Facebook to forcefeed you web ads, whether you like it or not: Ad blocker? Get the Zuck out! Facebook will circumvent browser ad-blocking tools to push web adverts onto people's screens. The new policy calls for the social network to serve up ads regardless of the presence of ad-blocking software, and in exchange give users greater control over their ad preferences to cut down on intrusive or annoying ads. The …
> How do they block an element that's in the same domain as the page itself without blocking actual content?
Same way you can currently do in your typical content blockers; find the element hosting the ad (or whatever else you don't want to see) and block it. As a non-ad example, I use the following filter to block the annoying (to me) elements of El Reg;
theregister.co.uk##.dont_miss.dcl
theregister.co.uk###top_tease
theregister.co.uk##.article_img
Adblock tools like ABP/ABL (with the additional element picker) or uBlock come with GUI tools to help you select and block various elements, else just fire up the dev tools and examine the page structure to write your filter manually.
I guess next step in the ad-block wars would be to use randomly named page elements but I've not seen anyone try that yet.
"I guess next step in the ad-block wars would be to use randomly named page elements but I've not seen anyone try that yet."
I've already seen them: hashed elements so they're unique for each visit (and each visit can be traced). It reaches a point where you can't block one element without blocking ALL elements, INCLUDING the content itself which is kept in a separate frame.
Well that is the only redeeming feature of a social media site, is that it's a lot better than blasting a bunch of people with emails in the hope they find it interesting, and not an annoyance or an intrusion.
You can say "I got married" or "I pupped out another brat" or "my car exploded" to whoever finds it interesting, and the "friend's" list is sort of self-curating.
I still don't have a FB account, though. They've sh*t&stirred it so hard, the original purpose is lost.
You know, there is this thing called a telephone...
Or put a line in the Hatch, Match & Despatch column of a newspaper?
Sorry... coat's over there... the one with enough 50p coins in the pocket to afford a 1 minute call from a phone box.
M.
<rant>Would you believe that I found two working phoneboxes within half a mile of each other in a mobile-signal-less part of Mid Wales? They were both working, but neither took cash, neither had a card reader, and when I made a reverse-charge call (not easy as the keypad stopped working as soon as the automated system answered "100") my parents (who were the recipients) were charged NINE POUNDS and SEVENTY FIVE PENCE for a two minute call! Landline to landline!</rant>
<rant>Would you believe that I found two working phoneboxes within half a mile of each other in a mobile-signal-less part of Mid Wales? They were both working, but neither took cash, neither had a card reader, and when I made a reverse-charge call (not easy as the keypad stopped working as soon as the automated system answered "100") my parents (who were the recipients) were charged NINE POUNDS and SEVENTY FIVE PENCE for a two minute call! Landline to landline!</rant>
Near Towyn?
Near Towyn?
't other side - Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant.
All I needed to do was get a message to my wife, who had gone to Oswestry. She was intending to contact our landlady while there - i.e. while there was a mobile signal - but I met the lady in the village while at the butcher.
M.
"You know, there is this thing called a telephone..."
You know, there are these things called toll charges. Yes, I know, shocking. As it turns out, in many third-world countries, calls and text cost a decent amount of dosh (especially if international in nature) while they can do short facebook trips free. It's true. I've seen them do it firsthand AND seen the ads.
>You know, there are these things called toll charges. Yes, I know, shocking. As it turns out, in many
>third-world countries, calls and text cost a decent amount of dosh (especially if international in nature)
>while they can do short facebook trips free. It's true. I've seen them do it firsthand AND seen the ads.
ITYF in a lot of 3rd world countries people have cellphones and no computer.
Aside from that, if someone claims to want to know what their friends and relatives are up to yet doesn't want to pay a few pence for a phone call then they quite obviously don't want to know particularly badly. What next - complaining about not getting a free bus/train fare or free fuel for the car when you want to visit them? FFS.
This post has been deleted by its author
You can still allow your wife to use Facebook, whilst blocking all their other tracking on your network.
Just whitelist m.facebook.com whilst blocking everything else.
To to best of my knowledge 99.9% of third party websites do not use m.facebook.com as a domain for their facebook tracking crap.
Using m.facebook.com also stops the autoplay videos as well. (Even on a desktop PC).
Which is nice.
The only adverts you see, is where one of your "friends" has "liked" a particular business or some other crap.
I recommend it.
The problem here is obviously that people aren't letting facebook profile them thoroughly enough. Please fill out the following twenty-six page survey regarding your shopping habits, personal finances and sexual preferences so we can more closely match you to our advertisers.
Or maybe FB's ad pimping isn't as successful as it hoped?
P&G are "scaling back Facebook advertising" as the targeting provided by Facebook didn't provide the expected increase in effectiveness (link to provide full details of claim, you don't have to click it...)
http://www.wsj.com/articles/p-g-to-scale-back-targeted-facebook-ads-1470760949
Considering that when I first started using the internet I had a 14.4k baud modem and I now have a 20M+ ADSL connection, web pages seem to be slower than ever.
Not only that, but when I try to scroll down a page my browser seems to continually lock up and make my whole machine unresponsive, sometimes for 20 seconds!
Perhaps I've misunderstood the concept of a faster internet connection and that the relationship with how quickly I can view material online is actual an inverse ratio.
Either that or the web has a deadly disease that sucks up all available bandwidth, has memory leaks and poor process queuing to the point where it can lock up a PC.
The day that people wake up and treat intrusive adverts as reasons *not* to buy a particular product from a particular vendor - then the disease just seems to spread and spread and spread.
We're doomed.
Either that or the web has a deadly disease that sucks up all available bandwidth, has memory leaks and poor process queuing to the point where it can lock up a PC.
Its the same disease that causes problems everywhere else - US Corporations. As they are obliged to pay more attention to shareholder remuneration than ethics, customer satisfaction, the law or even good taste combined; human beings are seen as having less relevance than the colour of socks worn by the CFO.
If companies want to be treated like people, they need to act like adult ones.
"Perhaps I've misunderstood the concept of a faster internet connection..."
It's so that the advertisers can load up the web page with dozens of heavy scripts to track you and show you ever more (somehow still irrelevant) ads. It's why we bought more powerful computers with more RAM too-- it's all for the benefit of the advertisers. Whatever we can do to help them invade our privacy!
When I used to read print periodicals for specialty interests (like computers), I used to look forward to the ads-- I wanted to see what was available. Ads for things I would never be interested in still weren't annoying; I simply did not look at them (once I saw that they were of no interest, of course). They didn't blink or flash or make noise or block content or play videos or force me to wait before I could turn to the page I actually wanted to see.
Now, though, even if we ignore the obnoxiousness of modern web ads, they are often far less relevant than when there was no targeting (beyond selecting which publication the ad was going into) and no tracking.
Some time ago, I was on Youtube watching air crash disaster videos and something happened (I must have disabled the ad blocker for testing; I never turn it off under normal circumstances) and I saw an ad. It was for either Boeing or Airbus (I can't remember which). What?? I might be able to afford a scale model of an airliner, but that would be about it.
It's true that I don't usually see ads or allow tracking scripts, and surely this inhibits the ability of the advertisers to track my interests (by design), but nothing I have ever done online would suggest that I am an executive at an airline or any other person who has a role in selecting or purchasing multi-million dollar airliners. At best, the algorithm clumsily matched an ad about airliners with videos about airliners.
The only ads I find annoying are the ones that pop up something over the page you want to see. But I have a solution to that, I never visit the page again. Auto-playing video ads aren't a problem as my audio is normally turned off. As for remaining ads I don't even notice them and have never deliberately clicked on them, my brain just silently filters them out after so long on the web.
Honestly I don't understand how anyone makes money from online advertising.
The only ads I find annoying are the ones that pop up something over the page you want to see. But I have a solution to that, I never visit the page again.
Cutting off one's nose to spite one's face? As has already been mentioned: NoScript.
Auto-playing video ads aren't a problem as my audio is normally turned off
Noscript deals with these too, which are a problem even if you don't notice them - they are consuming bucketloads of bandwidth in the background.
It's all relative, I suppose. It's like the text -v- Word processor thing. A 2k plain text file instantly becomes about 10k of ODT, even when you consider that the latter is (I believe) data compressed.
What used to be 10k of HTML "back in the day" with another 10k or so of GIFs to brighten things up is now easily ten times that, even on fairly "restrained" web pages. As I write the big picture on ElReg's front page is over 220k. No idea about the ads, as most of them don't load...
I don't use ad blockers per-se, just NoScript. Seems to deal with the worst offenders, and the others aren't usually a problem.
M.
If the website operators (and the advertisers) are so concerned about ads being blocked, why don't they just buffer up the ads at the website server and deliver them as part of the main page? That way, nobody could block them. Some targeting software would need to be running at the webserver end but it doesn't sound too complicated in principle.
Yes, they do that already and call it "Sponsored Content" or some such thing. South Park has a fun sendup of the term in a trilogy from last season. Yahoo! has been doing it since the front page got updated a few years back, and those are not too bad, you just skim over them and onto the next item... then, you click on some juicy news link and get some more ads, but only two or three extra sentences to the "article" which is then linked to the real hosting provider for it, and I go back and do that again. I get to a real article about once in five tries, which is not bad, but not super clean either. It's like qualifying for a swim event at the Rio Olympics; you win, but will you be swimming in a nicely chlorinated pool, or a local toilet?
"If the website operators (and the advertisers) are so concerned about ads being blocked, why don't they just buffer up the ads at the website server and deliver them as part of the main page?"
Started doing that at least 10 years ago - Ads are small and I limit the number of them to keep them non-invasive. They are from direct advertisers who contact me about advertising on my sites. First I check out the company. If I accept it, they produce a graphic and email it to me, I check it and minimize it. Pages don't call scripts - I keep the graphics on the server.
I do hope adblock stays as good as it is. I use NoScript, Gohstery and AB+ with Firefox for almost all my browsing around.
As to Facebook - No account there. No interest. Some friends and family are on it, but they can call me if they have something to tell me. Same with Twitter - No interest, never go there. Waste of time.
@ElsmarMarc
You get all my upvotes.
We need more people making pages that don't require 3 different blockers just to view them.
Today I tried using my secondary browser that has no blocking enabled to view a blog that seemed to require cookies and JS and all that nastiness...
...Three clicks later the browser jammed solid with a badly scaled reproduction of a Microsoft alert page and two undismissable javascript pop-ups telling me that my computer was infected/hijacked/doomed and to call Microsoft support on the helpfully provided phone number that I'm sure would connect me to a nice Nigerian man who could then explain how "Microsoft" was going to fix this "infection"...
...On my Linux machine.
I'm fair certain the creator of the site didn't intend for that to occur, but when you let every John on the stroll have a go at your CSS it's what's going to happen.
We need more people making pages that don't require 3 different blockers just to view them.
Today I tried using my secondary browser that has no blocking enabled to view a blog that seemed to require cookies and JS and all that nastiness...
...Three clicks later the browser jammed solid with a badly scaled reproduction of a Microsoft alert page and two undismissable javascript pop-ups telling me that my computer was infected/hijacked/doomed and to call Microsoft support on the helpfully provided phone number that I'm sure would connect me to a nice Nigerian man who could then explain how "Microsoft" was going to fix this "infection"...
...On my Linux machine.
Because this is what the internet has become. It is not the "shiny, happy place where everyone is your friend" experience that social media is brainwashing punters into believing. Your web browser is akin to some sort of sci-fi starship exploring space governed by a corrupt coalition that looks the other way when space pirates loot or destroy hapless vessels because of the percentage kickbacked to the coalition.
Shields up! (Ublock, Noscript, Ghostery). Activate cloaking device (Tampermonkey Adblock cloaking script).
Shields up! (Ublock, Noscript, Ghostery). Activate cloaking device (Tampermonkey Adblock cloaking script).
I actually use ublock origin, Self Destructing Cookies, and Https everywhere. But....
Thanks, that was HILARIOUS ! especially considering I'm a Trekie. By the way, if anyone is a Star Trek fan, who loves Fan Films, please consider joining our small "facebook" group. Where I never see ads by the way. Small Access Group,FB
https://m.facebook.com/groups/301105956896777?view=permalink&id=315998535407519&src=email_notif#!/groups/301105956896777?ref=bookmarks
And that's curious, because I have never seen one ad in the couple small groups pages I visit. Even in the main News page I never use, but checked today. Maybe the app wrapper I use for the mobile internet facebook access I use. It is called " Tinfoil for facebook" and in playstore.
Possible, but those serving the ads want to retain control to use them as a tracking tool as well, especially since they have to send some (usually pretty faked) data to those gullible people who actually pay to show ads hoping for some promised return in some future life.
If a site as big as Facebook starts serving ads from their own servers, they'll be blocked by CSS-style blocker rules in no time.
As long as the ads follow a pattern, they can be blocked. FB can use anti-adblock javascript. Stubborn users can use m.facebook.com with JS disabled. FB can make the mobile site JS-mandatory. Users can rebel against JS... on and on it goes...
Not that I care; I was using it a little but deleted my account this year. Even the wife has quit. People are starting to organize events the old-fashioned way. It's dead, dead, dead....
"As long as the ads follow a pattern, they can be blocked. FB can use anti-adblock javascript. Stubborn users can use m.facebook.com with JS disabled. FB can make the mobile site JS-mandatory. Users can rebel against JS... on and on it goes..."
Simple. Ads can be text-based in nature and served inline to the content. No way to block it without blocking the content, too. Image-based ads can be baked into legit pictures from the article, again making it all-or-nothing. Using randomly-generated tags ensures (a) the visit can be traced, and (b) the ads can't be easily blocked because the content has a similar tag. No JavaScript or external content necessary, and the content's loading can be detected server-side, meaning there's no way to avoid it without at least downloading the content, wasting your bandwidth, and triggering the demographics.
@Lost all faith
> > Not that I care; I was using it a little but deleted my account this year.
> No you didn't you merely hid it from view.
I'll never login again, though. It wasn't just Facebook's spying, it was the sum total of affronts that outweighed its slight usefulness to me, even before this adblock outrage.
Now the network effect works against FB when other people realize they're wasting their time there if they hope to reach me. If enough people do this, it's game over for FB. That's the ultimate solution to this problem.
I suppose there's also the question of who is responsible for the content. Content checking, management, hosting, click logging, etc. all takes time and money.
And If you end up unwittingly serving up a nasty trojan-bearing ad the reputational damage is all yours! Using an ad broker at least spreads the blame around a bit.
"And If you end up unwittingly serving up a nasty trojan-bearing ad the reputational damage is all yours! Using an ad broker at least spreads the blame around a bit."
If you serve up a nasty from your own servers then you're open to actual damages so have good reason to be careful after the first time.* Irrespective of using an ad-broker you're likely to get the reputational damage anyway - the users don't see the broker.
*Or maybe a whole lot of times if your CEO happens to be a baroness and you're a bit slow moving.
Lumped with it
My wife set up an account for me!!!
So I fill it up with as much rubbish as possible.
Great place to shove gameplay videos on, pictures from within games, anything to fill it up, use from a OC, er no.
I wonder what happened to the PSN trophy auto posting? That would nicely fill up fartbook as well.
Photomode in Uncharted 4, how about those for interesting posts?
Quote:
"I suppose there's also the question of who is responsible for the content. Content checking, management, hosting, click logging, etc. all takes time and money.And If you end up unwittingly serving up a nasty trojan-bearing ad the reputational damage is all yours! Using an ad broker at least spreads the blame around a bit."
Only yesterday I was shown a fraudulent advert by this very website:
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2016/08/10/Jamie_Jones_Scam_adverts_served_by_The_Register/
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