Hasta La Gadget!

By Klint Finley for WIRED.

The Coalition for Better Ads, a consortium of ad, publishing, and tech companies, wants to save the advertising industry — by killing it. Or at least parts of it. Companies in the coalition will discuss, among other idea, pre-installation of a selective ad-blocker on web browsers as a means to effectively purge the internet of the most intrusive types of ads, such as those that automatically play sound, take-up too much of your screen, or force you to wait a certain amount of time before you can dismiss them.

The idea was first reported Thursday by The Wall Street Journal, which suggested that ad-blockers would be built into Google’s Chrome web browser and turned on by default.

“We do not comment on rumor or speculation,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “We’ve been working closely with the Coalition for Better Ads and industry trades to explore a multitude of ways Google and other members of the Coalition could support the Better Ads Standards.”

READ MORE: The Ad-Blocking Browser That Pays the Sites You Visit

Stuart Ingis, counsel for the Coalition for Better Ads, says the group will begin discussing specific ideas in coming weeks, though it would be six months to a year before anything is implemented. “To my knowledge Google has not made any decision,” Ingis says. “But certainly a natural way to solve this problem would be in the browsers, whether it’s Google or Microsoft or Apple or any of them.” Ingis doesn’t like to call this ad-blocking, because ad-blocking is generally associated with indiscriminate blocking of all ads on all sites.

Whatever solution the group arrives at, Ingis says, Google won’t be making decisions for the industry unilaterally. The ad formats that are blocked will be decided by the coalition’s members based on its research on what types of ads consumers find most intrusive. The technology, if the coalition moves forward with it, will likely be eventually supported by other browsers as well. (WIRED publisher Conde Nast is a member of Digital Content Next, a trade group that is part of the Coalition for Better Ads.)

It might sound strange for advertising companies to embrace ad-blocking in any capacity, but there is a clear upside to instating this practice. About 26 percent of internet users have ad-blockers on their computers, according to a survey conducted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, and and about 10 percent use ad-blockers on their phones. The main reason people use ad-blockers, according to survey, is that ads make sites slower and harder to navigate. If the advertising industry can keep people from installing more strict ad-blocking tools by blocking the worst offending advertisements — or get some of those people who already use ad-blockers to turn them off — then perhaps it can save more advertising revenue than it stands to lose by running noisy ads that take over your screen.

RELATED: No One Can Stop Ad Blocking. Not Even Facebook

Last month, the Coalition for Better Ads published research to determine which specific ad-formats and behaviors most bother people. Based on this research, it created the “Better Ads Standards,” which will form the basis of any efforts the group takes to kill-off bad ads and promote good ones.

What the group hopes to do is discourage the use of annoying and intrusive advertising practices across the web in an attempt to win back consumer trust. Advertisers and ad-purchasers will play an important role in this by shifting their spending to publishers and ad-networks that only run ads that comply with the coalition’s guidelines says John Montgomery, the executive vice president of brand safety at GroupM, a Coalition member and the largest ad-purchasing agency in the world. Browser-makers like Google and Microsoft, however, could also play a role by not just blocking annoying ads, but blocking all ads on sites that include ads that violate the coalition’s guidelines.

That would be even more controversial than just selectively blocking ads, but it would also likely be the most effective way to pressure even the sketchiest of websites to comply. Google Chrome alone was used by about 53 percent of all web users last month according to web analytics company StatCounter. Few publishers are likely to risk losing more than half their ad-views just to run a few obnoxious ads. Ingis says if the group does go down this route, it will make sure decisions about which sites are blocked and which aren’t made by a single company, and that there will be an appeals process for publishers that feel they’ve been treated unfairly.

But the Coalition for Better Advertising is still only addressing one part of the problem with digital advertising. The thing is, web ads aren’t just annoying. They can also be dangerous.

Last year several mainstream sites, ranging from the New York Times to nfl.com, accidentally served ads containing code that tried to install malware on users’ computers. It wasn’t an isolated incident. Security researchers have been complaining about the scourge of “malvertising” for years. Meanwhile, adtech companies have a tendency to slurp up as much data about you as possible, likely violating your privacy in the process.

Most people use blockers for the sake of convenience, but many others use them to protect their privacy and reduce their risk of attracting malware. Ingis says that the Coalition for Better Ads isn’t looking at privacy–at least not yet — but other industry groups like the IAB are working on data protection and security standards for the industry. Until the industry cleans up its privacy act, ad-blockers will still be relevant.

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Who would ever cheat on Salma Hayek?

Well, not her husband, French businessman François-Henri Pinault. But that didn’t stop the 50-year-old actress from accusing him of having an affair after a hilarious misunderstanding.

On Friday, Hayek told Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show” that she recently saw a suspicious message on her husband’s phone from some multilingual woman named “Elena,” who was inviting Pinault to practice English with her.

“I was so furious, and I said, ‘Well, obviously she’s desperate,’” Hayek told Fallon in the video above.

Later that night while the couple was having dinner, Hayek tried to play it cool, but quickly lost her chill.

“I’m eating and I go, ‘Who the hell is Elena?!’”

Turns out the message was not from “Elena,” but from ELSA — an English-language learning app. Apparently Pinault, was just trying to work on his enunciation of English words.

That is too cute. Or rather, T͟Hət iz too kyo͞ot.

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Looks like it’s going to be a busy week of terrible news…

1. The French election will see Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen face off in another vote to take place on May 7th. A political noob and a right wing whack job… France is just looking for attention! More here.

2. China wants Donald Trump and Korea to chill. Since when did China become the voice of reason? More here.

3. Meanwhile, US government may screech to a halt as Friday’s funding deadline looms for the federal budget. Nobody in Team Trump knows what they’re doing so it looks like we’re headed for a government shutdown. More here.

4. The Taliban executed a deadly attack on an Afghan military base, killing up to 140 soldiers. More here.

5. Another day, another story about Uber being shitty. This is the slowest fall from grace we’ve ever witnessed. More here.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Good news for anyone who’s ever felt like a complete dolt when it comes to tasting wine. If you can’t detect the notes of wild blackberries, turpentine and baby bumblebees that were promised on a wine menu, it’s not just you.

It turns out no one is born with a talent for these things, not even sommeliers. Wine-tasting expertise is something you must ― and can ― develop with practice.

Let’s repeat that: You can become definitively better at tasting wine by drinking more wine. This is sounding good, right?

In her New York Times-bestselling book Cork Dork, author Bianca Bosker takes a high-speed journey from wine plebian to certified sommelier in just a year and a half, tasting her way through an unimaginable number of wines, eventually training her brain to think like a legitimate sommelier.

Bosker, who used to be the executive tech editor at HuffPost, started off like most of us ― barely able to tell the difference between a red and a white without looking. But by the end of her training, she could wear a blindfold and tell you she was drinking a chardonnay from Burgundy with a 2013 vintage.

She passed a sommelier certification test at the end of her journey, but Bosker wanted to prove her expertise in a completely objective way. To do that, she let science prove how her brain had changed.

“A lot of skeptics think sommeliers are at best, delusional, and at worst, frauds,” Bosker told HuffPost. “There are all these studies that show if you give wine experts a glass of white wine and a glass of white wine dyed red, they fall for it.”

“That doesn’t look good for sommeliers. It’s embarrassing,” she continued. “I wanted to know, was there such a thing as wine expertise? What does science tell us wine expertise looks like?”

After her extensive training, she took a spin through an fMRI machine to find out.

“Following the design of two iconic experiments, I took an fMRI test in which they compared my brain to the brain of an amateur wine drinker,” Bosker explained. “And in fact the pattern of activity in my brain was the same as the pattern of activity of these trained sommeliers in previous landmark studies.”

“Having looked at the scans, there’s a visible difference between people who’ve gone through wine training and amateur drinkers in the number of areas of the brain, and the location of the areas of the brain, that light up in response to flavor in wine,” she explains. “Essentially, in the amateur drinker, the brain is just not as active ― it activates the emotional part of the brain. But with training, we respond to that same flavor stimuli by engaging the parts of our brains involved in memory, reasoning and decision making.”

I think a lot of us have this idea that with taste and smell, we’re either born like bloodhounds or we’re not. And that’s not true.
Bianca Bosker

It wasn’t easy for Bosker to reach that level of expertise. Under the direction of trained professionals who could provide her with guidance along the way, she deprived herself of things like scented detergent, raw onions, perfume and even coffee to clear the way for an elevated sense of smell and taste. She also tasted more wines over 18 months than most of us will taste in our entire lives ― eroding her tooth enamel in the process. She studied thousands of flashcards, and many days she was drunk by noon, all for the sake of retraining her brain.

“I think a lot of us have this idea that with taste and smell, we’re either born like bloodhounds or we’re not. And that’s not true; it’s more like a muscle that we can improve and strengthen with training,” Bosker said.

But how can those of us who can’t dedicate a year and a half to intensive wine-tasting training learn to develop our sense of smell and taste? Bosker explains that we need to embrace the practice of sense-fulness.

“A really key first step is to develop a library of smells that you know and can recognize,” Bosker says. “One of my mentors gave me homework to label the smells of everything I encountered over the course of the day. When I was in the shower, that meant calling out the olfactory notes of my shampoo. ‘It smells like passion fruit with a little bit of artificial apple.’ When you’re cooking, take a moment to sniff the rosemary before you put it in the pot, and say the word ‘rosemary’ and try to describe it ― even the color that it evokes or the shape that comes to mind. It’s the same process as learning a word. If you have the capacity to learn words, you have the capacity to develop a fantastic sense of smell.” 

Even if you’ve never yearned to possess sommelier-level wine expertise, Bosker’s book makes a more general point about the way we experience food and drink. She illuminates an interesting flaw in our culture:

“This whole experience made me aware of this paradox in foodie culture, which is that we settle for secondhand sensing,” Bosker said. “We spend all this time and money and effort chasing down food that tastes better, but we rarely take the time to teach ourselves how to taste well. The result is that we let price or label or flowery menu descriptions substitute for our own self experience.”

“Wine has the ability to take us places, to make us wonder about the world, to help us travel through time. And much of that happens via the smell. But it’ll only happen if you’re primed to pay attention.”

When our parents told us that practice would pay off, we never imagined it would apply to drinking wine. It sounds like we should’ve listened.

Pick up your copy of Cork Dork, published by Penguin Books.

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