
Firms help websites evade ad blockers - Oatseller
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/10/25/the-internet-ads-that-would-not-die/2IiIl1niWZZZymfCy23cuN/story.html
======
randombits
I block all ads. Full stop. I also whitelist a trimmed set of websites to
allow logins. I disallow HTTP/S referrer, DOM storage, WEBRTC, and whole host
of other things. I have not seen an ad in years, I have not suffered malware
in years, my bandwidth is my own, not to be used for ad servers to serve up
their dreck.

The morality surrounding ad blocking is up for debate, but I do not feel
guilty because there is no OBLIGATION for me to view ads. Just because you
serve them up does not mean I need to view them. I don't view ads on TV, live
or DVR'd. I don't look at roadside billboards or look at magazines because
they contain too many ads.

I don't like being tracked, seen as a means of income by fly-by-night
operations, a target for malware because the ad server operators are too lazy
to secure their servers because there is no ROI in server security. In short,
I have a right to protect my precious bandwidth and my computers whilst on the
Web.

~~~
rayalez
I want to ask a question on this subject. Don't websites get paid for(most
of?) the ads only when user clicks through?

People talk about turning off ad block "to support creators", but aren't you
supporting creators only by clicking on ads?

Personally, I have probably clicked on at most 3-5 ads in the years before I
started using adblocker(by accident). Does it even make sense for me to turn
it off if I'm not going to click on links anyway?

~~~
pen2l
> Personally, I have probably clicked on at most 3-5 ads in the years before I
> started using adblocker(by accident). Does it even make sense for me to turn
> it off if I'm not going to click on links anyway?

You'll end up clicking more than 3-5.

I've been using a computer without adbock for the first time this week in the
last 6 or something years that I've been using adblock. I've clicked on a lot
of ads, they're too relevant. Curiously, I'm getting a lot of ads for products
that I've already bought.... and I end up clicking on them to find out more
info. They're just too relevant, they'll be about the thing you were thinking
about just the other day -- you'll click them.

~~~
885895
>Curiously, I'm getting a lot of ads for products that I've already bought

Exactly the same thing happened to me. Prior to the purchase I had been doing
a bit of web searches -- first for the family of products I was looking for
(i.e. not a specific brand) and based on what I read I decided to learn more
about one product specifically. Confident about its quality after having read
a lot of reviews, I bought it shortly after I had began looking. Several days
later I began seeing ads for the product and they kept targeting me for quite
a while since then.

When I need something, I will generally research intensely and make a decision
in short time. Sometimes the decision will be to not buy, sometimes to buy
later and at other times to buy right away.

When I decide to buy later, ads are useful to remind me or to offer competing
products which come out in the meantime since when I'd done my research.

Ads about something I decided I didn't want are mostly annoying.

Ads about something I have are always annoying. The only kind of ads which are
worse are those for things which are so irrelevant that I've never even
considered them.

------
contravariant
Why on earth would they use TV as an example of a medium where ads worked? The
response to the 1999 'ad-skipping' digital recorder was a ridiculous amount of
lobbying to try and make it illegal, followed by an ever increasing torrent of
ads, which has lead increasingly many people to move away from television
altogether to other media with fewer ads.

~~~
barclay
Seriously. Does no-one remember ReplayTV, and the shit-storm that went up
against them?

------
Animats
_" The Washington Post has begun testing a system that locks out visitors who
block advertisements. “In the long run,” said Post spokeswoman Jennifer Lee in
an e-mail, “without income via subscriptions or advertising, we won’t be able
to deliver the journalism that people coming to our site expect from us.”_

The Washington Post site has 21 trackers, ad services, and other junk. They
dug their own hole.

------
aikah
> For instance, the Washington Post has begun testing a system that locks out
> visitors who block advertisements.

I understand that position. But that's a losing position. It's an arms race,
ad-blockers will always find clever ways to bypass these schemes then
consultants will come with more complicated scripts that will make web pages
heavier and harder to visit for those who don't block ads ...

The Washington Post certainly is not going to win that war. The only solution
for them on the long run is all their website behind a paywall, like the
Financial Times.

I'm curious if youtube is going to do the same, since they introduced an ad
free paid offer.

~~~
bazzargh
I do this the other way round; I block entire sites that use obnoxious ads
rather than use an adblocker. Funnily enough, WaPo are on my block list - they
must've hit me with a modal (I unblocked them temporarily to see if they're
still doing it, apparently not)

The only ads I do block are the 'recommended for you' fake content from
outbrain, zergnet, gravity and taboola. Just terrible.

~~~
Riseed
You may be interested in this extension, which will do the site-blocking for
you:

[http://tinysubversions.com/notes/ethical-ad-
blocker/](http://tinysubversions.com/notes/ethical-ad-blocker/)

------
jakeogh
Tools that work on the local resolver level:

[https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate](https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate)

[https://gaenserich.github.io/hostsblock/](https://gaenserich.github.io/hostsblock/)

------
a3n
Similar articles:

[http://www.mediastreet.ie/blog/2015/08/17/ad-blockers-
intern...](http://www.mediastreet.ie/blog/2015/08/17/ad-blockers-internet-
advertisers-play-cat-mouse/)

[http://www.cio.com/article/2986749/consumer-
technology/adver...](http://www.cio.com/article/2986749/consumer-
technology/advertisers-can-now-pay-to-sneak-by-your-ad-blocker.html)

And this: some publishers are blocking visitors who adblock. Good, don't
whine, just allow or block.

[http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/22/reuters-america-google-
seeks-...](http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/22/reuters-america-google-seeks-common-
cause-with-media-firms-over-ad-blocking.html)

"Germany's biggest newspaper publisher Axel Springer last week banned readers
who use ad blockers from its Bild tabloid website, stepping up a fight by
publishers to stop online advertising revenues being eroded."

~~~
bsder
> And this: some publishers are blocking visitors who adblock. Good, don't
> whine, just allow or block.

I am perfectly ok with this. But they don't get to whine when they start
falling in the search results because fewer people link to them.

------
chillacy
Ignoring the ethics and just looking at the technology, would the next step
for content providers be to do the ad bidding and serving from the webserver
itself? This way, ad blockers wouldn't be able to just block an ad serving
domain. They could write custom filters for each website, but that increases
the work for the adblock lists.

~~~
pdkl95
All a website would need to do is tunnel the entire site through a proxy that
rewrites all of the asset and other same-site URLs so they are all the same
type of synthetic token or hash. This would remove the ability to do host or
URL based filtering, forcing ad blockers to download every URL and try to
classify by content.

This isn't even a particularly complicated change, and I've seen it done
before (circa 1997). As for how this impacts the ability to play the current
"ad bidding" game, that is trivially solved by 3rd (4th?) party proxies.

Ad blockers can be inconvenienced even more by making the content unique every
time it is sent by the proxy, preventing trivial matching by file hash. The
end-game of this type of strategy is having the proxy serve up a single opaque
block of WebAssembly code that renders the page to a <canvas> using custom
and/or obfuscated font rendering.

This is almost certainly a _stupid_ way to run a website, but I expect people
that feel they are under attack from ad blockers to fight back in any way they
can. Some of them are already trying to make up "moral" arguments (and legal
wishful-thinking) against the recent increase in ad blocking. Obviously this
won't work in the long run, but people that feel they are under attack are not
know for making rational decisions.

------
nicwolff
Ironically this article was blocked by a "We hope you’ve enjoyed your 5 free
articles" box – until I hid that div and set the content container overflow to
"scroll" with a little location-bar jQuery.

------
notjoedimaggio
Question for the people who perceive ad blocking as unethical: what is your
opinion on reading HN comments without giving an ad impression (clicking on
the link)?

Without the content, the discussions about the topics wouldn't be available.

I generally don't read the articles that are linked, just the HN content, as
it has higher value to me. (This means I have to try to avoid criticizing the
source article based on comments, but I'm generally more of a lurker anyhow.)

Genuinely curious.

------
draw_down
Don't hate the player, hate the game. Well, I suppose you could hate both.

