thing is, the advertisers will never do that - simply because their business model relies on tracking impressions and so forth. Hence they have to serve the ads on their own web platforms.
Then each publisher (operator of a web site that includes ads) could make a subdomain that is a CNAME (DNS-based alias) pointing at the ad server. In this way, the ad server will share the same public suffix as the rest of the publisher's site. So how will your browser be able to tell it from a subdomain that's actually operated by the publisher?
Who cares about Facebook?
People who want to use websites that require Facebook login. It is impossible to post on Answers.com or The Huffington Post without having a Facebook account that is "verified" (tied to the unique number of a phone capable of sending and receiving SMS messages). Spotify used to be the same way.
Nobody is forced to buy from a specific company (exclusive supply contracts or biased tender processes aside)
Copyright is similar in effect to an "exclusive supply contract". If the article you're interested is on a scriptwalled site, and no other article is authorized to carry the article, too bad.
Make them text or basic images like JPG or GIF (but then they couldn't hijack your speakers and blow your ears off, what fun is that?) and NO FLASH ADS because flash zero days are one of the biggest attack vectors out there
I agree, as does the featured article: "In addition, users who dislike the distraction of Flash-based advertising can install browser add-ons that just block Flash content, such as Flashblock for Firefox and Chrome." Flashblock for Firefox is the middle ground that I've been choosing for years. And before that became available, I had a practice of hosts-blocking any ad server that served SWF on a site. Slashdot was surprisingly one of the first sites I saw that showed an SWF ad for Splunk log analysis software, and whatever server was serving it was the first to get 0.0.0.0'd in my hosts file.
(but then they couldn't get "teh big bux" for having the most annoying Goatse of ads spewed on their pages)
Yeah, the article quotes the VP of some web advertising consulting firm who whines that static ads have an unviably low CPM. Boo hoo.
Contributors: already have encoder
Not all of them do. Contributors might have a decoder for use with their cameras but not a licensed encoder to encode footage to the correct bitrate, profile, etc. Besides, the thumbnailer on Wikimedia's servers (for resizing HD video down to SD and LD) still needs an encoder.
you do realise that h264 is royalty free encoding
Is it also royalty-free to obtain a lawfully made copy of the encoder software in the first place? Wikimedia is a U.S. company.
As far as I can see the formats have no technical, quality, or resource utilisation benefits, it comes down to licensing.
H.264 would require Wikimedia Foundation to utilize more of the resources (that is, money) donated to it.
Old programmers never die, they just hit account block limit.