Block That Ad!

I went to a baseball blog sponsored by a newspaper this morning, and was hit with the loudest, most annoying car sales advertisement imaginable. I could not turn it off, and a guy was walking all over the screen talking. When I closed the window it opened another and kept on going.

So I downloaded Adblock, a Firefox add-on that takes care of this sort of nonsense. But I also found this – a guy who writes these ads asking the annoying ad writers of the world to join together and boycott Firefox. He says that we are depriving him of revenue, and he’s pissed.

The Internet was first developed as a means of back-channel communication for the Pentagon. Later it was turned over to the educational community. In the early 1990’s not too many people saw the potential there, and when the net first went public it was a bonanza of free information sharing. That’s what it does best.

But the marketplace got hold of it, and it didn’t take too long before the penis-enlargers, sideshows, pornographers and carnival barkers came on board. The free market gave us viruses and spyware, pop-ups, intrusive ads along with the phishing and other schemes. When the first pop-up blockers came out, I jumped on them – surfing the web had become a tedious experience with ads jumping out at you from ever corner. Finally we had a way to block them.

But advertisers work hard every day to find ways to invade our computers. Adblock was developed by German programmer Wladimir Palant as open source, non-market, and does a marvelous job. Furthermore, advertisers cannot detect it and go around it. It’s priceless.

So web-browsing is again a pleasant experience and I’ve no doubt that, as advertisers find new ways to invade our privacy, open-source people will find new ways to block them. God bless open-source.