AdTrap Aims To Block All Internet Advertising In Hardware 295
cylonlover writes "AdTrap is a new low-power, zero configuration device which promises to banish adverts from computers, tablets, and anything else connected to the local network. AdTrap's creators point out that their device works not only with full-sized PCs, but everything else connected to your home internet, such as Apple devices running iOS 6 – and without the need of third-party apps or jailbreaking. In addition to blocking web browser ads, AdTrap is also reported to remove ads from streaming devices like Apple TV and Google TV. A configurable 'whitelist' is offered too, so that users can allow adverts on websites of their choice."
Countermeasures Deployed (Score:5, Funny)
This is why I place ads on the main page of my websites and you can only view content from the popups.
Re:Countermeasures Deployed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Countermeasures Deployed (Score:5, Insightful)
Then that just means you've never visited a fashion website, where all the articles are actually lightweight ads, and the actual ads are often more desirable than the articles.
Protip (that will likely blow your mind): people buy fashion magazines BECAUSE OF THE ADS.
They don't fill 800 pages of Vogue's September issue with articles. It's pretty much all ads.
The reason internet dorks hate ads is because they're fed terrible, terrible ads because of your undesirable last-place demographic. If you were fed good ads, perhaps with a naked Kate Moss, you would have absolutely no problem with ads, and in fact, would go out of your way to seek them. It is why fashion photographs often sell for thousands of dollars on their own.
Again, the fact that you hate ads just means you aren't receiving the good ones, because marketers have deemed you undesirable and unworthy of the good stuff, probably because you aren't a rich, young, beautiful woman that spends on wants instead of needs. (the worst ads are the ones that market to your needs)
Re:Countermeasures Deployed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Countermeasures Deployed (Score:5, Funny)
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“The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists
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Blacklist this, click next google result for my query.
Slightly off topic, is there any search engine that lets you blacklist sites so they don't show up in results? It's kinda tedious to copy/paste that endless tail of "-site:..."
Re:Countermeasures Deployed (Score:5, Interesting)
Google lets you block entire sites from search results. You'll never see them.
The feature is kind of hidden at....
http://www.google.com/reviews/t
(its amazing what blocking facebook here does. amazing and nice.)
Re:Countermeasures Deployed (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you have a pulse, you should probably block experts-exchange.com.
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If you find the site via Google, scroll down to the bottom and you can read all the answers.
Re:Countermeasures Deployed (Score:5, Insightful)
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What's wrong with expertsexchange.com? If I was in the market for a sex change, I'd want an expert, not some noob.
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Unless they've fixed it (doubtful), if you are redirected to the experts-exchange site through Google, you can scroll to the bottom and see the replies.
If they do fix it, I'm pretty sure it's against Google's policies and they would be removed from the results.
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Google lets you block entire sites from search results. You'll never see them.
The feature is kind of hidden at....
http://www.google.com/reviews/t [google.com]
It appears that this only works if:
a. you have a google account.
b. you are logged in to that google account while you are doing searches.
Re:Countermeasures Deployed (Score:4, Insightful)
How else do you expect them to know whose blacklist to use?
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Re:Countermeasures Deployed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Countermeasures Deployed (Score:4, Funny)
Hey! My AdTrap missed this one! I want a refund!!!
Re:Countermeasures Deployed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Target in particular decrements the $0.01 digit each time an item is marked down.
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Nobody else can do it. I've already patented it.
Embed ads into directly into HTML (Score:3)
Make them indistinguishable from a normal .png or a piece of text. Or is there some technical reason why this can't be done?
Re:Embed ads into directly into HTML (Score:5, Insightful)
Because these days ads are not served from the same source as the content. They used to be in the past and likely will again in the future if this sort of thing catches on.
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which would be great so it'd be a lot more unlikely for drive-by malware install ads to run, and if they ran the website owners wouldn't have the typical excuse of "oh sorry, one of our ad networks was compromised, we apologize"
Re:Embed ads into directly into HTML (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll bet Ad Proxies will become common before they host the files locally... it will look like it's coming from the server you are getting the content from, but the server is just relaying the ad from their ad host.
Re:Embed ads into directly into HTML (Score:5, Informative)
As a web developer that thought makes me physically ill...
I begrudge doing that with sites I set up myself and *trust* the content on, let alone random-ass third parties.
That way lies security nightmares.
There are three reasons why remote-hosting adverts (and user-generated content) on a seperate domain is a good thing:
1) Shares the bandwidth load between two servers
2) An extra seperation between Content and Application makes for simpler updates
3) Malicious Injected content can't pretend to be from my own domain and is sandboxed by modern browsers.
Re:Embed ads into directly into HTML (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Shares the bandwidth load between two servers
I just hope your layout does not depend on the ads them because those servers are going to be overloaded and dog slow, delaying the rendering of your page.
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Why wouldn't they? Just because the request from your browser goes to their server doesn't mean their server is the root source of the content; it is not at all impossible to have the website server, in handling a request for an ad with a "local" URL, make a request to the ad net
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That gets complicated. If you're not serving the ads from your server you have to trust the people who run the website. All the fancy click counting will go away, which the advertisers will hate. And if the advertisers hate it, I'm for it.
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Those are easily filtered as well. 99% of ad's are a specific size. Look for that and SMOOSH!
Privoxy as looked for and filtered specific sized image files for nearly a decade to scrub site hosted adverts.
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To add to everything that was said, and supposing that things like click counting, trust, etc get resolved, you'll also have to pay for add serving with your own bandwidth.
Pixelserv on DD-WRT (Score:5, Informative)
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It wont. He is making money off of taking it commercial and is ignoring the public DD-WRT. Pick up OpenWRT, it's far more advanced now than DD-WRT
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I would if they'd actually support my router [openwrt.org].
It's not new, it's been around for a while. ddwrt is the only version I found when I bought it years ago that would actually work on it.
no (Score:2, Interesting)
If they hardwired the blocking in to it the ad sites could simply play a name game and get away with serving adds so it is obviously software just on another box, second this won't stop ads that are encrypted traveling over ssl if embeded in the site correctly. It is more convenient for me to block ads at my own device using no script and adblock plus, as for my mobile devices I could simply blacklist IP addresses and domains at my own router and do everything this box claims to do already. Fail fail and mo
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Even if the ads are encrypted, if the IP of the ad server is blocked, the ads are not getting across.
My concern about a device like this is that it ups the arms race. Right now, I use Adblock, NoScript, and Ghostery on FF, and "click to play" and Adblock on Chrome without issues. With devices like this, websites will start denying content, similar to an old EQ2 wiki site where I had to use greasemonkey to get around the JavaScript.
Ads are less of a concern for me. The fact that ad servers are a very larg
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You can do all that. 250 million non tech sophisticateds can't.
I could write my own browser if I wanted to. You're missng the point.
Re:no (Score:4, Insightful)
"as for my mobile devices I could simply blacklist IP addresses and domains at my own router and do everything this box claims to do already"
Now pull yourself out of the Slashdot groupthink and pretend you don't know the difference between a router and a modem (and don't care). This is a box you plug in and it gets rid of a lot of ads. No need to install stuff on every computer, no need to fiddle with black-thingies and I-pee addresses (these Internet people think of such such stupid names).
Next Two Steps: (Score:2)
First, someone is going to Sue them for some asinine reason, based on loss of revenue, or some such nonsense.
Second, Product Placement will become the advertisement of choice, since it's a lot more difficult to remove or block. On websites, it'll be background wallpaper, or in the motif. You want placement? Better pay what it's worth to a site, series or production!
After all, the Ad companies, "need" to bombard us with their dreck, or we won't feel the need to rush out and buy it.
You know, like Cigarettes.
O
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Yep. But if you'll be able to donate whatever you like to remove the ads. For sites that are built around a product I'm selling, you won't ever see ads. Hosting isn't that expensive unless you're dumb. Even multi-gig software updates cost me nothing thanks to decentralized distribution and public key encryption / signing.
Protip: People are Decentralized. The Internet is Decentralized. Decent
my ISP allready has that! (Score:2)
it is called:
Block sites directly via their DNS server which gives back a NXDOMAIN for where it is propitiate.
Easy solution this f*ck advertise problem.
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You're lucky. I can't even use my ISPs DNS servers anymore, since they won't even return NXDOMAIN for domains that actually DON'T EXIST.
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Ads aren't really the problem any longer (Score:3)
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I do wonder about how badly it will screw up the layout of a website to pull whole chunks of it out. At work, our corporate overlords block Facebook, but I often find that without Facebook, the space that it should have been place it grows to accommodate the scolding message from our IT department about how Facebook is blocked, covering part of the content of the damn page! I even added Facebook to my hosts file, but now I just have a giant 404 iframe that again covers part of the content.
The Huffington Po
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For me, the ads aren't really the problem on webpages any longer.
Ads aren't the problem for me either. I use Adblock Plus and NoScript.
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Here's another vote for Lynx. It makes sites like Linuxtoday actually readable. Safari's Reader Mode does a good job of not presenting all the sidebar stuff, too. I find it very useful.
Seriously, if we stop looking at ads, will Western Civilization's already precarious economy suddenly implode and combust? Because if so, ... that would be cool.
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I'm sure you hand-carved this post on an ethically-harvested piece of wood and hand-delivered it to the local Slashdot office.
I am opposed to this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I am opposed to this. (Score:5, Informative)
The problem isnt advertising. The problem is F***ing obnoxious advertising! FLASHFLASHFLASH HEY THING ITS HEY THING!
Or, adservers that lag and wont let the site load. And when they do load, see above. So many flash adds that they crash a browser, or make it unworkable. obnoxious, grating, irritating ads.
Id happily unblock adds..Its just when I do, I get ALL THAT again. No matter how long its been. Its like its 2000 still.
Most content managers will counter with "well if you want free content you can come and get it" but at this point people (consumers and content providers) should be able to figure out what it is that readers really want, instead of taking anything that MIGHT generate a stream of eyeballs and ad the crap out of it (and instead of users following links to read the same information over and over). Here is a hint: taking a news article that you swiped from somewhere else (or worse, poorly re-authored with no thought and no English skill) and putting a timed popup ad that smacks me after about 15 seconds is a really good way to make sure I never pay attention to anything from your site ever again.
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And I counter that I don't want free content if the cost is advertising as it exists today.
Re:I am opposed to this. (Score:5, Funny)
adservers that lag and wont let the site load. And when they do load, see above. So many flash adds that they crash a browser, or make it unworkable. obnoxious, grating, irritating ads.
Come now, let's not bash Slashdot too badly.
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Just block Flash, and 99% of the irritants go away. Sites have to be paid for somehow.
Re:I am opposed to this. (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem isnt advertising. The problem is F***ing obnoxious advertising! FLASHFLASHFLASH HEY THING ITS HEY THING!
For me, the bigger problem is the tracking that goes along with the ads. If no advertising did tracking, I probably wouldn't bother to block them.
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Or... find someone who's willing to give it away cheaper/free.
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The major reason Google got popular was that they did simple to the point text based ads and those ads were far more effective than OMG PUNCH YOUR SCREEN TO MAKE IT STOP!!!!!!!!!!!!!! advertisements.
nice, but... (Score:2)
...does it work with Windows Media Center or XBMC to cut streaming ads without killing content streams?
I block scripts.... (Score:2)
but not ad's.
They really don't bother me as long as they aren't all flashing in my face style.
Have people really become so useless at ignoring shiny flashing things that they MUST look at the adverts, and then click them?... If a site so is bad the adverts are offputting I stop using it.
On slashdot I rarely see ad's as they let me turn them off :D
Cool (Score:2)
All I can say is how much does it cost and can it be circumvented?
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According to the Kickstarter page [kickstarter.com], it currently starts at $115 (which I find WAAAAY too expensive for a single purpose firewall.)
Not really an issue for me. (Score:2)
I don't even see ads anymore, thanks to ad blindness. They're easy enough to mentally block (except for the auto-expanders), that whatever they're selling doesn't really register.
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Adnix (Score:2)
It's Adnix. And by the look of it, we might soon need Preachnix. It's all for a good cause though, giving your money to Hadden so he can build the second machine.
adblock whitelist that doesn't display ads (Score:2)
Huh? (Score:2)
What is this ADVERTHOSIMENET you are talking about?
I've been thinking of something similar (Score:2)
We see adblocking software all over. Firefox addons, things for rooted androids and the like. Most often, they rely on some sort of hosts file or other host identification. (Thanks APK, no one could have thought of that before you did... oh wait... they did... it was too obvious.) But that sort of functionality really needs to live somewhere on the network. I haven't started googling yet, but I'm willing to bet there is some version of DD-WRT out there which will do that for me. But the idea of buildi
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Up the price and sell it as a security and monitoring device...
If the Kickstarter page is anything to go by, it will already cost you over $100 for the box and there's open wording on if they will have a service to keep it up to date. I don't know about you, but that's pretty expensive for what amounts to a selectively forwarding router. Most routers can be bought for much less than that and are fully programmable.
Why do people expect something for nothing? (Score:3)
I know the day that free web content and services dry up because there are no more ad revenue streams, the same people complaining stupidly against ads will want to complain about how the web is now hidden behind pay walls. The irony is that most of you won't be able to voice your opinion because you will refuse to pay to access Slashdot.
Actually, I think many of us might value when that day arrives.
MVP hosts file (Score:2)
http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt [mvps.org]
Who gets to define what is an ad? (Score:2)
Or is this going to be like the parental control software that blocks porn, with the definition of "porn" including "any web site that expresses a political opinion we disagree with"?
It's always a matter of trust. And has has been pointed out, in this case, you're trusting a company that has built it's business model on denying other companies income they rely on to say in business.
Sounds cool. (Score:2)
Untangle (Score:2)
Sorry if someone has already posted this, I didn't see it in any of the popular comments while browsing.
I'm a sysadmin and I use something similar for my networks that's free. It's a Linux based firewall for complete idiots called Untangle. (I don't work for them or contribute to the project.) They have an "app" (also one of the free ones) that runs adblock on everything that passes through the device.
Take any old crappy PC, buy a NIC ($10-$20 investment), burn Untangle to a CD. It's a typical Next-
Will it eliminate ... (Score:2)
Looks phony - typical Kickstarter "Spare Change" (Score:3)
Watched the video. It's all about their little hardware box (which is some ARM machine), and says nothing about how it blocks ads. At the wire level, you can certainly apply a domain blocklist, for which there are already many free software tools. That gets rid of many ads, but not all of them.
Some (not yet many) sites resist ad blocking. Some Flash-driven videos won't play if you block their ad server. Some get the ads and the video from the same place. Some ad services have each site create a subdomain (like "ads.example.com") for ad serving, so blocking by second level domain doesn't work. Look at the constantly changing blocklists for AdBlock. The problem is almost as bad as signature-based virus detection. The people with this little box say nothing about this.
The one big advantage this device offers is the ability to block ads on closed systems like Apple products. A big disadvantage is that the device has a backdoor into your data stream and could be an attack vector for eavesdropping.
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Why not just setup a proxy on one machine instead of bother to do this to every machine in your home? Or just do it on the router.
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Harder than doing nothing, yes.
I can't imagine a real router having trouble with that. A proxy is easier in that you don't have to copy the file over and over to each machine as it updates.
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Privoxy runs on OpenWRT and does everything you need.
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I do not think I will ever understand their logic as to why they do not use Adblock, which, when questioned, results in a shrug.
Re:blocked already (Score:5, Insightful)
1. They understand that the web sites and services they want need money to operate, and that money comes from ads. When ads no longer pay the bills (because everyone uses some method to avoid them) those 'free' services will no longer exist. You know why newwpapers are dying - because they are losing their major source of revenue, ads. The same thing will happen with the web. How long do you think Google, for instance, would last without advertising revenue?
2. They don't have a pathological fear of ads
3. They may find some ads actually useful
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In a similar vein, on sites I visit the most I use Adblock Element hider to get rid of extra unwanted elements that are meaningless to me. For example, share buttons. I will never share content except maybe on Youtube, thus if I commonly use a website, I will hide the "Sh
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but to dismiss the entire advertising industry is wrong
I dismissed the entire ad industry as soon as I got background popup videos that were playing sound, and an ad somewhere near the bottom of a long page that was also playing sound at the same time. At that point, it just became a battle of who could make me hate the internet more, so I decided to surrender and make a blanket statement of "I never want to see another ad again, lest I destroy my computer out of
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The free web predates the commercial web.
You know why newwpapers are dying
Because dead trees have no relevance to the modern world, and what little non-local coverage most of them carry, they buy from a syndication service anyway?
How long do you think Google, for instance, would last without advertising revenue?
Google predates ad-sponsored Google.
They don't have a p
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Try reading and understanding what someone said before firing off an idiotic response.
The free web predates the commercial web.
Yep, didn't say otherwise. What I said was a particular web site/service that a particular user wants to use, and which is currently ad-supported, will no longer exist for free if advertising can't pay the bills. The fact that other, different, free sites and services may exist does not change that fact. The fact that road-kill skunks are freely available does not negate people'
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Note: That box is unchecked... I'm willing to allow slashdot to extract whatever meager ad revenue they can from my presence, in exchange for them allowing me to consume their bandwidth & storage space with my positive and negative contributions.
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When ads no longer pay the bills (because everyone uses some method to avoid them) those 'free' services will no longer exist
Nonsense. When ads no longer pay the bills, people will pay for the services they find useful directly. If they don't, and the service goes away, it must not have been that useful.
This will actually be cheaper than ad funding, because ad funding has to make people buy things they wouldn't, and the ad accounts for a very small proportion of those purchases. Suppose I see an ad on sl
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I generally only block ads that are incredible intrusive (in which case I probably stop visiting that site), or from sources that push dishonest bullshit adverts, like: the "[insert name of nearest city] mom is hated by aerospace engineers for discovering a [Insert local currency] tip for decreasing the fuel requirements of a rocket capable of achieving escape velocity".
Aside from that, adverts don't bother me. Some are interesting, and sites have to pay the bills.
Re:blocked already (Score:5, Funny)
It's an Android app that takes any input text and randomly capitalizes and bolds fragments, inserts random punctuation, and then adds large lists of /. internal links to the end.
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And it's not a wholly owned subsidiary of The Lumber Cartel, which also does not exist, either.
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Why would that matter? Do you really think it is inspecting the packets to do this?
I am betting it is just dropping traffic from known advertising domains.
Re:SSL ads? (Score:4, Interesting)
Presumably even encrypted communication has to come from a url, which is how most adblockers identify ads.
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Nope, there's still host resolution step. Device sits between you and DNS.
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The IP isn't the issue, it's the domain name. I use a hosts file to do my ad blocking (works great). If the domain name for the ads and the content is the same, you're out of luck, but nothing is ever 100% effective anyway.
The real problem is that all we're doing now is getting into an arms race. Without ads, we've got to pay for content. Alternatively, ads will go back to being embedded in websites instead of comming from an outside source. In which case, we'll see more latency in loading web pages.
I
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I'm not going to purchase the product so I am saving them the bandwidth of trying to sell me something I have no interest in.
Besides ads have become one of the major ways virus and malware are spread these days.
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Blocking ads seriously seems like stealing to me.
As is going to the bathroom during commercial breaks, showing up late to the theatre to miss previews, failing to read every single ad in the free weekly, etc...
If you don't want the ad don't use the site/service.
If you don't want me to use the service without viewing ads, don't send me the data until I've viewed the ads.
Undermining companies like this will only end badly.
Moving away from the inefficient and perversely incentivized ad supported model and towa