The lonely bully: China issues edict to ban ad blockers

Prevent ads from blocking other ads is what is most likely about. Thats my reading of the promulgation here http://www.saic.gov.cn/zwgk/zyfb/zjl/xxzx/201607/t20160708_1...

They key is in 'other legitimate ardvertising' i.e. if you are advertising you cannot block other adverters. Is not about blocking all ads as a consumer. Means NYTimes cant block the ads of Bloomberg or Google cant block the ads from Baidu, as 2 examples. But does not exclude the consumer from blocking everything.

BTW for the noobs, this is the way that legislation is written in China. The Central government lays down the principles, then regions figure out how to make it work. After a while the outcomes, case histories, impact/costs are weighed up and a more comprehensive law written up. This is a faster, more efficient way for a developing economy than the western developed economy approach of write the tome for all possible cases, debate for a few years, make legislation.

And for ad-blocking i personally use ABP, Sanitize, Ka-Block, and sometimes HideImages, all at the same time because use of internet from China can make everything else slow. And its the ads that drag down the load time of pages. A lot. And i have zero interest in the ad content).

With Firefox's move to the new Chrome-inspired extensions framework, I hope it's able to provide the required hooks to implement a capable ad blocker. That is, if you compare what ads get through uBlock Origin in Chrome vs uBlock Origin in Firefox, it's clear that the Firefox version is able to hook into events that for example block images that are loaded by the 1st party javascript as base64 data uris. These images are never blocked in chrome based browsers.

There's a good explanation on reddit [1] about this.

https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/4u2jd4/china_wil...

So is this to protect Chinese companies that need ad revenue or are ad blockers interfering with government tracking? Or both?

So when ad code comes in via an online service, the user is obliged to run it? Will browsers that block JavaScript altogether be prohibited?

Here's ultimately where the anti-ad-blocking movement leads, the user isn't allowed to control what the software on his own device does. Digital tyranny.

Strange way to do communism, too.

Its much harder to analyse web request that don't generate a cascade of derived requests. The signature of a page visit that pulls in a bunch of different sized resources from a plethora of advertising sites is much more distinctive. If the great firewall wants to know what you are reading, or if that TLS connection is actually a tunnel, the request signature is very useful. Even for sites with a CSP requiring everything encrypted this is still useful. It is quite feasible for state security to place ads for content that matches China related content.

Even internally in China, having websites load ads is very useful for tracking and injection. Local ad serving companies will cooperate completely with the provincial and national security bureau.

See also, Great Cannon: https://citizenlab.org/2015/04/chinas-great-cannon/

A bit off-topic. What's the best way of blocking ads on Android? Firefox for Android + uBlock Origin? I'm getting a lot of scam that redirect you from the website and want you install malware.