“If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”
Andrew Lewis aka blue_beetle@metafilter.
Does anyone know of any examples of malware being delivered specifically via Google adsense ads?
They have a policy that appears to promise that they actively police content and target of their ads, but I am interested to know if it’s working.
In that case, there seems to be little hope that a responsible/ethical ad host (as suggested in posts #118, #119) could prevail, without itself falling victim to either infiltration by malicious advertisers, or simple market forces (going up against Google, at the same time as being generally meek, and having reduced funcitonality does not seem like a recipe for success).
Sounds like things need to get significantly worse or break down completely before anyone can make them better.
Hell, I still get those even WITH an ad blocker (mostly “Hey LIKE US ON FACEBOOK oh pretty please!!!” type popups).
Since my browsing is mostly news and I don’t rely on a single (or a few) sources, I don’t have anything permanently whitelisted. If I click to an article that won’t load unless I do, I may acquiesce to turning it off on that page only for the five minutes it takes me to read the content – IF said content is compelling enough for me to bother. And the “disable on this page only” is unchecked before I leave.
Unobtrusive (and malware-free) ads I wouldn’t mind – hell, I probably wouldn’t even see them. But I paid for my computer for MY convenience, not anyone else’s. No one has an inherent right to my eyeballs.
I pay for data and bandwidth. Their ads steal it. I never consented to view their advertising. They put their content on the public internet. Not me. It’s not stealing to look at something that is public. Am I stealing the street busker’s music if I don’t put a tip in his guitar case?
They can put something behind a paywall if they want. If they did that, I wouldn’t visit their sites, and nobody would be “stealing” from anybody else, bandwidth, content or otherwise.
You want to keep your content secret? Don’t make it public. But don’t put it out in public and get mad when I look at it without paying. At that point, you’re a busker, hoping that enough kind people tip you, but nobody is obligated to give you money or ad views just because you’re offering free content to the public. That’s the risk the publisher/busker made, not me.
You guys are acting like there’s a transaction here, and there’s not. It’s free, it’s public, and they just hope you look at the ads so they earn money. Just like it isn’t stealing to turn the TV off during the commercials, it isn’t stealing to block ads on a public website.
If she did that, that would be her decision as a business owner, not the people who took the free samples she freely offered.
This is a great analogy, because a baker who offered unlimited free samples would just stop offering them if they never turned into a sale. And yet here we are, with major online publications in the same position, offering content for free and getting upset that we don’t buy anything.
Stop being a shitty businessman and charge something for your product. If you offer it for free to the public, stop getting mad about them getting something for free. It’s your decision to offer something for free to the public. It’s not their obligation to give you money or ad views. It’s your obligation as a business owner to monetize your product or, if you can’t, to either accept it and become a charity, or to change businesses.
Well this particular thread is about sites putting up an adwall. Do you think it’s ok to circumvent that?
There’s not an “adwall”. That isn’t a thing. They put their books out on the “free” rack, and hoped that people wouldn’t tear out the pages of junk to read the good stuff. Their hope was misplaced.
If they wanted to force people to login and agree to a TOS mandating ad views, they could do that. Then their content would be private, unless you agreed to view ads. It would be a classic transaction, “I give you this if you give me that”. But “Here’s some free stuff you might find interesting, hope you look at the obnoxious stuff I threw in with it as well” is not a transaction. The recipient of the free stuff didn’t agree to look at the obnoxious stuff, too, that’s just what the person who published free stuff in public wanted. But we don’t always get what we want, do we?
What? Yes there is an adwall. It’s when a site says you must turnoff your adblocker to view the site.
Then I almost certainly won’t view it. Win-win. I was responding to the opinion that blocking ads is literally theft. It isn’t. It’s not even close. Sending me unwanted ads over a bandwidth-limited channel that I pay for, when I only requested content, isn’t stealing either, but it’s closer. It’s like sending me lead through the water main when I only requested plain water.
And if I can circumvent their “adwall”, and the content is important enough to me (usually it isn’t), I just might. Just like they tried to circumvent my ad blocker. It’s an arms race at that point. May the best technology win.
Ditto. Now the next thing we must tackle is the site that says, “You have reached your limit of 10 free articles this month. Subscribe to continue.”
Sorry, NY Times, with 5000 other news sites in the world, you can easily be scratched off my list. In other words, Eat Shit and Die.
If you circumvent an ad wall it’s not just an arms race, it’s you trying to cheat on classic contract you said it constitutes. And you “just might” if you really wanted to look at it rather than suffer a single ad. Maybe you should drop the moral outrage part of your argument since you basically just admitted you are indeed willing to steal content.
Two reasons I can think of. First, if the host changes the hosting provider, the IP will change and hundreds of IP refernences will have to be changed as well. While a global replace of source files can usually be done, it’s one more hassle that isn’t needed if you use DNS.
Second, some browsers and/or malware protection schemes treat IP addresses in a URL as a bad sign, and flag or block them. I run into this problem with people who want to access my video server’s broadcast schedule, given only by IP number (it’s a private server on a static IP, and doesn’t have a domain association). I’ve had to convert the URL to something acceptable, like a bit.ly address to get around that.
No. Looking at public things is not stealing. Don’t put your content on the public internet if you don’t want people to see it. An “adwall”, as you put it, is not a paywall. Anyone can still view it. The website just makes it a little harder if you happen to run an ad blocker.
And there is no contract. Zero. Zilch. Making someone sign up for an account so they agree to your terms of service is a contract. Putting up something for free in public does not constitute a contract.
I think a page that says we require ad money to run this site therefore you must agree to turnoff adblocking to continue is pretty obviously a contract.
Contracts require both sides to agree to them. Making your site in such a way that no one can see the content unless they agree to your terms is legit. Posting something in public and just assuming everyone agrees to your terms isn’t. That’s a poor business decision, not a contract.
The Dayton Daily News charges an extra dollar for the Thanksgiving edition, the one with all the Black Friday ads. 
It’s not posted in public though. It’s on their private server. Your computer requests the page to be sent. They have decided not to send it if you are using adblocker. You then have the choice - move on or turn off your adblocker and re-request the page.
StarTribune.com does this.
On the other hand, I can view unlimited articles each month by using my iPad in privacy mode. I just have to tolerate them throwing three ads over the top of what I’m trying to view in addition to all the sidebar ads.
Oh, and let’s not forget that people on the dope have experienced malware from the ads. Not hard to do a search here for that.
I tried to watch a movie on TV the other day, one of those obscure cable channels. Three minutes of movie, EIGHT minutes of ads, about 30 seconds of movie, SIX minutes of ads, 5 minutes of movie and back into commercials. I turned it off and mentally marked that channel as one I will never attempt to watch again.
If your webserver serves content to the public, it is not private. If your webserver serves me content because I fooled it into thinking I turned my ad blocker off when I didn’t, that’s a problem with your server, not me. If the content cannot be accessed without logging in and agreeing to terms, I’m not going to hack into it.
There’s a difference between hacking into your server to obtain content, which is wrong, versus changing something on my own machine that allows me to access your publicly served content in the way I wish, which is just fine. It’s the difference between breaking into your house versus just admiring the color of your siding. Breaking in is wrong. Viewing public content is not.