Experimenting With No "Hover Ads" On Phoronix

[marzoul]

Phoronix server expenses alone cost $500+ per month...

OMG What's that machine, a supercomputer?
Are you using it for other tasks that having Phoronix up online? Can you share some specs?
I know websites heavier than Phoronix that run very smoothly on dedicated 50-80?/month servers (OVH provider) (smooth without ads of course ).

[krach]

Thanks Michael for the initiative and the open words. I'm reciprocally experimenting with turning adblockplus and ghostery off on your site. I'll see how it goes.

Does anybody know whether there is an easy way to
- have adblock plus generally enabled and
- whitelist all ads for phoronix.com and
- still have the controls and ability to block individual annoying ads ?

[droste]

Thanks Michael for the initiative and the open words. I'm reciprocally experimenting with turning adblockplus and ghostery off on your site. I'll see how it goes.

Does anybody know whether there is an easy way to
- have adblock plus generally enabled and
- whitelist all ads for phoronix.com and
- still have the controls and ability to block individual annoying ads ?

adblock off, flashblock on and your pretty much good to go ;-)

[tmpdir]

I find the conversations funny, simply because of how depressing they make me feel about the human race in general. That, and I think that I'm a little insane.

In that case life in general is funny as hell, there are a lot of depressing people out there. And I thinks every Linux user sometimes find himself in a situation thinking he/she is crazy

[krach]

adblock off, flashblock on and your pretty much good to go ;-)

Mhm, ok, thanks for the suggestion. On the one hand this seems to take out quite a number of ads, maybe more than needed and on the other hand there are still some slightly annoying ones left. Well, if I can't come up with a more fine grained solution, I'll do it like that.

[droste]

Well it may block ads that would be ok. But if an ad doesn't want to be annoying (e.g. play videos or sound) it should not use flash. :-)

[MWisBest]

It's not that it's not appealing, it's just that alone or anything close to that isn't really viable if the original poster was thinking it could replace ads.

Ah, I misunderstood that that's what the purpose of it was. Sorry, my bad!

[Luke]

Full anti-tracking setups almost impossible to use whitelisting with

The author of Adblock Plus accepts money to unblock some sites by default, which is why people should use Adblock Edge instead.

To surf the web a complete prevention suite is required, you need to be ready to block not just ads, but trackers, scripts, plugins, cookies, referrer, and even obfuscate your browser to reduce fingerprinting techniques. The most offensive anti-adblocking sites might require some stylish or greasemonkey scripts.

The web became way too hostile to naively use it with a plain vanilla browser, and i can't imagine doing it like that in a mobile.

As for, business models, yadda, yadda; well, if it fails it fails, good riddance and others will come. In fact the amount of people using ad blockers is too small to affect the revenue of a site and its usually the whole idea that might be flawed to begin with.

The solution is very simple but people like Michael are lazy. They have to strike the deals directly, and not use a third parties to serve ads. You serve the ad (from your server and your bandwidth), and it will be seen. Get some sponsors, such as Valve and the german beers, and because you cut the deals, these should bring far more money per view.

Also, a single static ad per page at most. Of course i don't expect any change any time soon, and the site still goes on so its not in any danger the way it is.

I am surprised you had something so horrible in the first place, i could have never guessed you had those links pop up ads in place. You just reinforced the need to defend ourselves against the hostile web. Are you even not blocking ads? You can never honestly answer, or you live in multi megabit land where contacting 30 servers before any page gets displayed, and executing an obscene amount of scripts, plus loading plugins such as flash and java, doesn't bother you and somehow it all loads under 1sec.

Well good luck convincing people to opt in to watch those ads.

This situation, in turn, makes whitelisting difficult as well as actually dangerous when 3ed party ad networks are combined with computers handline sensitive information. If I want to look at a site with all 3ed party content enabled, it's actually easiest to use one of my old clunkers with a Mint live USB stick. Pull out the small form factor Pentium 4 Prescott/Nvidia 520 with Mint, hook up the cables, plug in the Mint stick and go. If it gets fingerprinted it doesn't match any of my operational machines. Don't browse any other websites, read your Phoronix content, reboot for any other sites you want to view this way, one boot per site.

The use of another machine is to defend against fingerprinting by clock skew and other hardware uniquenesses. Also be sure that you do any typing in text editor and cut and paste to browser while using an undefended machine, as Scout Analytics is attempting to build a database of unique users by typing cadence. Browser fingerprinting firms like BlueCava have publicly announced their goal of building a database of people's computers that would be used like credit scores. I go out of my way to keep my working machines that handle information that must be kept from Homeland Security out of those databases.

In the sites I an directly involved with administering, we are still seeking a way to enable users to post stories with 3ed party media content such as Youtube videos without exposing users to being tracked simply by loading the page. They are expected to know that clicking on a link to content from Google means being tracked unless they have very strong defenses. Against Google I trust only Torbrowser. You won't get hacked from Google (that I know of), but you will get tracked by Google otherwise. 3ed party content in general is the vector of attack, it has nothing to do with whether the content is an ad for BMW or a Youtube video of global warming protesters dressed as elves outside a BMW dealership.

Some of this is out of the hands of a site like Phoronix, the ad networks themselves are going to have to become as robust against being hacked by a 4th party attacker as Youtube's videos are. Unlike Youtube, the ad networks themselves will then have to find a way to make their ads work without storing persistant databases of web surfers. Not just at Phoronix but at almost any website, "relevant" ads could be determined by content of the page within the website, perhaps by keyword provided by the site hiring the ad agency. This would work the way magazine ads can be placed by the pages most relevant to the ad itself. Those "mouseover hover ads" used on so many blogs and just dropped here could simply require the link word be a word and context that would be relevant to a hyperlink to something similar to what is being advertised.

Also needed is some kind of certification system where ad networks are audited to ensure that they are not engaging in browser fingerprinting, setting supercookies, flash cookies, or other ways to cooercively track users who do not allow 3ed party cookies to be set. A site using only ad networks with this certification and a security certification could then confidently tell users they can whitelist the site at no risk to themselves if their blocking setup supports whitelisting or can be hacked to do so.

One site cannot fix all this, when it becomes industry-wide due to prevailing trends the big ad networks will adapt because they have to. If the number of people actually BUYING the advertised content stays similar, than the same financial value is delivered to the advertisers, and market forces should push the same money out to sites using them. I for one am glad to see that Michael is willing to discuss this, keeps active forums for this, and responds to user concerns. There are a hell of a lot of monetized sites out there that automatically ban any users who discuss their ad practices in any way, in stark contrast to Phoronix. Takes guts to discuss this in the open, kudos to Michael for being willing to step up to the plate and talk about this!

[fuzz]

I turned off adblock and I had to enable some sites in noscript, whitelist the site in ghostery... We'll see how this pans out.

[geearf]

Thanks to the people mentioning Ghostery, that looks very interesting!
As for adblocking... one my main issue is really loading time... When I go to a website that has various ads and they take forever to load while the website does not... it's super annoying.
I wonder why the websites cannot pre-cache a certain amount of ads before and serve them from their own servers... that'd be a lot better for visitors.