What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning I saw that iOS 9 dropped from Apple, and I upgraded my iPhone right away - why not, right? I've been hearing of all the nice things in iOS 9, and one of the things I was really interested in was the Ad Blocking in WebKit/Safari. I've worked in the Ad business now, and I have to say that while it has the potential to be a very useful thing, it's really degenerated into a cheap way for some folks to get a little revenue for their web sites without having to do anything other than a little code added to their pages.

I get it... you pay $20/yr for a site, and you'd like to see $30/yr in revenue, but the "easy money" is not in advertising - at least not now. It's the wrong game to let Double-click or AdWords into your site. They just they show is just not good stuff - and they'll say it's not their fault - it's the publishers - and it is, but it's all a race to the bottom.

So I've just gotten sick of it, and got Peace, the ad blocker for iOS 9 from Marco A. as he's one of the good guys, and he teamed up with Ghostery, the desktop Chrome/Safari ad blocker, and it's pretty slick. The point was just to get a better experience on my iPhone as well as getting rid of all the tracking. If a site wants data about me, and they offer a decent reason, I'll do it. But as it is now, Google is the company that's collecting all this data, and I'm not so sure I like them knowing so much.

Just too much power.

So I turned on the ad blocking with Peace on iOS 9, and with Ghostery on my laptops. I have whitelisted a few sites: Bank of America, Loggly, Daring Fireball... they are OK. But the rest - no thanks. Too much.