LWN: Comments on "Ad-blocking extension AdBlock sold to new owner"

Ad-blocking extension AdBlock sold to new owner

ssokolow — Thu, 15 Oct 2015 08:58:05 +0000

Not really.

I too have Asperger's syndrome (again, professionally diagnosed), so it does help my focus but, even if I didn't, it took me less than 5 minutes to install uBlock Origin and click the checkboxes for the lists.

As for NoScript, that's more about ensuring Firefox doesn't grind to a halt under heavy load for lack of a Chrome-style multiprocess architecture and protecting me from 0-day exploits and, still, it's one or two quick clicks on the odd site where it breaks something. Now, I HAVE seen other family members encounter such issues before they built a habit of using "temporarily allow all", which suggests that you and I visit very different sets of sites and that's why our experiences diverge so much. (Plus, it saves me a lot of annoyance from those "Hey! We know you haven't even read the article yet, but why not register an account (or take a survey)!?" superstitials.)

...plus, they're a ~~good part of this balanced breakfast~~ useful part of my stack of privacy-enhancing extensions (HTTPS Everywhere, NoScript, BetterPrivacy to whitelist Flash LSOs, RefControl to prevent CDNs from doing Referrer+IP tracking, Beef Taco to ensure all of the opt-out cookies are set, and uBlock Origin, which is also useful for preventing WebRTC-based LAN IP leakage) which I combine with stuff built into the browser like forcing cookies to session-only unless whitelisted and clearing cache on restart as part of a strategy to foil EverCookie.

We live in strange times

raven667 — Tue, 13 Oct 2015 19:28:38 +0000

Holy crap. If Google actually committed to this system it would completely change the dynamic on the Internet by fundamentally changing the incentives away from privacy invasive monitoring toward direct payment of creators, with Google taking a cut of the action, naturally. Outwardly it may look the same, creators still get a check every month based on the number of views they get, viewers browse cat pictures all day, read their email, etc. but now Google, and other middlemen, have no reason to build personality profiles of you for sale and there is a more direct and transparent link between customer and the creator, compared to the completely opaque and unaccountable firms that sit off to the side and bankroll the Internet we have now.

Of course they will probably just want to double-dip direct payments and advertising revenue and not solve any of those problems but we can all dream, right? 8-)

We live in strange times

nye — Tue, 13 Oct 2015 17:03:31 +0000

>I like Google's project to pay to not see ads.

Is this the "Contributor" thing? I've never heard of it before but that looked like the most relevant result based on some quick searching. It looks pretty expensive though for an estimated "roughly X% reduced ads" kind of deal, plus there's very little in the way of detail, and it appears to be US-only, for some reason.

I know at one point they were talking about having a way to pay to remove ads from Youtube, with the revenue (or presumably like 20% or whatever) being split between the channels whose videos you watched, but then that seems to have sunk without a trace.

Acceptable Ads

nix — Tue, 13 Oct 2015 13:47:16 +0000

The locking up firefox thing is quite different: the instantaneous auctions happen on the server (ad-farm) side, as soon as your HTTP GET hits them. Degree of protection from malevolent actors submitting high bids to malwareize machines: not much, and it's an arms race so they lose quite often, and whenever they lose someone *else* gets hurt, not them, so they don't have much motivation to do better.

We live in strange times

jospoortvliet — Sun, 11 Oct 2015 17:00:35 +0000

Then again, no company has to accept your feeling of entitlement to their content-for-free so blocking ad blockers and not showing anything to JavaScript blocking users seems totally fair game to me too...

I like Google's project to pay to not see ads.

Acceptable Ads

Wol — Sun, 11 Oct 2015 10:19:45 +0000

Only milliseconds? It locks up firefox for seconds ime. Oh - and the ad-serving sites are popular targets for crackers seeking to spread malware ... do you want to be pwned because some site you *wanted* to visit sent you an from some site you care nothing for, that was badly secured and has a load of malware on it?

Cheers,
Wol

Acceptable Ads

nix — Fri, 09 Oct 2015 16:47:00 +0000

Modern ad networks are worse than that, of course. By visiting a site, I don't want to have code executed on my machine by people chosen as a result of an automated auction process that *I had to wait for before the site appeared* (yes, only milliseconds, but still) that is trivially gameable by attackers.

Unfortunately that's the current web advertising world. :/

Ad-blocking extension AdBlock sold to new owner

nix — Fri, 09 Oct 2015 16:37:43 +0000

Strongly agreed. As someone with both Asperger's (actually diagnosed, not just I-have-it-on-the-Internet) and visual deficits (amblyopia) flashing or strongly textured ads, particularly in left-side sidebars, are not just impossible to ignore: they forcibly overlay the text beside them in a blurring, shifting morass, jumping and bouncing whenever my eye muscles work, that is next to impossible to make head or tail of. Without an adblocker (currently uBlock Origin) the Web would be literally unusable for me.

Ignoring such ads would, as Cyberax suggests, be easy! All I need to do is to read the web with one eye permanently closed, or suppress all my visual saccades and microsaccades so that at least the ads were overlaid into the text next to them in an unchanging fashion. The former is fantastically annoying and impractical and the latter is impossible without specialized drugs and would make the entire visual field fade into invisibility in about a second. Easy!

Perhaps because of this, or just because of their intrusive, irrelevant-or-creepy-or-both nature, I have never been tempted by any online ad I have ever seen, with the exception of some of the 'people who bought this also bought' stuff that is integrated into various online stores (and those aren't *adverts* in the most pedantic sense, they're recommendations: nobody is trying to force them down my throat whether the recommended products are any good or not, the way adverts do). I cannot imagine this changing, so I'm actually *helping* advertisers by preventing them from wasting their money and bandwidth advertising to someone who will never buy their stuff and might well be turned off them by the advert.

We live in strange times

mathstuf — Wed, 07 Oct 2015 01:58:16 +0000

You know that you can replace all four with uBlock Origin (and uMatrix if you want resource-type blocking too)? Much easier to manage than the three together (I only ever used Ghostery on the phone since the others don't work there, but uBlock Origin works there too, so it's gone as well).

Feel free to couple with Lightbeam to do the visualization.

Targeting ads

dmarti — Tue, 06 Oct 2015 23:27:32 +0000

The audience is made up of people with better applied behavioral economics skills than most marketing people give them credit for. An ad "pays for" the user attention it consumes by sending an economic signal about the advertiser's intent in the marketplace.

"Acceptable Ads", unfortunately, is a program that blocks the best of the web ad business (new kinds of ad units that are attention-getting with less battery suckage) but not the worst. Third-party tracking is allowed in "Acceptable Ads." In order to get protection from third-party tracking, you do need to find and turn off "Acceptable Ads" or install a separate tool such as Privacy Badger (suggested elsewhere in this comment section.)

Ad-blocking extension AdBlock sold to new owner

Wol — Tue, 06 Oct 2015 20:14:52 +0000

One of the reasons I installed flashblock was I CAN'T mentally block them out. Both flashing images, and sound.

My wife hates it when the TV is on - I find it EXTREMELY distracting, not least because we never had a TV until I was in my mid-20s. So I never learnt to subconsciously screen that sort of stuff.

Plus - a lot of people here probably have mild autism of one form or another - one of the symptoms of which is heightened sensitivity to stimuli of one form or another.

Telling people "if you can't ignore adverts" is assuming everyone is the same as you - news at ten, they're not! We may be predictable, we may be similar in many ways, but we cluster round a whole bunch of different attractors, and some of us find it very difficult to tune out adverts. Especially when those adverts are specially designed (as their designers intend!!!) to be hard to ignore. An ad that's designed to get through to someone who CAN ignore adverts, will have absolutely no difficulty whatsoever getting through to someone who finds them hard to block!

Cheers,
Wol

Ad-blocking extension AdBlock sold to new owner

zlynx — Tue, 06 Oct 2015 16:30:36 +0000

If data analysis of behavior patterns can predict so well that it "creeps" people out, the answer isn't to hide it away and intentionally degrade the analysis. It's to get people used to it and to realize that they are rather predictable and are not special individual snowflakes.

Hiding it does not solve the "problem." The tracking is still there. The data is still there.

Acceptable Ads

NAR — Tue, 06 Oct 2015 08:36:09 +0000

"An ad blocker is akin to a condom. By visiting a site, I don't want to be visiting every site that site is affiliated with. It's irresponsible for them to demand otherwise."

I nominate this for quote of the week :-)

Ad-blocking extension AdBlock sold to new owner

Cyberax — Tue, 06 Oct 2015 04:16:57 +0000

> And do you remember why it creeped them out? They were suggesting pregnancy products for people that didn't even know they were pregnant.
I actually know the inside details of this story - it was far overblown. Amazon shows pregnancy-related items to pretty much every female (and lots of males, I personally got them several times) on a random basis. So it's inevitable that in some cases it "guessed" correctly.

But let's suppose that Amazon can predict pregnancies. The answer is still: "So what?"

Ad-blocking extension AdBlock sold to new owner

sfeam — Tue, 06 Oct 2015 02:34:39 +0000

Yeah , except it wasn't Amazon. It was Target. New York Times article here here (I don't know if you'll hit a paywall):

Ad-blocking extension AdBlock sold to new owner

rahvin — Tue, 06 Oct 2015 01:12:51 +0000

And do you remember why it creeped them out? They were suggesting pregnancy products for people that didn't even know they were pregnant.

That's what you call seriously life and privacy invading tracking. It's the kind of tracking very bad people and large intelligence agencies would be interested in. Though the science of it is fascinating the potential for abuse of such intelligent tracking is scary. In a fantasy setting think of the tracking capability that was discussed in the fantasy movie Captain America: Winter Soldier. As in the ability to detect those who would resist oppression and to preemptively eliminate them. I dare say you are on the way to that if you can detect pregnancy before the doctors can.

We live in strange times

rahvin — Tue, 06 Oct 2015 01:02:39 +0000

I don't fault them for wanting to make money to support an effort that's akin to wack-a-mole. I'm not opposed to advertising per say, I'm opposed to what constitutes advertising today which is to track me and document my life and then force obtrusive and annoying no skip ads on me.

In my experience adblock plus has never allowed ads through that I've deemed bad, but I also run noscript, request policy and ghostery on top. There's a pretty simple rule here, if adblock plus was to suddenly allow through a bunch of garbage their user base would be zero before the end of the day. They have a very strong incentive to prevent abuse of the acceptable ads program.

"Nice ad you got there. Shame if nobody saw it."

This is a typical complaint of the advertising groups that believe they are entitled to make people watch their ads and that somehow adblock plus is like the mafia. There have been various campaigns using this slogan to attempt to get legal action taken along with astroturfing and smear campaigns. Every time I see it I'm reminded that the people repeating it are often part of those organizations and campaigns.

No company has an intrinsic right to make me watch advertising, especially using my computer resources. I can and will block the execution and they better damn well accept it because its not illegal and never will be. In addition as the ad companies behavior gets more and more annoying more people will enable these blocks. The existence of these tools is precisely because of the slime that live in web advertising and advertising generally. Based on what I've seen in my life the people in advertising are on about the same level of sliminess as used car sales.

We live in strange times

rahvin — Tue, 06 Oct 2015 00:47:36 +0000

The plugin noscript blocks the scripting that detects adblock. Recently the websites that use these adblock detector techniques have simply refused to load with noscript running, probably because they can't detect if adblock is running. I just close the tab and find another link to the story or article.

Though it's a pain in the ass with four plugins on firefox you can keep the web sane while seeing what you want. Noscript, adblock, ghostery and request policy. Those 4 will tell you what scripts the site is running, who they share information with and how many advertisers and trackers they use. It's a bit shocking the first time you go to a website with these 4. All 4 plugins allow you to whitelist sites, either temporarily or permanently.

Acceptable Ads

bucky — Mon, 05 Oct 2015 20:21:20 +0000

I'd say that an "acceptable" ad is one that originates from the same domain as the site I'm looking at.

You know, like ads on TV. Never has the channel I'm watching automatically been changed to another station to view a sponsoring ad.

An ad blocker is akin to a condom. By visiting a site, I don't want to be visiting every site that site is affiliated with. It's irresponsible for them to demand otherwise.

We live in strange times

dswegen — Mon, 05 Oct 2015 16:28:56 +0000

I'd suggest taking a look at the uMatrix plugin (by the same guy who did uBlock) that allows you pretty fine-grained control on a per domain basis of what js, cookies and other stuff gets to be downloaded. The interface is pretty intuitive as well (unlike some other js blockers).

We live in strange times

sourcejedi — Mon, 05 Oct 2015 16:25:58 +0000

Privacy is not on the critera AIUI. At least it's not in the "manifesto".

Note the common "whitelist _1st_-party websites you want to support" plea / claim is harder if you're blocking for privacy.

There are other projects that push your criteria instead. In my experience they tend to break pages more. You only want to run one of that sort of extension, so you only have one potential culprit to disable. (E.g. using one alongside NoScript like I do is pretty annoying).

All of these can block social widget tracking (i.e. facebook like buttons). At least the first two make it easy to click through & interact with the widget if you want (almost like the "click to play" option for plugins).

1. https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

- happens to block virtually all ads, because they don't have a machine-readable promise to respect the "do-not-track" header.

- individual third-party ad providers can be enabled while still blocking cookies. I don't think it's intentional though; it's so you can selectively un-break a webpage. There's a list of exceptions where this treatment is enabled by default - again, to try and avoid breaking too many sites.

- so it's theoretically possible to use this in combination with selective adblocking, but again I'm not recommending that as a good experience.

2. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ghostery/

- explicit blacklist. Criticised by some for a business model that frankly I don't understand. But I haven't heard that they're exempting anyone.

- You have the option to only block the cookies & let the ads through. So you can combine this with selective ad-blocking. In general it seems pretty shiny, if not the most transparent. E.g

- As always there's potential for breakage. Last time I found it slightly annoying and performance-degrading, and I decided to try supporting the newer EFF project instead. I might switch back, because personally I'm more bothered by unethical ads than the tracking I can't see or understand.

3. https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/09/23/help-t...

- in Firefox beta, using the blacklist from disconnect.me

Ad-blocking extension AdBlock sold to new owner

mpr22 — Mon, 05 Oct 2015 10:22:23 +0000

IIRC, Amazon actually degraded the accuracy of their targeting, because people were being creeped out by it.

Ad-blocking extension AdBlock sold to new owner

xtifr — Mon, 05 Oct 2015 08:21:00 +0000

The problem is, Amazon seems to think I'm very interested in picture-books for four-year-old girls ... both my grand-daughter and nieces are well past that stage by now ...

Which is why I suggested they learn from Netflix, which presumably knows that you're not watching a lot of kids movies, and when you do (when the nieces and grand-daughter come to visit), they're probably for a slightly higher age.

Of course, it would be smart if Amazon by itself could figure out that you were looking for four-year-old's books four years ago, so now you might want eight-year-old's books. They'll probably get there. Eventually. It's an obvious thought, but not necessarily a priority.

Targeted advertising is an area of active research, and there's big money involved, so it's very active research. If IBM can make a computer that can win at Jeopardy, a computer than can figure out what I might want to buy is only a matter of time. (Of course, like Watson, it'll still make really stupid guesses every so often. That's unlikely to ever change.)

When the rogue AIs start trying to take over the world, they're not going to come from the Military. They'll come out of the labs at Google and Facebook and Amazon. And they won't be building Terminators to kill you; they'll be building Sellinators to try to sell to you. :D

We live in strange times

mjthayer — Mon, 05 Oct 2015 06:58:12 +0000

On the whole I prefer others to decide that for me as long as there are transparent criteria. I don't see looking at each individual advert and deciding whether or not it is acceptable as a useful thing to do, though something with crowd-sourced input might be good if it could be kept honest. And I think that I can go along with the usual criteria.

Of course, having to pay the ad blocker does not quite inspire confidence in the process. Does anyone know how good (in the expected sense) ABP's list is in practice, and if it is not good, how one can do better?

Ad-blocking extension AdBlock sold to new owner

Cyberax — Mon, 05 Oct 2015 03:54:47 +0000

Also, I see that people waste a lot _more_ time setting up blacklists and struggle with subtle bugs caused by NoScript.

Ad-blocking extension AdBlock sold to new owner

raven667 — Mon, 05 Oct 2015 02:48:04 +0000

> I've always wondered, what's wrong with being tracked

This is actually a really good question that I don't think has an objective, answer, because it depends on every individuals subjective belief system, and is something that is often presumptuously side stepped in this kind of debate. It is difficult to quantify the risk without ready access to a distopia, that you would find objectionable, where this kind of obsessive stereotyping was a key factor in its creation or maintenance.

Ad-blocking extension AdBlock sold to new owner

Cyberax — Mon, 05 Oct 2015 02:30:27 +0000

Oh, bullshit. If can't ignore advertisements then you're living in, like, 16-th century or so.

By the same token, a gray square from a blocked ad can cause an existential doubt of the humanity future, inspired by the uniform grayness of the pixels surrounded by the black-on-white text. Which...

Ad-blocking extension AdBlock sold to new owner

raven667 — Mon, 05 Oct 2015 02:24:10 +0000

> So ignore them

That is fundamentally inadequate, if you see ads you are taking away some part of your thoughts and replacing them with the advertisers thoughts. Any time you communicate with another person you rent out space in your mind to think their thoughts and are always making a trade off, are their thoughts worth your limited time in this life? That same trade off applies to advertising, although advertising is so omnipresent and normalized that it is almost impossible to think about in any objective way, or have certain thoughts about it at all.

Better than advertising for the reader on the Internet are paid sites and micro-transactions, so that one can choose to receive a monologue or have a dialog without some their party blasting them with insecurities about how white their teeth (or skin) are or how they could fix their rotten life if only they'd buy this one weird trick.

Ad-blocking extension AdBlock sold to new owner

raven667 — Mon, 05 Oct 2015 01:57:46 +0000

> While that's the official pitch, I've often found that non-targeted advertisements are just as relevant or more as "targeted" are.

I think this is likely to be true, the venue the ads are displayed in is probably much more relevant a factor, because that says something about a persons actual interest, than trying to stereotype an individual into some racist, sexist or classist box, and only showing them a world within that stereotype.

Ad-blocking extension AdBlock sold to new owner

Cyberax — Sun, 04 Oct 2015 21:11:46 +0000

So ignore them. Duh. It's not like you have an obligation to make advertisers' work easier.

Ad-blocking extension AdBlock sold to new owner

Cyberax — Sun, 04 Oct 2015 21:11:03 +0000

And so? Presumably the third party will use it for their own targeted ads.

Ad-blocking extension AdBlock sold to new owner

Wol — Sun, 04 Oct 2015 20:41:24 +0000

> "Sold to a third party" - yes? And? Now someone else will be able to customize ads to my interests. Is that bad, somehow? Heck, I'd be downright pleased if, say, Netflix and Amazon were to exchange data about my interests. Seems unlikely, but I live in hope. ☺

The problem is, Amazon seems to think I'm very interested in picture-books for four-year-old girls ... both my grand-daughter and nieces are well past that stage by now ...

And because I have a decent chunk of Nikon gear, I'm forever getting ads for Canon cameras ...

Targeted advertising is all very well, but when a lot of my online purchasing is presents for other people, I get fed up with having stuff that I personally have no interest in whatsoever pushed at me.

And when the stuff that MIGHT be of interest is of no interest because it's not compatible with what I've already got, it's equally annoying.

There's targeted advertising, and there's targeted advertising. In my experience, targeted advertising tends to be way off target!

Cheers,
Wol

Ad-blocking extension AdBlock sold to new owner

xtifr — Sun, 04 Oct 2015 18:20:42 +0000

In its most simple form, you just drown the user in ads for whatever he/she has shown in interest in. So if I've bought an inflatable elephant, for example, I will see nothing else than ads for inflatable elephants. As if I needed two of them.

It's not an unreasonable supposition. Maybe the first one was inadequate. And, generally, you'll also get ads for other inflatable toys, and other elephant toys. And again, that seems perfectly reasonable—either one might be a particular interest of yours.

I agree that targeted advertising does not generally seem to live up to its promise, but it's a field of ongoing research.

The main danger I see is that the folks trying to make sense of these huge piles of data end up creating Skynet to help them analyze the data, and then the future sends T2 back to force me to buy more products...at gunpoint. :D

Ad-blocking extension AdBlock sold to new owner

xtifr — Sun, 04 Oct 2015 18:06:44 +0000

"Sold to a third party" - yes? And? Now someone else will be able to customize ads to my interests. Is that bad, somehow? Heck, I'd be downright pleased if, say, Netflix and Amazon were to exchange data about my interests. Seems unlikely, but I live in hope. ☺

"Stolen" - well, I suppose if someone thinks it has enough value to buy, it has enough value to steal. But again, I'm not sure how that's a problem for me?

"Abused in other amusing ways" - I kind of thought this was the thrust of the question. How can it be "abused"? Transfer is not a form of abuse, and all you've mentioned so far are ways the data can be transferred.

I completely understand why, say, a politician running on a "send all the gays back to Mexico" platform might not want it to come out that his search results are full of gay latino porn. Or why someone trying to run a revolutionary cell under a brutal dictatorship might not want anyone to know what pages he's visiting. So I fully understand why ad-blockers are a good and useful thing. Although I'd think that things like Tor and private browsing and disposable sandboxes are more useful for those cases.

Ads are annoying, and the more intrusive, the more annoying. I can't deny that. But I also have trouble seeing what the downside of tracking and targeted advertising is. Heck, it seems to me to be the good part of online advertising.

The main advantage I see to tracker-blocking is that it provides "jamming". If only revolutionaries are using encryption and tracker-blocking, then it's easy for the evil dictator to spot the revolutionaries. But there seem to be lots of people who are, for whatever reason, determined not to let "Them" learn anything about their interests, so I don't feel my participation in this mass paranoia really adds that much. If someone were to point out some actual dangers, though, my attitude might change.

Acceptable Ads

jmclnx — Sun, 04 Oct 2015 17:33:52 +0000

The definition of an "Acceptable Ads" is very easy to define, it is an ad which the sponsor pays more for. Maybe they have to pay 2 people now, the WEB site owner and the "Acceptable Ad" People.

BTW,I use noscript and have never used an Ad Blocker.

Ad-blocking extension AdBlock sold to new owner

job — Sun, 04 Oct 2015 15:19:46 +0000

While that's the official pitch, I've often found that non-targeted advertisements are just as relevant or more as "targeted" are. It's probably much harder than people think it is, data is coarse, and nobody wants to pay for it.

In its most simple form, you just drown the user in ads for whatever he/she has shown in interest in. So if I've bought an inflatable elephant, for example, I will see nothing else than ads for inflatable elephants. As if I needed two of them.

Ad-blocking extension AdBlock sold to new owner

seyman — Sun, 04 Oct 2015 12:26:35 +0000

> I've always wondered, what's wrong with being tracked for advertisement purposes?

The problem is that the tracking information usually ends up being stored in a database somewhere where it can be sold to a third party, stolen or abused in other amusing ways.

Ad-blocking extension AdBlock sold to new owner

HelloWorld — Sun, 04 Oct 2015 11:57:16 +0000

In hindsight, that choice of words was unfortunate. I should have said “Stop being reasonable and thinking for yourself!”.

Ad-blocking extension AdBlock sold to new owner

HelloWorld — Sun, 04 Oct 2015 11:55:36 +0000

Hey, what are you doing here? Stop trying to be reasonable and thinking for yourself!

Ad-blocking extension AdBlock sold to new owner

Cyberax — Sun, 04 Oct 2015 09:52:16 +0000

I've always wondered, what's wrong with being tracked for advertisement purposes? I'm actually using several products that I've discovered through targeted ads (https://www.takipi.com/ , MetroMiles and OptionsHouse) right now.

I very much prefer seeing non-obtrusive ads relevant to my interests to being presented with endless advertisements for designer furniture and lingerie.