We’re not holding biz to ransom, says pay to play ad-blocking outfit

Even the worst adblockers run a better protection racket than governmental regulators whose job it is.

That said, just burn the web all down......

P.S. that's a highly simplistic diagram of the ad industry... tip of the iceberg.

Here's an idea

For the attention of:

The Minister of Being Unable to P**s in a Straight Line Even When Sober*

How about some new legislation: (You'll love this bit - it'll make it seem you're Doing Something Useful (TM).)

It becomes a severe offence punishable by Very Heavy Fines (TM) AND a substantial prison sentence to fling an ad which:

a. Contains any malware (definition to be decided by a poll of el Reg commentards - down guys and gals - wait your turn.

b. Is clickbait for (a) or any attempt to gather ANY personal information.

c. Places, attempts to place or is clickbait for ANY 3rd party cookie.

d. Causes any harm whatsoever to the receiving computer or any connected system, eg crashing the browser or interfering with a printer (eg wasting ink).

e. Requires for its display the use on the receiving computer or its associated systems of any software known or likely to be known to have security vulnerabilities.

d. Causes the user of the recieving computer, without their express permission, to incur any extra expense or delay.

e. Causes or could cause said user, or those around him/her/it any distress.

f. Does not have clearly within itself a continuous clear display of an accurate audit trail for the ad (similar to the health warnings on a fag packet).

g. "Ad flinger" to be defined as the whole food chain including from the source of the ad to the ad calling website, all to be totally responsible for the whole chain.

h. Telcos to be responsible for enforcing blocking offending ip addresses and aiding law enforcement. Cost to be borne out of fines. System to be self financing.

That might fix it.

*to be filmed by an arts council funded film unit while running a 100 yard sprint through a the gift shop of a similarly funded museum or gallery.**

** Necessary condition to identify appropriate Minister among all the other p**s artists in the gubbermint.

*** El REG - we still need that "It's not funny" or "not a joke" icon. And a Welsh sheep in a vacuum icon. And how about a "government minister nailed to the floorboards" Icon?

The ad industry as presently constituted might just as well face facts. The party's over. We're just waiting fro everyone to collect their coats.

I think I'm in the minority

But I'm just getting used to the idea of life without internet. Yup! The unthinkable.

It's possible for me to do this, but very difficult of course.

For the rest of you, with working lives and families, I don't see how you can possibly disconnect. You would be ruined!

The totalitarian regime just keeps bringing out laws and passing them all by itself like a tinpot dictator (which of course they are no better than), and everyone moans a bit then goes back to business. Diminished but back to business. No one complains, especially not the techies who understand far better than everyone else the implications of all this.

I suppose you don't have much time to protest, and you have jobs to worry about too. You know you are being tracked. You know the enemy is ruthless. In fact, they are only the enemy because they painted the normal population as such. Overnight they turned us all into legitimate targets and enemy combatants. If we are the enemy to them, what does that make them to us?

So I understand. It's not easy. I'm really hoping I can pull the cable in a few months just as I get all my main computers working as I want, and backed up, offline.

How many of you can say you are that angry? Not many I would wager. There is no way out for you now. The government could pass a law to make everyone who has an internet connection, use a passport/driving license/birth cert. to register, with weekly checkups on YOU, yes YOU, personally (got to keep creating those non-jobs), and there is not a damn thing you could do about it.

They have already gone cock-a-hoop the last week or two after bringing in the snoopers charter that you all fought so hard for years to stop. They just went and did it anyway. Not many of you seem too vocal or bothered by that. A bit miffed, but that's it. Now they are like a kid in a candy store: Make it illegal for setting up accounts without id, jail people who do not make others feel all fluffy inside, spy on you and pass around the readers wives shots to the lads. Oops, they already were doing that one since the internet was invented, they just didn't admit it then, as they do no admit now.

In short, they can do what the hell they please, and there is not a damn thing you will even try to do about it. You don't even acknowledge the severity of the situation, the rubicon we have just crossed. I read in the independent today that: Everyone knows they have no privacy now and accepts it! Really. I suppose you are right. Keep telling us we have no privacy. Keep telling us we accept it. Pretty soon we all will.

These are the good days. In the not too distant future, your medical records will be made available to that council worker you pissed off because you complained about not having your rubbish collected for two months. In fact, they can already check your medical records. The laws in existence today right now are far worse and more encompassing than anything the stasi dreamed about. It is full on 1984. Yet they haven't finished yet. They haven't even started.

We live in a world where the council (or was it the police) sent a copy of a letter out to every person who had had a complaint made against them (anonymously of course) naming the people that had made the complaint. Wowza.

This government has never taken security seriously. They are incompetent. Worse than that, they act with impunity not even wanting or pretending to be competent. And now they have started a dual-propaganda campaign vis a vis adblockers and the bbc license. It's a full on fucking psychological assault.

Face the facts. It's game over. You DO NOT own your computer. You WILL have ads and malware served to you or you WILL be criminalised. You are NOT allowed to disconnect from the net. I can see a world pretty soon where it will be illegal to NOT have an internet connection, with a camera installed that is permanently ON. Those that use black pvc tape to cover the lense will be rounded up, and asked just what they hell they thought they were playing at.

They already got away with putting RATs on to children's laptops, and even admitted viewing them naked in their bedrooms. They got away with it, because they are allowed to spy on our children in the nude, but we are not allowed to take preventative measures so we don't have to spend the next fucking 8 hours cleaning up our compos and restoring backups.

Every day I have to run a script (kindly offered by a fellow commentard) that blocks the windows update service. I've already turned it off but oh no, it doesn't work like that, does it. My machine grinds to a halt, the cpu goes through the roof, my fan starts going, my ram drops and browsers crash, all because fucking microsoft have planted malware on my machine and I can not get rid of it. I'm really going to have to spend a full few days sorting this out.

Keep in mind, that even though I'm not clever enough to be a 'real programmer', I can build systems both hardware and software. I'm no stranger to many of the sysinternals tools, and I run an nLited install of winxp that is only about 500MB large with nearly every service disabled that you can imagine, and some you can't (if you hadn't looked). I've delved into the deepest parts of the windows os, even downloading a document on undocumented api calls, and reading it. I just gave another going over to Cristina Cifuentes' PhD thesis on Decompilation - a bloody good read before bedtime I can tell you. I studied reverse engineering for many years, as well as computer programming (I failed at both in the end).

But I am busy juggling personal crises with family crises - my head is just not in the right place to have to deal with this shit right now. And still they come... whole battallions...

Days out of my life, just because I object to having my computer raped. I run the script, and in Process Hacker I can see the svchost.exe drop gigabytes - sneaky buggers don't even tell you what service it is, they wrap it in svchost - fuckers - took me hours to figure out. If that kind person here at El Reg had not shared that script, I really don't know how I could have fixed it so quickly.

I just did a scan with Super Anti Spyware which is more of a tracking cookie remover than anything else these days, and it found 60-70 tracking cookies on my machine since the last few days. I keep cookies on though I browse sandboxed usually, on this laptop anyway. The fact that companies are allowed to create these things and plant them surreptitiously on people's machines should be a crime in itself. It is a moral crime, and I believe that should be reflected with a fully fledged law giving perpetrators hard prison time. Let's not get too daily mail about it and not send them to the gulags just yet, but it would be nice to have it as an option.

This is a subject that is not up for debate with me, and I am heartened to find others that feel the same way. Even though we have been labeled militants, it is only because we are a minority so it's easy to name call. We just want some privacy and not be harassed. But they have made laws to invade our privacy and they have made laws that make us unable to stop the harassment.

I'm not sure mankind is going to get past this internet thing. This has to come to serious blows. If you take away people's right to sovereignty and the right to say 'no', then you are already a slave.

It was a fellow commentard here who said: The game was over ten years ago. We've been in a totalitarian state since then. So I know that a lot of you do get it. But what I don't get is, if so many of you get it, why do you at least not acknowledge the gravity of the situation.

This is happening now. To you as well as me. We are all the victims in this.

I hope I don't come across as rude or insulting, or even passive aggressively trying to stir things up and make you all form a protest in the street or god forbid start writing letters to your MP. Fat lot of good it would do. We are doomed. We all know it now. I'm just genuinely curious why there are so few people in uproar over this. Is there no length they can push you to, where you will not react?

It's going to be really hard coming off the internet. I won't be able to read the register anymore. Then again you won't have to read my inane dribblings, so that balances out for the good of humanity I suppose.

Adblockers, government, microsoft, google, apple, the whole fucking lot of them are in this together and have designated us the enemy. I'm not sure if that is quite understood yet, or if it is understood but people are just too scared to talk about it.

I see the register as one of the last bastions of freedom. I doubt it will be around in five years time, certainly not in its current form. I've learned some amazing things here from foes and friends alike, but I can tell you now, I will not be able to write these words as I am now in five years time. So I am making the most of my freedom for now.

Ok, I'll shut up now. I'm boring myself. I just wrote over 4000 words in the last few hours for El Reg and I don't want to outstay my welcome. Hopefully I haven't been too much of a nuisance. At least you always had the option to 'opt out' of reading my crap, anyway...

This is the script to STOP THE WINDOWS UPDATE hijacking your machine....

...for a few hours till it automatically starts up again. You can turn it off in services, but as most of you know it respawns itself anyway. This is a quick hack to temporarily regain control of your machine if you are doing something important (like watching cat videos).

net stop wuauserv

net stop bits

rd /s /q %windir%\softwaredistribution

net start bits

net start wuauserv

wuauclt.exe /detectnow

I just name it "winUpdateStop.bat" after pasting it into a text file (for you not so techy guys and gals), but you can name it what you want with the .bat extension at the end. Just 'Save as' from notepad to your desktop and run as administrator (unless you are one of those naughty naughty people that run full admin all the time, connected to the net [like the majority of you]).

Slightly OT, forgive me. I'm sure at least one person will find this handy. And thanks again to the Register commentard who wrote it. This stuff is voodoo to me and I stand on the shoulders of giants. If imitation is the sincerest form or flattery, then replication must be even better....

Proportinate response?

Government is dependant on the big ad agencies.

Just look back over who runs the election campaigns and who get honours afterwards.

Consider also the FTSE100 firms which rely on advertising.

Given that, it doesn't pay to totally piss off the ad agencies because of the influence they yield.

Users are adopting add blockers in droves.

Soon they will either be banned or circumvented.

So placing an ad filter on your device is a compromise which might work.

Oh, we don't mind YOUR adverts. Just the ones from the bad people.

Is it a protection racket? Could well be. Is it worth the price? Probably for a little while.

The check on the white list sellers is that there are always total ad blockers out there.

They have to please both the user and the advertiser.