The Annoyance Filter.pdf - Fourmilab

§9 ANNOYANCE-FILTER A BRIEF HISTORY OF ANNOYANCE-FILTER 15
9. A Brief History of annoyance-filter.
In a real sense, this program has been twenty-five years in the making. The seed was planted in the 1970’s
while thinking about Jim Warren’s concept of ”datacasting”. He envisioned using subcarriers of FM stations
(or perhaps data encoded in the vertical retrace interval of television signals) to transmit digital information
freely accessible to all. Not Xanadu or the Internet, mind you . . . this remained a one-to-many broadcast
medium, but one capable of providing information in a form which the then-emerging personal computers
could receive, digest, and present in a customised fashion to their users.
“But who pays?” Well, that detail, which played a large part in the inflation and demise of the recent
.com bubble, was central to the feasibility of datacasting as well. Jim Warren’s view was that the primarily
advertiser-supported business model adopted by most U.S. print and broadcast media would be equally
applicable to bits flung into the ether from a radio antenna. As I recall, he cited the experience of suburban
weekly newspapers, which discovered their profits increased when they moved from a paid subscription/percopy
readership to free distribution—circulation went up, advertising rates rose apace, and the bottom line
changed from red to green.
Intriguing . . . but still I had my doubts. When you read a newspaper or magazine, you can’t avoid the
advertising—you can flip past it, to be sure, but you still have to look at it, at least momentarily, so there’s
always the possibility a sufficiently clever image or tag line may motivate you to read the rest. I asked Jim
why, once a document was in an entirely digital form, folks couldn’t develop filters to remove the advertising
before it ever reached their eyes. This would destroy the free distribution model and render an advertisingsupported
digital broadcasting service unworkable. Jim wasn’t too concerned about this. In his estimation,
discriminating advertising from editorial content would require artificial intelligence which did not exist and
wasn’t remotely on the horizon.
That’s when von Mises’ words on advertising came back to me. Advertising is advertising—perforce,
it speaks with a different vocabulary than the sports page, letters to the editor, police blotter, national
and international news, and commentary (aside, perhaps, from Maureen Dowd’s columns in The New York
Times). Given a sufficiently large collection of known editorial copy and advertising, might it not be possible
to extract a signature, in the sense of radar signatures to discriminate warheads from decoys in ballistic
missile defence, with which a sufficiently clever program could identify advertising and remove it, with a
high level of confidence, before the reader ever saw it?
Fast forward—or, more precisely, pause. . . . By the late 1970’s I’d concluded the best strategy to make the
most of the ambient malaise was to amass a huge pile of money. Money may not buy happiness, but at the
very least it would mitigate many of the irritations of that bleak, collectivist era. Being a nerd, I immediately
turned to technology for a quick fix, and what should I espy but an exploding market in affordable home video
cassette recorders—-VCRs—which were, in those days, becoming a fixture in more and more households.
Many VCRs were purchased to play rented movies, but, being also able to automatically record programs
off-the-air on a preset schedule, they could be used for “time-shifting”—recording broadcast programs for
later viewing. But why, thought I, sit though all those tedious commercials you’ve recorded along with the
programs you intend to watch? Certainly, people quickly learned to “zip”—use the fast forward to skip past
commercials—but what if you could detect commercials and “zap” them—never record them in the first
place? It occurred to me that inventing a device which accomplished this might be lucrative indeed.
The concept couldn’t have been simpler—a little box which monitors the video and audio of the channel
you’re recording and, based on real-time analysis of the signal, pauses and resumes recording of the program
on your VCR, yielding a tape free of advertising. It was easy to imagine such a gizmo succeeding like the
contemporary “Demon Dialer” telephone speed dialer add-on, selling in the tens of millions in a matter of
months. 2 Imagine the dismay of advertisers and my own contented avarice as I watched the money bin fill
2 Well of course it occurred to me that widespread adoption of such a device would motivate advertisers to
disguise the tags that discriminated commercials from programs. But hey—by the time that happened I’d
have already cashed the customers’ checks and blown the joint. There was bit of the Ferengi in me then.
Truth be told, there still is.