Is blocking ads theft of service?

Readers sometimes write to ask how a certain ad got onto my blog. You know, I don’t see any ads at all when I read my blog. Or anyone else’s blog. Or, basically, anything on the Internet at all. Now, how could that be?

Am I stealing because I avoid ads in all aspects of my life? I don’t think so. In fact, if a company forces me to watch an ad — this happens on airlines now, when you first board — I feel I should be paid for the experience. If you sell my work or my time in order to make money for yourself, my feeling is you’re stealing from me unless you compensate me satisfactorily.

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But no, blocking ads is not theft of service unless seeing those ads is made an explicit condition of accessing some service. And if it is, I will probably not use that service or visit that site, just as I don’t watch commercial television any more (I stopped around 15 years ago).

Adblock Plus is the most useful piece of shareware I’ve ever had

And I’ve sent Wladimir Palant $10. I hope you’ll do the same.

A sage I know claims that a browser is merely an extension of Adblock Plus, just as Ubuntu is merely an extension of Apache2.

A less painful way to install Adblock Plus filter-subscriptions in Firefox

Adblock Plus, an “add-on” for current versions of the Firefox browser, is a powerful tool for suppressing advertising. After installing Firefox, you have the choice of installing any number of add-ons, and this is normally the very first one I do.

Adblock Plus uses filters to determine what is an ad. Finding filters, unless you write them yourself (a most tedious procedure), requires you to subscribe to existing lists. I subscribe to eleven in all, and I almost never see an ad — either graphic or text-based — when I use Firefox. It makes the Internet a liveable place for me.

But subscribing to filters is unpleasant because it requires many repetitive mouse-actions. A faster way is to create a file called patterns.ini containing only the following:

[Subscription]

url=~wl~

title=Exception Rules

defaults=whitelist

[Subscription]

url=~fl~

title=Ad Blocking Rules

defaults=blocking
[Subscription]

url=https://adversity.googlecode.com/hg/Adversity.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=http://adblockrules.org/download.php?type=all

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=http://adblock-chinalist.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/adblock.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easyprivacy.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=https://secure.fanboy.co.nz/fanboy-adblocklist-addon.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=https://adversity.googlecode.com/hg/Adversity-Tracking.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=http://fanboy-adblock-list.googlecode.com/hg/fanboy-adblocklist-current-expanded.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=http://fanboy-adblock-list.googlecode.com/hg/fanboy-adblocklist-stats.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=https://adblock-chinalist.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/adblock.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=https://secure.fanboy.co.nz/enhancedstats.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok

(This is my own list, of course.) I save patterns.ini to the adblockplus directory, which is typically at a path something like this:

… Firefox/Profiles/<hash>.default/adblockplus/

where <hash> is a random-looking eight-digit alphanumeric sequence that identifies a given user profile to Firefox. (Each <hash>.default user profile needs its own set of Adblock Plus filters in the appropriate subdirectory.)

Then I go to Firefox and open the filter preference window for Adblock Plus. On OS X, that means Tools -> Adblock Plus -> Filter Preferences. In the bottom right corner of the window there is a checkbox marked “Allow some non-intrusive advertising”. If I click it, either to check or uncheck it, the filters in patterns.ini immediately repopulate from the URLs I have placed in the minimal file.

So it doesn’t seem to be necessary to go through the tedious manual installation method in order to get the filter subscriptions. I save a copy of the minimal patterns.ini file above in a normal directory for fast replacement if I need a new user profile for some reason.

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The “Allow some non-intrusive advertising” option was introduced in v. 2 of Adblock Plus — in other words, it is recent. At the moment, only ads associated with two German sites, netzwelt.de and guruads.de, are involved, but surely this is the beginning of a much more pervasive trend, since advertising now funds most internet content, or so it appears to me. When I was a boy, all television was free as long as you had a TV set to receive it; apart from public broadcasting, it was paid for entirely with advertising. So I recognize the smell of this business model.