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I won't be turning off my ad blocker, but why can't ad blockers disguise themselves? Surely there's a way to trick their site into believing I have a normal ad

by exodust 11y ago

I won't be turning off my ad blocker, but why can't ad blockers disguise themselves? Surely there's a way to trick their site into believing I have a normal adblock-free browser. Even a per-site whitelist kind of thing, whereby popular sites with adblock detection can be dealt with via addon scripts - say for uBlock.

andrenotgiant 11y ago
It's just the nature of adblocking. The adblocker prevents certain JS from loading. Sites can easily check which JS has loaded.
- fwn 11y ago
  I think - if i didn't misunderstood it - the uBlock Origin author came up with something like a resource library for exactly that reason. Sadly I can't find a explainatory page on it right now; a possible resource file is located at: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/assets/ublock/resources.txt https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/assets/ublock/...
- facetube 11y ago
  Ad blockers could pretty easily fetch resources and just throw them away to work around this, or insert workalike shims if it's happening client-side.
  - dylz 11y ago
    You'd still have to execute the JS - how do you expect an adblocker to emulate an abusive tracker like http://cdn4.forter.com/script.js?sn=3326ea178bfb http://cdn4.forter.com/script.js?sn=3326ea178bfb (bonus: check out the way it abuses fake sourcemaps to try and hide from devtools, and additionally log with identifying information via a network request if you are trying to debug their scripts)
TeMPOraL 11y ago
In general sense, because of the halting problem. JavaScript is Turing-complete. Ad blockers work by ensuring that some parts of the site are selectively not loaded or not executed. Ad blocker detectors can check whether some code was executed. Halting problem prevents ad blockers from being able to counter all such checks in the general case. So it's not even worth starting that arms race.

by exodust 11y ago

andrenotgiant 11y ago

It's just the nature of adblocking. The adblocker prevents certain JS from loading. Sites can easily check which JS has loaded.

fwn 11y ago
I think - if i didn't misunderstood it - the uBlock Origin author came up with something like a resource library for exactly that reason. Sadly I can't find a explainatory page on it right now; a possible resource file is located at: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/assets/ublock/resources.txt https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/assets/ublock/...
facetube 11y ago
Ad blockers could pretty easily fetch resources and just throw them away to work around this, or insert workalike shims if it's happening client-side.
- dylz 11y ago
  You'd still have to execute the JS - how do you expect an adblocker to emulate an abusive tracker like http://cdn4.forter.com/script.js?sn=3326ea178bfb http://cdn4.forter.com/script.js?sn=3326ea178bfb (bonus: check out the way it abuses fake sourcemaps to try and hide from devtools, and additionally log with identifying information via a network request if you are trying to debug their scripts)

TeMPOraL 11y ago

In general sense, because of the halting problem. JavaScript is Turing-complete. Ad blockers work by ensuring that some parts of the site are selectively not loaded or not executed. Ad blocker detectors can check whether some code was executed. Halting problem prevents ad blockers from being able to counter all such checks in the general case. So it's not even worth starting that arms race.