Journal gzipped_tar's Journal: Ads Disabled, or Not 1
I've noticed this since day one but I decided to write about it only now.
On the index page of Slashdot there's a checker-box with the option "Ads Disabled" and a short note "Thanks again for helping make Slashdot great!" for me. I'm not a subscriber but I'm still awarded with this nice option. I guess it would be automatically available for all regular users with "a good karma". Well that's good, except it isn't. Or worse.
Before the appearance of such an option, I use NoScript to block everything on Slashdot other than that from slashdot.org or c.fsdn.com which hosts scripts that serve the normal malfunctioning of the site itself. After I accepted the no-ad offer, Firefox's status line began to show messages saying it was retrieving content from google-analytics.com and coremetrics.com, two ad servers. I haven't delved into the page source for the cause of this but I don't want it. It seems the (no-longer-)new "Ads Disabled" switch is designed to do the opposite of what we think it does: rather than a kill switch for ads, it does nothing to stop the ad servers from sniffing the readers' online activities, presumably even playing some role in bypassing readers' contermeasures.
For me this issue is somewhat mitigated by my habit of browsing the Web via a proxy server configured on the localhost with a custom, host-based blacklist (yeah, I know blacklists are an illusion and I should have used whitelists instead, and I get off your lawn). Here is a snippet from my Squid log:
127.0.0.1 - - [22/Sep/2009:19:18:18 +0800] "GET http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif? HTTP/1.1" 403 2795 "http://slashdot.org/" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; zh-CN; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090909 Fedora/3.5.3-1.fc11 Firefox/3.5.3" TCP_DENIED:NONE
127.0.0.1 - - [22/Sep/2009:19:18:18 +0800] "GET http://data.coremetrics.com/eluminate? HTTP/1.1" 403 2657 "http://slashdot.org/" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; zh-CN; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090909 Fedora/3.5.3-1.fc11 Firefox/3.5.3" TCP_DENIED:NONE
This is recorded when using Firefox with NoScript enabled and properly configured (using a whitelist).
Disabled (Score:2)
I had the same option before somebody bought me a gift subscription. I left it unchecked until one of the ads covered both the checkbox and the part where it says "you have n comments". The next time the ad didn't cover the box, I checked it.