IAB said the meeting is for "serious conversation."
http://www.businessinsider.com/adblock-plus-un-invited-from-iab-conference-2016-1
Popular ad blocker Adblock Plus claims that it was uninvited from the US Interactive Advertising Bureau's big conference.
The IAB represents the biggest names in the digital-advertising industry: Google, Facebook, Twitter, online publishers, and ad-tech companies.
Each year it holds its annual leadership meeting in Palm Desert, California. It's where the biggest names in the online-advertising industry network and thrash out their ideas on the issues and trends of the day.
This year they've got Oracle executive chairman Larry Ellison, Yahoo's global revenue chief Lisa Utzschneider, and Google ads boss Sridhar Ramaswamy speaking.
Adblock Plus won't be attending, though.
Last week, Adblock Plus received an email saying that the company's registration fee was being returned and its registration had been canceled.
When Adblock Plus said that "there must be some confusion" because it didn't ask for a cancellation or a refund, the IAB simply replied: "I'm sorry if there's any confusion. Just to be clear, there will be no ticket available for you and we've refunded your registration fee."
-- submitted from IRC
Related Stories
Former Mozilla CEO Launches Brave, a New Adblock Browser
Brave Software, a new startup by Brendan Eich (creator of the JavaScript programming language and former CEO of Mozilla), unveiled the new Brave browser today for Windows, Mac OS X, Android, and iOS. The Brave browser is currently in beta, based on Chromium, and aims to block most advertisements, while still potentially making money for publishers.
Brave will block all non-native ads, trackers, analytics scripts and impression-tracking pixels. However, the browser will eventually insert advertisements of its own, but which Brendan Eich claims to be unintrusive, with no persistent user id or highly re-identifiable cookie. The aim of Brave isn't to create a list of approved advertisers, or to aggressively pursue ad dollars: "We hope our users will form a valuable enough audience that our browser-side anonymous targeting will get ads from the buy side organically. We don't want to play games."
Beyond privacy protection, Eich promises Brave's browser will come with a speed boost: It loads pages two to four times faster than other smartphone browsers and 1.4 times faster than other browsers for personal computers.
[Continues...]
(Score: 5, Touché) by DarkMorph on Tuesday January 19 2016, @01:39PM
(Score: 5, Funny) by mtrycz on Tuesday January 19 2016, @02:14PM
In capitalist America...
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 5, Funny) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 19 2016, @03:08PM
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Tuesday January 19 2016, @04:03PM
Strange that this is modded funny. I would have gone more "Informative".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 19 2016, @04:51PM
Actually, it's score is +1 Insightful, +1 Informative, +2 Funny. Like any decently good joke, it has its basis in truth.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 3, Interesting) by danomac on Tuesday January 19 2016, @04:35PM
With the new smart TVs with microphones and cameras built-in, I really wouldn't be surprised at this point...
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Tuesday January 19 2016, @07:40PM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by edIII on Tuesday January 19 2016, @08:28PM
Surprise?
How so? Manufacturers have been quietly attempting to do so from the beginning. Microsoft's Kinect has been looked at to judge viewership of advertising, determine how many people in the room for licensing requirements, etc.
The days when a corporation stopped to think for a second about using de facto surveillance data on its customers has long since passed. Cameras and audio pickups in devices are merely tools to obtain customer data points to "create enhanced services and offerings only available through analytics of customer behaviors". Windows 10 moved to a full SAAS offering, hence their justifications for blanket surveillance of your keystrokes and every single thing you do on your device.
In other words, it's not unethical violations of consumer privacy, it's a feature!
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday January 19 2016, @06:50PM
Ok, just nobody let Tork know what's going on in this thread. He might need to update his sig!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @01:41PM
is now screw adblockers.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ikanreed on Tuesday January 19 2016, @02:24PM
I'm down for an adblocking arms race. Everyone else down too? Should be fun.
Fuck Madison Avenue.
(Score: 5, Informative) by DECbot on Tuesday January 19 2016, @03:43PM
Yeah, Fuck Beta!
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 4, Interesting) by edIII on Tuesday January 19 2016, @08:45PM
You mean invite people to the block party we've been throwing for a few years?
Hell yes :)
I know how we go nuclear on them. Design an AI browser within a browser. Fully sandboxed and designed to simulate human browsing activity with pre-defined patterns designed for their analytics. You sit behind after all the crap has been scraped out to view the pages, the AI acts as if it is you, clicking links and viewing the websites. Let's use fingerprinting to our advantage and distribute the patterns making it seem as if your AI is everywhere on everything.
Let Madison Avenue spend millions advertising on, and attempt to sell crap to, our AI web browsing butlers. Better him than me right? ;)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday January 20 2016, @05:42AM
I like your thinking :) "Bayesian poisoning," a.k.a., drowning the dataminers in liquid shit. It's delightfully ironic and poetic. These days they find you by the hole you leave if you attempt not to be seen, but let's see them sort through THAT shit. Bandwidth is cheap, ad copy and analytics is (by comparison) expensive.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Thursday January 21 2016, @02:25AM
You mean like Python Selenium? [readthedocs.org]
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Tuesday January 19 2016, @01:50PM
Malware served up by adservers [cnn.com] is an old problem yet a growing one. If the advertisers cleaned house and got rid of javascript, flash and other carriers of malware, then there would be little incentive for people to use adblockers. For my part, NoScript is enough, and would meet most other peoples' needs as well, but it is the ad blockers that are getting the attention in the media and thus people use them.
Another incentive for blocking ads is the industry's refusal to obey Do Not Track. I can only blame the industry for the mess they are in.
Kicking Adblock Plus out of the IAB conference only stirs the pot./p>
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @02:39PM
On top of that the ad networks are *sloooow*.
What first got me into adblocking was speeding up my browsing. Also the first rumblings of capped internet from time warner. If it does not load it means other things can, and does not cost me from my cap.
My test was about 20 pages. 'Open all tabs' with a clear cache. ~3-4 mins with no ad blocking. ~40 seconds with ad blocking. Got it down to ~20 seconds with local DNS caching, a squid server, and a very large local cache. With 2 gig local and 64 gig squid I still get a hit rate of ~30% on the squid cache. I probably could get it much higher if I put a MITM cert in the mix. The majority of it was blocking ads though. What ended up speeding up my browsing was getting a decent RSS reader :)
These days opening up things like no-script is quite interesting. When I first started it would be maybe 3-5 external sites. Some of them now have 30+ external links. Trying to find that one site that actually lets the page load can be 'interesting'. Sometimes they nest them. But that does not stop me...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 20 2016, @12:09PM
You've got issues if you're spending so many hours to shave off seconds. When you've purchased that whole separate computer to to simply run as your cache machine, you will know you've really gone off the bend.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 19 2016, @03:15PM
... Except for not having 1/3 of my screen plastered with ads, all trying to take my attention away from the information I actually want. That's really quite nice. Oh, and having my pages load much faster, because they don't have to send detailed information on what I'm looking at to Google and Facebook and the NSA and $DEITY knows who else.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @05:27PM
If the NSA gave a shit about what you were viewing, they would get it directly from the ISP.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday January 19 2016, @06:54PM
True, the ISP (and thus the NSA) can see what origin I'm viewing, as the hostname is sent as part of the TLS client hello message. But how would the NSA be able to sort out what I'm viewing on a particular HTTPS site?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @09:48PM
You are making a bad assumption. The assumption is that only one data point applies.
For example
You are looking at website X. Website X is mostly about cars. Suddenly you change to website Y. Website Y is mostly about DIY sort of fixes. You then change to website Z is mostly about car parts. I can infer that you are probably looking to fix a car. Maybe not true but it is not a inference that is terrible. I can infer that just by the website names.
You are thinking 1 dimensional. My example is 2d. You can even create more crazy connections if you feed in more data. My credit car shows a purchase at an auto parts place. A day or so later I call a dealership. You can infer from that I may have given up and want to buy a new car or need more help than I can manage. My example is still '2d'. You can get really crazy in the relationships between them all. Perhaps you called a buddy. Then he buys a car part thru his job at the dealership. You can infer that he recommended you come in as it needs more work than what you can pull off in your garage.
You can construct a narrative that is different than what I came up with. My narrative would not hold up in a court of law. But you can use it to put circles around people who are 'more' interesting than others. Which means more digging into your life for you. And that is just my sloppy version. The dudes who do this for a living are actually kinda good at it...
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday January 19 2016, @06:57PM
If the NSA gave a shit about what you were viewing, they would get it directly from the ISP.
Then why all the FISA requests? [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 19 2016, @08:13PM
They don't care now. They could conceivably care some time in the future, so if they're going for the same idea as Total Information Awareness [wikipedia.org] (and I have every reason to believe they are), then they'll be storing it so in case they need to look for dirt at some point in the future they can do so.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Tuesday January 19 2016, @04:32PM
If the advertisers cleaned house and got rid of javascript, flash and other carriers of malware, then there would be little incentive for people to use adblockers
That would go a long way, but for me there would still be the problem that I don't want to see advertising.
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Tuesday January 19 2016, @06:31PM
No, NoScipt would *not* meet most peoples' needs, not by a long shot. In fact, it's completely unusable for most people.
I use NoScript myself, but I'm under no illusion that it's usably by most people. I would never put it on my wife's computer. It's just too much of a PITA. I'm constantly having to whitelist various domains, experimentally, just to get webpages to work, because almost all of them use JavaScript from various different domains. Websites just don't work with NoScript's normal settings; I had to whitelist all same-domain sites, and over time whitelist many other domains (esp. "cdn" domains) to get it fairly usable. Almost every time I go to a new site, I'll have a new domain I need to whitelist.
Honestly, I wish now that I could use it in a blacklist mode, with everything enabled except certain domains (like "googleadservices" and other obvious stuff like that).
I also use uBlock Origin on top of that, for reference.
As for ABP, that's the ad-industry-friendly ad-blocker, which lets ad companies pay to be whitelisted (supposedly if they're "non-obtrusive"). If the ad industry is going to shut them out, that proves the ad industry just wants to screw us all over with malware infections and annoying ads, so fuck 'em. My recommendation: don't use ABP, use uBlock Origin. It's faster and uses less RAM, and doesn't whitelist *any* ads. The ad purveyors have proven they cannot be trusted one iota.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday January 19 2016, @06:58PM
Honestly, I wish now that I could use [the NoScript browser extension] in a blacklist mode, with everything enabled except certain domains (like "googleadservices" and other obvious stuff like that).
There used to be a persistent Anonymous Coward over on the green site who offered an app to build a blacklist that works not only in your web browser but also in other apps running on your PC. But he hasn't shown up for a couple weeks.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday January 19 2016, @08:19PM
Are you talking about the guy named APK who has obvious mental problems and pushes his silly hosts file? And why would I care about other apps? The web browser is the only thing that's going to try to use ad services.
You're right though, I haven't seen him ranting in response to Coren22 so much lately. He's probably been involuntarily committed.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DECbot on Tuesday January 19 2016, @09:15PM
Perhaps his hosts file exceeded the 4GB limit of FAT32.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday January 20 2016, @12:28AM
I've been wondering if he has a bot or something that looks for Coren22's posts and then just spams variations on his spiel from a botnet.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday January 20 2016, @05:25PM
Are you talking about the guy named APK
Yes. He's moved on to a different site that's somewhat more sympathetic to his point of view. He posted on that site that he's said "adios" to Slashdot effective January 1.
The web browser is the only thing that's going to try to use ad services.
Since Windows 10, the Solitaire app included with the system has ads and requires a subscription to suppress them. And for a long time, the Opera web browser itself had ads.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday January 20 2016, @09:53PM
He posted on that site that he's said "adios" to Slashdot effective January 1.
Good riddance.
Since Windows 10, the Solitaire app included with the system has ads and requires a subscription to suppress them. And for a long time, the Opera web browser itself had ads.
I see. Simple solution: don't use Windows (esp. not Windows 10).
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday January 21 2016, @05:40PM
For the record, are you recommending a switch from Windows to OS X or to GNU/Linux? To Apple or to System76?
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday January 21 2016, @08:04PM
Well, as an operating system user (esp. in a corporate environment), you should ask yourself:
Is this vendor treating me, the customer, with respect and as a valued customer?
Does this vendor force me to follow their upgrade schedule, or do I have more freedom to upgrade to newer versions when it's convenient for me?
If I have a problem with this vendor, or they come under new management and decide to start screwing us, can I easily migrate our systems to a competing vendor?
If I'm a large enough organization with my own IT department, how hard is it for me to make a highly customized version of the vendor's OS?
If I'm a government or other entity where data security is of paramount importance, how hard is it to verify what code is running in it? How much is a black box?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hemocyanin on Tuesday January 19 2016, @08:28PM
Even for people who are tech savvy. I used to be scrupulous about using NoScript, doing the same thing you did to figure out which nested combination of temp. whitelisting will allow a page to load, but after a couple years I just gave up on it because it is so amazingly annoying and time consuming. Honestly, it almost seems like the only safe way to currently operate a web browser is in virtual machines, and that still doesn't deal with tracking. I do use self-destructing cookies, uBlock, different switchable profiles, but man, what a pain. Maybe it's time to switch to Lynx, although I'll point out that Soylentnews isn't all that Lynx friendly -- there's a whole screen of header crap to scroll through before getting to the meat of an article.
Anyway, the point is, the graphic-design crowd won the web (or the advertisers who used it as candy to sneak in their crap won) and without javascript, 90% of the web is gone.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Tuesday January 19 2016, @01:52PM
I wonder if when he plays a pungi, ropes start to levitate?
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @04:10PM
Wow, you are a dick, aren't you?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @02:18PM
Adblock plus got bought out, didn't they? And they started pissing off its users with "acceptable ads". Now they are being dumped by both the users and the advertisers.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @03:10PM
Not only that. Who is going to use AdBlock when UBlock Origin [mozilla.org] is as capable, doesn't include paid acceptable ads and is way much faster and with a minimal ram footprint?
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Tuesday January 19 2016, @03:47PM
Also in chrome store - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm [google.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by Nerdfest on Tuesday January 19 2016, @04:06PM
Their javascript blocker, uMatrix, is really nice as well. A nice combination of NoScript and RequestPolicy that also supports text file based configuration.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by melikamp on Tuesday January 19 2016, @07:27PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @08:59PM
I still use AdBlock as their UI is far better than UBlock. I don't want to have to enable all ads then reload the page to see a raw listing of what was blocked. Their UI really sucks.
(Score: 2) by Techwolf on Wednesday January 20 2016, @03:34AM
Was you using ublock or ublock-origian? They are very different.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by KiloByte on Tuesday January 19 2016, @03:49PM
"Acceptable ads" has the same meaning as "honest politician" or "people's democracy".
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday January 19 2016, @04:38PM
"honest politician"
I think you're mis-characterizing things a bit, as Simon Cameron [wikipedia.org] pointed out almost 160 years ago.
Just sayin'.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 20 2016, @12:59AM
Now, now. Politicians can be honest when paid enough money to do so.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Wednesday January 20 2016, @02:03AM
I knew I should posted the quote, not just the link to the quote. It's kind of a shame when one can't apply any subtlety. Then again, what can you expect from an AC? Sigh.
I think you're mis-characterizing things a bit, as Simon Cameron [wikipedia.org] pointed out almost 160 years ago:
An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Tuesday January 19 2016, @04:50PM
ABP isn't a great solution to ads, and never will be. Like antivirus scanners, they are blacklist based, reactive, and by their very nature will ALWAYS be playing catch-up. Each time the ads change to get around ABP it has to be updated before it works again.
A better solution is a well-maintained host file. There's no need to block ads in the browser if you simply blackhole all traffic to the ad servers.
This is still not a perfect solution though. They CAN change servers, of course, that seems to happen less often than making changes on the server to get around adblock. Still it has the same fundamental problem - it's reactive, it requires maintaining, it will never be fully reliable.
The BEST solution is simply to disable ecmascript entirely in your browser. Without ecmascript, the ads that get through are unobtrusive and unthreatening, inert. If they still bother you add a host file, get rid of most of them entirely, and don't worry about one slipping through now and then because without ecmascript they cant do any harm.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @06:05PM
Amen -
I have about 17,000 blocked sites since it is firewall/dns level... ALL machines in the household are "protected", I do not have to worry my kids changing something. Yes, it is not prefect, is simple. Personally I use IPCop/Intel and IPFire/ARM not a Raspbian/ARM.
https://github.com/jacobsalmela/pi-hole [github.com]
I love is being able to complain, that I am not using ADBLOCKER and you are blocking me!
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday January 19 2016, @07:02PM
Without ecmascript, the ads that get through are unobtrusive and unthreatening, inert.
And a lot of pages end up loading completely blank. Grishnakh tried using an ECMAScript whitelisting tool [soylentnews.org] but had to give it up when whitelist maintenance turned out to be impractical.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Tuesday January 19 2016, @08:45PM
The two are mutually exclusive options.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday January 20 2016, @05:39PM
You appear to be an anti-script hardliner: documents ought to be static and applications ought to be native. Scriptless web applications have to reload the whole page when the user does the smallest activity, such as expanding or collapsing a subtree of a threaded discussion or moderating a comment. Is the increased CPU time and data cost of full-page reloads worth the security improvement from not running script? Or would you prefer that SoylentNews be available through a native application that is installed on your machine and has full local privileges to your user account?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday January 20 2016, @08:20PM
This is at best only half true - certainly there is no need to reload for expanding or collapsing a subtree though.
Virtually anything you might legitimately want to do *can* be achieved without scripts. The problem is that as long as 'designers' can just assume their scripts will be run, they are not going to take even 2 seconds to learn a better way of doing what they want.
In an ideal world we could just do the quickest and easiest thing - enable scripts - and call it good. In an ideal world we could also post all our passwords publicly, because no one would use them unless they had a good reason.
That's the sort of thinking that got us here, and experience, years of seeing how this works out, is what has convinced me we were wrong. We don't live in that ideal world. We live in a world with lots of nasty people and a need for security. And unfortunately that need is just as incompatible with an ecmascript-based web subsitute as posting all your passwords publicly would be.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday January 21 2016, @05:26PM
certainly there is no need to reload for expanding or collapsing a subtree though.
How is click to expand or click to collapse done without scripts? Is it by structuring the page as potentially hundreds of iframes, one for each comment? Back in the day, a web browser would crash on a test case that contained hundreds of iframes.
Virtually anything you might legitimately want to do *can* be achieved without scripts.
How would a web-based drawing app work without scripts? Server-side image map with a complete reload of the image every time the user clicks, and no ability to draw a free-hand curve other than as a polyline (with a complete reload for each vertex)?
How would an HTML5 game such as Cookie Clicker or Pirates Love Daisies be made without scripts?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday January 21 2016, @06:24PM
There are a couple of different ways that can be answered, but both start with "no" in regards to your iframes.
The immediate, practical answer is that you may indeed need to use scripts to get your expand/collapse to work the way you want them to with todays browsers. But you STILL have a choice of doing so in the proper way (so that it degrades gracefully and everything is still functional without scripts, even if it is less pretty.) That's the absolute *minimum* that should be viewed as at all acceptable here.
The longer term or broader view answer is that this is something that should be and could be accomplished much more simply by creating an HTML tag that functions as a hint to the browser that the list is intended to be collapsible, and then letting the browsers take it from there. This is the ideal solution, and the only one that's truly in harmony with the concept of the WWW. The web server should be serving content, with semantic tagging, not layout instructions let alone code intended to be executed. The layout should be done at the browser, which is the only place that has knowledge of the 'display system' (which is in quotes because there may well be no 'display' involved - in the case of a screenreader for instance) necessary to do the job correctly anyway.
"How would a web-based drawing app work without scripts?"
Well obviously it wouldnt. But why would you want such a thing? That's such an insanely bass-ackwards way to do things to begin with. Use the proper tools for the job. The web is about linked documents. If you need a drawing app then get a drawing app. The web doesnt need to be involved in that beyond simply allowing the file to be linked and downloaded.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday January 21 2016, @06:56PM
How would a web-based drawing app work without scripts?
Well obviously it wouldnt. But why would you want such a thing? That's such an insanely bass-ackwards way to do things to begin with. Use the proper tools for the job. The web is about linked documents. If you need a drawing app then get a drawing app.
For which platform would this drawing app be produced? It takes less programmer labor to produce one web-based drawing app than to produce six native drawing apps, one for Windows desktop, one for OS X, one for GNU/Linux, one for Windows UWP (that is, Windows Phone), one for iOS, and one for Android. In addition, installation of a native app, unlike use of a web app, requires seeking and waiting for the authorization of the administrator of the computer on which the app is to be run.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday January 21 2016, @07:47PM
For any platform on which sufficient demand exists.
"It takes less programmer labor to produce one web-based drawing app than to produce six native drawing apps, one for Windows desktop, one for OS X, one for GNU/Linux, one for Windows UWP (that is, Windows Phone), one for iOS, and one for Android."
Oh absolutely correct. No disagreement on that statement, so far as it goes.
But against that one beneficial aspect you have a tremendous pile of counterarguments. It also takes less programmer labor to produce one exploit to attack all of those targets, of course, and leaving your system open for one necessarily implies leaving it open for the other. Right there you should be at least starting to question whether it is worth it. On top of that, your web (substitute) drawing app is going to perform very poorly compared to the native app on every platform. It's unlikely to be as featureful, and if it is it will be a much heavier user of system resources to accomplish that. It will also violate the UI of each and every platform, contributing to the tremendous confusion of the typical end user.
Frankly the drive to minimize programmer time is wrongheaded as well. It's driven by a disfunctional market dynamic built on planned/forced obsolescence and results in the wheel not only being reinvented repeatedly, but often each successive iteration is done more quickly and more sloppily than the one before. If anything constitutes a waste of programmer time then this is it. Rather than having new and (not) improved versions produced on a schedule driven by marketing needs (to extract the maximum rent from customers) we could have solid software developed and maintained for as long as it is useful. Yes, it takes more programming hours up front, but it's very much worth that investment if you plan to continue using it indefinitely rather than planning to declare it obsolete and force your customers to a new version before it gets anywhere near stable anyhow...
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday January 22 2016, @07:14PM
It takes less programmer labor to produce one web-based drawing app than to produce six native drawing apps
No disagreement
From this we can reason further:
your web (substitute) drawing app is going to perform very poorly compared to the native app on every platform.
What makes the difference in performance between a native and web-based app necessarily count as "very poorly"? If not, then how are the counterarguments worth spending money on making six apps instead of one? Is each individual developer expected to buy a Mac with enough RAM for a VM, a copy of Windows for use in the VM, an iPhone or iPad, an Android phone or tablet, and a Windows phone, before even getting started? That's what it takes to test an app on all six platforms. If so, how should a first-time developer find the money and the time to learn all platforms? Or if not, what excuse should a prudent developer give as to why a particular platform is unsupported? And without a web-usable version, how should a developer convince to buy a copy of the native app?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday January 22 2016, @08:01PM
The longer term goal, the ideal state, would be one where standard languages like ANSI C can be used as intended. If the initial versions of the program can be done like that then it can be done on virtually any hardware, so you keep the bar to entry relatively low, but at the same time it should compile and run on many target platforms.
The final polish on a polished product would probably always be best done with native code, requiring forks for each platform, but that seems to be what is done today anyway - every time I look at the source to these ecmascript monstrosities I seem to see a LOT of code devoted to detecting the platform and forks containing different code for each. So it looks like they are still very much having to fork parts of the code for the different platforms, and presumably also testing on each, which means the hardware requirements just as you described, no?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday January 25 2016, @02:35AM
The longer term goal, the ideal state, would be one where standard languages like ANSI C can be used as intended.
That depends on whether it is "intended" for the ISO C standard library to encompass networking and graphical user interfaces, things which it does not encompass as of 2016. ECMAScript proper lacks both as well, but in practice, it is used with the HTML DOM, which provides both.
every time I look at the source to these ecmascript monstrosities I seem to see a LOT of code devoted to detecting the platform and forks containing different code for each. So it looks like they are still very much having to fork parts of the code for the different platforms, and presumably also testing on each, which means the hardware requirements just as you described, no?
Hardware yes, certificates no. The smoothest manner of distributing native applications requires purchasing and annually renewing four certificates through commercial certificate authorities: an Authenticode certificate to get past SmartScreen, a Mac developer program subscription to get past Gatekeeper and optionally get on the Mac App Store, an iOS developer program subscription to get on the App Store, and a Windows Store developer program subscription to get on Windows Store. (I exclude the Google Play Store and Amazon Appstore subscriptions for publishing Android apps because they are without charge after the first year.) That's not counting the even more expensive developer licenses if you want to get a native application onto game consoles. A web application, on the other hand, requires a domain and web hosting, which can end up cheaper for low-volume apps. TLS certificates are available without charge nowadays through StartSSL, WoSign, or Let's Encrypt.
In any case, like a web application available without charge, a native application available without charge will likely contain ads unless it is developed by a charity or an advocate of free software.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday January 27 2016, @04:35AM
Networking, I had to look it up because I remember doing plenty of networking in vanilla C way back in the 90s, but it seems you are *technically* correct. Not ANSI specified, POSIX specified, per wikipedia, but still standard enough. GUI stuff is always contentious because different platforms think in sometimes very different terms (and SHOULD do so, in my view, as none of them currently produce anything vaguely resembling a stable GUI with 'good' or better usability properties.) But the vast majority of it can easily be sidestepped if people focus on function instead of form. Each platform has it's own GUI paradigm so that thin crust does need to be done independently on each platform. There's really no way around that, either, some of the things done today do allow you to save time but they do NOT allow you to produce even a second rate GUI so they are pretty pointless.
"Hardware yes, certificates no. The smoothest manner of distributing native applications requires purchasing and annually renewing four certificates through commercial certificate authorities: an Authenticode certificate to get past SmartScreen, a Mac developer program subscription to get past Gatekeeper and optionally get on the Mac App Store, an iOS developer program subscription to get on the App Store, and a Windows Store developer program subscription to get on Windows Store. (I exclude the Google Play Store and Amazon Appstore subscriptions for publishing Android apps because they are without charge after the first year.) That's not counting the even more expensive developer licenses if you want to get a native application onto game consoles."
And this is all absolute garbage and just goes to show how astonishingly far the industry has been drug off course in only a few short years. What a ridiculous pile of garbage fashioned carefully into a wall to ensure that unearned rents flow to these big corporations. What a sad, pathetic population that allows such a thing to be perpetrated on them, that even ques up for the privilege of paying top dollar for new releases of this garbage.
Here's how you distribute your app. Put the source code on an FTP server and tell people where the link is.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday January 27 2016, @02:08PM
the ISO C standard library [currently lacks] networking and graphical user interfaces
you are *technically* correct. Not ANSI specified, POSIX specified, per wikipedia, but still standard enough.
POSIX networking is "standard enough" for Windows to implement a subtly incompatible version of BSD sockets.
Each platform has it's own GUI paradigm so that thin crust does need to be done independently on each platform. There's really no way around that, either
Other than to write the program in ECMAScript and use the HTML DOM for GUI.
What a ridiculous pile of garbage fashioned carefully into a wall to ensure that unearned rents flow to these big corporations.
ECMAScript with the HTML DOM is a means of rent avoidance.
Here's how you distribute your app. Put the source code on an FTP server and tell people where the link is.
I see several practical problems with that.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday January 27 2016, @05:21PM
That's not really a way around it though. It's more a way of climbing over the top of the barbed-wire while ignoring the damage you're doing to yourself in the process. Loss of blood causes problems whether we acknowledge them or not.
Ecmascript and the rest (AJAX) may allow you to generate a very rough and shoddy UI that can be distributed across platforms very quickly, but it does not give you the ability to create a properly behaved UI on any platform, regardless how much work you put into it. Programmer-hours spent on such projects can only be seen, from a long term view, as wasted at best. It's an inherently inferior method in nearly every way.
The fact that this method gets picked over all others time and again points to the fundamental problem with the industry, and perhaps more broadly with business in the USA and perhaps the west more generally, in this time period. It's an obsession with the one thing metric by which AJAX looks good - low initial investment.
Look, there's a time and a place for low initial investment. I get that. But ultimately most things are worth doing right, once, and saving, instead of constantly re-implementing in a shoddy fashion. Engineering is NOT Fashion, yet the software industry is ruled by fashion sensibilities, and instead of producing the software equivalent of a stable, safe bridge we develop a new bridge every season, in order to generate constant monthly income, not for any technical reason. We build the bridge the cheapest, quickest way possible, because we're just going to tear it down and build a new one next season anyhow. It's a horrible waste of resources from a societal POV, but from a business POV it wont change until customers get smart enough to reject it.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @07:57PM
How is 'a well maintained hosts file' not reactive? Inquiring minds would like to know...
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday January 19 2016, @04:55PM
Adblock plus got bought out, didn't they? And they started pissing off its users with "acceptable ads". Now they are being dumped by both the users and the advertisers.
I despise advertising and block it extensively. I also time-shift any television I watch just so I can skip the ads.
At the same time, I think it's a little disingenuous to blast these guys about the whole "acceptable ads" thing in ABP since you can disable "acceptable ads" with a single check box on the filter preferences options page.
No. Wait. I'm wrong. Three (I counted) mouse clicks is much too onerous a burden to place on users who wish to disable those "acceptable ads" (ABP calls it "some unobtrusive advertising"). Everyone should uninstall ABP and post about just how evil ABP is on every website they can reach [xkcd.com].
N.B.: I do use ABP, but am unaffiliated with that organization, nor do I have a financial interest in *any* advertising or ad blocking businesses.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday January 19 2016, @06:37PM
I have no idea why anyone technically-capable uses ABP any more. uBlock Origin is much faster, uses much less RAM, and doesn't need to have the "acceptable ads" turned off. The first two items alone should be more than enough reason to switch.
Why use an ad-blocker that hogs your CPU and RAM when there's a better alternative?
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday January 19 2016, @06:52PM
Speaking for myself, I'd say inertia.
I see zero ads with ABP. Which is what I want. I haven't had any noticeable speed/RAM issues with ABP, so as the old saw goes, if it ain't broke, why fix it?
Given the above, I have little incentive to performance/resource utilization test other products.
Is ABP the best product out there? According to you and some others here, no. It wouldn't surprise me if it wasn't even in the top five. Fair enough.
If and when ABP annoys me enough to do something about it, perhaps I'll check out uBlock Origin. Thanks for the recommendation!
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday January 19 2016, @07:51PM
Yep, definitely a classic case of inertia here. I was just making a post on another forum about inertia like this. Well, anyway, keep uBO in mind; for me it was a good move since I have a lot of tabs open and my primary laptop is older and limited to 4GB.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @05:30PM
If I ran ABP, I would instantly delist as an acceptable ad Google (biggest sponsor), and all the other (major?) sponsors of the conference.
Now, I do get the idea of "acceptable ads" as a peace treaty/ceasefire. I'm not sure I'd really want to be in an arms race with Google's engineers. I also don't want to see ads. I don't know what a good solution really is.
(Score: 3, Funny) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday January 19 2016, @02:47PM
Adblock Plus Un-Invited From IAB Conference
It could've been worse. They could've been double-plus un-invited.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Tuesday January 19 2016, @03:19PM
Sad that the advertising vendors decided to refuse to even let adblock let them know what kinds of adds their actual users might be willing to put up with. They might even have reached a consensus.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @03:28PM
Henry Tree :-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @03:34PM
Consensus and compromise is for the weak!
No platform for haters!
Zero tolerance is the American way!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @03:26PM
Yahoo's global revenue chief Lisa Utzschneider
What the heck does she do? It's clear what she's *supposed* to do, but what does she actually do day to day? Talk about a meaningless title...
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday January 19 2016, @03:40PM
I suppose she sits around, dreaming up new ways to rob you of money, while providing the cheapest service possible, while at the same time, transferring money between various international offices and addresses, so as to avoid paying taxes anywhere. Revenue chief. Otherwise known as a waste of time and space.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Wednesday January 20 2016, @05:12AM
Yahoo does not provide any services and it does not have any revenue. That's the joke.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @07:27PM
Be the sacrificial lamb when revenue doesn't go up?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ticho on Tuesday January 19 2016, @03:38PM
Adblock Plus should just hold their own conference. With blackjack and hookers.
(Score: 2) by TheReaperD on Tuesday January 19 2016, @03:59PM
You forgot blow. (Cocaine for those living under a rock.)
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @04:43PM
This is probably a woosh on my part... but here's the relevant Know Your Meme page [knowyourmeme.com].
(Score: 2) by xpda on Tuesday January 19 2016, @04:29PM
This is really funny. I'd like all the ad execs are pretending that ad blocking does not exist. That will make it go away.
[Long rant on intrusive internet ads included by reference.]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bob_super on Tuesday January 19 2016, @05:46PM
Actually, they didn't publicly talk about Ad Blocking until Apple ruined it for the rest of us by finally allowing it on their toys.
A few geeks (yeah, millions of us) wasn't a big deal. But if the cash cow of Apple users slips away, helped by non-tech journalists actually learning it exists for the first time, it's time to panic!
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday January 19 2016, @06:25PM
In considering your comment, I find I'm OK with everyone else watching ads as long as us geeks don't have to. Yes, there are the meta concerns about advertisers manipulating the public, but there is the benefit of us geeks getting something we're not paying for.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by HiThere on Tuesday January 19 2016, @09:05PM
Ads, OK. I'm not, however, OK with my wife getting malware just because she isn't a geek. Or even at all technically competent.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 20 2016, @04:04AM
Well, once again that's a geek vs. Norms issue (no offense) that i'm also OK with. Once upon a time i tried up and down to convince others to switch to linux or freebsd and people always looked at me like i had three heads. Now i content myself with being happy to be free and in total control of my computer, and that i never get malware; if other people choose to still run windows and present themselves as a more attractive target for malware writers, well, that works to the benefit of geeks too. We get to work happily along because others don't want to think about geek stuff. And why shouldn't we enjoy a few advantages? god knows we certainly suffer enough disadvantages!
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Zz9zZ on Tuesday January 19 2016, @09:36PM
Horrible elitism which we techies are so well known for :(
I want the general public to find out about this stuff ASAP, otherwise we will continue down the dark road as most people get mired down in the quest for UPs (likes, votes, kittens, smileys). The big problem with keeping the workarounds a secret is that the advertisers have ungodly amounts of money to throw at the problem, and will simply churn out more and more DRM heavy channels. Sure there will always be workarounds, but the potential for having the Law come down on you will increase, and within a few decades the idea of encryption and privacy will be synonymous with theft and crime. So bring on the banhammer! Let the sheep see their fate coming!
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 1) by tftp on Wednesday January 20 2016, @01:55AM
I find that a lot of people are ready and willing to sell safety of their computers and security of their data for the reward of seeing an animated score of a football game. They actively reject offers to protect them from ads. I guess you cannot really ask from them more than they are able to deliver. This is not a new problem. Step back a thousand years. How many people in the street would be able to give up pleasures of life and become honest, dedicated monks? Our browsers, clean, fast and free from scripts, are not too different from plain desks and rooms of monks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 20 2016, @12:23PM
Honest, dedicated monks? Are you serious? I think you'd find your pool of people who have a desire, even in principle, to become dedicated monks to be quite small in the first place, so I would think the vast majority of people have no desire to become monks of any persuasion.
I also find it quite amusing that you believe not running ad blocking software to be a fundamental moral failure. Personally, I believe there are relatively so few nuns primarily because of women's infatuation with the toilet seat position.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jdavidb on Tuesday January 19 2016, @04:30PM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 4, Funny) by snufu on Tuesday January 19 2016, @11:01PM
from the conference subtitle: "How we will join forces to defeat Adblock Plus." Including a graphic of someone twisting their mustache.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 20 2016, @04:03AM
You joke, but that is essentially the content of an article on AdAge titled Ad Blocking: The Unnecessary Internet Apocalypse [adage.com], written by a certain Randall Rothenberg, who is the CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, and most likely the guy who booted AdBlock Plus out of the conference (which is no surprise that AdBlock got "crickets" when they called Rothenberg).
From Rothenberg's diatribe:
The rest of the article is rife with the word "disruption" (someone read a little too much Clayton Christensen for their lifespan), and self-delusion. Rothenberg fails to even acknowledge the proliferation of malware via ad networks which are barely being curated for code quality, let alone ad content quality. And Rothenberg's "answer" to this is "native advertising" (which John Oliver had plenty to say about in this Last Week Tonight segment [youtube.com]), and that "extortion payments to blockers will become routine" (subtle hint to IAB subscribers to ramp up the nag screens, at least until most people have been moved by their college kid to Pale Moon with NoScript and RefControl).
(Score: 2, Informative) by fubari on Wednesday January 20 2016, @05:03AM
Diatribe? The Rothenberg excerpt you posted seems accurate and level-headed to me. Not what I would call "diatribe". Rothenberg is saying the ad industry needs to turn the cause of blocking around before they are all out of business, and I agree with that 100%.
diatribe [merriam-webster.com]
1 archaic : a prolonged discourse
2 : a bitter and abusive speech or piece of writing
3 : ironic or satirical criticism
From Rothenberg's diatribe:
ad-block use is caused by a general disdain for advertising and concern about the safety of user information.
89% of respondents who have installed ... to improve their experience.
The ads deemed most intrusive are video ads that play automatically, screen takeovers, and blinking ads...
We are mistreating our most valuable asset -- our consumers.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Wednesday January 20 2016, @05:39PM
We can (and should) contemplate suing unethical ad-blocking profiteers out of business.
... expecting that he considers all ad blockers as unethical. Is Adblock Plus profiteering? Surely not, as it is open source. Yet they got kicked out of the conference so are presumably thought "unethical" by the IAB.