"The Most Dangerous Piece of Software in the World."

March 22, 2001 7:29 AM

"The Most Dangerous Piece of Software in the World." With his usual hyperbole, Calcanis of SAD calls WebWasher a scary product. We all know that net advertising is not profitable (i.e. Salon going to subscriptions) and as products like WebWasher proliferate, we can be truly assured that none of these net business models are worth anything. Of course software to kill ads on the web has been around for years but is this the one that will break into the mainstream?
Better sell your DoubleClick stock (like it was worth anything to begin with ;)
posted by gen (35 comments total)

Well, it's certainly dangerous to Calcanis. Without a steady supply of cluefree dotcoms buying ads, his little party goes under. SAR is already getting smaller with each passing intermittent issue. The last thing he needs is something that will take away even more eyeballs.
posted by aaron at 7:57 AM on March 22, 2001

I've never used ad blocking software before. I must say, I'm extremely impressed with how well this works.

All the unpleasantness is hidden, and the good stuff remains. Simply marvelous.

However, the program acts as a proxy server, and has to screen each and every image on a given page. This makes for significantly longer load times - not unberable, but a bit vexing nonetheless.

What's interesting is that I never would have installed this software had this Calcanis not written the article. For someone who thinks this is a most dangerous product, you'd think he'd keep quiet about it.
posted by aladfar at 8:18 AM on March 22, 2001

I've been blocking ads for years; this article makes me feel like a terrorist...but in a good way.
posted by sonofsamiam at 8:20 AM on March 22, 2001

This is nothing new. I've been using Guidescope (which is totally user friendly and free) and before that JunkBuster (which is free but not so user-friendly) for years. To be honest, I have no idea which sites have ads on them. It's rare enough that I run into an ad that *isn't* filtered out that it catches my attention and reminds me of the weird alternate advertising driven internet that everyone else is experiencing.
posted by muppetboy at 8:20 AM on March 22, 2001

Aladfar, it's like Calcanis implied: that if this WebWasher thing is going to be as mainstream as Napster or the like, then one editer at one online magazine isn't going to make much of difference. He might as well just go with the flow and see what happens when AOL/TW or some other overpowering media company files suit.
posted by rlef98 at 8:25 AM on March 22, 2001

I find it absolutely hilarious that so many people bitch so hard about ad-blocking software. The internet is a different medium than television. It's a different medium than newspapers or magazines. It ***requires*** a programmable, semi-intelligent device to display its content. Should anyone be surprised or put out when those people who are reading the content get fed up with the ads and start using the medium's native intelligence and power to stifle the ads?

Tossing in banner ads willy-nilly, and hoping that they will be effective, just shows the laziness and shortsightedness of the advertising and business community. They're going to have to become far more clever if they want to get their message across.
posted by websavvy at 8:39 AM on March 22, 2001

I read this discussion before the article and I had the idea he was going to be hysterical over this, but he seems even-headed, it's not too overblown at all really if you ask me. One point though:companies aren't going to start buying this for all their employees. For one thing, you would still have to filter a TON of ads before it saved you more than the cost of the program in bandwidth, and I mean a ton. Also, if the software does work as a proxy as someone above mentoined, and as the company's page suggests, how is it going to save any bandwidth? I am assuming that means a proxy that is downloading the images, reading the image files' headers for size, etc, and then just not displaying the ones that seem to be banners, etc?
posted by beefula at 8:39 AM on March 22, 2001

The demographics of the web are rapidly changing so that "unsophisticated late adopters" outnumber the tech savvy. A substantial number of these people might not leave their homepage without banner ads to lead them around by the nose. Having helped quite a few friends and relatives set up PC's and get online recently, I can't see many of them downloading and installing this software. I spent half an hour explaining Norton LiveUpdate the other night. "That's right, click on Next. Yeah, with the mouse." By the time a huge number of people are ready for WebWasher, the web will have changed so much that it probably won't matter. The enterprise edition, for saving bandwidth in the workplace, might have more of an impact in the short term.
posted by gimli at 8:42 AM on March 22, 2001

WebWasher seems to be doing its job fairly well here. I go to Slashdot and I don't see the ad at the top. Same with Salon. Same with everything else. Pop-up windows seem to be gone mostly, although I still get a couple that slip through the cracks. All in all, a solid filtering proxy.

But, it does seem to increase the load time of a page. So is it really worth it? My main concern with ads is the valuable bandwidth they consume, unless they are pop-ups, in which case my concern is how damned annoying they are. So I'm batting .500 here with WebWasher.

I figure it's only a matter of time until a browser comes along with this functionality integrated directly into its page-rendering engine. Are there any Mozilla developers here?
posted by Succa at 8:46 AM on March 22, 2001

In my experience, he's way overstating the complexity of WebWasher's UI (which he seems to feel is not "user-friendly"). The beauty of the WebWasher install is that you don't have to know anything about how it's doing what it's doing - it default settings will work for the vast majority of situations. Sure you can tweak it - there's where you need the background knowledge, the labelling is, well, terse - but "out of the box" it's a big help without having do anything other than install it.
posted by m.polo at 8:48 AM on March 22, 2001

Posted too quick: Succa, this capability is built in to the iCab browser for Macintosh, although not to nearly the extent of WebWasher - it concentrates on blocking ad graphics and managing precisely who gets to set a cookie on your machine.
posted by m.polo at 8:49 AM on March 22, 2001

dang thing didnt work. couldnt figure out why either, even after going to their troubleshooting page and setting http1.1
posted by mikojava at 8:50 AM on March 22, 2001

Also, if the software does work as a proxy as someone above mentoined, and as the company's page suggests, how is it going to save any bandwidth? I am assuming that means a proxy that is downloading the images, reading the image files' headers for size, etc, and then just not displaying the ones that seem to be banners, etc?

The proxy downloads the HTML pages, figures out which markup is ads, and then strips that markup out. The images are generally then not downloaded at all because the browser sees no IMG tag that tells it to do so. Or, the proxy will get a request for an image, recognize the URL as being from an ad server, and return a blank GIF instead of actually downloading the image. Some ad-blockers might look at images as they're downloaded to see if they're the right size to be an ad, but if they do that, they can abort the transfer after the first few bytes because that's where the image dimensions are stored. Yep, huge bandwidth savings.

There are of course multi-user ad-blocking proxies. In fact I used to use GoTo Software's ridiculously cheap WebEarly (running on my Windows box) over my LAN from my Mac. WebEarly also does anticipative pre-fetching, so that plus the ad blocking really made the Web fly.
posted by kindall at 8:55 AM on March 22, 2001

Hmm. I wonder if one of the side effects of mass-usage filtering software is going to be an overall increase in the amount of bandwidth available to Internet users in general.

Say your average 168x60 animated .gif banner ad is 50k. It's a nice round number, and I really have no idea how large they are. Any given ad-driven content site has at least one banner, often more, but 1's a nice easy-to-calculate number also. It also to some degree balances out what's likely an inflated banner size.

If 10 users aren't download 1 image, that's 500k that isn't being transfered. 100 users is 5000k, or ~5meg. Scale that into the thousands and millions of users and the thousands , and a whole lot of bottle-necking could be alleviated.

So by blocking images, not only are you saving your eyes from impressions, you're actually improving the Internet. I'm sold. :-)

(pokethe logical holes all you like, it's still a fun prospect. :-)
posted by cCranium at 9:08 AM on March 22, 2001

m.polo: Well, we all know that Mac browsers are irrelevant anyway!

Kidding! Kidding! Come on Mac users, don't look at me like that. I'm not spiteful towards your platform (even though you have to select "Eject Disk" to get a floppy disk out of the machine, which strikes me as the strangest innovation in computing history).

So, what can we expect next from the towering schemeweavers of the advertising industry? With the proliferation of these filter proxies, they are going to need new, insidious ways of creeping into our browsers, right?

I'm picturing websites where every image on the page (including in the navigation and layout itself) is a rollover image, with a carefully placed advertisement underneath. Running your mouse cursor over the whole page would expose you to as many ads as a half-hour bus ride on public transit. It just goes to show you that the scariest software product on the planet is not Webwasher...it's Javascript!

But no matter what they come with, it won't work. Web surfers are finely-tuned machines, capable of detecting and ignoring all advertising on a page, regardless of the medium in which it served up. Online ads simply don't work.
posted by Succa at 9:12 AM on March 22, 2001

easy way to get rid of those crappy ads: list the urls of ad servers in your host file. simple as that. sure it doesn't get all of them, but most.
posted by chrisroberts at 9:17 AM on March 22, 2001

here's an example hosts file containing a lot of adservers. i have been using this for a while now and it's amazing how much bandwidth you save by not downloading banners.
posted by dutchbint at 9:30 AM on March 22, 2001

AdSubtract is banner-blocking software that's offered in free and priced versions. It's also capable of filtering cookies. I've demo'd the free version at work and home and it works pretty well, except that it sometimes filters sites I've specified as being OK to allow through.
posted by phichens at 9:40 AM on March 22, 2001

I was just discussing this with a friend, and he raised an interesting query, I'd love to hear what others think.

"If you're using SSL, I wonder if they could charge you with a violation of the DCMA for filtering out portions of a page."
posted by cCranium at 10:16 AM on March 22, 2001

If you're using SSL, I wonder if they could charge you with a violation of the DCMA for filtering out portions of a page.

No, because it doesn't require circumventing any "protection mechanism." The text is in the clear by the time the proxy or browser's rendering engine gets it.
posted by kindall at 10:31 AM on March 22, 2001

I second Muppetboy's endorsement of Guidescope. Free, fast, and easy to use. And you can easily set up one computer to act as the proxy for your whole network.
posted by waxpancake at 11:24 AM on March 22, 2001

Succa - exCUSE me?! You'd prefer that the Mac UI worked in incredibly intuitive ways like, say, the process for shutting down your Windows computer: "You want to turn off your computer? OK, go over there and push the START button..." HUH?!

I've actually seen ads buried inside of what were otherwise innucous looking animated .GIFs (which I've since learned to just turn off, they so seldom add anything to add to the content anyway...)
posted by m.polo at 11:35 AM on March 22, 2001

Hey, I never said Windows was at the vanguard of good UI design, but I've had plenty of experience with Macs and the whole "Eject Disk" idea is completely and utterly stupid, and without any good use whatsoever. I can't count the number of floppies I've had stuck inside after a system crash or some other anomaly. What's the big deal with having a button for ejecting items that are considered ejectable media?? I just don't get it.

And don't get me started on the idea of dragging your disk to the TRASH CAN to eject it...ahh, mixed metaphors abound...
posted by Succa at 11:48 AM on March 22, 2001

Anyone know if there's a way to make this work during the times when I'm ::shudder:: forced to use AOL?

Sure. Don't use their browser, use a standalone copy of IE or Netscape. Their integrated browser uses a proxy server, so short of hacking into AOL there's no way to make their browser use the custom hosts file. But you can use any browser while logged onto AOL, not just theirs.

And don't get me started on the idea of dragging your disk to the TRASH CAN to eject it...ahh, mixed metaphors abound...

Well, it's not a metaphor so much as a shortcut. The real and obvious way to eject a disc is to use the "Put Away" command (or else "Eject" which works the way you'd expect now). As for why you can't eject a disk while you're using it, well, what exactly keeps you from ejecting a disk in the middle of a write on a PC? Nothing, that's what, which strikes me as even worse.
posted by kindall at 12:09 PM on March 22, 2001

Eh, the disk drive just busy-waits until you stick the disk back in, no big deal.

I like the idea of trusting myself enough not to pull the disk out of the drive mid-write. I prefer that to trusting the computer to eject the disk for me, which it often has a hard time doing.

Also, I knew there'd be a catch to Webwasher...it doesn't play nice with Blogger. I had to turn it off to post to my site. Just when you think you've found the Promised Land, you look a little closer and no, it's not the Promised Land...it's Flint, Michigan. Sigh.
posted by Succa at 12:26 PM on March 22, 2001

exCUSE me?! You'd prefer that the Mac UI worked in incredibly intuitive ways like, say, the process for shutting down your Windows computer: "You want to turn off your computer? OK, go over there and push the START button..." HUH?!

Everyone knows the correct way to shut off your Windows computer is to begin editing a vital document with Word.
posted by gleemax at 12:28 PM on March 22, 2001

The problem with trusting you to know when it's OK to take the disk out is that you may not know what programs have files open. And who says it's done writing just because the light went out? Maybe it's doing some processing and will write again in a little bit. Maybe it has dirty blocks in the cache it won't actually write to disc until later. If you let the user take the disc out whenever they want, you essentially can't do write caching or leave files open pending further writing -- everything must be written to disc immediately or there is danger the disc will be corrupted because some nimrod might take it out.

Just taking the disk out was fine when you could run only one program at a time. Today it's just plain dumb to let people do it. Unix, for example, expects never to crash and so it tends to keep huge dirty cache files. You should see the fit some Unixes throw if you restart it without shutting down properly.
posted by kindall at 2:10 PM on March 22, 2001

I use Junkbuster on my box, combined with a Squid local cache that links to the JANET UK academic cache. It makes a difference, nine times out of ten.

Calcanis misses the big threat: not individual users with copies of WebWasher, but ISPs with transparent caches. Most big ISPs in the UK automatically filter port 80 to save on transatlantic bandwidth, as do all ac.uks. It doesn't take much to stick Junkbuster on the Big Bad Proxy Cache. In fact, there's a revenue model just waiting to emerge, where ISPs dictate terms to advertisers: pay us, or we block you.
posted by holgate at 2:28 PM on March 22, 2001

I'd rather continue seeing straightforward banner ads, even big ones, to increased cleverness and resourcefulness on the aprt of advertisers. Can you say advertorial?

"Click here for our investigative report on how to get grass stains out of denim, using innovative Procter & Gamble products!"
posted by dhartung at 3:06 PM on March 22, 2001

Not to sound deeply ignorant but...what actually is a host file?
posted by davidgentle at 4:27 PM on March 22, 2001

kindall:
And who says it's done writing just because the light went out? Maybe it's doing some processing and will write again in a little bit.

I've used floppies in my PC for many years, and I've never had any floppy troubles because of manual ejection (that sounds kinda dirty).

However, I've crushed, smashed, and destroyed a ton of the suckers. I remember this one I left in my backpack…man, the poor thing didn't have a chance. It had sugar, dirt, & all sorts of nastiness inside of it.
posted by gleemax at 4:47 PM on March 22, 2001

I've used floppies in my PC for many years, and I've never had any floppy troubles because of manual ejection

Yeah, that's because PC programs are designed to take into account the fact that users might take the disk out. This means that if there's going to be a long pause between one write and the next, the program (or OS) has to flush the buffers (at the very least) and make sure the disk's still there the next time it wants to write.

I actually ruined disks on Apple IIs by switching them when the computer wasn't expecting me to. Some program went to finish up a write that I thought was done and bang, it wrote data to what would have been the right place on the old disk but was completely and utterly wrong in the new disk. Oh yeah, taking the disk out in the middle of a block was a Real Bad Thing too; computers don't expect to read half a block and then stop, so that sector of the disk was basically rendered unusable.

Because of this problem, manufacturers of removable drives quickly implemented a "unit lock" command that let the host computer prevent ejection until it was done with the disc. Sometimes it was literally physically locked. SyQuest 44MB discs would make a nice solid thump when it was safe to take out the cartridge.

A better solution to both the Mac and PC way of doing it would have been to have an eject button but make it really an "eject request" button. When you push it, the computer flushes the device's cache before ejecting the media. If there are programs using the files on the disk, the OS tells the offending applications to close the appropriate files first. When you put the disk back in, those same files open back up automatically. That is the way computers should work.
posted by kindall at 6:07 PM on March 22, 2001

davidgentle:try here.
posted by sonofsamiam at 10:11 PM on March 22, 2001

Yes, the CD-ROM style eject mechanism is ideal, but I wasn't aware that people were still doing anything intensive enough with floppies that would require multiple write sessions and buffer flushing over a prolonged period (running .exe's, for example). Unless you're running a compact Linux distro off the disk or something, in which case you're probably not dumb enough to take the disk out while the machine is active.

Whatever, "Eject Disk" in software is still way more annoying than the odd few bytes of garbled data. I've probably spent hours over the course of my lifetime trying to get stubborn Mac System 7 to eject my disk after a crash.
posted by Succa at 10:31 PM on March 22, 2001