Revenge on the Nerds -Maureen on a rampage
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- and everyone thought I have been blowing smoke over the few years over the need to dismember Micro$haft. More aye-sayers than naysayers have joined the fray, some even eloquently. even the opinion polls are against BadBillyG: bubba is more trusted! as is the government... Mickey$lop no longer generates terror in the hearts of everyone --just the OEMs who can not afford to even testify for fear of retaliation --and it is a real fear. keep your fire extinguisher handy. Maureen is really smoking! January 21, 1998 NYTimes OpEd Columnist LIBERTIES / By MAUREEN DOWD Revenge on the Nerds WASHINGTON -- I figured things were way out of perspective in the Other Washington when I heard that Bill Gates had put an inscription from "The Great Gatsby" around the domed ceiling of the library in his new $100 million pad: "He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it." Bill Gates was obviously unaware of the magnitude of the truth that he had unwittingly admitted. When he read about the blue lawn, he must have imagined computers with glowing blue screens stretching to infinity. And he must certainly have liked the proximity of the words "dream" and "grasp." With a judge who is likely soon to hold Microsoft in contempt for petulantly defying an order designed to give its rivals any chance, Mr. Gates's dream may at last have exceeded his grasp. The Justice Department never came down on Gatsby. This Washington has disabused that Washington of its arrogant presumption that what's good for Microsoft is good for America. This Washington has stripped that Washington of its image as warm, tender, flannel-and-soyburger pioneers of the new economy, and properly pegged Microsoft as an egomaniacal, dangerous giant that has cut off the air supply of competitors in a bid to control cyberspace. "The only thing the robber barons did that Bill Gates hasn't done is use dynamite against their competitors," Gary Reback, a Silicon Valley antitrust lawyer, told John Heilemann of The New Yorker. The disheveled college dropout who used to get adoring headlines like "A Regular Guy Who's a Legend: Bill Gates Puts a New Face on the American Dream" now looks like a spoiled rich brat. When they treated the Justice Department and the judge with the same contempt with which they treat competitors, the masters of the virtual universe got hit with a grim truth: People hate Microsoft even more than they hate the Government. Mr. Gates has gone from Horatio Alger similes to virus similes. Frederick Warren-Boulton, another antitrust expert, told The New Yorker: "Gates is like smallpox. You have to go in there and you have to nail it. If you leave it lying around, it will just come back." When asked who they thought had done more good for the future of America, Bill Gates or Bill Clinton, more Americans chose Mr. Clinton. (Even though portfolio-obsessed Americans would still rather have their children grow up to be more like Mr. Gates than Mr. Clinton, by 47 to 24 percent.) As Jacob Weisberg plaintively wrote in Slate, Microsoft's on-line magazine: "A few months ago, everyone I met seemed to think that working for Microsoft was a pretty cool thing to do. Now, strangers treat us like we work for Philip Morris." The Times's Timothy Egan explored the angst that has gripped the Redmond campus since Microsoft lost its sheen. Some fret that the fate of the entire Pacific Northwest is at stake. All the instant millionaires in thermal shirts, droopy drawers and sandals with wool socks are suddenly Wondering If It's All Worth It. They have staggered out of the Seattle fog long enough to listen to their inner browsers. This has been a rude shock to them because they honestly believed that our Washington was full of anti-business, careerist bureaucrats, and their Washington was full of imaginative idealists and entrepreneurs who buy and sell to the beat of a different drum. They didn't reckon smokestack laws could apply to high technology. As Mr. Gates's lawyer, William Neukom, told Steve Lohr of The Times, "We sincerely believe that we are a force for good in the economy." Actually, Microsoft has been a force for greed in the economy, more brilliant at marketing and purloining and crushing than it has been at innovating. The company saw the fight with the Justice Department as a defense of its way of life. And that way was hardball on software; anything it decided was a core threat to Microsoft was sucked into the operating system. These are Darwinian nerds. Besides, Microsoft couldn't even save the universe in "Independence Day." It took an Apple to do that. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: latin1 Comment: No safety this side of the grave. Never was; never will be iQBVAwUBNMZSQ7R8UA6T6u61AQH2fgH+OQT3p1cE1lRxSzMvhyt9AvvH2N3jFUmO UZzpqRbrn9pB1VPxZLKG2lgBwOW4hPIlpFRWg8Fp+Uu6KoL6kKObuw== =n+/c -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
"Attila T. Hun" <attila@hun.org> writes:
and everyone thought I have been blowing smoke over the few years over the need to dismember Micro$haft. More aye-sayers than naysayers have joined the fray, some even eloquently. even the opinion polls are against BadBillyG: bubba is more trusted! as is the government...
I don't know why there's somuch mickeysoft-related traffic all of a sudden, but here are a couple of rants: Jack Aaron's, the commodities division of Goldman Sachs, controls inter alia like 99% of US coffee supply. if you try to circumvent their monopoly, by trying to import a material amount of coffee, whether it's the cheap shit for proles or the high-end caffeine fix from Kenya, you and your suppliers just might find yourself in a lot more trouble that the computer manusfacturers who were reluctant to put the free mickeysoft browser on their dekstop. Why doesn't DOJ come down on Goldman Sachs? Does it have anything to do with the fact that a Goldman Sachs partner is in Clinton's cabinet? Speaking of browsers: I'd rather *pay* for a browser that has such an obvious feature as a list of URL regexps that you don't want to browse. Neither IE nor Netscape has it. I don't know about Lynx. I'm now using junkbuster from www.junkbuster.com (highly recommended) to filter out ads and banners and cookies. I generally think WWW sucks; but if I use it, I want to be able to tell the browser that if the page tried to load an image from a URL that looks like valueclick.com bannermall.com adforce.*.com/ bannerweb.com eads.com/ /*/sponsors/*.gif *banner*.gif /image/ads/ etc etc, I want the browse to ignore this request. Clearly Microsoft and Netscape both don't give a damn about the desires of their NON-PAYING users and would rather bend over for the advertisers. Wow, two rants for the price of one. --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps
Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
Speaking of browsers: I'd rather *pay* for a browser that has such an obvious feature as a list of URL regexps that you don't want to browse. Neither IE nor Netscape has it. I don't know about Lynx. I'm now using junkbuster from www.junkbuster.com (highly recommended) to filter out ads and banners and cookies. I generally think WWW sucks; but if I use it, I want to be able to tell the browser that if the page tried to load an image from a URL that looks like
valueclick.com bannermall.com adforce.*.com/ bannerweb.com eads.com/ /*/sponsors/*.gif *banner*.gif /image/ads/
etc etc, I want the browse to ignore this request. Clearly Microsoft and Netscape both don't give a damn about the desires of their NON-PAYING users and would rather bend over for the advertisers.
I suggest writing a proxy server that does such filtering, running it on the local machine, and using it as proxy server from your netscape browser. There is a proxy server in form of a 20 line perl script, you can take it and modify it. - Igor.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In <199801220537.XAA00871@manifold.algebra.com>, on 01/21/98 at 11:37 PM, ichudov@algebra.com (Igor Chudov @ home) said:
Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
Speaking of browsers: I'd rather *pay* for a browser that has such an obvious feature as a list of URL regexps that you don't want to browse. Neither IE nor Netscape has it. I don't know about Lynx. I'm now using junkbuster from www.junkbuster.com (highly recommended) to filter out ads and banners and cookies. I generally think WWW sucks; but if I use it, I want to be able to tell the browser that if the page tried to load an image from a URL that looks like
valueclick.com bannermall.com adforce.*.com/ bannerweb.com eads.com/ /*/sponsors/*.gif *banner*.gif /image/ads/
etc etc, I want the browse to ignore this request. Clearly Microsoft and Netscape both don't give a damn about the desires of their NON-PAYING users and would rather bend over for the advertisers.
I suggest writing a proxy server that does such filtering, running it on the local machine, and using it as proxy server from your netscape browser.
There is a proxy server in form of a 20 line perl script, you can take it and modify it.
I *highly* recomed taking a look at: http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/ If I can't view a website using Lynx 99.9% of the time it's not worth the effort of the DL. - -- - --------------------------------------------------------------- William H. Geiger III http://users.invweb.net/~whgiii Geiger Consulting Cooking With Warp 4.0 Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail. OS/2 PGP 2.6.3a at: http://users.invweb.net/~whgiii/pgpmr2.html - --------------------------------------------------------------- Tag-O-Matic: What I like about MS is its loyalty to customers! -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3a-sha1 Charset: cp850 Comment: Registered_User_E-Secure_v1.1b1_ES000000 iQCVAwUBNMbQ249Co1n+aLhhAQG4cgQAo3bldsA3mgaQucL7qh06bkdHfbszEhix PJzuYpRwMyfwpaW51PHGB6dBbhtUnaenifQUtv9lCqxcXibArXprIaT1ZKAHxG32 dxcUvzx7gIdbgQ67e3xyaTfxALdVqD+MCd5+aoBebiPM8aA38Y6SJctdGOJJOkW5 VgjfceZDnzI= =Rpgw -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
On Wed, 21 Jan 1998, Igor Chudov @ home wrote:
Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
Speaking of browsers: I'd rather *pay* for a browser that has such an obvious feature as a list of URL regexps that you don't want to browse. <snip>
I suggest writing a proxy server that does such filtering, running it on the local machine, and using it as proxy server from your netscape browser.
There is a proxy server in form of a 20 line perl script, you can take it and modify it.
Try this: /sbin/route add -net 199.95.207.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 lo /sbin/route add -net 199.95.208.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 lo Goodbye doubleclick.net. ... Repeat as necessary with other ad networks. I wrote an init.d script for Debian GNU/Linux that automagically handles this for a couple ad networks, if you're intersted. Michael Stutz . http://dsl.org/m/ . copyright disclaimer etc stutz@dsl.org : finger for pgp : http://dsl.org/copyleft/
Igor Chudov @ home writes:
to tell the browser that if the page tried to load an image from a URL that looks like
valueclick.com bannermall.com adforce.*.com/ bannerweb.com eads.com/ /*/sponsors/*.gif *banner*.gif /image/ads/
etc etc, I want the browse to ignore this request. Clearly Microsoft and Netscape both don't give a damn about the desires of their NON-PAYING users and would rather bend over for the advertisers.
I suggest writing a proxy server that does such filtering, running it on the local machine, and using it as proxy server from your netscape browser.
There is a proxy server in form of a 20 line perl script, you can take it and modify it.
I've already done the work: http://www.lne.com/ericm/cookie_jar/ It'll block cookies, accepting them from a specific list of sites. It blocks the outgoing requests for ads, on a (regex-controlled) host or URL basis. So you don't bother to download ads, saving you from seeing them and wasting the bandwidth downloading them. As an example, my .cookiejarrc file currently holds: denyhost *.doubleclick.net advertising.quote.com commonwealth.riddler.com denyhost *.linkexchange.com *.pagecount.com images.yahoo.com www.missingkids.org denyhost ads.*.com ad.*.com adforce.imgis.com www.bannerswap.com denyhost *.flycast.com/ songline.com:1971/ denyurl /ads/* /ads/images/* *sponsors/redirect/* */bin/statthru* */AdID=* denyurl /adv/* /sponsors2/* */ad-bin/ad* /advertising/* */livetopics_anim.gif* denyurl /Banners/* /shared/images/ad/* /sponsors3/* /adverts/* /free/FarSight/* denyurl /ad/ /*ad*.focalink.com/ It'll let you selectively block sending the User-agent line in the HTTP request, and will let you randomly select from a list of User-agents that you supply if you want to mess up site's data collection schemes. And you can choose to block sending anything but the Accept and Pragma lines in the HTTP request for more privacy. -- Eric Murray Chief Security Scientist N*Able Technologies www.nabletech.com (email: ericm at lne.com or nabletech.com) PGP keyid:E03F65E5
On 22 Jan 1998 02:22:29 -0600, ichudov@Algebra.COM (Igor Chudov @ home) wrote:
Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
Speaking of browsers: I'd rather *pay* for a browser that has such an obvious feature as a list of URL regexps that you don't want to browse. Neither IE nor Netscape has it. I don't know about Lynx. I'm now using junkbuster from www.junkbuster.com (highly recommended) to filter out ads and banners and cookies. I generally think WWW sucks; but if I use it, I want to be able to tell the browser that if the page tried to load an image from a URL that looks like
valueclick.com bannermall.com adforce.*.com/ bannerweb.com eads.com/ /*/sponsors/*.gif *banner*.gif /image/ads/
etc etc, I want the browse to ignore this request. Clearly Microsoft and Netscape both don't give a damn about the desires of their NON-PAYING users and would rather bend over for the advertisers.
I suggest writing a proxy server that does such filtering, running it on the local machine, and using it as proxy server from your netscape browser.
There is a proxy server in form of a 20 line perl script, you can take it and modify it.
- Igor.
If you have a unix box, try using the roxen web/proxy server. It has a regexp module that does exactly this. http://www.roxen.com -- Phelix
Good day list. I was just in the process of mailing off a copy of the GNU junk email contract to some sammer or another, and it occured to me; It would certainly be nice to collect that 10buks a hit for this crap, It will never happen, Seems alot the spam I recieve originates with a node from uu.net and I am no big fan of Ubermesiter John Sidgmore, Wouldn't it be nice to hold uu.net culpable for all their spamming ways. They want to own the internet, let them hang for it. Just a thought, anyone intested in doing a class action to recover email processing fees? luv chipper
Note: What I write here are my own views, not necessarily those of my company. On Tue, 3 Feb 1998, Chip Mefford wrote:
Wouldn't it be nice to hold uu.net culpable for all their spamming ways. They want to own the internet, let them hang for it.
http://www.us.uu.net/support/usepolicy/ It would be nice to differentiate between the spammers themselves and the ISP they use. Simon.
At 02:37 PM 2/3/98 +0000, Simon Fraser wrote:
On Tue, 3 Feb 1998, Chip Mefford wrote:
Wouldn't it be nice to hold uu.net culpable for all their spamming ways.
They
want to own the internet, let them hang for it.
http://www.us.uu.net/support/usepolicy/ It would be nice to differentiate between the spammers themselves and the ISP they use.
Simon.
Yes. Otherwise an ISP loses common-carrier status and is thus responsible for the content of its traffic. Blame the junk-faxers, not the telcos. David Honig honig@alum.mit.edu --------------------------------------------------- Is Monica Lewinsky endorsing kneepads for Nike yet?
Wouldn't it be nice to hold uu.net culpable for all their spamming ways. They want to own the internet, let them hang for it.
http://www.us.uu.net/support/usepolicy/ It would be nice to differentiate between the spammers themselves and the ISP they use.
You'd lose a class action suit. More important is to get them to close any open sendmail relays at their dialup sites (maybe they have by now), since those formerly-useful servers are a major tool for spammers. The other problem is just that they're big enough that if even a small fraction of their customers are spammers, lots of spam comes from their customers; at least they don't encourage it, unlike some providers. If you want to cut way down on spam, there's Paul Vixie's Realtime BlackHole List service at maps.vix.com. It uses DNS as a convenient query/response server and some short sendmail scripts to block mail from any site known to have an open smtp relay. They're fairly zealous, and don't mind throwing away a few extra babies to get rid of lots of bathwater, so if you don't want to block everybody that they block you'll need to hack some sendmail configs. My main frustration is that they block mail from the ix.netcom.com smtp servers, which blocked mail from me to the PGP-users list, but I've found another relay at Netcom that they don't know about :-) Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
* Bill Stewart wrote:
If you want to cut way down on spam, there's Paul Vixie's Realtime BlackHole List service at maps.vix.com. It uses DNS as a convenient query/response server and some short sendmail scripts to block mail from any site known to have an open smtp relay.
I prefer teergrubing. It does increase the realtime costs of spamming. A lot of professional spammers are teergrube aware and do not spam to such hosts. Unsecure relays die by a lack of ressources after catched by some teergrubes, so the admin has to do something to deal with the problem.
phelix@vallnet.com writes:
On 22 Jan 1998 02:22:29 -0600, ichudov@Algebra.COM (Igor Chudov @ home) wrote:
Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
Speaking of browsers: I'd rather *pay* for a browser that has such an obvi feature as a list of URL regexps that you don't want to browse. Neither IE nor Netscape has it. I don't know about Lynx. I'm now using junkbuster from www.junkbuster.com (highly recommended) to filter out ads and banners and cookies. I generally think WWW sucks; but if I use it, I want to be ab to tell the browser that if the page tried to load an image from a URL that looks like
valueclick.com bannermall.com adforce.*.com/ bannerweb.com eads.com/ /*/sponsors/*.gif *banner*.gif /image/ads/
etc etc, I want the browse to ignore this request. Clearly Microsoft and Netscape both don't give a damn about the desires of their NON-PAYING user and would rather bend over for the advertisers.
I suggest writing a proxy server that does such filtering, running it on the local machine, and using it as proxy server from your netscape browser.
There is a proxy server in form of a 20 line perl script, you can take it and modify it.
- Igor.
If you have a unix box, try using the roxen web/proxy server. It has a regexp module that does exactly this. http://www.roxen.com
Thanks guys!! I'm now using the junkbusters proxy servers for this very purpose. It works fine. I just think that this should be a function of any decent browser, without requiring the extra overhead of a proxy server. --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps
At 8:21 AM -0800 1/22/98, bill.stewart@pobox.com wrote:
What I'd really like to see in a browser is an option to turn off animated GIFs (other than by killing all images.)
Yeah, I'm surprised that "banner ad eaters" have not been widely deployed. (If they're available, I haven't about them.) Something to remove the annoying banners, or stop them from wasting valuable time loading in the first place. These would be comparable to "television commercial killers," which have not really been feasible, as the pattern recognition methods (like increased volume for commercials) are not reliable. But with banner ads, this should be possible. Whether through a plug-in, or through a "patched" version of Navigator or Explorere. (In fact, why don't these vendors offer a switch to turn off downloading of ads? I think I know the marketing reason, but this still suggests a market opportunity for someone to jump in with a patched version, or a "advertising-free" browser.) BTW, some of the notorious features of the new "anti-hacking" laws make disassembly of programs, like browsers, illegal. While they won't bother with folks who just fool around with disassembling code, they might use these anti-hacking laws to throw the book at anyone who made such a banner-eater available. After all, directly infringing on the rights of advertisers to beam their shit into our eyeballs is America's most serious crime. --Tim May The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."
On Thu, 22 Jan 1998, Tim May wrote:
BTW, some of the notorious features of the new "anti-hacking" laws make disassembly of programs, like browsers, illegal. While they won't bother with folks who just fool around with disassembling code, they might use these anti-hacking laws to throw the book at anyone who made such a banner-eater available.
Fuck that, Netscape is soon to be GPL'd.
After all, directly infringing on the rights of advertisers to beam their shit into our eyeballs is America's most serious crime.
Probably considered more serious than murder by them. =====================================Kaos=Keraunos=Kybernetos============== .+.^.+.| Ray Arachelian |Prying open my 3rd eye. So good to see |./|\. ..\|/..|sunder@sundernet.com|you once again. I thought you were |/\|/\ <--*-->| ------------------ |hiding, and you thought that I had run |\/|\/ ../|\..| "A toast to Odin, |away chasing the tail of dogma. I opened|.\|/. .+.v.+.|God of screwdrivers"|my eye and there we were.... |..... ======================= http://www.sundernet.com ==========================
On Thu, 22 Jan 1998, Tim May wrote:
Yeah, I'm surprised that "banner ad eaters" have not been widely deployed. <snip> Whether through a plug-in, or through a "patched" version of Navigator or Explorere.
I suspect that new versions of Navigator will have these features plus much more: <http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/9813.html>
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- tcmay@got.net said:
Yeah, I'm surprised that "banner ad eaters" have not been widely deployed. (If they're available, I haven't about them.) Something to remove the annoying banners, or stop them from wasting valuable time loading in the first place.
Netscape just announced that they're going to release the source code to Communicator 5.0 with a license that allows modification and redistribution "in the heritage of the GNU Public License." No details on the specific license yet, but it sounds *very* hopeful. The point is... we *will* be able to add all the funky new features we want. Complaining about the browser will no longer be acceptable now that we will be able to *do* something about it. It also means that Microsoft will get to compete head-to-head with a real free software model. This is an excellent opportunity to demonstrate what the free software model can do. I can already envision non-Netscape "distributions," custom browser modifications for big customers, etc. More info here: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/980122/ca_netscap_3.html http://www.yahoo.com/headlines/980122/business/stories/netscape_1.html http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl?980122.ehnetcode.htm -john. ...................................................................... . . .....John.D.Blair... mailto:jdblair@uab.edu phoneto:205.975.7123 . . http://frodo.tucc.uab.edu faxto:205.975.7129 . ..sys|net.admin.... . . the university computer center ..... ..... g.e.e.k.n.i.k...the.university.of.alabama.at.birmingham.... -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3a Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBNMfLCwJjTpK3AXhBAQHDMQP+LaUVmDpm2Rv8EPVCkd1o389OrOKi/3EY MKmlHaeruFKhAf1tCcY78C8I6Ofm0jbZJ9s1sHOWprqjAbi4l+C53GlQoGNCuD6R x9Zm3fflfRbMF0slUqNUcAxVMPF8Qjh5YC2f6iOchIq0GgxnO8B53r5cUwri5Ne9 pYaq2/HpAow= =eG/n -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Tim May wrote:
At 8:21 AM -0800 1/22/98, bill.stewart@pobox.com wrote:
What I'd really like to see in a browser is an option to turn off animated GIFs (other than by killing all images.) Yeah, I'm surprised that "banner ad eaters" have not been widely deployed. (If they're available, I haven't about them.) Something to remove the annoying banners, or stop them from wasting valuable time loading in the first place.
There are several examples people have mentioned here: Roxen, junkbuster, etc. I happen to use one called WebFilter, a patched CERN httpd (http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/NoShit) which allows program filtering based on URL regexp matching. Of course, now that Netscape's releasing their source code, what would *really* help the practice take off would be integration of one of these systems into Netscape. On the downside, this is sure to trigger an ad Arms Race, with content providers melding together content and ads. Right now, I can view the web with almost no ads, but if a million people are filtering ads off a site, you can bet there will be countermeasures, and lots of them. It's difficult to imagine the filters winning, without more advanced support (for example, cropping images to remove ads, and collaborative filtering pools). But if a million people are using the system, and 0.01% are coders committed to making it work, well, you can do a lot with 100 brains.
BTW, some of the notorious features of the new "anti-hacking" laws make disassembly of programs, like browsers, illegal. While they won't bother with folks who just fool around with disassembling code, they might use these anti-hacking laws to throw the book at anyone who made such a banner-eater available. Proxies can do the same thing, and just as well, IMO, and it doesn't require any ugly binary patching.
-MT
At 11:16 PM 1/22/98 -0800, Wei Dai wrote:
It seems to me that blocking ads is no different from blocking porn. All of the technology being developed for the latter purpose (PICS for example) will eventually be used for the former.
With both PICS ratings for web pages and the new TV ratings, somehow the ratings only apply to the program and not the ads. After all, if each TV commercial had to be separately rated, people would rapidly develop equipment to autoblock commercials, and that just wouldn't do.
I think the long-term outlook for content providers is pretty bleak. How do you make a profit when your copyrights are not enforceable and your ads are easily filtered?
Unfortunately, you're probably right, though providers and advertisers who really want their messages to get through will find ways to do it. The current banners are nice, friendly implementations in that they're easy to identify and block; newer ones will just be sneakier. They'll come from the same machine as the real page, or they'll be embedded in the background images, or the servers will insist on not shipping you the pages you want until you've downloaded the banner (e.g. by putting some of the interesting material into images.) Sure, it requires some server rewriting, but there's money in it. Alternatively, they may go to clickthrough payment models - the web page owner only gets paid when people click on the ad, though perhaps at a higher rate than current "impressions". Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
On Thu, Jan 22, 1998 at 03:19:11PM -0800, Brad Threatt wrote:
There are several examples people have mentioned here: Roxen, junkbuster, etc.
I happen to use one called WebFilter, a patched CERN httpd (http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/NoShit) which allows program filtering based on URL regexp matching.
In addition to all of the ad blocking software mentioned on that page, If you're running the Microsoft Proxy Server, I wrote an ISAPI filter DLL plugin that can be used for blocking ads based URL regexp matching. See http://www.eskimo.com/~weidai.
Of course, now that Netscape's releasing their source code, what would *really* help the practice take off would be integration of one of these systems into Netscape.
On the downside, this is sure to trigger an ad Arms Race, with content providers melding together content and ads. Right now, I can view the web with almost no ads, but if a million people are filtering ads off a site, you can bet there will be countermeasures, and lots of them. It's difficult to imagine the filters winning, without more advanced support (for example, cropping images to remove ads, and collaborative filtering pools). But if a million people are using the system, and 0.01% are coders committed to making it work, well, you can do a lot with 100 brains.
It seems to me that blocking ads is no different from blocking porn. All of the technology being developed for the latter purpose (PICS for example) will eventually be used for the former. Filtering technology in general will advance as the net becomes more diverse and people seek to protect themselves from unwelcome information. I think the long-term outlook for content providers is pretty bleak. How do you make a profit when your copyrights are not enforceable and your ads are easily filtered?
On Thu, 22 Jan 1998, Wei Dai wrote:
I think the long-term outlook for content providers is pretty bleak. How do you make a profit when your copyrights are not enforceable and your ads are easily filtered?
I think this is actually a very encouraging sign for content providers. The profit model, however, will have to change -- those models that work for free software businesses will likely also work for other forms of information as well.
For now, most of those services all live on machines dedicated to the banner service, rather than on the same machine as the server. Making machines vanish is easy - put them in your hosts file as aliases to 127.0.0.2, and if you're behind a proxy server, put them on your "no proxy" list. Of course, if everybody starts doing this, then more systems will start using ad servers that have names in their own domain, but it works for now on most of the major servers. I've found that killing doubleclick.net and linkexchange.com gets rid of most of the banners. What I'd really like to see in a browser is an option to turn off animated GIFs (other than by killing all images.)
Speaking of browsers: I'd rather *pay* for a browser that has such an obvious feature as a list of URL regexps that you don't want to browse. Neither IE nor Netscape has it. I don't know about Lynx. I'm now using junkbuster from www.junkbuster.com (highly recommended) to filter out ads and banners and cookies. I generally think WWW sucks; but if I use it, I want to be able to tell the browser that if the page tried to load an image from a URL that looks like
valueclick.com bannermall.com ... I suggest writing a proxy server that does such filtering, running it on the local machine, and using it as proxy server from your netscape browser.
There is a proxy server in form of a 20 line perl script, you can take it and modify it.
If you have a unix box, try using the roxen web/proxy server. It has a regexp module that does exactly this. http://www.roxen.com
Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
Jack Aaron's, the commodities division of Goldman Sachs, controls inter alia like 99% of US coffee supply. if you try to circumvent their monopoly, by trying to import a material amount of coffee, whether it's the cheap shit for proles or the high-end caffeine fix from Kenya, you and your suppliers just might find yourself in a lot more trouble that the computer manusfacturers who were reluctant to put the free mickeysoft browser on their dekstop. Why doesn't DOJ come down on Goldman Sachs? Does it have anything to do with the fact that a Goldman Sachs partner is in Clinton's cabinet?
Yow - talk about threats to the Computer Industry - Controlling our Coffee Supply can affect the productivity of the Entire Country! These Monopolists are after our precious bodily fluids! BTW, if you've ever been to Sacramento, CA, that hive of villiany and stupidity, there's apparently a law or custom which says that nobody may make or sell any coffee strong enough to wake up a government bureaucrat... Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
bill.stewart@pobox.com writes:
Jack Aaron's, the commodities division of Goldman Sachs, controls inter alia like 99% of US coffee supply. if you try to circumvent their monopoly, by trying to import a material amount of coffee, whether it's the cheap shit for proles or the high-end caffeine fix from Kenya, you and your suppliers just might find yourself in a lot more trouble that the computer manusfactur who were reluctant to put the free mickeysoft browser on their dekstop. Why doesn't DOJ come down on Goldman Sachs? Does it have anything to do wit the fact that a Goldman Sachs partner is in Clinton's cabinet?
Yow - talk about threats to the Computer Industry - Controlling our Coffee Supply can affect the productivity of the Entire Country! These Monopolists are after our precious bodily fluids!
Purity Of Essence[tm]
BTW, if you've ever been to Sacramento, CA, that hive of villiany and stupidity, there's apparently a law or custom which says that nobody may make or sell any coffee strong enough to wake up a government bureaucrat...
The heathen custom of percolating coffee leads to mental degeneracy and sexual perversion. When the water passing through the grinds is not boiling, many essential chemicals remain in the grinds. The only civilized way to make coffee is to boil the grinds in the water for a few minutes. Try it, you'll discover that it tastes completely differently from the percolated swill. --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps
participants (18)
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Attila T. Hun -
Bill Stewart -
bill.stewart＠pobox.com
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Brad Threatt -
Chip Mefford -
David Honig -
dlv＠bwalk.dm.com -
Eric Murray -
ichudov＠Algebra.COM -
John Blair -
lutz＠belenus.iks-jena.de -
Michael Stutz -
phelix＠vallnet.com -
Ray Arachelian -
Simon Fraser -
Tim May -
Wei Dai -
William H. Geiger III