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Ars Technica on the problem with adblocking
Deozaan:
I have the solution! The ad-blockers should download the ads, pleasing the site, and not display them, pleasing the viewer!
-TomTrottier (March 28, 2010, 10:37 PM)
--- End quote ---
I believe that some ad-blockers work that way.
I'm using AdThwart for Chrome and sometimes it will display the ad for a split second and then it will disappear. Almost as if it has to load it first before it chooses to block it from showing up.
IainB:
@ TomTrottier and @Deozaan: I could be wrong, of course, but I gather that all current adblockers download the ads and related crap regardless anyway, which consumes bandwidth. They just don't display the crap, that's all. Ars technica, however would seem to be insisting that we actually must have that crap displayed on our screens, which is why I tell them to "get lost".
Interestingly, there was one ad-blocker - defunct now, but the one that probably started it all - which actually sent requests to the server to NOT send specific advertising-related material. It was called JunkBuster (junkbuster.com and junkbusters.com) and was developed by Anonymous Coders and Junkbusters Corporation. This system (it ran as a proxy server on the client) is no longer maintained, but it is mentioned in Electronic Privacy Information Center.
I started using JunkBuster in 1997/8, as I was working as an expat in the Philippines and later in Thailand, both of which had crappy telelcomms infrastructures. Connection to the Internet was usually via dial-up voiceband modem, and connection speeds with the Internet could be incredibly slow, regardless of whether you had the latest newfangled 56K dial-up modem. At that time, the advertisers were starting to flood the web with advertising, and people had started to create web pages with very little real content and lots of whirling and flashing gizmos - these, as now, were all major bandwidth hogs, and I couldn't afford to have them. JunkBuster was a lifesaver for me then. It was brilliantly designed.
With JunkBuster, you could:
* spoof your http header (mine said I was using an obsolete Macintosh, with the obsolete Mosaic browser), and included my email address as "<[email protected]>"
* update/add to your block-list (using Regular Expressions) to make it just right for you
* share your block-list(s) with other people (this was very useful, for me)
* block cookies and control whether you responded to them
* keep cookies in a "cookie jar"
* share cookie jars with with other people (clever idea)
* send someone else's cookies to a server, from a shared cookie jar (brilliant idea; thereby completely frustrating the concept of cookie tracking)
There were various other JunkBuster features, but the above would give you some idea of the scope of it.
The JunkBuster site is no longer maintained, and JunkBuster was largely superseded by GuideScope, and that was later superseded by NoScript and AdBlock - which do not send requests to the server to NOT send specific advertising-related material. That is, they don't help your bandwidth any.
I would dearly love to have the ability to do the same sort of things though - e.g., maintain cookie jars, send requests to the server to NOT send specific advertising-related material - as I still wish to retain my anonymity when surfing and I still have to pay for bandwidth (so I want to be thrifty about that).
I wonder, is this something that the Donation Coder people could help with?
If anyone is interested, you can download the JunkBuster install file of the last version, which includes the source code (JunkBuster 2.0.2 - ijb20.zip) from here. I think it needed redeveloping when SSL was introduced, as it did not work very well with SSL switched on (and we all tend to use that now, by default).
f0dder:
"clean" browser: 185 requests, 731KB, 25.38s
W/O ABP, W/noscript: 171 requests, 576.7KB, 1.86s
W/ABP, W/O noscript: 162 requests, 605.5KB, 1.89s
WITH ABP + noscript: 148 requests, 575KB, 893ms
There were various other JunkBuster features, but the above would give you some idea of the scope of it.
The JunkBuster site is no longer maintained, and JunkBuster was largely superseded by GuideScope, and that was later superseded by NoScript and AdBlock - which do not send requests to the server to NOT send specific advertising-related material. That is, they don't help your bandwidth any.-IainB (March 29, 2010, 04:44 PM)
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Huh? :huh:
Do you have any detailed information on this? I don't see how you can "tell the server not to send advertising stuff"; there's nothing related to this in the HTTP protocol, and servers don't send stuff they haven't been requested to send - it's your browser pulling rather than the server pushing.
OTOH, AdBlock and friends actually do get you bandwidth savings - this is pretty easy to verify using FireBug's "Net" tab that shows which URLs get fetched, including content size and loadtime. Here's some stats for loading http://www.eb.dk :
--- ---"clean" browser: 185 requests, 731KB, 25.38s
W/O ABP, W/noscript: 171 requests, 576.7KB, 1.86s
W/ABP, W/O noscript: 162 requests, 605.5KB, 1.89s
WITH ABP + noscript: 148 requests, 575KB, 893ms
Those are full reloads - if cache had been used, FireBug would should that.
When requesting a page, you obviously grab the entire contents for the requested page (index.html, foo.php, yomomma.asp or whatever) - so if there's embedded HTML ads, those might be blocked but you won't get bandwidth savings... but that's not really the sinner anyway, the external flash/image based crap is. The good news is that for stuff AdBlock filters out, HTTP requests won't be made.
Also, note the extremely long load-time when loading the site without any script or ad blocking - this site is loaded, rendered and ready to use well before that, it's all the background ad-server tracking that isn't done before those 25s have elapsed.
IainB:
@f0dder: Well, I did preface my comment with "I could be wrong, of course...". However, it does seem that the modern AdBlock does download the crap, display it momentarily (in Chrome) and then remove it from the display. (This has been mentioned by someone else in this discussion thread, above.) As far as I am aware, JunkBuster did not do this.
You ask "Do you have any detailed information on this?" Well, I might have, and it will be in the .ZIP file I linked to.
For example, In the FAQ file, it says this:
Can web sites tell that I'm using the Internet Junkbuster?
With the default options the proxy doesn't announce itself. Obvious indications such as Keep-Alive headers are deleted, but sites might notice that you can cancel cookies faster than any human could possibly click on a mouse. (If you want to provide a plausible explanation for this, change the User Agent header to a cookie-free or cookie-crunching browser).
But when certain options are used they could figure out something's going on, even if they're not pushing cookies. If you use blocking they can tell from their logs that the graphics in their pages are not being requested selectively. The add-forwarded-header option explicitly announces to the server that a proxy is present, and sending them wafers [a kind of dummy cookie] is of course a dead giveaway.
--- End quote ---
The key words there are, "are not being requested selectively".
f0dder:
@f0dder: Well, I did preface my comment with "I could be wrong, of course...". However, it does seem that the modern AdBlock does download the crap, display it momentarily (in Chrome) and then remove it from the display. (This has been mentioned by someone else in this discussion thread, above.) As far as I am aware, JunkBuster did not do this.-IainB (March 30, 2010, 11:20 AM)
--- End quote ---
I don't have Chrome installed, so dunno - but is AdBlock for chrome the same as AdBlock for firefox? Addon support for Chrome was added rather late, so it's possible it doesn't have all the capabilities of FF adblock.
Anyway, when checking site load with FireBug for FF, I can definitely see the ad-related URLs not being requested when AdBlockPlus is enabled.
Can web sites tell that I'm using the Internet Junkbuster?
With the default options the proxy doesn't announce itself. Obvious indications such as Keep-Alive headers are deleted, but sites might notice that you can cancel cookies faster than any human could possibly click on a mouse. (If you want to provide a plausible explanation for this, change the User Agent header to a cookie-free or cookie-crunching browser).
But when certain options are used they could figure out something's going on, even if they're not pushing cookies. If you use blocking they can tell from their logs that the graphics in their pages are not being requested selectively. The add-forwarded-header option explicitly announces to the server that a proxy is present, and sending them wafers [a kind of dummy cookie] is of course a dead giveaway.
--- End quote ---
The key words there are, "are not being requested selectively".-IainB (March 30, 2010, 11:20 AM)
--- End quote ---
Yes - they can see that some graphics (stuff-we-want) are being requested, and others (crappy-ad-crap) isn't, hence "selectively". This is in no way different from how things work with AdBlockPlus (I'm ignoring the part about cookies, since I honestly don't care much about them).
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