And the rest of the world ruled that piracy is officially cool again.

Yes officer, this blind man right here is commiting the heinous crime of not to watching my ad.

In other news: sunglasses are now prohibited in public transport, they were found to modify the perception of ads, modifying the intellectual property of ad maker in public places, the impact was a reduced market values of ad space in public transit which would have forced the city to increase the ticket price.

Stay tuned for news on those disgusting blinker pirate: those people blink twice more often than normal people which makes them see only half as many ads, police forces has invested millions in brand new blinking frequency detector, in order to more easily catch those dangerous criminals.

Data that arrives in the browser is downloaded and processed there.

In a newspaper, I could ask someone to cut out the advertisements before I read them. Or not?

I’ve never been blocking ads of Axel Springer, because I’ve been blocking all of their rotten publications. Get bent, you assholes.

Read in German

Jarrrr

@sad_detective_man Nah, come on — Springer is claiming that a website is a computer program.

But that’s not quite accurate.

HTML and CSS aren’t computer programs - they’re markup/style sheet languages. They define structure and appearance but don’t perform computation or logic. JavaScript, is a programming language and can make a website behave like a program. The same goes for server-side technologies like PHP.

However, what Adblockers typically do is prevent certain resources from loading. They don’t modify the underlying program logic itself - they’re just manipulating the DOM or blocking elements before they render. So in many cases, we’re not interfering with a “program” in the traditional sense, but rather adjusting the output or content that gets displayed.

i’m gonna block ads even more just to spite the germans

I would VERY much appreciate a court ruling that makes spreading misinformation and propaganda illegal

Of course torrentfreak would use the most outrageous & clickbaity title possible. It’s not so bad though.
Discussed in another post:

I speak German legalese (don’t ask) so I went to the actual source and read up on the decision.

The way I read it, the higher court simply stated that the Appeals court didn’t consider the impact of source code to byte code transformation in their ruling, meaning they had not provided references justifying the fact they had ignored the transformation. Their contention is that there might be protected software in the byte code, and if the ad blocker modified the byte code (either directly or by modifying the source), then that would constitute a modification of code and hence run afoul of copyright protections as derivative work.

Sounds more like, “Appeals court has to do their homework” than “ad blockers illegal.”

The ruling is a little painful to read, because as usual the courts are not particularly good at technical issues or controversies, so don’t quote me on the exact details. In particular, they use the word Vervielfältigung a lot, which means (mass) copy, which is definitely not happening here. The way it reads, Springer simply made the case that a particular section of the ruling didn’t have any reasoning or citations attached and demanded them, which I guess is fair. More billable hours for the lawyers! @

It can’t be said often enough: fuck Axel Springer.

Here’s a thing about LLMs, they will effectively make laws like this meaningless. Law comes in to enforce against a company building a program to block ads, extension goes off market. Someone asks their LLM “create an extension function referencing the same data set for my browser that performs the same function” boom new extension with no central point of distribution. Share the prompt on a forum, now everyone has a custom ad blocker. Or not so far down the road, LLM is directly built into the browser, no extension needed just prompt “do not display known advertisements on pages I request before loading, but perform background activity which gives feedback to the site that ads have loaded” boom done.

In a way, local LLMs are like distributed applications, they make enforcement against specific program functions pretty much impossible.

It’s time to abandon the internet and build a new one from scratch.

What’s next? Forcing people to buy articles in the supermarket? Forcing people to go to the cinema? Why is copyright law even applicable here??

That’s foul. I wouldn’t touch YouTube without Ublock. You ever try watching that garbage without it?

The one app game I like(d) was Scrabble. It was sold and is now an endless stream of ads. Turn, ad, turn, ad, turn, ad, nonstop. It’s unplayable. I had to delete it.

Ad blockers make media consumable. Granted, less screen time would likely benefit everyone.