Adblock plus served with takedown order | Hacker News Reader

Adblock plus served with takedown order

adblockplus.org

38 pointspjc509 comments

Wrote Clay Shirky: "Monetizing two per cent of your audience is the easy part, doing without 98 per cent of your advertising is the hard part". Bild is discovering the latter part, and for a paper with a long history of bullying it's a difficult lesson.

At worst, APB can block bild.de if the maintainers are beaten up in court. No law against that, and if the tiff between Bild and Google is any history, most of Bild's audience will forget Bild and just go to Tagesschau or something.

Poor Bild. It must be hard to be a tabloid and have to sell yourself every day to customers who don't really care.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9Xb-buT...

Alas, not very helpful, from the top of the Google cache page :

This is Google's cache of https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=41068. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on 25 Oct 2015 20:18:41 GMT.

As the deed was done on 23 October, this version is not much use.

Anyone know of an earlier version (or how to get Google to spit out the earlier version it, for sure, has) ?

As pascalmemories noted, this cached version is "post-takedown" as evidenced by "[Redacted]" in the second posting along with the explicit notice "Filters deleted due to a court injunction we received today."

While I didn't see the filters "pre-takedown", a Google search for the URL [0] turns up a number of other places where it was referenced. While I can't verify that they did/do work, at least a few of those results appear to contain filters to defeat the anti-ad-blocking mechanisms put in place by bild.de. (I'm intentionally not reproducing them here in an effort to perhaps save dang from having to respond to a takedown notice.) :/

[0]: https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=41068

A little passive aggressive (better than the legally aggressive approach of Axel), but pretty interesting. Not sure if I would qualify the eschewing of an AdBlock work-around as Big Brother, but the legal precedent is worth discussing.

Now, when you visit bild.de with AdBlock and NoScript...

Streisand effect in 5... 4... 3...

I doubt it. Bild just isn't what it was. They tried another fight like this last year, were ignored, and caved in after two weeks, claiming the whole exercise was just an data-gathering experiment.

Well, the data was gathered: When Bild grandstands and demands more income, the newspaper loses a majority of its audience.

IMNSHO Bild hasn't gotten used to being too small to bully. Bild isn't Streisand-class any more. On the web it's just another web site, too small to rouse much emotion.

I don't think their size is too relevant, in this case. It was noticed by the tech community, at least, and the first thing I did was search out the code so that I could duplicate it -- and I don't think I'm the only one who thinks like that.

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