AdTrap removes ads between your modem and router
kickstarter.com
kickstarter.com
How do you know that your modem, router, and ISP aren't doing something nefarious? Somehow I doubt a product which explicitly does Bad Things© to your datastream will sell well.
I run Linux on my router and encrypt traffic of any value beyond it. This being HN, it's probably not a particularly unusual setup.
Which brings me to the most important question about that device, why not move its functionality to the router? Why yet another box?
Would love to see how they work on picking adverts out of SSL pages.
Would also love to see how they deal with tracking and affiliates stuff in addition to banner adverts.
That latter one is an issue for me, I've found some sites to be simply unusable if AdBlock or Ghostery is running in my browser.
It's usually tracking code (LinkedIn Inbox is useless to me as are sites that add Omniture to their shop button), and occasionally I go to buy something which is an affiliate link and it gets treated as an advert click and stopped.
So it's important not to go too far and break the internet either (though in my view it is the sites that add all this stuff that are breaking it).
If this stuff is all in a black box without external configuration... then how do you correct the false positives?
But that won't catch everything.
I noted a friend who used this http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero/
All looked good, but as it includes more than just banner advertisers (shock sites, tracking sites - privacy issues) he'd have more false positives than I did.
Ghostery and the like (browser plugins) are reasonably easy to just disable when you come across an instance that it breaks functionality in a web page. But using a hosts file or DNS block, it was much more opaque about why it was failing as you'd have to remember something you'd forgotten about: You've blocked this thing at the DNS level, it wouldn't resolve. Or more to the point, it would resolve to a local web server that served up zero bytes.
That's my worry with a black box on the line... how easy is it to override in those edge cases, and will they play safe by sticking just to known banner adverts and not tracking sites which are sometimes necessary parts of functionality (due to the fact that links are redirected via the tracking site).
People who host these type of sites often give donate options but in most cases the donations would not cover the hosting costs.
I honestly do not know why people are surprised by this. People who play sports (say football) have no issue driving kids to matches. People who goes to bars, sometimes buy a friend a beer.
In a internet community of 10-500 people, someone will have the spare 10$ for a domain name, and someone else will have a other spare 10$ for some server space. sometimes, its the same person. Server and domain names are not expensive, and is about the same cost of a few beers. If you spend hundred and hundred of hours on the site, work on the design and add new features to it, spending 20-30$ a month is basically a non-issue (just look at mmorpg players).
The problem arrives when those 200 people turn into 200k people, but then, the economy tend to change. Members fees, donations, t-shirts, and sponsorship tend to be the solutions in those situations. If you have a site for classic cars with 200k daily visitors, I doubt you will have a problem finding a sponsor, even if you have a no-ads policy. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if a car seller would not happily sponsor such community, and then send some nice profession images of "nice looking cars, just by chance available to be bought".
Once you start selling merch , membership fees etc it will suddenly start to feel more like a business and require more effort on the part of the owner which they may well not have time for.
Besides ads for sponsors or popups saying "buy a T shirt!" will be just as annoying as other types of advertising.
Apply to above comment, and how large do you need to grow until hundreds of $ for a month? even if the cost goes up to 100$, isnt that like 5 beers?
blocking ads is as ridiculous as trying to block porn.
Ever tried getting past adblock? It's very trivial.
Also I'm not convinced this method of removing ads would work on ads served over https, where they can't inspect the traffic.
Regarding SSL, they could have the device issue an SSL certificate that you install on your devices and it could intercept that traffic as well.
Ever tried getting past someone who thinks they can force you to watch ads? Also trivial.
Citation needed. "Most people" might not use AdBlock because they don't know about it or don't know how to install it.
The problem seems to me that a publisher with one ad makes 1x dollars. Then a marketing genius comes up with a great idea, lets put two ads on the page and make 2x dollars! The 2x dollars maybe lasts for a little while until the advertisers realize they aren't getting 2x the sales so the value of the ad goes down. Marketing genius gets another idea. Hey, how about three ads? Four ads? Pop-up ads..?! Now you just have an overload of cheap, crappy ads that everybody hates and people start figuring out ways to block them.
A better solution would be for smaller number of ads with higher cost to the advertiser. They would all be more valuable and get more clicks because we're not so over-saturated with ads.
I don't see how it could ever be that way due to human nature, greed, etc. But it would make a lot more sense.
Also, I wonder if some sites will stop working: e.g. I can imagine a video with a pre-roll just never starting, when the pre-roll can't be loaded. And it being hardware, this will be harder to skip.
24/7 I have a verizon MIFI device as a hotspot for work.
I have been wanting an in-line wire filter for a long time. While I am not concerned with ads as much, I'd love an inline wire FW that would be configurable.
Or does it do an SSL MITM attack on all your traffic?
The former is interesting mostly because it doesn't require end-user configuration, so to a naive user it really is plug-it-in-and-works. The latter is, as several have now pointed out, horrendously awful.
What nobody seems to have mentioned yet, though, is that you can turn the first into the second with a code update.
One where ads are not so annoying people go to the trouble of buying this and setting it up. Malware ads, video ads, ads deliberately designed to fool people into thinking they have a virus and need to CLICK NOW! are all reasons why people would be considering going to the immense trouble of getting this little piece of gear and making it work for them.
So there will always be people who block ads, then. It's not an argument so much as a simple case of cause-and-effect.
- Meg Hourihan, co-founder of Blogger
All the same, I am more and more convinced that subscription funded, high-quality digital content production is the correct path for the future.
My question was about the AdTrap competitive advantage, if any.
I should have stated it better: assuming, for the sake of discussion, that we want an ad-blocking device, what will prevent modem/router manufacturers from embedding an ad-filtering proxy into their devices, tomorrow?
From the OEM perspective, more features means bringing more value. In turn, an ad-blocking router/modem would erode the need for a specialized device a la AdTrap.
I think the routers where you can flash your own linux on, and run it as a server, might already be able to do so. Other than that I think they innovate too slowly to be a significant competitor to AdTrap, for now.