Adblock Plus Reduces University's Network Traffic By 25 Percent 327
Mickeycaskill writes: Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada claims it cut 25% of its network traffic (40% of video traffic) by deploying Adblock Plus across its internal network. The study tested the ability of the Adblock Plus browser extension (PDF) in reducing IP traffic when installed in a large enterprise network environment, and found that huge amounts of data transfer were saved by blocking web-based advertisements and video trailers. The experiment was carried out over a period of six weeks.
Disclaimer: the study was funded by Adblock Plus.
I believe it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Even though it's funded by adblock, I still believe it. May not be such high percentages, but it will certainly take a measurable chunk away.
Individual sites cry foul because they cannot meet their advertising targets affecting their revenue, but from the point of view of the user that is active on the net they are bombarded by advertising. Stripping even 10% away can be a good thing...
Re:I believe it... (Score:5, Informative)
We block advertising at the web proxy on our corporate network, and the savings is substantial, easily 25% when I look at the traffic reports/dashboards. Never mind protection from a malware vector, the improved browsing experience and network relief makes ad blocking a no brainer.
Re:I believe it... (Score:5, Informative)
Gotta agree here, big-time. Even my own impromptu testing with AdBlock on/off shows that, as an example, roughly 20-30% of Facebook's packets carry advertisements to my browser. Sites like /. have the percentage down to something like 10% or so, personal and fringe sites maybe 5%, and at the other end, any ZDNet/CNET owned website blasts out soemthing like 25-35%. Don't ask what tomshardware.com and the gaming websites throw at you...
While it's nothing more than an annoyance on my home machinery, I know that when I'm tethered, it makes a *huge* effing difference in data usage. I have it firmly installed on my mobile for just this reason.
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Should say - I have it installed both on my laptop and my mobile.
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I did have it installed on my phone (the standalone version, not a Firefox plugin) but it's a bit of a resource (RAM) hog if your phone isn't brand new.
Re:I believe it... (Score:5, Insightful)
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There are few things that bug me more than a page load delay waiting for an ad url to respond.
or when the page formatting isn't set up right and when it renders it pops the browser view around. hm, I suppose the browser window could be modified to detect this stabilize keep the view ...
Re:I believe it... (Score:5, Interesting)
Local news sites have been some of the worst for me. I found one site that told my browser to keep downloading some resource from an ad network (no idea what it was) as long as the window was open, I just happened to have network tools open to see it. By the time I finished reading the story and closed the page the browser had downloaded tens of MB.
Re:I believe it... (Score:4, Interesting)
For the record; I have NEVER in my life clicked an ad from a website that resulted in a purchase. I have only a handful of times, made purchases from email blasts when good deals were presented. Once from Tigerdirect, some from NewEgg during black friday deals, a couple times from REI, and once for a viagra, JUST KIDDING!
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The thing about the email ads is that, with a lot of those, you sign up for those willingly, and they're from places you're interested in buying from. Newegg is a good example here: you probably got those emails because you bought stuff from Newegg, and then clicked on a box to be put on their mailing list so you could see their specials. It's entirely reasonable to think that you, both a former Newegg customer and a Slashdot user, meaning you're most likely a tech worker or the like, would be interested
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LOL. As if web proxies have issues with https anymore.
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Can you expand on that? What part of SOX specifically requires a MITM gateway/proxy for https connections?
Re:I believe it... (Score:5, Funny)
I banned Powerpoint presentations. Saves huge amounts of time, and server space. I don't have figures to support it, but I strongly believe it raises moral and stops a decline in general intelligence.
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I banned Powerpoint presentations. Saves huge amounts of time, and server space. I don't have figures to support it, but I strongly believe it raises moral and stops a decline in general intelligence.
(grin)
Actually, the problem isn't Powerpoint or presentations. The problem is people who do not know how to create or give good presentations.
Most boring presentations fall into the following categories:
1. a presentation that you are forced to attend but that has no direct relevance to you, your job, etc.
2. a presentation with too many details for the time slot. The Presenter speed reads the presentation
3. a presentation where the presenter just reads the presentation. There are no explanations and no ex
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I banned Powerpoint presentations. Saves huge amounts of time, and server space. I don't have figures to support it, but I strongly believe it raises moral and stops a decline in general intelligence.
(grin)
Actually, the problem isn't Powerpoint or presentations. The problem is people who do not know how to create or give good presentations.
Agreed. It's the wasted time that bites. IMO the worst offenders spend too much time preparing it (which hasn't been a problem for years). Then there are those that create Powerpoint presentations which should have just been written documents - which they could have emailed me (no Powerpoint on my computers). In which case I would have just read it and the meeting would become redundant. As a general rule I won't go to presentations unless they've sent me something that explained the presentation first - th
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Actually, the problem isn't Powerpoint or presentations. The problem is people who do not know how to create or give good presentations.
The simplest rule of thumb is to minimize the number of words on the slides. It keeps the presenter and the audience from just reading the slides and forces the presenter to actually engage with the audience.
If they removed the ability to insert text into Powerpoint slides, the workplace would instantly become a better place. (Really, people would just paste Word documents into slides or use more of those stupid clipart icons, but it would be better for one stupid meeting's worth.)
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The point isn't that slides are boring people, it's that slides create the impression that you're in the meeting to be entertained. If you can't pay attention and digest information from your field, try again.
Re:I believe it... (Score:4, Insightful)
I never said anything about boring people. If you need to actually present something instead of just handing out a document, then you should focus on presenting and not just showing text in the most inefficient format possible and then proceeding to read it from the screen.
In my field, that means showing the plots of your data instead of a wall of text describing your interpretation of them (and then reading that wall of text). If you're not interacting with your audience then you're not aware of how well you're delivering the information.
The point of a presentation is to deliver information by speaking. The point of a presentation aid like Powerpoint is to help you show things that you can't say or emphasize things that you can say. If you're just a talking head reading your slides out loud for the presumably literate audience, then you're just wasting everybody's time.
If you can't be bothered to efficiently use a medium, then proceed to blame that ineptitude on your audience, try again.
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I am all for adds in websites... However many of them had became too intrusive, to take up so much bandwidth, or chew up too much cpu power to make it worth it.
Adds should be relative to the content of the site/page, they should be clearly marked as adds, they in total should not take up more then 20% of the total sites resources. (Bandwidth, CPU, screen real estate... )
I get it, a site offers service free of charge, so they use some space for advertising... I get that. However the goal is to get you to th
If neither party is willing to foot the whole bill (Score:2)
Say it costs $20 to provide a service. Advertisers are willing to pay only $10, and subscribers are willing to pay $10. The result is Hulu Plus, which has both ads and payment.
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In the case of Hulu Plus (or cable TV), subscribers are never offered the opportunity to foot the whole bill.
The subscription + advertising model of Hulu Plus and cable TV are due to the advantages of being able to derive income from two distinct non-communicating parties. Since Hulu is owned and run directly by the media networks, it's not surprising that they're keeping the same business model. Since advertising and commercials are the foundation of their entire empire, I'd be surprised if they ever offer
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I wonder if the monthly costs between Amazon (no commercials), Netflix (unfortunately starting commercials), and Hulu (lots of commercials) compare in this way.
http://www.digitaltrends.com/h... [digitaltrends.com]
According to this site, Netflix with no commercials (starting commercials sometimes for their own things, before or after the show, not during) costs almsot exactly the same as Amazon and Hulu:
http://www.businessinsider.com... [businessinsider.com]
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No commercials on Netflix here in the UK - I guess having an ad-free public broadcaster of world-renowned quality forces the other market players to raise their game (we have an average of 12 minutes per hour rather than 18 on our other FTA networks).
Given that most of the costs must be for content, imagine what the USA could have with a similarly funded ($19 a month) public broadcaster...
Exclusives (Score:2)
I currently subscribe to none, but I'm told Netflix and Amazon Prime also tend to have older shows than Hulu Plus because the royalties are cheaper. If you want to stay current on watercooler conversation, you may need the service with both revenue streams. From the article you linked on businessinsider.com:
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"Exclusivity" and "the royalties are cheaper" describe entirely different things.
From your example, "New Girl" is distributed by 21st Century Fox (indirectly through subsidiaries) and Hulu is a joint venture between 21st Century Fox and several other media companies. One of the companies that owns Hulu also owns "New Girl". There is no evidence that new episodes of "New Girl" are available at any price to Netflix (a stream-as-you-like service that competes directly with Hulu, as opposed to Amazon's pay-per-
Remember dollar movies? (Score:2)
There is no evidence that new episodes of "New Girl" are available at any price to Netflix
Only because FOX is bigger than NFLX. When publicly traded corporations are involved, everything has a price. Netflix just happens to be at a lower end of the market, buying rights once the royalties are cheap enough. Do you remember second-run theaters [wikipedia.org]? They would show movies at a deeply discounted ticket price because studios charged a smaller royalty to show films that had already finished their first theatrical run. It's a form of urgency-driven price discrimination. In this case, Hulu is to full price
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In this case, Hulu is to full price theaters as Netflix is to dollar theaters.
Since Fox (who jointly owns Hulu) actually holds the copyright and distribution rights, it's not directly comparable to the theater situation. It's more akin to television networks, where the networks themselves hold exclusive distribution rights: Fox will air their episodes on their television network, exclusively, and they provide no option for their competitor networks to air that show at the same time. After some time, however, they may sell the rights to air their shows to other networks.
Amazon has both the pay-per-episode model and the Netflix-clone that Prime subscribers get. I was referring to Prime.
The only thing
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To be honest, my unfounded speculation is that the subscription fees alone are enough to cover the operational costs plus a respectable profit for Hulu Plus (and Amazon/Netflix when they aren't being squeezed by the media companies). I think that the advertising revenue is pure gravy and that they'll never give it up because of the licensing exclusivity that they hold (=they can) and their longstanding partnership with advertisers.
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Some of us are willing to pay (with actual money, not eyeball-time or personal information) for commercial-free media. It's only the people that are constantly chasing "free" that should have to put up with the shock-and-awe advertising campaigns.
Paying for access, only to also be subjected to advertising, is bullshit. I would gladly pay Hulu to cover the share that they're getting from advertisers, but I'll pay them exactly nothing if I can't lose the advertising altogether.
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Agree totally. The moment anything includes ads is the moment I stop paying for that thing.
The big problem is that the ability to encounter ads is forced as hard as they can.
"Ok before you can see whatever, watch this ad. Fast forward won't work obviously." -> adblock
"Oh, I see you're using adblock, well whine bitch cry" -> greasemonkey to hide that I'm using adblock
Advertisers see no issue demanding that their clients try as hard as they can to subvert user control of their machine and time. Fuck
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Say it costs $20 to provide a service. Advertisers are willing to pay only $10, and subscribers are willing to pay $10. The result is Hulu Plus, which has both ads and payment.
mmmm not the ones I know.
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Does it cost $20 though, or is Hulu gouging their subscribers? I don't subscribe to, say, NBC, yet they and their affiliates manage to turn a profit from advertising alone. Digital distribution is extremely cheap, and yet, it costs more to buy a digital download of something than to buy a physical copy. Something is amiss. Hopefully competition will force downward pressure on prices, but right now it's more of a cartel than a competition. Netflix may be an outlier in that regard, for now, but Hulu and
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YES but we are not allowed the option.
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Not sure it's a valid representation.
Maybe HuluPlus just wants $10 more/person?
And next year, maybe it's $15 more...so more/bigger/higher$ ads.
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I'm not really sure what your point is here. That's like asking if paying your ISP bill should make the internet ad-free. Even cable TV isn't analogous, in that it pays some amount for most of the channels you get, then charges you to put it all together.
Cable TV is a transport service. Ads on TV are to pay for the content. Or at least that's the basic idea. Cable TV technology has been able to "insert" (actually overwrite) ads on individual channels for years, though I'm sure they do pay a little to the c
I'm surprised it's not more. (Score:5, Insightful)
Even though it's funded by adblock, I still believe it. May not be such high percentages, but it will certainly take a measurable chunk away.
I'm surprised it's not more.
Perhaps that's me, though. My browsing tends to be sites, such as Slashdot, where the meat I'm after is text, and the site's chaff is mainly icons, formatting-prettys, buttons, and other things that are static, image-light, and either susceptable to substantial compression or rendeded by the browser from small descriptions. Ads, meanwhile, tend to be image-rich, moving, and flashy, and designed for the add site's customer (who has litte concern for the viewer's costs) which chews up bandwidth.
I'll presume it's so low either because others browse more bandwidth-intensive sites or site designers, in this age of broadband and optimized-only-for-appearance site design tools, are also not interested in keeping the bandwidth down (and the resulting performance up).
Individual sites cry foul because they cannot meet their advertising targets affecting their revenue, but from the point of view of the user that is active on the net they are bombarded by advertising. Stripping even 10% away can be a good thing...
For reducing viewer distraction, cutting bandwidth costs, and avoiding delays in web-page rendering.
I NEED to suppress the ads when I'm at the ranch, with only slow dialup. A single image can make a page take minutes to load, when it could have been up in a second or less. So imagine one surrounded by banner ads, sidebar ads, embedded ads, footer ads, and so on. One animated ad can make the page take half an hour or more to load, and dynamic content can make it never finish at all, as the content changes outstrip the bandwidth.
I even browse Slashdot with a configuration hack corresponding roughly to enabling firefox's long-lost "delay image loading" option. To do otherwise, even in classic mode and with "patron status or enough karma to disable ads", would be impractical.
Without adblock plus AND noscript, (and maybe flashblock,) I'd be off the web when out of town.
Video Streaming is Huge (Score:2)
I'm surprised it's not more.
That was my first reaction too, then I remembered how much streaming has taken off. Globally, video streaming accounts for a bit more than 50% of all traffic. Excluding that means that at least 50% of non-video-streaming traffic is caused by ads.
You'd also expect that video streaming was higher among a younger demographic like a University. If removing ads decreased the video traffic by 40% and 25% of total traffic was ads, the non-ad video streaming accounted for up to 62% of the total traffic at the Unive
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Students were again instructed to mimic surfing to a designated basket of URLs (Table I) as they might perform research for a paper, casual surfing (news). They were required to spend at least 5 - 15 minutes on each site.
Table 1: Basket of URLs Visited
youtube.com
bild.de
gamestar.de
cnn.com
shopping.com
bloomberg.com
spiegel.de
ebay.com
nytimes.com
mashable.com
yahoo.com
huffingtonpost.com
digg.com
washingtonpost.com
reddit.com
abcnews.go.com
buzzfeed.com
cbs.com
yelp.com
espn.com
msn.com
dailymail.co.uk
skysports.com
imgur.com
imdb.com
techcrunch.com
alibaba.com
reuters.com
cnet.com
thesun.co.uk
stackoverflow.com
bbc.com
Phase II of the testing was conducted from March 15, 2015 to May 1, 2015 with 103 students participating. Phase II revealed some interesting results. For the purposes of analysis, we selected two computers with the most web traffic, one with Adblock Plus (Computer Y) and one without any ad-blocking technology (Computer S).
That's an interesting test methodology and a highly questionable way to cherry pick analyze 2 weeks worth of data.
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Speaking of cherry picking, you excluded the sentence immediately following the list of sites:
Then a little bit later they say
So they proposed a test, performed the test, an
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An easy experiment if you're masochistic is to enable your ad blocking proxy on cell data but not on wifi. Watch the stats. If you're on Android it's easy to see the data savings pile up.
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Even though it's funded by adblock, I still believe it. May not be such high percentages, but it will certainly take a measurable chunk away.
So you're saying that you believe that making fewer requests for less content results in less traffic? It's good that you believe that, now I will believe it also. I didn't want to be the only one.
Now if only Slashdot would get rid of video ads. (Score:5, Insightful)
Blocking Flash does a lot (Score:3)
Was this a Flash ad? I save a lot of Internet traffic and CPU time on an Atom laptop by just setting Adobe Flash Player to "ask to activate". In my experience, most major ad networks currently aren't smart enough to sense that the Flash object has failed to load in order to replace it with an HTML5 video ad.
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I save a lot of internet traffic by not installing flash at all & using Chrome only for flash required things (hate your tech decision, VMware!)
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I use noscript and have no ads nor tracking while on slashdot...
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haha. now THAT is clever
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Game Of War really bugs me, not because I've ever played it and had a problem with the actual game, or because of the ads, but because of the name. It's just lazy. "Game Of War", really? I imagine the first meeting with the new advertising firm.
"OK, what are we selling here?"
[slight accent]"Well, we've got a game of war."
"And a name! 'Game Of War', got it, let's not spend another second thinking about that, now let's talk about whose boobs we're going to show everyone."
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The cynic in me wonders whether that was calculated marketing sleaze as opposed to laziness, maybe they're targeting people who try searching for Game of Thrones. The various app stores all have auto-suggest, so you start typing in "game of" and get other suggestions including Game of War.
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I doubt that a game with a $40 million annual advertising budget, including Super Bowl ads, would rely on mistaking them for something else. They're obviously trying to spread their name, I just think they chose a really lazy name. From what I hear from reviewers, it also sounds like their gameplay is equally lazy, but put Kate Upton's boobs on TV and they earn $600 million with a shit cash-grab game.
"the study was funded by Adblock Plus" (Score:2, Interesting)
Disclaimer: the study was funded by Adblock Plus.
Gosh, they must be selling something. It's not as if they'd just give Adblock Plus away for free.
Re:"the study was funded by Adblock Plus" (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: "the study was funded by Adblock Plus" (Score:2)
The whole gist of this article is that "free" websites are paid for by whoever is paying for transit. For a university it's probably thousands of dollars per month that they pay so that a student can look at usatoday for "free".
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FYI nothing is ever given away for free.
Yes at first glance that's just a platitude, but it's a good idea to always think about this simple truth whenever you you evaluate something has has a face price of zero.
It's really not so simple as that. You can walk into many places at random to use their public restroom without making a purchase. They have given this service to you for free.
At any coffeehouse you will also see that the napkins and creamer and sugar are free for the taking. They don't charge anything for them.
You will also notice that wifi is free in many many places nowadays.
Also you might notice that the city has given you permission for free to walk on their sidewalks and drive on their roads. They
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Seems a bit high (Score:2)
Text article with video ads (Score:5, Insightful)
I could see 25% if you handling mostly text/images. But with streaming services, I feel like it'd be a bit less.
What tips the scale is the fact that a lot of sites stick video ads into text/image articles.
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Ever 3rd (ca) thing I hear on Spotify is an ad for Spotify Premium
Ever 5-6 minutes on DI, I get an ad
On Sony's music-video service I got 2 ads per song (Often the same twice)
On YouTube I get a video-ad per video, easily as long as the video I'm watching in case of short "funny" vids (I've clocked youtube video-ads up to 3 minutes long)
On Comedy Central, watching Daily Show and Colbert Report I get (got?) 1-3 video-ads per ca 6-minute segment
The notion that stripping this could result in 25% reduction seems.
AdBlockBlock (Score:3)
Adblock if you use the standard block lists blocks youtube ads.
If it is acceptable for a client-side proxy or browser extension to block the display of preroll video ads, would it also be acceptable for YouTube to retaliate against the user of such proxy or extension by blocking the display of the video that plays after the preroll video ad?
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I would say yes. You and I are under no specific obligation to make web requests for any specific content, we are under no specific obligation to display/execute/process response content in any fashion. Similarly Youtube et al should be under no specific obligation to respond to any given request or respond with any specific content.
Re:AdBlockBlock (Score:4, Insightful)
Absolutely! But when Joe Sixpack eventually figures out that "nothing works" at YouTube, he will stop going there.
Also keep in mind that a lot of actual "content" consists of little more than advertisements in itself. Product reviews (even teardowns), music videos, movie trailers - Do you think YouTube wants to block someone from watching the real ad, just because they skipped the pre-ad?
Unequal sharing of bandwidth cost (Score:3)
So you still don't get the user to see the ad, all you've done is waste their *and your* bandwidth.
Bandwidth is a lot cheaper for a server in a datacenter than for a viewer behind a WWAN (cellular or satellite) connection, which tends to have a cap of 3 to 10 GB per month. So WWAN users have a monetary incentive against downloading ads that will not be displayed.
Give uploaders the choice (Score:2)
You make a good point. I was mostly thinking of ad-supported sites operated by for-profit companies that may in fact have to pay royalties per play to an upstream licensor. Perhaps a service that hosts videos uploaded by the public should give the uploader (or Content ID claimant) a "Play despite ad blocking" checkbox to allow playback of a "monetized" video when the ad fails to load. Uploaders whose incoming donations exceed ad revenue would turn this on; uploaders without a donation flow might get away wi
Laugh (Score:2)
This seems like a "no duh" thing that would have been done long ago.
Sounds Legit. (Score:2)
And that's even aside from the benefits of blocking a malicious vector.
Didn't AdBlock development split at some point? (Score:2)
To beomce AdBlock and AdBlock Edge because AdBlock whitelisted some ads by default and made it difficult to remove those whitelist entries?
I heard something to that effect, any way. I can't remember when it happened but I remember a pretty big stink being raised about it and I swapped over to using Adblock Edge.
Irony is... (Score:5, Interesting)
... if you visit the first article linked in the story, while using AdBlock, you get a giant pop-up complaining about your doing so. :-)
Not if you also use noscript. (Score:2)
... if you visit the first article linked in the story, while using AdBlock, you get a giant pop-up complaining about your doing so. :-)
Not if you also use noscript. B-)
I definitely buy it (Score:2)
When I can be bothered to install AdBlock on a machine, the responsiveness goes up significantly. I'm guessing most of the speed increase isn't in the downloading of resources, but the messy JavaScript that has to run in the browser to position everything.
On a related note, I also remember hearing something about when the new CEO of JCPenney took over, his team noticed that almost 1/3 of all network traffic coming out of their HQ was YouTube. That's a LOT of cat videos. It's enough trying to balance control
I'm against ad-blocking on a network level (Score:2)
I have Adblock+ installed on my browser, but I only use it on the most obnoxious of sites.
There are 3 ways content sites can support themselves:
1) With payments & subscriptions;
2) With Ads outside of the content;
3) With sponsored content that *is* an Ad
I choose 2. I don't want to have to pay for every site & page that I click on, so the only other option a site has bar explicit ads, is with sponsored content. Content which attempts to look legitimate & impartial, but whose ultimate goal is to in
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4) The site is run Ad-Free as a side cost of doing business.
Oh, the only business _is_ the site?
No, the business is the "content". I frequent many sites who provide quality content & support themselves with advertising & merchandising. I've got little interest in merchandise, so the only revenue these sites can earn from me to cover their costs are from advertising & donations. The latter tends to be limited to small hobby sites.
B&M is expensive & restricts you to a physical location, & in my case the majority of the content I consume (tech news & blogs, international polit
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:reduces some traffic, enables others. (Score:5, Informative)
Adblock plus has a coloured history of cherrypicking advertisers to quietly ignore
They openly advertise this, pun intended. They do claim to have a minimum quality requirement for whitelisted companies, and companies need to pay to get on that white list. Breaking the terms by having questionable ads can remove the companies from the whitelist forcing them to pay all over again. I seems to be done in a way that would cost a company more to break the rules.
I believe it too, and also a pitch for Ghostery (Score:5, Informative)
AdBlock Plus is awesome. Another really useful tool is Ghostery. It might not reduce bandwidth dramatically, but by blocking beacons, trackers, etc. it junks tons of JavaScript content and makes web pages render far more quickly. This really improves the browsing experience.
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I absolutely agree with using Ghostery (or something like it) for privacy reasons. That said Ghostery and AdBlock both use quite a bit of memory*, and IMHO slow things down as much as the ads they are blocking (apart from flash ads which FlashBlock or native click-to-play capability solves with much less overhead). Furthermore, I almost never see ads when running Ghostery, and conversely the EasyPrivacy filter list for AdBlock does much of the same thing that Ghostery does. So I would recommend trying them
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Try uBlock Origin; Chrome is using considerably less memory on OSX than it was when I was running ABP (anywhere from 15% to 25% less).
https://chrome.google.com/webs... [google.com]
uBlock Origin (Score:2)
Adblock Plus is old and busted, uBlock Origin [github.com] is the new hotness.
uMatrix (Score:2)
I don't know... (Score:4, Funny)
See, this one guy said I should use his custom HOSTS file to block this stuff...
/duck
/run
God Damnit (Score:3, Insightful)
The first rule of AdBlock Plus is that you do not talk about AdBlock Plus.
THE SECOND RULE OF ADBLOCK PLUS IS THAT YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT ADBLOCK PLUS!
caps filter bypass: lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
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Hacking by incantations?
Where are the uBlock people? (Score:5, Informative)
I remember a related story a few months ago and I was using Adblock Edge (forked non-sell out version of ABP) and advocating it. People kept spamming my thread saying that uBlock was better. So I tried it out and am now a convert. It is in fact lighter weight and nearly transparent, but since they don't pay for placement you have to search for it 2x in the add-ons to find it.
I primarily use Firefox, with uBlock (you can enable even stricter subsets of rules if you want, I did without issue), HTTPS Everywhere and Privacy Badger (the last 2 are from the EFF). I only see ads at work on other people's machines. There are other good add-ons for other stuff but this + wipe everything on browser close and private windows are nice.
The only memory leaks seem to come from anything Flash based. So I'm forced to kill/restart FF every few days or it gets progressively slower and slower. I've noticed it's not really an issue without something running Flash.
But they are stealing... (Score:2)
I can't believe anyone actually uses that to try and guilt people into not blocking ads.
Trashy Celebrity Block (Score:4, Funny)
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until advertisers vet every single advert (like a newspaper) and use static adverts instead of javascript they will remain blocked.
Where does that leave web applications that use scripts for core functionality, such as online whiteboards or even opening and closing comment subtrees in SoylentNews, Slashdot, or another threaded web-based discussion forum? People will end up whitelisting scripts on those web applications' domains to "unbreak" them and getting ad scripts along with them.
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Which is why I block known ad servers by their hostnames instead of messign with browser settings. So many things I do for work and school depend on javascript and such working, it is much easier to play with your hosts files (home, single user) or block them at the router.
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Perhaps I mistakenly inferred recommendation of NoScript from "use static adverts instead of javascript" in comment #50081673.
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until advertisers vet every single advert (like a newspaper) and use static adverts instead of javascript they will remain blocked.
Where does that leave web applications that use scripts for core functionality, such as online whiteboards or even opening and closing comment subtrees in SoylentNews, Slashdot, or another threaded web-based discussion forum? People will end up whitelisting scripts on those web applications' domains to "unbreak" them and getting ad scripts along with them.
It leaves them mostly unaffected. Adblock Plus is an adblocker, not a javascript whitelist addon. You may be thinking of NoScript.
I use AdBlock frequently to block Javascript that is loading from somewhere other than the page I'm on. This disables a lot of the annoying ads.
Sky is blue, water is wet, hosts is useful (Score:2)
And caching HTTP and DNS requests reduces your network traffic.
Especially if you cache the DNS responses in /etc/hosts and forge ad networks' addresses as 0.0.0.0 in the same file.
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To me, it's both. A disclosure disclaims the implied lack of affiliation to a particular concern.
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With a total reduction in network traffic of 100%!
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Wouldn't that be the exact opposite of the findings? After all, it is ad networks that carry most of the Internet's malware.
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Magazine ads don't squirm and wriggle around,
High Times ads excepted.