Sourcepoint: Former Googler Will Sell Tech to Punch Through Ad Blockers
bgr.com
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Happy arms race.
Skynet, here we come.
+2
It's only somewhere in the last 5 years the SPA trend seems to have reached critical mass and instead of starting from the idea of meeting user needs by serving reasonable media types from resource endpoints (and then building up interactivity on top of that), people want to treat browsers as just another cross-platform runtime (an inferior one, naturally) that happened to win out instead of Java or Flash or Silverlight.
Pros for expecting JavaScript to be enabled:
- Cheaper development because you can assume a common, featureful baseline. That leads to less code complexity on both the client and the server because you don't have to implement parallel code paths.
- Freedom to add features that would be difficult or impossible to emulate with traditional static pages
Cons for expecting JavaScript to be enabled:
- The site won't look and act right for the 1% of visitors who are used to every other site also not looking and acting right
There are lots of reasons to use JavaScript in the browser and almost no reasons not to, so everyone collectively decided to stop hamstringing themselves to cater to a teensy portion of users.
Huh.
If you think that one of the advantages of JS-required SPA-style applications is that they will help you avoid things getting expensive somehow... I'm not sure where to start, actually. Maybe the situation here is kindof like the old saw about mediation: you should do it for 20 minutes a day, unless you don't have time, then you should do it for an hour a day.
My experience is that sites that start with the focus on their shiny new JavaScript framework and their app-like UI tend to devolve into architectures with overspecific and mixed concerns pretty quickly. If you want to keep things from getting complex and expensive, start by keeping discipline involved in conceiving of the app in terms of plain HTTP and different media representations of the same relevant resources/data. For back ends already producing well-modeled JSON documents, producing equivalent HTML representations should be easy. If it's not, something is likely wrong (and if you're already producing well-modeled HTML documents, it's exceptionally rare that producing good JSON docs with the essential content is anything other than trivial).
Now it's true that some apps just aren't about resources and media types, and you need the browser-as-runtime instead of the browser as document/media viewer. It's nice that the browser keeps growing in capabilities here. But let's be honestly: most of the JS-required apps we're seeing out there these days aren't even close to meeting this bar. And the "extra costs" you're invoking of supporting clients without JS are, in those cases, self-inflicted.
> That's because industry analytics showed that approximately 1% of visitors lack JavaScript.
And I bet those same analytics probably showed even fewer visitors without JS after they used those stats to require it -- problem solved!
http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/PressReleases/facial-recogn...
"Monetary gain" can be realized in more forms than those implied by the perfect accomplishment of a goal, of "winning," which adblock-blocking most surely will not, just as adblocking will never be perfect.
I am being currently "re-advertised to" by Converse. They and a few ecommerce keep showing the products I browsed, and I find that to be not annoying at all. In fact there is a small chance I would drop them a quarter to keep reminding me for some time.
BI gave an example of The Guardian in it's article, but that is visible for me.
Instead of addressing the root cause, ad tech will further hurt publishers by chasing more traffic away. How difficult is it for the ad world to get the UX issues that are at stake?
Publishers need to invest in UX - not tracking, malvert, bandwidth consuming tech that has forced users to go out of their way to install ad blockers in the first place. No, it's not theft. It's common sense and basic security.
Sorry for the rant ... Just looking for customer examples for what Sourcepoint is doing.
"'if users opt-in to having advertising subsidizing the experience, we can serve that ad, [and if an ad blocker continues to block the ads] then that would be illegal'"
Wouldn't unauthorized use of my browser to download content over my ISP, against my wishes and for the benefit of someone else, be a federal crime?
When you're a grownup, when you agree to pay for a product (again, this scenario is opt in, by contrast to a lot of current content delivery), it's not a crime or unauthorized to enforce your end of the transaction that you agreed to. I never thought I'd have to explain that to someone over the age of ten.
That is not opting-in. That's the publisher forcing ads on the user without their permission.
What you're describing is covered by contract law I guess. Contracts can also be trumped by law. E.g., if you reply to this comment and don't click this link for a free iPad, http://www.vanderbilt.edu/innervu/news/win-a-free-ipad , then you owe me $100.
If a site wants to detect an ad blocker and block their own page too, fine. But if they want to circumvent it and silently download whatever resources they want and thwart all countermeasures they encounter, then that's cyber crime IMO.
This is also not an entirely sensible question, as it works the other way around, too: "Wouldn't unauthorized downloading of content, using your ISP, and then deliberately extracting certain parts of it, against the publishers wishes, and for your own benefit, be a federal crime?"
(Note: The question of whether this is copyright infringement, which is the common claim, is separate from the question of whether it may fall under some crime)
1. encourage users to enable ads on publisher's site
2. register an account with the publisher for free
3. view certain number of ads to unblock publisher's site
4. publishers can also circumvent the ad-blocking
I assume the opt-in would happen in option 2. It's option 4 that I think is illegal.
Also, even if option 4 happened after the opt-in, you may get bound to a TOS or something that allows them to do it, etc.
Note also that all of this may run afoul of various civil codes, of course (it's hard to say, a lot of them are pretty vague, so until someone tries it, it's not easy to say what the actual end result would be)
It’s been solved in court in the past (and some horrible misdecisions were made, like saying that if no one links to something, it isn’t public), but in general: if you make something available for me, I can ALWAYS for private-only use remix it as much as I want. I can copy my CD collection a thousand times, I can burn a hundred clones of a videogame – for private use.
Which is the case here.
The publisher has no right to expect that users actually see ads. Even with TV, all recording devices since the time of VCR skip recording ads completely. And with live TV, people switch the channel.
No, it actually hasn't, at least not to the degree you think.
For example, the main ruling in favor of your argument, the Hopper ruling, turned on this: "commercial-skipping does not implicate Fox’s copyright interest because Fox owns the copyrights to the television programs, not to the ads aired in the commercial breaks."
Not on some more general right to commercial skipping.
The only thing won on appeal so far is the preliminary injunction. Dish may in fact, still lose :)
Even if they don't, unlike TV shows, publishers will likely be able to claim compilation and collective copyrights on the work as displayed to the user. Plus, it's not time-shifting. Plus you have website terms of use that may bind you.
You may not want this to change the result. It probably changes the result.
"The publisher has no right to expect that users actually see ads. Even with TV, all recording devices since the time of VCR skip recording ads completely. And with live TV, people switch the channel."
This is 100% not the same as what is being described here. Those are time shifting devices. This is not. It is not "fast forwarding" the ads on the computer. People are also not switching to different tabs to avoid the ads. You also have another serious problem in websites: Terms of use. Unlike TV, which doesn't bind you to anything, on the web you can be bound to terms of use (plenty of website terms of use have been held valid and binding, it's usually a mixed question of fact and law). Expecting precedent to come out the same given all this seems .. a dubious line of argumentation. It may, it may not. Acting as if this is a solved question is incredibly premature.
Additionally, the only court in your favor has not ruled that Ad skipping is generally okay, it ruled that Fox can't complain about it because they don't own the copyright rights to the ads".
You do realize this means the ad owners* may be able to complain, right?
Anyway, if you believe otherwise, i'd love to see some case law. (Because the case law i've found doesn't support your argument at all :P)
(Note, since i got a private email about it: I actually don't have strong feelings one way or the other as to whether it should be legal/etc, i'm just trying to express an view as to whether it is)
Anyway, under German law, you can always make a copy or compilation of any product you can use or have a license to use for personal use.
As an adblocker is only personal remixing, it is totally legal - just like ripping a CD, or mixing two songs I downloaded from iTunes.
Additionally, there are personal rights which can not be signed away by a ToS or even a contract, including the right of remixing.
Bring it.
Ultimately I think the problem is that most publications aren't worth reading anymore, and so "never do business with the company that uses your tech ever again" may be an appropriate solution.
Unless the server actually doesn't send the content until the ads are loaded; but that would slow down page loading for everyone (and still easily bypassed by sending requests and dropping the incoming packets).
If there was a large need for it there would be extensions that do it automatically (and with IPv6, you would have no shortage of addresses, which makes it easier to obtain new ones).
Thankfully, I haven't seen anyone go "thermonuclear" on ad blockers yet except for executive-level decisions and lamentations — but as a technological-level problem it's theoretically straightforward to subvert given the rudimentary nature of ad blockers.
One site that still has me beat dynamically loads all of the content and code through a websocket, and various bits are so heavily obfuscated that they look like brainfuck. Finding tools to tamper with SSL websockets is a challenge enough in its own right (Chrome has nicer tools now though).
In reality, the simplest answer is to just not view the content.
If advertisers want to have a technical arms race against their users, all they do is piss us off. That is a stupid, stupid approach to business.
They will allow users to pay a subscription price instead of seeing ads if you prefer that. Are you just against companies that make money? If everyone uses an ad blocker and pays no money to the sites, most sites just won't exist.
I'm actually pretty OK with this. I doubt it will happen, though. There must be a better way.
For example (and this is just an example from my own life), right now, the only thing I can do is block everything, there is no way for me to communicate my actual preferences to site owners. I used to white list sites I really enjoyed to give them some revenue, but with every ad network creepily tracking me, I don't do that any more. No matter how much I trust the site and respect the site, I can't trust their ad network.
What if you could approve ads, but block tracking? I'll allow you to insert some content into my pages that advertises to me, but I won't let you execute JavaScript to do it. The ad is less valuable, but it is better than nothing. If I allow tracking, I see fewer ads (but get tracked), if I just allow ads, I see more ads, but don't get tracked.
There are surely other, better ideas as well.
<img style="display:none" src="//some.ad-domain.com/pixel">
The original tracking 'technology'. JavaScript free.