imagine a world without advertising quite easily. If you could snap your fingers and make all advertising disappear the world would be a better place. Sure, TV and Radio would disappear, but who needs it? I stopped listening to Radio years ago,and people are fleeing from TV in droves. I remember the internet before the "make a buck off the internet" crowd showed up. They can all fall out as far as I'm concerned. The beauty of the internet is that you don't have to see advertising if you don't want to. And if the day comes when it can't be avoided I'm turning it off. Wouldn't miss what the internet has become now anyway, just another form of TV.
- frik 11y ago
  No ads would mean you will have to pay per page view like in MicrosoftNetwork/MSN95 (Bill Gates plan of the "information highway" that failed in 1995 thanks to the free internet), and Teletext based systems from the 1980s like BTX in Germany.
  - WorldWideWayne 11y ago
    I think the point is that who needs them? Most news networks serve up propaganda and useless bullshit anyway IMO. Endpoints that don't depend on advertising dollars to keep the servers running will always be there (like GitHub, Hacker News, IRC, Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, etc.) if people want them.
    - oldpond 11y ago
      Right. News is a commodity. I am sure nobody would be surprised to learn that the results on google news are mostly media outlets that use google's doubleclick service. As long as it's easy to donate to sites you find valuable on the internet then advertising free sites will flourish.
- jgmmo 11y ago
  What makes you think TV and radio would disappear? Can't content creators monetize their shows with other methods than third-party ads? Like selling their own goods and services?
bsder 11y ago
Great. Maybe I can finally load a website on mobile in less than two minutes. Maybe I can finally load websites without my entire browser freezing for several minutes while a zillion Javascript scripts all fight it out. Maybe I can finally switch a tab and switch back without the entire website having to reload because all the Javascript wants a new set of ads. All of this could have been avoided if you loaded my content FIRST and then filled in the ad placeholders SECOND. But, noooooo, ads are more important than content so my screen jumps around, my browser freezes, and my tabs reload and reload and reload and reload. Fuck 'em.
MarkMc 11y ago
So when I try to visit The New York Times website it will say, 'Sorry Safari is not supported - please switch to Chrome'. Is that what Apple wants?
- mike-cardwell 11y ago
  Guess what. Other browsers can block Ads too.
junto 11y ago
The other day I visited the website mirror.co.uk from reddit. This is a national tabloid neespaper website! As I started to read the article I was redirected to install the game "Game of War: Fire Age" on Google Play. My iPad has similar experiences but more often and it is very annoying. I welcome these changes. Notably I refuse to ever have install a game that uses tactics like this, on principle.
keithpeter 11y ago
Static ads: no problem. Videos or content that moves or flashes I find amazingly distracting. Hence ad blocker type functionality. I do 'unblock' domains that I trust not to have moving/animated/flashing content. I also use the readability bookmarklet when all else fails. Am I in a tiny neglected minority here?
alkonaut 11y ago
Does this mean that it will be possible to use tracker blocking like Ghostery and similar plugins too? That would be fantastic.
alkonaut 11y ago
I'm not sure I understand why Adblock still works? I mean, how can it be so reliable in detecting ads? If I had a site with ads I'd try to make them as unobtrusive as possible and indistinguishable from my own content. A sidebar of images with urls only from my own domain. If an ad network is used to serve those images it can be proxies through my servers. There has to be some technical reason why this isn't the standard way of doing it (for example that it breaks advanced tracking, or that Adblock detects the actual contents).
- kayoone 11y ago
  probably because it breaks view and meta (retargeting etc) tracking which is why ad networks might not allow it
  - alkonaut 11y ago
    What hopefully happens is that either that advertising online becomes what it is offline: dumb and expensive ads displayed to people on billboards and in newspapers. This will effectcively kill the small operations that pay for servers and bandwidth through ads. or Ad networks will become content networks: a content provider (such as a blogger) publishes their content to the network who bakes it together with ads and displays it on the site in question. That is, you either get nothing or you get content plus ads.
- benashford 11y ago
  I think it's because, so far, the reach of ad-blocking is quite small so there hasn't been a significant need to invest in anti-blocking measures. An arms race in blocking ads designed not to be blocked would be interesting to watch. While it would be very easy to introduce text/images/video in such a way that hides the fact it's an advert (there will be heuristics, of course); I suspect it'll be more difficult to measure the viewership/click-through-rate of such ads, as that's what will give the game away and make signal the presence of an ad. Ultimately it might come down to old-fashioned offline measures, similar to how billboards/magazines use third-parties to measure the reach of an advert without any tracking on the advert itself. This would make small content producers suffer the most. While everyone knows and trusts the reach of a newspaper site, a blog that suddenly gets 20,000 HN visitors in one afternoon, what's that worth?
aorth 11y ago
I am sympathetic to content creators making money, but I don't think the trade offs in privacy are worth it. For example, a recent Wired article about Apple's WWDC[0] pleas with the user to "do us a solid" and whitelist their site in their adblocker. Sadly, whitelisting that site in uBlock actually does 28 sites a solid[1]. What's worse, their site doesn't even use HTTPS, so how can I trust the code I get from them? [0] http://www.wired.com/2015/06/same-plans-tech/ http://www.wired.com/2015/06/same-plans-tech/ [1] https://imgur.com/nqUQsML https://imgur.com/nqUQsML
mukundmr 11y ago
This was overdue. I am fed up with websites auto launching the iTunes store to download an application or popping up another window for advertisement on the phone.
z3t4 11y ago
Startup idea: Invent a discovery tool that works better then ads. Hacker news is a good example. But there must be even more clever ways.
kyledrake 11y ago
The fun thing about detecting ad blockers is that it works both ways http://kyledrake.neocities.org/adblockbar/ http://kyledrake.neocities.org/adblockbar/
- hvs 11y ago
  Detecting ad blockers is usually a futile effort, though. The ad blockers will quickly discover that you are doing it and then just block your detection code.
- PJones 11y ago
  I have uBlock and Ghostery enabled in Safari, and this site didn't pick up either.
empressplay 11y ago
I love the smell of that antitrust bacon in the morning.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
HugoDaniel 11y ago
I wonder if they have anything planned for in-app ads, as these seem to be trending.
72deluxe 11y ago
Resurrect HTTP 402 perhaps?
liviu 11y ago
Good move for Apple and end users. BTW, AdBlock is the most popular extension for Safari OSX. https://extensions.apple.com https://extensions.apple.com
the100rabh 11y ago
Wonderful, tool to enable website be served only if it does not have adblocker installed will be the norm soon.
Nursie 11y ago
I don't want to see any ads. Ever. In the UK we have the BBC, with no ads. I pay for Netflix and NowTv, so I can watch movies and tv with no ads. I pay for spotify and get no ads. For the web I run adblock on as many devices as I can because I hate them. I am perfectly happy to have this detected and my access blocked. I'd go as far as setting a 'will not render' header in my http requests if that made it even easier. I don't want to rip anyone off but neither do I want branded brain-pollution.
- WorldWideWayne 11y ago
  Don't forget malware delivery on the web and in your native apps. I think the worst kind of ads have to be those that get loaded into a native app instead of a browser too because - who knows what kind of vulnerabilities the given app has?

494 points by IBM 11y ago

I'm completely cool with ads; what I'd like to see is the ability to block analytics, for example one-pixel transparent gifs as well as javascript "sources" consisting of one character of whitespace. I can do this with the hosts file but that requires that I jailbreak my device. Most are not going to want to do that. I'm also concerned about "mobile analytics" in which SDKs are offered free of charge to app developers so they can determine how users operate their apps. However the data centers are quite costly to operate; _someone_ must be paying for all that. I expect mobile analytics can be blocked in the hosts file as well but it isn't so straightforward to determine the hostnames to blackhole.

walterbell 11y ago
> I can do this with the hosts file but that requires that I jailbreak my device. Most are not going to want to do that. Alternatively, VPN to a home router and filter all traffic there, for TV, desktops, laptops, mobile.
- Abundnce10 11y ago
  Do you find your browsing speeds increase when you do this? I ask because I'm assuming the page loads faster without the ads but it must be offset (to some extent) by the VPN connection. Also, can you link to any examples on setting this up on an Android device?
  - walterbell 11y ago
    Here's an example: pfSense 2.1.5 (which can be run in a Xen VM) with Android, iOS, Windows and Linux clients, https://blog.andregasser.net/how-to-configure-ipsec-vpn-on-pfsense-for-use-with-iphone-ipad-android-windows-and-linux/ https://blog.andregasser.net/how-to-configure-ipsec-vpn-on-p... I'm still setting this up so don't yet have field data on performance, but 4G LTE ping times are about double the latency of home broadband, http://blog.catchpoint.com/2014/01/15/theres-no-avoiding-network-latency-on-4g/ http://blog.catchpoint.com/2014/01/15/theres-no-avoiding-net....
  - click170 11y ago
    Filtering in this way does provide a significant speed hit if you choose to use your home router but nothing is stopping you from using a VPS instead. For me the primary concern is privacy and security and using the always on VPN is the best way I've found to protect what I value. Nothing gets out without my expressed consent, just the way I like it.
    - walterbell 11y ago
      Are you using Android or iOS? There seems to be flakiness on iOS8 where the VPN gets disconnected during a change between WiFi and Cellular, or if the device is locked.
      - click170 11y ago
        I'm using android. The VPN can drop out when I change networks, but it reconnects in less than a single second under good conditions, and that's not an exaggeration. I use a plain ipsec xauth VPN. Having tried both ipsec with l2tp and openvpn SSL VPN, ipsec is the only one I can get to reconnect in under a second. All the others take at least 5 seconds to complete a handshake.
- 0942v8653 11y ago
  You don't need to VPN. A DNS server works as well as a hosts file and is much faster than putting every request through your network.
  - walterbell 11y ago
    Good point. VPN can be used to deliver the ad-blocking DNS server to multiple mobile devices, enabling access to VPN-hosted files while leaving most traffic on the cellular network.
davidgerard 11y ago
http://lwn.net/Articles/646339/ http://lwn.net/Articles/646339/ privacy.trackingprotection.enabled Works on Firefox on desktop and Android. Speeds up browsing 40% on particularly obnoxious sites. (AdBlockPlus also works in Firefox Android.)
popcornarsonist 11y ago
> The new Safari release brings Content Blocking Safari Extensions to iOS. Content Blocking gives your extensions a fast and efficient way to block cookies, images, resources, pop-ups, and other content. It seems like this feature isn't really just "ad blocking", it's the ability to write any kind of blocking extension. So a plugin that blocks analytics should be pretty doable.
morgante 11y ago
Why do you think creators shouldn't be allowed to know how many people are reading their content?
- MichaelCrawford 11y ago
  I'm completely cool with the analysis of one's own web server logs. What I'm not cool with is Hacker News knowing that KindGirls is my favorite website of ill repute. Consider the challenge faced by closeted homosexual presidential candidates. Analytics is also used for credit scoring. That is, suppose I were to hang out at sites that covered asset protection, bankrupcy. There are all kinds of ways to beat debt collectors, most of them perfectly legal and while well-documented they are not well known. Were I to apply for any manner of loan after hanging out at all these sites, my loan would not be approved. If you don't believe me I can dig up the specific company that offers this "service" however not just now as it will take me some time to find it again.
- pdkl95 11y ago
  Why do you think you need anything other than the HTTP server logs to find out that number?
  - morgante 11y ago
    > Why do you think you need anything other than the HTTP server logs to find out that number? All server logs tell you is that some user agent loaded the page. They tell you absolutely nothing about whether that computer was actually a person, or if that person actually read the article. I don't understand all the hate around analytics. Data is how better decisions are made.
    - pdkl95 11y ago
      Tracking that kind of information is the worst kind of surveillance there is. You see it as profitable data, but lots of things are profitable or useful, and sometimes society sees things as going too far and those things get restricted or banned. Breaking into people's homes is useful, even if you don't take anything; this distinction is so significant that just the violation of someone's property was made into it's own, separate crime. The problem is that technology has made the personal boundaries somewhat harder to define, and this is being made worse by the fact that there are a LOT of people that are ignorant about how that technology actually works and a lot of businesses that are finding it really profitable to take advantage of this ignorance. Analytics, for example. Baring any specific contracts[1], the transaction that is implicit when someone clicks on a link is that their computer will request some other computer (identified by the host in the URL they clicked on), with the expectation that the other side may (or may not) send a document (or document-like thing) back in reply. Unfortunately - and unknown to most people - the technical nature of HTML and especially Javascript have made it easy to include 3rd parties into construction of the page, and for the transaction to continue FAR longer than the initial click+download. As part of that increase in scope, many people have now decided that they have some sort of right to this extension, a right to run Turing complete code on other people's CPUs, and a right for 3rd parties to be involved. None of that exists - we haven't signed a contract - and just because you found a technical trick that lets you accomplish this kind of surveillance doesn't mean you should do it, or that it is morally right. Asking you for a page obviously consents to you knowing about that request. Logging information about people without their knowledge or consent makes you an overly-nosy neighbor at best, and a stalker that should face criminal charges at worst. The truth is probably somewhere in between those extremes. Why does this matter? Because as you say - data is how decisions are made. Data wants to be aggregated and aggregated data is an attractive nuisance to people that want to exploit that data. Do you really want to have the fact that you spent N hours reading on some topic to be known whatever government we end up having in the future? Do you think your insurance companies are interested if you read various topics that interest them? There are incalculable potential problems with storing personal data, simply because we cannot predict what subset of that data will be problematic in the future. By logging data at all, you are creating this future - and that makes you an enemy of those of us that still value privacy. I suggest that your business model needs updating. Maybe it only requires being clever and finding a socially-responsible way to make those same decisions. Maybe some business models are pathological, and need to go away. I don't think those lines are perfectly clear yet, so I wish you luck should you choose to pursue a different path. Oh, and because this is about analytics, that means Google in most cases. A single party. One would think the potential monopolistic issue would be enough to stop using their analytics services. Anyway, if you truly want to learn about what this backlash is about - which is a backlash against all aspects of "surveillance as a business model" - then I recommend watching the link I have posted here several times recently of Aral Balkan's recent talk[2], as he explains things in far more detail. If you have any sense of privacy left, it might just terrify you. [1] if one side is highly ignorant of what the contract's consequences are, I consider that a contract made in bad faith [2] https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html#balkan https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html...

untog 11y ago

This is a fantastic development for users. That being said, hopefully you can permit me being a grouch: Apple hasn't done this entirely out of the goodness of their own hearts. After all, this isn't going to filter ads in native apps, is it? If you're a site that relies on ad revenue you've just been given another reason to live in app-land, not web-land. Imagine you're a publisher. With one OS release Apple has provided the ability to block ads on the web and Apple News, a charming new platform for you to publish your articles, complete with iAd integration. Which one are you going to prioritise? Not that this is an either-or thing: just like Google vacuums up your personal data and gives you Google Now in return, Apple will push publishers towards iOS apps while also giving you a great web experience.

briandear 11y ago
Anything that stops the obnoxious redirects to the App Store would be awesome. I started turning off JS on mobile today simply because most news sites I read had become unusable. This is great news and an ideal way to punish publishers that bombard my experience with giant turds. I will gladly pay for content that doesn't suck.
- untog 11y ago
  Anything that stops the obnoxious redirects to the App Store would be awesome. Except that you're going to get a lot more of them, pointing you towards native apps that serve you articles with unblockable ads.
  - mhurron 11y ago
    Or you stop going to those sites. Though I don't browse on my phone so I don't have this problem.
    - manigandham 11y ago
      This is the real answer to everything: if users dont like the ads, then dont go to the site.

dj_doh 11y ago

May be it's a good thing for the news/media industry. Why rely on flimsy ads. If your news contents are credible and important to users they'll subscribe to it a la Netflix or HBO Go.

threeseed 11y ago
It's going to be increase the polarisation of the media that's for sure. In order for subscription models to work you have to either (a) focus your content on a specific target e.g. Huffington Post or (b) be eminately respected like the NY Times. The real company to watch is News Corp. The Sun in the UK was just eclipsed by the Daily Mail largely as a result of The Sun having a paywall on their website. This meant more web traffic to Daily Mail which then brought in new customers and translated to more newspaper sales. Likewise in Australia the paywall sites e.g. The Australian have been struggling. Making the subscription model work is turning out to be a lot harder than it looks for many.
erickhill 11y ago
That's an extremely naive attitude, IMO. To this day, the vast majority of publishers who rely on traffic and ad revenues simply can't afford to create subscription walls and stay in business. In addition, Mobile Web revenues are a tiny shred of revenue compared to desktop experiences. It isn't a huge leap to expect this type of behavior in a future release for Safari in OS X, too.
- Retric 11y ago
  The vast majority of publishers are terrible and I have no issue with them disappearing.
- douche 11y ago
  Desktop Safari has such a minuscule market share that it doesn't really matter.
- eli 11y ago
  Go check the comment thread on any HN link to a paywalled article like WSJ. Users really don't like paywalls. > Mobile Web revenues are a tiny shred of revenue compared to desktop experiences That's already changing and will continue to change.

threeseed 11y ago

This is extraordinary news. There has been an overwhelming shift from web to mobile advertising in the last few years and the prediction is for this to increase significantly. For the largest traffic producer to allow the blocking of ads is going to completely upend the economics of many web sites. I think it is very telling that Apple is doing this right when they have announced a News app. Clearly they want to direct publishers and bloggers into that app and away from mobile sites. All in all this could be devastating for companies like Google.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

bsaul 11y ago

I don't think a combo of dns aliasing to the ad network, plus better embedding ads in the dom to make them look like a site's regular content, plus random ordering of news and ads to prevent any kind of static css rules matching can be countered. Now of course that means ads will require a bit more work to integrate to a website, and probably move integration deeper in the server side, but technicaly i don't see any major issues. Am I missing something ?

rblatz 11y ago
Most ads that pay the highest are retargeting ads. Meaning you went to an online store looked at gadgets, that site included a snippet of js that said to the ad network, "hey he looked at gadgets". Now the ad network shows you ads for gadgets from that site. There isn't a good way to build that deeper into the server, cookies don't work that way.
- bsaul 11y ago
  You could configure the js to use another domain name to talk to, ( the same as the original site), that would be just an alias to the ad network. Ad blockers work on the http level, not on the dns one, so there's no way for them to know the redirection did happen. Or you could make it all happen on the server side. Just have the ad network provide a server side plug in that would analyse incoming http request for user blueprinting, and ask the ad server what ad to display. Then you'd just have to include that content in your response.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

endymi0n 11y ago

Here's what's going to happen. Just a little while longer: nothing. As soon as one big party will try to make a significant impact on the ads market (more than 20% at once), a big shift will happen, uniting Publishers all around and shutting adblocking visitors out completely in a coordinated manner. Just like Microsoft's opt-out only DNT-Field, the tide will quickly turn against Apple, as soon as you can't read 50% of all web pages anymore because ads are blocked by default (or a majority). Same thing with this Filter startup that wants to block ads on a mobile provider level (forgot the name). As soon as people realize that all the stuff on the internet isn't "free", but ad financed, they will finally have to make the real choice themselves by opting in or paying.

threeseed 11y ago
There are some problems with this theory though. (a) On average iOS users have more disposable income than Android users, (b) iOS users have shown a proclivity for spending that money on mobile content and (c) iOS are responsible for more web traffic than Android. So if publishers adopt a freemium model (the most common) and they present a crappy experience to users who block ads then they won't be willing to buy a subscription. That's why most websites today don't punish users who block ads and that position will likely continue on mobile as well.
- endymi0n 11y ago
  True. But don't underestimate the efforts of a multiple billion dollars content industry with their back against the wall (a lot of them ads only without any freemium option). Robbed of any monetization strategy for a whole segment (unlike the ads vs. paywall wars between publishers), I see much more collaboration coming against a too invasive force with their own objectives.
- lelandbatey 11y ago
  Your third point is completely false. According to Opera Mediaworks, as of Q1 2015, Android makes up 65% of mobile traffic, 3x more than iOS with 22%, as well as beating iOS out of the top spot for ad revenue. You can read this report here: http://operamediaworks.com/sites/default/files/file_attachment/sma_q1_2015_compressed.pdf http://operamediaworks.com/sites/default/files/file_attachme... (page 2)

cwyers 11y ago

And this is why Google moved heaven and Earth to get Android out the door, even when it stalled all the momentum for its own ChromeOS.

toomuchtodo 11y ago
Yet you'd still see users flock to iOS if Apple lowered the device price. Disclaimer: Ex-Android user.
- cwyers 11y ago
  I don't know if that's true. I don't know that it's not true either. I don't say that to claim superiority for Android, that's for sure. I would probably be an ex-Android user if the app situation on Windows Phone wasn't so dire. It's just a pretty clear example of the reason that Google doesn't want Apple (or anyone, really) to be able to control the platform they use to reach people.
- recursive 11y ago
  I'm skeptical of that. I've got zero to back it up, which is the same amount as you, but I can say I'd pay a premium for Android over iOS if necessary.
- dublinben 11y ago
  The success of premium devices like the Galaxy Note and Galaxy S6 undermines your argument that Android only succeeds based on price. Many consumers prefer Android over iOS, and deliberately choose not to buy iPhones.
  - jay_kyburz 11y ago
    I bought my Nexus 4 on the promise of Android. Damn thing crashed and rebooted when I was trying to answer a call the other day. There are so many UI issues. Material design might look nice, but sux in so many other regards. I will not buy another Android phone that's for sure.

mmanfrin 11y ago

This feels like a broadside attack at Google.

baldfat 11y ago
Just like the Apple Now clone with no tie in with Apple ID (Not like other Companies) Also anti-competitive US Government will go nuts on them. I could see companies blocking iOS as a protest if ads were blocked by Safari. Edit for grammar.
bb0wn 11y ago
Came here to say just that. Apple seems to be trying to make the case that users don't necessarily need to get in bed with creepy, data-mining-for-profit platforms to receive good service. Whether that's really true, or just good rhetoric...

Osmium 11y ago

Interesting that, at the same time, Apple is actively promoting iAds for people to monetize its new news service. On the one hand, if you have to have ads, it's probably better to have an ad platform under your control (where you can enforce privacy and safeguard against performance issues), but it's still not ideal (slippery slope later on?). I wonder if Apple's News app takes off if, at a later date, they could introduce a paid tier Spotify-style to let people read its news content without ads, and distribute the funds accordingly to news providers who've signed up for it?

justaman 11y ago
There are numerous issues with this business model. If we examine the parallel of the app store. Many smaller app developers are frustrated with the "large cut" Apple takes per download. Similarly in the music world, you have Tidal(failing) and artists like Taylor Swift upset.
- Osmium 11y ago
  For sure, but it could still be better than what publishers currently have, which is basically nothing. Especially for smaller sites. Very few succeed individually on a subscription basis, and micropayments haven't really taken off. I was wondering if they could calculate the cut they have based on the length of time a person reads a given news source, which would promote long-form content.

pasta_2 11y ago

Tech/media companies dependent on advertising should just adapt. As techies told a complaining music industry, just do concerts and sell t-shirts. Now maybe this won't be as profitable as the current business model, and maybe the industry will be smaller and more consolidated, but that's capitalism. No one guaranteed you would keep growing and making more money. Perhaps you'll have to stop using third-party ad networks and start selling and creating your own ads. Native ads like Buzzfeed's sponsored posts could work. It'll probably require more capital and won't scale as well, but you'll just have to deal with that.

guelo 11y ago

FYI, Firefox for Android has had ad blocking extensions since it came out.

jusben1369 11y ago
<insert snarky comment about the 12 people that's helped and get downvoted>
- guelo 11y ago
  <insert comment about how it would be way more people if Apple wouldn't block iphone users from running browser apps>
- kibwen 11y ago
  Firefox for Android has been downloaded between 100 million and 500 million times, which is a bit more than your estimate. :P See https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.firefox https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fi... -> "Additional information" -> "Installs". And given that AdBlock isn't available for Chrome on Android, I wouldn't be surprised if AdBlock for Firefox was a large motivator behind this statistic.
EpicDavi 11y ago
Also FYI, there are no extension enabled versions of FireFox on iOS because Apple requires all web content to be rendered in their specified engine (WebKit IIRC) and Mozilla is not allowed to use their own.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  They could still allow extensions for WebKit.

learc83 11y ago

I wish there was a service that integrated with the major ad networks that allowed you to pay money not to be show ads. Something were the majority goes to the owners of the websites who's ads you're blocking.

scottfr 11y ago
https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/
anuragbiyani 11y ago
https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/
karmelapple 11y ago
1. Pay to block ads 2. Choose a couple types of ads that I would be okay to see, either by companies or topics, reducing the money I pay
manigandham 11y ago
The issue is that this is a global business with hundreds of companies and publishers and not much regulation (which is what I think is the real solution), plus people aren't interested in subscriptions when they can just download an extension and block everything for free. Unfortunately, while I think the reasons for adblock can be valid, it's allowing people to effectively take content without letting the producers earn anything in return. Just because something is easy doesn't make it "right".
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- learc83 11y ago
  >Unfortunately, while I think the reasons for adblock can be valid, its allowing people to effective take content without letting the producers earn anything in return. Just because something is easy doesn't make it "right". Do you feel the same way when someone mutes the TV during commercials? What if I put a piece of tape across my monitor to block an fixed location add? I don't feel morally obligated to view ads on publicly accessible internet sites in the same way that I don't feel obligated to stay in the room during commercials. I'll happily pay content providers if it's easy, but it's a utilitarian decision for me not a moral one. If you put information in public, I don't feel bad about viewing only the portion of that information that's useful to me.

niccaluim 11y ago

His list of arguments for using ad blockers left out what I imagine is the #1 reason, which is "you're filling my eyeballs with garbage."

hellbanTHIS 11y ago
The new thing they're trying is what you could call "gross-bait" ads, one gem that comes to mind is the girl's legs with indentations in them and white things coming out. I'm not even sure they're selling anything anymore, most web ads seem more like psychological warfare. How about a subscription service - and it could be a voluntary honor system thing - where you pay something each month and it gets distributed to websites you visit, and in order for a site to register with the service they have to forgo advertising. I'd pay $10 a month to do my part to rid the world of web ads. Somebody steal that idea.
- lewisl9029 11y ago
  > Somebody steal that idea. Google already did: https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/
  - hellbanTHIS 11y ago
    Well, shit.
- antimatter 11y ago
  Also, Readability tried something similar. Didn't work. https://gigaom.com/2011/02/01/419-readability-intros-subscriptions-to-pay-publishers-for-focused-readers/ https://gigaom.com/2011/02/01/419-readability-intros-subscri... https://gigaom.com/2012/06/13/readability-ends-publisher-payment-program/ https://gigaom.com/2012/06/13/readability-ends-publisher-pay...
  - hellbanTHIS 11y ago
    Sounds like Readability was blocking all ads and then saying "come find us so we can pay you, even though we never told you we were doing this, oops too late". Plus since then there's been the invention of these Taboola and Outbrain type ads which are like the ISIS of advertising. Because of them I'm sensing a lot more people are ready to declare war on web ads.

egwynn 11y ago

I’ve started running a local instance of dnsmasq that returns NXDOMAIN for a giant list of ad servers. For anything not in the list, it tosses the request up to the real DNS server. I’ve found it to be a simple and effective way to block lots of ads for all local network traffic.

Adaptive 11y ago

I'm in way too late on this thread for this comment to be noticed, but this is so absolutely self-serving for Apple. DO NOT LAUD APPLE FOR THIS. If Apple were doing this for any reasonable purpose, they'd do it on Safari on the desktop as well. Almost every sane reason for blocking ads is as pertinent there. They are simply trying to force content providers to go native app and become part of the Apple revenue stream. That's it, pure and simple.

IBM 11y ago
You've been able to install ad blocking extensions for Safari on OS X for a while now.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - integraton 11y ago
    > But not everyone installs extensions... All of that seems to be besides the point with regard to the parent's comment. Based on what the documentation seems to be saying [1], iOS Safari ad-blocking would require third party extensions, like OS X Safari. 1. https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/releasenotes/General/WhatsNewInSafari/Articles/Safari_9.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40014305-CH9-SW9 https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/releaseno...
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - sjwright 11y ago
    The new "in-browser option" is available for both mobile and desktop Safari. It also requires user actions equivalent to selecting and installing an extension.

popsaraivah 11y ago

@Popsaraivah

popsaraivah 11y ago

Qr hackear

popsaraivah 11y ago

@Popsaraivah

guptaneil 11y ago

I think everybody is missing the point here. Content blockers are nice for ad blocking, but an even better use case here is websites knowing whether or not you have their mobile app installed. Imagine a website that has an "Install our app" script that normally runs when you view it on mobile, but that script gets blocked by their own app when it's installed on your device. With a bit of creativity, you can do even cooler things than that once you think about content blockers like this. It's kind of the inverse of extensions, where websites can define various extensions that are enabled or disabled accordingly by your installed apps.

douche 11y ago
I would pay money for an extension that would prevent websites from redirecting me from the full desktop version of their site to the crippled "mobile-optimized" version. Especially when the full site has to load completely, before a jQuery onready function fires to do the redirect...
- alttab 11y ago
  This is temporary. Unfortunately, news sites have to get a clue...
- hayksaakian 11y ago
  get an extension to change your user agent change it to the desktop version of your browser (eg. chrome desktop instead of chrome mobile). you may need root/jailbreak to do this
- kzahel 11y ago
  In Chrome on android this is an option in the dropdown menu "request desktop site"
- mkskm 11y ago
  You can do this now by tapping the address bar > Request Desktop Site in Safari on iOS 8. Would be nice to have it be automatic though.
11y ago

d_luaz 11y ago

Wikipedia could survive with donation. If AdBlocker is detected, website should prompt for donation (like Wikipedia) until a certain yearly amount is reach.

cooper12 11y ago
Personally, I don't feel like the payments should be called donations. It's like saying "please give us money out of the kindness of your heart or else we'll die" instead of "please acknowledge the value of the content you consumed so we can create more".
profmonocle 11y ago
Wikipedia's donation banners last year were more intrusive than paid ads on a lot of sites.

notNow 11y ago

Apple is basically sticking it to Google here. They want to weaken their competition in the ad space to have more room and leverage for its products. Time for the anti trust bodies to look seriously into their practices.

dvhh 11y ago

This move would give a lot of legitimacy to "native advertising" or "advertorial", so yes I am glad we would give up the garbage of page filled with banner/popup/redirection to buy your app to get manipulated by article that will show me the truth about Scientology

unholiness 11y ago

I posted this on an earlier thread about the morality of AdBlock, but it seem relevant to the discussion: There is a huge irony in that fact that AdBlock's function of keeping ads away from our content will eventually do the opposite. The alternative to ads alongside my content is ads inside my content. Let's face it: paywalls don't work. The alternative on the horizon is native advertising. Buzzfeed is now famously refusing to host ads. Instead they sustain themselves by publishing content that subtly supports the agenda of any company with deep enough pockets to pay for it. A viewer's ability to distinguish between native ads and regular articles is small and quickly vanishing. If separate ads stop reaching people, the path to monetization remaining is to change your content to reflect someone else's agenda. I keep AdBlock off by default because I prefer a world where creators can make a meaningful articles and a useful apps without caring about who they are supporting, and can, as the price tag, separately attach an ad. I do see it as a moral issue. There are good people making content that's being sustained by ads. I am never going to remember to give them my modicum of support if I don't consider them innocent until proven guilty. It's worth the small annoyance. It's worth the 2 seconds it takes to turn it on for the problematic pages. Hell, you can even map it to a shortcut[1]. It sucks, but the alternative is positively bleak. . TL;DR: The bathroom may be dirty, but at least no one's taking a shit in my kitchen. [1] https://adblockplus.org/en/faq_customization#shortcuts https://adblockplus.org/en/faq_customization#shortcuts

eeeeeeeeeeeee 11y ago
I see your point, but the the alternative is we need a better solution; blocking ads doesn't mean the writing becomes corrupt and we give up and that's it. Adblocking will lead to content creators finding a better revenue source; there are a lot of people that don't want to compromise themselves by being a paid voice for corporate interests. Buzzfeed is a poor example; it's just garbage content that is being re-circulated by many different places. There are TONS of sites that have paywalls and/or ads on their sites and their writing is still compromised. So I think paying for content and getting advertisements out of good content is the solution to restore independence, but the price point needs to be right. I hate blocking ads (I whitelist sites I visit frequently with reasonable ads) but ads have become obnoxious, so AdBlock is a natural reaction to site owners treating users like shit. Sadly, a lot of reasonable sites with unobtrusive ads have gotten caught up in blacklists. I would pay for good news content if I could pay for a bundle of good content at a fair price. Even something like the NY Times is a hard sell; it feels weird given the wealth of sources and information we have access to these days. NY Times is a great source, but I don't want to only read a single source. And it quickly becomes unaffordable if you want to pay for a lot of sources of information. Spotify and similar providers solved this with music and I still think a better solution will come out eventually for news. There are a lot of people that want to pay a fair price for good content, but the current options are not very good.

joesmo 11y ago

This is a step in the right direction but falls short of being the right direction. An ad blocker built into a major browser and turned on by default should long ago have been available. This will hopefully push websites, especially news websites, to figure out some other monetization strategy, one that's not based on ads and therefore doesn't undermine the credibility of the news and the site. So it's a win for consumers as no one wants to see ads as well as hopefully taking consumers closer to ad free, unbiased news sources.

alogray 11y ago
The next obvious target for monetization by news organizations are sponsored articles. I've started to see them in certain San Francisco specific news websites. It's not exactly the sort of thing we want to push these sites toward.
- kibwen 11y ago
  Press releases masquerading as news have been a tradition since time immemorial: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
jay_kyburz 11y ago
A fools errand. The only news sources that can ever be trusted are publicly funded organisations like Australias ABC. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Broadcasting_Corporation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Broadcasting_Corpora...

joeblau 11y ago

This is interesting. Does Googles mobile chrome browser have something similar on Android? I'm not really a huge fan of advertising but this seems like a feature that would make a certain group of users choose one browser over another and I can't really see Google not adding mobile plugins to allow this as some point.

throwaway2048 11y ago
chrome on android has no plugin support, firefox does however.

raquo 11y ago

Apple killing off publishers' revenue streams that it doesn't get a cut from? Big surprise.

wnevets 11y ago

such an innovative move.

markbnj 11y ago

How long have "ads" been around in the modern form? By which I mean "visual content embedded in some medium that is viewed by significant numbers of people." If you include storefront signage in that then a long time, I suppose. But in terms of reaching anything like a mass audience I assume it essentially began with the advent of print publications. Maybe the time of mass visual advertising is just over? It reached its peak with network and cable television and radio, and now that those mediums are evaporating there is nothing to replace them that offers the same characteristics. Maybe the next model will be something entirely different.

morgante 11y ago
Advertising as a business model was in place as far back as the Roman empire. [0] [0] http://purplemotes.net/2009/09/20/mass-media-in-ancient-rome/ http://purplemotes.net/2009/09/20/mass-media-in-ancient-rome...
tribe 11y ago
There are examples of medieval books with ads in them, so it seems such advertisements are older than mass media or the printing press. http://medievalbooks.nl/2014/12/05/medieval-spam-the-oldest-advertisements-for-books/ http://medievalbooks.nl/2014/12/05/medieval-spam-the-oldest-...
dredmorbius 11y ago
Advertising is as old as business and writing. The modern form of advertising however relies on a few specific developments: 1. The printing press. (1450) 2. Widespread literacy. (18th / 19th century) 3. Consumer products. (mid 19th century) 4. Consumerism, generally. (early 20th century) 5. Mass media. (early/mid 20th century) Much of this converged in the 1920s as mass-market consumer culture really started to take hold, though it was interrupted by the Great Depression and WWII, re-emerging in the late 1940s and 1950s. The latter were the heyday of the large magazine publication (arguably the Web content of its day), with both nonfiction and fiction carried prominently. Both faded as TV replaced reading as a pastime. Adam Curtis's 2002 BBC documentary, The Century of the Self details much more of the history of advertising and propaganda, particularly the role played by Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays (who arguably made Freud as well). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self

jay_kyburz 11y ago

Attention somebody looking for their next startup idea! Content publishers need an innovative way to serve ads in a way that cannot be distinguished from the content. Perhaps by acting as a proxy for ad networks, perhaps by hosting the ads directly. I guess publishers will need to collect their own demographic information and make it available to the advertisers.

nickhalfasleep 11y ago

This and HTTP2 for content aggregation point to embedding advertisements deeper within the main content provider. Look for plugins to popular web servers to make a side pull and injection of content before it leaves the server, not in the browser DOM.

tuananh 11y ago

This would hurt Google so much.

cttet 11y ago

This is why Google developed Chrome and Android, in case of these things happen..

zodiakzz 11y ago
It's gonna happen there as well once they add support for extensions ;)

Sideloader 11y ago

I use dedicated Ad Block software (or a customized host blocker) on all my internet enabled devices. I have no moral qualms whatsoever about doing so. Why do I block ads on the Internet? They are annoying and detract from my browsing experience. In addition to serving distracting ads that I never click on, online advertisers want to "hijack" and redirect my browser to sites I had no intention of visiting not to mention throwing up pop-up banners that I didn't ask to see. These tactics are the Internet equivalent of shop owners and proprietors grabbing people off the street and forcing them into their stores. I wouldn't put with it on the street and I won't put up with it on the Internet. This is hardly proof of anything but in my experience the vast majority of people do not use ad blocking software of any kind. The people who do make use of such software tend to be slightly more savvy than the (usually older) people whose Internet experience consists of browsing the surface of the surface web (Yahoo!, Facebook, first page of Google search results etc). This demographic also tends to leave default settings unchanged unless there is significant hype or FUD to make them pay attention, e.g., Facebook privacy settings. The people installing ad blocking software or writing their own host blockers are specifically seeking out ways to limit their exposure to advertising. They are not likely to be enthusiastic ad clickers and likely do not make purchasing decisions based on sponsored text or images shown next to their search results. Really, how valuable are potential customers that go out of their way to avoid being exposed to advertising? Advertising companies - Google and Facebook being the most ubiquitous and powerful examples - are already data-mining every piece of information they possibly can and finding new ways to collect ever more intelligence. Never in human history has mass surveillance been practiced on such a large scale. Google and Facebook then sell or auction amalgamated data bundles to a robust industry of data brokers who in turn attempt to monetize the information they have paid for. The end user (whose attention is the product being sold by the providers of "free" content) has no control whatsoever over their data. More than a few large SV corporations have a close relationship with the state. Google being the most notable here...Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen wrote a book that was, in part, about the company's partnership with the DoS. These same companies despite some impressive lip service often roll over very quickly when the NSA and its pals come knocking. When state intelligence agencies and a handful of powerful corporations collect and store massive amounts of citizens' data without any meaningful oversight or checks and balances we have a problem. Oh sure they all say "trust us" and "your privacy is"...wait for it.."important to us" (do a search for that phrase) but were it not for the painless under-the-radar data collecting methods employed, and the amount and content of information harvested and stored was made obvious, many more people would give more of a shit about what kind of future we are building. And it is advertising that drives the corporate data-mining industry. So all y'all will excuse me if I laugh out loud when some random forum poster launches into a stern lecture about the immorality of blocking advertising on the Internet and on mobile devices. Oh, and I also block as many trackers as possible and am absolutely okay with that, too. I should add that I am not opposed to all surveillance. Indeed, many of the benefits the Internet has brought would be impossible without it. Government surveillance, in specific instances, is also justified. However, ever increasing mass surveillance with little or no oversight controlled by some of the most powerful entities on the planet is definitely cause for concern.

emehrkay 11y ago

Did Google recently say that most of their mobile ad revenue comes from iOS users? I could see this prompting a Apple/Google cold war that would go as far as iOS including ad blocking by default in a few years.

Sideloader 11y ago

Mobile Safari sucks compared to Mercury browser, which already has built in ad blocking and a host of other awesome features. And it is fast...really fast. I barely use Safari on my (jailbroken) iOS devices and don't miss it at all.

epc 11y ago

This will be the toehold DoJ and the FTC need to file antitrust charges against Apple, if it’s true that iAds cannot be blocked, and continue to be only acquirable through Apple’s process and not on the various ad exchanges.

colinbartlett 11y ago
I don't think Apple would be that dumb. Is iAd even available for websites? I doubt it. Also I doubt they even care about iAd, I imagine it's such a tiny part of their revenue.
- epc 11y ago
  The value of the feature to the alleged monopolist is irrelevant to the FTC/DOJ, solely the impact on competition. If the primary way consumers consume information is shifting to mobile, and the premier mobile platform inhibits mobile advertising except their its own built-in advertising system, then the FTC/DOJ can use that as the start of the investigation. Given the speed DOJ and FTC move for monopoly investigations I doubt anything will happen before the market is already significantly changed and/or damaged.

oldpond 11y ago

I can imagine a world without advertising quite easily. If you could snap your fingers and make all advertising disappear the world would be a better place. Sure, TV and Radio would disappear, but who needs it? I stopped listening to Radio years ago,and people are fleeing from TV in droves. I remember the internet before the "make a buck off the internet" crowd showed up. They can all fall out as far as I'm concerned. The beauty of the internet is that you don't have to see advertising if you don't want to. And if the day comes when it can't be avoided I'm turning it off. Wouldn't miss what the internet has become now anyway, just another form of TV.

frik 11y ago
No ads would mean you will have to pay per page view like in MicrosoftNetwork/MSN95 (Bill Gates plan of the "information highway" that failed in 1995 thanks to the free internet), and Teletext based systems from the 1980s like BTX in Germany.
- WorldWideWayne 11y ago
  I think the point is that who needs them? Most news networks serve up propaganda and useless bullshit anyway IMO. Endpoints that don't depend on advertising dollars to keep the servers running will always be there (like GitHub, Hacker News, IRC, Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, etc.) if people want them.
  - oldpond 11y ago
    Right. News is a commodity. I am sure nobody would be surprised to learn that the results on google news are mostly media outlets that use google's doubleclick service. As long as it's easy to donate to sites you find valuable on the internet then advertising free sites will flourish.
jgmmo 11y ago
What makes you think TV and radio would disappear? Can't content creators monetize their shows with other methods than third-party ads? Like selling their own goods and services?

bsder 11y ago

Great. Maybe I can finally load a website on mobile in less than two minutes. Maybe I can finally load websites without my entire browser freezing for several minutes while a zillion Javascript scripts all fight it out. Maybe I can finally switch a tab and switch back without the entire website having to reload because all the Javascript wants a new set of ads. All of this could have been avoided if you loaded my content FIRST and then filled in the ad placeholders SECOND. But, noooooo, ads are more important than content so my screen jumps around, my browser freezes, and my tabs reload and reload and reload and reload. Fuck 'em.

MarkMc 11y ago

So when I try to visit The New York Times website it will say, 'Sorry Safari is not supported - please switch to Chrome'. Is that what Apple wants?

mike-cardwell 11y ago
Guess what. Other browsers can block Ads too.

junto 11y ago

The other day I visited the website mirror.co.uk from reddit. This is a national tabloid neespaper website! As I started to read the article I was redirected to install the game "Game of War: Fire Age" on Google Play. My iPad has similar experiences but more often and it is very annoying. I welcome these changes. Notably I refuse to ever have install a game that uses tactics like this, on principle.

keithpeter 11y ago

Static ads: no problem. Videos or content that moves or flashes I find amazingly distracting. Hence ad blocker type functionality. I do 'unblock' domains that I trust not to have moving/animated/flashing content. I also use the readability bookmarklet when all else fails. Am I in a tiny neglected minority here?

alkonaut 11y ago

Does this mean that it will be possible to use tracker blocking like Ghostery and similar plugins too? That would be fantastic.

alkonaut 11y ago

I'm not sure I understand why Adblock still works? I mean, how can it be so reliable in detecting ads? If I had a site with ads I'd try to make them as unobtrusive as possible and indistinguishable from my own content. A sidebar of images with urls only from my own domain. If an ad network is used to serve those images it can be proxies through my servers. There has to be some technical reason why this isn't the standard way of doing it (for example that it breaks advanced tracking, or that Adblock detects the actual contents).

kayoone 11y ago
probably because it breaks view and meta (retargeting etc) tracking which is why ad networks might not allow it
- alkonaut 11y ago
  What hopefully happens is that either that advertising online becomes what it is offline: dumb and expensive ads displayed to people on billboards and in newspapers. This will effectcively kill the small operations that pay for servers and bandwidth through ads. or Ad networks will become content networks: a content provider (such as a blogger) publishes their content to the network who bakes it together with ads and displays it on the site in question. That is, you either get nothing or you get content plus ads.
benashford 11y ago
I think it's because, so far, the reach of ad-blocking is quite small so there hasn't been a significant need to invest in anti-blocking measures. An arms race in blocking ads designed not to be blocked would be interesting to watch. While it would be very easy to introduce text/images/video in such a way that hides the fact it's an advert (there will be heuristics, of course); I suspect it'll be more difficult to measure the viewership/click-through-rate of such ads, as that's what will give the game away and make signal the presence of an ad. Ultimately it might come down to old-fashioned offline measures, similar to how billboards/magazines use third-parties to measure the reach of an advert without any tracking on the advert itself. This would make small content producers suffer the most. While everyone knows and trusts the reach of a newspaper site, a blog that suddenly gets 20,000 HN visitors in one afternoon, what's that worth?

aorth 11y ago

I am sympathetic to content creators making money, but I don't think the trade offs in privacy are worth it. For example, a recent Wired article about Apple's WWDC[0] pleas with the user to "do us a solid" and whitelist their site in their adblocker. Sadly, whitelisting that site in uBlock actually does 28 sites a solid[1]. What's worse, their site doesn't even use HTTPS, so how can I trust the code I get from them? [0] http://www.wired.com/2015/06/same-plans-tech/ http://www.wired.com/2015/06/same-plans-tech/ [1] https://imgur.com/nqUQsML https://imgur.com/nqUQsML

mukundmr 11y ago

This was overdue. I am fed up with websites auto launching the iTunes store to download an application or popping up another window for advertisement on the phone.

z3t4 11y ago

Startup idea: Invent a discovery tool that works better then ads. Hacker news is a good example. But there must be even more clever ways.

kyledrake 11y ago

The fun thing about detecting ad blockers is that it works both ways http://kyledrake.neocities.org/adblockbar/ http://kyledrake.neocities.org/adblockbar/

hvs 11y ago
Detecting ad blockers is usually a futile effort, though. The ad blockers will quickly discover that you are doing it and then just block your detection code.
PJones 11y ago
I have uBlock and Ghostery enabled in Safari, and this site didn't pick up either.

empressplay 11y ago

I love the smell of that antitrust bacon in the morning.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

HugoDaniel 11y ago

I wonder if they have anything planned for in-app ads, as these seem to be trending.

72deluxe 11y ago

Resurrect HTTP 402 perhaps?

liviu 11y ago

Good move for Apple and end users. BTW, AdBlock is the most popular extension for Safari OSX. https://extensions.apple.com https://extensions.apple.com

the100rabh 11y ago

Wonderful, tool to enable website be served only if it does not have adblocker installed will be the norm soon.

Nursie 11y ago

I don't want to see any ads. Ever. In the UK we have the BBC, with no ads. I pay for Netflix and NowTv, so I can watch movies and tv with no ads. I pay for spotify and get no ads. For the web I run adblock on as many devices as I can because I hate them. I am perfectly happy to have this detected and my access blocked. I'd go as far as setting a 'will not render' header in my http requests if that made it even easier. I don't want to rip anyone off but neither do I want branded brain-pollution.

WorldWideWayne 11y ago
Don't forget malware delivery on the web and in your native apps. I think the worst kind of ads have to be those that get loaded into a native app instead of a browser too because - who knows what kind of vulnerabilities the given app has?