
The next version of Safari will let users block ads on iPhones and iPads - IBM
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/06/a-blow-for-mobile-advertising-the-next-version-of-safari-will-let-users-block-ads-on-iphones-and-ipads/
======
unholiness
I posted this on an earlier thread about the morality of AdBlock, but it seem
relevant to the discussion:

There is a huge irony in that fact that AdBlock's function of keeping ads away
from our content will eventually do the opposite. The alternative to ads
alongside my content is ads inside my content.

Let's face it: paywalls don't work. The alternative on the horizon is native
advertising. Buzzfeed is now famously refusing to host ads. Instead they
sustain themselves by publishing content that subtly supports the agenda of
any company with deep enough pockets to pay for it. A viewer's ability to
distinguish between native ads and regular articles is small and quickly
vanishing. If separate ads stop reaching people, the path to monetization
remaining is to change your content to reflect someone else's agenda.

I keep AdBlock off by default because I prefer a world where creators can make
a meaningful articles and a useful apps without caring about who they are
supporting, and can, as the price tag, separately attach an ad.

I do see it as a moral issue. There are good people making content that's
being sustained by ads. I am never going to remember to give them my modicum
of support if I don't consider them innocent until proven guilty. It's worth
the small annoyance. It's worth the 2 seconds it takes to turn it on for the
problematic pages. Hell, you can even map it to a shortcut[1]. It sucks, but
the alternative is positively bleak.

.

TL;DR: The bathroom may be dirty, but at least no one's taking a shit in my
kitchen.

[1]
[https://adblockplus.org/en/faq_customization#shortcuts](https://adblockplus.org/en/faq_customization#shortcuts)

~~~
hyperbovine
> The alternative to ads alongside my content is ads inside my content.

A false dichotomy if ever there was one. "Paywals" worked in literally every
single other sector of the economy for all of recorded human history (I know,
I know, who can remember that brief ~6000 year interlude between the Sumerians
and the Internet!) The continue to work at your local dry cleaner, grocery
store, Home Depot, etc. Really everything that doesn't require a browser.
There are all sorts of moral, social, economic, and environmental reasons to
be opposed to advertising. I keep AdBlock on by default because I dream of a
day when I can pay Google a decent sum of money each month in return for their
service.

~~~
ptman
[https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/](https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/)

~~~
felipeerias
I see people posting that link over and over, as it it made some kind of
valuable point. Do you realize that for this to work, you need to be
permanently tracked by Google?

~~~
mike_hearn
Er, yes. What is your proposed alternative? Ads have the advantage of being
anonymous and the "tracking" is optional (you can block cookies and see worse
ads, if you like). The alternative is to pay for things. On the internet
paying for things requires an account and (modulo bitcoin) a credit card,
neither of which are anonymous or private.

So far we cannot have our cake AND eat it. So you have to pick.

------
untog
This is a fantastic development for users. That being said, hopefully you can
permit me being a grouch:

Apple hasn't done this entirely out of the goodness of their own hearts. After
all, this isn't going to filter ads in native apps, is it? If you're a site
that relies on ad revenue you've just been given another reason to live in
app-land, not web-land.

Imagine you're a publisher. With one OS release Apple has provided the ability
to block ads on the web _and_ Apple News, a charming new platform for you to
publish your articles, complete with iAd integration. Which one are you going
to prioritise?

Not that this is an either-or thing: just like Google vacuums up your personal
data and gives you Google Now in return, Apple will push publishers towards
iOS apps while also giving you a great web experience.

~~~
MBCook
As a longtime iOS user browsing the web keeps getting worse.

These are getting bigger, they're more resource intensive thanks to
'waterfall' design. They push up my data usage.

They spam open the App Store, and are all around broken. Recently I can't
watch videos on some sites because ads elsewhere on the page grab the click
and pop a new tab open.

They take longer to load than the real content. Then they MOVE the real
content AFTER I STARTED READING because it took them that long to load.

I've used a Flash blocked on my laptop for years, but I didn't used to care
about blocking on iOS because it wasn't a problem.

That has ABSOLUTELY changed in the last year or two. Reader mode used to fix
sites but as they do more stupid JS trickery that often doesn't work.

I keep running across articles I literally CAN NOT read on my phone due to
these kinds of issues.

Ignore iAds and Goigle and privacy (all good points). This is starting to
seriously degrade my iOS experience and I'm not surprised Apple was moved to
do it.

~~~
joosters
You can block ads on iOS right now (but it's not easy): install 'privoxy' on a
home computer and set up your iPad to use it as a proxy server.

~~~
randcraw
Use Atomic Web or Mercury as your browser. Both will block ads. I've used AW
for about 3 years on both my iPhone and iPads. I couldn't live without it.

------
niccaluim
His list of arguments for using ad blockers left out what I imagine is the #1
reason, which is "you're filling my eyeballs with garbage."

~~~
hellbanTHIS
The new thing they're trying is what you could call "gross-bait" ads, one gem
that comes to mind is the girl's legs with indentations in them and white
things coming out.

I'm not even sure they're selling anything anymore, most web ads seem more
like psychological warfare.

How about a subscription service - and it could be a voluntary honor system
thing - where you pay something each month and it gets distributed to websites
you visit, and in order for a site to register with the service they have to
forgo advertising. I'd pay $10 a month to do my part to rid the world of web
ads. Somebody steal that idea.

~~~
minthd
>>I'd pay $10 a month to do my part to rid the world of web ads.

I read somewhere that the number is close to $70/family/month, growing at %10
per year. Would you still pay ? Would this model even fit most people ?

~~~
rayiner
I'd pay hundreds of dollars a month to be free of all the ads that bombard me
from every fucking direction every fucking waking minute of my life. I'd love
Apple to get so big and monopolistic they could curate the Internet, and you'd
just pay them a monthly fee and they'd pass a percentage on to the sites you
visited.

~~~
harryh
Adblock?

~~~
rayiner
I use it on my desktops, but feel kind of like I'm littering. I would like to
pay for the content if possible. Also, where do I get ad block for IRL. Some
airports have ads on their escalator handles now.

------
oldpond
I can imagine a world without advertising quite easily. If you could snap your
fingers and make all advertising disappear the world would be a better place.
Sure, TV and Radio would disappear, but who needs it? I stopped listening to
Radio years ago,and people are fleeing from TV in droves. I remember the
internet before the "make a buck off the internet" crowd showed up. They can
all fall out as far as I'm concerned. The beauty of the internet is that you
don't have to see advertising if you don't want to. And if the day comes when
it can't be avoided I'm turning it off. Wouldn't miss what the internet has
become now anyway, just another form of TV.

~~~
jgmmo
What makes you think TV and radio would disappear?

Can't content creators monetize their shows with other methods than third-
party ads? Like selling their own goods and services?

~~~
oldpond
Sure, there might be a trickle of user supported programming. I don't know how
successful satellite radio is these days. The whole reason TV and radio exist
is to bring advertising into our homes and cars. Those "commercial free'
stations are there to attract the audience back to the channel. For example,
Game of Thrones on HBO is there because Time Warner wants to keep it's TV
audience for it's other advertising channels. In other words, commercial free
shows are there to keep the medium alive.

------
endymi0n
Here's what's going to happen. Just a little while longer: nothing. As soon as
one big party will try to make a _significant_ impact on the ads market (more
than 20% at once), a big shift will happen, uniting Publishers all around and
shutting adblocking visitors out completely in a coordinated manner. Just like
Microsoft's opt-out only DNT-Field, the tide will quickly turn against Apple,
as soon as you can't read 50% of all web pages anymore because ads are blocked
by default (or a majority). Same thing with this Filter startup that wants to
block ads on a mobile provider level (forgot the name). As soon as people
realize that all the stuff on the internet isn't "free", but ad financed, they
will finally have to make the real choice themselves by opting in or paying.

~~~
modeless
I think it's more likely that ad networks will come up with a way for
publishers to start serving the ads from their own domains and with randomized
filenames etc. You can't block ads if you can't differentiate them from the
content in an automated way.

~~~
seiji
You give them way too much credit. The simplest ad blocker is just a user
stylesheet that hides "class='ad'". The complex ad blockers include variants
of that as well as network-blocking bad domains, but publishers+advertisers
are really really dumb in aggregate.

~~~
Encosia
I get the impression that today's CTR-driven advertisers would prefer _not_ to
show ads to folks who are actively trying to block them, because they would
almost never have generated useful clicks anyway. Kind of like how online
scammers purposely don't even try to sound legit, so that their leads are
better qualified when the gullible do eventually respond.

Effort invested in technical solutions to work around ad blockers might just
lower CTRs and be worse for everyone involved.

(edit: I don't mean to insinuate that online advertising is anything like a
scam; just that there are parallels in terms of targeting the correct audience
so that the effort is effective.)

~~~
specialk
I know this probably sounds counter-intuitive but the company that provided
the report mentioned twice in the article also have a blog post about how
adblock users click more ads than non-adblocking users[1]. There's not much
detail in the article to back up their claim but it's an interesting idea to
play around with.

[1] [http://blog.pagefair.com/2015/adblock-users-click-more-
ads/](http://blog.pagefair.com/2015/adblock-users-click-more-ads/)

~~~
Encosia
That is definitely interesting. I wonder if it's because they're more likely
to be contextually interested in ads on a site that they would go to the
effort of whitelisting, but that wouldn't actually be the case overall if they
were seeing every site's ads?

~~~
philwelch
I think it's because people who use adblockers aren't used to tuning out ads.

------
bsder
Great.

Maybe I can finally load a website on mobile in less than two minutes. Maybe I
can finally load websites without my _entire_ browser freezing for several
minutes while a zillion Javascript scripts all fight it out. Maybe I can
finally switch a tab and switch back without the entire website having to
reload because all the Javascript wants a new set of ads.

All of this could have been avoided if you loaded my content _FIRST_ and then
filled in the ad placeholders _SECOND_. But, noooooo, ads are more important
than content so my screen jumps around, my browser freezes, and my tabs reload
and reload and reload and reload.

Fuck 'em.

------
Osmium
Interesting that, at the same time, Apple is actively promoting iAds for
people to monetize its new news service. On the one hand, if you have to have
ads, it's probably better to have an ad platform under your control (where you
can enforce privacy and safeguard against performance issues), but it's still
not ideal (slippery slope later on?). I wonder if Apple's News app takes off
if, at a later date, they could introduce a paid tier Spotify-style to let
people read its news content without ads, and distribute the funds accordingly
to news providers who've signed up for it?

~~~
justaman
There are numerous issues with this business model. If we examine the parallel
of the app store. Many smaller app developers are frustrated with the "large
cut" Apple takes per download. Similarly in the music world, you have
Tidal(failing) and artists like Taylor Swift upset.

~~~
Osmium
For sure, but it could still be better than what publishers currently have,
which is basically nothing. Especially for smaller sites. Very few succeed
individually on a subscription basis, and micropayments haven't really taken
off.

I was wondering if they could calculate the cut they have based on the length
of time a person reads a given news source, which would promote long-form
content.

------
cwyers
And this is why Google moved heaven and Earth to get Android out the door,
even when it stalled all the momentum for its own ChromeOS.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Yet you'd still see users flock to iOS if Apple lowered the device price.

Disclaimer: Ex-Android user.

~~~
dublinben
The success of premium devices like the Galaxy Note and Galaxy S6 undermines
your argument that Android only succeeds based on price. Many consumers prefer
Android over iOS, and deliberately choose not to buy iPhones.

~~~
jay_kyburz
I bought my Nexus 4 on the promise of Android.

Damn thing crashed and rebooted when I was trying to answer a call the other
day.

There are so many UI issues. Material design might look nice, but sux in so
many other regards.

I will not buy another Android phone that's for sure.

~~~
nickonline
How long ago did you buy your NEXUS 4? That phone was released in 2012.

I think any iPhone from 2012 would be struggling under the current iOS as
well.

~~~
greedo
And you would be wrong. iOS 8 works fine on my iPhone 5. The iPhone 5 was
released in the fall of 2012.

------
aorth
I am sympathetic to content creators making money, but I don't think the trade
offs in privacy are worth it. For example, a recent Wired article about
Apple's WWDC[0] pleas with the user to "do us a solid" and whitelist their
site in their adblocker. Sadly, whitelisting that site in uBlock actually does
_28 sites_ a solid[1]. What's worse, their site doesn't even use HTTPS, so how
can I trust the code I get from them?

[0] [http://www.wired.com/2015/06/same-plans-
tech/](http://www.wired.com/2015/06/same-plans-tech/)

[1] [https://imgur.com/nqUQsML](https://imgur.com/nqUQsML)

------
Nursie
I don't want to see any ads. Ever.

In the UK we have the BBC, with no ads. I pay for Netflix and NowTv, so I can
watch movies and tv with no ads. I pay for spotify and get no ads.

For the web I run adblock on as many devices as I can because I hate them. I
am perfectly happy to have this detected and my access blocked.

I'd go as far as setting a 'will not render' header in my http requests if
that made it even easier.

I don't want to rip anyone off but neither do I want branded brain-pollution.

~~~
WorldWideWayne
Don't forget malware delivery on the web and in your native apps.

I think the worst kind of ads have to be those that get loaded into a native
app instead of a browser too because - who knows what kind of vulnerabilities
the given app has?

------
egwynn
I’ve started running a local instance of dnsmasq that returns NXDOMAIN for a
giant list of ad servers. For anything not in the list, it tosses the request
up to the real DNS server. I’ve found it to be a simple and effective way to
block lots of ads for all local network traffic.

------
guelo
FYI, Firefox for Android has had ad blocking extensions since it came out.

~~~
jusben1369
<insert snarky comment about the 12 people that's helped and get downvoted>

~~~
kibwen
Firefox for Android has been downloaded between 100 million and 500 million
times, which is a bit more than your estimate. :P

See
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fi...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.firefox)
-> "Additional information" -> "Installs".

And given that AdBlock isn't available for Chrome on Android, I wouldn't be
surprised if AdBlock for Firefox was a large motivator behind this statistic.

------
learc83
I wish there was a service that integrated with the major ad networks that
allowed you to pay money not to be show ads. Something were the majority goes
to the owners of the websites who's ads you're blocking.

~~~
manigandham
The issue is that this is a global business with hundreds of companies and
publishers and not much regulation (which is what I think is the real
solution), plus people aren't interested in subscriptions when they can just
download an extension and block everything for free.

Unfortunately, while I think the reasons for adblock can be valid, it's
allowing people to effectively take content without letting the producers earn
anything in return. Just because something is easy doesn't make it "right".

~~~
learc83
>Unfortunately, while I think the reasons for adblock can be valid, its
allowing people to effective take content without letting the producers earn
anything in return. Just because something is easy doesn't make it "right".

Do you feel the same way when someone mutes the TV during commercials?

What if I put a piece of tape across my monitor to block an fixed location
add?

I don't feel morally obligated to view ads on publicly accessible internet
sites in the same way that I don't feel obligated to stay in the room during
commercials.

I'll happily pay content providers if it's easy, but it's a utilitarian
decision for me not a moral one. If you put information in public, I don't
feel bad about viewing only the portion of that information that's useful to
me.

------
pasta_2
Tech/media companies dependent on advertising should just adapt. As techies
told a complaining music industry, just do concerts and sell t-shirts. Now
maybe this won't be as profitable as the current business model, and maybe the
industry will be smaller and more consolidated, but that's capitalism. No one
guaranteed you would keep growing and making more money.

Perhaps you'll have to stop using third-party ad networks and start selling
and creating your own ads. Native ads like Buzzfeed's sponsored posts could
work. It'll probably require more capital and won't scale as well, but you'll
just have to deal with that.

------
guptaneil
I think everybody is missing the point here. Content blockers are nice for ad
blocking, but an even better use case here is websites knowing whether or not
you have their mobile app installed.

Imagine a website that has an "Install our app" script that normally runs when
you view it on mobile, but that script gets blocked by their own app when it's
installed on your device. With a bit of creativity, you can do even cooler
things than that once you think about content blockers like this.

It's kind of the inverse of extensions, where websites can define various
extensions that are enabled or disabled accordingly by your installed apps.

~~~
douche
I would pay money for an extension that would prevent websites from
redirecting me from the full desktop version of their site to the crippled
"mobile-optimized" version. Especially when the full site has to load
completely, before a jQuery onready function fires to do the redirect...

~~~
alttab
This is temporary. Unfortunately, news sites have to get a clue...

------
alkonaut
I'm not sure I understand why Adblock still works? I mean, how can it be so
reliable in detecting ads? If I had a site with ads I'd try to make them as
unobtrusive as possible _and_ indistinguishable from my own content. A sidebar
of images with urls only from my own domain. If an ad network is used to serve
those images it can be proxies through my servers. There has to be some
technical reason why this isn't the standard way of doing it (for example that
it breaks advanced tracking, or that Adblock detects the actual contents).

~~~
kayoone
probably because it breaks view and meta (retargeting etc) tracking which is
why ad networks might not allow it

~~~
alkonaut
What hopefully happens is that either that advertising online becomes what it
is offline: dumb and expensive ads displayed to people on billboards and in
newspapers. This will effectcively kill the small operations that pay for
servers and bandwidth through ads.

 _or_

Ad networks will become content networks: a content provider (such as a
blogger) publishes their content to the network who bakes it together with ads
and displays it on the site in question. That is, you either get nothing or
you get content plus ads.

------
bsaul
I don't think a combo of dns aliasing to the ad network, plus better embedding
ads in the dom to make them look like a site's regular content, plus random
ordering of news and ads to prevent any kind of static css rules matching can
be countered.

Now of course that means ads will require a bit more work to integrate to a
website, and probably move integration deeper in the server side, but
technicaly i don't see any major issues. Am I missing something ?

~~~
rblatz
Most ads that pay the highest are retargeting ads. Meaning you went to an
online store looked at gadgets, that site included a snippet of js that said
to the ad network, "hey he looked at gadgets". Now the ad network shows you
ads for gadgets from that site. There isn't a good way to build that deeper
into the server, cookies don't work that way.

~~~
bsaul
You could configure the js to use another domain name to talk to, ( the same
as the original site), that would be just an alias to the ad network. Ad
blockers work on the http level, not on the dns one, so there's no way for
them to know the redirection did happen.

Or you could make it all happen on the server side. Just have the ad network
provide a server side plug in that would analyse incoming http request for
user blueprinting, and ask the ad server what ad to display. Then you'd just
have to include that content in your response.

------
joeblau
This is interesting. Does Googles mobile chrome browser have something similar
on Android? I'm not really a huge fan of advertising but this seems like a
feature that would make a certain group of users choose one browser over
another and I can't really see Google not adding mobile plugins to allow this
as some point.

~~~
throwaway2048
chrome on android has no plugin support, firefox does however.

------
emehrkay
Did Google recently say that most of their mobile ad revenue comes from iOS
users? I could see this prompting a Apple/Google cold war that would go as far
as iOS including ad blocking by default in a few years.

------
dj_doh
May be it's a good thing for the news/media industry. Why rely on flimsy ads.
If your news contents are credible and important to users they'll subscribe to
it a la Netflix or HBO Go.

~~~
erickhill
That's an extremely naive attitude, IMO. To this day, the vast majority of
publishers who rely on traffic and ad revenues simply can't afford to create
subscription walls and stay in business. In addition, Mobile Web revenues are
a tiny shred of revenue compared to desktop experiences. It isn't a huge leap
to expect this type of behavior in a future release for Safari in OS X, too.

~~~
Retric
The vast majority of publishers are terrible and I have no issue with them
disappearing.

------
joesmo
This is a step in the right direction but falls short of being the right
direction. An ad blocker built into a major browser and turned on by default
should long ago have been available.

This will hopefully push websites, especially news websites, to figure out
some other monetization strategy, one that's not based on ads and therefore
doesn't undermine the credibility of the news and the site.

So it's a win for consumers as no one wants to see ads as well as hopefully
taking consumers closer to ad free, unbiased news sources.

~~~
alogray
The next obvious target for monetization by news organizations are sponsored
articles. I've started to see them in certain San Francisco specific news
websites. It's not exactly the sort of thing we want to push these sites
toward.

~~~
kibwen
Press releases masquerading as news have been a tradition since time
immemorial:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

------
mmanfrin
This feels like a broadside attack at Google.

~~~
bb0wn
Came here to say just that. Apple seems to be trying to make the case that
users don't necessarily need to get in bed with creepy, data-mining-for-profit
platforms to receive good service.

Whether that's really true, or just good rhetoric...

------
jay_kyburz
Attention somebody looking for their next startup idea!

Content publishers need an innovative way to serve ads in a way that cannot be
distinguished from the content.

Perhaps by acting as a proxy for ad networks, perhaps by hosting the ads
directly.

I guess publishers will need to collect their own demographic information and
make it available to the advertisers.

------
raquo
Apple killing off publishers' revenue streams that it doesn't get a cut from?
Big surprise.

------
markbnj
How long have "ads" been around in the modern form? By which I mean "visual
content embedded in some medium that is viewed by significant numbers of
people." If you include storefront signage in that then a long time, I
suppose. But in terms of reaching anything like a mass audience I assume it
essentially began with the advent of print publications. Maybe the time of
mass visual advertising is just over? It reached its peak with network and
cable television and radio, and now that those mediums are evaporating there
is nothing to replace them that offers the same characteristics. Maybe the
next model will be something entirely different.

~~~
dredmorbius
Advertising is as old as business and writing.

The modern form of advertising however relies on a few specific developments:

1\. The printing press. (1450)

2\. Widespread literacy. (18th / 19th century)

3\. Consumer products. (mid 19th century)

4\. Consumerism, generally. (early 20th century)

5\. Mass media. (early/mid 20th century)

Much of this converged in the 1920s as mass-market consumer culture really
started to take hold, though it was interrupted by the Great Depression and
WWII, re-emerging in the late 1940s and 1950s. The latter were the heyday of
the large magazine publication (arguably the Web content of its day), with
both nonfiction and fiction carried prominently. Both faded as TV replaced
reading as a pastime.

Adam Curtis's 2002 BBC documentary, _The Century of the Self_ details much
more of the history of advertising and propaganda, particularly the role
played by Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays (who arguably made Freud as
well).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self)

------
epc
This will be the toehold DoJ and the FTC need to file antitrust charges
against Apple, if it’s true that iAds cannot be blocked, and continue to be
only acquirable through Apple’s process and not on the various ad exchanges.

~~~
colinbartlett
I don't think Apple would be that dumb. Is iAd even available for websites? I
doubt it. Also I doubt they even care about iAd, I imagine it's such a tiny
part of their revenue.

~~~
epc
The value of the feature to the alleged monopolist is irrelevant to the
FTC/DOJ, solely the impact on competition. If the primary way consumers
consume information is shifting to mobile, and the premier mobile platform
inhibits mobile advertising except their its own built-in advertising system,
then the FTC/DOJ can use that as the start of the investigation.

Given the speed DOJ and FTC move for monopoly investigations I doubt anything
will happen before the market is already significantly changed and/or damaged.

------
Adaptive
I'm in way too late on this thread for this comment to be noticed, but this is
so absolutely self-serving for Apple. __DO NOT LAUD APPLE FOR THIS __.

If Apple were doing this for any reasonable purpose, they'd do it on Safari on
the desktop as well. Almost every sane reason for blocking ads is as pertinent
there.

 _They are simply trying to force content providers to go native app and
become part of the Apple revenue stream._ That's it, pure and simple.

~~~
IBM
You've been able to install ad blocking extensions for Safari on OS X for a
while now.

------
mukundmr
This was overdue. I am fed up with websites auto launching the iTunes store to
download an application or popping up another window for advertisement on the
phone.

------
junto
The other day I visited the website mirror.co.uk from reddit. This is a
national tabloid neespaper website! As I started to read the article I was
redirected to install the game "Game of War: Fire Age" on Google Play.

My iPad has similar experiences but more often and it is very annoying. I
welcome these changes.

Notably I refuse to ever have install a game that uses tactics like this, on
principle.

------
z3t4
Startup idea: Invent a discovery tool that works better then ads.

Hacker news is a good example. But there must be even more clever ways.

------
keithpeter
Static ads: no problem. Videos or content that moves or flashes I find
amazingly distracting. Hence ad blocker type functionality.

I do 'unblock' domains that I trust not to have moving/animated/flashing
content. I also use the readability bookmarklet when all else fails.

Am I in a tiny neglected minority here?

------
dvhh
This move would give a lot of legitimacy to "native advertising" or
"advertorial", so yes I am glad we would give up the garbage of page filled
with banner/popup/redirection to buy your app to get manipulated by article
that will show me the truth about Scientology

------
nickhalfasleep
This and HTTP2 for content aggregation point to embedding advertisements
deeper within the main content provider. Look for plugins to popular web
servers to make a side pull and injection of content before it leaves the
server, not in the browser DOM.

------
Sideloader
Mobile Safari sucks compared to Mercury browser, which already has built in ad
blocking and a host of other awesome features. And it is fast...really fast. I
barely use Safari on my (jailbroken) iOS devices and don't miss it at all.

------
tuananh
This would hurt Google so much.

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kyledrake
The fun thing about detecting ad blockers is that it works both ways
[http://kyledrake.neocities.org/adblockbar/](http://kyledrake.neocities.org/adblockbar/)

~~~
hvs
Detecting ad blockers is usually a futile effort, though. The ad blockers will
quickly discover that you are doing it and then just block your detection
code.

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cttet
This is why Google developed Chrome and Android, in case of these things
happen..

~~~
zodiakzz
It's gonna happen there as well once they add support for extensions ;)

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liviu
Good move for Apple and end users.

BTW, AdBlock is the most popular extension for Safari OSX.

[https://extensions.apple.com](https://extensions.apple.com)

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d_luaz
Wikipedia could survive with donation. If AdBlocker is detected, website
should prompt for donation (like Wikipedia) until a certain yearly amount is
reach.

~~~
cooper12
Personally, I don't feel like the payments should be called donations. It's
like saying "please give us money out of the kindness of your heart or else
we'll die" instead of "please acknowledge the value of the content you
consumed so we can create more".

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MarkMc
So when I try to visit The New York Times website it will say, 'Sorry Safari
is not supported - please switch to Chrome'.

Is that what Apple wants?

~~~
mike-cardwell
Guess what. Other browsers can block Ads too.

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alkonaut
Does this mean that it will be possible to use tracker blocking like Ghostery
and similar plugins too? That would be fantastic.

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HugoDaniel
I wonder if they have anything planned for in-app ads, as these seem to be
trending.

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empressplay
I love the smell of that antitrust bacon in the morning.

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72deluxe
Resurrect HTTP 402 perhaps?

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Sideloader
I use dedicated Ad Block software (or a customized host blocker) on all my
internet enabled devices. I have no moral qualms whatsoever about doing so.
Why do I block ads on the Internet? They are annoying and detract from my
browsing experience. In addition to serving distracting ads that I never click
on, online advertisers want to "hijack" and redirect my browser to sites I had
no intention of visiting not to mention throwing up pop-up banners that I
didn't ask to see. These tactics are the Internet equivalent of shop owners
and proprietors grabbing people off the street and forcing them into their
stores. I wouldn't put with it on the street and I won't put up with it on the
Internet.

This is hardly proof of anything but in my experience the vast majority of
people do not use ad blocking software of any kind. The people who do make use
of such software tend to be slightly more savvy than the (usually older)
people whose Internet experience consists of browsing the surface of the
surface web (Yahoo!, Facebook, first page of Google search results etc). This
demographic also tends to leave default settings unchanged unless there is
significant hype or FUD to make them pay attention, e.g., Facebook privacy
settings.

The people installing ad blocking software or writing their own host blockers
are specifically seeking out ways to limit their exposure to advertising. They
are not likely to be enthusiastic ad clickers and likely do not make
purchasing decisions based on sponsored text or images shown next to their
search results. Really, how valuable are potential customers that go out of
their way to avoid being exposed to advertising?

Advertising companies - Google and Facebook being the most ubiquitous and
powerful examples - are already data-mining every piece of information they
possibly can and finding new ways to collect ever more intelligence. Never in
human history has mass surveillance been practiced on such a large scale.
Google and Facebook then sell or auction amalgamated data bundles to a robust
industry of data brokers who in turn attempt to monetize the information they
have paid for. The end user (whose attention is the product being sold by the
providers of "free" content) has no control whatsoever over their data. More
than a few large SV corporations have a close relationship with the state.
Google being the most notable here...Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen wrote a book
that was, in part, about the company's partnership with the DoS. These same
companies despite some impressive lip service often roll over very quickly
when the NSA and its pals come knocking.

When state intelligence agencies and a handful of powerful corporations
collect and store massive amounts of citizens' data without any meaningful
oversight or checks and balances we have a problem. Oh sure they all say
"trust us" and "your privacy is"...wait for it.."important to us" (do a search
for that phrase) but were it not for the painless under-the-radar data
collecting methods employed, and the amount and content of information
harvested and stored was made obvious, many more people would give more of a
shit about what kind of future we are building. And it is advertising that
drives the corporate data-mining industry.

So all y'all will excuse me if I laugh out loud when some random forum poster
launches into a stern lecture about the immorality of blocking advertising on
the Internet and on mobile devices. Oh, and I also block as many trackers as
possible and am absolutely okay with that, too.

I should add that I am not opposed to _all_ surveillance. Indeed, many of the
benefits the Internet has brought would be impossible without it. Government
surveillance, in specific instances, is also justified. However, ever
increasing mass surveillance with little or no oversight controlled by some of
the most powerful entities on the planet is definitely cause for concern.

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wnevets
such an innovative move.

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MichaelCrawford
I'm completely cool with ads; what I'd like to see is the ability to block
analytics, for example one-pixel transparent gifs as well as javascript
"sources" consisting of one character of whitespace.

I can do this with the hosts file but that requires that I jailbreak my
device. Most are not going to want to do that.

I'm also concerned about "mobile analytics" in which SDKs are offered free of
charge to app developers so they can determine how users operate their apps.
However the data centers are quite costly to operate; _someone_ must be paying
for all that.

I expect mobile analytics can be blocked in the hosts file as well but it
isn't so straightforward to determine the hostnames to blackhole.

~~~
walterbell
_> I can do this with the hosts file but that requires that I jailbreak my
device. Most are not going to want to do that._

Alternatively, VPN to a home router and filter all traffic there, for TV,
desktops, laptops, mobile.

~~~
Abundnce10
Do you find your browsing speeds increase when you do this? I ask because I'm
assuming the page loads faster without the ads but it must be offset (to some
extent) by the VPN connection. Also, can you link to any examples on setting
this up on an Android device?

~~~
click170
Filtering in this way does provide a significant speed hit if you choose to
use your home router but nothing is stopping you from using a VPS instead.

For me the primary concern is privacy and security and using the always on VPN
is the best way I've found to protect what I value.

Nothing gets out without my expressed consent, just the way I like it.

~~~
walterbell
Are you using Android or iOS? There seems to be flakiness on iOS8 where the
VPN gets disconnected during a change between WiFi and Cellular, or if the
device is locked.

~~~
click170
I'm using android.

The VPN can drop out when I change networks, but it reconnects in less than a
single second under good conditions, and that's not an exaggeration. I use a
plain ipsec xauth VPN.

Having tried both ipsec with l2tp and openvpn SSL VPN, ipsec is the only one I
can get to reconnect in under a second. All the others take at least 5 seconds
to complete a handshake.

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notNow
Apple is basically sticking it to Google here. They want to weaken their
competition in the ad space to have more room and leverage for its products.
Time for the anti trust bodies to look seriously into their practices.

------
threeseed
This is extraordinary news. There has been an overwhelming shift from web to
mobile advertising in the last few years and the prediction is for this to
increase significantly. For the largest traffic producer to allow the blocking
of ads is going to completely upend the economics of many web sites. I think
it is very telling that Apple is doing this right when they have announced a
News app. Clearly they want to direct publishers and bloggers into that app
and away from mobile sites.

All in all this could be devastating for companies like Google.

