Happy #420day: Today in Tweets

Binjabreel,

I’ve already deleted my browser history, but the problem persists.

I know there’s not a prayer of this happening in the US right now, but I really think there should be some regulation of this. An ad that redirects your browser and won’t yet you leave the page is entirely not okay.

This.

I’m coming to the belief that there’s a lot of stuff that internet companies are doing right now which will be illegal in future; some of which will be jail-time illegal, and some of which will be your-shareholders-will-do-jail-time illegal. I think our current situation is the technological equivalent of those nineteenth-century factories, with shitty and harmful practises being cheerfully indulged in as long as they make money.

Maybe Cambridge Analytica will one day be spoken of in the same context as the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. That’s a comforting thought.

My desktop browsers are all equipped with both NoScript and uBlock Origin. I almost never see an ad, and am at almost zero risk of malware via advertising, whether browser hijack or much more serious consequences like ransomware.

As for mobile, I have one device with Chrome but I use that browser sparingly and do not keep large amounts of irreplaceable and important data on that device.

If anything, my ad blocking is doing everyone a favor anyway as I’m a particularly poor sales lead. I don’t make much, do very little discretionary spending, and for obvious reasons what discretionary spending I do do involves heavy research and comparison shopping as a rule. If I want it and it exists, I’ll discover it and decide whether or not to get it independently of any ads. Brand choice will likely be much more strongly influenced by product quality and price, especially the latter, than any ad I may or may not see.

Advertising to me pretty much won’t budge your sales figures an iota … unless you’re obnoxious enough about it that you land on my shitlist, in which case they’ll go down slightly, if anything. (Obnoxious ranges from somehow sneaking a popup past my ad blocker to convincing a TV station to display your ad ON TOP OF THE SHOW I’M WATCHING instead of drawing neatly inside the lines surrounding the three-minute breaks that are where all TV advertising is supposed to go. If you do that I won’t buy from you for months, if ever again. And that clock restarts from zero if I see another popup with your logo on it blocking part of my screen during a show.)

The one type of ad I might actually pay attention to and that might actually lead to a sale is a movie trailer aired properly during a break. My main way of knowing that/when something like, say, Infinity War is coming out in theaters is the TV spots. Which is probably due to my lack of a social life, which is probably due in turn to my lack of enough money to be tooling around everywhere in my very own car (or enough to be able to afford downtown bigger-city rents in locations where one might actually have social opportunities without a car).

Even then, the two types of ads I get exposed to still have little effect. Mobile ads that apps throw at me get the back button instantly enough I usually don’t know what the heck they were peddling. And the appearance of TV ads sends me to the fridge, bathroom, computer, or etc. for three minutes. If there’s a trailer for a movie I might actually be interested in I only know about it because of the audio.

Treeperson-

In other news I’m planning on walking/running my first 5k on Wednesday,
I’m doing a virtual race with this app called “Zombies, Run!”.

Congrats on your first 5k! Good luck! “Zombies, Run!” sounds like a fun app. I must get it!

@Dormousing_it

“In the arms of the angels…”

Internet advertising….

I don’t get that much, or what does come up is pretty much what I was recently looking at. I comparison shop also.

Shoes, the boots I’m wearing. Bought online. Until I cleared the laptop here, I was getting shoe ads.

Economic state. I was online shopping for a used (like 5 years old) car in the $12 thousand range, I’m now seeing a bunch of used car ads.

They pitch to the low bucks too. Some of these things I might even look at. But not after the fact. You have to clear the system. The only net I have is an old (er) mac laptop. It works fine. Mostly. It could be that a lot of ads don’t interface with it. I know little to nothing about these things.

I’m not a fan of advertising, I was just wondering if they couldn’t target people better? For instance, if I happened to go look at a “home depot” type of site online, and something specific, like maybe a particular pipe for under a sink or something.

Well then you’ll get more ads for these same pipes! From the same stores. Wouldn’t it be better to put out a more broader ad for these stores? Like Hey Pipe Shopper, here’s our weekly ad, we have a variety of things you may be interested in.

Instead of – more pipes. Which I have probably now purchased.

Or shoes. No I don’t need to see those exact same boots again, – I just bought them. Not that they should know that, but, if a person did not buy at their site, why not put out a more broader ad that shows other things a person might be interested in?

They even do this at the bottom of shopping sites – “similar products you may be interested in”.

I don’t do a lot of online shopping either, plenty of “window shopping”, comparison shopping, you’ll get enough of advertising. Used cars! Go look, at say a site like Auto Trader, look at any used car you may want. Quit that and go back to looking at whatever, watch the ads pop up. For not only used car sellers, but the specific car.

This actually doesn’t bother me that much. And I glance at some, and in this case, if it was a local seller or something, I might look at it. Or something like furniture or clothes, some vary their ads anyway. Didn’t buy the blue sofa? Backed off that page? Well here’s a green sofa you may be interested in, plus our sales ad.

They could vary their ads a bit. Or, – No, I do not need to see that same toilet pipe again. Til the end of eternity, any time I look at your site. Nor do you need to put it on all the ads of whatever other site I look at, nor do you need to send me a gazillion emails about it.
(I don’t give out my working or personal emails to anyone. I should set up a better shopping only email, for certain things, you might get some coupons.)

No giving out email randomly anyway, unless it would be dedicated to that.

For the most part this isn’t a big issue for me. And if you “clear the system” which I do about daily, that seems to work.

@kupo,

Your comment reminds me of a stupid argument I had recently. I noted that meritocracy was a cruel lie, and that no matter how hard we work, we will not “get rich” because that’s not how capitalism functions. Yada, yada, everyone here is familiar with this.
The response (somewhat paraphrased) was “typical lazy leftie, looking for handouts.”
Like most of us, I’m part of the precariat; I’m a contract academic with no job security, no sick leave, no health cover, etc. I work ridiculous hours, have far more contact teaching hours than permanent academics, haven’t had a weekend or day off in months (as for a holiday, just lol).
I seriously love my work, but the strain and the insecurity is increasingly hard to deal with.

The thing is, most people are in a similar situation. Unstable, short-term, long hours – more and more of us are living with this, so it’s not something that requires imagination or empathy to envision. And yet, to criticise it is still unthinkable.

(oh, and to top it all off, a certain make-the-dog-do-a-nazi-salute-for-lulz twerp weighed in, with “you’re all ‘gibs me dis, gibs, me dat'” which added a lovely racist layer of icing to the cake of stupid)

Yesterday was cops making jokes about arresting lids smoking pot instead of looking into much more harmful crimes in my state
Sorry with my bitterness it easily annoys me

David,

When my phone gets hijacked, it’s almost exclusively your site. And I detest that because, well, I love this site.

Although maybe it *is* somehow connected to Google, because it did it to me on Google’s reverse image search.

Used TinEye, instead. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@SFHC
Have you tried the AdBlock browser from the play store? Works well on my Android phone and resolves the ads issues when I get them.

That’s weird. Don’t think I’ve ever gotten a browser hijack ad from WHTM while using my android phone, although I’ll occasionally get them from other sites. And yeah, I’m usually using firefox with a couple of security extensions, but I’m not getting them when I use Chrome or other browsers either.

Any chance that there’s a phone virus involved?

I’ve been getting hijacked on lots of the last 10 posts of David’s, though not this or I think the last couple.

Will follow Jo’s suggestion and email some URL/s to David