Stardate 20020131.0617

With the free software, users will be able to control and block cookies sometimes used by Web sites to track surfing habits. They will also be able to activate a feature that scans outgoing Internet traffic for credit card numbers and other private information that might be sent unknowingly.

Other features include an ad blocker and a password manager.

This may not seem important, but it's going to shake the foundation of the web: HP is preinstalling an ad blocker. Within a year, all the majors will be doing the same. Within four years, the majority of computers used to browse the web will routinely use ad blocking.

Which means that the ad market for the web isn't going to rebound in the long run. This spells the end of the ad banner and of most other forms of intrusive advertising. We (the users) win.

Ironically, this will force pro-sites to return to the only kind of advertising that can't really be blocked: inserted text, included at the server before download. Any advertising based on image files or flash or other such technologies must necessarily involve separate downloads, and they can be nailed by ad blockers. If text is downloaded using Javascript from the browser, it can be stopped. If it comes from a dedicated advertising server, it can be blocked. Advertising which is normal text inserted at the server before downloading (see the blue and yellow boxes on this site for examples) won't be as easy to remove. Not impossible, mind, but not easy.

The irony is that anything unusual that gets done on such advertising to make it stand out also makes it easy to remove. No-one uses the blink tag anymore, so it would be child's play to program an ad blocker to not only remove blink tags, but to remove all the text between them. (In fact, it is easy to do things like that now using primitive tools such as Proxomitron.) If tables with a certain background color on a certain site are invariably advertising, they can also be removed. If advertising forces a specific font, that can be used to recognize that it is advertising. Anything which makes advertising text stand out also makes it easy to remove algorithmically. If we can see it, so can an ad blocker. The only way the advertising text can be unremovable is if it looks exactly like the rest of the site, and in that case it will no longer force itself onto our attention.

Advertisers are now going to be forced to be good citizens in our computers. They will no longer be able to rely on forcing us to look at things we do not want to see. Everything they can do to be obnoxious paints a target on their material for ad blocking packages, and now the majority of users will be using them.

It's the end of an era — and the beginning of a better one.