During an outbreak of common sense in a Hamburg, Germany, court it was ruled that.. no, advertisers don't get their own way every time.
Zeit Online GmbH and Handelsblatt GmbH as representatives of the advertising world filed suit against Eyeo GmbH (the owners of AdBlock Plus) claiming that the latter should not be allowed to distribute software (a browser plugin that blocks ads) that disrupts their income stream.
The court did not look favourably on the advertisers' case.
From an article in The Register :
Ben Williams, a director of Eyeo, wrote in a blog: "The Hamburg court decision is an important one, because it sets a precedent that may help us avoid additional lawsuits and expenses defending what we feel is an obvious consumer right: giving people the ability to control their own screens by letting them block annoying ads and protect their privacy."
This has ramifications for another simmering case in neighboring France.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2015, @12:49PM
The whole model is based on a backwards model.
If you want to put advertising on the McLaren Formula One car, you pay McLaren for permission to do so. If you want to put advertising on a building, you pay the owner of the building to do so. So, if you want to put advertising on my monitor, YOU PAY ME. Putting advertising on another persons property without permission is known as graffiti.
But not only do they try to put advertising on my monitor without my permission, now they want the court to prevent me to take down their advertising.
Yes, I have adblock installed. But I'm open to adding exceptions. If I like your product, I'll sell you advertising space for the same price per square inch per second as McLaren (due to bad experience with advertisers putting up ads without paying, you'll need to pay up front). But then you might want to buy your advertising space from McLaren instead, you just might get more viewers there.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Covalent on Wednesday April 22 2015, @12:59PM
Well said...but:
We watch advertising in exchange for "free" services, like TV and Internet. Now I understand that neither of those things are "free" anymore, but that used to be the premise, anyway.
I also have AdBlock installed, FWIW. I'm just saying the premise of advertising on "your" screen has precedent.
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday April 22 2015, @01:19PM
Is it illegal to commercial skip when watching TV in Germany, at least technically illegal even if never enforced?
In the 90s I was into american football. Its an interesting sport with all kinds of tactical / strategic / logistical issues. Although that rain puddle is pretty shallow so I got bored of it after a few years. Anyway I used to mute the TV/radio when the commercials blared, is that illegal in Germany?
I was just recently reading about getting a blue card in .de and it sounds appealing. Every country has their weirdness, and everyone knows everything about the USA weirdnesses, so perhaps this advertising stuff is .de's secret weirdness. Or maybe they got other weirdness.
(Score: 4, Informative) by bradley13 on Wednesday April 22 2015, @02:15PM
No, there's no particular advertising fetish in Germany. Which is why the court decided in favor of AdBlock.
I can only encourage you to give Germany a try. It's a nice country and Germans are nice folk. Do make the effort to learn German, though, or you will forever remain something of an outsider. I worked there for a few years, and enjoyed it a lot.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday April 22 2015, @01:37PM
The key thing to remember is that if you aren't directly paying for the service, you are the product, not the customer. In the case of services where you provide all sorts of personal information, that personal information is part of the product, and again you are not the customer.
And in the world of business, the customer is much more likely to be listened to than the product.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Wednesday April 22 2015, @05:00PM
*You are the Consumer, not the Customer
The proper distinction has existed for ages. Can people stop using the dumb "product" quote?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2015, @10:03PM
For instance, If I have a website, let's call it BookFace, and I let you use it for free* because I make money by selling your personal information for money than you/(your information) are/(is) the product.
You can say they are consumers/(products), it becomes an argument of semantics and pedantics at that point because the information is conveyed. Everyone understands what the other wrote.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday April 22 2015, @10:16PM
Using proper terms clarifies the relationships:
The product is the web site (or the TV channel), and more specifically the Ad slots.
The consumer is you and me
The customer is the advertiser.
The customer buys the product at the value set based on the consumer's exposure.
Now, some consumers can also be customers, if they pay a subscription of any kind. But unless you are talking about packaging their personal info to sell it directly to the highest bidder, the user is NOT the product.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2015, @10:51PM
I am a citizen, not a consumer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2015, @09:40AM
Off to the re-education camps with you, 'citizen'...
Repeat after me: "All glory to our corporate overlords!"
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2015, @03:41PM
Speak about yourself. I usually don't watch advertising on TV. When having the choice between either watching the ads or possibly missing a bit of the show if I check too late if the ads are over, I generally choose the second option. Indeed, the ad break may actually cause me to realize that the show wasn't actually worth watching to begin with, and I was just too lazy to switch off; in that sense, the advertisers do me even a favour. ;-)
Oh, and my internet isn't free, I pay my ISP (but I suspect that you didn't mean "free internet" but "free services on the internet" anyway).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Wednesday April 22 2015, @09:41PM
We watch advertising in exchange for "free" services, like TV and Internet.
Well, that's the theory.
But I don't remember agreeing to that, or even being asked to do so. I was not a party to that decision.
If websites want to embed ads into their own html, served from their own servers, that might be different. Ad blockers would then have to physically change their html to block these.
But the way it is done these days is to simply instruct MY browser to go fetch an ad from somewhere.
We are perfectly withing our rights to refuse to do that. We are perfectly within our rights to ask for compensation if we choose to do so.
If ABP were a honorable company, there wouldn't be such a huge exemption list, or you could sign up to allow their exemptions in exchange for part of the proceeds. (The largest part I might add, since users pay the bandwidth, electrical, and inconvenience costs of ads, while ABP pockets their "protection money". Till this is an option I don't allow their exemption list.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday April 22 2015, @10:39PM
If ABP were a honorable company, there wouldn't be such a huge exemption list, or you could sign up to allow their exemptions in exchange for part of the proceeds. (The largest part I might add, since users pay the bandwidth, electrical, and inconvenience costs of ads, while ABP pockets their "protection money". Till this is an option I don't allow their exemption list.
Not that I'm defending them per se, but if they didn't have a whitelist I would imagine there would be a lot more people (companies) angry at them. And you know the saying, Don't get angry, get even^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsue somebody.
Also can't you opt out of it with just a couple clicks? It's like a checkbox in the menu you get when you click the icon. It's practically impossible to make it any easier to opt out.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by edIII on Thursday April 23 2015, @04:28AM
Not exactly. During the evolution of the marketer subcreature, the term captive audience was coined. All advertisers did is recognize a captive audience in a brand new format. It literally took decades for technology to catch up, and remove the captivity part. I have to disagree that the "premise" here is correct, which is really the social contract between the content providers and content consumers. It's anything but certain that we all made an agreement to put up with their bullshit in exchange for anything.
In essence, that is what all of the arguments of the marketers are. A weak, futile, and entitlement laden plea that time reverse itself and we unlearn all of the technology that freed us from captivity. So the precedent is most certainly not our acceptance of this social contract, of which it never was, but the recognition by all sides there was simply the lack of choice. At no time was the agreement that advertising space was opening up in our private areas, only that you could piss us off with the interruptions to an extent. Of which, you may notice has grown substantially in the last few decades. I think we are down to well less than 20 minutes of actual content per 30 minute window. That's ridiculous.
I always have to disagree with that. While this did happen before I was born, I disagree that I inherited such an interpretation, which in my mind is just a rephrasing or restatement of our apathy and laziness as a much more nefarious agreement. This alleged agreement is now being conflated with rights of possession by the advertisers. It's evolved from a semi-polite and goofy intermission, to a truly damaging sense of entitlement about what they can do in our private spaces. In between was the move towards an acceptance that it's simply the way the whole thing is funded, and thats-just-the-way-it-is attitude.
That defeatist attitude is fine and all, but not the acceptance of this beach head into our lives. I recognize no such precedent, or it's implications. At least not in mine, and I will never let their delusions over old advertising models influence my rights of possession and peaceful enjoyment WRT my systems and networks.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2015, @09:38AM
Now I understand that neither of those things are "free" anymore, but that used to be the premise, anyway.
So what you're saying is the world has changed and we no longer get things for free... I think it is fair that we are paid to look at advertisements.
Me, do my own DNS poisoning. If I hear of a domain that is used to serve ads or track me, it gets added to my list of places that tells my machines to look for it at 0.0.0.0!
The problem with adBlock is that it only works in the browser (and in all fairness, I don't know whether it just *prevents* ads to be shown or whether it prevents the request to be made at all). I don't even want these bastards to see a request from me.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by FatPhil on Wednesday April 22 2015, @01:20PM
They pay the newspapers to carry their adverts, they do not pay you.
They pay the football clubs to carry their adverts around their stadia, they do not pay you.
At no point in the past has the final viewer of the advertisement been paid to view it.
Why should the internet be any different?
That doesn't mean they dont have things a bit back-to-front. The web works on requests from users to servers, and the server has the final say whether it serves the data or not[*]. But from the client's perspective - there should never be any obligation to request anything, it should always be the individuals choice what they request. Advertisers are just servers in this role - if they are unhappy with how we are treating their valuable product, they should refuse to give it to us until we pay for it - that would work just fine for me.
[* Case law shows that at least in the US this is not understood at all, which is why programs like wget have been described as "hacking tools", and why deleting the filename from the end of a URL to get a directory name has been judged as "illegal access to a computer". General IT literacy seems to be right down in the dumps to be honest. I think my (least) favourite show of IT bullshit in a court of law was MIT's Prof. Stuart Madnick, who was an "expert" witness for Microsoft - "One cannot delete the Web browser from KDE without losing the ability to manage files on the user's own hard disk."]
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 5, Informative) by Aichon on Wednesday April 22 2015, @03:18PM
stadia
Just to share a fun fact about "stadium" and its pluralization (I'm not trying to play grammar nazi here; I just thought this was interesting when I learned it a few years ago), depending on which sense of the word you're using, the word should be pluralized differently. Specifically, "stadium" has a few definitions:
1) It can refer to a track used in ancient Greece and Rome for foot and chariot races.
2) It can refer to the measure of length (about 185m) for the aforementioned track.
3) It can refer to a sporting structure with tiered seating for spectators.
Typically, when we use the word today, we're referring to the third definition, since we're talking about an arena or other structure. The first two definitions are rarely used today. What's interesting is that the third definition, which originated in the mid-1800s, is pluralized differently than the first two. The first two are pluralized as "stadia" (likely owing to their ancient etymological roots), while the third is pluralized as "stadiums" (likely because it's a word of modern origin). As a result, there's quite a bit of confusion over how to pluralize the word, especially so since a good chunk of the dictionaries that include "stadia" as a valid pluralization fail to indicate which senses of the word take that pluralization.
(Score: 5, Funny) by M. Baranczak on Wednesday April 22 2015, @04:25PM
Interesting. So Americans weren't the first to use "football field" as a unit of measure.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 22 2015, @09:36PM
But perhaps part of the club promoting fuzzy units for exact references? :P
(Score: 2, Interesting) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday April 22 2015, @04:06PM
But in a newspaper I am not forced to look at the advertisements, I simply skip over them and read the articles. (Ok, that isn't true, I don't read newspapers anymore, but back when I did, this was the case.)
Some guy does not run up and grip the newspaper out of my hand if I refuse to read the advertisements. Also, most of my paper reading was on the toilet, so this would have been super extra awkward.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Wednesday April 22 2015, @07:01PM
But in a newspaper I am not forced to look at the advertisements, I simply skip over them and read the articles. (Ok, that isn't true, I don't read newspapers any more, but back when I did, this was the case.)
This is the problem with internet advertising. I would not care if there were ads on the pages I visit if that is all they were. I do not believe anyone really ever did. Internet advertisers seem to feel that not only are they entitled to show us their ads, but also that they are entitled to track us all over the internet. Not only that, in extreme cases (not rare enough), they feel they are entitled to take control of our PC's by installing their malware so they can continue to serve us ads when they want to do so. They started breaking the "rules" and making everyone hate ads when they first started using pop-ups in advertising. I switched to Firefox back then because it had a built in pop-up blocker and since then it has been a running battle to block their intrusions. They are losing, and like all too many corporations seem to do now when their business models are failing, they resort to trying to get laws passed to force us to support their business model rather than changing to something that is acceptable.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 22 2015, @09:38PM
They will try to keep their business model alive as long as they can. It's profitable you know?
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday April 22 2015, @09:57PM
I would not care if there were ads on the pages I visit if that is all they were. I do not believe anyone really ever did. Internet advertisers seem to feel that not only are they entitled to show us their ads, but also that they are entitled to track us all over the internet.
You've hit the nail on the head.
Although i disagree that nobody cared about ads. Ads that are abusive in size, with noise or video, or take up more space than the content are objectionable even without tracking.
But no specific advertiser has anything to gain by tracking me all over the net. Why would Ford or GM care if I clicked a Bob's Burgers ad? Why should they know this? Kohls or Target haven't got the smarts to track me, they can barely keep thieves out of their own cash registers.
The problem is that large ad selling companies got in the mix. They are the ones doing the tracking these days.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Thursday April 23 2015, @01:59PM
In fact, I would even extend this to: I wouldn't care at all about ads, except that the advertisers are scammers and spammers, every single one of them. Pop-up ads, then pop-under ads, flash ads, ads that put a panel over the content. Pages with one paragraph per page to increase ad hits. Unskippable video ads, web bugs, trackers, personal information sales, slashvertisements, paid "review" sites.
It leaks into the real world as well. People don't pay enough attention billboards around here, so they now have these obnoxiously bright video ads. Thanks, I wasnt using my night vision while driving, anyhow.
Here is one [triblive.com] where the advertisers are suing a couple that complained about an overly bright billboard because the mean couple dared speak out against them.
Do I have any shame for using adblock at every single opportunity? Hell no. They are all liars and scammers. All of them.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Marand on Wednesday April 22 2015, @11:45PM
Why should the internet be any different?
Because, as it currently stands, internet advertising is built on the idea that the advertisers can run their untrusted code on your machine, counter to any sane concept of safe computing. It's your CPU, your electricity, and your OS that risks being served malware, not theirs. You're effectively shouldering the burden of the cost of viewing those adverts. This is especially true for non-savvy users that have to pay others to repair their systems after getting a virus from yet another malware-laden advert.
That makes them fundamentally different than other forms of advertising.
When an advertisement plays on the radio, it doesn't get temporary control to parts of your car. TV commercials can't unmute the set, pause themselves until they know you're watching, or mess with your DVR's recording settings. When you're at a stadium, those advertisements plastered all over the architecture aren't installing apps onto your smartphone.
Then there's also the bugbear of advertising panopticon, where the advertisements are used to track everything you do and everywhere you go. As annoying as advertisements could get, they couldn't do more than get aggregate data about groups, like targeting TV ads based on the general age group of viewers of a specific show. With online advertising, if you even load a site that has any form of Google anything attached to it, Google's ad machine will remember and show you adverts for that product everywhere[1] you go.
I'm not saying they should be paying the end user to view the ads, but in the form online advertising takes now, it's very much a different beast than the others. It's worth noting, though, that other intrusive forms of data-gathering usually offer incentives for their intrusion. The closest examples I can think of to the online advertising panopticon we have now are surveys and that Nielsen rankings system for TV viewing. In both cases, you actually do tend to get paid for the data in some form.
[1] I've had the same incognito session running in Chromium for a couple days, and it's very clear that anything you see feeds the advertising monster. I followed a link early on and days later I'm still seeing ads for that product in Chromium. As someone that primarily browses with NoScript and Self-Destructing Cookies in Firefox -- which results in very generic, untargeted ads -- the difference is extreme, and creepy.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday April 23 2015, @07:25AM
I think we're perhaps in violent agreement on this matter.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday April 23 2015, @08:08AM
Probably so; I was using your comment as a starting point, rather than attempt to refute anything said. The gist of my view is that, for better or worse, internet advertising is different than what's come before it because it expects more control (running executable code, requiring attention, etc.) and uses widespread surveillance for data gathering in ways that surpass even government espionage of previous decades. The increased demands and pervasiveness of online advertisers require either greater compensation (which we don't get) or greater resistance (NoScript, adblock, cookie stuff, etc.)
If online advertising were more like the offline forms -- passive, primarily visual, and largely non-tracking -- there would be much less pushback against them, but you can't put the genie back in its bottle. There's no way advertisers will quit doing any of it now, even if people push for regulations against the worst of it.
Not that that's likely to happen, so the only alternative is "war" against them, trying to block ads and trackers and effectively disappear, not out of a sense of greed -- I'm not opposed to ads themselves, as they sometimes introduce me to things I find useful -- but out of a desire to maintain my privacy and control of my own property.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday April 23 2015, @01:54PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday April 23 2015, @10:47PM
I generally see it the same way you do. However, we may not think of it as war but the advertisers clearly do. This lawsuit and article wouldn't exist if they didn't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2015, @07:18AM
So, if I want to advertise a service for newspaper owners, I can put an ad in the newspapers for free?
If I want to advertice a service for football clubs, I can put an ad on the stadium for free?
That's what you are arguing. That because the owner of the medium is also the target of the advertising, the owner of the medium should have to run the advertising for free.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Wednesday April 22 2015, @01:18PM
1. It hurts economies by convincing people of things that are not true.
2. It creates a layer of competition that exists only as a drain the companies that need it: if nobody's advertising, the playing field is exactly as level as if everyone is, except the products lack the 25-100% markup that marketing expenses create in various fields.
3. Marketing wastes peoples' time and attention. A lot of it. We only have our short little lives, and demanding our attention is an unreasonable behavior.
And the only excuses neoliberal economics types have for it really fall flat for me. "It's a trust negotiation expense" they say, which is bullshit; everyone knows ads are laden with as many half-truths(or unrelated emotional manipulation) as the law allows. "It increases the informativeness of the marketplace" they say, which is bullshit for the same reasons.
I value some of the things that depend on ads for revenue, but not the ads themselves. They're unhealthy, and need to be excised like a tumor.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday April 22 2015, @01:28PM
The only strong argument I can make in favor of advertising is some folks need an outlet for certain energies or behaviors. Its kinda like pr0n in that way.
So if you didn't have job positions for liars and crooks to make advertising, they'd get jobs somewhere more important and F that all up. Would not want that type to be managing operations, or in charge of environmental regulation compliance, etc. Sort of the court jester, the kingdom needs at least one guy who can tell the king he's full of shit and thats the jesters full time job. Likewise liars and cheats and crooks are gonna get jobs and better in advertising than in accounting or whatever. Gotta have a spot for that kind of person somewhere and advertising causes the least societal damage of the alternative job categories.
In the long run maybe you could educate or beat anti-social tendencies like that outta a population. Maybe. Then you wouldn't need a place for them and wouldn't need advertising.
Of course I admit upfront this argument stinks of the broken window fallacy of economics where obviously producing ads that no one looks at is a waste of food water and oxygen even if on paper it generates economic growth. But its not that awful of an argument overall.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2015, @01:47PM
In the era of the adblocker, tabbed browser, and smartphone, no ad can demand too much attention.
(Block ads, switch away from unskippable video ads, and divert attention from captive ads.)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Wednesday April 22 2015, @02:10PM
Excising ads from your own life is a good thing for me, yes. But a broader economy that actively punishes a lack of advertising with bankruptcy is symptomatic of a larger problem.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 22 2015, @09:43PM
That the public at large exercise insufficient quality control or if they need the product at all? In nature large hordes can trample valuable areas in the same way. So divert the dead fish elsewhere and constrain resources available to groupthinkers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by M. Baranczak on Wednesday April 22 2015, @04:24PM
This is true, and you can say the same thing about the banking/investment sector. Modern society needs these businesses - but nowadays, they've grown way bigger than they need to be, and they're sucking resources away from the people who actually do useful work.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2015, @07:15PM
banking [...] Modern society needs these businesses
s/businesses/services
Let the USA's #1 advocate for banks owned by THE PEOPLE tell you how 1 state has stayed out of the crapper by having a public bank for over a century.
Don't give your money to corporate bankers [google.com]
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Thursday April 23 2015, @02:23AM
Say one nontrivial thing that's true.
It's bullshit half truths all the way down. Bullshit half truths are the currency of the human race. They're the substitute for the deeper truths we try to connect with but fail to attain.
For me personally, advertising works like simulated annealing: sure most of the time the changes it promotes in my behavior are of dubious marginal improvement but sometimes I find something I like and stick with it. Most of the time, doing my own research doesn't yield a high enough value over the above pattern so I live with advertising.
If you reject that pattern, maybe it's because doing your own research on the things you use gives you a feeling that you have control over your life.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday April 23 2015, @01:20PM
You're a moron who overestimates their resistance to advertising.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2015, @03:19PM
Maybe you underestimate your resistance to pseudoscientific brainwashing waves. I see lots of people refer to how much money companies spend on advertising research, but they've never proven that the specific people they're replying to are actually susceptible to advertising. Yes, some people are different. Amazing. I heard the FBI also spent boatloads of money on psychic detectives at one point; they must have been effective.
(Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Thursday April 23 2015, @11:14PM
Well, given that I think all humans are stupid, I don't doubt the first part, but I don't overestimate my resistance to advertising, I just don't care about its negative effects on me. I embrace and enjoy the arbitrary and capricious nature of the universe.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2015, @01:57PM
The next step is to invalidate web API licenses.
Websites like facebook and twitter are notorious for getting applications shut down that use their APIs to do things those companies don't like. That's bullshit because it isn't the app developer using the API, it is the user who runs the software. If those companies don't want people using their APIs do things they don't like, then they should enforce it at the user level. But that's too hard, they want to have their cake and eat it too.
Adblock is exactly the same thing, its just that the "API" isn't some json thing, its html. If advertisers don't want people using adblock then they need to enforce that at the user level, and facebook et al need to do the same thing.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Wednesday April 22 2015, @03:39PM
As far as I know no one is forcing you to use FB or Twitter. Staying away from them keeps you from accepting their "policies".
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2015, @04:07PM
I feel like you are being deliberately obtuse.
Let me mirror your reply back to you to help you see why:
As far as I know no one is forcing you to use websites with advertising. Staying away from them keeps you from accepting their "policies".
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Wednesday April 22 2015, @07:37PM
Actually all my angles are less than 90 degrees and there is no deliberation involved that's just my nature. I just don't like sites that block my extensions and cram in redirects and load crap scripts. I don't use Facebook nor Twitter.
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 22 2015, @09:47PM
Given how society is organized nowadays. You could then also say that no one is forcing you to use electricity or the Internet. Too many dead fish will only communicate through Facebook, Twitter etc.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anal Pumpernickel on Wednesday April 22 2015, @10:59PM
Idiots are no friends of mine. Just ignore them.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Wednesday April 22 2015, @03:40PM
Germany 1 : AdBlock Plus 1 : Advertisers 0
Why does Germany get points? They didn't "win" anything. They were just the hosts.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2015, @04:08PM
A German judge from a German court had an outbreak of common sense (and wasn't corrupt I guess). Given the amount of BS coming from some (US but not only) courts lately, I believe the author thought Germany deserves its point as a "well-played" pat on the shoulder.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Wednesday April 22 2015, @04:40PM
As I've pointed out before, ads aren't really the problem. Tracking is the problem. Running FireFox in "stealth mode" with AdBlock, NoScript, Ghostery, and other extensions is a way to stop third parties from tracking you. That's the real issue here.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by acharax on Wednesday April 22 2015, @05:00PM
Tracking isn't the only real issue with ads, ad firms are prime vectors for driveby malware installs and have been so for a very, very long time because they don't care what gets distributed through their networks (and refusing to be held responsible for any resulting damages) as long as they get paid enough, which is a much bigger threat at the end of the day as far as I see it.
I don't believe for a second most of these firms have any real review process, and if they do, allot more than one or two interns to the task of briefly skimming over 1000 or so submissions. Hell, it'd be very easy to curtail most of this by returning to simple unobtrusive text and banner ads, but serving active content is much, much more lucrative because those ads are harder for the average Joe to ignore.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday April 23 2015, @06:40AM
Isn't it a crime to distribute malware?
So you could have ClamAV look over all your ads, then if it finds some malware it files an automated report with CERT.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2015, @09:51AM
Running FireFox in "stealth mode" with AdBlock, NoScript, Ghostery, and other extensions is a way to stop third parties from tracking you. That's the real issue here.
That's a nice illusion you've got there... be a shame if something happened to it.
While what you suggest goes a long way, sadly it doesn't go *all* the way. They still fingerprint your browser using a variety of means (canvas, installed plug-ins & fonts, screen dimensions & color depth, etc...) and then they also use your IP/mac to match you... See, these fuckers won't stop, ever. You may need to extend your set of tools with an anonymizing proxy as well.
I agree that the tracking is the real issue because the reason they track is to manipulate you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2015, @03:16PM
There are also extensions to disrupt the fingerprinting nonsense, which I use.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2015, @03:42PM
Please elaborate because I would like to add them to my list of extensions to run (not trolling, genuinely asking)
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday April 23 2015, @08:25PM
Well, I'm using RequestPolicy; that way my browser doesn't even contact their servers. So how would they track me?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.