As one of the largest ad blockers around they also try and extinguish any potential competition before it has a chance to establish itself.
When I initially released my ad blocker for the iPhone and Mac – Magic Lasso Adblock (https://www.magiclasso.co/) they attempted to stop its distribution through the Apple App Stores.
They sent legal threats directly to myself and then to Apple claiming that they own the term 'adblock' and demanded that my product stop using that term in any marketing or App Store keywords. This went on for months with them constantly pushing less and less plausible evidence for their ownership of the term.
I eventually told their enforcement loonies to stop contacting me and provided evidence to Apple that their claims are baseless (which meant their claims directly to Apple could also be ignored). They eventually stopped but I can see how their tactics could discourage any new entrants in the space.
I'm still dubious the city skylines can be copyrighted - NYC believes they own the copyright on the city's skyline. I'm also dubious that the NYC Subway can copyright the route indicators (letters in circles).
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/the-por...
http://www.fordhamiplj.org/2010/01/07/mta-symbols-intellectu...
They're a corporation who paid a lot of money for the rights to it, how is is different than Walmart or Netflix going after companies for using their fonts?
Judging from the examples on one of the MTA's branding pages[1], there doesn't seem to be anything particularly unique about the font they're using. They don't even mention it by name. Other sources claim the official signage is a mix of Helvetica and Akzidenz Grotesk. In any case, fontface designs are not copyrightable in the US. Fonts can be (as programs/data) but that isn't really relevant here.
[0] http://www.fordhamiplj.org/2010/01/07/mta-symbols-intellectu...
[1] http://web.mta.info/developers/resources/line_colors.htm
At least movies cost millions of dollars and presumably we as a society will get more books if authors don't also have to make french fries. What protection do fonts need?
Right under the ad was a gigantic message that said “contact-less trademark owned by and used with permission of EMVCo, LLC”
I can imagine the airline’s surprise if they have originally printed ads without this.
I've read several articles bloviating about this or that font, describing it like a wine taster would write about a wine, and would just come away rolling my eyes.
You need to draw every letter in uppercase and lowercase, and every number and symbol. You need to make sure each character is visually consistent with and works well alongside every other character.
Then you need to repeat the above for every weight your font supports. (Bold, semibold, light, heavy, etc.)
Then you need to repeat all of the above for italics.
Then you need to kern the font. This means determining how much space to leave between every possible combination of two characters in your font.
---
> And people have been creating fonts for 500 years. What's the need to create more?
That's a bit like saying "People have been writing books for 500 years. What's the need to create more?"
We've only been displaying fonts on LCD screens for ~30 years, and fonts that were designed for print don't look as good on screen (and vise versa). Even fonts that were designed for low-res LCD screens often don't look as good on newer high-resolution ones.
Because you can't choose what's acceptable, they do.
You won't decide the topic, format, quantity, density, duration, nature or interruption type. Which is different for you, me, or your children.
What's more, ads are not made for your benefit, ever, but to the benefit of the advertiser which may (but statistically more likely may not) align with yours.
And also because:
- the incentive gets twisted, which means you can't trust ublock on the long run.
- unkown unknowns means down the road, some ads will manage to track you or serve malicious content despite ublock filtering.
- ads paid content is a terrible business model which take a price people are not wired to assess nor realize they pay for something they disguise as free yet has an impact on the entire society. Not a great thing to encourage.
And I say all that as someone who gets revenue from ads.
Why is this? Would you also say this for other long running open source projects which have never breach the trust of their users?
The repo was handed in good faith, not for the sake of financial gains. It turned out to be a mistake, from which I learned. That was now nearly seven years ago. If the take away from that event after years of never breaching user trust is that "uBlock Origin can't be trusted in the long run", that's pretty harsh.
I think the story of how uBlock was transfered and then managed in a way that was not what you wished is pretty well known, and I think most people know that you forked back the project to restore that trust, and they appreciate the work you're doing for the community. At least I know I do, so let me take this opportunity to say thank you.
As far as uBlock Origin goes, it's one of the extensions I trust the most.
Based on his past actions, I feel comfortable trusting and using uBO until he decides he's done.
Not exactly the acceptable ads must conform to the standard that is defined by the acceptable ads Committee which consists of publishers users, and distribution. Something like that.
That seems like just an implementation detail. If users are able to choose/vote what is "acceptable" that seems like a concept worth trying.
[0] pop up blockers, originally
If you live in the city, advertisers manipulate you every waking minute of your day, bombarding you from billboards, on tv, on the internet, and are constantly shoving their disgusting garbage in front of your eyes in new ways; at petrol pumps, on your tv menu, right in front of you on a taxi cab.
Worse still, the more you pay to avoid this trash, the more you become attractive to them as someone with money to spend. I can't remove the ads as a walk about the city, but for damn sure I'll remove them wherever I can in my home. Pi hole, ublock origin, sponsor block etc, all running to keep this crap out of my life. If people wont pay money for what creators are making, and they can't provide it for free, I'm fine with it going away. It probably wasn't worthwhile to begin with - only "addictive".
Ads are a scourge and make me sick. There are no "acceptable ads".
They can all pay the consequences now of me blocking them.
If they had been well-behaved and stuck to inline ads with no cookies, I would have left them there.
I REALLY do not want to pay for a bunch of random services with my tax dollars. In your example, once I lose interest in youtube (or peertube in this case) I would still be paying for other people to use it and I get no benefit.
Right now, when I lose interest in Facebook (as I did) I just move on to the next service, it is unbelievably friction free. I just type a few letters in a URL.
Facebook dislodged Myspace, Tiktok is competing with Facebook, Discord is a brand new social media product. Anyone is totally free to create a subscription service or alternative (see DuckDuckGo). I don't understand the monopoly case.
While I support this sentiment, a definition of "badly behaved ads" which is based on whether or not the advertiser paid money to some third party is just not a definition I can live with.
But the problem is, that is very poorly enforced in practice. Whenever I use ABP, I see ads breaking the standard everywhere. To the point where I can only assume the Acceptable Ads definition is just a deflection.
And of course, there's the whole "you need to pay to get on the list" which creates some very awful incentives.
The word I think you're looking for is "canter," as in three main gaits of a horse being walk, trot, and canter, with some other ones like gallop, tolt, and more obscure ones. They are defined by the number of beats in the gait. The walk has 4, trot 2, canter 3, and gallop is also 4.
But to extend the dressage metaphors, a Gish Piaffe would be extravagent and showy movement that goes nowhere and stays in one spot, a Gish Passage would be where the extravagent movement is independent of the direction, etc.
Dressage means "to straighten," or "to educate," so one works on the dressage of the horse, and dressage riding is riding with that intent. What people do in the olympics is ride, and it is the overall dressage of the horse that is what is judged. It's one of the few remaining sports in the olympics that is not merely a game. Source: am dressage bro. :)
Seems pretty much in line with food labeled as "organic" or "fair trade". You can say you meet the requirements, but if you want to advertise it somebody else certifies it.
But ... the ad industry would never accept a static ad more akin to a billboard than a tracking device. Many times in the past malware has found its way into networks run by the more highly regarded ad systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising
If a content publisher refuses to let people read articles without a subscription or with an ad blocker, I am ok with that. It is their choice.
The sad part is that you assume that modern day billboards aren't tracking you. All you need is a camera, a tiny computer and some AI. Once walked by a fully electronic billboard where the slideshow crashed, the log it displayed listed everything it could identify about people passing by, age, gender, height, hair color, emotional state, ... .
Is JS synonymous with tracking? Why can't you just track server side? I don't see how removing JS from ads would prevent FB from targeting me on my FB feed.
The ads market is a very complex and competitive industry. This means that practically every display side provider has their own special "ad product" to differentiate themselves. Almost all of these require JavaScript to implement their key features.
In addition there could be 4 or even more parties involved in showing an ad (publisher, publisher's supply side provider, advertiser's display side provider, advertiser, plus miscellaneous middlemen). These different parties may not trust each other, so they currently use JavaScript to send (via `fetch`) themselves information about the auction to check up on each other.
I've seen websites ask me to disable my ad blocker when I only have Privacy Badger enabled (on top of Firefox's built-in behaviour).
>Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
Also, the fact that they are taking money to get on the 'acceptable ads' list looks a little shady. It could be (let's be generous) misinterpreted as a third party just elbowing in to get a cut of the transaction, like some kind of protection racket. I'd worry this sort of thing might draw unwanted attention in some jurisdictions, even if it really isn't warranted.
Why bother going with the solution that is both technically and ethically more complicated? Just do the dumb thing and block everything.
BUT as the definition of acceptable is not in the hands of the accepting receiver but in the hands of the sender the word acceptable is used in a twisted manner. You are told it is acceptable but their behavior will be driven by forces yielding anything but acceptable.
Ignore what they say - their behavior matters and incentives are stacked against your interests with no effective limits.
It might exploit a buffer overflow or it might exploit a distractable human, but it's malware just the same.
It was a great deal for everyone, but people who installed ABP.
i mean, it is. ABP is basically modern day protection racket
Inflamatory statements aside, and whether or not online advertising is acceptable in its current form, there is a need they are fulfilling. If people don't find ads to be hospitable to their user experience then people don't find ads to be hospitable to their user experience, period. You can argue why all you want, in the meantime, ABP is there to get rid of them for you.
I'm going to need a citation for that. I don't use ABP for obvious reasons, but I don't really see them as a problem; they're effectively extorting money from advertising companies, which are absolute scum and deserve to lose any and all profits that they have made (not only for scummy business practices and an entire business model built around the worst kind of psychological manipulation and data mining, but actually convincing people that they are good for supporting a "free web" as if they are some charitable benefactors giving free money out of the good of their hearts). The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
I haven't been able to suss out any way that they do any real harm to the end users, but if they do actually do harm to other ad blockers, that would be some actual harm, but I am having trouble finding any evidence of this anywhere.
> I'm going to need a citation for that.
I was mostly referring to the fact that they bought uBlock and made it use their “acceptable ads” program, which seems mainly like a move intended to weaken uBlock Origin, or at least leech off its reputation.
Honestly I don’t really know much about them, I just know that I’d much rather support uBlock Origin than this company.
There is a middle ground of people okay with advertising, but pissed off about the nightmare that is the present state of internet ads. I use uBlock. But I’d be okay with e.g. text ads that don’t track me.
By having ABP widely used a lawyer could make the argument, or a judge could infer that advertising is an acceptable behavior, but the use of ABP is just the users signaling to advertisers that ABP content is rather preferred method.
If everyone used uBlock Origin on the other hand, a compelling argument against the legitimacy of intrusive advertising becomes much more likely to be accepted in court, which is where it matters.
It's sad it's come to this, but with advertising and marketing as huge active lobbying groups, the courts are one of the more even battlefields we stand to even be able to win on.
Companies pay to get their ads categorized as acceptable if they meet the criteria for that. You can't just pay to get your ads to show up.
And within the browser extension, the user still has the option to block them anyway.
They'll also mistakenly introduce bugs to destroy your on-site metrics if you don't pay up.
In this case they're a middle man between the abusers and the abused, so I think it's more like prostitution.
https://www.mobilegeeks.de/adblock-plus-undercover-einblicke...
Historically, it always seemed like it was one company though as Adblock codebase has been based on Adblock plus codebase for years, and they both use Acceptable ads.
Edit to avoid confusion: Fake "uBlock" (not to be confused with uBlock Origin) is owned by AdBlock https://www.ublock.org/blog/an-update-on-ublock/
uBlock is a scam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin#uBlock https://ublock.org
µBlock/uBlock was the original, released in 2014 by Gorhill. In 2015, fed up with support request, he transferred the project to Chris Aljoudi. He then forked his own project, most likely due to a disagreement over donations, it became uBlock Origin. Eventually most people moved from uBlock to the better maintained uBlock Origin. Eyeo eventually bought uBlock and added their "acceptable ads" option.
So you can't say that uBlock is a fake, it is actually the original project. But the one made by the original author is uBlock Origin.
Yes it is confusing, but whatever, get uBlock Origin.
The essence of a project is not the location of its repo on GitHub, it's who worked on it since it was first created, i.e. the commit history. If you look at the commit history of "uBlock Origin", it goes back without interruption to June 23rd, 2014, back to when I created the repo.[1]
The claim that the current "uBlock" is the "official", "original" project is a marketing pitch by the people behind it, who I call out as purposefully deceitful.[2]
* * *
How does Eyeo make money?
They charge advertisers to be part of their 'acceptable ads' scheme that then allows these ads to be shown to users of their ad blocking products (ADP, Adblock Plus, Ublock).
I must admit, this is pretty funny... there is "ublock" which users are tricked into installing (instead of the real ublock origin), which uses their "acceptable ads"
and people have said that their business model is based on extorting ad companies to pay them to not block their ads