Adblock Plus to sell Ads

The popular browser extension that a lot of people use to block ads, Adblock Plus, will be selling ads too soon.

Yes you heard that right.

Good Ads and Bad Ads?

Instead of removing ads from the websites you visit, Adblock plus will instead replace the “bad” ads with the “good” ones.

Here’s how Adblock will classify the good ad from the bad – the ‘bad’ ones include any ad that are too big and intrusive and ultimately irrelevant to you. While the ‘good’ ones will be the smaller and more subtle ads.

And that’s not all. Adblock is going to be launching a marketplace for ‘good’ ads.

New Ad Marketplace

Adblock Plus will be launching an ad marketplace which will let blogs and publishers choose ads from and run them up on their websites.

Essentially, this means that if you have Adblock Plus installed on your browser you will still get ads on websites who are using the ad marketplace, thus entirely killing the idea of installing the Adblock.

Ben Williams, operations and communications director of Adblock Plus says,

It allows you to treat the two different ecosystems completely differently and monetize each one, and crucially, monetize the ad blockers on on their own terms.

In fairness, Adblock had been running an Acceptable Ads program since 2011 but it was fairly limited in scope.

Whitelisted ads could be displayed on websites but the process of whitelisting was a complex and time consuming process. Not to mention Adblock Plus charged the websites to allow them to display whitelisted ads specifically on their websites.

Extension to “Acceptable ads” Program

Through the new ad marketplace, Adblock Plus is hoping to expand their already existing Acceptable Ads program. The publishers will be able to sign up and start running the whitelisted ads after making small modifications to their website’s code.

Whitelisted ads will not be able to track you from different websites and will adhere to specific site and relevancy guidelines as defined by Adblock Plus.

Toll Charging Gatekeepers

They are aiming to place themselves as the gatekeepers, charging a toll from the publishers to let them have that ad revenue they are missing due to blocked ads.

This move is said to be “publisher-friendly” as 80 percent of the ad revenue will go to the publisher while the remaining 20 percent to third parties involved in serving ads (including Adblock Plus, which will be getting 6 percent of it).

The Ad marketplace launches in beta today while the full version is expected to roll out later this year.

Whatsapp to Share User Data with Facebook for ad Targeting

Its now official. WhatsApp just stated that they’re sharing user data with Facebook.

In a blogpost updated moments ago, Whatsapp noted:

And by connecting your phone number with Facebook‘s systems, Facebook can offer better friend suggestions and show you more relevant ads if you have an account with them.

In addition to this, Whatsapp has said that it won’t share Whatsapp conversations or content of messages with anyone. That’s something not everyone is going to trust, especially when you consider Facebook’s new ball game.

Let’s not forget that Facebook had bought Whatsapp for a whooping 19 billion dollars. Clearly they didn’t invest this amount of money for a service that doesn’t even generate more than 1$ per customer per year, or in some cases not even a single penny for a lifetime.

What Does This Mean For Us?

Whatsapp had more than a billion active users as of February 2016, which means one in every seven individuals on earth has a Whatsapp account. Resultantly, Facebook — through this acquisition — will have access to major part of communication that we do, and just if you don’t know: more information means more money.

What’s more alarming for some customers would be the fact that Whatsapp could also give access to your communication to governments world over, especially the notorious NSA.

While its still early to say more on how this shared data is going to impact our lives, given the track record, we can predict that its not going to be very beautiful.

Beware ! Advertisers are Tracking you via Mobile Battery Status

Is my smartphone battery leaking details about me?

Unfortunately, YES!

Forget about supercookies, apps, and malware; your smartphone battery status is enough to monitor your online activity, according to a new report.

In 2015, researchers from Stanford University demonstrated a way to track users' locations – with up to 90 percent accuracy – by measuring the battery usage of the phone over a certain time.

The latest threat is much worse.

Two security researchers, Steve Engelhard and Arvind Narayanan, from Princeton University, have published a paper describing how phone's battery status has already been used to track users across different websites.

The issue is due to the Battery Status API (application programming interface).

How Does Battery Status API Help Advertisers Track You?

The battery status API was first introduced in HTML5 and had already shipped in browsers including Firefox, Chrome, and Opera by August last year.

The API is intended to allow site owners to see the percentage of battery life left on a laptop, tablet, or smartphone in an effort to deliver an energy-efficient version of their sites.

However, researchers warned last year about the API’s potential threat that could turn your battery level into a "fingerprintable" tracking identifier.

The researchers found that a combination of battery life loss in seconds and battery life as a percentage offers 14 Million different combinations, potentially providing a pseudo-unique identifier for each device that can be used to pinpoint specific devices between sites they visit.

Now, the last year's research has grown into a proper threat.

Advertisers Are Tracking You via your Battery Status

One of those researchers named Lukasz Olejnik has published a blog post this week, saying that companies are currently leveraging the potential of this battery status information.

"Some companies may be analyzing the possibility of monetising the access to battery levels," he writes. "When a battery is running low, people might be prone to some - otherwise different - decisions. In such circumstances, users will agree to pay more for a service."

Olejnik underlined the latest research by Engelhard and Narayanan, who discovered two tracking scripts of shady code running on the Internet at large scale, which take advantage of battery status API and currently tracking users.

The duo explains that they observed the behavior of two actual scripts and suggested the companies and other entities are perhaps leveraging this technique for their own purposes.

"These features are combined with other identifying features used to fingerprint a device," the researchers write in their paper titled, "Online Tracking: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis."

For in-depth information, you can head on to the research paper [PDF].

Here's come the worst part of this attack:

There's hardly any way to mitigate against this attack. Nothing works: Deleting browser cookies or using VPNs and AdBlockers will not solve your problem.

The only option is to plug your smartphone into the mains.

"Some companies may be analyzing the possibility of monetising the access to battery levels," Olejnik writes.

Over two months ago, Uber's head of economic research Keith Chen said the company had been monitoring the battery life of its users, as it knows users are more likely to pay a much higher price to hire a cab when their phone's battery is close to dying.

Windows 10 - started showing FULL screen Ads on Lockscreen - here is how to turn it OFF

If you've upgraded your older version of Windows OS to an all new Windows 10 operating system then you may have noticed an advertisement appearing on your desktop or laptop’s lock screen over the past couple of days.

Yes, this is what Microsoft has chosen to generate revenue after offering Free Windows 10 Download to its users: Monetize the Lock Screen.

Thanks to Windows 10's new Spotlight feature that usually shows you clean and beautiful photographs and fun facts on your lock screen, but now started displaying advertisements to over 200 Million devices running Windows 10.

Some Windows 10 users have reported seeing ads for Rise of the Tomb Raider with links to Windows Store from where users can purchase the video game. Microsoft started selling the game last month.

Although the ads are not as annoying as the Windows 10 privacy concerns related to the way Microsoft collects your personal data, the good news is that you can turn the ads OFF.

Here's How to Turn the Ads OFF

The advertisements are because of the Windows Spotlight feature in your Personalization settings.

If you don't want to see these intrusive ads, follow the steps given below to disable Windows Spotlight:

• Open the Start Menu and look for 'Lock Screen Settings.'
• Under 'Background,' Choose either 'Picture' or 'Slideshow,' instead of Windows Spotlight.
• Now, Scroll down to 'Get fun facts, tips, tricks, and more on your lock screen' and uncheck this box.

The advertisements are turned ON for your lock screen by default, which is definitely a clever way to offer companies to reach their customers, without mentioning the word 'advertisements' to the Windows users.

As I previously said: Nothing comes for Free, as "Free" is just a relative term. Everything comes with its own price.

As warned last year, Microsoft also started pushing Windows 10 upgrades onto its user's computers much harder by re-categorizing Windows 10 as a "Recommended Update" in Windows Update, instead of an "optional update."

Google to Ban Flash Based Advertising - Bye Flash

Google had also joined the path of Apple, Facebook, and Youtube to kill the "Adobe Flash Player" by announcing that the company is banning Flash banner support from its Adwords Advertising platform.

"To enhance the browsing experience for more people on more devices, the Google Display Network and DoubleClick Digital Marketing are now going 100% HTML5" Google says.

It's been two decades since Adobe Flash has ruled the Web Space Animation Arena, which was the de facto standard for playing the online videos.

Flash Player had been famous for Zero-day exploits which are a potential threat to online users.

Even Adobe tried to maintain equilibrium by releasing a countless number of patches frequently (that got hiked), for instant reported vulnerabilities, but this had annoyed both customers and companies.

The endless troubleshooting of the Flash Player plugins never resolved the vulnerabilities.

To put a full stop on this issue... many major tech companies like Apple, Facebook, Youtube, Google Chrome, Firefox had been magnetized towards the new substitutor - HTML 5.

• Facebook's Security Chief publicly called for Adobe to announce a 'kill-date for Flash.'
• Google Chrome has also begun blocking auto-playing Flash ads by default.
• In January this year, YouTube moved away from Flash for delivering videos.
• Firefox also blocked the Flash plugin entirely.

By ending up Flash, all the above companies found a silver bullet to the security issues that have plagued Adobe Flash for years, as well as eliminated a third party dependency.

Steve Jobs was right about the end of Flash as he quoted as saying in his letter:

“New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.”

HTML 5 has gained a Word of Mouth Popularity by many developers and also have many advantages like to play the video smoothly, in fact, in a better way.

So, Google also officially declared that it would not support Flash ads in Doubleclick Digital Marketing from July 30, 2016.

Moreover, from January 2, 2017, the company will discontinue the support for Google Display Network as a part of complete Flash Wipe Out.

However, as a Result of this awful reputation, Flash Player would be rebranded as “Animate CC” with some additional features like the direct conversion of Flash Files to HTML5 Canvas files.

Adobe Animate CC – mostly looks like an update to the Flash Professional software – supports Adobe Flash (SWF) and AIR formats 'as first-class citizens,' along with other animation and video formats, including HTML5 canvas, 4K and WebGL output.