Adblock Plus blocks Facebook's ad-blocker buster: It's a block party! The makers of Adblock Plus (ABP) have already found a way to defeat Facebook's anti-ad-block tools. An updated filter list for ABP will disappear web ads on Facebook's desktop site – including banners the social network said it would force people to see even if they are using ad-blocking tools. Those ads are specially crafted …
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127.0.0.1 facebook.com
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127.0.0.1 static.ak.connect.facebook.com
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# Block Facebook IPv6
#fe80::1%lo0 localhost
::1 facebook.com
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::1 edge-star6-shv-02-ams2.facebook.com
@Ivan 4.
What do you mean - you don't want 27 different types of new car, the latest mobile phone (even though you are already in a 2 year deal on the current one) - and as for your choice of music, well its about time you realised that mum knows best and you really should be listening to the latest fingernails down the chalk board "music"
When will the advertising people realise that we are all different, have different views and want do do things in different ways. I'm not in the slightest bit interested in the latest game, fridge or TV or other random thing that some random party is paying you to spam across the Internet.
As others have already said on previous posts, Stylish is great for blocking entities on web pages and any ad blocker is better than none, although uBlock is as others suggested very good.
BTW - does anyone know if they still push adverts on El Reg - not seen one for very many months ;-)
I bought some incontinence pads for my mother (hence the AC) online. The scumbag company has passed my email addy to every man and his dog that sells 'aids for the elderly'. While I am over 60, I ran a half marathon last March and am in pretty good health.
Yes I know that I was foolish not to use a throw away address but that's life.
Now and I'm looking at you Google I get ads for stairlifts, zimmer frames and all that crap when I visit a number of sites.
I was pretty ambivalent about online ads but now? They can all go and fuck themselves. I've blocked ALL ads no matter how innocent and well deserving the site is.
They have brought it on yourselves so good riddance to the lot of you I hope you all die a horrible lingering death.
Same issue as others - I often avoid making on-line purchases for presents due to the lack of ability to forget that I looked / purchased a particular item. I want the surprise to happen when the wrapping paper is removed, not when they walk past my PC for any of the next 4 weeks after buying the item
This is yet another marketing WTF - If I've already purchased something, then there is a really good chance that I won't want another one - by virtue of already owning one. Obviously if the item is a consumable, then for repeat purchases, then I'll probably go back to where the last ones were purchased from, so I don't need an advert for that as I've got both a brain and a pile of e-mails as it goes through the purchasing system.
Advertising morons!. You would have hoped that the above would have gone into the marketing thinking under the topic of "Understanding your customer", Then for some random reason, the Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy pops into my brain (2nd time this week) and I remember why Golgafrinchans. They are one of the useless third !
"This is yet another marketing WTF - If I've already purchased something, then there is a really good chance that I won't want another one - by virtue of already owning one."
I think you just hit the nail on the head. The advertisers doing the tracking should be using a blacklist system. If they want to "personalise" ads, and you are prepared to let them, they should be blacklisting the products and related keywords of your recent purchases, not using them as guides of what to show you now.
"Now if I open amazon @work I can see penises!!"
Way back in the MySpace days, a friend of mine said a MySpace friend bought a dildo.
Soon afterwards _all_ her friends received a message saying "so-and-so just bought a dildo, would you like to buy one too?"
Very classy. And it appears no-one has learned anything since then either. Idiots.
Amazon does allow you to change your settings so that past purchases and searches aren't used to give you recommendations. I had a similar, but not as amusing experience a while back when my wife searched for clothes whilst logged into my account. A bit of pissing around through the settings allowed me to clear out the recommendations.
""Now if I open amazon @work I can see penises!!"
Just put yourself in my shoes. I once purchased a Michael Jackson DVD on behalf of my nephew. Jackson's stuff kept appearing for ages after in my recommendations.
I still wake up in cold sweats now.
*Shudder*
I can top that...
Ex-wife was a social worker.
Bought a book on sexual exploration and modern slavery...
My ad's then consisted of BDSM books and accessories.
One quick email to Amazon and a very apologetic email back....and the ads very quickly disappeared..
Amazon and Ebay do lose business due to this, if you keep getting it rammed in your face you go to places which do not.
Many times we have gone elsewhere for presents to avoid the recipient seeing things like this about it.
I had to set up another Ebay account for this and only use with one browser to stop it polluting other browsers.
And yes I do block as much as I can
Yes I know that I was foolish not to use a throw away address but that's life.
Make sure you never, ever participate in the so-called "Google Trusted Stores" program. Its only purpose is to enable The Goog to capture info about purchases that you made without using their search or Gmail.
EXACTLY! I would like ads, I love buying crap. But only if they are interesting to ME. I turn ON all the 'give them my demographics' in the hope I'll get better targeted ads but nooooo it's still all rubbish. And as for El Reg, I would be a supporter and turn the ads on, but the first day I did that I got an autoplay video about NOTHING AT ALL from IBM in the middle of a story. So ABP went straight back on.
Codysydney: "And as for El Reg, I would be a supporter and turn the ads on, but the first day I did that I got an autoplay video about NOTHING AT ALL from IBM in the middle of a story. So ABP went straight back on."
I won't allow ads on my (my!) system, as long as a single piece of malware has been delivered that way in the preceding decade.
However, as soon as The Reg starts supporting Flattr or Flattr Plus, they'll start seeing revenue from me. I can't imagine why they haven't already done it. (Unless maybe it violates their deal with some of the ad providers they use.) I'll support these mechanisms not just because I value the content here, but more importantly because Introducing any sort of direct user support into the ecosystem will put the fear of god into the ad companies. (Who currently think they are the Gods of the Internet.)
does anyone know if they still push adverts on El Reg - not seen one for very many months ;-)
Yes, they do. But my in my impression most of these ads are non-intrusive and don't disturb, so I prefer to not adblock El Reg.
Btw: IMHO the quality of advertisement on a site tells also something about the general quality of the site itself, so there is also some benefit of not blocking ads per default.
The ublock.org developers forked the original and tried to pass it off as their own creation. They ask for donations to support their "hard work". The correct site for the real Ublock is https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock. You can also install "Ublock Origin" from the Mozilla add-ons site.
See also the Wikipedia article on Ublock Origin.
"The advertisers wouldn't do it if there was no money in it......."
Distinguish between the advertising industry and the advertisers, those who have something they want you to buy.
The money is in it for the advertising industry for showing the ads. If they really wanted to do something for the advertisers' profits they'd follow the following line of reasoning:
1. This person is trying to block us.
2. This person therefore doesn't like being pestered by ads.
3. If we pester him he'll probably give our client a miss when he might have otherwise bought something.
4. Breaking through his ad-blocker will be bad for our client.
5. We won't try to do it.
The fact that they don't think that way (nor do the publishers) should tell the advertisers something and one day they might actually catch on and pull the rug out from underneath the whole thing.
The fact that this hasn't happened yet tells the rest of us two things: firstly that the advertisers still haven't grasped the fact that they're not special snowflakes to whom this logic doesn't apply and secondly that the advertising industry is using this to sell successfully.
And remember, the advertising industry doesn't sell to the rest of us, it sells to advertisers. How good a deal do they get?
Doctor Syntax: "The money is in it for the advertising industry for showing the ads. If they really wanted to do something for the advertisers' profits they'd follow the following line of reasoning..."
I once spoke to a spammer on the phone - back when they were stupid enough to put a phone number in their email promotions. He literally screamed at me (from his poolside deck-chair in Florida) about his absolute legal and moral right to bombard me with adverts for penis-enlargement products.
The online ad industry today feels at least as entitled as that guy did. Check this article from the CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the big online-advertising trade group:
The Ad Industry Needs to Disrupt the Disruptors
The author refers to ad-blocking as "robbery, plain and simple," and an "unethical" "extortionist scheme." And (oblivious to irony) he compares those promoting ad-blocking to gangster Tony Soprano. We, the consumers, clearly do not have the right to control what we see, on our own hardware, via our own Internet connection, if said control interferes in any way with the advertising revenue stream.
The online advertising industry truly is laboring under the delusion that they provide an indispensable service - as opposed to enjoying a pot of gold provided purely by an accident of history and contorted capitalist economics. When confronted by ad blocking, they rant and rave much like the content companies do about piracy - forgetting that content is something that consumers actually want. Warmed by their obscene profits, they've convinced themselves that advertising is an inescapable law of nature, that "advertising helps the economy function smoothly," "keeps prices low" and generally makes everyone happy.
Introducing any workable direct payment system will pop this bubble. When content providers start seeing any other revenue stream, the ad industry will shit a brick, then swiftly fall over itself finding excuses for why its ads suddenly need to be much less aggressive, and much more tightly vetted for safety. That's the logic of self-interest, the only logic they understand.
"When will the ad pushers realise that most people don't want adds pushed in their faces when they visit a web page?"
They DO realize it, BUT they only need ONE hit out of the unwashed masses to make it ALL worthwhile. Think about it. ONE hit among BILLIONS and it's in the black. They've essentially got nothing to lose.
"They DO realize it"
The advertising industry probably does. The advertisers may well not - after all they're probably so full of shit that they think they're universally adored.
"They've essentially got nothing to lose."
The advertising industry hasn't. They get paid for shoving the ads out there. Why should they care that they're pissing off their clients' potential customers?
There are ways to make ads unblockable.
Text ads get baked inline with the article. The only way to block the ad would be to block the article, making it a pyrrhic victory and defeating the purpose of the ad blocker (you want to block just the ad, not the whole page).
Graphical ads can be given a hash name so that it's different every time, making blacklist useless from the whack-an-ad shenanigans. Furthermore, ads can be programmatically baked into images genuinely to do with the article the way product placement and ads are now baked into TV shows so that you can't skip them without skipping the program.
The nuclear option would be a clickwall, and the loading of ads (especially in-house ads) can be detected by the server without any scripting, especially if the filenames are hashed (and thus tagged per session).
Yes, I know the nuclear countermeasure would be to abandon Facebook, but for many it's the only way to keep up with remote family (because where they live Internet, including e-mail, is a premium while Facebook is gratis) or other reasons that make ignoring Facebook "Walking on the Sun."
Inline ads: People will stop using the site if every single "article" (i.e. a post from a mate) includes an ad. That'll be too far for pretty much anyone.
Name Hashing: I don't think many ad blockers rely on the name of a jpg that gets displayed.
Product Placement: They can't programmatically add products into a post from your mate without running into the Inline Ads problem.
Nuclear Option: Clickwall ads will be replaced with whitespace, whatever return the server is expecting to receive will be given by the adblocker.
Can't see any of those methods would produce unblockable ads. Not really relevant to me as I've never used the site and never will but it'll be interesting to see where this goes.
"Actually AdBlock Plus Element Hiding Helper can do regexps."
But how does that help when (1) the name's different every time and (2) the legit images have the same scheme? The only way around it now is to block ALL images. And that does nothing for inline TEXT ads. And for those who think people will be turned off by them, they do it on television and people haven't unplugged en masse yet, so I don't think an inline text ad is going to make much of a difference. Some sites do it right now...successfully.
>I know the nuclear countermeasure would be to abandon Facebook, but for many it's the only way to keep up with remote family
Not quite the only way. You can... call them. They generally appreciate a call more than a "like" anyway.
I tend to use skype on linux - no ads there (at the moment). I'm rather hoping firefox webrtc is usable before MS kills the skype client. I'll probably invest in an mpeg4-encoding webcam.
"Nope. Their reception is spotty, meaning you don't know when they're in reach."
There were multiple communication channels in existence on the net years before Facebook came along to monetise it. They are still viable. If Facebook and the online advertising industry were both to disappear from this Earth today people would still communicate.
"There were multiple communication channels in existence on the net years before Facebook came along to monetise it. They are still viable. If Facebook and the online advertising industry were both to disappear from this Earth today people would still communicate."
In the years before Facebook, the post was cheap enough to be useable. Not anymore. Now, like I said, it's Facebook or Bust.
'abandon Facebook, but for many it's the only way to keep up with remote family'
Whew. Does making an account with that particular demon still require an e-mail account and presumably an ISP? If yes, then viewing 6 million ads just to get in contact with someone you know is not necessary, e-mail groups and lists work fine, and are ad free. Do you just want to troll around and spam what you ate for lunch? Carry on.
No need for the nuclear countermeasure if you don't encourage the cancer to begin with.
Facebook is far from being the only way to keep in touch. One almost forgotten solution that has been around for more than a couple of decades is Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Set up your own private channel for family and friends and then you can have multiway chats, transfer files, etc. No need for your family pictures to become tagged, geolocated, recognized and otherwise processed property of some data slurping corporation.
"Facebook is far from being the only way to keep in touch. One almost forgotten solution that has been around for more than a couple of decades is Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Set up your own private channel for family and friends and then you can have multiway chats, transfer files, etc. No need for your family pictures to become tagged, geolocated, recognized and otherwise processed property of some data slurping corporation."
You underestimate the capabilities on the other end. There, Facebook is SEPARATE the Internet on cell phone plans, which costs extra, meaning ANYTHING related to the Internet (e-mail, IRC) EXCEPT Facebook is a non-starter. And given that cell phone reception there can be hit or miss, something that doesn't require a constant connection, like Facebook, is preferred.
Basiclly put, it's Facebook or Bust. And if they're pretty much the only family I've got left, going without means going total hermit.
@Katie Saurcey
Some of us have Facebook accounts because it's a lot less effort to log on once a week and "like" a bunch of photos from distant relatives and friends you're not too keen on, than it is to actually have to see them in person a few times a year.
Block the Ads, spend 10mins clicking "like", job done.
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