German blogger calls Adblock Plus 'a mafia-like advertising network'

Meanwhile, Adblock Plus CEO and online deposit specialist Till Faida is warning the world against web scams:

http://www.express.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/421092/Don-t-get-burnt-by-a-summer-scam

 

And how is that related to what we're discussing in this thread

Give us a break in your vendetta against ABP. Please. It's getting silly.

 

Against the backdrop of its evolution from ad blocker to for-profit entity and the resulting controversy surrounding its business practises, Adblock Plus repositioning itself as an 'online security specialist' is news.

 

Do they really? That's how the Express calls them.

 

It is related, because the CEO Till Faida himself still runs several scam websites for ABP, like -http://chromeadblock.org/extensions/adblock-wins-award/- and -http://chrome-plugins.org/extensions/chrome-adblock-plus/-

Additionally Faida used several several fake accounts to place fake reviews and guest articles for Adblock Plus on blogs and reddit. German bloggers counted at least three dozend camouflaged PR-articles written by Mr. Faida and his team.

btw: Did you all know, that - really, it was just an unhappy coincidence, for sure - all Acceptale Ads were re-enabled with the last update two weeks ago?

-https://adblockplus.org/blog/bug-in-adblock-plus-for-chrome-and-opera-caused-acceptable-ads-setting-to-be-reverted-

Is here anybody who still believes that Adblock Plus is trustable?

 

How are those scams? Are you claiming that -http://chrome-plugins.org/- is his site?

I use it, and it blocks ads. It's a little annoying that I need to disable "acceptable ads", but whatever. If they want to make some money through "acceptable ads", that's fine, as long as I can turn them off. I'm not yet convinced that there's anything not to trust.

 

Of course. He claims, that they have "no affiliation with Google, Adblock Plus, or any other trademark", but that's a lie:
http://whois.domaintools.com/chrome-plugins.org
http://whois.domaintools.com/chromeadblock.org

"Some money"? The deal with Google is worth $887 Million. Can you imagine how much they pay Adblock Plus?

http://www.businessinsider.com/goog...by-paying-adblock-plus-to-show-its-ads-2013-8

Yes, turn them off. And don't forget to control if they are still disabled after their next automatic update. Everytime. And tell your friends and neighbours, too. Very trustable.

 

http://chrome-plugins.org/about-us/

http://whois.domaintools.com/chrome-plugins.org

 

Where's the data for this claim? Every time, huh, why didn't I experience that? Let me guess, you're not even using ABP.

 

Of course not. In fact, most people I know have switched to Adblock Edge. The glitch you mention is but one issue; their deceptive and intransparent business model is the most frequently cited reason for switching.

 

History and perspective are good things.

 

This has been an interesting thread.

A couple of comments.

One….. what lucky bastards those Adblock Plus guys are. From all appearances, they started out on a project to genuinely help with an internet challenge, and then become millionaires out of it. They stumbled into becoming millionaires.

Two….. at least they publish the whitelist. They could just hide it. Maybe they do it out of a fear of discovery, but the fact that it is published and we can opt out is something.

Three….. the most remarkable thing happened while I was reading this thread. The website computerworld.com was mentioned in this thread as a site that has a lot of advertising. Out of curiosity, I went there and turned Adblock Plus on and off to see the difference. One of the ads (IBM) caught my attention. I clicked it and learned something that might benefit me. And then I thought…. Hmmmmm…. Maybe some ads are not so bad. So I turned off Adblock Plus and went to some of the websites that I periodically look at for professional purposes. Sure enough… there were additional ads I clicked on.

Maybe I’ve gone too far with fighting ads… maybe I’ve mindlessly blocked all the ads including some that would have my interest in some way.

I’m going to turn off Adblock Plus for a while and see how it goes. Maybe I’ll settle on just using the “Malware Domains” filter list.

With a high speed internet connection, maybe ads are not such a bad thing.

What’s up with that?

 

Enjoy being tracked all over the Internet then. While the thread has gotten perhaps a tad bit overzealous in ABP hate and random accusations, "bad ads" are still a real threat and the advertising industry as a whole is fighting tooth and nail against any sort of regulation and blocking. Compromise is not in their dictionary, and instead of taking blocking as a message for them to straighten up, they're consistently using it to make their case and threaten "internet death"..and it's working beautifully.

 

If you can get some value from seeing ads, then turning off Adblock Plus or using a less restrictive list is a good choice. For people like me, who never clicked on an ad, they offer too little value and are more of an annoyance, hence using the ad blocking software.

 

Well, I would also add BetterPrivacy to stop the trackers.

 

What do you mean by "being tracked all over the Internet".
Mrk

 

I mean precisely that. The majority of ad servers are trackers. Doubleclick being a huge example. Ads don't just show up on one page as a pretty picture and never bother you again, otherwise targeted advertising (the largest advertising method in use today) would not work. Take your ad blocker away and suddenly Doubleclick, Adsonar, Neodata, Google and tons upon tons of others will be following you across sites serving up ads and gathering data based upon what ads you saw on the last site, things you click on and websites you visit.

You can cut down on some of that by using tools such as DNTMe, but going "naked", yeah, you turn into an advertisers wet dream. I'm not against reasonable ads, hell, I deal with it on television. I am however against incessant and increasingly difficult to block tracking, Flash-based, full volume ads blocking half my screen and, especially, the "our way or the highway" attitude of the industry as a whole. Cut down on tracking me, shoving the most annoying forms of ads possible in my face and not forcing me to either choose all ads or no ads, and I'll turn my ad blocking off. Adblock users aren't killing revenue for websites, the advertisers themselves are.

 

Bloody well said!

 

I'm sure that argument will be tossed aside as stupid, but I'd have to ask just what the hell are users supposed to do when their hand is continually forced? Don't use ad blocking, and websites suddenly become wastelands of ads for Viagra, dating sites and other crap, most often overlapping or otherwise hiding the actual content you're there to see, all the while silently following you to the next website where you face the same issue with more "relevant" ads. Use ad blocking and websites start crying foul about losing money and advertisers just come up with more complicated and devious (see the evercookie mess in the past) ways to get around you or websites tell you to f off until you turn blocking off.

Customers and website visitors are consistently the last party to be thought of. So, I'm sorry little 3 man operation or one man blog, but until you get rid of that insidious advertiser you made a deal with who wants to either infect me or drive me nuts and invade me, I really don't give a damn about your survival.

 

You could always take the middle-ground of using an adblocker and then whitelisting sites you support and/or that have acceptable ads.

I know Neowin.net takes feedback about their ads seriously. There may be others.

 

Whitelisting doesn't solve the issue of tracking or even possible malicious ad servers. Unless you're prepared to research the thousands of individual ad servers and companies, hope they don't change practices and whitelist every single one, a user doesn't have a chance at keeping up. They don't have to even be ad servers. There are a ton of trackers out there that don't actually serve up ads (including the big names like Facebook and Google+, but lots and lots of "no names".)

ABP tried to help with acceptable ads, but the problem is that they are determining what is acceptable and they are also allowing payment to be put on the list. Once again the user gets left out of the discussion.

P.s, a lot of websites don't even know what ads are being served up and have often gotten yelled at for allowing infected ads. So there is that issue as well. If you can know how a particular ad provider does business and know that a website can and will control who serves up what kind of ads, then your suggestion would work very well and most of us would support it. But you can't know.

 

Erm ... yeah. I understand how important advertising revenue is, but I tend to agree that some ads are so intrusive & annoying they really do ruin the experience of browsing the Net. I don't know what the answer is, I wouldn't mind ads that weren't so distractingly in my face or yelling at me. I'm not too happy about being tracked though either.

I'm OK with ABP at the moment.

 

The answer, as always, is compromise. But the ad industry won't and, I admit, many users won't either. ABP (with Edge being included, depending on who you ask) is really the best, most readily available option we've got. Until someone comes along that does it better, then we can argue about whether the people behind ABP are good or bad all day long and it won't do much good.

 

Constantly annoying your readers, members, potential customers, etc is a lousy business plan. So is exposing them to tracking and profiling. Even worse is putting them at risk of malware exploits.

I have no good choice except blocking ads. White listing doesn't work, because site owners can't effectively control what ads appear.

 

Yeah, that just about sums it up.