story
"It's a simple solution that works for everyone involved."
It's literally none of those things. It's not simple, it's not a solution, and it doesn't work for anyone involved.
Still I don't buy the argument that just because you don't want to pay for the content (by viewing ads) that you should still be able to consume it without ads. From a technical perspective I guess the client can do whatever it wants with the data returned but it's still not "right".
I'm not taking anything from you because you gave it to me for free. Pirating is one thing. You're getting something for free that the distributor expects you to pay for. You're going out of your way to get something for free that you know you have to pay for. My ad blocker doesn't get me into Netflix for free, nor does it get past the NYT's paywall. It doesn't do anything fundamentally different from hitting "Reading Mode" built into my iPhone. Hell, it doesn't do anything fundamentally different from the Chrome extension "Cloud to Butt". It doesn't get me for-pay content for free. It couldn't possibly be any further from pirating MP3s.
logical fallacy. You took it for free, but it had a price. If the ad has a $3 RPM it means you seeing the ad pays $0.003 to the content producer.
The price was just to let that ad load. not even to watch it or to read it.
It was free for you because you took it, by using a browser extension that lets you watch the site in a different way than the one that was intended.
Instead, by serving their content upon request, the sites are implicitly agreeing to my terms. So, I'm not doing anything wrong by running an ad-blocker on my computer.
I think it would be great if someone codified this too. If servers can have Terms of Service, so can users. Wouldn't it be great if my browser could send a TOS to each site once before I accepted content from them? A simple notification of my terms, via a custom header sent from a browser extension would work today, but I don't feel that I need to do this since most servers happily give me their content.
There is no way to identify an ad blocker in the initial request. If there was the adblocker would just spoof those params anyway. The way most of the scripts detect ad blockers is to load some JS class in an file that is likely to be blocked by an ad blocker. If the class is loaded they assume that ads are not blocked.
> If I can identify that you are running an adblocker then I could do something even more malicious than serving an ad.
Well, then you'd be an asshole. Running an adblocker on my computer is not malicious, so some site responding with a possibly illegal action wouldn't be a good solution for anyone.
