GQ And Forbes Go After Ad Blocker Users Rather Than Their Own Shitty Advertising Inventory
from the stay-on-target dept
And so the war on ad blockers marches on. Lots of sites have recently made ad blocking software a target of their ire, complaining that such software ruins everything and is a form of puppy genocide or whatever. We, of course, know that to be bullshit, so we think it's just fine if you block ads (in fact, we make it easy to do so). Still, some of these attempts are getting more and more aggressive, such as what two recent sites, GQ and Forbes, have decided to do.
Let's start with Forbes, in which the website was recently putting up a "none shall pass!" wall for users who attempted to access it while using an ad blocker.
Reports are coming in from Twitter, and I can confirm, that Forbes is now preventing all (most?) visitors who use an ad-block tool from viewing any articles. From what I can tell, the ban on ad blockers is only rolling out today, and it is not affecting all visitors. I have a report from a uBlock user, as well as one from the UK, which say that they got through just fine.Those who didn't get through receive a page that reads "Hi Again. Looks like you're still using an ad blocker. Please turn it off in order to continue into Forbes' ad-light experience."
Here we get into the crux of the problem. First, anecdotally, I see these same messages from sites on occasion. My reaction is always the same: close out the tab, move on to find another source for whatever I was looking for. I have literally never shut down my ad blocker in order to continue to the site. Which, in the case of Forbes' ad-light experience, would only have caused me to frantically turn it back on to begin with, as the reports from readers indicate that ad-light translates into real-life speak as a barrage of advertisements. Add to all that, that the barrier only affects certain users using certain ad blockers, and this all devolves into a DRM-esque game of whac-a-mole. Go ask the gaming industry how well that money-pit has turned out for them.
But GQ goes one further. Instead of only giving users the choice of turning off the software or moving on, GQ additionally offers potential readers the option of paying for every single article they read! Progress!
“Turn off your ad blocker or purchase instant access to this article, so we can continue to pay for photoshoots like this one,” it concludes, pointing to an image of Amy Schumer dancing with stormtroopers.GQ's advertising is notable in that it is the worst and most annoying kind. Multiple auto-playing videos with volumes ratcheted up, banner ads that fill up the space and auto-expand, and ads that follow you around as you scroll the page. Or you can pay four-bits per article, which is an appropriate phrasing of the price, since apparently GQ believes it's still operating in an old-timey online ecosystem where it can hold content hostage rather than working to make itself more attractive to readers.
Readers who choose to pay for their content rather than view GQ.com’s ads for beard oil and expensive clothing are directed to start an account with content, a micropayment company that allows you to pay the $.50 fee to read whatever story you were trying to reach.
And that's the crux of the issue. The war against ad blockers didn't start when users began using the software. It started when online outlets refused to understand that content is advertising and advertising is content, and if any part of that equation is bad, the whole thing falls apart. There's a reason why users use ad blockers after all: many online ads suck harder than a vacuum cleaner looking for love. But they don't have to. Everyone has their stories about ads they have liked or loved. Some readers will always block ads, but not most of them. If ads were good and fun, they wouldn't need to be blocked and users wouldn't want to block them. Fix that and the war on ad blocking can be retired.
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Filed Under: ad blockers, ad blocking, forbes, gq, journalism, paywall
Companies: forbes
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Hipster Paul Bunyan reads GQ? Go figure.
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A: He drank coffee before is was cool.
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While it may not be what they're doing now, it's possible for them to require all of the ads to load before they display the page content. Depending on how much they're willing to impact page load performance, they could go as far as making it impossible to fetch the actual content without submitting tokens included in the ads. That would mean the user's browser would need to at least fetch, if not actually display, the ads in order to get the page content.
That would impact their performance for users who don't block and would require significant additional resources and complexity on the server side, but that hasn't stopped people from using DRM before...
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Re: HOSTS file
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Except that's a pain in the ass because every time you encounter an ad you have to go edit your hosts file to add the 50,000,001st ad domain. With an ad blocker someone else takes care of that for you.
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I have my linux box scripted to dl the mvps hosts once a week, compare the entries to my current hosts, and add any my current hosts is missing. For windows they include a handy dandy batch file.
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...or on second thought, don't. The fact that they continue to find it worthwhile to toss money into means you're not likely to get an objective answer out of them.
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I'm Sure They Are Easy to Bypass
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Re: I'm Sure They Are Easy to Bypass
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... which is why you have to turn off the ad blocker to see it.
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I bet that even if I were to white list the sites in question that ads still won't show due to my script blocker preventing the running of scrips from other domains. Until these sites are held liable in court or via legislation for harm from 3rd party scripts launched from their sites, no way.
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I'm no big fan of ads, though auto-play videos of any kind do tend to cross my threshold. The trigger that pushed me to ad blocking is security - I'll be happy to remove my ad blocker once I can be sure that there's no way to inject malicious code via ads.
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We can block if we want to...
Forbes can keep their content. How they expect to monetize a site with no viewers might be an interesting subject, but isn't my problem.
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Re: We can block if we want to...
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And yet they still don't understand why people are blocking ads.
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The end of Eternal September?
Theoretical, it could be fewer "shill for money" sites. In my opinion, that would be a good thing. There would not be fewer Internet users though, so the citizens of the world would just participate elsewhere, and most would be better off.
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Re: The end of Eternal September?
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Re: Re: The end of Eternal September?
Fox news is in many ways the epitome of unreliable information; they have even used evidence of how unreliable they are in court to evade convictions when they lie, as a "no one believes what we say anyway, because we lie all the time".
Implicitly referring to MSM as "Fox news" is warranted because they are all best avoided. (And if they all disappear we are all better off.)
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IIRC that was one particular Fox affiliate, not the Fox News cable channel.
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Re: Re: We can block if we want to...
Suppose I sell you ground beef. And I depend upon this for income. Then I start including salmonella in my ground beef for no extra charge. Then you start blocking me as one of your vendors. Then I complain that you are blocking me, but still using other vendors.
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Re: Re: We can block if we want to...
Reality is ... don't you just love this intro - lol.
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Re: Re: We can block if we want to...
But we built it. It ran. It worked. It was just fine.
It would work just fine again if did what we should do -- which is to ban advertising and blacklist anyone engaged in it. Yes, a LOT of sites would die: that's perfectly fine. It is completely acceptable because any site which can't survive without advertising DESERVES to die. And good riddance to them: nobody is going to miss GQ or Forbes except the inferior morons who are too stupid to know any better, and well, fuck them.
Advertisers are the enemy.
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Re: Re: Re: We can block if we want to...
True, and because it worked, every commercial concern out there jumped onto the web to have "an on-line presence." Why? To help them sell their stuff; Forbes and GQ magazine for instance.
Then some shithead MBA decided the "on-line presence" had to pay for itself, or even show a profit if possible. Hence, advertising. Lots and lots of advertising, and some of the worst advertising ever imagined; pop-up ads, ads which completely took over the browser, or even the desktop. Worse advertising than TV, and that's saying something (no mute button, autoplay videos, ...). Continue that with websites with cookies to follow you wherever you went, and store your web activity in databases, then sell that data to their "corporate partners."
Now, they're insistent that we're stealing their content if we're not letting them treat our web activity like TV on steroids.
Fuck 'em, indeed.
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Re: We can block if we want to...
Yes, some of the ads are really annoying, but 20 years ago, you'd pay $20 - $40 a year to get a bundle of paper in the mail once a month with the content - and still full of ads. (We called them "magazines.")
I have hit some sites where the ads are so bad that I can't read (or even find) the content, and some where there really isn't content - they just lured you there with the promise of content to show ads.
On those sites, I leave.
I don't see Forbes as being that bad. Maybe I'm just numb to it.
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Re: Re: We can block if we want to...
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Why were ad blockers created?
Now the ad industry wants to cry about it?
They should have thought about policing themselves a little bit better.
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Re: Why were ad blockers created?
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Remember Mr & Mrs Spam, (Canter & Siegel)? Utterly unrepentant to this day.
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They have an attitude that they have a God given right to put ads on the inside of your eyelids once the technology becomes available.
They think they should be able to put ads on every surface on the planet.
What kind of thinking do you think is behind the rise of spam starting in the usenet days, and then moving to email, and then growing to what we have now.
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Forbes is doing us a real service
So, thank you Forbes for making it that much easier to avoid you completely.
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That's not targeted, it's just plain stupid! And if stupid is what they do, I'm blocking the adverts, their scripts and any attempt at data collection I can see.
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They brought this upon themselves.
In response, they're continuing to bring it upon themselves.
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Either way, there are enough news sources these days, if they want to actively encourage people not to use them as a source, somebody else will be welcoming.
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Alternatively, moan and complain about ad blockers, driving blog writers to produce articles like this which inform *all and sundry* that GQ and Forbes are too much pain and aggravation to bother with to get what they offer in return.
Hmm. Six of one, or half a dozen of the other? I was told the dinosaurs died out. What's with all these dinosaurs wandering about?
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For what it's worth...
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Re: For what it's worth...
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You're not, but ad-blocking isn't in the majority, sadly. Though that fact makes these attempts by some sites to get us to allow their ads seem even more like petulant whining.
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When this most valuable audience migrates to The Verge, Vice or other online-centric publication (if it hasn't already), all they will be left with is crumbs, kinda like prime-time news....
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They could, you know, be smart about it and imbed ads on their own servers without any flash bullshit, but noooo they are too lazy and cheap so they let others do their work for them and then bitch and moan about how people are stealing their content ... which btw they probably stole from someone else.
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Personally I wouldn't even notice if Forbes ceased to exist.
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Allowing some ads
Karma Blocker for Firefox lets some ads through to support the publishers while blocking annoying ads.
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I don't generally use blockers, but I will tend to avoid sites that overuse ads, use autoplay videos, intrusive ads, etc. If a site does these things, I won't go there again. People who do the same as me have even less value to advertisers as while you may be able to convince someone to turn off their ad blocker on a site to help them stay in business, you're less likely to recover readers who you've chased away completely.
"How do people expect these publications to exist without a revenue stream?"
They have no God-given right to exist. If they fail because they're causing their own customers to kill their revenue stream and they don't have any other method of funding, then good riddance. They deserve to die, and they will have done so by their own hand.
They all have competitors, and the market won't mourn their passing for long.
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Who?
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Though I noticed something as a child, whatever subject I knew something about, if the Main Stream Media covered it they were way off alarmingly often. As in almost always. That were science stuff, but it made me wary of political tales issued by the same publications.
I were much older when I were able to assess if my mistrust were justified. How can we know what is true, and what is deliberate lies? This is no easy task. To the extent that I have been able to check, the MSM is even worse for non-science "news"! And that is telling something.
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Took 3 minutes
I still have no interest in going to their site...just wanted to know how long it would take me to bypass it.
|http://i.forbesimg.com/welcomead/scripts/vendor/4681989c.modernizr.js
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For the other 99% of the population, they're rather either be able to block whatever they wish or, ideally, not have ads that are so annoying/usage breaking in the first place.
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Somebody reads Forbes and GQ?
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Amusingly, that fake survey ad had a disclaimer that they believed the images used in their website were "in the public domain" due to the "fair use act" (huh?) and because they were "available on the Internet". I can only imagine what would happen if the DMCA didn't protect the websites those ads were served on.
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Next.....
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Seems like they would have to pretty sophisticated and have some tight integration with the ad network that your HOSTS file is blocking.
There's certainly things they could do toward that end, and that's probably where we're headed. A war of attrition against the browsers they are serving content to ... sweet.
And certainly putting gq.com and forbes.com into your HOSTS will solve the ad problem with both those sites :)
But the war on HOSTS was already started by Microsoft, who now will bypass it for their own "telemetry" data.
As pointed out, we're ripe for some good turnkey hardware solutions.
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Ads, datamining, Do not track failures, and the lack of industry oversight to prevent malware, will ensure I will never turn off the ad blocker.
This is a failure of the advertising industry that it doesn't want to address or acknowledge. The total loading of websites with so many ads you can't pay attention to the articles has come down to the surfers of the net doing something about it since the sites and ad companies refuse to.
Please, can we have some more of these idiots that think their content is so unique that other items of interest can't be found on the internet to replace them? I would like to see those so greedy go down the path to bankruptcy to end the issue.
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Bring it ON
Who in this world looks forward to ads shoved in their face for shit they don't want.....and secondly who in the hell clicks on one and actually buys something.
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The problem is, the "nag strips" are FUNNY. I wouldn't want to subscribe--and miss them.
"Advertising is content, and content is advertising", indeed!
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Hmm?
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Missed the big one
You forgot the really important one: 'And are guaranteed not to contain malicious code'. I value my computer more than I value any given site, so as long as ads have a potential of screwing with my computer due to lazy and/or indifferent ad services that can't be bothered to check ads for questionable code, even if the ads presented were amazing the ablocker would still stay on.
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If they could they would.
The corporate sense of entitlement is getting out of hand.
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Everytime an autoplay ad blasts away, an ad blocker gets installed.
Perhaps they should focus more on cleaning up the bad things in the ads, rather than the revenue they think they are missing out on. Everytime they host an ad that tried to infect a user, they make sure that user will find an ad blocker to avoid it happening again.
The focus is on the money they are losing, rather than on why people are blocking. Doubling down on demanding the revenue stream is going to end up costing them much more as people look for sites that aren't tone deaf to why the ads get blocked.
I'd love to be that kind of hacker who could track all of the employees of Forbes & GQ online and see how many of them are blocking ads themselves yet somehow still clueless as to why others are doing it.
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Disabling ad blocker doesn't even work
Guess who's not a loyal Forbes reader anymore?
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- It has the same sorts of lists of known ads and ad-serving domains as power ABP and uBlock.
- It blocks everything that ABP would block that is not a .gif, .jpg, or .png -- and does so by content-type, so renaming a script or a Flash video to .png isn't going to sneak by it, or by blocking everything outside of img tag src attributes.
- It allows the first three (3) things that ABP would block that *are* img src=*.gif, .jpg, or .png, and blocks all subsequent ones, per page load.
This allows and *enforces* a certain minimal level of non-intrusive, non-security-risk advertising. It does not allow plugin content or scripts, which are security risks and also contain some of the worst annoyers: pop-unders, pop-ups, overlays that follow you around or cover up content, auto-playing stuff, and everything with audio. Excessive banner ads will also be trimmed down to just the first three on the page.
Sites that want to advertise to users of such a blocker need to get static image ads, which are just img tags in the html -- they can still be script-selected, by running the scripts server-side. (img src="adserver.example.com/serve_random_ad.cgi" etc.) The first three of these on a page will get through.
The only thing this doesn't address is the deceptive banner ad: fake download buttons and message boxes, etc., as well as bait-and-switch ads that link to pages hosting malware or to scams. But there is no way to block such things short of blocking all ads.
As a compromise, it might be accepted by some sites that try to block other ad blockers, as well as by some users that otherwise would block all ads. Call it the "return to the early 1990s" ad blocker. :)
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No such thing as good ads, though.
The whole methodology is insanely bad and makes little sense. Unfortunately, to fix it and to remove all ads everywhere forever, we first have to make one minor adjustment - end capitalism and competition and switch to a real-world based cooperation focused approach. We need that for many reasons, though, including this one.
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Hmm Tim, I have an issue with this "content is advertising and advertising is content" thing. Like everything, it seems that there are some folks getting overboard with it. I haven't seen this regularly in news outfits but there are whole portions of some sites dedicated to "sponsored content" or something. I mean, you did something like that in the past and frankly it didn't bother me (and it was well disclosed) but I've seen some pretty nasty attempts. Keep an eye, it will be abused like everything else.
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And also ignore the issue of sites where content cannot be read until all ads loaded (which can be a long time on slow mobile connection, again ignore the bandwidth cost) and even then popups / unders attempt to make viewing of content a major challenge once it is finally available.
So, lots of inconvenience and my excess bandwidth costs ignored we still have the deal breaker..
On a near daily basis we read of "mistakes" where lack of due diligence allows bad actors to purchase online ads which are then used to install malware on machines.
The last is a key reason that many people block ads / scripts, they wish to reduce the risk of a common attack vector.
Every now and again I fire up a fresh VM and test a few sites with usual ad / script blocking disabled (vanilla browser setup with no extensions), sadly each time I do this the incidence of aggressive ads seems to have increased & it reaffirms my usage of protective measures .
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Eh
Get over it.
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Re: Eh
Get over it.
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Re: Eh
I did not think anyone here was contesting that at all.
Most surfers will simply go elsewhere.
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Getting around the block
Or, just keep hitting refresh. Somehow eventually it let me in.
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Why do they insist on executing code on my computer?
But then they had pop ups.
And then they want to execute code on my computer? Why does an advertiser have to execute code on my computer?
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On the flip side
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malware
So i do what i can and use an ad blocker. When they put up prompts like that (can't see this because of your ad blocker), then i add filters that bypass it and still get in with no ads. :)
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I guess?
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Re: I guess?
Or maybe you could read the article where it mentions that not every user is encountering the block?
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Re: I guess?
About a decade ago, I started hearing about people using multiple anti-virus suites at once. Half their CPU was being taken up by anti-virus programs! That brand new, state of the art quad core box was performing no better than the single core CPU box they had five years ago.
Don't you think it's a bit odd that you need to saddle your system with three already? How long will it be before you're using six, or twelve, or twenty-four, ...?
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Re: Re: I guess?
Are you assuming browser extensions are the same way?
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I know how computers work. Each running process takes up resources; RAM, CPU, network communications, and storage read/writes. Each one of these processes execute, trigger more work when they detect what they're looking for, and call on other processes and system resources. Some work may be fobbed off on the web server the browser's communicating with, and the server may be telling your browser to kick off stuff on its own. Each of those cause latency slowing down the overall process.
I doubt browser extensions are much different from any other type of process.
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* don't cause the page to slow down
* don't run video/audio automatically on page load
* don't expand over the content I am looking at just because the page loaded or my mouse went across it
* don't follow my mouse or scroll
If ads were more like real life ads (i.e. billboards) that were there and didn't try to interact with me or the site I'm on I wouldn't have to block them.
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If you use AdBlock Plus you can enter your own filters. These will bypass forbes' jackassery with no problem:
click on your ABP icon
Select options
Select the ADD YOUR OWN FILTERS tab
Enter the following filters one by one:
@@||forbes.com^$generichide
@@||forbes.com^$genericblock
||moatads.com^$domain=forbes.com
||shareth rough.com^$domain=forbes.com
||amazon-adsystem.com^$domain=forbes.com
Tells Forbes.com to fuck off with their stupid system that prevents visits to their site. It's rather interesting to me that their advertisers are paying forbes to advertise on their site, but forbes is taking their money and actively preventing people from seeing their site and thus the ads. If I were an advertiser on forbes.com, I'd sue them for this practice or at least tell them to lower their ad rates.
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http://www.extremetech.com/internet/220696-forbes-forces-readers-to-turn-off-ad-blockers-pro mptly-serves-malware
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That seems to be becoming a trend already in 2016. For the past week or so I am constantly coming across sites that serve blank pages whose content can only be unhidden by turning off CSS. I can't fathom what this could possibly accomplish for the site operators. The typical nontechnical user will take one look around and hit the "back" button. But many such sites are aimed at nontechnical audiences, and most of the rest have no sensible reason for trying to restrict access to only the tech-savvy...
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Wonkiness.
FWIW, I haven't seen that, nor do I know what you mean by "Web Developer > CSS > Styles > Disable All Styles." In what? Your web browser, or something else? What OS and browser?
I have seen wonkiness of another sort recently (Debian Linux "testing" here). The first two articles about T-Mobile's Legere was spiking my Gkrellm "proc" window. I couldn't read them as they were threatening to crash my box. That's new. I've seen pages that spiked CPU cores, but rabbits? Never. I saw the same thing happening on other sites at the time, and now haven't seen it again (so far). Weird. Sounds to me like a bug in a library common to multiple web servers.
I think the web was a great idea, but I've not been happy about how that idea was executed for a long time, and every day it seems to get worse. I suspect it's in dire need of a re-think and re-boot, just like everything else on the net; IPv6, secure DNS, kill Microsoft & Java & flash & ...
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Re: Wonkiness.
The blockchain math that underpins BitCoin enables cryptocurrency because it allows distributed authentication of edits of a file -- it allows everyone to distinguish a "proper" update to the ledger from an "improper" one, and thus allows everyone to agree on where a given BitCoin has gone, even if people other than its owner try to claim to have spent it, or that it was spent to them.
The same technology should allow *any* kind of computer file, not just a bitcoin wallet or ledger, to be maintained in a distributed way while still having an "owner" with distinct editing rights. In other words it allows creating a distributed, world-readable filesystem with cryptographically protected "w" permission bits. And that allows creating a truly decentralized web on a P2P base without everyone being able to vandalize every page, even one with some amount of interactive features. The users share in the hosting costs, as with BitTorrent and other P2P systems. No central servers. No DNS. No single points of failure -- either engineering-wise or legal-wise. Which means no takedowns, no censorship, full freedom of speech.
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Re:
Actually it is very clear how to resolve the issue: if an ad network cannot manually and very carefully vet all ads served through it, then it should serve only ads that are physically incapable of infecting anyone with anything.
I suggest that they serve only 460x60 JPEG files. That ought to be pretty safe. Any major security holes in commonplace JPEG decoding libraries have surely long since been fixed.
Of course the advertisers will have to give up the ability to pop things up, pop things under, obscure content, autoplay audio, and all similar things, but cest la vie...
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Code
"Yep, you're in a test. Thanks for participating and kudos if you want to hack around it. Let us know why you dislike ads: gq.com/contact/contactus"
The code in the page that displays the popup is:
div id="abnm"
and if can be turned off by editing the code to add in that div:
visibility: hidden.
I can be reached via email for assistance on bypassing these.
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Why do adblockers exist?
Spammers tried suing over block/boycott lists. It didn't work out so well for them and it won't work out so well if advertisers try going down the same route.
There's a world of difference between website operators running adverts to offset costs and blindly selling space for adverts which consume excess resources on the client computer.
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Online ads are dangerous
ESPECIALLY when you try to goddamn shame me into it. Fuck you, and take your stupid content and stick it up your ass. It's not worth risking joining a Russian botnet to read "The top 25 cutest puppies."
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Re: Online ads are dangerous
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