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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Consumerist relays a report [consumerist.com] from Digiday (which appears to be so laden with ad Javascript it's not worth directly linking here) about GQ Magazine issuing an ultimatum to their web readers: disable your ad blocker, or pay us $0.50 to read this article. As Consumerist's Chris Morran puts it so eloquently, "The latest attempt to prevent people from blocking ads comes from Conde Nast, a company that loves advertising so much that it created an entire boutique salon of highly-skilled editors dedicated to creating advertisements that look like articles."

This is part of a veritable arms race, spearheaded by the Internet Advertising Bureau, in reaction to casual web users becoming more aware of ad blockers, including mobile ad blocking technology now allowed by Apple on its iOS-platform devices. The IAB's approach can be best described as schizophrenic; at one moment they are threatening to encourage their members to block ad-blocker users, as well as launching lawsuits against companies that make ad blockers [adage.com], and the next moment, they are saying, "We messed up," [iab.com] realizing that the reason mass-market users are installing ad-blockers is due to the Idiocracy-esque avalanche of ads [codinghorror.com] that are chewing up bandwidth, taxing CPUs, and even resulting in data loss due to the surreptitious installation of ransomware such as Cryptowall, often distributed via web ad networks that almost never filter out malware when they buy ads.

Meanwhile, these "ad-blocker blockers" don't seem to be blocking users with anti-Javascript measures such as NoScript, which are being installed by those in the know, due to the willy-nilly ultra-cross-scripted architecture of modern popular websites.

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