Reuters has reported that, in a defeat for the publisher Springer, the German Supreme Court has ruled that ad blockers are legal.
Germany's Supreme Court on Thursday threw out a case brought by Axel Springer seeking to ban a popular application that blocks online advertising, in a landmark ruling that deals a blow to the publishing industry.
The court found in favor of Adblock Plus adblockplus.org, an app marketed by a firm called Eyeo that has been downloaded more than 100 million times by users around the world seeking protection from unwanted or intrusive online advertising.
That is followed by some analysis by Rick Falkvinge on the court's decision over at the Private Internet Access blog.
Related on SN:
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Mainstream websites, including those published by The New York Times, the BBC, MSN, and AOL, are falling victim to a new rash of malicious ads that attempt to surreptitiously install crypto ransomware and other malware on the computers of unsuspecting visitors, security firms warned.
The tainted ads may have exposed tens of thousands of people over the past 24 hours alone, according to a blog post published Monday by Trend Micro. The new campaign started last week when "Angler," a toolkit that sells exploits for Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and other widely used Internet software, started pushing laced banner ads through a compromised ad network.
If you haven't installed a good ad blocker on all your friends' and family's computers, now is the time.
takyon: The article includes an update from Malwarebytes, which found malvertising on the likes of msn.com, nytimes.com, bbc.com, aol.com, my.xfinity.com, nfl.com, realtor.com, theweathernetwork.com, thehill.com, and newsweek.com.
Ad blockers, our last hope against the onslaught of malvertising campaigns, appear to have fallen, as today, Malwarebytes published new research detailing a malvertising campaign that successfully bypasses ad blockers to deliver their malicious payload.
This malvertising campaign is named RoughTed based on the initial malicious domain at which it was found back in March 2017, but Jérôme Segura, the Malwarebytes security researcher who came across it, says there are clues to show that RoughTed has been active for over a year.
The campaign is very complex and well designed (from a crook's standpoint), as it leverages multiple tricks of the trade, most of which have allowed it to grow undetected in the shadows for so much time.
The word that describes RoughTed the best is "diversity." The operators of this malvertising campaign not only feature traffic from different types of sources, but also include different user fingerprinting techniques, and very different malicious payloads.
Source: BleepingComputer. Segura's original blog posting and analysis.
The Brave browser's basic attention token (BAT) technology is designed to let advertisers pay publishers. Brave users also will get a cut if they sign up to see ads.
Brave developed the basic attention token (BAT) as an alternative to regular money for the payments that flow from advertiser to website publishers. Brave plans to use BAT more broadly, though, for example also sending a portion of advertising revenue to you if you're using Brave and letting you spend BAT for premium content like news articles that otherwise would be behind a subscription paywall.
Most of that is in the future, though. Today, Brave can send BAT to website publishers, YouTubers and Twitch videogame streamers, all of whom can convert that BAT into ordinary money once they're verified. You can buy BAT on your own, but Brave has given away millions of dollars' worth through a few promotions. The next phase of the plan, though, is just to automatically lavish BAT on anyone using Brave, so you won't have to fret that you missed a promotional giveaway.
"We're getting to the point where we're giving users BAT all the time. We don't think we'll run out. We think users should get it," CEO and former Firefox leader Brendan Eich said. "We're going to do it continually."
The BAT giveaway plan is an important new phase in Brave's effort to salvage what's good about advertising on the internet -- free access to useful or entertaining services like Facebook, Google search and YouTube -- without downsides like privacy invasion and the sorts of political manipulations that Facebook partner Cambridge Analytica tried to enable.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by FatPhil on Wednesday April 25 2018, @09:07AM (5 children)
I went into one of the local fast food places the other day. Good range of stuff being offered on the menu - burgers, kebabs, all sorts. I ordered chilli on chips. I got no kebab meat. Did I "block" the kebab meat by only ordering chilli on chips? Of course not. So why is simply not asking for something that you don't want - *on a computer* - any different?
Of course, this overrides the set of instructions that the webserver previously sent to the browser, but there's no reason why every, or even any, instruction from a web-server should be obeyed. Look at older media - once I've got a book or a newspaper, I can do whatever I like with it: I can make a giant floppy paper aeroplane from the newspaper, they publishers don't care, I'm not obligated to buy every weight loss pill or scandinavian cruise that's being offered to me. I can tear the pages out of a bible and use it as thin shiny (but old trim!) toilet paper, and the publishers of that will, oh, I don't know, forgive me perhaps. I'm not obligated to go to war against the Jereboams, for pity's sake. Yes, they can decide what they send me, but once they've sent me it, it is quite literally out of their hands.
This suit, at least Falkvinge's write-up of it, appears to have shone some light onto the above, and caused light-bulbs to turn on above at least a few people's heads, so hopefully the shedding of light can continue.
But there's a long way to go - see the many hacker-because-he-edited-the-URL cases there still are. They still haven't worked out that the server has far more agency than the client when it comes to the transmission of data from server to client.
Can you stick some kebab meat on top of the chilli and chips for free? Sure. Thanks - yum! Hey - stop, thief!
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Wednesday April 25 2018, @09:11AM
Mods - please downmod this one flamebait *before* modding the previous one interesting, otherwise I'll somewhat unfairly bounce of karma cap - thanks for your cooperation!
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday April 25 2018, @04:02PM (3 children)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 25 2018, @05:13PM
And what about my high-contrast mode with images turned off, or my friend's screen reader? Those also rewrite the DOM, stylesheets and more (if not explicitly, then implicitly). The fact is that the user agent has been rewriting and changing pages for years now, the difference now is that people are more aware of it to the point where it is starting to hurt. That and ABP's protection racket didn't hurt when it came to getting on the publishers and ad companies' radar.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday April 25 2018, @08:53PM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday April 26 2018, @08:47AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 4, Informative) by inertnet on Wednesday April 25 2018, @09:12AM (7 children)
This case is about Adblock Plus charging money for putting the publisher (Axel Springer Verlag) on a whitelist. The publisher argued that this was illegal. It's not about forcing end users to swallow advertising, although indirectly it obviously is, but about having to pay for that. And that the whitelist only allows for non intrusive ads, which they claimed would impede their freedom of press.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by sjames on Wednesday April 25 2018, @10:53AM (2 children)
Of course, the fee is to cover the cost of reviewing the ads to determine if they are non-obtrusive. The "restriction on publishing" is no such thing. If I don't buy a crappy newspaper, I haven't censored them, they can keep on publishing and I'll keep on not buying.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 25 2018, @05:41PM (1 child)
What you say is true. On the other hand...
"Nice website you got there. It'd be a shame if anything were to happen to it..."
Likewise having to pay the phone company to not list your number in the phone book.
I honestly can't see a huge difference between what AdBlockPlus is doing, and an extortion racket. Now I don't like how current ads work so my moral outrage isn't really irked, but intellectually I can't really say AdBlockPlus is fully correct here, either.
Maybe somebody more knowledgeable can explain the difference?
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday April 26 2018, @12:11AM
Unlike the extortion racket, AdBlocker is providing an actual service that actual people want (and that is legal to provide) that might also negatively impact a website.
The wise guys arranging for shops to have 'accidents' benefits nobody but themselves.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday April 25 2018, @02:14PM
Exactly, Adblock Plus and Eyeo cannot be trusted due to their paid whitelists. Everyone should have moved on to uBlock or some other ad blocker.
Axel Springer just wanted to sue them out of existence so they could stop paying the extortion fee. If they somehow managed to get the court to declare all ad blocking illegal, that's just a bonus. I doubt they expected that outcome. Hell, even if they did, what would stop people from blocking anyhow? They could use Eyeo out of existance, and a dozen other blockers would show up to replace it. (Hell, there are already a lot of fake adblockers named "Adblock ____".)
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 25 2018, @02:32PM
Fuck both Springer and Adblock Plus.
Oh, and Springer isn't the academic publisher, this one is known for its fake news tabloid "Bild".
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday April 25 2018, @06:36PM (1 child)
Adblock Plus screwed its own credibility just as NoScript had also done.
Try uMatrix. It's nerdy. Definitely not for Grandma. But that probably won't bother anyone here.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 25 2018, @07:19PM
uBlock Origin is a straightforward drop-in replacement for Adblock Plus. Not as powerful as uMatrix, which I also use, but doesn't require any special knowledge to use, either.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday April 25 2018, @04:04PM (1 child)
When I get my completion check I'm going to try direct mail
What I object to is tracking. If online ads were no more able to track the user than dead tree ads can track newspaper readers I'd be completely cool with them.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 25 2018, @06:06PM
Not me. I believe advertising to be deleterious to society. All adverts must be destroyed.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Wednesday April 25 2018, @06:34PM
Raise your hand if you've gone to a site that loaded, and then suddenly was replaced with:
Something interfered with this website loading.
I disable JavaScript for the site, and then it works fine. So it seems that what blocked the site was it's very own JavaScript code. (And no, just changing View --> Page Style to No Style won't fix it. The JavaScript actually deleted the content after it appears.)
It is a ruse to get you to disable your defenses. They want to give you ads with a side of malware.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @08:40AM
Since when you you have a legal right to tell me what I should download onto MY fucking computer?!