1&1 (aka 1and1.com)
GMX
WEB.DE
InterNetX
united-domains
Sedo
mail.com
Fasthosts
affilinet
Arsys[1] http://www.digitalfaq.com/editorials/websites-blogs/hostgato...
http://chromespot.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/screen_quot...
By getting the user accustomed to seeing browser warnings and info there, you make it impossible for them to distinguish a legit browser warning from a fake one crafted by an unscrupulous site owner.
Browser warnings and notifications should significantly overlap the browser chrome (embedded in the address bar for example) so that no web page can make something that looks like it.
edit: image link
it belongs to 1&1[1] one of the bigger internet companies in germany.
it's really odd that no one ever shot them down. they are famous for tricking users into shady 2 year contracts, if they wanted to upgrade their 12 mb mailbox.
they also upgraded the freemail to 500mb if and only if you would install their browser toolbar, which would change the mail server etc. now it's 1gb with toolbar i think.
they tried to force my mum into a contract, because she clicked on a banner while logging(for free xxx mb click here style banners). then promptly closed the account should she not pay.
the result was her saying fuck it i'll use gmail.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%261_Internet
http://www.teltarif.de/web-de-freemail-speichererweiterung/n...
But I agree that it takes discipline (germans are good at that :o). Gmail, on the other hand, cannot be trusted either. While web.de is evil, google is evil too, but google is bigger and google is not an european company. All of the data is used abroad thus circumventing civilized laws.
The real problem is this: these companies offer a service and everybody expects free services online. Of course the companies have to make money. Ask yourself: would you pay for an email account (I do)? If not, you have to accept ads. Or googles snooping in your data and selling your profile to everyone who pays. There is no free beer online. At least web.de shows us how ugly it gets, if things have to look like they were free.
This is not intended to excuse the primitive tricks we.de uses. But if you have a solution, post it here and I'll get rich.
You should really read Google's privacy policy:
http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/
So, no, they don't sell your profile.
I do agree with your point: if you don't want advertisements. Pay for the service. E.g. Google Apps for domains allows you to disable adds in Google apps. And since you can bring your own domain, you can move to some other service if you are not happy with them.
I've been on a crusade to try to make people switch to, well, whatever but not that.
I think it was one of the first ones around here and people got used to it and the status quo, most don't even know or care about how bad they've got it.
Though, GMX has done some shady business over the years and their servers are in Germany. They would be better off with some other email provider...
I noticed as a mail.com user was trying to email me and the message was being rejected, saw the spamhaus listing in my logs. Asked the sender, and they said that their messages to gmail were going into spam too.
I emailed postmaster@, support@, sysadmin@ etc. to try and inform them, as well as trying two contact forms; never heard anything back and it took several more days for the listing to disappear.
Actually it's quite easy to just enter some address and order some useless premium services "in behalf" of other people - this actually happened to a member of my family. According to consumer protection organizations this seems to be their business model [3,4].
Note that those links are in German: [1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web.de#Kritik [2] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmx.de#Kritik [3] http://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/digital/Glueckwunsch-Abz... [4] http://www.verbraucherzentrale-niedersachsen.de/link1811119A...
In my opinion using ad blockers is borderline piracy. Refusing the content creator his revenue by blocking his ads is little different than downloading music, books... without rewarding the creator. On top of that most of the quality content this days is on websites that have decent ads.
I am not trying to start a dispute if piracy is good or bad just wanted to express an opinion on ad blockers that many seem to miss.
Once upon a time I agreed with you... now I view all online ads as threats.
Unfortunately, marketing companies have gotten greedy and the degree to which they fingerprint and track us as we surf the web has gotten completely out of hand. This is an industry that cannot even follow their own watered-down initiatives like DoNotTrack.
And because ad networks use layers of affiliates, sites typically have no visibility nor control over what their visitors are being served. That's why you end up with a marketing company like Evidon buying Ghostery - just so they can help companies monitor the garbage on their own pages![3]
And to top it off, ads are now a common attack vector for viruses and malware that not even the big companies can control:
1. Just last week, Youtube was serving banking malware via its online ads. [1]
2. Last month Yahoo got a lot of attention serving Bitcoin malware via online ads on their site. [2]
I know that online publishing is important, and we need a strong press. But publishing desperately needs to find a new business model because online ads are a failed experiment and it's time to stick a fork in them.
[1]: http://labs.bromium.com/2014/02/21/the-wild-wild-web-youtube...
[2]: http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/05/tech/yahoo-malware-attack/inde...
My point it: people mostly hated ads since they were invented. Be it by not looking at them on the street, changing channels on tv or installing AdBlock on your computer, they do their best to avoid them.
I agree that people hate ads and people also hate paying for things that can get for free(piracy).
You guys are missing my point of ad blockers being borderline piracy and mainly try to justify your reason for using them.
Die out, go away, and let us get back to the point where the motivation to publish something on the 'net stems from the desire to share knowledge. To hell with the cacophonous status quo of doing the bare minimum to trick people into giving you their attention in order to fill their head with garbage for a fraction of a penny. And if hosting honest content using central servers costs too much to be sustainable, then let that dead-end approach leave us and make room for decentralized software to deliver information.
I am in favor of a great coordinated blackout campaign by the large content providers. Dont want to see ads? Fine, pay a dollar via Paypal to see the site - or go away.
Anti-piracy main reasoning is that if it's too expensive(too many ads in your case) just don't buy it. The 2nd main reason is lack of availability(in ad blocker case - lack of sites with less ads that give you same content).
This flag is checked by default.
More Info: https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads
Now, I'm sure that you took care to guarantee that your ads won't track me, or try to invade my computer, right? Because if you didn't, it's blocked and you can whine and call me bad names the entire day, it won't change a thing.
By the way, I never saw adblockers blocking properly applied, safe to load ads. Maybe they do, I don't use them for quite a long time (I use other tech).
However, I think it's also important to recognize that by similarly-strong analogy, advertisements in general are inherently a sort of mental manipulation or brainwashing.
Now, I'm not saying that mental manipulation is inherently a bad or evil thing. When I'm writing this post, I hope that those reading it will become in some way more mentally accepting of my point of view. But I think we don't look enough at how susceptible we are to advertising, and how much advertising depends on exploiting cognitive biases or implying untruths that are not explicitly stated.
We (humans) are really bad at not being affected by advertising, even if we know we're being advertised to, and even if we know the ad is deceptive. When sites depend on ad revenue, they're saying "We're offering this content for free, but in exchange we want to be able to bias/prime your brain so that when you see Product X, even far in the future, you are more likely to desire it." That's a very powerful thing, and while it's certainly necessary for many business models today, I think we should think of this as a "necessary evil."
There are sites where I disable ad-blocking, often in response to a genuine plea on the part of the website. If it's a site I particularly care about and feel that I trust, then I allow ads as a way of helping them out. But if ad-blocking is piracy, then ads themselves are brainwashing -- exploiting failings in human cognition to unconsciously guide people into actions or purchases that may or may not be optimal for them -- and with the subject having limited defenses against it once infected.
I would not go that far and claim all ads are brainwashing and manipulative. Going this route it means all communication is manipulative as there is an intention behind every word.
There is not.
But if the advertising industry starts to act like one huge criminal enterprise without any limits to the kind of deceptive practices they use I'm forced to defend myself.
I see no reason to be fair to those who deceive me whenever they can.
But beyond that, this is pretty irrelevant to the topic at hand. However you feel about ad blockers, tricking people into turning them off is still completely unacceptable.
With retargeting ads this days it becomes easier to show relevant and targeted ads.
Actually most HN-ers are leaving huge money on the table right now for not using the highest ROI ad channel - retargeting.
One of the providers, web.de, also sends it’s users emails with advertisements which cannot be disabled or marked as spam.
What they pull is still shady, but the text seemed a bit sensationalist at that point.
Is it libelous against browser makers, though? They spoof the browser's info bar and I believe they style the landing page to look like an internal browser page.
Incidentally, I remember reading before that Germany had the largest percentage of users using AdBlock, so it makes sense that the pushback is starting here.
Someone has said that they do not view advertising. They have modified their browser to avoid ads.
A marketer choses to ignore that person's choice and choses to use tricky technical means to ignore that person's wishes in order to show an ad.
How is that in any way beneficial to the product being advertised?
I am ad tolerant (don't run ad blockers etc) but behaviour like that fills me with rage. It is exactly the same kind of attitude that said it is fine to spew email to anyone whether they want it or not.
Marketers need a code of conduct to say that this behaviour is unacceptable.
but the default position of most people is to disregard someone's position. There is a stunningly vast portion of the population that actively assumes that everyone believes the same as they do, even if they know otherwise.
"I can't focus with the tv on" "Yes you can." turns tv louder
marketers ignoring stated positions for money is a symptom of the greater disease of people ignoring others positions.
it isn't. But the clients of the advertisers cannot really have a say in this - the measurements of ad effectiveness tend to be done with impressions. They are optimizing for a metric that doesn't completely align with the goals of advertising
(There's also the alternative of targeting the scripts that do this; an anti-anti-adblock! Reminds me of the arms race between malware attempting to prevent itself from reverse-engineering via detecting debuggers and such, and the opponents coming up with anti-anti-debugging, leading to anti-anti-anti, and so forth...)
Anyway, the point is that you could probably easily check for adblock by checking the image size of something within a div named "advert".
But I doubt any of them will do that because, security be damed, it messes with the minimalist fashion.
But I think the best place for it would be between the tab bar and the location bar.
The GMX website is disrupted by a plugin
(orginal: Die GMX Website wird durch ein Plugin gestört)
As you can see on their "information campaign" page: http://www.browsersicherheit.info/sicherheit_ff.htmlThey also faked press articles: http://www.browsersicherheit.info/pressestimmen.html (two websites are related to "1&1"-company and they other one is "Bild")
webpages at http://browsersicherheit.info/ seems to be removed.
http://web.archive.org/web/20140226224721/http://www.browser... says that adblock "Filters page content"
Such a shame...
This kind of social engineering approach to removing an extension is not significantly different from a browser exploit that achieves the same result.
I'm amazed they don't just social people to download toolbar claiming to fix the "security compromises".