

9.5mm Firefox browsers use Adblock Plus Daily - darien
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/statistics/addon/1865
This means about 10% of all firefox browsers on any given day block online ads. (See http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2009/08/11/how-many-firefox-users-use-add-ons/) Is it right for mozilla to advocate adblock? Is mozilla liable due to promotion? Will the online industry ever address the rising use of adblock a la MPAA/RIAA?
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DEinspanjer
Please keep in mind that these numbers are not 100% accurate. We do the best
we can to parse out the add-on version check pings that this number is based
on, but what we don't do is systematically attempt to track users. That means
we don't have a cookie that we can rely on to determine exactly how many users
are using a particular add-on. We can only count the number of pings.

Firefox will ping for a version check multiple times during the process of a
browser upgrade. The user can manually check for updates as many times as they
like. There are weird mis-configured proxies that can spam a single ping a
hundred times for some reason, and there are browsers that have been
recompiled for a variety of reasons that can behave in a non-standard fashion.

In each of these cases, we do the best we can to eliminate spurious or
duplicate requests, but because of NAT and DHCP, we can't really rely much on
an IP address to determine the validity of a set of requests.

Personally, I'm happy to provide less accurate statistics and be able to feel
good that I am not violating Firefox users' privacy. This extends down to
things such as not even storing IP addresses in our data warehouse once the
access log data has been parsed. Regardless of the fact we have privacy
policies that state we won't do anything bad with the data, I prefer to not
even have the data available in a database at all.

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darien
This means about 10% of all firefox browsers on any given day block online
ads. (See [http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2009/08/11/how-many-
firefox-u...](http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2009/08/11/how-many-firefox-
users-use-add-ons/)) Is it right for mozilla to advocate adblock? Is mozilla
liable due to promotion? Will the online industry ever address the rising use
of adblock a la MPAA/RIAA?

~~~
pavel_lishin
"Is mozilla liable due to promotion?"

Liable for what?

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darien
Liable for lost advertising revenue due to the 'defacement' and 'republishing'
of copyrighted content under the DMCA. It is a stretch, but America is a
litigious nation and the courts have a tendency to rule in favor of big
business (because they support the economy). And if the courts wont rule the
first time around, there are always lobbyists to help change laws.

~~~
habitue
I think it would be a humongous stretch to say it's defacement. The server
client model is the important factor I think here. A server sends data to the
client to display in a manner it chooses fit. If a browser chooses not to
request certain content, or chooses not to display it to the user, there is no
defacement going on. If it is legal for there to be rendering differences at
all between browsers, I think adblock fits into that gap as well.

As you said however, who knows what crazy justification they will come up
with, and what the courts will buy.

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darien
I definitely agree with you. Right now I'm trying to get into their
argumentative mindset. I think web properties can argue that their copyright
extends to HOW the content is displayed. This point is furthered if online
sites can prove that their site is generated dynamically based on specific
browsers. If they can argue that they manually create different (authorized)
versions for different configurations (1 configuration for each browser, os
and monitor type), and that all of those configurations contain ads. The
courts may find that any configurations outside the site's authorized versions
are unauthorized, an infringement of copyright and illegal. To me it almost
makes sense. Thoughts?

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DEinspanjer
If the web properties could successfully argue that their copyright extends to
how the content is displayed, I think it is likely they could get a lot more
bang for their buck by suing Microsoft for the mangled content that comes out
of the many millions of IE 6 browsers still being used out there. :)

That said, I highly doubt either lawsuit has much of a leg to stand on.
Content transformation is a long standing and tacitly accepted feature of web
protocols. Caching, zooming, and even assistant technologies such as a screen
or braille reader would run afoul this argument.

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cmars232
Millimeters?

~~~
darien
In finance, MM stands for millions. It can also be MLN.

