The article that I chose to blog
about this week is one that is about our good friend Edward Snowden. In this
article, Snowden declares his support for ad blockers. For those who are not
familiar with ad blockers, these are programs that filter out content that it
recognizes as an advertisement. Snowden is supporting these programs for a
different reason than you may think. He claims that using them is a way to
secure your computer. Snowden claims that through the contents in ads is a way
that attackers can get into your system. By filtering out these buses of
malicious code, we can shut down one possible route for attackers to target us.
Ad blockers seem like a good idea
right? They keep you safe and stop annoying ads. However, there is a downside
to the ad block software. By selling ads, sites are able to keep their content
free or as cheap as possible. Advertisers pay a lot of money to get websites to
show their images or play their videos. The article speculates that ad blocking
will cost content publishers $22 billion in 2015. This is money that goes
towards maintaining and improving their services. So, if advertisers are not
willing to pay for ads that will be blocked, who will pay for the sites? You
and I will. More sites will require paid subscriptions for their services.
Advertisers have gotten better and
better at shoving their ads in our faces. They do this via side images,
commercials before videos, and especially the dreaded popup. There is even a
relatively new breed of ad that requires the user to interact with it by
answering a question of performing a simple click and drag task, before the ad
will go away and allow you to access whatever content that you were trying to
see. These ones are particularly evil. There ads have become incredibly
intrusive on many sites, often rendering the sites unusable. So, ad block
software can make ones browsing experience much more enjoyable, on top of
making it safer.
A current trend in ad block
software is a sort of white list that contains ads that will pass through the
filter and be displayed. This will allow non-intrusive ads to be shown. Many
people don’t like this because it allows advertisers to “bribe” programmers to
allow their ads through. I however like this development. This will allow
decent, non-intrusive ads to be displayed, benefiting website owners and advertisers
without hurting the user’s experience. This will encourage good ad-development
practices as well.
I agree with Snowden’s point about
the security benefits of blocking ads. These days, you can only trust yourself
when it comes to web security. While you may be able to rely on your one
antivirus program, it won’t stop everything. You must take additional steps to
secure your computer, whether this is through safe browsing practices or
blocking potentially infected advertisements. This article just reveals one
more concern that people should have when using computers.
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