Technology

The trade body called it “illegal circumvention technology”

Lol. Fuck off.

I used the internet for a long time before ad blockers even existed. Everybody simply ignored ads, instead. But that wasn't good enough for the advertisers. They weren't happy unless we were forced to look at the ads. Extraordinarily obtrusive ads. Popup ads. Popunder ads. That's when people started blocking ads. When you realized that your browser always ended up with 20 extra advertising windows.

Nobody really cared about blocking ads until advertisers forced us to. They made the internet annoying to use, and sometimes impossible to use.

Advertisers couldn't just be happy with people ignoring their ads, so they forced our hands and fucked themselves in the process. Now, we block them by default. I don't even know any websites that have unobtrusive ads because I never see their ads in the first place.

Now, they want to go back to the time when we would see their ads but ignore them. Fuck off. We know we can't even give them that much. If you give them an inch, they'll take a mile.

The use of the term "Dark traffic" here is to paint the use of ad-blockers as something nefarious. Don't use it, fuck these people right in their stupid mouths.

I propose using the terms "clean traffic", for ad-blocked website traffic, and "dogshit traffic" for everything else.

Besides the miserable experience unchecked advertisements cause, it is simply not safe to allow those advertisements to load.

A few years ago (before SSDs were common) I noticed unusual hard disk activity when loading a popular link aggregation site. A bit of investigation turned up a Trojan on my system. After removing it and reloading that site, my PC was immediately reinfected. The site owner denied any responsibility and said it was the advertising company's fault.

The way the Internet operates now means no one is responsible for the content their site provides or the damage they cause. Imagine if restaurant owners were able to deny responsibility for the atmosphere in their restaurants or food poisonings they caused? IMO it's the same thing.

Advertisers and websites have created the "dark traffic" mentioned here by repeatedly poisoning the public and they deserve the massive loss of revenue their behavior has caused.

Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.

It arbitrary pollutes any environment it’s conducted in, and causes secondary harms to non-participants by incentivising insecure hoarding of private information with the intent to better target individuals.

Raw-dogging the internet without an adblocker is about as irresponsible as not using contraception

I used to maintain a website for a bicycling club in my county that was great for getting people into biking, getting people out the house, making friends, and staying fit.

We had a banner ad along the top of the site for a local bicycle/bicycle repair shop that aided the club a lot and was very reasonable.

He got something out of it (publicity and a seal of approval towards the value/quality of his work), and we got something out of it (money to run the site, and a bit left over for things like puncture repair kits and the occasional celebratory drink after an arduous ride).

Nobody bats an eyelid to those ads. They are reasonable.

What we have now isn't that. What we have now is an insecure, malware-infested privacy nightmare that ruins webpages and stresses everybody out.

Use Firefox + uBlock origin for your own sanity. Don't let big tech make you feel guilty for not going along with their game.

Almost 70. Spent way too many years watching cable shit tv. I hate ads. I fucking hate ads with a nuclear passion. I have ad blockers, pirated shit and some services that do not show ads so far. If there are ads I find an alternative or read a book. Our teen son screams ad every time he sees one that sneaks through ad just to get me going.

They got it the wrong way around. Visitors who use adblock are not "dark traffic", the bullshit scripts and tracking they use are dark. The adblock users are actually the only clean traffic. The adblockers aren't "brutal", the people without blockers are being brutalized.

Millenials are killing the ad industry!

Good.

The trade body called it “illegal circumvention technology”, said 12ft.io has been locked by its web host, and promised to take similar action against other paywall bypassing technologies.

Just because you send bits to my network does not oblige me to render them. That's like saying I broke the law back when I had cable and changed channels during ad breaks. Falls flat on its face.

Ad BwOcKeRs ArE StEaLiNg FwOm Us!!!!

Meanwhile Google, Amazon, Facebook, and a billion AI web crawlers can hammer the fuck out of of your site and nobody cares.

If ad networks weren't the number 1 way to get malware installed on your machine, didn't slowly take over the dedicated space for the actual content of a website, or put pressure on the websites in question to only publish things inoffensive to the advertisers maybe adblockers wouldn't be such an issue.

If your site can't exist without being a cesspit of annoying and useless infomercials and a deployment mechanism for malicious code injection then your site should not exist.

Not too many people had an issue with static banner ads back in the day after all except greedy website operators and advertisers.

I have said it before and I'll say it again.

Adblockers are a critical part of any modern computer's security suit, and everyone should use them.

I won't even consider removing mine unless the owners of a site with ads take full responsibility for any dammage to my computer coming from visiting their site with out an adblocker.

This is due to the fact that ads can be hijacked and infect your computer with malware just by accessing the site.

I have also experienced my browser being hijacked by clicking a link that was compromized, it redirected my browser in a loop, then opened a javascript password popup box that took all focus from the browser window and refused to go away, while the page below displayed a message that I needed to call tech support.

It was very annoying to resolve, Firefox would by default restore any pages that was open in a tab if the browser crashed, and since the password prompt was stealing focus from the browser window, I had to kill it through the Task manager, which restored the page on start up....

I had to create a new profile, then it it solved it

Proud to be part of a growing tradition.

I feel like one thing doesn't get talked about enough is that websites feel the need to implement ad services that want to track the user in order to serve ads. Which I just find weird, the expectation to give up ones privacy, just to get served an ad.

Instead, the ads should just be relevant to the content of the page where an ad is embedded, which would automatically make it relevant to the reader, without tracking them.

The web has almost always been unusable without an adblocker. Ads today are less malicious, but more insidious. Clicking the wrong ad in 2003 would brick your computer. Clicking the wrong ad today means you'll have to cancel a credit card after your personal data is compiled and sold on the black market.

Nothing new. Ads don't fuel a free internet. They fuel a business model. The free internet is fueled by the time and donations of kind, dedicated people.

Maybe if they didn’t use very intrusive ads people would not install ad-blockers so much

Many websites put a video playing in later in top of the text, with another layer of ads and tiny space to read… the website would be unreadable without ad-blocks

“The growth of dark traffic undermines the ability of publishers to fund the production of quality content, or even operate as a business. We must recognise users are not the main driver causing this.”

"It’s demonetising publisher content at scale without user consent."

They act like we don't know what we are doing and want the ads. People who block ads in browsers like ddg and brave choose those browsers for that reason.

The ad industry is an abusive ex that complains when you defend yourself.

gasp you mean to tell me you DON'T like 20 million videos playing over the top of the recipe that you're trying to read while trying not to burn dinner? unbelievable.

smh these motherfuckers are so brazen

I have my entire network running with a DNS that blocks all advertising by default. And then, just to make absolutely certain, I run browsers with UBlock Origin on them.

People don’t mind ads for the most part it’s the fact that they take over 3/4 of the screen and generally try to be as obnoxious as possible.

If we stuck with banner ads no one would care, but they just had to make ads as shitty as possible.

It's not about blocking ads for me, that's a happy side-effect, it's about owning your computing and taking the necessary protection against tracking. Before "ad blockers" existed I spent a lot of time manually configuring my browser to block websites from connecting me to unnecessary, potentially intrusive third party servers, after all it's my browser and my internet connection. Now uBlock Origin does that for me, it's not an ad blocker, it's a wide spectrum content blocker and the user should have the final say on what they connect to. I think we should stop calling them ad blockers.

I don't mind the old system of one or two ads on a page or a 10-second ad at the start of a YouTube video if they don't track their users. But these days it is growing out of proportions, we are almost at American television with the amount of ad breaks in a YouTube video, and it's absurd.

The fbi suggests using an ad blocker. Guess what an ad blocker is as important as an antivirus.

An adblocker on your devices is equivalent to putting a Britta filter on your water tap.

And I'm one or them. Every time I turn it off things become legitimately unusable.

Besides the trackers and malware, ads can be categorised as a flaw in technology. A kind of software parasite that uses a computer's resources without providing any additional functionality to the user.

Maybe the problem is the advertisers and not the consumers. Jeeeesus.

News Media: "ADVERTISERS CAN'T DISTRIBUTE ADS BECAUSE OF YOUUUUUU"

g-good!

Using an ad blocker makes me tech savvy? Oh, la, la. Hand me my monocle and glass of schardonayegh.

Bottom line: if I'm forced to consume ads on a device belonging to me - I will rather throw it away!

When I was about five years old, my parents were shopping for a car. When the radio said Brand X Dealer was the best place to buy a car, I was so excited to tell them what I'd just learned.

I haven't forgiven advertising since.