Chrome's Ad Blocker Will Go Global On July 9 (venturebeat.com) 129
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google today announced that Chrome's ad blocker is expanding across the globe starting on July 9, 2019. As with last year's initial ad blocker rollout, the date is not tied to a specific Chrome version. Chrome 76 is currently scheduled to arrive on May 30 and Chrome 77 is slated to launch on July 25, meaning Google will be expanding the scope of its browser's ad blocker server-side. Google last year joined the Coalition for Better Ads, a group that offers specific standards for how the industry should improve ads for consumers.
In February, Chrome started blocking ads (including those owned or served by Google) on websites that display non-compliant ads, as defined by the coalition. When a Chrome user navigates to a page, the browser's ad filter checks if that page belongs to a site that fails the Better Ads Standards. If so, network requests on the page are checked against a list of known ad-related URL patterns and any matches are blocked, preventing ads from displaying on the page. Because the Coalition for Better Ads announced this week that it is expanding its Better Ads Standards beyond North America and Europe to cover all countries, Google is doing the same. In six months, Chrome will stop showing all ads on sites in any country that repeatedly display "disruptive ads."
In February, Chrome started blocking ads (including those owned or served by Google) on websites that display non-compliant ads, as defined by the coalition. When a Chrome user navigates to a page, the browser's ad filter checks if that page belongs to a site that fails the Better Ads Standards. If so, network requests on the page are checked against a list of known ad-related URL patterns and any matches are blocked, preventing ads from displaying on the page. Because the Coalition for Better Ads announced this week that it is expanding its Better Ads Standards beyond North America and Europe to cover all countries, Google is doing the same. In six months, Chrome will stop showing all ads on sites in any country that repeatedly display "disruptive ads."
Not needed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Google last year joined the Coalition for Better Ads
That makes as much sense as a Coalition for Better Nuclear Weapons, or Coalition for Better Malaria.
a group that offers specific standards for how the industry should improve ads for consumers.
Do those "standards" include websites not showing ads that originate from a network, or contain content, not under their control? Do those standards include websites being held liable for ads that deliver malware? No? Then fuck you.
Ads used to just be annoying. Now they are a major vector for malware distribution, due to a combination of greed, laziness, incompetence, greed and greed.
There is no such thin
Standards ban eight ad formats (Score:5, Informative)
Do those "standards" include websites not showing ads that originate from a network, or contain content, not under their control?
No. The standards ban eight distinct ad formats deemed unacceptably annoying in tests:
- pop-ups (other than exit intent pop-ups)
- autoplaying audio (other than preroll before relevant video)
- vertical ad density over 30 percent of article space
- sticky ad taller than 30 percent of the scrolling area
- prestitials (with countdown on desktop or at all on mobile)
- postitials with countdown
- animated ads that include flashing elements
- screen-height ads that appear as a float rather than inline, thereby pausing scrolling of the article behind it (a format that I haven't personally seen in the wild)
They do not discern whether the ads are served by the publisher or by a third party, nor whether serving them relies on surveiling the viewing habits of each visitor across numerous unrelated websites in order to infer each visitor's interests.
Currently, the standards page [betterads.org] includes a pile of 404 errors with -archived-0 in URLs, but the links from the research page [betterads.org] still work.
Once most search results are from shunned sites (Score:2)
Let's say that displaying an anti-adblock notice is "the last time I'd visit such a website". In that case, good luck using the web after the majority of results for a given search query end up being from sites that you have vowed to no longer visit.
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Agreed.
PUNCH THE MONKEY TO WIN A CAR
This is too little, too late. If this had been around
*race car engine revs, tires screech*
fifteen years ago when ads started getting
FIND HOT GIRLS IN YOUR LOCAL AREA
particularly invasive and annoying and ad companies
PUNCH GEORGE W BUSH TO WIN PRIZES
were participating in a race to the bottom, people
YOU'VE WON! CLICK HERE TO CLAIM YOUR PRIZE!
might be more sympathetic their plight.
(Fake ads brought to you by the year 2004.)
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I don't see how this is even "blocking ads," it is merely "blocking google's competitors."
They're going to get sued for monopoly abuse in 12 countries for this.
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We already have ad blockers that block ALL ads
We do? I use AdBlockPlus, and I still see a whole lot of ads! Sites are more and more learning how to get around the ad blockers.
All ads are none compliant (Score:1)
Ads have no place on the internet.
Re:All ads are none compliant (Score:4)
Ads have no place on the internet.
How much have you donated to Slashdot to ensure its financial ability to continue to publish what you wrote? Would you prefer that your favorite sites all go behind a paywall? If not, I'd be interested to read about your third option to fund full-time operation of a website other than ads or paywalls.
Re: All ads are none compliant (Score:3)
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Sans ads and the marketing behind /. It would probably cost $40US a month to run.
It's more than that. SoylentNews is a news aggregator site with a similar concept (and codebase) to Slashdot. Its statement of finances for the first and second quarters of 2017 [soylentnews.org] shows $270 per month for the server and backups and a hefty chunk of change for tax payments and tax compliance costs.
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How much have you donated to Slashdot to ensure its financial ability to continue to publish what you wrote?
Full disclosure: I used to subscribe to Slashdot. I don't nowadays because its subscribe button [slashdot.org] has been broken for years:
SoylentNews, by contrast, still has a working subscribe button (and working Unicode).
Home Internet with only hobby sites (Score:2)
As you point out, the Internet used to consist of sites run as a hobby. It also used to be exclusive to universities. If the Internet were to shrink to again consist of sites run as a hobby, would those sites alone cause enough demand to justify upkeep of the infrastructure for high-speed access at home?
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If Internet ads were banned, legal TV would fall squarely into the paywall category, as would erotic paysites. The U.S. has already started to see multichannel subscription IPTV services such as Sling and DirecTV Now. As for illegal TV, ISPs aren't allowed to mention that in advertising. MGM v. Grokster, 545 U.S. 913 (2005).
Ads have a place (Score:3)
Sometimes, I'm looking for a product to buy. There's a lot of research I have to do to eliminate unsuitable brands, but there are several left. But at that point I'm pretty much asking to be advertised to.
The issue is normally it's a crappy brand I've eliminated that advertises to me.
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The problem is that ads did make sense, back when they were a simple bar, or text based stuff. Then came the video ads, then the pop-ups, and so on. Now, one of the biggest infection vectors around is malvertising, with ad companies turning a blind eye to malicious code served through their networks because the delivery mechanism can be widespread and not hit an IP range twice in a close interval.
Once ads became security issues, ad-blocking has become more vital than an AV program. I've even personally t
Good news (Score:5, Funny)
You can never have enough ad-blockers/tracking blockers running in your browser, as long as there is stull some memory left in your device to actually display the content you were trying to see.
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Calling this an "ad-blocker" is a misnomer on your part. It's an ad-filterer. No doubt someone will defeat their filtering and google will again serve malware right through to your desktop.
It's built-in. If you want to compile your own browser (or use a fork like Chromium) feel free.
Just because a browser offers protection, doesn't mean you can't add more, with access you can control which was exactly my point.
It's like people using AdBlock Plus, not knowing ABP has "paid exceptions"
"
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Nobody said it wasn't built-in (although it isn't, yet) and that irrelevant point changes nothing about the above. It's NOT an adblocker. You can turn off ABP paid exceptions with a single click, it's trivial. Try that with google anything. Nope!
You're trying to avoid the important part, that Google is not a trustworthy actor either in delivering ads or protecting users of their browser. Expecting this to supplant actual ad-blocking is for Google execs, and their derpy pawns.
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No sir, I don't trust you. (Score:1)
And I don't want to see "compliant" ads either, fuck you, I'll continue blocking every single goddam ad/frame/beacon and you data thief schmucks can go have a shvitz in HELL, how bou dah?
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fuck you, I'll continue blocking every single goddam ad
I can think of one practical problem with your suggestion if it were to become widely adopted. It'd...
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You do realize Slashdot clones exist that have no ads at all?
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I'm aware of SoylentNews. It has no ads, but the featured articles it links to have just as many ads as the featured articles that Slashdot links to.
Question (Score:1)
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Easy, they disable their competitors ads...
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This part is odd for me. How is this not a monopolist leveraging their near-monopoly in desktop and android mobile browser markets to attack their competitors in advertising field which is their main money maker?
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Why do you think it isn't?
Does that get punished before it happens, or after? What stage are current events at?
Has this corporation received a major monopoly smack-down in the past? If not, why would they even have internal processes to protect against it?
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Yes, this is good ads/bad ads as defined by a "third party" that Google sits on the board of. And that info was in the summary, you didn't even need to read the article.
Won't block YouTube ads. (Score:3)
Google makes way too much money for something like this to block video ads on YouTube. I'm sure this is more of an effort to make it more difficult for people to identify which ad blocker they should use because there is no way this thing blocks YouTube ads.
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How YouTube ads don't fail the standards (Score:2)
Preroll ads before "video content that is relevant to the content of the page itself" are not one of the eight ad formats that the Better Ads Standards ban. The ban on autoplaying audio [betterads.org] explicitly does not ban preroll ads.
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Basically, this is going to mean the end of auto-play ads with sound, and not much more.
Re:Won't block YouTube ads. (Score:5, Interesting)
Not only that, if it blocks Facebook and other competitive ad networks, but not doubleclick/google ads, it seems like that's very much in Google's interest.
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In February, Chrome started blocking ads (including those owned or served by Google)
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Yes, if they violate Google's "good ad" policy. (Technically 3rd party, but they're on the board.) Odds that Google's ads don't meet their own policy? I mean, sure it sounds neutral. But it's not.
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Yes, if they violate Google's "good ad" policy. (Technically 3rd party, but they're on the board.) Odds that Google's ads don't meet their own policy? I mean, sure it sounds neutral. But it's not.
So you even know the policy is by a 3rd party but are being disingenuous anyway?
The policy covers how the ad behaves, not who delivers it. Nothing in what makes an ad "good" is restricted to something only Google can make.
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Goalpost shift. I said Google wasn't blocking its own ads (since its ads are going to comply with the behavior it prescribes.) That is, all Google ads are shown. You then went on a tangent about how non-Google ads may also be shown.
That said, maybe it was an accident. A lot of people get "All X are Y" and "Only X are Y" confused.
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Yes, I'm implying, and stating outright, that this is an anticompetive move by Google. The "acceptable ads" (which are not really determined by a third-party, because they're on that board) specifically exclude the most profitable ad types that Facebook and Amazon use. Sure it's "neutral", but it isn't. It allows what Google has been tuned for.
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I like your all caps, but there's actually no evidence Google's own ads were ever blocked. Google's ads aren't immune. There's a big fucking difference. That is, Google blocked all their ads that don't line up, all 0%. I
And Google was also involved in talks with the organization in the beginning. The standards group was founded at a pro-advertisers conference (and covered here on /.)
Or show me a single example of an ad served by Google being blocked.
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Re:Won't block YouTube ads. (Score:5, Insightful)
Google makes way too much money for something like this to block video ads on YouTube. I'm sure this is more of an effort to make it more difficult for people to identify which ad blocker they should use because there is no way this thing blocks YouTube ads.
It's an effort to push people away from using current blanket ad blockers by getting rid of the most annoying ads. If people follow through they will start to see more ads from Google as they will get rid of their ad blocker. I'm sure that's the thinking, anyway.
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All I see is an impostor joe-jobbing APK with a racist diatribe.
But the Better Ads Standards don't cover the content of ads. The Standards cover only ad formats. This means that as I understand it, Chrome won't block antisemitic ads unless they're pop-ups or something similar.
A step in the right direction (Score:1)
I use an ad blocker mostly as a security measure and it really is the shit shady semi-criminal ad networks that are responsible for most malware. Not saying the 'legit' networks are perfect and they can do a lot more to enforce their own networks.
This isn't perfect and I don't plant to use it, but for unskilled users this can potentially cut down on a lot of malware/scams and that's a good thing.
Conflict of interest? (Score:3)
Can we turn it off? (Score:5, Insightful)
I want to keep using a 3rd party extension with the important feature of NOT BEING INSTALLED BY DEFAULT
Simple.... Whatever Ad-Blocker is installed by default will be the ad-blocker that all the websites that want to show Ads spend their efforts detecting and making workarounds for.... workarounds like annoying prompts requiring you to "Whitelist" before being allowed to see the content referenced by the search link you clicked on.
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Exactly. Only a moron would trust google to do this properly and protect their users, that ship has sailed.
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"If you like your ad blocker, you can keep your ad blocker."
There's no actual cost to "not using Chrome at all", if they piss you off too much.
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I want to keep using a 3rd party extension with the important feature of NOT BEING INSTALLED BY DEFAULT
Simple.... Whatever Ad-Blocker is installed by default will be the ad-blocker that all the websites that want to show Ads spend their efforts detecting and making workarounds for.... workarounds like annoying prompts requiring you to "Whitelist" before being allowed to see the content referenced by the search link you clicked on.
The point is that this ad blocker will let through all compliant ads. So the scenario you're worrying about likely isn't going to happen. It will be easier for people to make their ads compliant rather than trying to find ways around Google's ad blocker. That's the whole idea: to make ads less annoying so fewer people install blanket ad blockers.
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The point is that this ad blocker will let through all compliant ads. So the scenario you're worrying about likely isn't going to happen.
Well... how the feature is explained it will block ALL ads, even Ads by Google, On websites that display ANY non-compliant ads.
I'm personally not 100% sure what a "Compliant ad" is, But this causes a few concerns.... (1) Does Google really agree with us on how much and what kind of ad placement would be "OK" ? (2) Does this include any feature where a 3rd
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I'm personally not 100% sure what a "Compliant ad" is...
Helpful examples of what is considered NOT compliant [betterads.org].
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Tracking protection installed by default in Fx (Score:2)
Whatever Ad-Blocker is installed by default will be the ad-blocker that all the websites that want to show Ads spend their efforts detecting and making workarounds for
The Mozilla Firefox web browser is installed by default on most GNU/Linux distributions and available for Windows, macOS, and Android. Private Browsing is installed by default (but not enabled by default) in Firefox. Private Browsing includes a "tracking protection" feature that causes Firefox not to connect to servers involved in large-scale surveillance of viewers' browsing habits across multiple websites to gather interest data and "retarget" viewers.
Sites could work around tracking protection by falling
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Great, this should kill those Google ads (Score:1)
I was getting tired of Google's ads. Hopefully it will stop Google collecting information about me too.
Ads are allowed (Score:2)
The bad third party ads get banned.
Always use a trusted ad blocker that's not made by an ad company.
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An entirely logical move by google (Score:2)
Google can't be trusted (Score:2)
It's time for President Trump to get out his trust-busting stick. Break up Alphabet!
Android - separate company
Chrome - separate company
YouTube - separate company
Gmail - separate company
Search - separate company
Advertising - separate company
Maps - separate company
Shut down the dangerous mad science projects. Shut down the wannabe-Skynet AI. Arrest the mad scientists and the executives that backed them.
Break up Alphabet now! Stop Google before it's too late!
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False prophets of religion have been replaced with false profits of capitalism. :-/
LD_PRELOAD module on the making (Score:1)
Better summary (Score:2)
Ah (Score:2)
Anti-Trust violation? (Score:2)
How is this not an anti-trust violation?
Google, a behemoth company, is using their dominance by blocking ads on third-party sites using the browser that they control, a browser that has 65% market share. The demand for advertising won't go away - it will just shift to Google Text Ads, meaning that publishers will have even fewer scraps to feed on.
Given how shoddy that "Coalition for Better Ads" site is (404s on what should be their main content pages), I wonder if they are just a front organization for Goog
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The Better Ads Standards ban eight ad formats. Any publisher or adtech provider can avoid this ad blocker by not running ads in those formats. Compared to the analogous Acceptable Ads program [acceptableads.com] that Eyeo runs, the Better Ads Standards are far more lenient (allowing inline ads between the start and end of an article) and do not require the publisher to pay to whitelist a site. The reason AdSense ads don't get blocked isn't that it's run by Google but that AdWords doesn't sell ad space in those formats to adver
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Not everything it bans are "formats". I would call these "formats" (which means a publisher can avoid them by not placing their code on the site):
- pop-ups (other than exit intent pop-ups)
- prestitials (with countdown on desktop or at all on mobile)
- postitials with countdown
- screen-height ads that appear as a float rather than inline, thereby pausing scrolling of the article behind it (a format that I haven't personally seen in the wild)
These two are ad characteristics that cannot be directly controlled b
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These two are ad characteristics that cannot be directly controlled by the publisher via the placement of code:
- autoplaying audio (other than preroll before relevant video)
<video autoplay muted>
- animated ads that include flashing elements
If the publisher can approve or veto creative before it appears on the site, the publisher can veto creative incorporating flashing. If the publisher cannot approve or veto creative before it appears on the site, the publisher can switch to a different ad network or exchange, switch to publisher-hosted ad delivery without any network or exchange, or not use video as a format.
As a publisher myself, I don't want to show such ads, but first, there is no option in a network that says "don't show animated ads with flashing elements"
You could drop animated ads altogether. If your network doesn't allow that, you could drop your network an
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> If the publisher can approve or veto creative before it appears on the site, the publisher can veto creative incorporating flashing. If the publisher cannot approve or veto creative before it appears on the site, the publisher can switch to a different ad network or exchange, switch to publisher-hosted ad delivery without any network or exchange, or not use video as a format.
Online advertising no longer works like that. It is all programmatic. No publisher personally approves programmatic creatives, th
No personalized newspaper or magazine ads (Score:2)
Online advertising no longer works like that. It is all programmatic.
By "programmatic" do you refer to it having become standard practice to run nonfree scripts [gnu.org] on viewers' computers to perform large-scale surveillance of viewer's browsing history across multiple unrelated websites? If so, then perhaps online advertising needs to cease being programmatic in this way.
I couldn't find anything in Google's DFP (most popular ad serving tool) that says "don't show flashing animation".
Is there anything saying "report this ad for standards violations, such as inaccessibility to viewers with a seizure disorder"?
No one sells ads directly on their sites to advertisers, that is not a viable model because advertisers want to get their message out to a variety of sites instead of "sponsoring" one or more pages on a single site.
Publishers of newspapers and magazines never printed ads customized to each individua
Control (Score:2)
Very nice. Google just gave themselves more leverage in dealing with advertisers. Big win for them.
Oh wait! I got the wrong message.
Google is so fucking awesome in how they think of the users of their browser. They block malicious ads for us! Thank you so much Google. You take care of us so well.
Or it it back to what I first said and now Google has a mechanism to assure advertisers that a particular ad was definitely displayed so pay us more to show that ad.
No no no. I must be a good person and thank Google
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Wow, you really are delusional. You think the apk file extension was a copy of your initials?
I think you forgot to take your meds again Andy
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