> John McCormac wrote:
> > There was an article in the latest Linux Journal about using an approach
> > with Apache/proxy to rewrite the ad domain urls to a local gif. I think
> > he was using the Apache gif. It could be on the LJ website. I'm not sure
> > if Squid has the same rewrite capability.
>> Indeed it does ( as a quick search on freshmeat.net will show you ).
> I am using the one called adzap.
I'm sure we've had this discussion before, but this kind of thing makes
me uncomfortable.
The Web, regardless of how you see it, is largely funded by advertising.
Those little banner ads you see all over the place are, often, what _keeps_
the site going.
Bandwidth, servers and people's time generally costs money, although the
latter can be free if people are just doing it as a hobby. Other than
that, websites, particularly high-effort high-traffic websites, need
money to survive. How do you think Slashdot and Salon are funded? Magic
fairy dust? Sure, in this day and age of weirdie dot-com capitalism,
most of the money floating around _is_ hot air funny money, but the basics
(the hardware parts) still need to be paid for in cold, hard currency.
Disable the banner ads, and you're depriving the sites of income. Sure,
it's probable that _most_ people will leave them enabled, but if, say, 20%
of people use a filtering proxy, that's 20% of the site's income.
One argument is that it's like, well, what most people do during television
ad breaks - ignore them and go to put the kettle on (RTE) or have a bath
(Sky). But the television companies will get the tiny fraction of income
that they would have received for transmitting the advert to your
television even if you don't watch it - on the Internet, there's no other
way of counting these things other than by accesses to the ad servers, so
they don't get paid. And if sites don't have anything to live on, they
tend to disappear.
m.
--
Computer Science System Administrator, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
mike.knell at cs.tcd.ie -=- http://www.cs.tcd.ie/Mike.Knell/
Maintained by the ILUG website team. The aim of Linux.ie is to
support and help commercial and private users of Linux in Ireland. You can
display ILUG news in your own webpages, read backend
information to find out how. Networking services kindly provided by HEAnet, server kindly donated by
Dell. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds,
used with permission. No penguins were harmed in the production or maintenance
of this highly praised website. Looking for the
Indian Linux Users' Group? Try here. If you've read all this and aren't a lawyer: you should be!
