Ad Blocking, Ad Networks, and Your IP Address | Hacker News Reader

Ad Blocking, Ad Networks, and Your IP Address

snelling.io

52 pointssamsnelling51 comments

Amongst those four arguments, I again don't see mine:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10241380

I don't want ads because I don't want to be manipulated into buying things I don't need. I especially don't want to allow this manipulation while I'm in the middle of something else.

Even if ads were presented with speed, privacy, and safety, I still don't want them.

Fair enough. So, you just have to not use websites that live off ads.

Or, use an adblocker until the rest of the world comes to its senses.

Why does (s)he have to do that? Because the video makers don't want you to watch it without seeing the ads is not a sufficient reason. Content producers just have to accept the fact that they don't get to control how people see their stuff once they put it out there, just like TV producers didn't get to prevent you from flipping channels during an ad break.

If you disagree, as the copyright holder of my posts, I revoke your license to download them. I guess you'll just have to read HN comments pages where I haven't posted.

Why isn't it a sufficient reason? If they say "don't watch my video unless you pay $5" are you okay with that or do you just think whatever they made you're entitled to it, you never have to give what they ask in return? Isn't it up to them to decide what they want to charge you (pay $$, watch this ad, etc.) and for you to decide not to watch if you don't want to pay whatever they are asking?

How is this any different than say GPL in that you can either pay the price "make your modified version GPL too" or you can not modify the software. Do you also think that's not for them to decide and that you should just use and modify the software anyway?

PS: please don't turn this into a thread about the minutia of the GPL. That's not the point. The point is whether or not the same concept that lets a creator set a software license and choose the terms, whether that concept also applies to other creations, videos, books, movies, games, magazines, articles, etc..

> "don't watch my video unless you pay $5"

This is an explicit agreement between the customer and content provider. YouTube, Google search, etc don't have any explicit agreement with users in this regard -- the ads just show up.

The TOS says it, your understanding of their business model conveys it, but at the end of the day they just shove the ads in there without directly claiming to their customers, "you must see ads and be tracked to get free content".

I think usage would change dramatically if they actually claimed this when a user first uses their service.

I hope you realized you've proved my point by replying to my copyrighted post, in which I revoked your right to download it (which happens after you reply to it).

When the demands of copyright holders are not reasonable, we are not ethically required to comply. Your words say you disagree, but your actions show otherwise.

Aren't you a bit childish today?

Not just today :)

You're using a website (hacker news) which has a copyright and privacy policy. When you use this website, you accept this policy and I'm free to read your posts.

If you want to instead post your content to your own website, with a clearly stated policy that excludes people who don't agree with your views on copyright, I'll be more than happy not to visit that website :)

Where is HN's copyright policy?

Actually, now that I checked, they don't have one. They apply the DMCA though, so if you think that my reading your comments here is violating your IP rights, you can ask them to take those comments down:

https://news.ycombinator.com/dmca.html

Besides that, [1] applies.

Regarding ad-supported websites, they have their copyright policies and you should respect them (if you care about having their rights respected as much as you care having your rights respected, of course). If you choose not to respect them, it's your free choice to do so and bear any possible consequences - as it is my choice when I don't respect copyright laws, which happens frequently enough, but with my full knowledge that I'm actually violating the rights of the original content creators, and also, in that case, breaking some laws...

[1] If a reader comments on my blog, does she license the rights to me?

When a person enters comments on a blog for the purpose of public display, he is probably giving an implied license at least for that display and the incidental copying that goes along with it. If you want to make things clearer, you can add a Creative Commons license to your blog's comment post page and a statement that by posting comments, writers agree to license them under it.

https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/liability/IP

If a reader comments on my blog, does she license the rights to me?

Surely an implicit license for HN to redistribute the comment exists, but without an explicit TOS, I don't see why it would be irrevocable. So I'd say people disagreeing with my post are still infringing on its copyright.

They apply the DMCA though, so if you think that my reading your comments here is violating your IP rights, you can ask them to take those comments down

Yes, I know, but the DMCA doesn't eliminate the infringement by the users of a site, it just puts the site itself in a safe harbor.

Sure, that's the legal position, no argument there. But I think the discussion regards the ethical position.

Regarding ethics, my position is that authors should have the choice to monetize their content with ads if that's their best option.

When this happens, others can make the choice to hack the system and access the content bypassing the ad delivery system, but in that case they should at least be aware that they're getting value from the author's effort without compensating him or her, the ethics of which I'll leave for you to judge case by case.

I don't think it's up to the poster to change behavior to make up for a website's poor business model.

I'm with you Jorgigh althought I'm probbably pretty resistant, I have a 2 and a 3 year old who are already being bombarded with ads on youtube.

That's easily fixed (at least for the ads labeled as such, rather than the ads posted as videos).

To add to that, a world without ad supported content very well may be better that the one we currently inhabit.

I'm reminded of a story the director Milos Forman told about his film Amadeus, which was made before the fall of the Berlin Wall. In deciding where to shoot the film, he chose Czechoslovakia because there was simply too much signage and too many visible advertisements plastered around Austria, which otherwise would have been the more historically appropriate filming location. It kind of illustrates how pervasive advertising is in our daily lives. I'm just glad we have the ability to do something about it on the Internet.

Thanks for this, I actually read your comment the other day, and it slipped my mind as I wrote it this morning. I've added an edited section about manipulation, with a link to this comment.

What if the ads have just been embedded in the content itself? Publishing sales departments are going to have to shift tactics and when the banners disappear they might have to start selling more "advitorials". Only when it comes to the web, they won't be as obvious as print.

You may find yourself subject to much more intense manipulation.

That already happens though and at some levels even more undetectable by the masses. [0] And if it becomes more common, so will the callouts and public awareness of it. All you're advocating is "the devil I know". There's a third choice: don't give those websites your traffic. I'd rather take no evil than the lesser of two, thank you. Often ethics are tied strongly to the quality of the content. I don't go on buzzfeed and 9gag because they steal content from others when I'd rather consume it from the original source. Readers will just have to be more discerning.

[0]: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

I know that iOS 9 is allowing ad-blocking, but a majority of the articles I've seen on HN and elsewhere aren't saying anything new. Yes, we know what an IP address can reveal, and we also have heard all the arguments behind blocking ads or not. But nothing has really changed since iOS 9, besides the fact that even more people are doing it.

If you think AD blocking alone is enough to protect your privacy, think again. I think the real problem is fingerprinting. You are always going to be tracked on the web, and one can tunnel their traffic through a hardware-based TOR router, and surf with Lynx browser and still get tracked. Also blacklisting entire classes of AD networks is not thorough enough as a lot of publishers are doing 'roll your own' ADs. You can't block an 80x80 banner graphic with a link yet (well you could if you block images, but we're not all neckbeards who surf with Lynx). You could thwart low hanging fruit stuff like 1x1 pixel beacons, but AD serving technology is ambiguous and also one of the many hard problems of the web.

Shameless plug, I wrote about how to thwart browser fingerprinting here: http://blog.higg.im/2015/04/29/do-ad-blockers-and-anti-track...

My current solution is use any number of things on privacytools.io and try not to centralize browsing to one device and one network. A bit obvious, but you would be surprised how many people just use their phone to navigate the web.

Like all hard problems, there is no sweeping silver bullet that will solve this. You have to get smarter about your browsing. The 'mixing effect' of cities is a great idea, and cheap $10.00 internet enabled burner devices for surfing the web are awesome too

IP addresses can be geolocated. Big deal. This article seems a little out of date when it comes to what an IP address means for home users. (For mobile users, there are far easier means of tracking than via IP address.)

For instance.... "One important thing to note is that most consumers probably have a “dynamic ip address” meaning that your internet service provider probably rotates this ip address ever 24-48 hours. Your internet service provider usually charges more money for static ip addresses which is where you keep the same ip forever."

Really? Mine hasn't changes in over a year. My ISP could change it, but absent any reason to do so they don't bother. Once upon a time they would assign new IPs when boxes turned off and on, but security measures these days mean neighbourhoods are assigned small pools of IPs. Turn off and on and you will more often than not be assigned the same IP. Besides, nobody turns off cable/DSL modems anymore anyway. Truly dynamic IP's disappeared with dialup.

And... "So each and every web request I make to any website, can find out my city, state, zip code, internet service provider, time zone, average city income, average population, and if I’m residential."

Nope. Mine is always wrong. All the geolocation services place my IP in the wrong city. That's because my area is served by boxes one town over. So all the info gathered via my IP address beyond which state/province I'm in would be incorrect. These online IP databases are not the same as actually phoning an IP for a street address. They are at best a good guess.

MaxMind themselves only claims something like 80% accuracy on getting the correct city with their commercial geoip database

Eh, for most people, the IP changes every 24 hours, and the most ISPs assigns IPs not by city – today you could have 86.131.1.1 and tomorrow 86.127.254.254.

Only some providers in the US have actual static IPs and NATs. Or restrictions like "you can not run a server", or restrictions like blocking port 25.

I would gladly pay a small fee to not have to see adds.

The issue is how to solve that, how could i pay that fee in a simple manner where the cash only goes to the sites that i use.

Google (of all companies) actually has a program for this, but like you'd imagine you still need be OK with some tracking (otherwise your payments wouldn't go to the sites you visit!).

https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/

I haven't implemented it on my site, but Google keeps asking me to.

Google has a proposal for this: Google Contributor [1]. Of course, only works for Google ads, but this is a substantial portion of the web.

However, I don't like the current proposition: you pay for seeing less ads, but there's no tier guaranteeing no ads. Even if they guarantee 99% less ads, I still wouldn't sign for it.

Paying for seeing less ads does not change the incentives for tracking and targeting, and may even worsen them: surely Google will start by cutting the less targeted ads. The more I cut the ads, the more targeted the remaining ads will be, and stronger will be the incentive to track me.

Only by a policy of no ads and no other revenue stream besides my money would avoid the perverse incentives that are in place for tracking - and trying to change - my behavior.

Of course, Google Contributor would still have to track the sites I visit, so I wouldn't be able to prevent tracking with a technical tool if I signed for it. This adds even more to the argument that Contributor is only an option if no ads are allowed, so that he incentives for targeting and analysis are now removed.

[1]https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/

That does't solve Google tracking your every move around the internet. They still get all your information.

They are only doing this to save face or to find an alternative path of revenue.

I refuse to be tracked, specially by a corporation whose president is quite against privacy and anonimity and has a lot of friends in the US government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Privacy

I imagine their business model with this service is this:

* collect some continuing revenue from subscribers for seeing less ads

* sell these subscribers to advertisers as people who are viewing fewer ads (which then increases the display profile of any ads they are shown) and also as an elusive demographic who mostly try to block out advertising

I would imagine point 2 is the much more valuable proposition.

Flogging a dead horse of a story certainly brings in the clicks, which in the past has resulted in more advertising revenue.

I'm interested to see if this continues, or if it declines since there is a reduced financial incentive.

I could imagine that in a world of paywalls, this is disincentivised, since your users don't want to have the same crap thrown at them over and over (as opposed to now, where publishers make as much controversy/noise as possible in the hope of attracting new clicks).

Could it be that this change in model requires more thoughtful journalism?

This is pretty low quality description of a very complicated industry: http://www.lumapartners.com/lumascapes/display-ad-tech-lumas...

And the best part, nothing is said about the fact that blocking inside apps is not on the table, so Apple is simply driving more dollars to where they stand to capture the most from them.

The war of ad-blockers and anti-ad-blockers will be ugly, I suppose.

Say, if Youtube is going to enforce anti-ad-blocking across the site, and I believe the could do that-their Chinese copycat, Youku, has already done this long time ago, will you give up watching? That might be a hard question to answer.

The answer is that anti-anti-ad-blockers will start to exist. As long as users still have control over the software they run on their devices, they will have the advantage in this war. That control seems to be slowly disappearing, unfortunately:

http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html

Already existing.

After https://github.com/sitexw/FuckAdBlock was invented, and I got annoyed,

I reported https://github.com/sitexw/FuckAdBlock/issues/26

and wrote this solution to the issue https://github.com/sitexw/FuckAdBlock/issues/26#issuecomment...

How is it a moral issue? If it's immoral to block certain behavior on sites, then it's just as if not _more_ immoral for users to block ads in the first place. The usual argument is that sites with ads constitute an implicit agreement, etc. If users have the prerogative (regardless of moral ambiguity) to block content they don't like, sites have the same prerogative to block unsavory visitors as they see fit. To say that using FuckAdBlock is forcing anyone to accept content is complete and utter nonsense.

No, I mean: I do not care about a website showing me an ad as plain <a href="..."><img src="..."></a>.

I have no issues with those ads.

I have issues with ads running javascript, tracking me, and trying to abuse holes in my browser to install malware.

And it is immoral to force people into running those ads.

No one is forcing anyone to whitelist the site and view the DRM'd content. The site is simply offering an explicit choice to the user: go away or play by our rules. Whether or not serving the ads in the first place is morally correct simply does not matter—the price for admission could change to require the user's car, their livelihood, their life, and the premise is the same. There's an explicit acknowledgement of the cost and a conscious choice by the user.

An apt analogy would be a magazine on a table with a sign denoting the price. Without FuckAdBlock, the sign reads "Price: ___". Taking the magazine and not paying anything isn't immoral, it just shows you value yourself above others (nothing wrong with that). With FuckAdBlock, the sign now reads "Price: Your kidney". By taking the magazine and not paying, you're quite literally stealing, regardless of the price now on the sign.

No one can force me to watch or click ads either. I can just glue something over my screen – or just mute the sound and watch some other video while an ad is running.

Many people even are okay with watching TV 15min delayed, and instead having their receiver automatically cut away the ad breaks.

You can’t force ads on users.

Now, with the web, we have ads that aren’t just annoying, but actively malicious.

And while I’m the kind of person that often gives people money because they need it – be it because they can’t afford a bus ticket, or whatever – or that I often if I am at a place with a sign "pumpkins 2€" (where you can take yourself, no one watches, etc) still pay more than those 2€.

So it’s not like I actually like doing this.

But advertising is not acceptable. And as long as someone can program computers, I will not see interactive javascript ads. Image ads with a simple image in a link? I even have a whitelist for such ad networks. Seriously.

I'm not arguing that ads are acceptable, merely that it's acceptable for sites and users to come to an agreement where ads must be "unblocked" in order to view content.

Whether it's the publisher's job to inform the users of the risks involved with allowing ads to appear is questionable (should the publisher also inform the user that staring at a monitor for extended periods of time can cause adverse effects, or is this simply common knowledge and implied?).

If you want to discuss the morality of online advertising, that's another story altogether. In my opinion, ads used to benefit the common good at the expense of taxing individuals of time and attention are fine. Take Google for example, the ads they show collectively benefit the public distribution of knowledge (search, maps, books, entertainment, etc.) Just like with any government, if you're unhappy with how taxed resources are managed (or the amount you're taxed), you're free to leave society and live outside of civilization.

I am not that optimistic on that front.

Several things that might happen: 1.Use data mining or machine learning, I believe, the big networks will find ways to distinguish whether a user has enabled ad blockers or not, using only the data they collected. Google, as a network, already offers segments to publishers, called viewability, representing how the ads is viewed by the user.

2.Once they have the data, they could do a lot of things with it. Sending warnings, or service degradation, or if you are on the phone force you to jump to app in order to serve you native ads.

By any means, they couldn't 100% eliminate usage of ad blockers, but they could make it harder and more uncomfortable to use in the long term.

One thing I am more afraid of is that, it will means the death of the free web, and drive publishers/platform to serve their content through native client, like apps, where they have greater control. But what about small publishers? Well, maybe nothing but doom...

It's funny how both sides of the argument think that ads are something people has to "put up with". If ads are really that good, not watching would cost you (either money or a nice opportunity for good products). For now I don't really see that much of benefit of seeing them (it's the absent of benefits so it's really hard to measure though). I hope web ads companies one day start producing ads that are actually pleasant to watch (some TV commercials are doing a good job here). Until then, you can't really stop people blocking ads.

This is a war that will force websites to find workarounds ... from redirecting you to a message saying sorry this content is blocked you are running an adblocker to innovators creating work arounds that ad blockers can't block and they are more annoying then the ads we have now.

The web has flourished and we all get to enjoy it for free because advertising. Though the majority here seem to want all ads to be blocked... does that mean the majority will then sign up and pay each site for their content? Highly doubtful ... so what is the solution, people need to be paid for the content we consume each day for free on the web!

I certainly expect there will be a war - a highly asymmetric one. The cost of developing 'anti-ad-block' tech will exceed the cost of updating filters for some time.

It will also lead to more intrusive ads in a world where user expectations have changed. Users will become used to a "quiet" web and might just prefer to hit the back button.

Another point worth making. If your content is good enough for me to turn off my ad blocker, it's probably good enough to paywall. If not, you have no chance.

Not really, a site can just proxy ad content through their servers. How can an ad-blocking service tell the difference between an image needed for the site and an image that's an advertisement?

It will be more challenging but not a big issue. Ads will still contain signals they're an ad (I'm reminded of banner ads on the Web 20 years ago).

Back hauling traffic through the site may happen, however that's a huge latency penalty and also will reduce the amount of data leakage. Networks will no longer have carte Blanche access to end users. Also worth noting is that it increases the complexity of the technical implementation from 'drop in this code' to 'get your backend team to change your architecture in this way'.

A note about the IP addresses: Some ad networks/analytics software does not store your IP address, but an anonymized version of it (eg. drop the last octet[1] or an store only an hash). I believe that they must do this in order to operate legally in certain countries.

They can still store the geoIP information without storing the IP, though.

[1]: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2763052?hl=en

Where you are is only marginally useful to advertisers. What you've clicked on is sort of useful. The really valuable information is what you've bought and paid for.

That's what makes Amazon go. Other advertisers would like that info, but they have to buy it from people who actually sell real stuff, and those sellers don't sell it cheaply.

(Of course, Amazon's product recommendations would be more useful if they stopped spamming them with ads for their failing mobile devices.)

As a publisher who depends on ads I do not have a problem with people using adblockers. Those wouldn't click on an ad anyway, so no money lost. But those guys running around and installing adblockers on every computer where they have access to, even without asking the owner before, those guys suck.

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