Chrome will stop displaying ads that are repeatedly flagged as disruptive

Putting the ad in an iframe without the allow-top-navigation[0] sandbox permission could prevent that. Or if the ad naturally consists of an iframe then a browser extension could intercept the iframe load and add the equivalent CSP rule[1]. Or google could do that themselves. I think they would still be allowed to open in a new tab.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/if... [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Co...

And now I have FF and uBlock Origin on my phone.

I agree fully. I think part of the issue is that the folks submitting ads want to collect a lot of data. They probably don't use that data (or if they do, not well), nor do I trust them to not collect very invasive and unsafe data, but I suspect for many folks that having their own JS payload makes or breaks a possible ad network.

Given concerns about Monero mining, redirects, and other hijinks, removing JS from ads is even more critical now. I think the compromise will be to give ads some kind of network provided hook to get data back to "home" eventually, though then the issues above only shift from the ad provider to the ad network provider.

I was... rather surprised. One of AMP's huge value props is preventing that type of garbage.

I'm also surprised that the publisher did that, I hope that'd be a good way to get blacklisted from the higher search ranking placement.

I wonder if we're heading into a new era where online advertisements will become indistinguishable from non-ads. For example, a picture of your friend vs a picture of your friend with a soda bottle subtly added. That would be more tolerable to most everyone when compared to a flashy gif of that soda bottle bouncing around in your browser.

This reasoning doesn't make sense to me. Many startups offer their services for free or low cost, burning cash, to acquire users/mind-share until they find a way to be profitable. Google and Facebook found advertising as that way, and thus survived instead of running out of money. And are able to offer their services for free.

"Google should ditch that and start again" doesn't even start to make sense.

Google should be broken up over this type of behaviour. Spend too much money in Washington though.

what could they possibly sell that would even come close to replacing ad revenue?

The point is, they're not only a near-monopoly in web advertising, but also have very detailed data about their competitors (via GA and many other products) AND now are controlling the channel for 60% of users. It's unbelievable they managed to pull this out and still so few people seem to care.

Doesn't google still make like 80% of its revenue off advertising in search? If its true, then they really don't have the money to drop it

And instead of viewing it as double-betting, it can just as easily be seen as a compromise. They still want to advertise, and makes sense for them to want to, and the truly troublesome ads are poisoning the water for everyone, by leading (normal) people to total solutions ie adblock. Which is bad for business. In which case, you should expect them to find a middle-ground solution, and it would be absurd for google to move in either direction too strongly (because the money's not there).

Its not that they're taking sides, but that they're trying not to.

This bit is especially infuriating for me, as there seems to be a High Sierra issue with Chrome and videos (for me, at least - it's hard to figure out how widespread it is). They cause massive browser lag when they're on a page for me, to the point of missed characters while typing.

However, it does not seem to do much, if anything, for me. I tend to just use Privacy Badger to block any site that looks like a CDN

Go to chrome://flags, search for Autoplay policy, and select Document user action is required.

Note that if you use the Imagus extension, this could block some videos/gifs/etc from playing when you hover over a link.

  media.autoplay.enabled = false
  media.autoplay.enabled.user-gestures-needed = true

I tried setting the Autoplay policy at the browser level once but found that it was inconsistent and broke certain players. Iridium works perfectly.

[1] https://blog.chromium.org/2010/12/year-of-extensions.html

Isn't there an open API for querying this information, as well as their webapp? It can't be all that secret.

https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search

Oh, wait...

Whenever you have the browser maker, and punitive actions controlled by the same party, and arbitrarily, its a recipe for disaster.

If Google really cared, they should spin Chrome off to a foundation, provide it a large amount of funding, and totally step aside.

Having the #1 web browser and the largest ad network, controlled by Google, even if you agree with what they are doing, is a recipe for disaster.

Google, of course, MUST protect its ad business, let's call his what it is.

Out of curiosity what is your objection to the Safe Browsing lists?

I personally have my router blocking sites at the IP level and DNS rejecting queries for domains off this list.

I can't remember the last time I couldn't visit a site because it was on the list but with the prevalence of zero-day malware and naive users on my network, I'd rather just not even deal with the potential.

They use this by default, but you're free to turn it off, and that setting (unlike others) seems to sync just fine using Firefox Sync. Just checked and it's off. I turned it off once years ago and switched between OSs and different devices in the meantime, and it's still off.

Don't know if the same is possible on Chrome.

> I should note that this is the same mechanism by which the safe browsing lists work that tell you a page may be bad. For consistency, I disagree with that too of course, but I find the motives and targets here to be much more sinister.

I agree with you completely on this one.

I had to turn that off on two layers, on a browser level, and inside my antivirus' firewall. My antivirus now constantly complains that I'm "not fully protected" because I don't want it to do web filtering for me.

I do support other private browsing techniques that stay on my device, like first party isolation, and adblock-like lists that are downloaded on my device.

Both are available in Firefox, and using them doesn't collide with my stance on NN, since I'm the one preventing the content from being fetched by my machines.

As you noted, this is false. See https://developers.google.com/ad-experience-report/

> They use the hard work of people like EasyList and subjectively apply it (though not that big of a deal, they do make it free/open for all uses after all)

Again, I don't see the problem here. As you said, EasyList is free and open. It seems like your objection is just that you don't like the way its being used?

> They build it into the browser instead of as an extension or working with the existing ad-block community

I'd actually consider this a huge win. Everyone gets it by default (though you can turn it off in settings if you want), and it works on mobile, which doesn't currently allow extensions. What's your actual concern here?

> think a coalition can be an on-by-default gatekeeper of good or bad web items I'll never understand. At this point, I have a hard time separating browser from ISP wrt end user control and limited choice

There's a reason browsers are called the "user agent"; it's because their purpose is to make decisions and perform actions on behalf of the user. If a browser vendor wants to block ads on behalf of the user on sites which they deem to be using those ads in an abusive manner (and the standards for what is considered "abusive" in this case are actually pretty clear-cut: https://www.betterads.org/standards/) I don't see a problem with that. If you as a user don't want your user agent behaving that way, you can either tell it to stop (chrome://settings/content) or get yourself a new user agent. (And both of those actions are significantly easier than they are with your ISP I might add.)

To the point of not receiving salaries? I’ve little sympathy here.

Can the coalition truly be independent when their only active enforcer is a member? Would that coalition defy that one member ever?

Under what circumstances will other sites and advertisers learn of updates to ads? Will that policy remain? Will google always have a head start?

What of ads and scripts designed to track and de-anonymize you? What of ads that consume huge amounts of bandwidth passively while not otherwise being annoying? These policies seem directed only at the aesthetic of the web.

And really, it remains to be seen if our long term interests are in line with googles, if you asked me, I'd very much say no.

Does it? This is not at all obvious to me. Do you mind sharing your reasoning for this claim?

That's begs the question - Why were those ads approved by Google in the first place? They were the source of the problem to begin with !! Also, before we rush to judgement, how much revenue were those ads generating for Google in the first place? I would respect them a bit more if they actually are taking a hit on this.

>But Google has demonstrated over the years that they're willing to sacrifice their short-term gains to maximize their long-term gains.

How have they demonstrated that? Could you elaborate?

But seriously, this line:

> To us, your experience on the web is a higher priority than the money that these annoying ads may generate — even for us."

Is a flat out lie and you should know better by now.

Unless the "us" speaking here is a very specific (and powerless) subset of whoever could be speaking for Google. Which would make it merely disingenuous.

And even then their actions require a lot more before they deserve that kind of trust again.

> We've been trained that every corporate action is selfish, by definition against our interests.

If we had been trained we might've gotten to this conclusion sooner and prevent some of the worse shit that's happened because of it. But we weren't trained (what would have trained us?).

I'd rather say we've been extremely slow to recognize that even though the law recognizes corporations as persons (in some places), they are in fact, inhuman. And they will continue to act with complete disregard to human interests. I think it's still useful to think of corporations as organisms, just not of our species, in the same way that a fungus is not the same species as its substrate.

Some people "at the top" believe they are in control, but they are in control as much as you can be in control sitting on top of a wild, untamed beast. And you've seen it, corporations replace "the top people" like any other employee and it doesn't change much. Not nearly as much as they want you to think. It's more like trimming your fingernails than getting a heart transplant.

Of course, nation states are just the same. Conglomerate hierarchies of humans, doing whatever to stay in existence as a sort of entity. Problem was they were caged by design, rules, from the bottom up. This was because we needed them to be, we saw tyrannies rising when we didn't. So we made rules to bind them, deliberately stunted like bonsai trees, to preserve our individual freedom and not become cogs or ants. So they subverted the meaning of "freedom", because we should be free to make new corporations (conglomerate hierarchies, egregores, group minds, call them however you like), because you know, freedom! Except this exploit existed even within the nation states that were deliberately stunted to not grow out of control. Just don't feed them after midnight, okay?

And then we were free to create corporations, without stunts, or rules or restrictions to preserve actual real individual human freedom.

And of course these new corporations quickly grew to become more powerful than many nation states. REALLY quickly, if you think about it, if you compare it to the speed at which nation states exchange power and conquer one another. But corporations kill at sub-decade frequency currently.

I went a bit off a tangent here sorry, and I doubt this is the proper forum to share this kind of thing either. But just stop and think for a moment, who or what is writing those words you just quoted. It's not something that could ever be your "friend".

Humans are fundamentally biased, manipulative information sources.

(Overt, not organic or otherwise covert) ads are just human acts where the bias and intended manipulation are unusually transparent.

Neither of these points need to be true. Consider if someone had a text ad which said “We made widgets. Click here to see our widgets”. There's nothing manipulative about that, it need not use more than a small amount of network or CPU to deliver, and all but the most extreme members of the no logo camp would tend to agree that there's nothing manipulative about it.

Journalism provides a necessary service for a democracy, and unpaid bloggers haven't actually made much of a dent into real, investigative journalism. Hell, they haven't even made a dent into regular ask-questions-at-press-conferences journalism.

Which leaves paywalls. But even if I everyone bought subscriptions to the top 5 or so publications they read regularly, we would all drastically reduce the variety of sources we get our news from. No fan of Breitbart is going to pay for the New York Times, even though now, they might (sometimes accidentally) come across an article offering them a glimpse of real journalism.

It's really easy to try: Just for a month or so, don't visit any sites showing advertisement that you haven't paid for.

Also, what is your threshold for 'bandwidth-hogging' videos and GIFs? Do you trust content-lengths from the server?

According to the post:

"... Chrome will stop showing all ads on sites that repeatedly display these most disruptive ads after they’ve been flagged.

To determine which ads not to show, we’re relying on the Better Ads Standards from the the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group dedicated to improving the experience of the ads we see on the web. ..."

They are a bit vage in this post, but as we know from other posts and press briefings, this means:

The site owners will get a notice when Google has found that their site is displaying ads not compliant with the Better Ads Standards. When they don't fix this until after 30 days, all ads on the site are blocked, even those complying with the standards. The site owners can then of course still fix it, and get removed from the block list.

So the "flagging" is actually done by Google, and means the owners of the site get a notice.

https://github.com/cpeterso/clickbait-blocklist/

You can simply scroll p and it’s gone. It’s also at the top of the page, not interrupting your reading.

It’s far better than an overlay that requires you to close it by hitting a tiny x.

And the standards for what is considered "disruptive" are here: https://www.betterads.org/standards/

"It’s important to note that some sites affected by this change may also contain Google ads. To us, your experience on the web is a higher priority than the money that these annoying ads may generate—even for us."