Facebook rolls out code to nullify Adblock Plus’ workaround
techcrunch.com
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It used to be that market economies were simple: you wanted something, you paid for it. Companies would pay their employees a fair wage for their labor, and then those employees would spend that money on consumer products. Their were some exceptions, like advertising on broadcast TV, but they were a relatively small part of the economy.
Netscape seems to have opened the flood gates with their "commoditize the browser, and make money selling servers" approach. Suddenly, it became consumers' expectation that things should be free, and business's expectation that you can't actually make money by selling to consumers. And businesses adapted: first it was the dot-com boom, where the business model was "use VC to grow marketshare while losing money on subsidized products, IPO, and have clueless tech stock investors foot the bill for cheap cool consumer products." Then there was Google, which made finding stuff free but extracted huge rents for getting found, and Facebook, which is similar but with more personal data. Then there were all the startups whose only revenue model was to sell to Google or Facebook - sometimes by threatening legal precedents (YouTube) or irrelevance (Instagram/Whatsapp). Consumers don't have money and would never be able to pay for their YouTubing/Instagramming - but Google & Facebook will pay a lot to maintain their business model.
Now we have ad-tech to optimize the ads shown; clickbots to make (fraudulent) money for a publisher; more clickbots to bankrupt advertisers; botnets (often distributed through these ads!) to hijack users' computers; clickjacking to hijack users; adblockers so consumers don't have to deal with any of this; and counter-adblockers to block the adblockers. It's like humans are doing their best to never see ads, which are only getting clicked by machines, which aren't actually buying the product but are usually attempts by competitors to bankrupt their competition. Oh, and of course all of these players are getting hacked on a regular basis.
Add to this the whole credit-card & consumer debt industry, which is based on some portion of the population never paying for stuff, but making up the losses on the interest payments of people who pay for their stuff late.
It's occurred to me that if a financial terrorist wanted to do a lot of damage to the capitalist system, they need only hand out free credit cards that are backed by lists of numbers stolen in one of the many data breaches that have happened this year. It's free money for the consumer, who can buy whatever they want, anonymously, with no bill. Indeed, with the lists of credit cards stolen in 2015, someone could pose as the credit card company and mail out these cards to unsuspecting consumers, who would think they were using a legit card rather than one with someone else's account number. The merchants won't care initially until the cards start getting declined, which may not happen for a month. The CC & government resources dedicated to investigating card fraud would be overwhelmed if millions of people became fraudsters at once. And then straightening out the mess of who owes what would likely be impossible, with goods already "purchased", fenced, converted to cash, and gone.
Netscape originally charged for their browser. They only switched to this business model after Microsoft began giving away IE for free. Netscape couldn't compete with a free browser, especially not when that browser is included with the most popular desktop OS in the world, so they came up with the idea of using the browser as a loss leader for their server product.
Before IE, the only free browsers were the terrible TCP/Connect II-based browsers that various ISPs, such as AOL and Interramp, bundled with their service. Netscape was able to position Navigator as a premium offering, as the TCP/Connect II browser was horrendously slow and feature-bare. Navigator, meanwhile, was adding proprietary extensions to HTML such as tables, frames, the font tag, and blinking text (yes, <blink> was considered a selling point back then), it was fast for its time, and it had a toolbar with some useful features (like a button that took you to a search engine; I think Infoseek was the default). But IE had their own proprietary extensions, and it was about as good as Navigator, so Navigator was no longer the sole premium product.
That's an extremely romanticized version of historical capitalism, especially if the context is the United States.
The only thing you can do is give facebook some vague hints topics of ads you are particularly interested in and which you are not - with facebook making it clear that you'll get the same results with less hassle if you just opt-in to targeted advertising.
What annoys me most about Facebook's approach is their dishonesty. If the just stated "look guys, we have to show you ads cause that's how we make money. We can't let you block them", that would at least show some basic respect for their users. Instead, both the announcements and the preference page seem to recite the tired old fairy tale that users secretly love ads and are only shunning them because they are not "relevant" enough to them. I don't know if they actually believe what they are writing but I don't know anyone who thinks like this.
They show the same cynicism in the linked post. Yes guys, we all know ad-blocking is a cat-and-mouse game. But first making it deliberately hard to distinguish ads and content, then blaming ad-blockers that they also remove content smells like a really cheap attempt to shift the blame.
We have lived with (and sometimes even liked) curated ads in paper publications for decades. If the web just had those kind of ads, it would be great. Web pages need some way of financing, and if there is a reasonable one, it would be good for everyone.
The big problem with current web ads, and the reason I do run adblock is, that they are uncharted, often violently annoying and unfortunately a growing security risk.
In this sense, I support Facebook in having proper ads.
In the 1970s, my grandfather mailed his local newspaper and asked them to remove the ads when they made his copy of the paper. "I never read them" he wrote.
My mother had to explain to him how mass production worked.
What I was talking about is, that the page showing ads needs to be fully responsible for their content to prevent malware attacks, and of course, should see to that they are aesthetically acceptable.
If they want to advance an agenda that whitelists ads they consider "not annoying", fine, people who disagree with that agenda can use a better adblocker that blocks all ads. But accepting money allows articles like this one to paint all adblockers with that same brush, making them all seem less legitimate.
I think there's a general consensus that people aren't against advertising in principle, it's the tracking, the intrusiveness etc. that the game has turned into.
I feel it's perfectly fair for an organisation working towards this ideal to take money in somehow in order to pay for it.
lol they designed it this way. I'm disappointed facebook, but what could I expect from you anyway...
Because the uBlock "Origin" UI sucks compared to ABP.
Because acceptable ads is easy to turn off with one click.
And because gorhill is a real asshole when you submit an issue. It's now obvious to me why uBlock had all sorts of drama at launch.
The "seeing more ads" part can just be the result of having fewer users.
I think it's possibly just a case of someone unhappy for whom I declined[1] to take care of their pet issue, so lashing out with vague supposed flaws so as to undermine my work makes him feel better.
1. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues?q=label%3Adeclined+...
That's funny. Because the reason I said it was that you close issues without pointing out WHAT item in your huge list of ridiculous guidelines (like "I don't accept pull requests") has been broken. LOL.
It's a real asshole move and if anyone actually reads the list of declined issues they can clearly see that people are annoyed by that.
Given the amount of invalid issues that keep being opened[1], asking me to spend time to detail why issues marked as "invalid" are invalid is to ask me to spend a whole lot of precious free time on not working to improve uBO.
CONTRIBUTING[2] is there to be read and respected. If you disagree with it, best is to not open issues. Countless other people understand why it is needed and respect it, and helps the project get better.
1. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues?q=label%3Ainvalid+i...
2. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.m...
In most open source projects, contributing refers to contributing code not opening tickets for issues or requests. Even Github's help documents align with this understanding:
https://github.com/blog/1184-contributing-guidelines
I have never used uBlock or looked at its project pages before now and would have skipped-past CONTRIBUTING.md if I was looking for issue-reporting guidelines. The current title doesn't even tally with the first line of the document. There is also no reference to the appropriate issue-reporting process from README.md.
> Read first: <https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.m...
And thanks for maintaining uBO. Using it happily since it became a topic on HN.
Furthermore, since the person closing the issue is already quite obviously aware of which rule was broken - how much effort are we haggling over? A couple seconds?
Anyway, as I've said it's clear from reading many of the declined issues that people are annoyed by your behavior. It's also clear that you are annoyed by your users, so I wouldn't say that you "happily" volunteer.
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/1886#issuecomment-2...
It's those that provide the blocking logic, and which need to be updated to fix this.
1. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax
"As online advertising is becoming more automatic, universal and unsanctioned, AdNauseam works to complete the cycle by automating all ad-clicks universally and blindly on behalf of its users. Built atop uBlock-Origin, AdNauseam quietly clicks on every blocked ad, registering a visit on the ad networks databases. As the data gathered shows an omnivorous click-stream, user profiling, targeting and surveillance becomes futile."
But that just leads to fuzzy matching of ads. And unless facebook start disguising their ads as actual content (which would get them in huge trouble with the FTC), adblock can always work out what's an ad because it's somehow marked as an ad.
When I was at university, a lab-mate of mine was working on automatic article summarizing. Essentially, you could point his thing at a long article, and it would try to pick out the important bits and generate questions based on the content. I pointed out that one nefarious use of his work would be to post relevant looking questions on blog posts, but have them still link back to spam. It would become increasingly difficult to identify legitimate questions from the spam ones.
But yeah... when does this all stop? Maybe when people realize that 99% of advertising is a complete and total waste of money.
Or am I missing something?
They could block ad blocking users completely, but that would be too much negative PR and hurt their already peaking MAUs.
"Maybe Facebook has planned this like a chess game, and planned several moves ahead even before their first move."
I wonder how many moves they have in advance.
> Please contact the Board Administrator for more information.
> Reason given for ban: Let's play whack a mole
> A ban has been issued on your IP address.
uhhh ok? I've never visited that forum, even.
>Facebook commissioned research firm Ipsos to investigate why reports say 70 million Americans and nearly 200 million people worldwide use adblockers.
Americans are less than 10% of the online population but around 35% of adblockers? Is this just am exposure thing?
[0]https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/09/facebook-will-bypass-web-a...
The first one I can immediately think of is that ads are quite often not served worldwide. I only started receiving ads very recently, first only a couple but now there's an actual variety. I also started using adblock recently :)
The next one would be the content consumed. While Facebook is pretty ubiquitous, other countries have their own social networks which may have less common or less intrusive ads. Similarly, other countries would consume local news/blogs/etc, which might have the same characteristics. As an example there, visiting NYT/Forbes/HuffPo/etc always gives me a headache(pre-adblock), but our local online newspapers use fairly light and simple banner ads.
The third one would be the level of tolerance for ads. As American media seems to blast ads at a very high rate, American users may have grown extremely intolerant to them. I don't mind our own ads that much, which are comparatively sparse and much less 'attention-grabbing'. Of course, over time, I've grown less and less tolerant(I've already stopped watching TV), but averaged over a whole population there's probably a notable difference there as well.
All three of those reasons also touch upon a pretty central one - the type of ads being served. The more obnoxious the ads, the more likely people are to use adblock, and there's definitely a difference in the "advancement" level of ads in different countries.
"Your WiFi was infected with 99.5 viruses call this number so we can scam you out of your money".
Usually they are greeted with warnings about lack of functionality because of absence of Javascript, and imperatives that they must upgrade to a "modern browser".
Once-free websites that were converted to companies, like Google and Facebook, must survive on web ads.
But web ads are built on an unstable foundation; their presence relies on several assumptions.
And, quite simply, the web works without them -- without the assumptions and without the ads. Longtime web users, who grew up with early "browser" prototypes, including "text-only browsers", remember this.
The network is very fast now. We can move all manner of data across "the web". But the architecture of the internet and the web is still more or less the same.
This is, thankfully, why "blocking" (not requesting) web ads is so easy.
2) EasyList is maintained by others, and could be used by any other adblocker. Eyeo only maintains the so-called "Acceptable Ads" whitelist.
3) Even if someone managed to acquire the company behind that "Acceptable Ads" whitelist, that list has no value without users. The value of the purchase would evaporate if all the users switched to another adblocker, or a forked version of Adblock Plus itself.
Also, the remaining user base of item 3) -- the "even if" case -- might still be sufficiently large to warrant a purchase.
According to this source [0], which seems to come from their public filings, in 2014 they apparently had "only" €4.32m in revenue.
Edit: According to [1], in 2015, they apparently struck a much more lucrative deal with Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, among others.
As long as ads are hosted on the same server of the website, there is no problem. Until that's done, I'll keep blocking. Google ads were a fine example of unintrusive ads.
I've been using it for years and have turned off my entire news feed on desktop. I don't miss it one bit.
Link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fb-feed-modifier/h...
The hard part is the 'easy action'. Installing ABP is pretty easy. If that does not work, and "FB ad block" extension is the easy thing to do, that will be installed. Sooner or later.
If facebook stops something working because of the ad-blocker, or accidentally cause something to break while trying to do so perhaps even for users without the blocker, the users will see facebook making it difficult for them to do what they want.
If on the other hand facebook stops the ad-blocker from being able to work on their site, without breaking other bits of the facebook experience at all, the same users will see the ad blocker failing to do its job.
ISPs intercepting traffic and injecting ads that neither the user nor the site owner intended, yeah, I can see how that could be classed as "shoving ads in people's faces", but "here's a free service with ads attached, please either take both or leave both"? What part of that is "shoving"?
When I walk into a shop I am presented with a similar "here are some objects with prices, please either take the object and pay the price or don't do either". However, it's physically possible for me to decide which part of a transaction I want to take part in. If choose to accept the "taking objects" part of the deal while ignoring the "paying for them" part of the deal, am I doing something wrong?
If the shopkeeper then said "hey, you should pay for that", would you have "zero sympathy" for the shopkeeper because they were "shoving capitalism in my face"?