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

Zaneis: "It costs something to deliver these services. Bandwidth is not free, server capacity is not free."

Ads or not free either: whatever they cost add up to the price of goods and services ultimately.

Edit: Hopefully, blood-boiling Zaneis will get some sort of insights from the comments section of the article.

 

http://www.einnews.com/pr_news/1995...nifesto-against-bad-ads-asks-students-to-sign

 

But wait, is this a good idea?

Umm, maybe not...

Wait, wait... Let's force all the users to pay us money!

So, basically, lining their own pockets means upsetting the users in one way or the other. I can hardly wait their next move.

 

Their current move is shocking enough - hijacking social change platform Change.org to pursue their commercial agenda, violating their terms of service in the process:

http://www.change.org/petitions/eve...-ads-think-ads-could-be-better-then-join-us-3

 

Thanks JRViejo. With only 1 tab open:

 

Firefox using lots of memory? Adblock Plus may be the reason

 

http://www.extremetech.com/computin...eason-firefox-and-chrome-are-such-memory-hogs

 

ABP itself and the list maintainers are two different matters. The list maintainers are the ones that need to do some trimming and, more importantly, stop adding individual entries for special user requests. Users are perfectly capable of adding their own entries without effecting the list for others who may never visit a specific site or see a certain ad.

 

"Hey, look, we have 1000 3rd party scripts on our page. This will kill your software. Get rid of it.". And I just love them when they bring into discussion "If you like the site don't block ads. Help it survive". Here's another idea: paywall. But we all know they don't want a paywall because they'll have to work to provide content. The usual half A5 paper page article won't be enough to make people pay.

 

On the Adblock Plus memory consumption · 2014-05-15 15:35 by Wladimir Palant

https://adblockplus.org/blog/on-the-adblock-plus-memory-consumption

 

Part of the issue involves how Firefox handles things, particularly stylesheets. It looks like there is some Mozilla side interest in those and perhaps changes will be made. Part of the issue stems from ABP being a tool that provides finer-grained blocking as well as hiding rules. You want to be able to sniper the bad things that are bundled with good things. Otherwise, you'll end up letting bad things in with the good or taking out good things with the bad. Since the objective is to have filters in place *before* the user runs into items they want filtered, nearly every user logically would have filters that aren't [yet] getting hits. Language/region oriented lists can help with this, and theoretically there could even been "partial" as well as "full" lists. However, there is no free lunch. The vast majority of people do NOT have the knowledge and/or experience and/or time to create and maintain their own filter sets. Especially those wanting to block not only visible ads but the numerous non-visible elements that are also a privacy/security threat. Even just supplementing a partial list can be both a challenge and chore, so be careful what you wish for.

Clearly, subscription maintainers ought to be maintaining their lists. However, that calls for a system to do so. The standard approach would involve creating automated tests that cause the browser to visit a very large number of the more popular sites while collecting information like filter hits. Depending on the context, these automated tests can be made somewhat sophisticated too. So that they simulate some user interaction at those sites (move the mouse around to hover on things, generate clicks deeper into the site, etc), collect information to identify new/changed threats that are slipping past current filters, and collect various client-side performance information (even with and without the filtering tool running). Arguably, the ABP developers and at least some subscription maintainers should have had something along those lines setup and running a long time ago.

I notice that ABP developers are now pursuing phone-home filter hit reporting. At present it appears they are intending to make it opt-in. That may be useful, particularly in a supplemental sense, for regions without active contributors, and/or from the POV of collecting info behind logins and other pages missed by automated testing. However, that is the type of thing many users (especially privacy focused ones) would not want to enable. I hope they fully consider and adjust for that lack of coverage. As well as refrain from making such phone-home features opt-out or mandatory.

 

http://www.horizont.net/aktuell/med...d-P7S1-verklagen-Adblock-PlusEyeo_121209.html

http://www.horizont.net/aktuell/med...r-geht-gerichtlich-gegen-Eyeo-vor_121227.html

 

I've been running ABE on SeaMonkey for a while and it does seem to load in the GUI faster than ABP. It appears to work fine.

 

http://onlinemarketing.de/news/axel...icht-warum-und-was-sagt-die-online-szene-dazu

 

Adblock Plus sued by German marketing companies.

http://www.neowin.net/news/adblock-plus-sued-by-german-marketing-companies

 

Whitelisted 'acceptable' domains now include British Airways, CBS, Chanel, Cisco, Daily Mail, FIFA, Home Depot, Lenovo, Microsoft, Nike, O2, Orange, Sears, Target, UPS, Verizon, Walmart and Western Union.

https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt

https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easyprivacy.txt

 

Please point out exactly which rules you seem to disagree with, as from what I saw in your previous post, you don't understand how these rules work and are mistaking block rules for allow rules. You also don't seem to comprehend the need for specific whitelist entries for preserving website functionality.

EasyList has no connection to the people making ABP whatsoever. The list of "acceptable ads" is created by the ABP authors, not EasyList. The people behind EasyList contribute of their own free time and are not paid for it.

 

elapsed, you're an incurable optimist - you still think that Pinga will pause for a moment in his holy war against ABP ...

 

@ tlu

Lol. I agree but I wouldn't call it "holy war". It's more like some sort of sick obsession against ABP. This thread has been multiple times left without any further debate by anyone. It should have died peacefully knowing that there is a disagreement on where members stand in their thoughts on the matter.

Sadly to say, Pinga keeps on bumping up this thread with "new" info quoted from the German media.

 

You're right. I actually meant to say: unholy war

 

I don't know, I'm kinda entertained. How often do you see one person keep a thread going for a year all by their lonesome, regarding a topic no one gives a crap about anymore? This is one of those annoying threads that you can't make go away because it stays within the forum rules. Never mind that it's some bored dude/gal who can't seem to get over it, it's not against the rules so it continues to get bumped. I only stopped in here because Tlu was the last poster and I thought maybe something different might be going on. Nope, same s*** different day.

 

@Pinga: keep on posting your links. I like checking them all out.

 

http://www.lesechos.fr/tech-medias/...ande-qui-fait-trembler-les-medias-1027512.php

http://www.geste.fr/

 

Since there was no reply to this, I took a look (at https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easyprivacy easylist.txt to make it quicker). I see exception rules specific to each of the entities that were mentioned. Most of which I would disable by default, but there are some I think are OK. The ups.com WebTracking ones, for example, would appear to be related to tracking pages packages via web.

One piece of information that the lists, themselves, don't contain is whether or not an exception rule is:

1. Consistent with the objectives of the list and used to make an exception for something that should not be blocked by such a list (aka to prevent false-positives).
   
2. Inconsistent with the objectives of the list, but
   1. Put in place solely to reduce/eliminate breakage that some users would object to
   2. Put in place for some other purpose

Which, in general, makes it more difficult to rapidly determine which exception rules shouldn't be disabled and which should be disabled [wherever tolerable]. Few are eager to change rule syntax that is in widespread use, but it occurs to me that a related field could be embedded within filter lists in order to help users differentiate "safe" and "unsafe" exceptions. Whereby, so-inclined users could run with all #2 above category exceptions disabled by default. Then if/when a user actually runs into a problem, they could review Blockable Items to see the disabled exceptions that they might want to enable to reduce the breakage.

Do you think the same applies to EasyPrivacy? AntiSocial? Fanboy lists? No ABP/Eyeo employees in there somewhere? No ties to the "compensated for exceptions" business model?

I probably should have, but I've never paid much attention to the subscription maintainers, their discussions and attitudes, etc. I've just tried to focus on the lists and modifying them to suite my own purposes. The above is a genuine question.