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from the if-they-had-only-listened-before dept.
Marketoonist ran a story about marketers saying, "Oops, our bad."
The Interactive Advertising Bureau issued a remarkable mea culpa last week about the state of online advertising. In response to the rise of ad-blocking software, IAB VP Scott Cunningham said digital advertisers should take responsibility for annoying people and driving them to use ad blockers:
"We messed up. As technologists, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of the user experience....
"We build advertising technology to optimize publishers' yield of marketing budgets that had eroded after the last recession. Looking back now, our scraping of dimes may have cost us dollars in consumer loyalty...
"The consumer is demanding these actions, challenging us to do better, and we must respond."
Nod to pipedot for running this story.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday October 26 2015, @07:46AM
I should have been doing that all along. First, I installed NoScript and PolicyRequest. Allow a request, whitelist that page, etc etc etc. It has got to the point that a single page often exceeds 30 permissions. FFS, that's entirely to many permissions to scroll through, deciding which sites and which permissions to allow.
I've begun to rethink my permissions strategy. Just close the damned tab, and do a google search for the content that I thought I wanted to see.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TheRaven on Monday October 26 2015, @09:42AM
Just close the damned tab, and do a google search for the content that I thought I wanted to see.
If you want to discourage advertisers, maybe try using a search engine that isn't run by one of the largest ad companies on the planet.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday October 26 2015, @10:05AM
No fair being rational!
I'm accustomed to using Google, after years of using it. It's irrational, but it's what I turn to. Ehhh - maybe I need an attitude adjustment. Yeah, I know Duckduckgo works - I've used it off and on.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Hyperturtle on Monday October 26 2015, @04:36PM
yes use duck duck go , or ixquick. Not perfect, but what is.
Google made a change in the past year or two that simply made it harder to get the results I wanted. Searching with quotes and other symbols and operands simply stopped working. This mobile first ranking system is of zero relevance to most of what I search for and if i paid for the service I'd be upset. Instead, I am powerless to even complain about it and expect anything in return. It's not like my opinion matters, nor those of many others.
It's bad enough when "they" correct my search to be something I didn't search for, so I am now cautious to make sure the results they gave me are even relevant, but over all -- I can't even be somewhat granular and get a very specific wrong answer. I get wrong answers in general, or even worse, some blog where the guy asks a different unanswered question that gets linked to in numerous other search results.
That they are so in your face about the ads and and data collection is reason enough to avoid them--giving me poor on a desktop because sites are ranked mobile first... makes it hardly worth the cost of free that I am paying. If they do it differently than how I described, then ok I am wrong, but it still isn't worth the price and it's unlikely I am going to resume using it regularly. And yes I realize what I am saying. It is like the woody allen joke about two old ladies at a restaurant they frequently visit--one comments that the food there is terrible, and the other one says yes and the portions are so small, too. Ladies, why do you go there, and if the food is bad, why are you complaining you don't get enough of it?? You can ask me the same of the google search engine.
Even if nothing is as good as google's search engine used to be, I have come to believe that I am right back to where I was in the late 90s -- using multiple search engines because none of them are really very good at finding what I am looking for.
Mind you, it's mostly job or IT related stuff. Maybe if I searched for celebrity news I'd get all of my wildest queries answered for me. I don't know. But since I am not in the market for that and I already am poisoning my well, I don't want my well to start mixing poisons like that. Then it would be truly worthless.
To that end.. uh does anyone remember the program Copernic? It used to search all of the search engines you defined (or a list of them as defaults) at once, and would do its best to use your parameters (like the options google removed to make their search that much easier to use on a mobile, I guess).
After a while it started to become ad driven and then finally disappeared when Google started to reliably deliver the same useful results Copernic did, without having to install something to do it.
So, to go full circle back to how I used to do it efficiently... does anyone know of such a product that can span multiple engines and deliver the top 5 results from each? Without the low, low cost of my immortal soul being repeatedly harvested in exchange?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday October 26 2015, @04:57PM
Actually, yes - I do vaguely recall Copernic. And, a quick search found their home page - https://www.copernic.com/ [copernic.com] It appears that they are just a "desktop" search now. Another product, "on the go" is a private cloud search engine? I guess they surrendered the internet search, and restricted themselves to a niche market. I can't even imagine using a hard drive catalogueing application - it's pretty much built into any *nix distribution, if you understand how a file system works.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday October 26 2015, @07:41PM
But Google isn't annoying. I may refuse to use their services (e-mail, etc.) but Google search is hard to beat, and isn't annoying. I don't pretend that it's secure, I know they track my search history, but they aren't annoying, and I believe that they consider their information on me to be a corporate advantage, so they won't sell it, at least not without either coercion or a highly restrictive NDA and a steep price. This isn't real security, but it's probably the best that's available.
OTOH, advertisers have contributed to my decision to not install Flash. And they have driven my decision to use noscript.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday October 26 2015, @11:41AM
That's surprisingly easy, given that most outlets are grabbing articles from AP, Reuters, and other newswire services. Most places eliminated their newsrooms a long time ago and now only repackage what they get from a feed and pass it off as their own.
Why should anyone suffer advertising for that?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday October 26 2015, @12:25PM
Why should anyone suffer advertising for that?
No one has an answer; leading to the industry being almost dead:
http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/05/moderating-declines-parsing-the-naas-spin-on-newspaper-circ-data/ [niemanlab.org]
In just a couple more years, following 75 years of trend, there will be no newspapers.
There are of course more ads than just legacy local newspaper websites. Arguably clickbait and ads on clickbait sites will never die as long as there are gullible people, for example.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday October 26 2015, @01:24PM
I just recently installed NoScript, and WOW!, what a difference. uBlock Origin is good too (I still use that), but lately I was having all kinds of problems with my browser eating up 100%+ CPU time, and I couldn't figure out why. So I finally installed NoScript and suddenly my browser isn't pegging my CPU all the time, so it was obviously all the JavaScript bullshit these sites run. And now that I've been looking at the NoScript toolbar and seeing all the JS that sites want me to load, it's been a real eye-opener.
Anyway, I don't use PolicyRequest (nor have I heard about it before), but NS seems to work well, but the problem I found was that frequently sites just didn't work right until I enabled the right scripts. The simple solution is to simply allow it to temporarily whitelist the site's own domain. It seems rare for BS JS to be loaded from a site's own domain, it always comes from someplace else. For instance, I have another tab open for an auto parts site, and it has no less than 5 domains loading scripts. The first is the site itself, but the other four are newrelic.com, addthis.com, google-analytics.com, and trustwave.com. NoScript blocks those last four and everything seems to work fine. Occasionally I'll run across a site where I need to enable something like sitenamecdn.com, but that's it.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Snow on Monday October 26 2015, @05:11PM
Try visit this site:
failblog.cheezburger.com
If you start temporarily allowing all, you'll see that 3rd party scripts call 4th party scripts, call 5th party scripts, and so on. It's like a stack of turtles. There are a lot of sites that do this. Newspapers are some of the worst.
NoScript is also pretty annoying when ordering things online. It seems I always miss a script at the payment screen and end up entering everything again.
But I'll be damned if a website is going to load content from 100 different untrusted places on my computer.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday October 26 2015, @06:25PM
Anyway, I don't use PolicyRequest (nor have I heard about it before)
Possibly because the actual name is RequestPolicy. [mozilla.org] It's like NoScript but for cross-site scripting. Unfortunately they also block CSS* and in my several attempts to find a way to only disable that functionality I've been so far unsuccessful. So basically 75% of the time you load a new site, the entire page style drops out until you just whitelist the domain...which kind of defeats the whole purpose (?).
Hmm. I get a "site says it's HTTPS but we don't trust it" error when trying to go to their non-Mozilla website. That's interesting.
*"that's not a bug; that's a feature"
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2015, @04:49AM
uMatrix ftw! You can control cooke, image, css, iframe, plugin, script and XHR blocking separately, globally and per-site. It's UI may be somewhat confusing at first, but when you'll get used to it, you'll wonder how you managed to live without uMatrix before.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2015, @04:46AM
uMatrix is WAY better than RequestPolicy, and it was written by gorhill too!
Also, you don't even need ReqiestPolicy with uBO: check "I am an advanced user" in uBO options, and you will be able to block 3rd-party thingies from uBO popup.