Mozilla Junkbuster-like Feature Removed 262
"Please don't jump to conclusions." That's the advice from the developer whose bugzilla postings got people concerned in the first place. OK, so let's take this slow.
Oh, and - this is the second story on Slashdot today that puts generous, overworked open-source contributors under the microscope, and I feel a little bad about that. I hope they understand we're not denigrating their efforts, and that we are grateful for their work.
The feature at issue here lets you block images from a webpage if they come from a foreign site. If you're reading www.slashdot.org, any images from www.foreignsite.net will simply not be loaded. Say, hypothetically, www.doubleclick.net. That would be one example.
Is this the most important feature in the world? Not really. But is it important? Yes. Not just because it blocks most ad banners. It also eliminates what Richard Smith calls web bugs: a technique which can track you across the net without your knowing. The extra privacy is probably a good thing.
(On the bright side, the feature that blocks foreign-site cookies is still in place; this is a very good idea.)
One thing that complicates the issue is that the image-blocking feature was having a few problems. The example given was that, on AltaVista's homepage, the "submit" button graphic comes from a domain owned by the same parent company - but because the domain name is different, the button does not appear. There was concern that users might not understand this. A proposed alternative was to add a dialog warning of such unexpected behavior, and/or to give users more options for how graphics would be blocked.
My thinking is that the problems could have been solved. The person in charge of UI design issues suggested a design workaround that probably would have made the feature quite usable.
I should point out that just because this bug has been marked as WONTFIX, that doesn't mean it won't be reopened; this has happened thousands of times. Actually, now the bug has been marked INVALID, indicating the removal of the feature from the menu is not considered a bug but ... a feature. Well, OK, so its removal was intentional; will the feature be re-added later? Possibly.
But why was this feature removed? In mid-April, shortly after it had disappeared from the current build, one volunteer spoke to a Netscape employee and summarized events as "management had told them to strip the feature."
This sounded uncomfortably like AOL influencing the browser design to suit their needs. I suspect that the Time-Warner media empire might take in a few dollars from banner ads. I suspect they might not like giving users a way to block almost all banner ads with just a few clicks. They don't mind a small percentage of us using a squid proxy, Junkbusters, or creative /etc/hostsing. But to turn that power over to everyone would seriously threaten their revenue stream.
As one might expect, the preview release of Netscape6, the "AOL version" of the browser that was spun off of the Mozilla project, has a preferences dialog that looks a lot like Mozilla's except when it comes to this feature. The foreign-cookie blocker is in place; the foreign-image blocker is not. (But they spun it off an earlier release - maybe the feature wasn't written then; I don't know.)
One of the volunteer developers, at least, has been loudly protesting the implication that anything is wrong. On kuro5hin.org, they are free to state their case and there's some good discussion. And this morning, the same volunteer who originally logged the "went the way of management decree" message appended another log entry, worth reading in full:
"This has gotten a little out of control. The only thing Steve Morse informed me was that as of now, the image blocking prefs have been *publicly* removed from the build. This means that though you CAN still retrieve the feature if you so desire, the menu options and interface are not -- by default -- accessible. This is done often for testing purposes; if something you're working on seems to be conflicting with the image blocking module, you can simply opt to turn it off to complete your work. Who the heck said anything about it being removed permanently? Admittedly, my note wasn't clear, but I think blaming AOL for the supposed 'removal' of this feature is absurd and a little conspiracist, don't you think? To the news sites carrying this: I'm sorry, but what we have here is a nonissue. [...]
"To clarify: the ONLY piece of information Steve gave me was that the feature, as of now, did not appear to be in the latest builds, but really was. His words that the feature 'went the way of management' decree simply refer to the fact that 'management' (NOT AOL management or even AOL-related, mind you) told him to turn the image blocking preference off by default in the latest nightly builds (probably so some technical issues that the feature's causing can be ironed out). That's it - I apologize for the ambiguity of my original words, but they never meant to imply the removal of this feature. Nor did Steve's."
I'm a little skeptical of what would be accomplished by removing this feature from the menu and dialog, but then I'm not the one who's working on the source, am I?
I'm less skeptical about all this now than I was this morning. Part of what worried me was this same volunteer's earlier comment on kuro5hin.org:
"...there's still quite a easy way to get the image blocking preferences back (IMHO, I believe they were removed in the first place because it is ads that heavily supports Netcenter), by adding a certain line in your prefs.js file."
But in email today, he said that this was just a guess and he no longer believes it's true. Fair enough.
Getting any developers to talk about this bug has been like pulling teeth. Only one of the developers I contacted (repeatedly) even bothered to return my email.
What's important to understand is that having to restore the preferences by editing a Javascript preferences text file isn't the same as having it in the right-click menu. If people could block ads with a right-click and just a little poking around, the nature of the web would change drastically.
Finally, here's the same volunteer, again on kuro5hin.org:
"This has been blown way out of proportion.
"I am now hearing from other NSCP employees that this feature has only been taken out temporarily due to complications with the PSM module.
"Furthermore, can you all _please_ stop assuming things from Steve's statement? Steve said it went the way of management decree. This means whatever happened to the image prefs, it came by way of a couple people labeled 'management' (not AOL management, nor AOL-related in any way, mind you). _I_ was the one who suggested the feature was stripped. In reality, this feature may be being improved on, may have been removed temporarily (this happens often to many commonly used features in testing), or a number of other things that would explain its current disappearance.
"Please don't jump to conclusions."
OK. And those are nice hypotheticals for what could be something perfectly ordinary. If the explanation is that simple, though, I wish that someone else had just answered my email to say so.
The nice thing about an open-source web browser is that, even if M16 comes out with a NoPrivacy(tm) feature that uploads everything you do directly to whitehouse.gov, we're all free to fork our own project with the M15 source. We can include this feature or any other.
Conversely, Mozilla is not Netscape 6; AOL is free to add or remove whatever features they like when they release 6.0.1.
But, the official release of Mozilla will be widely distributed. I hope its functionality will be all it could be. If you want the Mozilla development team to make this feature work, and keep it in the next builds, post a comment below to let them know it's important to you. And be nice. They work hard.
Re:I thought this was better than avg /. (Score:1)
So if someone is responding to the article, then yes, the article is a good one and examines a controversy that makes for an interesting read. The title, however, seems to contradict the majority of the research presented in the article, and could be the subject of complaints if it seems likely to mislead readers. Not a good thing.
Re:They should get rid of it. (Score:1)
Re:Ad Blocking with DNS or No-Proxy instead of Pro (Score:1)
I slapped squid together fairly easily (the config file is long, but after one sitting I had it working), and added ad zapper [zip.com.au]. With a little work and reading, I had a proxy that had 778 rules for allowing/rejecting images. As a side benefit, the caching is infinately better than Netscape's default cache. Far too often Netscape wanted to re-download entire static pages just when I hit back/forward.
Re:Plenty of other filtering software (Score:1)
Best util I've ever found, it's only 600k, so check it out!
Re:Morality question - Is this not theft? (Score:1)
It's a power shift, no question. Though in the past it has been possible to block banner ads (Junkbusters [junkbusters.com] has had a proxy server that blocks banner ads for years now) it has been enough of a pain that 99+% of people just aren't going to do it.
Add a menu option on the browser to do the same thing, and you've just made the blocking of banner ads much, MUCH easier for the end user, and lots of people will take advantage of it. I don't think anyone's going to argue against that.
The status quo has created a convenient space for marketers to lurk; they can position ads in such a way that you really have to have them visible in order to see the content you really want. What's key here is the (If you'll pardon the choir preaching on Slashdot...) practical lack of freedom of choice in the viewing of those ads. American society is so infested with advertising and marketing at the moment that the individual who doesn't want to see the pervasive marketing is having his or her freedoms whittled away day by day. It's gotten to the point where people used to the "freebies" provided by advertising question the very morality of providing a way to bypass ads.
It is not immoral to refuse to look at content you don't want to see.
Advertising is lauded as a way to make things free, but from a purely economic view, advertising as we see it today is wasteful in the extreme. Billions of dollars are spent every year to convince you that you need some new good in your life. 99.9% of the time this is pure consumerism hype; someone on the other end of the TV commercial, junk mail, or banner ad is trying to keep their economic niche alive by convincing you to budget money for their product or service that you were just as happy knowing nothing about.
The net result? You have to make more money to afford all the things you now "need". So you work harder, your productivity increases, the economy "grows" and politicians take credit for improving our lives. But is our standard of living really higher? Witness the infomercials that have to spend 15 minutes of a half hour slot trying desperately to convince you that your past advertising-driven purchases were all mistakes because this is the product you really need. There is a schizoprenia implicit to advertising that reveals its true nature.
With respect to banner ads and simple blocking, all that has happened is a power shift away from advertisers and towards end users. If end users are annoyed by ads, they can turn them off. If sites can't survive with users turning off those ads, the sites go down. There is no moral obligation to support that business model. If the cost of that business model is my freedom to choose what I look at, I say that cost is much, MUCH too high.
Re:Plenty of other filtering software (Score:1)
Re:Morality question - Is this not theft? (Score:2)
See previous threads on this, it is obviously not stealing.
1. People pay for their internet connection, if anyone is stealing its the publishers stealing bandwidth from users and using it to make money for themselves.
2. They chose to make it their source of revenue, they can find other ways to do it.
3. Filtering spam isn't stealing, changing the channel during commercials isn't stealing, using a TiVo isn't stealing, not looking at a billboard isn't stealing, how is filtering banner ads?
4. Lynx views 0 graphics, do people who use lynx steal because they don't see the ads?
Your methodology is draconian. What you're suggesting is forcing people to pay for their internet connection and bandwidth to view these banner ads, taking time and money away from users to make the publishers money. This is fair, how?
-- iCEBaLM
Re:Morality, and the Atom Bomb of TiVo (Score:3)
[/sarcasm]
I would not lament at all if the giant advertising economy crumbled to the ground. Wasting time watching TV is bad enough, but now more than 50% of what you watch is commercials! There's something like 13 minutes of commercials in the average "half-hour" program, and then there's those infomercials. I have to pay for cable/satellite anyways (there are less local stations in San Jose that I can receive than there were in Visalia when I was 10!), and they use that money to bombard me with ads!
People, ads are EVIL. Some are cute and all in good fun, but the system in general is really fscked up! I am pretty resistant to the lies and general fluff found in ads, ("You need this prescription drug. We won't tell you what it does, so ask your doctor about it. Get medicated with InActiviara and be a happy person. Side effects are mild and include vomiting, montezuma's revenge, priapism, and menstrual cramps.") but I am not resistant to my kids begging and pleading and they are not resistant to advertising.
In a perfect world, the internet would let us get past ads. Instead of being constantly being bombarded by ads everywhere I look (highway 101 anyone?), if I was in the mood to buy something I would look it up. Instead of shooting random ads at me, ad money would be spent answering my questions by a real person (or suitable bot) when I come investigating for myself. Products would be sold based on their quality and warranties, not on the fact that their commercial has burping frogs.
...and before anyone says something about "but that would disrupt such and such a system", I DON'T CARE! Humans have rights (and animals too). Corporations/Economic systems do NOT.
Re:Comercials (Score:1)
The content providers on TV for instance are paid to run the ad whether *you* watch the ads or not. Therefore, they lose no money if *you* turn away from the TV during commercials.
It is different on the web. Content providers are typically paid per impression (i.e., the more downloads of a company's banner, the more the content provider gets paid).
By not downloading the banners, and yet still consuming the content provider's content, you *are* stealing from them - i.e., you get their content without them getting paid for it.
It may not be illegal as such, but it is certainly immoral.
I understand and share the concerns about privacy issues. I also don't like pop-ups. But are there not better solutions to this than completely blocking the ability of content providers to support themselves?
Remember, There Ain't NO Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
-Geon
Methods for blocking, methods for dodging (Score:1)
A similar mapping to geld the scripting on specific pages or sites, and/or to disable for all but re-enable for specific would also be good.
Putting these in a separate config section, disabled by default and emblazoned with suitable warnings (perhaps even rcfile-style completely eliminable for tur[n]key intallations) would help to ally the fears of the "it causes problems" panic merchants. Mozilla, if it is to succeed, will want to be more like Lego than any other browser, that is, more possibilities available but not forced on you.
The idea of banner ads going away is difficult to envision. Advertisers are finding more ways to assault your eyeballs, not less. For example, if *.doubleclick.com becomes widely blocked, an advertising site (www.randomwebsite.com) need only add an A-record to their DNS (for something like dc.randomwebsite.com) that resolves to an IP owned by doubleclick.com. If doubleclick then diversifies their IP address holdings, this will become increasingly difficult to block.
Although doubleclick seem to me to be slowly improving the quality of their ads, I do find them extremely tiresome and would treasure an easy way to replace them with a fast blank box.
What is the JS pref change? (Score:1)
I beg of you (Score:1)
- Netscape is evil incorporated.
- AOL is even more evil and capable of burning millions of CD-shaped coasters.
- Time-Warner is crazy.
- Mozilla will save the universe.
Try not to stray from these official Slashdot opinions. Sure people with emails containing "@aol.com" or "@netscape.com" may say it's still in the source code, and it may be accessible by setting it in the javascript file, heck, it might even be in the source code (like anyone looks at it), but please, for the purpose of this discussion area, consider it completely removed because AOL/Netscape/TW are paid by advertisers to ensure we users do not avoid their advertisements.
After following these guidelines, only then may we have a coherent, rant-filled discussion forum on this topic.
Thank you.
Re:Blocking Ads is Not Stealing (Score:2)
It's nice to see you're not a hypocrite regarding your Metallica feature. And i completely understand the last part of your post - i've put out a lot of humor in various mediums (1 [cumb.org] 2 [cumb.org] 3 [flora.org]) and it's often taken quite a bit of my time and effort to do so. But even though i can't name any benefit i get from it, i just feel i have to. I mean, once an idea comes to me, it's like an obligation to develop and release it.
It's the exact same reason people work on Open Source - while the Cathedral and the Bazaar suggested reasons like peer admiration and utility, i think my feeling of duty is the real reason. That "labor of love" feeling produces the purest kind of art, be it humor or code or music.
One last point of irony - when i go to Brunching on a weekday and see no new feature, i feel robbed, as in, "Hey! I downloaded a banner ad and i didn't get any content in return!"
Uh, on that note, everyone should click the link in my sig, sign up, and make me some money.
--
Jamie is a guy (Score:1)
Well, it was either a guy, or she has a deep voice. <shrug>
"... message passing as the fundamental operation of the OS is just an excercise in computer science masturbation."
Re:it's not about blockin ads;it's about blockin b (Score:1)
Re:Needs to block cookies from all but list of sit (Score:1)
Here's my [radiks.net] DeCSS mirror. Where's yours?
There Is Another Option To Appease Advertisers (Score:1)
Instead of not downloading the banner, one could instead download it at low priority. This slower download is accomplished by calling setsockopt to set the TCP receive buffer size (SO_RCVBUF) to something small (2k or so). This keeps the transfer rate of the socket low, leaving bandwidth to download the rest of the page first.
I explored this in a research paper [ieee-infocom.org] (postscript) I helped write. Here we ran netscape against a background ftp transfer -- crippling the ftp using essentially setsockopt, to make the web transfer happen faster.
If anybody with the skill to implement this is reading this, shrinking the receive buffer is the safe, effective way to make banner ads less annoying. The first packets containing the image header are likely to be downloaded soon, so that page rendering can proceed as designed. The ads (and important buttons) still get displayed, but our experience isn't consistently slowed by them.
Reducing the transfer rate of the foreign images is the answer, not omitting them.
Re: They should get rid of it (Score:1)
Jeremy
Re:how about (Score:2)
This should not even have been posted. (Score:4)
The report also has something to say about news sites carrying the story without confirming that facts...
So, this is here, why?
--
blue
More than just the preference box. (Score:3)
I don't particularly mind, because I know I can always proxy banner sites into oblivion. However, It was much easier to build an effective blocking list by simply right-clicking on every banner ad on the web. Within a few minutes, you could have an advertisement-free web experience. Now I have to edit some proxy config files.
The other reason I don't mind is that the source to Mozilla is open. This feature can be added (or apparently, #defined into existence) by whomever, whenever.
-jwb
Re: This should not even have been posted. (Score:1)
Advertising == Cool Free Stuff (Score:2)
But I also disagree with anybody who suggests that it makes sense to filter out ads. Thanks to advertising revenue, I don't have to pay anybody to use countless great sites that never would have gotten to be as good as they are without ad revenue.
Why do advertisers pay to appear on these sites? Because they know they'll get the page views, which will bring the click-thrus, which will bring them sales and revenue. If they see those numbers going down the business case is gone, so are the ads, and so is the content the ads pay for.
Suck it up. Boycott sites that have advertising if you're so friggin' put off by it. Or do what I do: Ignore the stupid things for the most part (they're not all that intrusive). And who knows? Like me, you might just occasionally see an ad for something that interests you.
Content Free Reporting (Score:4)
Did slashdot try to talk to the mozilla.org people? Doesn't seem like it. I didn't get email and no one else reports having gotten any either.
this is an innovative feature (Score:2)
there was a time when i turned of images, so pages would load faster, too. it was useful at the time. very nice. but now... i haven't used that feature in years. i'm not even sure if it still exists. heh. (okay, i use lynx fairly regularly still, but that's a different story.)
turning off images to foreign sites would be really handy in a couple of instances... for example, in mid-afternoon the IGN network's adserver inevitably gets bogged down (try http://pc.ign.com/ [ign.com]) and this makes it seem like the page is still loading. hitting "stop" causes the page to appear, sans ad banner. good. having a browser that could do this automatically if i chose would be a Good Thing.
i'd like to see it.
Ad Blocking with DNS or No-Proxy instead of Proxy (Score:2)
makes them point to the nonexistent machine next to you. Alternatively, if you've got a real machine that wasn't already running a web server, you can point it there, especially if you've got a handy 404-returner application to make it fail faster (or to return a blank dummy banner.) Or you can point it to a Class E IP address or a nonexistent machine on your LAN.
If you're running Windows, you'll need to find a way to convince the OS to check your C:\WINDOWS\HOSTS file before checking DNS - or get your DNS admininstrator to help you (or find a DNS server for Windows and run it on 127.0.0.1.)
Another simple method for Windows, if you're inside a corporate firewall and use an explicit proxy server (as opposed to auto-proxy or a transparent proxy) is to list the annoying banner domains in the "Don't Proxy" box in Netscape along with your corporate network. That way it tries to reach annoying-banner.com directly and gets blocked by the firewall instead of proxied. It's not quite as fast as not looking for the banner at all, but usually as fast as or faster than actually retrieving it.
Re:The Real Story - there isn't one (Score:2)
Well, sure. This is exactly why the allegations that Netscape management pressured mozilla.org into concealing a useful feature of their software are disturbing.
Re:I thought this was better than avg /. (Score:2)
If I could moderate articles, Jamie would be in karma heaven.
(Then again I'd like to give Katz a *plus* one-Troll :-)
Re:Who's stealing from who? (Score:2)
I didn't say it was illegal to block certain parts of the site, my commentary was more directed at the fact that someone had the nerve to say that ads are somehow stealing from him as a user (I do think the newer Shockwave and other heavy-media based ads are stretching it a bit).
If you wish to install blocking software to block off ads, more power to you. If an inconspicuous and tiny graphic bothers you that much, by all means, block it. You're probably the same type of person that's downloaded hundreds of commercial songs via Napster, and thinks that's perfectly fine. (This isn't directed at the post I'm replying to, just in general)
Realize, however, that when your practice of screwing money out of the webmaster becomes wide-spread, that content you were so desperate to see uninterrupted by ads might just disappear completely. I run ads to pay for the server I run my site on. Yes, they do pull in a little bit more than the cost of the server, but I'm not getting rich off them by any stretch of the imagination, especially compared with the time I put into my site. By blocking the ads, you're taking money out of my pocket.
No, there's no click agreement, and you're not legally bound to view them, but you should be morally bound to at least tolerate them.
Politics? No: Money. (Score:2)
Yes, but Netscape's parent, AOL, makes relatively more money from service fees than from ads. This feature puts them at a competative advantage to pure-Internet sites which derive a greater fraction of their revenue from ads.
It might be a bit cynical for me to say it, but it is easier to claim that AOL would want to promote this feature than to have it removed.
If off site graphics were blocked... (Score:2)
if (browser.allow_off_site_graphics)
{
document.write('Our site uses off-site graphics, which your browser does not support');
document.write('To turn on off-site graphics do: yada, yada, yada');
}
The result: Big sites with valuable content (Yahoo, online newspapers, slashdot taken over by the dark side) would still get ad money, whereas smaller sites and sites where you can choose an alternative with the same content (startups, slashdot as today etc) would not.
Webmasters can use countermeasures too, you know...
Re:Who's stealing from who? (Score:2)
--
Re:Morality question - Is this not theft? (Score:2)
No way! Paying for your internet connection just pays your ISP, it does not pay for the content on the internet. The content provider you are viewing also pays bandwidth costs.
Instead, think of it as a premium rate phone number, you are paying for the ADDITIONAL content by downloading the ad-banner. If companies started adding buttons to telephones that caused a premium rate call to be charged at normal rates you would soon see the premium rate numbers disapear.
I agree Filtering spam is not stealing, you have not asked for anything, you get nothing out of it in return. Changing the channel during commercials is not stealing, the commercials have not gone away, the Tv company is still paid for runnign them and the program you are watching still gets financed.
Most Banner advertising gets sold on a CPM basis, if you don't download the banner then the website doesn't get paid.
I admit lynx is an interesting case in point, however lynx does not hide the fact it is a text only browser. The key point here is that lynx does not avoid displaying ad-banners, it just can't. The difference here is that an option like this in mozila is diliberately avoiding the banners.
When you pay for your internet conenction you are paying for a connection, not the content. Thats the fundamental basis of the internet, if you remove the capability for content providers to make money you remove once chunk of the web, you will just be left with hobby sites, pay sites, charity sites and online stores.
My methodology is not draconian, I find banners as anoying as the next man, I am however a realist, content that is payed for by banners would not be here if it were not for the banners. Frankly I find your argument hipocritical that you post such an opinun on a website that IS PAYED FOR BY BANNERS.
Re:Morality, and the Atom Bomb of TiVo (Score:2)
Parents, don't let your kids go into advertising!
Re:Who's stealing from who? (Score:2)
--
13? (Score:2)
IIRC, if I scan past the ads, a 1-hour show takes about 48 minutes to watch.
BTW: Right now, I have iCab not loading any images and asking me when I want to accept cookies. When It encounters cookies, it asks if I want to accept it, accept it but expire at the end of the session, or NEVER ACCEPT cookies from this domain EVER again. That last option is sweet!
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
Re: This should not even have been posted. (Score:2)
The problem with banner ads isn't just that they're annoying and consume bandwidth. The real evil is that they put the web on the same "top-down" model as TV and radio, leading us to a situation where a handful of advertisers end up with a lot of control over content.
From the blatant self-promotion department: I'm working on a "bottom-up" system for supporting websites (or other activities) where readers would be able to pay to place sponsored links on a site. I call it the sponsorpool.
It works like this: a sponsor decides how much they're willing to pay , and registers their message and payment on a sponsorpool server. Then on every page load from a sponsored site, a sponsorship message is selected from the pool. The probability of a message being selected is the amount of sponsor's payment for that message, divided by the total amount of sponsorship for the month - the more you sponsor a site for, the more often your message appears, but even a few bucks will get you some impressions.
The hope is that rather than attracting big contributions from a handful of big sponsors, this will attrach many smaller contributions from average readers. (Would you pony up $20 one month for one in a thouand Slashdot page loads to display your message?) I believe this allows a more democratic and more free-market ap proach to site sponsorship that will be much less annoying than banner ads (the links are just text, though there's no technical reason why the system couldn't be expanded to handle images as well). It would benefit small sites and sites with controvertial content that can't attract banner ads.
In addition to supporting websites, I think this could be used to support other activities - a sort of generalized PayLars.com [paylars.com].
I've been hacking on this in my copious spare time for a month or two, and my proof-of-concept pre-alpha 0.0 version should be ready within another week or two. It's just a couple of PHP and shell scripts, and in this first version, payments are handled with PayPal [paypal.com]; so anyone with PHP, PostgreSQL, and some time to puzzle over my poorly documented code will be able to set up a server. If anyone would like more info, drop me a line (drop "spambefuddler" from the address above) and I'll send you more information when it's ready. (Which will be Real Soon Now. Unless it's not.)
I think this is good (Score:2)
Let's be a little selfish for a while, OK? I think it's a (practically, not ethically) good thing that a browser that is destined to become a major product (or at any rate, let's hope so) should not have an ad blocker feature. If it did, too many people would activate it, the efficiency of ads would decrease and that would mean either (a)some other means of advertising being invented, probably not as nice, or (b)less money for the web, so more expensive connections or something of the sort.
In essence, this is a dilemma: I don't want to see the ads, but I want others to see them so that the system will work. This is why I want Mozilla (or at any rate Netscape 6) not to include a junkbuster feature, whereas I am capable of (i)patching the sources to add such a feature myself, or (ii)more simply, set up my /etc/hosts file to redirect some hosts like ad.doubleclick.net back to 127.0.0.1 (this is what I do: while it isn't as selective, it is still nice because it works with every browser and at the same time is not as complicated as using a proxy).
This is definitely selfish of me, but who cares? Seeing ads is not the end of the world. The use of the /etc/hosts file is well documented, as is the C++ programming language: it's not like the method were kept secret and undocumented. I just don't want to see 10^8 newbies getting rid of ads on the Web.
Re:The Real Story - there isn't one (Score:2)
mozilla.org produces software for developers, not end users (most of the time). Netscape will produce the first end-user browser based on Mozilla - and how much Mozilla tech is in it is completely up to them.
Gerv
Re:Morality question - Is this not theft? (Score:2)
Good, I like that, we all seem to forget slashdot was, and arguably better when it was, a hobby site. If the larger content providers go down because they base their business on such an easily foiled revenue stream then THEY DON'T DESERVE TO BE IN BUSINESS. I pay for my bandwidth, I choose what I do with my bandwidth, if I don't want ads, and I don't want spam in my inbox, and if I don't want to see slashdot posts from the user "JamesSharmon" then I will damn well filter them out at my lesiure, and not you, or anyone else, is going to tell me I'm stealing because of it.
-- iCEBaLM
Re:I thought this was better than avg /. (Score:2)
OT : Sometimes I also got the same headline twice, because someone made a little change to spelling or punctuation. So some people's spelling flames really help
Re:They should get rid of it. (Score:2)
Almost all web advertising agencies have a reputation of blatant privacy violators... So in order to donload let's say first 5 bytes so that the site gets some money you have already lost your privacy...
If I had that option (without having my address immediately correlated, bought and sold I would have immediately started to download the first byte from ads on userfriendly. Now I simply dump 'em...
Dunno... Just some thoughts... From the internet furnace...
It's not (Score:2)
Out of curiosity, what makes your eyeballs so much better than theirs? Why should others 'pay' for your web browsing?
the efficiency of ads would decrease and that would mean either (a) some other means of advertising being invented, probably not as nice, or (b) less money for the web, so more expensive connections or something of the sort.
I hate to break it to you, but banner ads aren't working [useit.com] as it is. The reason they have to base advertising costs on page views is because clickthrough rates (the amount of people who actually click on a banner to see where it leads) decline by about 50% a year.
And it's the advertiser's own fault, really. Even with a theoretical clickthrough rate of 0.25% as of the end of 1999 (the article I cited above [useit.com] states the clickthrough rate is 0.5% at the end of 1998) how many of these are translated into actual sales? The problem is that once they get that clickthrough, they fail to deliver the goods. If I click on a banner that says "BUY QUAKE III NOW AND SAVE 20%!" I want to click on that link, enter my name and address and billing info that will get me Quake III. I don't want to get directed to the front page of http://www.coolnetgames.com/ and have to go hunting for it myself.
As others have said, when we make the transition to an advertising-based economy, you can expect products and services to go right down the tubes. (Hey, welcome to prime-time television! Has anyone else noticed that they squeeze ads in every place they can anymore, like during the end credit sequence of their shows?) Why should they care if I buy or not when they're making more money selling my eyeballs to other advertisers?
I would much prefer advertisers to put their money into something that is useful to them as well as to me -- that way, they will continue to pour their money into the internet, I'll find products I wish to purchase, and we will both get something of value. Because as it stands, this bubble is going to burst (whether or not Mozilla has image-blocking features) and the costs of your connection and other services are going to go up anyway.
Jay (=
Re:Is this not theft? Welcome to ecology... (Score:2)
In every dynamic ecology, you have an "arms race" between the 'prey' and the 'predator'. However, as Tom Ray points out, the rise of parasites (a form of non-lethal predator) leads, in the long run, to a more stable and diverse ecology.
In this example, banner ads are the parasite. They 'eat' attention (which Howard Rheingold pointed out is the irreducible resource on the Net) without giving anything back. (Of course, they *promise* to, but promising sybiosis and delivering parasitism is an old, old trick...) Therefore, it is logical for 'eyeballs' ('prey') to evolve various methods for protecting themselves, such as "tuning them out" (not paying attention) or developing devices that strip out images (a bit of an overkill, methinks, since you are ignoring anything that *might* be a parasite).
The counter I expect that will next be used by the parasites is 'mimicry': ads will try to pretend to be something that they are not.
Re:More than just the preference box. (Score:2)
now, the thing that I'd *really* like to see in Mozilla, is the ability to allow/disallow loading a URL, based on pattern matches on the URL itself and also on the referer. So I could say something like "doubleclick is blocked, unless it's from slashdot or another favorite site of mine". this puts control back where it belongs, in the hands of the user, and would let users choose to support a site or not.
The Real Story - there isn't one (Score:5)
The current Mozilla builds are nightlies, downloaded by a few people for testing. If you download one, you'll find green and purple lines surrounding half the UI elements. Why? Debugging. Ugly? Yeah. A Slashdot story? No. Just more evidence of UI changes.
My point: this is _not_ a big deal. No-one has said this feature is going away from the code available from mozilla.org. Any feature that is destabilising the build could be deactivated. Tooltips are currently not working either, when they were last week. No fuss about that...
Gerv
(Declared interest: mozilla.org external QA volunteer) Please help: Get involved with Mozilla QA [mozilla.org]
Re:Who's stealing from who? (Score:2)
I think you misunderstand the theory about how ads work. They don't work becaues anyone has any kind of moral obligation to give them attention; they watch because most people are apathetic enough not to bother avoiding them. It's easy to avoid ads on TV (change the channel, mute the sound, fast forward on taped shows or if you have a TiVo), it's easy to avoid ads on the web (use junkbuster, or put the big adservers in your /etc/hosts). yet most people don't care enough to do even that, and that's why the whole ad system keeps working and will keep working.
Re:More than just the preference box. (Score:2)
*.*/adclick.html
*.*/adclick
*.*/ads
*.*/Ads
*.*/*/banners
*.*/BannerAds
*.*/banner1.gif
*.*/groupbanners.phtml
*.*/img/ads
*.*/RealMedia/ads
None of those ad systems can be blocked with a hostname-based system. So it seems worthwhile to me, to go through the effort of a one-time hour of setup.
Plenty of other filtering software (Score:3)
Everyone go out and try an ad filtering proxy today! It makes your browsing experience so much more tolerable!
--Bob
Re:They should get rid of it. (Score:2)
With any junk busting feature (either mozilla or external) you are actually not downloading them.
---
Actually, you are. The file is downloaded to your computer, and a piece of software on the client end edits the file before it is displayed onscreen. The page is literally resident inside your computer (well, at least with the blocking software I've used - some may use a proxy of some sort, but then it's on someone else's computer who has consented).
When the data is on my computer, I can view it as I wish. That's the nature of the web - there is no guarantee how something will be rendered.
BTW: Yes, I run a site that is advertising supported (velocinews.com). Yes, I have no problem if you use ad blocking software. It is your right to do so.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])
Re:They should get rid of it. (Score:2)
So who cares? The internet isn't, and shouldn't be, one large corporate strip mall. Right now we have all kinds of corporate noise camoflaguing any real useful information (which is almost allways not on a site with banner ads). So what if the fat gets trimmed? Who cares? The information density of the net will rise.
-- iCEBaLM
This would also break technologies like Akamai's (Score:2)
Re:They should get rid of it. (Score:2)
they knew the market they were trying to get into (ie, advertising on the net via web banners) and they should know that its technically very easy for banners to be blocked.
its not like they (the advertisers) weren't aware of this fact. it was their choice to blow money this way.
and its my choice to not look at their crap.
nothing at all immoral or wrong with this. both sides know the rules and capabilities.
--
Re:They should get rid of it. (Score:2)
How do you think Slashdot makes money?
---
Advertising revenue.
That's because a statistically insignificant number of people are blocking ads. If enough people do it, Slashdot could move to subscription fees or some other manner to get money and be done with it. I'd be 100% fine with that - if a site is good enough to read daily, it's worth a little cash to me.
Really, it's much nicer than pimping out one's eyeballs, don't you think?
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])
Re:The reality of web advertising (Score:2)
Not necessary (Score:4)
Not necessary. Find your prefs.js file and add this at the end:
user_pref("imageblocker.enabled", true);
Note that if you want to go back later to turn it back off, it probably won't still be at the end of your prefs file because mozilla alphabetizes your prefs list each time you close the program.
--
Re:This should not even have been posted. (Score:2)
This is a good story. It sets the record straight. It is no different than Sky and Telescope doing a report on "the really big moon" or "The Earth is in peril on 5/5/2000". They covered both in depth to put the real story out for the masses.
Re:Morality, and the Atom Bomb of TiVo (Score:2)
Meta News == No News (Score:3)
Since nothing really happend and the article above gives a trivial way to enable the preference. Why was this posted a day later on Slashdot anyway?
Re: This should not even have been posted. (Score:2)
In any event, with all these changes, one has to wonder: is the banner ad on the way to "dead"? I'm much fonder of googles less-intrusive context-sensitive ads, and despise pop up windows and DHTML covers on pages. But it leads me to wonder if certain services (geocities?) would remain economically feasible.
That's half the question. The other thing the article shows the average reader (myself included), is that the press and community is quick to jump on corporate intervention in corporate-sponsored open source projects (or whatever term you prefer for Mozilla). All the better that it was a false alarm, but it was interesting to see how they went defensive.
Re:Where's the return for publishers without the a (Score:2)
//rdj
Politics (Score:3)
Or, even worse, banners would start to come in new shapes and sizes. As it is, they're common enough to be almost subliminally recognizable, and therefore ignored. If they start to change because of banner-blocking, they're going to be just as obnoxious as when they first started to become popular.
Leave the banners alone, I say -- at least as far as the major apps go. If you really don't like them, there are several good third-party progs that will take care of them fairly effectively (including /. banners, which I no longer see).
Comercials (Score:5)
So is it stealing to switch channels or change radio stations durring commercials? Is it immoral to fastforward commercials on recorded TV programs? Or the real killer: should TVs with features that automatically mute commercials or change the channel for you be banned?
Of course, just like radio and TV commercials, I dont "block" them I usually just tune them out. Never even pay attention. I think most people have that sort of "viewing habbit".
Re:They should get rid of it. (Score:3)
This is patent nonsense. There is nothing, NOTHING, illegal, immoral, or unjust, about blocking advertising. You may as well tell me that it is stealing when I mute the commercials on my television. If I wish to ignore the advertising and the browser allows me this capability, then I will gladly do so. If they wish to prosecute me for stealing, then let them do so. I will live well off of the resulting lawsuits.
The Second Amendment Sisters [sas-aim.org]
Re:They should get rid of it. (Score:2)
If you can block out advertisements, you are no longer paying. You are essentially stealing.
When I get my snail mail, the first thing I do is sort through it and dump all the glossy ads in the recycling bin. Same with the newspaper. This is my right-- that paper is being delivered to me, and as such is mine to do as I wish with.
Now, when I use a web browser, it's downloading files from a site onto my computer. Who's to say that those files once downloaded onto my computer aren't fair game for throwing in the trash, if I choose to do that.
I think these two scenarios are very comparable.
Wouldn't matter much (Score:2)
a) All graphics, ads and content
b) No graphics.
An evil webmaster would make sure that the site really sucked in alternative b) and as I claimed: Big sites would get away with it, small sites would not.
Re:They should get rid of it. (Score:2)
I read web pages with images turned off. Is this considered stealing too? But I don't get to see all the pretty stuff either. What if some ads are in JS popup windows, or in Java? Would I be forced to turn those on too?
What about stuff like junkbuster? That would have to be banned, because it's used for stealing.
I would disagree. Some content on the internet is free. Some you have to pay for. Those that you pay for you pay with your credit card before they send you a login. Others you pay for by giving them an email address they can send ads to.
Just because they would rather we watch ads and give them money, doesn't mean we must submit to them.
---
Netscape 6 (Score:2)
Now, it's almost a joke. I upgraded to N6 for about half an hour, then went back to 4.7. The power of the Dark Side has grown strong....
What's next? Is IE going to become the One True Browser?
The Good Old Days! (Score:2)
Can I get an amen?
Re:They should get rid of it. (Score:5)
Personally, I regard these advertisements as stealing my meager 33.6KBPS bandwidth from me, and in some cases holding the rest of the webpage hostage until they load themselves. The animated ones are especially bad in this regard, as they're essentially not just one image, but several. And this is saying nothing of the privacy issues that allow people like DoubleClick to track where you go from page to page with them even without using cookies. No thanks; include me out.
Furthermore, almost no money is ever made from banner ads anyway; most people ignore them and almost nobody ever clicks on them. Incidentally, the technology to block ad-blockers does exist. Mind's Eye Fiction [tale.com] uses it in their "read our stories for free by viewing banner ads" payment option. If places really wanted to force their viewers to see the banners, they could use it.
I regard banner ads as being similar to spam email, and feel justified in using whatever means I can to block them.
I also use the "mute" button on my TV set during commercials...does that make me a bad man, too?
--
probably not all that useful anyway (Score:2)
However, being able to right-click on an image and select "no more images from this site" is convenient. I hope that feature will survive.
I would hope that one way or another, Mozilla will actually become as customizable as Emacs, with user-definable hooks for most actions. Then, you could define URL-PRELOAD-HOOK, URL-POSTLOAD-HOOK, FORM-PRESUBMISSION-HOOK, and all those things yourself to implement the privacy and advertising policies you like yourself.
In short.... (Score:3)
Not that I mind seeing Slashdot becoming the web's answer to 20/20 style investigative reporting, but it doesn't seem like there's much left to discuss.
Where's the return for publishers without the ads? (Score:2)
In this content, junk-busting banner ads feels to me as if the reader is trying to welsh on their part of the bargain.
Thanks
Bruce
Re:The Good Old Days! (Score:2)
Actually, I'm thinking it's time to go back to Archie and ftp.
Morality question - Is this not theft? (Score:2)
If this were to really happen you would run the risk of moving into an arms race between website designers trying to squeeze their banners past the checks (in order to gain ad-revenue) and the browser hackers trying to eliminate them. Now obviously there is little to stop individuals from patching browsers, proxies etc.. Themselves but really and truly is this not steeling from the web publishers?
this will block services like akamai (Score:2)
but then I started thinking about me as a developer and sites that I've built to make heavy use of services like akamai [akamai.com]. now _none_ of my images will show up in your browser because all of the images are served out of akamaitech.net (akamai's distributed network). now it doesn't sound so great...
unless I could setup akamaitech.net as an exception, and therefore acceptable to fetch images from (but how many average joe users of netscape would actually understand why my page looked bad in the first place?). but then, if I allow akamai images, the ad banner folks will just start akamaizing their delivery (not a bad idea to begin with), and I'm back to square one...
just my (probably incoherent) ramblings...
- mark
how about (Score:2)
...................
Re:They should get rid of it. (Score:2)
So, do you dutifully sit attentively through TV commercials, and then jump up to drain your blatter and grab another brew when the movie starts up again?
--
I've been following this pretty closely... (Score:5)
I read all the news.mozilla.org newsgroups pretty regularly (IANAP: "I am not a programmer"). Around a year or a year and a half ago there was debate about an image-blocking feature. Many developers took the attitude of "Banner ads are how many many sites make money; we think that including this feature would result in sites that we support losing money."
I, and others, disagreed with this: it was debateable who was making money with banner ads in the first place, and furthermore we felt that their argument could be made about cookies and a dozen other technologies. Users clamor for the the ability to control their browsing experience, and Mozilla, an org with users, not a corporate strategies, as their motive, was refusing to implement this feature.
Time passed. The double-click scandal broke. Image filtering shareware/add-ons appeared in earnest. Icab (a great Mac web-browser) appeared with amazing image-filtering capabilities.
And then, one day, image filtering appeared in Mozilla! There were almost no discussions of it in the newsgroups, and my attempts to start threads failed. But I was VERY happy.
The functionality was part of the cookie-filtering scheme they had in place. You could check "ask before accepting a cookie" and "ask before accepting an image" from the prefs, and then you'd get a dialog box saying "the site images.slashdot.org wants to load an image..." You could accept this one time, refuse this one time, or have your decision remembered for the future. I quickly refused for all time "doubleclick.com" images and cookies, and quite a few others. I didn't only block banner images; I found that a site like moviefone.com works MUCH faster with no images, so I perminantly rejected them.
Then, one day, the image-blocking functionality was gone. I asked and asked why on the UI newsgroups, but no one responded, excpet with the standard "If you want it, you do it." I finnally decided I WAS going to try to add the functionality back, if I could. (I was hoping that any C++ programming was still in place, and that the only code that was removed were the XML and JavaScript files that make up Mozilla's user interface.)
I poked around, and learned a bunch. (Mozilla is going to be really good, I think.) Before I got deeply into it, I found a post by Mike Shaver on the LAYOUT newsgroup (I think Netscape pays him to work on Mozilla). I include most of his message below becaue I think it points out a few things about Mozilla:
* Mozilla is composed mostly of developers who are working, not bothing to explain their thoughts to other people who aren't familiar with their projects;
* Different people involved with building Mozilla disagree about different stuff...after watching them, I'm convinced that their heirarchical structure is sound, that is, good, open minded, smart-as-shit people who seem to be good at managing other contributors are Module Owners;
* The pace of development is fast as shit.
I asked Mike to clarify his thoughts and he did. It seems to me that he wants to make "content blocking" broader than "image blocking;" that this fucntionality will be part of a general "zones" pref where users can block according to zones. There has been MUCH discussion about this in Mozilla for a while, and it seems like it's going to get done "the RIGHT WAY."
Here's Mike's post:
Subject: lighting a candle: nsIContentPolicy
Date: 26 Apr 2000 01:44:16 GMT
From: shaver@zeroknowledge.com (Mike Shaver)
Organization: evil evil evil men
Newsgroups: netscape.public.mozilla.layout
I dislike a number of things about the current image-blocking infrastructure, namely:
- it causes core layout functionality (imagelib) to depend on the ``cookie'' extension,
- the control interfaces are mushed into the cookie manager, which seems to me to be unrelated, and
- it's insufficiently general: I might well want to block or or or the same way.
So I spent some time thinking about this, because it's really not helpful to just bitch (thought I confess that I did a fair bit of that, too), and came up with the attached.
Basically, I have a general interface for controlling the loading of certain kinds of out-of-line content, and for controlling the processing of certain kinds of in-line content. (I'm not so sure the latter is useful, but it's nagging at me that I'd like to do something with it, and I with the current state of API pressure I'd rather get it in and have it be unused or disabled later than have to champion it during more conservative times.)
I will add to this by providing an implementation of nsIContentPolicy, which will in turn load all the registered policy widgets (via a "content-policy" category). The attached patch is not by any means complete, and is probably not worth applying, but it shows where I'm
headed. I'm going to hack more on this week's SFO round trip, batteries willing, and see if I can't get it ready to land. I hope to adapt split
the cookie manager into a new extensions/content-policy component, but I
might need some help with that.
Comments welcome, of course.
{patch snipped}
Re:Where's the return for publishers without the a (Score:3)
In this content, changing the channel feels to me as if the viewer is trying to welsh on their part of the bargain.
Thanks"
How much sense did the preceeding paragraph make? None at all. There is no material difference between the situation with regards to banner ads and the situation in the case of commericials on television. I certainly did not make any bargain with the web sites that I read or visit to view their ads; they (they being the operators of the sites) chose to make their sites freely accessible to anyway with an IP address and a web browser. Did I have to click-through a license agreement to view the site? Would such a click-through license even be valid? Once the banner ads leave the server of the web site, I can do anything I want with them, including rejecting connections (via ipmasq) from the server at the port level, filtering out the images via a proxy, or instructing my browser not to display the ads.
Re:Where's the return for publishers without the a (Score:4)
This is silly. Lets face it, banner ads exist now not because they're actually worthwhile, getting linked in a single article on
Most of the advertising "revenue" made these days is not in fact revenue at all, invariably its part of a banner-swapping deal, I'll run banners for you if you run banners for me. Even in the cases where there is money paid, in plainly doesn't make sense:
Site A gets money for ad views
Therefore Site A is more profitable if it gets more hits
Therefore Site A pays other sites to advertise, to increase its hits, so that those hits translate into ad views...for other sites...
The only places that are actually playing this game effectively are sites with valuable content, which are populated by word of mouth more than anything else (/. being a prime example), and sites that are making real sales on their website (Amazon etc).
These are a small fraction of the web, the rest is populated by mediocre content attempting to increase its hit rate by getting banners everywhere it can, a pointless exercise as users have now almost entirely done the job Mozilla would only complete, they've tuned out.
Even if they do read the banner ad, they've been stung so many times by clicking on an ad to find a boring, pointless or overly complex page that they no longer bother. The ads are intrusive but we appear to be mentally well equiped from years of TV to filter them out without even realising it.
How many of you even notice ads on
The massive popularity of banner ads is a simple result of human need for a solid number. We can't estimate our websites effectiveness in terms of brand awareness, we can't develop a solid business plan for a website based on word of mouth, we need numbers. We got n hits, we sold n ads, we bought n ads, next month we will sell n ads and buy m ads and get n hits. Pretty graphs, but utterly useless when you realise that the revenue is actually n-m, often a negative number.
Doubleclick and co know this, they've seen it coming, and they're desperately trying to increase the effectiveness of their trade. Targetted ads, profiling etc, but it isn't really working because its too late, they overdid it at the start and now we're filtering out anything that looks vaguely like an ad.
I don't however expect a recognition of this from either ad companies or businesses that buy and sell ads. Why? its like every other currency that we have, a vast portion of it is illusory, its a convinience that gives us a justifiable excuse to do something. Does anybody ever believe the US will pay off its national debt? no. Does that stop them trading with the US in US$? no, its the currency itself that has become important, not the backing behind it.
But if you want to create a successful website, as opposed to a website with pretty graphs, you need to listen not to the accountants, but to the users. The Cluetrain (http://www.cluetrain.org/) has it all there for you in nice bullet points.
I say putting advertising blocks in Mozilla is merely acknowleging the truth of the situation, its being honest and it may well have the effect of having website operators start building their websites with a view to how the web really works, instead of the current communal delusion.
My 2c
Re:Netscape 6 (Score:2)
...it's not running on Windows!
Re:you forgot one: (Score:2)
I thought this was better than avg /. (Score:4)
Overall, I have been quite pleased with the quality of news that Jamie reports on. I was especially impressed with her series on library e-censorship. Most articles are simply a link and a short opinion commentary. This was more than that. It is clear that Jamie went out of her way to e-mail developers and verify the facts that she could. Sure, she could have e-mailed various execs at AOL to find out what happened, but it is unlikely that she would find a response.
I don't dislike the normal format. In fact I find it somewhat refreshing that Slashdot culls its news from its users. But I think that there is room for this sort of journalism too. I personally don't have the time to e-mail developers from the Mozilla project to find out exactly why this feature (which I like) was removed.
I felt that this article did exactly what it was intended to do. It brought up an issue of contention within the Open Source community, and then it explained some of the views and rationale behind the feature removal.
No, this wasn't a "Whoa cool, we have practical worm holes now" sort of article, but it was informative. It is also abundantly clear that Jamie cares about producing "News for Nerds."
I say "Bravo!"
Kudos for some of the better journalism that I've seen on Slashdot.
Morality, and the Atom Bomb of TiVo (Score:2)
Viewing advertisments is not paying for your content. You are under no obligation, implied or otherwise, to view ads. The content is offered for free.
While the assumption made by the sponsor is that X content viewers = X ad viewers = x-y(rational people)= actual sales, that is an assumption, not a compulsion or obligation.
Whether y is the number of people who think for themselves, or y is the number of people who hit the mute button on their remote during commercials, or y is the number of people who get up and go potty or grab a beer, or use TiVo to time-shift past the commercials, or whether y is the number of people who disable banners, that assumption is made by the sponsor, and is risk inherent in the venture, and is reflected in the value of the ad "real-estate".
The only real effect here is that our value for Y increases, and the risk to sponsors rises, and therefore the value of that ad real-estate declines. The outcome, a simple escalation of advertising: 1 ad previously viewed by 100,000 people costs $100,000, now viewed by 10,000 people, now only costs $10,000, so instead of one ad, the content providers must now sell 10 ads to get the same revenue. Or, the content provider must also provide a better method of binding the advertising to the content - which will result in, probably, proprietary content formats bound to proprietary viewers, which do not permit ad filtering. (or in a simpler form, probably ad banners that originate on the same server and rotate via a CGI or something).
Either way, the costs to content providers and advertisers will increase, again decreasing the value of the ad "real-estate".
While we can imagine this game running a few dozen rounds in web browsers, other than stuff like product placement, I don't really see any alternative to ad-supported TV broadcasting when you throw a powerful weapon like TiVo into the mix.
Except a migration to a pay-per-view model.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
Re:They should get rid of it. (Score:2)
I pay for my internet account, I pay for my bandwidth, I pay for my email box, yet when I decide how I want to use it, I'm stealing? What planet did you come from? I'm STEALING if I don't allow ads I DON'T want wasting bandwidth I PAID for? Who moderated this guy to insightful? I'd like to show him what stealing really is.
-- iCEBaLM
Re:They should get rid of it. (Score:2)
Who's stealing from who? (Score:2)
As a webmaster of a site that has ad banners on it to offset server costs, personally, I regard people that block my banners as stealing content from me.
Nobody's forcing you to go to these sites with banners. The bandwidth isn't being "stolen", it's a condition of viewing the page.
So roll your own and don't rely on the browser (Score:2)
http://members.tripod.com/Proxomitron/
Then put together a list of "kill" characteristics. Suggestions would include domains you don't want to retrieve and known banner sizes. There are numerous configurable ad banner killers where you can get this information.
Not running Windoze? Sorry, Proxomitron is only written for windows. I've sent email to the author asking about conversion to Linux for use in firewalls but never got any response. Maybe somebody else will have better luck. Sure would like to know if they do.
fredthompson@mindspring.com
Perhaps... (Score:2)
Perhaps....
Far too many people have trouble with that last one...
The reality of web advertising (Score:2)
Re:They should get rid of it. -- Hardly (Score:2)
I use Proxomitron [cjb.net] (Windows app) to filter ads and annoying java script - it works brilliantly and it's free.
The perils of using a beta release (Score:2)
You haven't tried NS6 - it hasn't been released! There's a *reason* why people call things ß releases. It's because they are *not ready for general consumption*. So please try the release version before deciding whether or not it is a joke.
Blocking Ads is Not Stealing (Score:5)
I run a site that gets all income from ads, plus a few T-shirt sales. I like to sell ads. I like to get money from ads. I like to spend the money I get from ads on fun stuff like huge servers and tiny cel phones. And yet, with all that, it strikes me as unmitigated nonsense to claim that not viewing ads is stealing.
It's completely unsupportable to say that by reading my page, you've entered into some sort of contract, the terms of which are hidden from you and changed according to how I'd like to make money. Yes, if people turned off all ads, it would affect my income. It would also affect my income if people stopped buying the stupid crap they see in ads (like tiny cel phones, for instance), or if they didn't want to wear T-shirts with the name of my site on them, but I'd laughed off the net if I claimed that there was some sort of invisible contract that required you to buy a shirt after enjoying so many features.
Publishers of free content, myself included, are taking advantage of a series of coincidences, that's all; sometimes these coincidences verge in such a way that someone spends some money, and thousands of companies are designed to make this happenstance more likely. It's a sign of naivete (on the part of readers) and hubris (on the part of the aforementioned companies) to claim that this thin thread of chance constitutes some sort of fundamental right to not only make money, but to make money the way you're used to.
Anyhow, all this back-and-forth could be avoided by making the invisible contract visible. Just require readers to register and sign a contract stating that they will read all ads assiduously and consider them deeply. And then you can watch as the readers fail to beat a path to your virtual door. Sometimes chance is more effective than certainty.
So what happens if banner ads disappear?. I'd be sorely surprised to see the entire Web roll over and close up shop (to mix metaphors rather badly). The very fact that paid ads for free services exist is a tribute to the ability of those who want money to get it from those who have some to spare. And if the money isn't there? Personally, I'm insulted by those who claim that all art and entertainment would dissolve into wisps if they didn't pay big bucks (not that they do now, not on the Web at least). Do these people really think that I put up cartoons about masturbating Chinese food because of the favorable cost/benefit ratio? Sure, I have no problem making money from it, in the same sense that I'd have no problem with being paid to eat tri-tip sandwiches. But the reason I do it is because these things are in my brain and I take sick pleasure in making sure people know it. The same applies to any artist or entertainer worth the name.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Content Free Reporting (Score:2)
Re:Who's stealing from who? (Score:2)
Of course, that would also break compatibility with Lynx, but hey, who uses that old thing anymore anyway (sarcasm sarcasm)?
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Re:The Real Story - there isn't one (Score:2)
But, like I said, I hope you're right.
Contacts were attempted (Score:2)
Jamie specifically noted that only one of several developers responded to his queries:
Getting any developers to talk about this bug has been like pulling teeth. Only one of the developers I contacted (repeatedly) even bothered to return my email.
(Maybe they've never heard of Slashdot?)
This is consistant with several other reports -- I'd also exchanged email with Blake Ross. Two emails (one asking if he'd posted to Kuro5hin [kuro5hin.org]) netted a grand total of "that's me :)" in response.
While I haven't seen compelling evidence of skulduggery in this case, Netscape/AOL have been less than forthcoming.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Scope out Kuro5hin [kuro5hin.org]
Re:So roll your own and don't rely on the browser (Score:2)
www.squidguard.org [squidguard.org]
The differences seem to be that SquidGuard is aimed at servers and departments, while Proxomitron is aimed at users.