Thank you for ad blocking

I try to stay out of the moral discussions about "consuming" content without "paying" for it. The way I see it, ad networks will regain their rights to run code on my machine when they start taking positive steps to ensure that said code will not cause harm or copy unauthorized information off my machine.

I bet that as a total percentage of visited sites from webpages, advertising will account for a tiny fraction.

The perception by advertisers that this is a product they should buy, even though it fails massively, and is very very hard to attribute value to, means we are only one small hop away from billboard and radio advertising.

The illusion of statistical/analytical evidence is so frail without a massive privacy compromise, it makes the whole task seem pointless from both sides.

Now that malware is a part of the mix, makes everyone think - lets just block this shit and get on with our lives.

The ad business now is like a computerised 80's junk tv ad marketplace. Offering little or no value to anyone.

The original instinct by the OP was correct, users are at the heart of the internet - not companies.

I see it a bit like Fairtrade or FSC certified, but for advertising and tracking - an independently verified set of criteria which must be met to be awarded the standard. As an independent body, it wouldn't have the conflict of interest of, say Eyeo/ABP.

And unlike offline standards agencies which rely on self-certification and occasional inspections, the testing would be done at the browser plugin level to filter out any scripts and ads which don't meet the standard.

A combination of marketing to end-users as to the benefits of ethical advertising, and real-time feedback to site owners and advertisers as to which ads were blocked, why they were blocked and how much money that cost them could be a powerful incentive to clean things up.

1) publishers can't just switch to serving images with their text and ads, because advertisers do not trust publishers, and this would enable them to cheat. So they can't move, they need the 3rd party tags.

2) browser vendors can't "fix" this, despite several browsers being done by large players in ad selling space (even IE's successor, Edge, seems to be making efforts to support ad blocking).

3) end-users won't switch on ads because publishers are overdoing ads, or they are helping malicious actors, or are simply malicious themselves.

4) advertisers can't switch away from the internet, because the internet is eating the press, TV, radio, ... It just wouldn't work.

Everything is stuck and nobody can move. But somewhere in there is the answer.

That quote was probably the most ridiculous and self-revealing thing I've read in a long time. Are they really that desparate? Good to hear.

The bait doesn't work 100% of the time yet, so I wouldn't recommend using it in production.

Edit: ooh neat, I just found a few better ways to do adblock detection. Maybe I'll update this code to work better now..

As is clear by now, the only way for ad networks to provide any sort of extra value to the service is by choosing the exact image very carefully. To choose the ad carefully, the person browsed must somehow be differentiated, and there really isn't anything to do but tracking.

So ad networks must by logical necessity turn into unregulated surveillance networks and try to soak up as much data about every visitor, collect and collate this data for the express purpose of tracking individual behaviour and then use this information to choose the image.

This creation of a private surveillance network for tracking of individuals is basically the minimum level of sinister an ad network needs to have any sort of "dynamic" product. Yet, at the end of the day, banner ads don't amount to more than very basic content, so it hardly seems justified to create an invasive surveillance apparatus just to serve slightly less irrelevant content.

And there doesn't seem to be much at the other end of sophistication: paid sub sites with dynamic recommendations for the visitor based on stated preferences.

Banner ads can never amount to more than those small ads crammed into the edges of the newspaper, despite being in a domain where companies can talk to users directly and dynamically. The reason for this is that you don't have a conversation with someone trough a small hole in a newspaper and as long as that is how you serve your ads, spying on the user is the best you can do.

Add some machine learning algos with image recognition and the user's ability to mark "Don't display stuff like this again" and there would be a very good compromise between viewing ads and keeping a device secure. More persistent tracking, especially cross-domain tracking, could also be avoided.

The alternative is something I've entitled "Enhanced Do Not Track", which consists of setting the DNT header and then maliciously editing advertising information sent by the browser. In time, advertisers would learn to actually obey DNT calls or face the prospect of terrible data.

If that would be the standard way to go, I doubt people would just bundle all advertising scripts they can find around the web.

I could turn the page or not read it. Sometimes it was interesting. In specialist magazines, the editorial content is often secondary to the advertising. I read "Professional Builders Monthly" so I can keep an eye on new products being advertised. My experience is enhanced by advertising.

The cost of effort is borne by the advertisers and publishers. The production costs are covered by the advertisers and the purchaser of the information (me).

On the internet there is significant cost to me. I risk malicious actors, I pay for bandwidth and CPU cycles, my attention is stolen by flashing and sound, data is collected on my habits and traded with who knows who - my experience is degraded not enhanced by advertising.

Then I'd love to see a filtering solution that blocks all third party tracking.

Inside this tag can only go text-link ads. Ads in any other form on the page will be ignored. But for ads with those tags, the text will be displayed at the top of the browser, in the premium location for users to see it.

This allows ads, reduces the impact of ads on visual clutter, eliminates delivery of malware via ads, and drastically decreases page weight and load time. In addition, by enforcing an arbitrary scarcity, advertisers will be forced to bid-up for one spot on the page instead of being lured into more and more complex advertising platforms that are unwieldy to operate and many times have dubious added value.

This is Mark Miller's work http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...

Anyone who wants to hold an educated opinion on the topic should read it.

EDIT: sauce for "direct inclusion": https://github.com/FUDCo/ses-realm

By the time Snowden came around, I felt like the battle over privacy had long since been lost. I felt like every passionate statement was a point in an argument made a decade earlier that lost largely due to apathy from the general community (though the tech community always held privacy at a high level of importance).

The way things related to privacy are today, they are irreversible, IMO. Forget governments, private companies have long understood the value of information. Whether it's good or bad, the point is moot. Now we're in the era of figuring out what to do with all the data. Luckily for the world, I feel that the data has much more indirect commercial value than direct. Yes, it's nice to be able to target users with ads about phones when you know they are ready to upgrade. But it's more valuable to be able to answer questions like "what are the top 30 locales in the U.S. where a x business would succeed", or "what elements would provide the most compelling story-line to a high budget movie targeting x customer base".

It's not that users' individual privacy is being held in particularly high regard, it's simply that collective information provides the answers to more interesting and more profitable questions.

Where government treatment of privacy is concerned, that's a pendulum that sways too far in either direction at any given point. It's a tough debate in general because people are constantly asked to weigh the balance between preventing their worst fear and creating it. You want the government to be able to break down any wall to get your lost child returned home, but you don't want the government breaking in your door because you happened to order pizza from the same restaurant as the kidnappers. At some point the person with the kidnapped child will be the most sympathetic character in the argument, at another the person who ended up in the hospital because of an unnecessary raid. Politics isn't about cooler heads prevailing, it's about garnering support and creating passionate followers.

One thing for sure, the U.S. government interest in technology and information has spawned some inventions that otherwise wouldn't exist. Things like realtime translation, advances in battery technology, gps navigation, and the internet itself are all examples where we wouldn't be where we are today without the enormous amount of interest and funding that follows a government project.

Incidentally, I wonder why we don't see more ad networks implemented server-side as a way to help prevent blocking? Is it too hard to track with reasonable accountability?

Wow. Just wow.

Worse than email spearphishing, even. Totally automatic.

I wonder if anti-malware apps catch any of this.

Is it feasible for a domain to only accept ads with static content?

Or, for dynamic content, share the relevant portions of their own JS / envelope third party JS into their own code base (and presumably scrub it/test it)?

Should there be more of a controversy for DVR, or less of a controversy for Web ad blockers?

This is absurd. Destroying my focus so you can sell your product does not "damage the national economy".