Pornhub Bypasses Ad Blockers with WebSockets
blog.bugreplay.com
blog.bugreplay.com
They were accepting credit cards online before virtually anyone. In fact, I think most innovations in technology come from either the military, video games or porn.
It was one of the only companies where I truly felt that they would let their engineers experiment and grow. If an idea sounded like it could bring more traffic or increase the quality of traffic, they'd let you do it. If that idea didn't pan out in a short period of time (~3 months), then it was canned and they tried something new.
I work at a very large global corporation now and I'm shocked (and bored) at how drawn out their development cycles are, and at how little license they give their engineers to be creative. The risk averseness makes it almost impossible to bring anything into production.
I'd go back to porn if it weren't for the fact the industry as a whole seems to be very secretive and mafia-like.
When you're building software for a specialized field like finance, health care etc., the end-impact is always obscured by layers of product managers, business analyst and the domain where you have no knowledge - web development in porn seems like a good biz to be into where "I'm not only the Hair Club president, but also a client."
One thing about being an engineer there was that you did actually own the product end-to-end. I remember taking systems from development to production without all the bullshit you normally encounter at large corporations. I would put something into production and my boss (the CTO) would leisurely say "Oh yeah, contact so-and-so in ops to have them secure the server." I would do that, and I didn't get a freak-out like you'd experience in more straight-laced companies: "YOU PUT THIS IN PRODUCTION WITHOUT FILLING OUT ALL THE REQUIRED JIRA TICKETS AND APPROVAL FROM 3 LAYERS OF MANAGEMENT?!?! WE'RE GONNA HAVE TO TAKE THIS DOWN AND HAVE A MEETING!" Nope, a dude in ops, who was usually stoned, would log in, add all the necessary protections and even redeploy the whole stack if he had to. No griping.
One thing about it was that you'd have to be okay with some unscrupulous/unethical practices. Copyright infringement is par for the course in that industry. Studios/companies stealing others' content is unavoidable (and encouraged).
I remember when I wrote a tube site and I was given a list of other tube sites to rip content from. For that particular project the product manager (who was also a high-ranking exec) strongly emphasized two things: every action had to be trackable, and it was a necessary requirement that handling DMCA take-down notices had to be a very streamlined and automated process.
Why? They would have people monitor which videos were heavily viewed and which were taken down frequently. If a particular studio's content generated lots of traffic but were frequently taken down, the sales/ad guys would contact that studio to make a deal. If no deal was struck, then an "anonymous user" would reupload the content to the site; starting the cycle again. Eventually that would wear down the studio into cutting a rev-sharing deal. Sometimes the company would buy the studio outright, if it made enough sense.
I mean, I use Libgen and usually get enough books to cost me 5k or 10k €. Hopefully it will bring sanity into that market (Even though it is already blocked in UK, for some obscure reason)
Take my Spotify away and I'll probably just stop caring about music that much at all
This is totally OT, but during my training at a large corporation, I was building a very simple web application and found it desirable to access the corporate phone directory to augment some of the information I presented to the users.
I looked around a little and discovered that there was indeed an LDAP server that served the phone directory for the entire freaking company. It would even speak to me after I did an anonymous bind. ;-) So I wrote my web application, handed it off to the guy who ended up maintaining it (me being a trainee and all), and the I thought I'd be a good corporate citizen and checked what I had to do to "legally" access that LDAP server. Turns out I had fill out an application form that was something like six pages long.
Unfortunately, filling out that form and sending it to the designated address were my last actions as a member of that team, as my time with that particular team was up. So I never found out if "they" rejected the application or not. (I guess they approved it, because if it was such a big deal, they would not have opened that LDAP server for anonymous access, but you never know - could have been plain stupidity.)
That made me laugh. The guy in charge of securing a production server is usually stoned...
Try finding porn while not seeing any male genitals during searching/browsing. It's virtually impossible, and it totally ruins the UX :)
It was actually really exhilarating, if you could overlook the fact that the work you're doing offered absolutely zero value to anyone involved except the bosses whose pockets you were lining if you succeeded. I don't work at a large global corp now, but at a small company (can't really call it a startup anymore, though that's how I would have described it a year or two ago), where there is still a relatively quick development cycle, but it's glacial compared to what I did at that last job. We are also trending toward much slower turn around times as we grow, which there was no danger whatsoever of at my ad industry job.
It's unfortunate that these developer-candy-store development cultures largely seem to be limited to get-rich-quick industries which can be unattractive from an ethical standpoint, or new startups which can be unattractive from a job security standpoint.
I lasted barely a year in advertising, the whole industry is a scam, top to bottom, big players and small, just scam and horrible people. Worked 5 years at MindGeek/Manwin, saw/did some dodgy shit but nothing that made me want to distance myself from the industry.
Come up with a new "widget", implement, push it out there, monitor monitor monitor, if players don't embrace just leave it to rot while you push out the next one.
(I'm not saying that working for a porn company is bad! Far from it. It just seems like it would be really difficult to break back into the corporate mainstream after working for a porn company due to the raised eyebrows during the screening process.)
The more difficult part is tolerating the passive-aggressive culture of "polite society" that exists at most "legitimate" companies. Porn company culture is very aggressive. At my current dull-corporation job it's almost a weekly occurrence where I want to tell my manager or someone else up the chain to fuck off and get out of my way, in regard to getting work done. Porn is the only industry I've worked in where an aggressive (tinged with a modicum of respect) attitude is rewarded. I hate the hypocrisy at large corporations who encourage "take initiative/leadership, get-it-done!" attitudes, but then push back when an employee actually does that.
The funny part was how curious everyone was about what went on there. I never really felt that much stigma about it from others...most of it was actually self generated. The other way I got past the potential stigma, though, was that I discussed how serious the business side was. The analytics we did, how much detailed knowledge we had about what downtime cost us, etc. Our HR training was done by lawyers, not consultants, because if the company got sued they were not going to get a sympathetic jury so I knew what what not to do as a manager there. That was actually pretty attractive to the VP of HR at my next company.
I'm not saying you won't find those that pass on you because of having porn on your resume but I don't think it's that big of an issue. As others have noted before most porn companies do business under a pseudonym that is innocent sounding and it's usually enough to get you past the screening that might filter if it said "Bang Bros" or whatever company it was.
The bigger issue is if you had school aged kids. They'd never have let me talk at career day. :-)
When asked by a recruiter for more portfolio I said "Well, there are more, but they're adult". Her response was "Wow, I've always wondered about who does those and how that all works!"
and:
"That must be great, you'd have all the passwords!"
Mind you, this is in the more liberal Australia.
Then cross-fingers hoping they find that description generic and boring enough that they don't Google it.
Either way, its turned out to be a total non-issue. I always used the innocuous name on my resume, but everybody generally already knew, and nobody cared. Seemed like most people I end up working with have worked there or have had a friend that did or hired someone that did at some point.
I was kind of surprised.
Most coworkers at companies I have worked at know what I have done in the past. Never had an issue. You don't bring it up at the office and you use calibration and gradually give out details and judge whether coworkers would be cool about it when talking to them outside of work.
Devs rarely hung out with the production staff. I almost never saw the talent. The production was done in warehouses several miles from where the back office work was done. However, the owners occasionally threw parties where the talent would show up. If you wanted to fuck a porn star you met at these parties, you could, if you were mostly discreet about it. Devs would also go to tech conferences (flying first class no less), but we never shared the nature of our business with people we met (at least I never did).
Compensation was comparable/above average, perks were good (free membership at high-end gyms, fully paid health insurance), but bonuses were meager and there were essentially no equity possibilities. However, after 1.5 years working in the area of the country where I was, I had enough saved to put a down payment on a nice condo. I didn't, and I used that money to move to the Bay Area, where I had to start that process all over. And the Bay Area is definitely not a place where a developer can buy a condo after saving for ~2 years.
I shot on set here and there but the money was unreliable. I did shoot once or twice a week at the agency doing portfolio shoots of all the girls. That was a lot of fun. I couldn't believe I was getting paid to do it.
I had to eventually move into full time programming at various companies (pay wasn't good enough at agency) and they were completely separate from content production, they just bought it from someone else usually.
The vast majority of programmers in the adult industry have no exposure to the production side. An agency or production company is where you need to be at. The really small production companies that have production and programming at the same office would get you exposure to it though.
Everyone is completely open about porn and there's no hiding it. It's quite refreshing not having to worry about being PC about anything. There's porn on everyone's computer at work and nobody bats an eye. Surprisingly, there are about the same number of women in a porn tech office as there is in a typical Silicon Valley startup.
The technology is really archaic though. FTP, PHP, Apache, really? It drove me nuts that I wasn't doing anything innovative and I eventually moved back to Silicon Valley.
Would definitely recommend it if you ever get the opportunity though.
Your goal is to keep people jacked into their streams for as long as possible. To do that you basically take advantage of every human weakness ever documented. There are better things to do with your time and skills imho.
The drawback to driving traffic is that the porn companies are constantly shaving you. You had to track each of your referrals very carefully. Though generally, if the affiliates saw they were getting fucked over, they just switched off their firehose and directed it to another porn company. That always resulted in a face-to-face meeting with apologies and increased incentive to redirect the firehose.
I don't agree with the fact that porn is a frontier of tech anymore. Just read some of the forums on GFY (NSFW). They are all using PHP still and are absolutely clueless about anything that was invented after 2004. Also, read through the API docs for some of the billers. It's amazing how bad the docs and APIs are.
And no, I'm not going to give you FTP access to my server to set up your "script" because I haven't used it in over a decade, and second, I'm not giving you access to my server period. Who the hell still uses FTP? LOL
The porn industry is like the Cuba of the tech world.
Lots of fun times. Lots of horror stories too. Very unethical stuff going on though. Funny thing is, the porn sets were probably more ethical than the programming jobs.
All kinds of shady stuff happen at porn tech companies. Making the favicon look like a lock to fool users into think it was a secure site. Creating fake sites en masse just to get credit card approval because the accounts got shut down so fast for deceptive hidden cross sales.
Front load everything with something like Varnish (Nginx can do some of it to a certain extent) and you'll be handling 15+ millions users a day on a skeleton server stack. Hell back in '09 Pornhub was running smooth on a similar stack with very few servers (when you consider the traffic).
If you ask me most of what was "invented" after 2004 is stuff invented by Google/Facebook who are realistically the only ones needing it, but they saw an opportunity to scoop up market share in dev so they marketed their stack as "bleeding edge". The only thing bleeding is my eyes when I see something that could be wiped up in a standard PHP/Python/Ruby stack but instead is made with so many dependencies and 3rd party library that you wonder if the dude who wrote it actually knows programming or if he just glued cool techs together because Techcrunch and HackerNews say they are cool.
But yes, the smaller players are usually using outdated stuff, then again 99% of the web is. Hence why Wordpress is still a thing.
And as a former Lead Dev of Pornhub, I can assure you that tech peeps definitely are aware of the bleeding edge of tech, just that most have a tendency to not buy the hype. My most recent experience still prove to me that 95% of the cool tech I see mentioned is pure mental masturbation, it makes life easier I keep hearing yet I've never seen it, always a mess, "Goddamnit Grunt!", "Fucking npm", 'Damn dependencies not resolving!", "npm is down", are so commonly heard nowadays I wonder if people who tout it as modern development practice have actually done any "old" school development and realised "modern development" is mostly vendor lockin and provides very little added value to a competent developer.
/rant
I tried really hard to use Stripe to bill for an adult project I was working on (which was being built with Django so I could learn Python, which I needed to sharpen up on for my day gig), and Stripe wouldn't budge on it because it was an adult site. I was willing to hold excessive reserves, accept chargeback charges at a higher rate, whatever. Ended up having to use a well-known biller instead.
Some of the tools the adult industry ends up using is solely because there are limited options for that business avenue, and because of that, captive audience.
Also, at the company I worked at, they had a sort of level of employee where you were "made". You got to go on lavish trips (the owner had a private jet) and dinners with executives. At that point, you had a job for life as long as you didn't fuck them over.
http://www.marketplace.org/2015/11/18/tech/codebreaker-it-ev...
They don't want they employees to be stigmatized for it, I would guess.
I have a couple questions that I hope you would not mind answering:
- Is there a stigma to have such company on your resume? (for a technical position obviously)
- Could you elaborate on the engineering culture, the salaries and the general atmosphere? What do you mean by mafia-like?
The engineering culture was great. Most of the engineers were genuinely about trying new stuff, improving the sites and were heavily into tech outside of the office. Every engineer who made it past the 90-day probation period was solid/competent. Management was very selective during the probation period. I would say about 60% of new hires left or were fired before probation was over. If you made it through, you really had to fuck up to get fired.
They were pretty conservative about their stacks. I see why, because it's hard to hire in that industry. They want to keep their stacks as uniform and simple as possible, so the skill requirements were easy to meet. However, no one was constantly vetting your projects. If you wanted to use something new, and it worked, they didn't care. You owned the whole process. Getting resources wasn't too difficult, if the project was desired by management. A fat pipe to serve content? You got it. Tons of storage for media? You got it. Servers to process large amounts of media? You got it.
There were never any meetings of any sort. I only attended 3 meetings in my entire time there. We had 10-minute scrum-type stand-ups now and then, but it wasn't religiously followed. I miss this aspect the most. I can't tell you, as an engineer, how resentful I am that managers take up 2-3 hours of my week because they need to fill slots in their calendar to prove they're "working."
Salaries were competitive with the area; at least 50% above the median household income. When I was given an offer, they gave me 10% more than I asked for, which has never happened to me before. I actually think I was underpaid relative to coworkers, and could have asked for 20-30% more and gotten it. Perks were okay; raises and bonuses were minimum. Promotions were very rare, but someone told me engineers, in general, don't often get promotions (this is my experience at my current company - one developer out of 20 in my department got promoted last cycle).
The general atmosphere is unlike anything I've experienced before. It's a boys club. The only women in the company were assistants/secretaries - of two types: related to their boss, or fucking their boss. There were women who worked in accounting and HR, but they were located away from the the rest of the company. All the engineers, QA, designers and salespeople were men. Surprisingly there were no real HR issues I heard of. I guess when you're dealing with all men, they tend to work out differences among themselves. I rarely got into the office before noon, because my boss wouldn't come in until after 2pm. Very relaxed and pet friendly. There was a little hazing of new employees, but nothing abusive. It's a culture you wouldn't find at a modern "let's be inclusive and supportive with hugs and validation of everyone's concerns" corporation.
It was mafia-like in the way that there was an inner circle of employees that didn't give you much regard. But if you proved yourself, they warmed up to you and welcomed you.
Basically, tobacco is one of the most regulated, taxed and restricted products in Australia. The government doesn't take kindly to them, no matter who is in power, so they have to be incredibly careful to follow the rules as closely as possible. The company I consulted at decided that as they needed to do it anyway they decided to use that to their advantage and did something interesting: they tried to incorporate the regulations into their process improvement model and leveraged the regulations to, rather ironically, increase their efficiency and expand their market share in an increasingky shrinking overall market.
They used over-regulation to their advantage. I've never seen anyone else do this, and whilst I frankly find what they do deadset evil (hence my conflicted feelings on this job) I could not help but to be impressed by the most innovative response to a frankly impossible situation.
joking aside, you never hear about porn companies hiring, how did you get in?
It might have something to do with profitability and margins.
When you make a lot of money, it's easier to justify investments.
But it's completely true that those are the classic 3.
If only we could get them to all combine their powers. Sort of a DARPA-Psyonix-PornHub merger. I'll bring it up at the next G8.
Westworld springs to mind
Imagine... World War of Dicks.
Also, finance. Machine Learning for trading algos, Bitcoin/Blockchain etc.
Bitcoin is the exception, not the rule. And the machine learning in finance isn't very innovative at all. In fact, working in the industry I'd say they really don't know what they're doing! They just try stuff and see what works (at a glacial pace no less).
On June 27th, someone pointed out in the Chrome bug tracker[0] that an ad network called RevDefender started using WebSockets to deliver ads.
[0] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=129353...
I used to work as the lead developer of a big adult online store and its associated social network website, at the beginning I was ashamed to talk about it with my non-coworker friends because talking about porn and sex toys is not well seen in my home country because there is a lot of religious people.
It was not until at year later that I realized that I was gaining more experience as a software engineer with the challenges in this project than in previous jobs. Now I am very proud of the work I did there, and although HR people still cringe every time I talk about it during interviews I always end up seeing a face of amusement when they hear about the challenges that my team had to face.
If it weren't because finding the careers page in these websites is difficult I would happily apply to work there. I understand that working in the sex industry is still a taboo (either as a model, manager, developer, etc) we have to agree to what my grandfather used to say: Sex and Food, that's what sells.
My point being that you can see technological innovation from the perspective of pursuing 'base' desires or as an outgrowth of intellectual curiosity or basic research, and make a good argument either way depending on what other points you want to make.
Your friend the chemist might seem to enjoy explosions a lot, but also be systematic and detail-oriented.
- Guy grabs a Magnum Condom and proudly puts it on while girl smiles. - A couple have a picnic lunch in the bed of a Ford F150 pickup truck and end up having sex - etc...
I'm sure you couldn't get a deal with every company (McDonald's probably wouldn't buy in) but there are quite a few adult companies that would work. As long as you could accurately track views across distributors you would be golden. :)
Just an idea.
1) distorts the ad marketplace, resulting in impressions that may be paid and not seen, or seen and not paid, and;
2) anti-consumer experience, as the consumer expects no ads.
Disclosure: Years ago I cofounded a company that offers a private ad exchange to large sites, and recently released a Subscriptions service that is able to blank out ads with good technical hygiene for paying subscribers. [1]
A good chunk of porn site revenue comes from rebills to people who forget to cancel their subscription after they've joined at 2am Saturday morning, drunk/high, needing to pound one out before passing out. (This is literally the description of a typical customer a porn studio manager gave me.)
Sounds like a good thing to me.
The first online orders were processed by Netmarket[1][2] which had nothing to do with the porn industry.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetMarket
[2] - http://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/12/business/attention-shopper...
First off, we can dispense both porn and video games as important technological drivers since both are realms of extremely narrow focus compared to the breadth of the military; neither can for instance be credited with driving development of automatic telephone exchanges.
The military has much more diverse needs, and could therefore plausibly drive "innovations in technology" over a large enough breadth of technologies to count. Still, the technology the military directly develops or pay for being developed is of a decidedly military nature, and as we all know the civilian sector of society is quite sizable and contains a multitude of technology unique to it, none of which are directly developed by the military.
Frankly, the fact that the Board of Longitude lead to portable timepieces does not mean the military can be credited with all advances in timekeeping henceforth.
The article also notes that uBlock and ABP have both shipped "workarounds", in the typical cat and mouse fashion
I get that this is a porn site we are talking about here, but why is "just pay for it" never discussed in these kinds of submissions?
Why is it always "how do we keep getting all this content for free without paying" and not "why can't they make it easier to pay" or "how else can I pay for this without losing security or anonymity"?
But don't try and turn a security issue into an ethics issue.
They have a way to pay and get ads 0% of the time, guaranteed. If you really cared about your security, you would both block ads and pay for the subscription to ensure you never get served the code in the first place.
And even if that weren't the case, why is it okay to just take what you want without paying just because you don't approve of the security.
Often times I don't trust a website with my credit card info, the solution is to not use that website. The solution is to not try to hack in and take what I want without paying...
Edit: i've now had threats sent to the email I had listed in my user profile about this. So i'm done talking here.
Hardly. Taking what you want? Hacking in? What in the world are you talking about? Nobody is hacking into their systems.
They are willingly serving up a page to my computer for free. This has absolutely nothing to do with payment. Whether I view the entire page, or only the part of the page I want to see, is none of their business. What scripts I allow to run on my computer, what content I allow to be downloaded to my computer, is also none of their damn business. All of this happens on my own private property.
Personal security easily trumps whatever ethics concern you have.
It's still, and entirely separately from payments, a very important issue.
The real context here is:
Controlling what my own mechanical device does with the information it receives from other people's machines.
Even if the internet had no ads and no tracking code and no malware anywhere whatsoever, there would still be a need for the technology to block and change the way in which my computer handles the things sent to it by other computers before showing them to me. I have a myriad blocks and css modifications and even site additions and other things set up that have absolutely nothing to do with ads, and being able to do that reliably is important.
You're off track. A server sends your browser what it would like you to display. It's not required to be displayed in any sense. Why is not displaying all of it stealing / not ethical? The way advertising is typically constructed gives all of the power to the client.
Not sure why you're getting threats over email for this comment though. I love HN for its comments but sometimes discourse can break down hard for issues people are passionated about.
Are you saying that blocking ads on a website is somehow the same thing as hacking the website and taking material?
The other day, on my phone, I used an ad-supported app and I got malware on my phone (5x, latest Android 7.0). I went to the Play page for that app and many other people complained of the same thing.
So, it's not just an ethics issue.
I chose, when I got this phone, not to root and run software that prevented ads from being shown. I'm wishing I had done that, because my likely course of action will be to reset my phone and spend many hours getting it setup like it was before the malware.
When every site gets their ads served from the same central location and that location is compromised, everyone is at risk unless they have strict anti-ad rules implemented.
Blocking ads is about blocking ads because ads are horrendous.
I'm displaying content on my screen. It's my screen, and my computer, and I don't see a difference between an ad blocker and, say, putting post-it notes over the screen to physically block the space the ads are appearing in.
In the same way, I can control whether I watch a video muted or at 100% volume. I can control what font I use, whether my browser is fullscreen. I can modify the displayed content so all instances of the word "millennials" read as "snake people". I can choose not to display ads.
I'm not articulating this well, but I hope I got my point across. I view anti-adblockers like I do DRM - it's a program or piece of data (edit: ...that is running on my computer, not remotely) that is causing my computer to behave in ways I do not want my computer to behave, and so fits the definition of malware.
Do you really think everything you can do that takes advantage of legal rights you should totally have is ethical? If that's the case, which of the following do you agree with:
A. It should be illegal to cheat on your significant other.
B. It is totally ethical to cheat on your significant other.
On recording and fast forwarding later since it's a closer analog, the network is being paid to show that ad to people during that time period - generally the numbers used to sell ad space exclude people recording for later (they are broken out). So that is also not ripping them off since the ads are part of the "cost" of watching the show at that time, not in general.
- a right to freely inspect and disassemble the software before running it to make sure it doesn't have any malicious or tracking functions and disable the code one doesn't want to be run on his system - a right to make any modifications to one's legally obtained copy of software (but not redistribute it) - a right to distribute tools necessary for disassembling and modifying software - a right to decide what information can be collected and sent from his device. For example, many smartphones today have preinstalled software (like Google Play Services) that sends data to Google and to manufacturer. The consumer is unable to inspect or disable this unless he is a computer engineer having a lot of free time. Even if it is anonymised data they should not be sent without owner's consent. If you are unable to control this you are not the real owner.
The digital techologies are a new thing and are not yet covered fully with laws so large corporations (and their friends at NSA) try to make the rules beneficial to them. We have a laws like DMCA that restrict the rights of consumer to repair a tractor but we have no laws protecting consumer from spying on him by Google. Large companies just want to have as much authority over consumer as they can.
I see these sites more like buskers than businesses. Perhaps if I could drop 10p in the pot with zero effort I might. I don't know. I'm certainly not going to go through the hassle of digging out the the first, third and eighth digits of my credit card 3dsecure passcode for it. Perhaps if they had a zero effort way of charging 10p every time someone used the site they'd get more people paying.
Also, just comparing specific examples here. The Guardian ask for £5/month to become a supporter. It's almost tempting at that amount. For that you get stuff they've actually created. Pornhub want to charge £10/month for content they've basically stolen from somewhere else and are now serving with a simple tag based categorisation and video player.
> "how do we keep getting all this content for free without paying"
Maybe this is what people are saying, but not what they actually mean. Almost without fail adverts are intrusive, obnoxious, sometimes disgusting, CPU spinning malware delivery vectors.
Perhaps the lack of middle ground between that, and paying more money than we think something is worth, is non-existent, and therefore filled with a workaround; adblockers.
I think it's been done (micropayments), but perhaps being able to pay for a fraction of something is needed these days. Not one whole newspaper (the past) but one article (the present)
The web is a public place where the majority of content is free to consume. Those publishers who wish not to provide content for free are free to demand payment for it. They're free to raise revenue by delivering ads too, but we're not obliged to see them.
It wouldn't (at least in my case) be a problem with advertisement per se.
Adservers with additional adservers behind them (and cascading further down) where only one would have to be compromised to infect my machine is what makes me use hard rules not to let (unknown) third party requests on any page pass.
I try to minimize my flank surface in regards to such online attack possibilities. In my case it is with adblocking, a curated and regularly updated host file, 3rd party request blockage and so on...
OK, the net is mostly unusable and painful nowadays, but that is the price to pay.
I don't block ads to stop creators from getting paid... I block ads because 99% of them are irrelevant, waste my time and are a massive attack vector.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160111/05574633295/forbe...
When people make this argument, it sounds to me like they are telling me to just steal my food from a restaurant if I don't think their payment processor is 100% secure.
I know that digital != physical goods in many ways, but the point is why does you not approving of their process, security, or price give you the right to just not do it?
I'm happy to pay for things, even digital files. But my browser is mine and it will do what I want with the content you put on the web.
restaurant payment processing is regulated by ACH/PCI/banking regs and I'll get my money back if their systems are attacked, up to and including a lawsuit if they dont act in good faith.
How about this, I allow ads to be served if they sign a contract making the advertiser liable for any and all damages incurred by the installation of malware ? Oh yeah, and I run Linux so the repair bill for a qualified Linux sysadmin to fix my system could easily run north of $200/hr (double the standard PC repair house rate, since fewer people are qualified to fix it)
http://zen.lk/2015/07/19/Why-you-will-never-escape-ads-by-pa...
(also: because they're shady as hell popunder scam ads, so this is by definition a shady actor, and shady actors don't get my financials)
And for all the talk of innovation, they keep putting terrible adverts up. Seriously, porn industry, mistargeted kinks are a turn-off that drives customers away, surely?
||*$websocket,important
There is also a note on the normal uBlock repo that says that Firefox has an extra feature with a link to inline script tag filtering, which says it does not work on Chromium based brownsers: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Inline-script-tag-fil...
Per-inline script tag filtering is possible for Firefox, but the feature relies on "beforescriptexecute", which is planned to be deprecated in Firefox as well[1]. As a result I have ceased to create "script:contains" filters and favor filter solutions which work on all browsers.
"UPDATE: since this companion extension was published, uBlock Origin has itself gained the ability to blanket-block all websocket connection attempts for specific sites using a new filter syntax."
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin-webs...
The real solution is for chrome to add support to their request filtering.
[1] Used for Pornhub and many others.
[1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=129353...
He showed me once how much traffic was going to porn sites on the company WAN (he knew I wouldn't tell anyone). It was quite impressive... at times it was 35%.
Now he could have been dick and found out which workers were looking at stuff but he did not and I remember distinctly his reasons were something like: "everyday I see the smoker crowd take 30 minute smoke breaks and all kinds of employees waste time and resources... but porn like coffee and cigarettes might actually help some people get work done..."
Maybe I'm just the weirdo for not jerking it at work?
* The sales team was predominately young college guys. I often saw these guys IMing links back and forth.
* The consulting team often VPN tunneled in. I remember distinctly that IT could never get the routing on the VPN right such that internet traffic would not go through the VPN. That is they would VPN and think... hmm I'm alone in a hotel and leave the VPN client on.
Ads are pretty bad right now but the reality is that the internet without ads would not be a useful internet. Half of the tools and the things you use all of the time could not exist without ad revenue.
The reverse of this is that Ad Blockers are much worse than the ads. They have become the Mafia of the internet!
Did you know that as a company looking to bypass adblockers you can pay ad blockers to whitelist you? That is extortion money! Google and Facebook pay. The little guys looking to aquire customers now have to pay for the ads by impression and when their ads are blocked have zero chance of showing.
I know you may not care but we are heading down to an internet where the ads are now becoming content and we are basically reading nothing but junk. The junk went from one section of the page to now being the page. Advertising has existed as long as media has and as such will never go away. There is advertising on pay to view channels like cable, companies want to sell to you and they wont just disappear.
Lets stop this, lets get rid of the ad blockers and lets force the advertising companies to be responsible with their technology, not drain our batteries, not sell our personal info and we will have a much better internet.
How about no?
How about we use as many ad-blocking methods as we want, and companies that depend on ad revenue either continue the cat and mouse games, find another way to make money or shrivel up and die?
Not because advertising on the web is inherently evil (I don't believe it is, although many people disagree) or because companies don't have a right to make money if they want to (sure, why not), but because the internet is structured in a way that gives the user direct control over what they see and what they don't see, which makes it by design an unreliable medium for advertisements.
The ability to block ads isn't a problem, it's inherent to the request-response nature of the web. It's not our problem that companies want ads on the internet to be as reliable as ads on television or the newspapers used to be. Doesn't work that way, and without fundamentally altering what the web is, or turning every browser into a dumb terminal, it can't be made to work that way reliably.
What companies are doing to undermine ad blockers makes sense, and it a rational response to the existence of ad blockers, but it's still a war of attrition that those companies are eventually going to lose, because the web was designed for serving documents in markup and giving the end user the ability to determine how that markup is displayed.
This aspect of the web is ignored 99% of the time but ad blocking is one example of it in action.
Lets say a person is a user of ads, i.e. they buy products because they see them featured in ads. This person would derive value from those ads, and would not enable an ad-blocker. If they did enable such an ad-blocker, it would be because they realized they wasted too much of their money on things they don't need, and wanted to limit their spending.
Now lets say we lived in an ad free society. Products a person buys would be cheaper - since the company selling them would no longer be paying for ads (talk about extortion). All we need to do is create a system where the money you would save is funneled back to websites.
Ads are not a good system for funneling this money. Ads reward the websites who can gain traffic from those most willing to waste their money. Ads also reward websites who can reload the page the most frequently. Ads reward pages that have as much free space on them as possible for displaying ads. Ads reward those websites whose creators care the least about workmanship and design.
We need a system that gives control to websites and users alike. The current system - sans ad-blockers - only gives control to advertisers. Websites should be able to set their prices based on their costs. Users should be able to analyze these prices and choose the websites they think deserve it. Ads cannot fulfill these properties, and need to be replaced.
I, and many others were on the net before ad-revenue models existed. I can assure you, it was quite useful.
People build stuff because it's cool to build and useful to have. Even Google's and Facebook's origins might fall under those descriptions.
>> lets force the advertising companies to be responsible
This is the global internet. It routes around people trying to force anything.
> essentially all of the ad supported sites I visit are diversions
The Internet was great before advertisements, and it can continue to be great without advertisements. I'd personally argue that it would be much better, because it'd be people who care posting content, not people looking to make a buck.
You are forgetting the whole reason ad blockers came to be and gained so much popularity is precisely because advertising companies are incapable of demonstrating the type of responsibility you are speaking of. You're living in fantasy land.
Adblock does this, but to my knowledge uBlock does not.
Bette use gorhill's ublock origins instead of ublock.
But, there are many many alternatives these days: Deluge and qBittorent are both pretty decent uTorrent replacements.
Much like TV ads, internet ads have to be responsible but there has to be a place for them or dont be surprised when this sort of thing happens.
In the example I cited, I didn't get a devastating virus from boxscore Javascript on NBA.com, or from some other local script, it was a driveby from a hosted ad. Just not worth the risk.
The vast majority of users use software on default settings and never change anything. IIRC only like 30% of users bother to install adblocking, and while that increases, it's going to asymptote sooner or later.
For the time being ad blocking is still inconvenient on many platforms like mobile and smart TVs. I still see lots of ads whenever I use any platform other than my desktop. And fewer users use desktop.
As technology improves, the costs of running websites should decrease. This means bandwidth, storage, open source software for running the website, etc. Many websites that required ad revenue to operate in the past, could get by with much less today or in the future. I know that's not ideal. But most of the software I use is produced open source without profit motive. Why can't the same be true for software that runs websites? Sites like HN and reddit get 99.99% of their content from unpaid users. Reddit uses entirely volunteer moderators even.
In the past newspapers and magazines required subscriptions. The worst case is we go back to that world. I can watch tons of TV ad free with a very cheap subscription to netflix, and youtube is rolling out a similar platform now. As much as I hate paywalls, they seem less sinister than advertising based models.
Adblocking will never be complete. You can block banner ads, but you are never going to be able to block someone endorsing a product in their podcast or youtube video (ok I shouldn't say never, but it seems reasonably unlikely for the near future.) Those ads also seem the least sinister and annoying to me, so I am ok with that. Websites might just put up endorsements or self serve ads, instead of relying on ad servers.
The day firefox will stop relying on google's advertising money maybe it will feature a fully loaded ad block such as ublock origin by default and the situation will be much different. Up until now mozilla has not delivered on the putting the user first marketing gimmick.
Hopefully at some point in a not so distant future most browser will get out of the pandora's box and block ads and tracking out of the box.
Obviously, chrome will not come with a fully loaded adblock as google makes its huge piles of monies from being the biggest ad network.
I'm using ublock origins as my adblocker and there is no such whitelist scheme, it seems that you are generalizing eyeo's adblock plus to all ad blockers which is nothing like what happens in the real world. Don't want to be leveraged by a german company to get money from advertisers ? use ublock origins.
BTW what eyeo is trying to achieve with their whitelisting is what you are asking for: acceptable ads and behavior from the advertising companies.
IMHO the only way out is by making ads less profitable so they will just cease to be the business model to go to. This means the largest ads company will probably stop being a competitor which provides product and services for free.
If you're referring to Adblock Plus, the majority of their whitelist got there without paying, and even those that pay have to meet certain standards.
> lets get rid of the ad blockers and lets force the advertising companies to be responsible with their technology
What leverage do we have that is as effective as ad-blocking?
Moreover, ad-blocking didn't develop in a vacuum: the ad industry created it through its over-aggressive tactics and low standards. e.g. the popup blocker was invented, and became standard-issue for all browsers, only because pop-ups were being abused by advertisers.
Firefox request filter APIs do cover websockets for example.
They only tolerate ad-blocking plugins as long as it's necessary to retain power users. For instance, they aren't tolerated on Android.
In the end these ads are paid for by sales, which means chrome is not free, you're not giving money directly but paying with your privacy and personal profiling then indirectly paying with money to buy advertised products which pays for ads which pays for chrome.
[1]: https://www.chromium.org/ [2]: https://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php [3]: https://iridiumbrowser.de/ [4]: https://www.epicbrowser.com/ [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome#User_tracking
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev... https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions
I made an extension in both browsers three years ago. It took me a week to make the Firefox extension and one day to make the Chrome extension. Chrome extensions are basically websites.
I also think Chrome's permissions based system is superior from a user-security standpoint.
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBO-WebSocket
[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin-webs...
Enjoy!
Source: Hum. Personal experience.
uBlock is less powerful than umatrix in some areas, so that might be an issue with the addon, not the browser.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XPCOM/... [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/AP...
Open the actual link you are clicking on in a new tab, and change the current page's location to some advertising page.
They even randomize when a link opens in a new tab, so you can't just close the page automatically, but have to wait for the result.
It drives me crazy.
---
I do love how the MindGeek guy got called out on the bug tracker, though.
I bet if you took a survey of the HN community, the majority would say they have no problem with 1st-party ads (how about simple inline images) of a quality commensurate with the quality of the publication.
I have uBlock Origin set to block any 3rd party requests, so I do have to explicitly "invite" any such code/resources. And you can tell uBlock to remember those invites. This feature has made the web bearable again.
You'd have to imagine that a visitor to their site, who has taken the time to actively setup and run an ad blocker, is probably the least likely user to actually click on an ad in the first place.
Alternatively, there are services that do well to advertise on PornHub that aren't porn: https://blog.eat24.com/how-to-advertise-on-a-porn-website/
- 21.2 billion visits in 2015
- Average of 9% of users using Ad Block
- Let's assume an average CPM (amount paid per 1000 views) of $2.00
- Let's assume 0.01% of users use adblock
That's ((21,000,000,000 * 9%) / 1000) * $2.00 = $3,780,000 in lost revenue due to adblock.
Sometimes porn doesn't play by the same rules as other markets.
Ad blockers are easily in the Early Majority right now, and it's becoming easier and more known about every day. It's dangerous to make such assumptions.
I don't work in ads anymore, but I get the impression that that industry must be under the impression that CTRs and conversions are in fact dropping because of ad blockers, because there's a rash of new startups that work in the space around detecting and getting around ad blockers.
"I am recovering over $1,000,000 / quarter in lost revenue from Adblock for my current employer. I have designed and implemented multiple strategies to combat Adblock. Would you like to know more?"
Ding ding ding. This describes advertising in general.
Also the adblock rates are already quite high [0]. I
[0]: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-percentage-of-Internet-use...
Too much money at play, can't be ignored ;)
[0] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=129353...
[0] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=129353...
(Or maybe I'm just missing the sarcasm in your comment)
Also interested in how a user in the thread knew that he worked for Mindgeek...if I'm reading this right [0], this Websockets thread was his first message.
Seriously though, PHP has come a long way from the CGI/SQL injection days, though I feel its namespacing and scoping rules are rather ancient.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin-webs...
The problem is the economic model of the web, or lack thereof. Ad blockers evade that problem.
Could it be that noscript will block this if you are forced to whitelist each video by clicking it before it plays?
And the latest from pornhub is actually that noscript cannot simply allow the video window, it refused to play until I allowed one of the domains on the page temporarily, then the ads came up and the video would play.
It's not rocket science, it's obvious that people will eventually defeat noscript. But I think pornhub stands out a bit as being especially nerdy and bleeding edge.
You reap what you sow
Female Pornstar: Yes! Harder!
Male Pornstar: Gimme a sec, I need to replenish my electrolytes with a big gulp of Brawndo!
From http://adage.com/article/media/york-times-debuts-native-ad-u...
> Times staff pitched story ideas to Dell. One of Dell's first paid posts delves into the topic of millennials in the workplace. The author is a freelancer that the Times contracted, according to Ms. Losee. The millennial generation is among four topics Dell customers are interested in learning more about, she said. A Times editor -- not from its newsroom, but instead part of an internal "content studio" -- pitched ideas to Dell around these topics that weren't related to Dell products. Dell approved the story ideas, which the Times farmed out to freelancers.
Edit: Never mind! I see now how this comment is relevant :) It's too early.
I would.
Also, at least in Germany, it is forbidden by law for press publications to mix ads and editorial content. (Good luck enforcing it, though.) What's the situation in the US there?
Considering what type of site it is (the biggest one) it doesn't bother too bad; a few pop ups here and there. If they start amping up that number then I will be googling for a better ad block.
Man, posts like this are so prevalent on HN. Why can't people stop and think about whether their words are useful to the conversation?
>> Looks like another case of the old myth about porn innovating or "pushing" technology, as usual with nothing to back it up.
> He literally gave a case (from memory) about the industry being an early adopter of technology.
Being an early adopter is not really the same thing as innovating.
Where's your citation about it being a myth?
The burden of proof does not lie with...oh, c'mon, you know this. Personally, I've given a fair shot at finding the boolean answer to the question. Best I can find, and the facts are sketchy at best, is the porn industry sucked at payment processing and the early card processing was done by a company that saw the need and filled it. But selling picks and shovels doesn't make you a miner.
Man, posts like this are so prevalent on HN.
Like what? The kind that call out urban legends, or the kind that perpetuate them?
No, he didn't give a case (of porn pushing technology), and he also didn't say his claim was from memory or was an anecdote. So what are you talking about?
He claimed porn used credit cards before "virtually anyone". Which is vague to the point of meaningless, concedes porn was in fact not first, and has zero to back it up anyway.
It's simply a boring "observation" people love to repeat when the topic of porn crops up. That it's actually the top comment here, rather than something about the actual story/submission, is unbelievable.
> Where's your citation about it being a myth?
The fact that there is nothing to back up the claim that porn innovated or pushed technology makes it a myth. You cannot possibly not understand this, so I don't know why you're asking for a "citation".
> Why can't people stop and think about whether their words are useful to the conversation?
If you want to go down that route, what's so "useful" about trotting out an age-old hackneyed myth about porn? What's so "useful" about your reply to me?
When you rollover the timeline of a video you're watching, you get a little popup showing a screenshot at that time, allowing you to know what's there prior to clicking and changing the video to that point. YouTube and other video sites finally adopted the same, but from what I recall, it was a feature of porn sites for years first.
Most video sites have a list of related videos, which include thumbnails. When you rollover those thumbnails on porn sites, they typically animate the thumbnail so it shows various screenshots from the video at different time periods, so you have an idea of the video content, before actually opening it. YouTube is still missing this feature, some other video sites have it, but like the above, I remember it first released on porn sites for years. Since this article is regarding PornHub, they actually further innovated on this feature. Instead of a series of static screenshots, PornHub now shows short video clips at different times throughout the related video when you hover it. Once again, not a feature I've seen anywhere else online, but when you try it, you quickly realize it'll be standard for video sites in a few years.
xVideos has an improved timeline showing which parts of a video are buffered. If you're watching a video, and it buffers the first minute, then 0-1 minute will be highlighted in red on the timeline. If you then skip later in the video to the 3 minute mark and watch for another few seconds, it might buffer the 3-4 minute time period of the video. The timeline would then show 0-1 minute in red, and 3-4 minutes in red. You could then click anywhere in red on the timeline and the video would instantly start playing, since as the timeline shows, that part is buffered and ready to go. I've never seen the same feature anywhere else, YouTube and Vimeo would display the timeline as having 0-4 minutes buffered, which is incorrect, since they don't accurately display the gaps missing.
I don't know if those qualify as innovations to you, but they're all big improvements in user experience when it comes to watching videos online, and I believe they all originated on porn sites instead of YouTube, Vimeo, or elsewhere.
How is this useful to the end user? From a developers perspective I suppose it's satisfying, but from someone who want to see titties I don't care what's buffered or not. To paraphrase steve jobs, buffer management is stupid (for a user to be doing.) While he was wrong about tasks, I'm pretty sure I'm right about buffering. I have zero action I can take wrt buffering problems. So why do I need this information?
It also sort of acts as a bookmark, to know what you've watched. Sometimes I'll open a long video (1 hour or more), and skip around watching a few parts for 30 seconds here and there. I then realize I want to return to one of the parts I skimmed over, but I have no idea where it was in the timeline. I'll drag the slider around trying to find it again, and sometimes I succeed, and sometimes I give up. With the buffered parts highlighted, I'd at least have a better idea where it was located (or better yet, the timeline could highlight the sections I've viewed).
IIRC YouTube used to do that but they stopped doing proper buffering a year or two ago. Presumably they were wasting a lot of bw sending content that was never viewed.
Well, I'd say they're relatively minor improvements to watching porn online - where people want to skip to and from different content - which is a completely different experience to watching non-porn.
And before we get carried away at how innovative PornHub is, let's remember the entire site is nothing but a porn version of Youtube, down to the styling of their logo.
Thanks for your interesting post though, about things I hadn't considered before. I'm willing to accept those minor features in UX may have originated at porn sites, but I don't think that is what people (including the top comment) mean when they repeat the old myth that porn innovates or pushes technology.
Porn innovates simply because it's a big market, with high competition. According to Alexa, there are 4 video streaming sites in the top 100 sites worldwide. They are YouTube, Pornhub, Xvideos, and Xhamster.
VR is new technology on the way. Which sites do you think are going to be pushing VR streaming online? It's going to be YouTube and those porn sites. I expect the porn sites to be first to adopt since VR streaming is an unproven market, and they'd be more willing to take the risk due to competition. Then, I'd expect YouTube to follow years after.
I'm not trying to say that porn is some golden goose industry that drives the world forward. I'm simply saying they're a big part of video streaming online, and for that reason I expect them to be on the forefront of that niche.