Adblock Plus Can Now Be Rolled Out To Every Single Employee In a Company 127
New submitter Mickeycaskill writes: Adblock Plus adds large scale deployment (LSD) to version 1.9 of its software, allowing IT managers to block adverts on thousands of computers in one go, months after a German court ruled the practice was legal. The move is likely to concern online publishers who rely on advertising to generate revenue.
It's not the adverts in themselves (Score:5, Insightful)
but the fact that you smear them all over my face, and that I can't connect to just YOUR website, but I effectively connect to fifteen OTHER sites to download scripts, just to make YOUR website run correctly. I use Ghostery and Ad-Block not because I am against advertising, but because I want a leaner and more tolerable web.
I understand the web is more complex today than a decade ago, but there MUST be a way to make today's websites better in these regards.
Re:It's not the adverts in themselves (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, of course it is. If I'm browsing YOUR site, then I've implied that I have some trust in YOUR site. Cross site scripting demands that I also trust those other ten, twenty, fifty, or maybe even thousand other sites. If you demand that kind of trust, then I don't need your site. Drive-by installation of malware is far to common for us to trust all those unidentified sites.
Re:It's not the adverts in themselves (Score:5, Insightful)
If you must show me an ad, that's one thing. To ask to run code on my computer is quite something else. Malware has been spread through ad networks, and I promise you it will be again. And again.
Advertisers have only themselves to blame that people block ads. At first web ads were more than tolerable. I was happy to see them, knowing they paid the bills. Then it got worse. And worse. Sites started having tiny bits of content surrounded by ads and you had to click the Next button twenty times to read a ten paragraph article that turns out to be devoid of real information. And other things I could go on about.
Online publishers ought to be careful of the ad networks they get into bed with. Those ad networks should be careful about the actual advertisers. Some of these ads are outright deceptive -- trying to imitate the look of a dialog box on a certain widely used OS. That kind of clever behavior turns out to be bad for ALL advertisers in the long run.
I did say I actually liked the idea that ads paid the bill in the early days. Now I view ads as a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Many of the advertisers have absolutely no sense of shame or restraint. They would tattoo advertisements to the insides of our eyelids if they could. Yes, really.
Re: (Score:2)
A coworker got infected by visiting a reputable programming reference site. He didn't know, and virus scan didn't pick it up. Other employees did get detected malware from the same site, so the security folks examined everyone who visited the site, and detected an anomaly.
Our security settings do not allow us to disable scripting in Internet Explorer, which is the only allowed browser. Nor Flash, because it's needed for training.
This is not hypothetical, and security best practice does not solve the prob
Re: (Score:2)
Ah everything is code. Even jpeg data is a sequence of instructions for the jpeg decoder FSM. Therefore nothing from the advertisers should run on my computer! But in seriousness, I agree. I think though that channel is doomed, exhausted forever. On the PC, I run noscript and adblock. On the phone, if I can't close an intrusive ad in half a second I close the page. I downloaded a stupid puzzle game (research, I swear) for the phone and the game asked me mid-play. "interested in annuities?" That's sheer desp
Re:It's not the adverts in themselves (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Deliver ads as a set of pixels, and then, and only then, I might begin to trust advertisers enough to let their pixels on to my screen.
Re: (Score:2)
10 minutes later, the VM was infected with a rootkit, proven when I snapshotted the VM, and scanned its disk with an AV utility.
I don't know what websites you browse or how your security is set up, but you are doing something incredibly wrong if you're getting infected 10 minutes in.
My own policy is no box touches a network (beginning with installation) until a firewall is active and all services are locked down/disabled except for absolutely necessary ones. Then, I take a flash drive and drop a copy of a few essentials on to the new box (browser, plugins, firewall/AV for windows boxes). Once the box is locked down, it can go online
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously, when was the last time you were infected by a flash drive? I suppose you pick them up in parking lots and plug them in, do you?
Re: It's not the adverts in themselves (Score:1)
I've always wondered whether the extremely intrusive ads actually get more clicks (at least intentional ones).
For me, at least, I go into "kill it with fire" mode whenever something intrusive pops up, or over, or starts playing sounds and I rarely even pay attention to what the ad is about. It is a knee-jerk "kill it!" response.
Then you have the "Adwords" where they not only turn words in the page into hyperlinks, but cause popups on mouse over. These turn an article into an advertisement "mine-field" for y
Re: (Score:2)
I gave up on Cable TV. It is now less than 1/2 content and more than 1/2 ads. And then the ads intrude into the program you are trying to watch with stupid bugs and animated people walking on the bottom 1/4 of your screen. Sometimes they obscure something important in the content of the program. At the same time the content has deteriorated to the point that it is not even worth watching. And content not worth watching definitely means the ads are not worth wat
Re: (Score:2)
Take a look at the adds that fans have uploaded to YouTube sometime.
I seriously doubt that the only clicks those videos are getting, are from people who want to see what commercials in other countries are like.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Great timing (Score:5, Insightful)
What video ad? :-)
Re: (Score:1)
after a German court ruled the practice was legal
I think you misread that part.
Ugh (Score:3)
I'm not looking forward to this arms race. Close one door with advertisers, they open a new one that's more obnoxious.
Re:Ugh (Score:5, Insightful)
Ad blocking was born in response to the arms race advertisers launched (and lets be fair here, also the websites that hosted them) where their ads became increasingly intolerable, obnoxious, disturbing and disruptive (to simple reading comprehension, never mind anything else). This behaviour *necessitated* a response; intitially simple pop-up blockers (now integrated into browsers AS STANDARD!) and gradually moving forward.
If anything, we've seen a lull in hostilities for the past few years as ad blockers have proved very successful, limited only by their install base.
The next round will probably involve websites refusing to show content until adblocking software is disabled (seen here and there already) and if/as this becomes more prevalent, ad blockers responding with stealthing mechanisms.
Since users ultimately own the rendering device, I'm not certain the advertisers can ever win. And god knows, they lost the moral argument long, long ago.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
I see you've just identified the need for free and open hardware. I agree. There is a lot money to be made giving consumers what they really want.
The short term money is now obtained from fucking consumers at every turn. The long term money is giving customers what they really need.
Re:I get that ads are nessesary for websites... (Score:5, Funny)
The few bad apples in the basket resulted in us throwing the entire basket out of the window.
Yeah, it's sad that 95% of the ads out there had to ruin it for the rest of them. ;)
Contributor (Score:3)
I wonder if AdBlock should refer people to alternative means of supporting web sites that publish useful content. I'd like to see something like Contributor gain widespread acceptance.
https://www.google.com/contrib... [google.com]
This is about "Adblock Plus" not "AdBlock" (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously folks, pay some attention to the name of the product and what it means. It's stuff that matters.
"AdBlock": A Chrome, and later other platform, ad blocking extension that has nothing whatsoever to do with "Adblock Plus" either in terms of codebase or project history.
"Adblock Plus" (note no MixedCase): The increasingly-monetizing adblocker which is owned and marketed by for-profit company Eyeo, that Wladimir Palant created to make money with the open source adblocker he took over as maintainer years ago, but did not create. The one that takes money from advertisers to whitelist so-called "Acceptable Ads" and has that feature turned on by default, so most non-techies see ads from Eyeo customers.
"adblock": Not a product at all but a generic term for an advertising, and sometimes also privacy, blocking extension for browsers. There are many competing products which might be generically called "adblock".
"adblocker" A more obviously generic term for the set of "adblocker" products that include, among many others, AdBlock, Adblock Plus, Adblock Edge, Bluhell Firewall, uBlock, uBlock Origin.
"Adblock" One of, if not the, earliest adblocking extensions for Firefox. Long obsolete, it was the inspiration for, and partially the codebase for the first version, of Adblock Plus. The maintainer of AdBlock (note the MixedCase) also claims Adblock is an inspiration for AdBlock but is no part of its codebase.
The article is about only Adblock Plusâ from Eyeo Inc. Which has the most commercialized, most cooperative with advertisers, and some including me would say, most skeevy business model of any of the major adblocker. Though the drama around the creator of uBlock forking it to "uBlock Origin" and the massively overlarge donation-begging by the new uBlock owners are some evidence that new-uBlock is pretty skeevy too. Which is why this tablet has uBlock Origin running in Firefox.
Re: (Score:1)
The one that takes money from advertisers to whitelist so-called "Acceptable Ads" and has that feature turned on by default,
And I say unto thee: wah. It's not difficult at all to turn off. Meanwhile Adblock Plus also makes ad-blocking easier on Android these days... and you can turn off acceptable ads there, too. And it provides a proxy service, so you don't have to see banner ads in apps either, for the most part.
It's really hard to get people incensed about a checkbox. If he starts bundling the Ask.com toolbar, you'll see the revolt you're looking for.
Re: (Score:2)
And I say unto thee, "RTFP". I explicitly noted that with this: "has that feature turned on by default, so most non-techies see ads from Eyeo customers."
Wherein I made clear that most non-technical users, which are not most of us Slashdot members, will leave it as-is. Implied, and from years of experience with non-technical users, because non-techies don't know/don't understand how/are afraid, to change anything from "normal".
Which means that Eyeo, Inc. continues to create a big user base of "pay for play"
Re: (Score:2)
It would seem better to use ad-blocking at all the major internet backbones and interconnection points.
Re: Who gives a FUCK what a court says? (Score:2)
Usually the ads are provided in distingushable elements anyway, likendiv elements with specific ids or classes.
Re: (Score:2)
>When an ad looks like editorial content, it becomes hard to impossible to have an automatic script that identifies ad content
There is/was an extension for Firefox that identified opinion pieces as third party advertising masquerading as an opinion piece.
The surprising thing was how much content on "news" sites was third party advertising, masquerading as a "reliable news source".
Your router (Score:3)
Whatever you use for a router can do it. I have a Netgear open source router. Flashed it with Tomato firmware, then installed the MVPS Hosts file on it. A startup script updates the Hosts file at boot, and then every four days after booting. Of course, the concept isn't exclusive to Netgear, or to commercial routers. Install it on your gateway, whatever that gateway may be.
I would be interested to hear how much bandwidth you save by blocking advertising for a company. I'd also be interested in learnin
Roll Out (Score:2)
Though, it might be nice to suppress the initial run page, which seems to be what the article is actually praising.
Re: (Score:2)
flash driven ads bite
For example those unwanted "Video Bytes" inserts on Slashdot which should be titled "Video Bites".
Why? (Score:2)
Block at the firewall/server.
http://www.privoxy.org/ [privoxy.org]
What about their "acceptable" ads? (Score:2)
Adblock Plus defaults to letting some ads pass. Can admins block those by default as well on a large scale deployment?
Boo hoo ... (Score:3)
Boo fucking hoo.
If the ad industry is going to be a vector for malware, then too damned bad. Inside the corporate firewall, the integrity of the systems is all that matters, and your damned ad revenue isn't even relevant.
Yes, your model says you'll make money from ads. But nobody is under any obligation to view your damned ads.
Don't like people skipping your ads? Make it a subscription site with login required.
Between the security risks, and the privacy implications, I will block any and all ads for as long as I have the technology to do so.
There are 8 domains just on this page as I type this whose sole purpose for being embedded in this page is advertising revenue. And that's not my damned problem.
I would love to see more corporate firewalls just straight up blocking ads. Corporations would probably have far less viruses and security problems.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, start small ... block ads, ignore sourceforge, disable Flash, block javascript.
That probably covers a lot of it.
Re: (Score:2)
I would love to see more corporate firewalls just straight up blocking ads. Corporations would probably have far less viruses and security problems.
Last time I checked, squid with ad-blocking was nowhere near as graceful about removing the content as Adblock plus. I have done the whole transparent squid proxy thing before though, and it's pretty cool. If I were running a corporate network today, I'd certainly do the same. It's simple enough to provide an unfiltered proxy port to the users who need unfettered access and can handle their own blocking.
Why would we even want this? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Because blocking some of the ads is better than no blocking at all. For a supposedly evil whitelist, I have never once seen an ad show up with Adblock Plus.
Damnit, AdBlock (Score:2)
The only reason you work is because most people don't use you. Success is the shortest path to failure, because websites *will* find another way to serve ads, whether it's through an EULA or randomizing/obfuscating the references to ads, or even serving the pages as images. Please stop trying to become more popular.
Re: (Score:2)
websites *will* find another way to serve ads, whether it's through an EULA or randomizing/obfuscating the references to ads, or even serving the pages as images.
I would be happy about an ad strategy that doesn't break the pages I want to browse. If they come up with an alternative to current ad strategies that doesn't result in accidental malware attacks and autoplay videos and flash animations, I will be too lazy to block it.
Adblock plus is pretty much the most effective antivirus on the market, even though that isn't even their intent, and that is the primary reason I use it.
DuckDuckGo (Score:3)
When I switched to DuckDuckGo, I was prompted, very politely, to allow their advertising. I whitelisted that site ONLY, and, so far, have not been burned by them (reasonably well-targeted ads, clearly identified, without visual or audible noise, and, AFAICT, no malware).
You want a site whitelisted? Treat me with respect.
I'd Like the Old Internet Back Please (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't care what happens to websites that rely on advertising revenue to stay alive. I preferred the "web" when the content was provided by enthusiasts, not corporate clowns. And yes, that definitely includes this web site.
I don't feel even the slightest bit of shame for blocking ads. You use technology against me. I'll use it against you.
Re: (Score:2)
I preferred the "web" when the content was provided by enthusiasts, not corporate clowns.
You mean the tiny web with less content which was more difficult to find and for the most part had a lack of common content aggregation beyond (and I'm throwing up in my mouth as I type this) web rings?
No thanks. I'll take today's web with a basic adblocker any day. The internet was orders of magnitude less useful when run by enthusiasts because quite frankly a lot of people don't share things for free.
Enough is enough (Score:2)
Question (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Question how do we keep sites from scanning our PCs to see if we have an ad blocker installed? what can be done if anything to stop them from doing that. If they can scan for an ad blocker im guessing they are scanning for everything we have installed.
They do not scan your computer. Their scripts running in your browser just check for a cookie or a session parameter that should have been set by the ad-showing script. If that's missing, you have an ad blocker.
Re: (Score:2)
This gets into the arms race thing again. Right now some sites/ad networks are doing things like setting cookies, parameters, checking logs, etc to make sure that you've hit the ad server. Alternatively, sometimes they'll use annoying NOSCRIPT code (or just rely on ad scripts to do something to the main page content) to blow up the website somehow if the ad scripts aren't loaded. There are any number of ways to detect whether adblockers are running or not.
Right now, most websites are still feeling like bad
There are other options now (Score:2)
I've already dumped Adblock Plus and moved on to uBlock Origin, which I trust a bit more to do the right thing.
Fire any administrator who does this (Score:2)
Seriously WHY would you want to deploy a plugin to 100s of users when you can be far more effective and far more secure at the gateway??? Run a proxy, filter at the proxy. Your individual machines should not be getting direct access to the internet anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
Like for example remove all div elements with class name "advertisement"?
Re: (Score:2)
Yes they can. http://www.psl.cs.columbia.edu... [columbia.edu] is specifically designed for the extraction of content based on class names.
ADP Large Scale Deployments in IT? WTF? (Score:2)
As I know from my job experience large scale IT deployments inside their WAN networks can filter whatever the fuck they want. Sudden appearance of ADP as an enterprise deployable package - who the fuck cares? We are right now black/white listing all the stuff we need. Who needs to introduce something like ADP that probably can mess with loads of internal services and need to be tested if you could just not use it? if an user has a problem with advertisements he/she is probably far away of what he/she should
Cry me a river. (Score:2)
Choose a phrase composed from the following words in any descending alphabetical order : "shit" ; "tough."
If loss of advertising revenue means that I have to choose which websites to pay for my news, mail service, etc, then that's just dandy and fine. Oddly, when I go to the cinema to watch a movie, I choose which one I want to watch then pay (and annoyingly still get some adverts, but by turning up 20 minutes late