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from the the-perfect-advert-for-AdBlock dept.
An interesting conspiracy theory on Business Insider:
A Business Insider reader claiming to be a former ad tech executive at a really huge, well-known news publisher then sent me a fascinating email, in which he claimed that ad tech companies deliberately serve ads slowly because everyone makes more money that way.
Basically, his theory is, when a reader clicks to read a story, the page calls for bids from advertisers on the ad space available. This bidding is supposed to take place in a few milliseconds. But, my correspondent says, ad tech companies hold open the bids much, much longer, so more bids come in, driving up the price. Publishers hate this because it makes pages load really slowly, giving readers a terrible experience. But it's hard to stop because everyone — publisher included — is taking a cut of the winning bid. So publishers and ad tech companies actually have an incentive to make pages load slowly.
[...] Generally, other sources in the ad tech business tell us that this is rubbish. But a couple also admitted that there are some shady practices out there, and it is possible for this happen. "In theory he is basically correct. Publishers and the ad networks they work with have pretty effectively gamed each other. Lots of crazy s--- happens," one source told us. "It's a wild world out there and publishers are not generally very technically competent so ad networks get away with a lot."
(Score: 1) by blackhawk on Thursday July 30 2015, @01:18PM
I run AdBlock and Ghostery to reduce the worst of the ads which is great on my PC, but doesn't do a thing for my Android TV, tablet, mum's iPad, etc. I was using a downloadable DNS block list (at the risk of summoning APK) and just editing it into my HOSTS file on my PC, but again, that does nothing for all my other devices.
A few weeks back I spent a few hours tossing a clean install of Ubuntu onto Raspberry Pi I had laying around and then installed the DNS Masquerade daemon to provide DNS and DHCP services. I switched off DHCP on my modem and let the Raspberry Pi handle it all for the internal network. After setting up the daemon to hand out IPs and set the default router and nameservers I was almost done.
Now, my sweet little Raspberry Pi hands out IP addresses, reserves some for specific devices, has entries in the hosts file to resolve internal device names and points at the Google nameservers 8.8.8.8 to bypass any shit the Australian government is trying to pull. The daemon loads up an extra file or two for me which it can resolve prior to asking the Google servers, so all the known ad servers and malware servers (on the list at least) resolve to localhost.
Now, every device on my network is at least partially protected from ads, with the only ones able to get through so far being served by Facebook. My browser wastes absolutely no time loading up Javascript, images or anything else from slow ad servers, and pages all load a lot quicker. My tablet no longer shows me bullshit ads, and Spotify is also happily ad free (as is Skype, whose flashing ads were a constant eyesore while I was trying to work).
If you're tech savvy, I'd suggest adding a DNS / DHCP server to your network too since it gives you the chance to stop ads / malware at the root. YMMV.