Re: [NYT] First public mention of ad-filtering proxies

Robert S. Thau (rst@ai.mit.edu)
Tue, 8 Jun 1999 08:03:24 -0400 (EDT)


Rohit Khare writes:
> At the other extreme, how long before the MS Office Assistant becomes
> non-disable'able and streams continuous advertising, keyed off your
> interests from what you type into Word files? Why not? It's the most
> targeted you could ever get, and it would subsidize free Office! What
> a spectacular good!

Recommended reading: The Space Merchants, by Frederick Pohl (with
sequel, The Merchants' War, by Pohl and Kornbluth), featuring a world
in which advertising covers *everything*. (But there's a certain
aspect of "plus ca change" here. Around Boston, there's a species of
Fenway Park traditionalist that is whining about the increasing amount
of advertising within the park. Yet old photos confirm that the left
field wall, a/k/a the "green monster", wasn't always green --- in the
'30s, it was covered with billboards).

rst