I’d use that.
They do seem keen on banging those nails into their own coffin, don’t they?
But you’re not real.
“While we understand that billions of dollars are lost each year to blocked ads”
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logged into my old yahoo email account using firefox with ABP & Ghostery active (as I do on every site) without issue.
Guess I’m not “some users” lol
I have a couple of aol accounts. I guess the company still relies a bit on people who never ended monthly payments, which is a bit scummy. If that’s not an issue, the current version of the accounts are reasonably convenient throwaway accounts and attract a little less spam than the others I’ve had. They’re also amusing.
Yahoo! is the company of geniuses that manage to fuck up everything they touch. Really, it takes some talent to be so consistent.
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Plenty of small businesses run their own email servers without getting emails bounced back all the time. Most rejections come about either due to improperly set DNS records, misconfigured email servers or users who get infected and send spam through the server or get their credentials stolen.
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I was just fiddling with AdBlockPlus to deal with a specific issue on a new site, and one of the options offered was to set things so that the other site wouldn’t know I’d blocked their element.
- pop-up addon options
- pop-up addon preferences
- add site rule
- close blocked windows after a small delay to prevent site from detecting it
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Translation: Yahoo is the new AOL. If you’re savvy enough to be using an ad blocker, you are clearly not part of our target demographic, and it’s long past time you switched to gmail.
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This is just the next step in the evolution of ads and ad-blockers.
And like evolution, if one side “wins”, the entire eco-system is destroyed. No more companies - no more web.
We’re not obliged to support their business model, and they’re not obliged to serve us the way we would like to be served (wonderfully, for free).
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On the plus side I always have dial-up Internet service as a backup plan
Calm down kids! I know I stashed our old 2400 bps modem somewhere. You’ll just have to be patient!
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That still leaves you at risk from ads containing malicious code.
But if you don’t execute the code contained in the ad, then the ad server can embed something in the code that calls home to notify that the code’s been executed. If it doesn’t receive the call-home bit, then they can disable the page for you.
If you run an ad’s code in a tiny sandboxed virtual machine, shitty pages with many ads will chew through the amount of RAM most people have in their systems in no time because ad servers will require increasingly complex checks to verify whether an ad’s just being run in a bubble. An adblocker with this feature would have to be extremely efficient at releasing RAM sectors once the VM bubble’s served its purpose.
If the adblocker sandboxes each individual ad in its own bubble, then the ad server could have some bit of code in each that interacts with the others on the page in some way: If the handshake fails, page disabled again. So all the ads on a page would have to be in the same bubble.
If the adblocker bursts the bubble between page loads, then the ad server would try to track continuity between page loads with secret cookies or some other demented infectious shit like that. So the bubble would have to remain open for however long you remain on a particular domain. Then the ad server would try to trick the bubble by injecting code from different domains, to see if the tracking bits stay.
If the adblocker gets around that, then the ad server will probably try to choke out the blocker with bits from too many domains at once, clogging the system’s RAM and dragging your browsing to a buggy, crashy, infuriating crawl.
So a single bubble would have to contain all the adblocked data and execute all ad code for the entire time that your browser’s open. When you open the browser and the ad servers on the pages you open don’t recognize you, they’ll be forced to assume you’re a new, untracked user. Or you managed to fully clear your cache, including secret cookies. Until they figure out how to reliably track you server-side, which they could well do by making deals with the sites you visit to identify you by your login. Editorial would have to get fully in bed with marketing for that to be a thing, which is bad business for even mildly ethical sites.
Something to consider, of course, is that if a VM has access to the network hardware to send the call-home bit, then any malicious code could potentially be run through a potentially vulnerable piece of hardware with a direct connection to the rest of your system. Firmware and driver updates would have to keep up.
It would take something extremely unethical for ad servers to break through VMs, though, so I’m not seeing much of a downside for users in the long run. Ad spammers would just be setting themselves up to be bankrupted through litigation. Until they all conglomerate into a single empirical entity and can lobby for laws in their favour with bottomless pits for bribes.
If the TPP and other deals like it go all the way through, blocking ads may well become illegal in the next few years anyway. I’m sure some fucking company or other will justify it by claiming that anyone who doesn’t want to be “tracked” in any way online must be up to no good. HURR DURR. The FBI and all them will happily step in to help fund and use the ad networks’ tracking systems. “For a fair price,” of course, wink-wink, nudge-nudge. Banning crypto and all that shit is obviously heading in that direction.
As more and more users are scared away from adblocking by more and more punitive actions like Yahoo’s, revenue losses will diminish. The money and zealousness available to punish the remaining blockers will skyrocket. A few centralized ad companies will start some massive organization like the MPAA and RIAA to go after “criminals” for not paying attention to ads, with legal government approval. And Black Mirror will be real.
Of course, that apocalyptic series of predictions ignores any probable efforts to the contrary. People do so love to prove my cynicism wrong occasionally. Prove me wrong, people. For the love of fuck. Please.
I’m of the opinion that browser tabs should operate inside a VM bubble by default anyway, with no live access to real system functions possible by web code. Bookmarks and passwords would be exterior functions, with layers of security preventing the injection of malicious code into URLs in bookmarks or display data: Code goes into the bubble, but not out. Only the tab’s current URL and display data would be reported to the exterior architecture. Load browser plugins into each tab’s bubble and allow them no external calls to the system. If malicious code alters a plugin within a bubble, it’s fine. It gets deleted once the bubble’s closed. The plugin’s source remains untouched outside. If a plugin is so poorly designed that it can’t function inside a bubble without calling out to the system, nobody should be using it anyway. Plugins that require a learning component can call back to the developer to make updates to definitions and the like, to be loaded into the plugin source in the system space, then injected back into the bubble the next time it’s created. The developer would have to have some way of identifying update calls from compromised plugin instances, though.
A developer mode would have to be available, to allow code other than just URLs and display bits to pass into the real system space, so you can fiddle with source code and stuff if you want.
But then I’ve got 32 gigs of RAM, so I’m not really worried about my own system’s requirements for all this excessive security, which would all be breached in a hot second anyway because Windows is a fucking sieve.
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Ya, who?
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We went from “That still leaves you at risk from ads containing malicious code” to “I’ve got 32 gigs of RAM”.
Tangent much?
Oh shit! We don’t have a landline anymore either!
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Say goodbye to the Yahoo before it vanishes forever!
Take a stand against animal cruelty!
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Protect lycos while your at it then.
I used my Lycos (originally MailCity) until about only five years ago. They were doing some “update” which effectively made it so I couldn’t login in with my weird username anymore. Until then, I had no problems with the service. I started the account around 1997-1998 because all of the other big services I knew of would let me register only if I already had another email address, which I thought was asinine.
The problems I think come from companies inability to commit to developing a specific business. I think that the model of trying to cash in by offering free email is kind of demented in the first place. Sure, adapt, offer some other things. But being well-known is arguably not an advantage if you can’t make up your mind what you are known for. Trying to please “everyone” when things get tough never works well. The only way to succeed IMO is to NOT use venture capital, but rather grow steadily through attracting actual users.
Also, controversially perhaps, people need to get rid of the model of using advertisers to pay for everything. It’s lazy, primitive, and the content suffers. So long as advertisers are the only customer who matters, the interwebs will get worse.
It categorically isn’t the only way, but I can tell you that founders who take VC and sometimes even Angel money frequently regret it later.
(If VC funding didn’t work to launch/mature businesses, there wouldn’t be any more VC funding.)
