That a company behind an ad-blocking tool should defend ad-blocking should hardly come as a surprise, but that is precisely what has happened. Ad blockers have been much talked about since Apple opened up support for them in iOS 9. The now infamous Peace shot to the top of the download charts before it was pulled by its creator.

Now AdBlock Plus has come out in support of Marco Arment who developed something of a guilty conscience after his ad blocking creation proved so popular. Ben Williams from AdBlock Plus says "I really applaud this guy", going on to suggest that whitelisting and the Acceptable Ads feature of AdBlock Plus epitomize the "more nuanced, complex approach" Arment called for.

Ad-blockers are proving to be extremely popular with the early adopters of iOS 9. Shortly after the operating system's debut, Peace skyrocketed to the top of the paid apps chart on Apple's App Store, taking Minecraft: Pocket Edition's place on the podium, while rival Purify Blocker has risen to fourth place.

Current leader Peace is the work of iOS developer Marco Arment, best known for the popular read-it-later app Instapaper. Since Peace will surely get the attention of many more users, let's take a look at what it has to offer.

After some time in the beta stage, Adblock web browser for iOS and Android is as of today officially available in version 1.0.

"Adblock Browser for Android was in an open beta for a while now, and thanks to the amazing feedback we received there, we were able to evolve it into something we’re proud to release", it says in the official news post following the release.

Twitter has inadvertently given a wealth of priceless advertising to a Welsh car company despite refusing to run its ads. Used car dealership Ceir Cymru has been operating in North Wales for over 30 years, but has been told that it is not able to advertise in its native tongue.

Twitter Ads supports just a limited number of language, and Welsh is not included. Having applied to use the service Ceir Cymru was told by Twitter that it would not be able to advertise as more than half of its tweets are in Welsh -- hardly surprising for a car dealership in Wales. Ceir Cymru says Twitter is "stamping on minority languages".

The advertising industry could be in for a rude awakening, with the growing adblock trend snatching $21.8 billion in revenue from the web in 2015. This figure is expected to grow, with a report from PageFair and Adobe claiming a potential $41.4 billion in lost advertising revenue by 2016 worldwide.

In the UK, adblock services grew up 82 percent, with 12 million users deciding to block adverts. AdBlock Plus is the most popular service, which provides a large database of blocked adverts alongside some approved adverts that are not obnoxious.

The next update to Apple’s mobile web browser Safari will include a way to block annoying ads, working similar to AdBlock Plus on desktop browsers.

Under the banner of user experience, Apple promoted the new loading system capable of blocking JavaScript, cookies and even images from displaying. The system came to the desktop version of Safari first. Users will be able to opt-in to this experience on iOS 9.

AdBlock Plus has already been in court once this year proving itself to be legal. A German court heard a case brought by a group of TV companies who felt they were getting a poor deal when their ads were blocked.

The internet has something of a love/hate relationship with ad blockers. While surfers love the fact that they clean up the browsing experience, content creators have a source of income crimped. To try to keep everyone happy, AdBlock Plus came up with the idea of Acceptable Ads -- a sort of halfway house between blocking and permitting ads -- and this was something that featured in this most recent court case.

Anybody can develop a mobile app, but making money out of it is another matter. Accepting adversing is a popular route but it involves linking the app to a specific network and that means making code changes if you decide to switch at a later date.

Estonian company MoneyTap is aiming to change that and put the developer in control. We spoke to the company's business development manager Pavel Goryakin to find out how.

Facebook and privacy are not words that generally belong in the same sentence, but a Belgian watchdog has expressed surprise at just how little regard for European law the social network shows. The Privacy Protection Commission says "Facebook tramples on European and Belgian privacy laws", and warns users to take action.

Mark Zuckerberg's site is accused to tracking users even if they are not logged into a Facebook account, and sidestepping questions from European regulators. Although the Privacy Protection Commission is not able to impose fines for failure to abide by European law, it is in a position to offer advice -- and the advice to people is to use software to block Facebook's tracking regardless of whether they use the site or not.

Google is facing something of a European revolution as mobile companies consider blocking ads on a massive scale. Israeli company Shine has developed software that blocks mobile ads, and it has gained the attention and support of a number of telecom companies in Europe.

Talking to the Financial Times, one wireless carrier said that the software had been installed at its data centers and could be enabled by the end of the year. With the potential to automatically block most ads on web pages and within apps, the repercussion of the ad boycott could be huge as mobile providers try to wrestle control from the likes of Google.

The headline may seem a bit outrageous but is a fair assessment of what Big Red gets from its proposed purchase of AOL. The all-cash, $4.4 billion deal would strengthen Verizon's media portfolio, and I wonder: Is this what happens when there is Net Neutrality? ISPs become content carriers?

Verizon's venture cannot be understated for what it means. Like a game of Risk, where players jockey for early-play position and forge alliances with eventual combatants, mobile is a battleground in the making. Territory captured now will mean everything in the future. AOL's content portfolio, which includes Huffington Post, is among the major assets.

Ads are hard to avoid at the best of times, but it has a tendency to get a little worse in the run-up to Christmas. Advertising has become increasingly prolific on social networks, and this is certainly true of Facebook. As we enter the holiday season, Facebook is providing advertisers with advice that will enable them to deliver finely-tuned ads at highly specific sets of users.

If you picked yourself up a new tablet in the Black Friday or Cyber Monday sales, Facebook makes it possible for advertisers to pick you out of the masses. The social network is not only rolling out a couple of new features to help with targeted advertising, but also providing tips for more successful campaigns.

If you are a MacBook Air user, chances are you are pretty happy with your device. It may not be the fastest or the lightest laptop around, but it has a great keyboard, gets amazing battery life, is more affordable than ever, can run Windows, and, thanks to iOS 8 and OS X 10.10 Yosemite, works great with iOS 8 devices. Even Microsoft is impressed, calling it "great" and "delightful".

Microsoft, however, believes you can do better. In a new video ad made for this holiday season, the software giant once again aims to make MacBook Air users finally see the light, and realize that the device they should be using is Surface Pro 3. But if MacBook Air is already "great" and "delightful", why would someone want to switch?

Facebook is ready to shake up its advertising efforts through a new platform that has already been dubbed by some as having the potential to be more powerful than Google’s current offering.

Atlas, which should be announced next week, allows marketers to track Facebook users that have seen, interacted with or acted upon ads on the social network, as well as third party sites and applications.

A shocking new report looking at online advertising shows that there has been a huge increase in the number of internet users making use of ad blocking tools. The report describes ad blocking as having gone mainstream, but it also suggests that the loss of ad revenue threatens the life of many websites.

Pagefair worked with Adobe putting together the report and found that 4.9 percent of internet users make use of ad blockers, including more than a quarter (27.6 percent) of those in the US.