... or so some web pages are now saying according to an article published by El Reg:
The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post has become the largest newspaper to refuse to serve readers who filter out advertisments.
The Post described it as "a short test" to gauge what users who use blocked blockers will do next. "Often, we run tests like this not in reaction to a problem, but to learn," said the paper in a statement.
Last week, Google also began to nuke the filters used to block preroll ads on its YouTube service. For extra punishment, YouTube viewers using AdBlock Plus had to sit through the full ad, by disabling the 'Skip Ad' button.
Around one in seven surfers use ad-blocking software, although the proportion rises when the demographic mix skews towards middle class and wealthy, and young and male, according to the latest annual PageFair report... into ad filters.
There is a reason why people use ad blockers. Sometimes it's for purposes of sanity, to avoid the very annoying auto-playing ads that more and more web sites now host. Others block them for security purposes, limiting one's exposure to the nastiness that can sometimes come from unscrupulous advertisers. Still others block them to reduce the draw on their precious bandwidth, especially those who get throttled if they use their monthly limit. Perhaps the Washington Post should be more careful with who they sell advertising to and more strictly limit the format of the adverts their sponsors pay them to publish instead of punishing those who block all of them.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @08:44AM
You can't win when it's all client side.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @08:56AM
NUKE the INTERNET! KILL the BEAST!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @10:07AM
They want clicks. I can make the adblocker click the ads for me on the background. Fine, right?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 18 2015, @12:35AM
But you'll still be connecting to dodgy ad networks, even if you don't see the ads. Not a great solution.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 21 2015, @07:32AM
The point is to fuck with metrics. These are meaningless clicks that bring no revenue yet chances are their stupid systems won't be able to tell the difference. That should give them the much wanted profit, right?
From the client's pov sluggishness doesn't really matter since you can indeed do all that crap on background, in parallel and without netiquette rules of max simultaneous connections per server or anything like that.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by M. Baranczak on Thursday September 17 2015, @01:58PM
(Score: 5, Informative) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday September 17 2015, @08:52AM
Anti-Adblock Killer [userscripts-mirror.org] Greasmonkey script.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @11:18AM
This is not a solution because this means you still download the ads, the advertising networks still see that you have visited the page and how long you stayed there.
The only valid move is to 'vote with your wallet' and not visit these sites again.
Let them burn like Rome! Now where's my fiddle?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday September 17 2015, @01:09PM
Sorry, I borrowed it for the debate last night. Right there with you on the "fuck em and feed em fishheads" plan though. If your shit don't work without ads, I'll find what I want elsewhere.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Thursday September 17 2015, @02:24PM
Downloading the ads still exposes you to malware even if they're not displayed, although to a lesser degree.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday September 17 2015, @03:52PM
Really??
How does that work?
Simply downloading a file (any file) and discarding the bytes as they arrive presents no exposure to malware.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Thursday September 17 2015, @05:30PM
Depends. If the code is parsed at any point along the way, you're still vulnerable to zero-day unpatched holes, even if the data is dumped before being displayed or, worse yet, as a secondary pass after being initially rendered. Not that it actually works like that now, but the arms race may end up going in that direction at certain levels of sophistication.
I'd like to assume that the ad info will never get loaded, but given the state of software in general, I'm not willing to make any bets on it.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday September 17 2015, @06:09PM
If you are fetching something simply to satisfy a server-side fetch request, why would the "code" be be parsed at any point along the way?
And assuming it was parsed at some point "along the way", but not in your machines, since you are going to /dev/nul all bytes that come across that socket, what would it matter?
Other than saturating your connection, (DOS), bytes received on a socket can only hurt you if you do something with them. If you refuse to even store them, you are safe. You simply read the socket in conveniently sized small buffers, tossing everything that arrives until socket is unreadable (empty), and then you close it. Your application (Ad-blocker, or what ever) simply has to know that the fetch was for an ad, and it should never do anything with the data.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @08:36PM
Please illuminate me and explain how I can configure $FAVORITE_BROWSER so that 'good' bytes run through $FAVORITE_BROWSER's rendering pipeline but ad-bytes and them alone go to /dev/null.
I think you are confusing "it could be done by rewriting a shit-ton of code and compiling it into your own custom version of $FAVORITE_OSS_BROWSER" with "it can be done with a simple configuration".
I'll be over here, waiting for your detailed explanation...
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Thursday September 17 2015, @08:57PM
Please illuminate me and explain how I can configure $FAVORITE_BROWSER so that 'good' bytes run through $FAVORITE_BROWSER's rendering pipeline but ad-bytes and them alone go to /dev/null.
Its easy.
Adblock Plus sees this html to fetch the ad, and strips it out as usual. (You do know that is how ABP works, don't you? Because If not, this discussion is pointless).
Then, for those ads that ABP has learned or has been configured to know must be fetched, it creates a http request, on its own socket, cloning the browser's Id string. But since it knows this is just a necessary fetch, it does nothing but dump the returned data.
As advertisers get smarter, they will return the url of the actual content appended to the end of the ad. ABP takes the next step in the arms race and finds that URL and pastes it into the page. (This would impose some risk as ABP would actually have to process the ad's data stream).
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Friday September 18 2015, @01:23PM
See, that last part is exactly what I am talking about. That blocker code has to be bulletproof, otherwise we're back to square one, with an even bigger attack surface.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 20 2015, @11:42AM
HTML to fetch ads? We aren't still living in the 90s.
Unfortunately most ad networks use Javascript. If you want to see how prevalent it is, install NoScript and turn off your ad blocker, unless you then explicitly allow the ad network's code to run you'll still not see 99% of ads. To spoof the ad views your ad blocker or most likely your browser on behalf of the ad blocker will need to run the Javascript to get the output that tell it what ads should be viewed.
(Score: 2) by hash14 on Friday September 18 2015, @03:05AM
Use the evil bit [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 21 2015, @03:29PM
I'm not sure whether the point has been that this is doable by joe average or by someone knowledgeable with reasonable effort in free time.
Anyway, for the latter case, there's this magical little device that almost every browser on earth supports which is called a proxy. Writing one of those from scratch is about a million times smaller effort than writing a whole browser. This is where I would start. (In fact, I have done it before..)
(Score: 1) by Pino P on Friday September 18 2015, @04:41AM
Simply downloading a file (any file) and discarding the bytes as they arrive presents no exposure to malware.
True.
However, it still exposes your account with your ISP to a risk of overage. And if the file fails to report to the server that it has executed, the server has the right not to serve more than the first paragraph of the article.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday September 17 2015, @05:00PM
Indeed, if the Post won't serve the news there are thousands of other papers out there with the same news.
But advertisers are either morons, or only market to morons. Like that car ad where the woman buys an old guitar, finds out it's BB King's and has him sign it. How in the hell is that supposed to sell a damned car??
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @08:39PM
But advertisers are either morons and only market to morons
There... fixed that for you... Now back to watching some YouTube vide... god damnit, what's with these adszzzz.... ooohhh shiny...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @08:54AM
Fuck you, asshole. If you want to play psychological games with me, I will not visit your site ever again.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @09:56AM
This is not a psychological game, but an a/b test. Does it increase or decrease ad views. Pure business.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @02:46PM
When I see that message I do not turn off my ad blocker, I close the tab and never go back. Phuck ads.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @03:08PM
Wrong tactics. You should return often, verify that it still doesn't show, and close the tab again. That way, they will get many server hits, but no ads nor content served; that ill tell them something. On the other hand, if you just don't visit them again, they cannot know whether it's because of their content blocking, or if it's because you're simply not interested in that site.
(Score: 4, Funny) by bart9h on Thursday September 17 2015, @04:23PM
Phuck ads.
You can say "fuck" on the Internet.
(Score: 3, Funny) by mcgrew on Thursday September 17 2015, @05:04PM
He must have visited Thailand. [wikipedia.org]
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday September 17 2015, @03:55PM
Funny thing is the WaPo pages always display fine for me with ABP running, and I never see any ad.
I must not be in their Test region, but Gewg complains about WaPo all the time, and he's probably located within 75 miles of me.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @04:42PM
Same here: I opened three articles in tor browser and they all were readable, with no graphical ads (just a link to "The Most Popular stories around the web").
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 18 2015, @01:19AM
Well, I do bitch about how they are an uncritical echo chamber for Wall Street and for the regime and and how THEY OMIT A HUGE NUMBER OF STORIES RELEVANT TO THE 99 PERCENT but I'm going to need a link to support your statement if it's referring to my opinion of their web-related activities in particular.
Up to this point, the bean counters have been mostly sane and WaPo's tech guys are pretty good.
-- gewg_
(Score: 5, Insightful) by quadrox on Thursday September 17 2015, @08:54AM
The reason I am blocking ads, scripts and other crazy shit is because I don't wan't to see that stuff. If you force me to do so, I'll just go somewhere else - it's just not worth my sanity to view some cute kitten video if I have to endure those ads.
If you are ok with me leaving, good for you. If not, you'll have to figure out a different way of making money.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday September 17 2015, @09:08AM
That's all fine and dandy, unless you have no alternative choices. Alternatives to Youtube for video content are pathetic at best. So... you're pretty much stuck with whatever Google wants to shove down your throat if you want to watch videos online.
Same for Google search - sorry, Bing, DDG or Blekko just don't cut the mustard. That's what you get with virtual monopolies like Google.
(Score: -1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @09:13AM
ftfy
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anal Pumpernickel on Thursday September 17 2015, @09:19AM
That's all fine and dandy, unless you have no alternative choices. Alternatives to Youtube for video content are pathetic at best. So... you're pretty much stuck with whatever Google wants to shove down your throat if you want to watch videos online.
I just download videos with youtube-dl and use adblockers and other anti-garbage plugins; no problems with ads or anything else. Even if they somehow stopped that, it's not like you need Youtube videos at all. I'm not sure I see the issue.
Same for Google search - sorry, Bing, DDG or Blekko just don't cut the mustard.
I use DDG and it seems fine to me. I have no trouble cutting off Google.
There's all kinds of other garbage in addition to this ad nonsense. I frequently see sites that want me to connect to over 20 third-party sites, all blocked by RequestPolicy. Not surprisingly, these same sites are often completely dysfunctional unless you allow a bunch of the third-party sites to load, and even then it's not certain that they'll work. And then there's "Comments powered by Disqus". "Comments powered by concentrated liquid feces" is more like it. It seems very few people know how to design a proper website, so it's not surprising they're making dumb decisions about advertisement policies.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday September 17 2015, @11:37AM
I use DDG and it seems fine to me. I have no trouble cutting off Google.
Likewise. I still try Bing (you never know...) and Google if DDG doesn't find what I'm looking for, but I can't remember the last time either actually has.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday September 17 2015, @01:15PM
Me too. DDG works fine most of the time for me as well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @02:04PM
I love Duck Duck Go with their bang commands. If I want a Google search of cute kittens because I don't like the results of DDG, I type in DDG "cute kittens !g" (no quotes). There is also youtube search (!yt), bing search (!b), amazon search (!a), google maps search (!gm), and pretty much anything you may want. Hell, there is even a kickass torrent search (!kat).
No way I feel stuck with google for their search engine. But point taken for youtube though, all alternatives are bad. We need a DDG of tubes.
(Score: 2) by TheB on Thursday September 17 2015, @05:07PM
I wish I could cut off Google completely as well, but DDG's search results are often lacking.
Until DDG gets functional date filtering I'll be stuck using Google search occasionally. DDG have been working on it for over 4 years and have only implemented a sort by date feature, which is currently broken.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 20 2015, @11:47AM
Try startpage.com instead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @09:59AM
Personally, I'd just stop watching useless video crap without replacing it with another video site.
Ofc, the problem is that this doesn't apply to masses since they are sheep and thus adcrap wins.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 17 2015, @01:44PM
Yes, I DO have alternative choice to Youtube. Don't watch the damned thing. Either/or - you either tolerate the advertising, or you don't watch. I'm fine with that.
I can't imagine any morsel of data on the web that is so very important to me, that I'll suffer through tons of shit just to get it. There is no video that good. Hell, I stopped watching television, and I don't miss it.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Nuke on Thursday September 17 2015, @02:04PM
I DO have alternative choice to Youtube. Don't watch the damned thing.
Trouble is, Youtube is not just cat videos. I visit a car enthusiasts website, and very often when a question comes up like "How to change a rearlamp unit", the reply is given in the form of a link to a Youtube clip that shows someone doing it. I have even bought new stuff and instead of instructions being given how to use it, the manufacturer tells you to go to a Youtube clip to see how.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 17 2015, @02:15PM
Yes - I'm aware that Youtube carries a lot of good stuff. I visit frequently. Sometimes, I have something more or less important on my mind. Other times, I just hit the site to amuse myself. Youtube has value. But - I can live without Youtube. An awful lot of the more-or-less-important stuff is found by way of other sites, which often embed the content on their site anyway. To date, I've not been required to view an ad before viewing an embedded video. But, again, if it comes down to viewing ads, or not seeing the content, I'll just pass on the content.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @07:23PM
So don't buy crap. No written instructions (with pictures, if necessary)? Crap, won't buy. Next, please.
Easy deal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @10:29PM
...and if it's the manufacturer for the item that you're repairing, with no alternative, then what?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 21 2015, @07:37AM
Get a bicycle instead?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 18 2015, @12:39AM
Youtube's shenanigans don't affect my ad blockers on Firefox. If you use Chrome you are going to get what ever Google wants you to get though.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Friday September 18 2015, @01:12AM
you're pretty much stuck with whatever Google wants to shove down your throat if you want to watch videos online.
At least for now, AdBlock Plus, NoScript and Privacy Badger limit YouTube forced commercial views to a second or so of an error message then the video runs as usual.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday September 21 2015, @11:05PM
Duck, Duck Go, is definitely a viable option to Google. Youtube is mostly for the masses. Netflix is what I use for Movies / Shows. Netflix => No Ads => Finish that Season in a day or two. YouTube can be useful, but you get what you pay for. In this case, you aren't paying them anything, so don't gripe about being served up a dish full of Nickelodeon / Game / Must See New Series advertisements.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Thursday September 17 2015, @12:41PM
I think this is exactly what people will do--go somewhere else. I will go one further and ask, if none of us get news through these 'old' channels, who cares? We already have videos of real events going viral, as do blog posts and social media posts. We have professional networks. We have many alternatives to Pravda and Tass. I know that many of the most important stories of the last 5 years have been broken by non-journalists. Established media outlets are just there to gin up outrage to generate page views or support some narrative that suits their publisher's financial interests, not to report facts or to inform.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @08:44PM
I think this is exactly what people will do--go somewhere else.
And guess what will happen next after they realize their readership is dwindeling?
"We need to push at least 5 in-your-face ads per page to every single one of you because we now only have 1 out of every 100 readers left. All the others left us. You will have to sit through the whole ad in order to see the 'content'/clickbait. But don't worry, once you hit the magic threshold and we've made enough money from your lifeless carcass, we will stop showing you ads... Also, that threshold is 50.000 ads per hour."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aristarchus on Thursday September 17 2015, @09:01AM
Well, if I can't read your site, I guess I will not read your site. It would be nice if you did not optimize for Internet Explorer, because no one does that anymore, and Microsoft sucks. But it would also be nice if you did not require a cookie when I have given you no reason to be able to identify me uniquely. And if you want to run code, even Javascript, on my machine, I expect to be paid. And if your web site is so bloated with video/graphics/smutz that you have to run ads to pay for the bandwidth, I just as well would prefer not to read it. So you see, the threat is empty. If I do not read you, SoylentNews will not read you, and if SoylentNews does not read you, Reddit probably does not read you. And if Reddit does not read you, that green site, or what is left of it, will not read you. Eventually, only people running Windows 10 logged onto Facebook will read you. This is a fate I would not wish upon my worst enemy. Please reconsider, who ever you once were? Washington Times?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @09:07AM
if I can't read your site, I guess I will not read your site.
This. I expect most people who get this message will simply leave. The majority of content on the web is not worth turning adblockers off for.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 18 2015, @02:10AM
If your page can't be read using Lynx, the screenreader of a blind person will not be able to use the page.
You are therefore in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
When I post a link, I assume the reader is blind and I check out this stuff--even finding the accessibility feature that indexes the page down past any crap to where the content starts.
If your page is simply a link within another page and fails on backwards-compatibility, I will note that--or even find a replacement link that doesn't suck.
If your page has the main relevant content and sucks, I'll just find a page that doesn't suck.
.
In addition, Google uses TEXT to deliver its ads--and always has.
Those are embedded in the page text and the code is obfuscated.
(I've tried to use the ##tag-here feature of my adblocker to hide (not block) that stuff and I couldn't do it.)
If you did ads the way Google has done from the start (and don't eat up folks' bandwidth and RAM with your non-text crap), you'd get a lot less grief from users.
-- gewg_
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday September 18 2015, @05:23AM
I'll comment on Google's text ads....
I feel that is one of the things Google's done right. The ones I have been presented are usually quite in line with what I am looking for.... and they are actually welcome.
Where I think Google is messing up is irritating people with YouTube ads. I will go for the "opt out" ad where five seconds of it are mandatory, but it allows you to bypass if you want, but forcing me to wait through a minute of something that is absolutely no interest to me is pointless and irritating. So far, I have about a 1 to 10 ratio of abortable ads that I actually watch, but of that one, it was one I wanted to see, not one I was coerced and angered to the point I abort the whole attempt.
Like a lot of other people here have already noted, the internet is not a very clean place. I do not like visiting any site with scripting enabled, just as I do not eat everything handed to me. Even in a business. I feel if they demand I eat it, I also reserve the right to sue the hell out of them if I get sick. However, the law sees things differently. A restaurant owner leaving a trail of e-coli infections in his wake is responsible for the grief, but a sloppy business webmaster leaking malware gets to hide behind a "hold harmless" clause.
If I stopped by a restaurant and the first thing I get is a well-dressed mater-D bringing me a note in a silver dish telling me that by eating there, I agree to hold the restaurant harmless against food poisoning, would I eat there? We sure seem to think differently about what is given to our machines don't we? As far as I am concerned, javascript is the computational equivalent of the soiled menstrual cloth referred to in the Bible, and I really do not want my machine executing code snippets pushed to me over the net.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @09:09AM
I still don't understand why people who read the democratic blog refuse to be the ones.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Thursday September 17 2015, @09:35AM
Yep, that's how I see it too - damage. And what does the Internet do when it encounters damage...?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @03:34PM
It bitches and moans about it on their blogs?
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Saturday September 19 2015, @11:29AM
Eventually, only people running Windows 10 logged onto Facebook will read you.
They don't see your remark as a threat. That's the world they're consciously trying to build.
Let's peek inside a marketdroid's lousy excuse for a brain, shall we?
Marketing works best against sheep. Therefore for maximum Return on Ad, we want to filter the traffic until we have only sheep. So we lose traffic from non-sheep? Fuck 'em. Not our problem.
Personally I don't care if the web fractures into a ad-sponsored money-making side and a free content side. The web was a lot better before the screaming shills showed up looking to "monetize" every electron. If you need ad revenue to support your site, we probably don't need your site.
(Score: 4, Informative) by GungnirSniper on Thursday September 17 2015, @09:03AM
Only the NYT and WSJ can get away with these antics because they both provide high-quality original content. WaPo has a good bit of AP articles, but most of the original work is just the newspaper version of an echo chamber; it can be found elsewhere.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @01:02PM
BWAHAHAHAaaa...high quality content. That my friend is a good chestnut. WSJ just echoes, or straight up has Heritage Foundation, Birch Society, or rehashes of Reuters. Times only has decent OpEds. Both can be easily lived without. You'll get these talking points from every other noise source within a few hours.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @01:46PM
You may not agree with it but it is at least semi original content. 99% of other sites out there are echoing AP or Reuters.
I dont agree with them many times. But at least some of it is 'new content' that has not be copy and pasted 300 times for 'pagerank' and 'views'.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday September 17 2015, @07:33PM
I don't know about recently, but once the WSJ provided useful information. I also don't know about the NewYorkTimes.
FWIW, I dislike reading long chunks of text off a screen. And I'm definitely not going to print out a newspaper. Ususally if an article is more than one screen in length, I'll just skip it, unless I think it important enough to print out...and in that case it had better be reasonably easy to print out, because very few of them are worth the effort of putting together into a single document. (And most of them are about programming techniques.)
FWIW, when Linux Today stopped coming out as a magazine, and went to only electronic edition, I dropped my subscription. That's not a readable format.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Thursday September 17 2015, @04:06PM
A few years ago NYT started to run a flash page if you visited their site more than 10 times a month. The easy way to kill that was to delete NYT cookies. NoScript also killed the flash and allowed the real page to load.
WSJ just has a member only gate, much like Nature and many other so called scientific journals. WSJ seldom has anything worth reading anyway so big deal to me. Most of the stuff in Nature and closed journals can be found at the real research institutions with just a bit of google-fu. If I really feel the need to read anything in Nature or other gated journals, I go use free wifi at the county library, or the local university library.
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 1) by Pino P on Friday September 18 2015, @05:00AM
"If I really feel the need to read anything in Nature or other gated journals, I go use free wifi at the county library, or the local university library."
That's not so easy if by the time you get there, the library would have closed for the night or for the weekend. Several county and university libraries and public transportation systems keep hours that don't mesh well with using the library after work.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Sunday September 20 2015, @05:12AM
Myself, I like to sleep most of the night. Actually, so do most people.
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 1) by Pino P on Sunday September 20 2015, @01:07PM
Even if you sleep through the night, you probably don't go to bed anytime near 6 PM, and you probably are awake at least some time on Saturday and Sunday.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by inertnet on Thursday September 17 2015, @09:46AM
This is the reason why I would like to have an adblocker that has a "per domain" option to download everything that's on a page, but doesn't show the ads in the browser. Render the ads on a hidden page or something.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @10:37AM
Some of the websites I often visit had some mildly irritating elements, which I hid through CSS: just add "display: none" in Stylish for the offending element. I think that the elements hidden this way are still loaded.
For example, this hides the irritating "you-agree-to-the-cookies" banner at the bottom of the Space Sector [spacesector.com] pages:
It requires more tinkering than the automated one-click ad-hider you asked for (and will probably need tweaking every once in a while), but on the other hand it's not limited to hiding only ads.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @11:21AM
HTTP Switchboard is your friend: https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard [github.com]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 17 2015, @01:57PM
Gorhill?!?! It's that Gorhill guy! Isn't he like - EVIL or something? He's threatening the blood flow of thousands of parasites! What's going to happen when the parasites start dropping dead?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @04:24PM
He is an avatar of Horus and you cannot stop him.
(Score: 3, Informative) by mmcmonster on Thursday September 17 2015, @09:58AM
I get all the news I'm interested in listening to BBC and NPR on the way to work. Browsing the web for news is just gravy.
Why would I be concerned about ads on a Washington Post site? If they block it, I'll just go somewhere else.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Bill Evans on Thursday September 17 2015, @10:04AM
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Thursday September 17 2015, @01:49PM
I don't know either - but I've corrected the omission.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 17 2015, @02:02PM
"wrote Advertising Age editor Ken Wheaton, recently. “But theft is still theft, even if it's dressed up as some sort of digital Robin Hood act. You're not just interfering with pixels, you're interfering with business.”"
Yeah, and likewise, I'm interfering with "business" when I cast a vote that doesn't support their pick for president.
Fok 'em.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 21 2015, @07:44AM
Funny - I can commit an even bigger theft by not reading the site at all. This is a two-pronged attack: On one hand, they won't get the ad revenue and on the other they have harder time influencing my opinions with their content.
This sounds truly horrible thing to do. Why isn't it illegal?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @10:08AM
Funnily enough, Washington Post articles are still readable just fine with adblocking if you don't enable JavaScript.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @10:49AM
And yet - when I browse to https://www.washingtonpost.com/regional/ [washingtonpost.com] I see the entire page
Why would that be? Because I'm also running noscript and their silly 'please disable your ad blocker' is a bunch of client side javascript. If you don't run that javascript, you get the full page unharmed.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Thursday September 17 2015, @10:57AM
Unable to replicate, but I'm also in Germany. This would be hilarious if it were true.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by stormreaver on Thursday September 17 2015, @12:24PM
This would be hilarious if it were true.
It's true here in the States. NoScript works just fine to view Washington Post ad-free.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 17 2015, @02:05PM
I'll verify that I run uBlock and NoScript - and I can read the site just fine. No popups, no popunders, no banners - nothing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @07:32PM
It's true for most of "modern" web: turn off javascript, and 2/3 of ads will disappear, and — tada! — most sites will never ever notice adblockers too.
I still wonder why people browsing teh internets with javascript turned on. Turn it off and see how fast web can be (also, blacklist shitsites that refusing to work without javascript).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @11:23PM
You almost answered your own question: with JS disabled a very large fraction of popular websites seem to stop working.
If it is true that you don't get the nag notice with JS disabled, that is actually an improvement over many web-sites I have seen. Many websites assume if you are not loading scripts, you must be blocking ads or something.
It is not MY fault if their Ads rely on client-side scripting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @10:37PM
I too am running noscript and ABP among other things and was wondering why I have never seen one of these disable messages.
I clicked the link, saw the whole page, and had a hearty laugh. Thanks for that. Well worth the time.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Thursday September 17 2015, @11:48AM
Once again, let's stop calling these "ad" blockers. You win the war by reframing the concepts to control how people view the issue.
WaPo is saying "we will not give you content unless you submit to our tracking so we can harvest personal information about you" - if you frame the discussion this way, then ... wait, even then, no one will care .. so why am I bothering? I need more pizza rolls. Where did I put my cellphone? It has coupons for pizza rolls in an free app I downloaded. Where's my grocery store loyalty card? Maybe I can pick up a copy of the WaPo while I'm out.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 1) by SomeGuy on Thursday September 17 2015, @02:29PM
Quite right, modern ad blockers also serve as virus and tracking protection.
On a side note, I always refer to store/reward/loyalty cards as what they are: Tracking cards.
Doesn't seem to dissuade anyone though. And in a few more years, tracking cards will be obsolete as retailers roll in automated facial recognition.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @03:16PM
No need for that. As soon as they removed cash, they'll always know who you are from your credit card.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @05:08PM
I only know of one retailer that doesn't accept cash: the filling station at Costco.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 18 2015, @01:56AM
Really?
Because costco warehouse is so cash friendly its weird their gas is not cash friendly.
I'd been thinking about joining costco with a fake-id because, according to gasbuddy.com, they are the cheapest by about 5 cents/gallon where i live. But if I can't pay cash, no thanks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @06:14PM
And that will be when I roll in my mask.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by rob_on_earth on Thursday September 17 2015, @12:10PM
I can use raw sockets, telnet, links or lynx plus a myriad of other routes to download a web page. I do not have to download or view your ads as well!
These people need some schooling on what it means to put up a public web server!
Next they will be complaining that blind people are deliberately avoiding viewing there ads.
I need a "this make me so MAD!" tag
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @01:15PM
If you guys want to keep participating in an economy while simultaneously forcing yourself out of major aspects of its operation, perceiving yourself to be better than the average user and deserving of special treatment, then go for it.
Those of us who want to live on planet Earth and don't hate our fellow man really don't mind the occasional ad and we are smart enough to realize a few extra Kbps of bandwidth or bits of NSA surveillance don't mean jack sh!@ in the long run.
Pure communist-type bull@#$
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @01:18PM
Thank you Herr Hitler.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 17 2015, @02:11PM
WTF are you smoking? Where's this "occasional ad"?
I like to look at weather.com now and then. In fact, when I get to work, I load the page, and click the hourly thing. The page loads, and loads, and loads. In the time it takes weather.com to load, I could have downloaded a ten meg file. WTF? Someone is PAYING FOR THAT BANDWIDTH - and it's not the advertisers.
If the advertisers want to use my bandwidth, they need to PAY ME!
WIth ad blockers enabled, the same page loads on the same computer in ten or fifteen seconds. Turn the adblocker off, and it's back up to 1 1/2 minutes.
Occasional ad my ass.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 18 2015, @03:17AM
You're using the wrong site; try weather.gov. It's run by the NOAA, funded by your tax dollars, and doesn't have a single ad.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Pino P on Friday September 18 2015, @04:37AM
When weather.com(cast) got out of hand, I switched to weather.gov and never looked back.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 18 2015, @03:04PM
Well - maybe I need to be nominated for a dumbass award or something. I've often visited NOAA weather. I've always just typed NOAA into the address bar, and click one of the links. The page I land on has all the data you would expect, minus the weather map. Well - I took your advice, and put weather.gov in the address bar - thought for a couple seconds, and enabled scripts. Yeah. And, no ads. http://graphical.weather.gov/sectors/shvLoop.php#tabs [weather.gov] I need to explore some more. The only thing I can find right now that looks better on weather.com, is that my weather map is centered on the town I put into the address bar. Here, it centers on Shreveport, and I'm out near the edge of the map. I can probably change that . . .
Thanks, man!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Thursday September 17 2015, @01:28PM
My google-fu appears too weak to locate the original. Doesn't quoting in Google searches still match the exact string? Maybe not.
Subj: Don't care!
I'm going to pirate everything forever!
I finally learned the lesson business has been teaching for decades.
Nothing else matters but the bottom line. My profit. Screw everything else.
Only profit matters. I have an obligation to my stockholder to provide maximum value.
And what better way for me to profit than download every piece of media in the world for free?
When i get caught i'll say i'm sorry. And go right back to doing it again.
What do you mean this is wrong? Nearly every company on the planet behaves this way. It must be correct.
Profit above all else. Fuck people. Fuck right and wrong. Fuck morality. Profit!
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @05:58PM
Doesn't quoting in Google searches still match the exact string?
Over the years, Google has progressively worsened their default search (for people who know how to construct a useful search query) in pursuit of ease-of-use for the less capable. Finally, however, just when I was about to give up and find some other search engine that's not determined to ignore my carefully selected words, they unleashed another round of dumbing-down, but this time, they added a hidden option to get a more-or-less traditional search. It's called 'verbatim' (admittedly, more concise than 'search for what I damn well typed, you cretinous bozos!', as I'd have termed it), and may be found under 'Search tools', along with filtering by date and location.
(Score: 2) by number6 on Friday September 18 2015, @10:11AM
I used this Google search query:
intext:I-finally-learned-the-lesson-business-has-been-teaching-for-decades -- Google Search [google.com]
and the first result was this:
Judge: IP is Not a Person - SoylentNews
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/03/26/1853210 [soylentnews.org]
Mar 26, 2014 - I finally learned the lesson business has been teaching for decades.
Nothing else matters but the bottom line. My profit. Screw everything else.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by acp_sn on Thursday September 17 2015, @01:36PM
I don't give anyone permission to use my brain's processing cycles or internal storage for their commercial purposes.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @03:21PM
So I get you refuse to do paid work?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @03:09PM
Online advertising steals your bandwidth, your privacy, your attention and your control over your machine. Advertising is theft and should be stopped.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @03:42PM
.... please disable your ads.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @04:30PM
Anyone else using noscript/adblock/etc on forbes.com?
Starting just a couple of weeks ago, anytime I go forbes.com all I get is a spinny circle animated gif. If I view google's cache of the page it just says "false" despite the google searches page showing the typical snippet of the real page.
Is it just me?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by rleigh on Thursday September 17 2015, @05:54PM
I only started using ad blockers early this year. Up until then, while I despised adverts, I thought if they funded the sites whose content I was reading then perhaps they were worth the annoyance.
But the advertisers crossed a line: flash adverts, adverts covering the whole page when you moved the mouse, adverts with audio and video blaring out in the office, tracking you etc. Too far. I can tolerate one or two static adverts, but what's going on now is plainly detrimental to the primary reason I'm viewing these pages and is also potentially compromising my computer. After enabling ad blocking, things became vastly saner though some stuff still does get through. If the advertisers realised that there are limits to what is tolerable then maybe blocking their stupid exceses wouldn't be necessary.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @11:01PM
What have you been waiting for? Your description of web advertising has been accurate for 10 years at least.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday September 17 2015, @11:31PM
Japan is doing something right by being stuck in the Web 1.0 world. Japanese sites have a LOT of ads. They are all still images or animated gifs. No flash, no sound, no tracking. My adblocker doesn't even block those ads, and I don't mind in the least.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @11:55PM
Firefox / Pale Moon equipped with NoScript, or if you prefer to eschew images, elinks. Now THAT'S an ad blockah!
I consider NoScript a vital tool for everyday browsing. Sure, it nearly catastrophically breaks some sites, but those sites are usually so gussied up with frivolous Javascript widgets, web fonts, cross-site scripting nightmares, I probably wouldn't want to visit their smarmy, shameless website anyway. It does get a bit hectic when attempting e-commerce, but I usually keep another instance of unlocked Firefox / Safari off to the side for purchases that would otherwise break without playing the whac-a-mole game of enabling scripting on the right combination of external domains.
Some content providers have reacted to this, and are blocking the sending of content if Javascript is disabled. Most notable among these is Microsoft's support site. Yes, that's right: previously free Microsoft support KB articles (such as https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/292942 [microsoft.com] ) are now inaccessible unless you enable scripting to at least assets.onestore.ms as well as support.microsoft.com. This is disgusting, ignorant, and arguably should be grounds for government scrutiny or lawsuits due to accessibility of publicly distributed support information.
The ultimate answer to all this: host web assets from the webserver itself. Yes, just like the old days of GIF/JPG images with hyperlinks. Unlike the absolutely disgusting abomination of cross-site scripting requests from Ad Age's Ken Wheaton article, which demanded to run scripts from Brightcove, Optimizely, Outbrain, Maxmind, Quantserve, and Twitter. And yet the page loads just fine when I browse to it with NoScript enabled. It looks beautiful without any disgusting ads or permacookie-tracking ad spying.
(Score: 1) by simonInOz on Friday September 18 2015, @06:17AM
There's a bit of a problem.
At some point, we all have to make some money. We all have to eat.
So how do we do it?
We can charge for our time, charge for our product, or be rewarded by some other party.
So how do journalists make money?
They used to sell their product (newspaper), and charge for ads.
Now what?
If they cannot sell ads because everyone blocks them, and cannot charge for their product directly (subscription models are unpopular) - how do they make money?
They could charge the people they are reporting on - basically become paid mouthpieces. I don't like the sound of that, actually.
They could get a rich sponsor - I'm not too keen on that, either.
They could get paid by the government - that sounds pretty dodgy too.
They could do it all for love - yeah, right.
So .. what?
We need some sort of solution that works. Criticising the newfeeds for desperately trying to make money is all very well - information should be free and all that - but where is a working business model?
-- cats like plain crisps --
(Score: 1) by Kawumpa on Friday September 18 2015, @07:05AM
You are absolutely right and I guess most people wouldn't have a problem with ads. They don't seem to have a problem when they read a dead tree publication, right? There is a difference however. Here are a couple of things that online ads will do that offline ads don't:
* Play sounds
* Display changing pictures or even movies
* Track your reading habits
* Track your surfing habits, following you across different sites
* Do the preceeding two in a way that you don't see or notice
* Display content on top of what you were reading until you actively dismiss it
All this is so distracting and in part invasive that many people prefer to block all this to read the content they came for. Blockers didn't become a thing until all of the above happened. Few people had a problem with static images or banners or text ads back (basically what you have in offline media) in the 90s if I recall correctly. The race started with pop-up ads (remember those?) and had us blocking JS.
There should be a business model to support quality journalism and the like, but it's not the user's job to figure out what it is. As long as the publishers can't present me with one and instead choose to bombard with blinking and screaming manure I choose to block this whichever way possible or not use their service. Whining also rarely helps, especially not from media outlets that already offer a product that is so bad that there is hardly reason to go there in the first place. Is it maybe because they don't pay journalists enough anymore to do a decent job researching the material they are writing about? I am thinking of the Murdochs, Bertelsmanns, Holtzbrincks and Springers of the world here, who have huge profits but still decide to not really invest in quality and instead use paywalls and/or heavy advertising and other annoyances. Publishers cite the lack of interest in subscription models to justify advertising. I have two points: A subscription model that forces me into a month long (at least) contract and charges what they would charge for the same offline publication is as ridiculous as 1.99$ per article. Especially considering that many of today's newspapers are mostly compiled news agency content without any input from the publication whatsoever. So yes, give me a non-intrusive website with static adverts and I will happily switch off my blocker. Give me a working micropay model and I will pay for content. But most of all, give me content I actually want to read of a quality that justifies paying for it and don't make me the product.
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Saturday September 19 2015, @11:37AM
So how do journalists make money?
Get a real job, just like the rest of us.