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Adblockers stop publishers serving ads to (or even seeing) 1bn web users - Press Gazette

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  • Besides the trackers and malware, ads can be categorised as a flaw in technology. A kind of software parasite that uses a computer's resources without providing any additional functionality to the user.

    Ads are malware (software maliciously made to do something the user doesn't want), yes. :3

  • Whats not to know?

    Step 1) Open the browser.

    There is no step 2. Just go wherever you want, and read. Or watch videos. If you don't know where something is, search for it. The browser does all the work. That's like saying you don't know how to use a microwave.

    A number of kids also don’t know “file system.” The filing cabinet is a foreign concept, as are many of the now-antiquated technologies referenced/adapted for desktop computing (the address card for your Rolodex, the floppy disk save icon). Tablets and phones are culturally moving us towards stuff being contained within its respective singular app, like all your word documents being within the word app rather than meticulously sorted through layers of folders (even though on the backend, it is). So returning to your first step: why have a browser as the first step when you could just skip having to search for anything because there’s an app? Plus, the delicious unskippable metrics.

  • The trade body called it “illegal circumvention technology”

    Lol. Fuck off.

    And this is exactly why Google did away with Manifest v2 (what uBlock runs on) and why they wanted to introduce their “web integrity” standard. At that point the pages would be signed with ads and in the signature didn’t match the page wouldn’t even be shown.

    They tried to play it off as “ensuring that you truly get the correct copy of the page and no bad hackers have intercepted it” but really it would have 100% forced ads.

  • They call it "dark traffic" - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.

    Not surprised that its growing. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and its only getting worse, and will continue to get worse every month.

    Besides the miserable experience unchecked advertisements cause, it is simply not safe to allow those advertisements to load.

    A few years ago (before SSDs were common) I noticed unusual hard disk activity when loading a popular link aggregation site. A bit of investigation turned up a Trojan on my system. After removing it and reloading that site, my PC was immediately reinfected. The site owner denied any responsibility and said it was the advertising company's fault.

    The way the Internet operates now means no one is responsible for the content their site provides or the damage they cause. Imagine if restaurant owners were able to deny responsibility for the atmosphere in their restaurants or food poisonings they caused? IMO it's the same thing.

    Advertisers and websites have created the "dark traffic" mentioned here by repeatedly poisoning the public and they deserve the massive loss of revenue their behavior has caused.

  • What was the malware?

    IDK, it was awhile ago and blocked in the page it auto opened. By Cromite maybe?

  • They call it "dark traffic" - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.

    Not surprised that its growing. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and its only getting worse, and will continue to get worse every month.

    When I was about five years old, my parents were shopping for a car. When the radio said Brand X Dealer was the best place to buy a car, I was so excited to tell them what I'd just learned.

    I haven't forgiven advertising since.

  • Whats not to know?

    Step 1) Open the browser.

    There is no step 2. Just go wherever you want, and read. Or watch videos. If you don't know where something is, search for it. The browser does all the work. That's like saying you don't know how to use a microwave.

    I think you underestimate how techy many people are.

    You need to know the concept links. URLs. Web pages, navigation, tabs and your browser controls. It’s like getting in a boat with no concept of boating.

    I’ve spent years trying to teach my mom and grandma, and honestly if they aren’t super interested/engaged, they just can’t do it. It’s like teaching someone how to boat that hates boating unless it’s required.

  • They call it "dark traffic" - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.

    Not surprised that its growing. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and its only getting worse, and will continue to get worse every month.

    Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.

    It arbitrary pollutes any environment it’s conducted in, and causes secondary harms to non-participants by incentivising insecure hoarding of private information with the intent to better target individuals.

  • The trade body called it “illegal circumvention technology”

    Lol. Fuck off.

    I actually agree with that but the only other solution is subject yourself to deeply concerning levels of surveillance, not to mention surveillance pricing.

    I use AdNauseum and they have a toggle for privacy-conscious ads and I leave that on. That's my best compromise.

  • I have said it before and I'll say it again.

    Adblockers are a critical part of any modern computer's security suit, and everyone should use them.

    I won't even consider removing mine unless the owners of a site with ads take full responsibility for any dammage to my computer coming from visiting their site with out an adblocker.

    This is due to the fact that ads can be hijacked and infect your computer with malware just by accessing the site.

    I have also experienced my browser being hijacked by clicking a link that was compromized, it redirected my browser in a loop, then opened a javascript password popup box that took all focus from the browser window and refused to go away, while the page below displayed a message that I needed to call tech support.

    It was very annoying to resolve, Firefox would by default restore any pages that was open in a tab if the browser crashed, and since the password prompt was stealing focus from the browser window, I had to kill it through the Task manager, which restored the page on start up....

    I had to create a new profile, then it it solved it

    I don’t know if anyone reading this will ever have this problem (if you got this far without installing an adblocker, this is your wake up call - go get one now), but ctrl+W is the shortcut to kill a tab and that should work regardless site focus or popups

  • They call it "dark traffic" - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.

    Not surprised that its growing. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and its only getting worse, and will continue to get worse every month.

    Yo bro. Looks like you are looking at some information without 15 things popping up in your face. I see you are into the "dark traffic"

  • Raw-dogging the internet without an adblocker is about as irresponsible as not using contraception

    And just like STDs, those malware-laden ads can infect your whole system before you even relaise what happened.

  • They call it "dark traffic" - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.

    Not surprised that its growing. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and its only getting worse, and will continue to get worse every month.

    “The growth of dark traffic undermines the ability of publishers to fund the production of quality content, or even operate as a business. We must recognise users are not the main driver causing this.”

    "It’s demonetising publisher content at scale without user consent."

    They act like we don't know what we are doing and want the ads. People who block ads in browsers like ddg and brave choose those browsers for that reason.

  • When I was about five years old, my parents were shopping for a car. When the radio said Brand X Dealer was the best place to buy a car, I was so excited to tell them what I'd just learned.

    I haven't forgiven advertising since.

    Can only imagine how f'd up kids' minds must be now

  • Here's how you make people aware of your products.

    You sell a quality product for a reasonable price.

    That's it.

    Instead, capitolism has become this game of cat and mouse where the consumers ALWAYS lose. Just a game of shrinking product sizes, reducing quality, and raising prices. Little by little.

    It's most obvious when you haven't had a product in a while, maybe years, and you grab it again. Only to realize they've gone through several iterations of enshitification.

    When I was a kid, Andy Capps Cheese Fries used to be about as long as my pinky, and they were thick. Now it's like the length of my pinky until my second knockle, and it's like the same thickness as a pretzle stick. Sure, it's technically the same product, but everytime I buy them I realize why I was disappointed the last time I bought them. And I won't buy them for another 5 years. Maybe by then they'll be the length of my pinky nail and as thick as a sewing pin, but cost 8 dollars instead of the 25 cents it was when I was a kid.

    They did a durability test on hammers. In one side was an old rusty hammer. It had a date of 1931 on it. In the other was a brand new hammer bought that same day from Home Depot.

    The new hammer crumbled long before the 1931 hammer did. This test was done in 2017.

    But I never buy products because they advertise. I buy them because I remember how good it was the last time.

    Except now, you're advertising BAD memories. Because when I go in expecting this much, with this quality, and instead I get a fraction of it, with only a fraction of the quality.....congradulations. You saved money on production costs. You also pushed your customer away from being a repeat customer.

    All this business schools, and all the data they have I'm sure shows that their way is better. So explain to me why it seems businesses these days struggle to make the line go up, but when I was a kid business was booming?

    The thing is business is more booming than it's ever been, but making the line go up forever is a fool's errand, at some point you'll hit a peak. Hitting that peak is immensely punished in our economic system.

    If you make a hammer that'll last 100 years, you'll sell as many as you can reach customers who need one, before hammer sales plummet. Instead of being rewarded for making a great product, you'll be punished when sales fall because you've solved a problem for most people.

    Advertising is kind of neutral in abstract in my head. Make a great product for a fair price, and let people know about it, and that's actually probably a benefit to both parties. Make a terrible product, and tell a bunch of people it's great, and you've spent resources doing them a disservice. But if you can convince them it's good enough to spend money on it, and keep your revenue per customer above the cost to acquire them, it's profitable. And that's all they care about. It's basically the same pattern as a scam, but profit is the only thing they're told they're allowed to care about.

  • And this is exactly why Google did away with Manifest v2 (what uBlock runs on) and why they wanted to introduce their “web integrity” standard. At that point the pages would be signed with ads and in the signature didn’t match the page wouldn’t even be shown.

    They tried to play it off as “ensuring that you truly get the correct copy of the page and no bad hackers have intercepted it” but really it would have 100% forced ads.

    Then I guess I'm not looking at those pages. No skin off my nose. That said, Firefox with Ublock Origin plus a couple of other ad-blockers seems to be working pretty well for me. Anything with a paywall, I just move on.

  • Advertising should be illegal. Huge waste of money and everyone's time.

    Unfortunately I don't think you can just make it illegal. People/companies would still do it, just covertly. Then you end up in a situation where adverts are not marked as such and that's probably even worse than the current situation, where ads at least identify themselves as ads.

  • Ex was mad that my PiHole was blocking some FB stuff so I turned it off.

    "The internet's slow."

    Looked over her shoulder and pointed to her (still loading) screen:

    "Ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad..."

    "FINE! Turn it back on!"

    Don’t date stupid people. Incentivize intelligence.

  • I actually agree with that but the only other solution is subject yourself to deeply concerning levels of surveillance, not to mention surveillance pricing.

    I use AdNauseum and they have a toggle for privacy-conscious ads and I leave that on. That's my best compromise.

    Toggles like that are available in other adblockers too and they pose a problem. They ad a ransom to showing you ads. You don’t want the ads but if the advertisers pay the adblocker company they get whitelisted and you see the ads anyway.

    Never use those toggles.

  • Besides the miserable experience unchecked advertisements cause, it is simply not safe to allow those advertisements to load.

    A few years ago (before SSDs were common) I noticed unusual hard disk activity when loading a popular link aggregation site. A bit of investigation turned up a Trojan on my system. After removing it and reloading that site, my PC was immediately reinfected. The site owner denied any responsibility and said it was the advertising company's fault.

    The way the Internet operates now means no one is responsible for the content their site provides or the damage they cause. Imagine if restaurant owners were able to deny responsibility for the atmosphere in their restaurants or food poisonings they caused? IMO it's the same thing.

    Advertisers and websites have created the "dark traffic" mentioned here by repeatedly poisoning the public and they deserve the massive loss of revenue their behavior has caused.

    Name and shame. Who's the link aggregator?

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    Oddly enough i heard that in my head with trump's voice. What has been heard cannot be unheard!
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    I'm not sure who you're referencing to, but I'm assuming you're not referring to me, because I despise the IDF
  • Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

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    Niemand hat geantwortet
  • getoffpocket.com, my guide to Pocket alternatives, just got a redesign

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    I've made some updates. There are many perspectives to view a guide like this. I hope there are some improvements to the self-hosting perspective. https://getoffpocket.com/
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    Obviously the law must be simple enough to follow so that for Jim’s furniture shop is not a problem nor a too high cost to respect it, but it must be clear that if you break it you can cease to exist as company. I think this may be the root of our disagreement, I do not believe that there is any law making body today that is capable of an elegantly simple law. I could be too naive, but I think it is possible. We also definitely have a difference on opinion when it comes to the severity of the infraction, in my mind, while privacy is important, it should not have the same level of punishments associated with it when compared to something on the level of poisoning water ways; I think that a privacy law should hurt but be able to be learned from while in the poison case it should result in the bankruptcy of a company. The severity is directly proportional to the number of people affected. If you violate the privacy of 200 million people is the same that you poison the water of 10 people. And while with the poisoning scenario it could be better to jail the responsible people (for a very, very long time) and let the company survive to clean the water, once your privacy is violated there is no way back, a company could not fix it. The issue we find ourselves with today is that the aggregate of all privacy breaches makes it harmful to the people, but with a sizeable enough fine, I find it hard to believe that there would be major or lasting damage. So how much money your privacy it's worth ? 6 For this reason I don’t think it is wise to write laws that will bankrupt a company off of one infraction which was not directly or indirectly harmful to the physical well being of the people: and I am using indirectly a little bit more strict than I would like to since as I said before, the aggregate of all the information is harmful. The point is that the goal is not to bankrupt companies but to have them behave right. The penalty associated to every law IS the tool that make you respect the law. And it must be so high that you don't want to break the law. I would have to look into the laws in question, but on a surface level I think that any company should be subjected to the same baseline privacy laws, so if there isn’t anything screwy within the law that apple, Google, and Facebook are ignoring, I think it should apply to them. Trust me on this one, direct experience payment processors have a lot more rules to follow to be able to work. I do not want jail time for the CEO by default but he need to know that he will pay personally if the company break the law, it is the only way to make him run the company being sure that it follow the laws. For some reason I don’t have my usual cynicism when it comes to this issue. I think that the magnitude of loses that vested interests have in these companies would make it so that companies would police themselves for fear of losing profits. That being said I wouldn’t be opposed to some form of personal accountability on corporate leadership, but I fear that they will just end up finding a way to create a scapegoat everytime. It is not cynicism. I simply think that a huge fine to a single person (the CEO for example) is useless since it too easy to avoid and if it really huge realistically it would be never paid anyway so nothing usefull since the net worth of this kind of people is only on the paper. So if you slap a 100 billion file to Musk he will never pay because he has not the money to pay even if technically he is worth way more than that. Jail time instead is something that even Musk can experience. In general I like laws that are as objective as possible, I think that a privacy law should be written so that it is very objectively overbearing, but that has a smaller fine associated with it. This way the law is very clear on right and wrong, while also giving the businesses time and incentive to change their practices without having to sink large amount of expenses into lawyers to review every minute detail, which is the logical conclusion of the one infraction bankrupt system that you seem to be supporting. Then you write a law that explicitally state what you can do and what is not allowed is forbidden by default.
  • Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates

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    I always say there are drivers out there who only survive by the grace of other drivers.
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    No, just laminated ones. Closed at one end. Easy enough to make or buy. You can even improvise the propellant.
  • MDM Thoughts?

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    Hello folks! Interested in learning new skills? Check out the best courses in graphic design- https://www.admecindia.co.in/courses/graphic-design-courses/ https://www.admecindia.co.in/course/advanced-graphic-design-master-course/ https://www.admecindia.co.in/course/most-advanced-graphic-design-course-master-plus/