12 ms·

With all the ad blocking technologies that are coming up, I wonder if Google is devising something to counteract these efforts. For instance, since browser-bas

With all the ad blocking technologies that are coming up, I wonder if Google is devising something to counteract these efforts. For instance, since browser-based ad blockers work from what I know by blocking known domain names, couldn't Google create random subdomains and serve the code from a different subdomain every day or even every few hours, as well as change the way their JavaScript and HTML looks? Even something very expensive to run would be justified with all the money that advertising brings in. If Google can create software that can tell what's in a picture, or if a person in a picture is happy or not, why can't they find a way to fool ad blockers..?

fwn 10y ago
Since all the popular filter lists are public, you could even scan them on the fly to evaluate your likelihood of being blocked. But in the end you probably won't win against someone who really hates ads. - and that's probably better for users as well as advertisers.
- Bedon292 10y ago
  That's another good point. The people who are actively blocking ads are probably not the ones going to click them, even if they are not blocked. So not worth the money to invest in unblocking the ads going to people who aren't going to click them.
  - SamBam 10y ago
    People greatly overestimate their ability to completely ignore ads, and to make purchasing decisions free from influence. Sure, I believe that I am pretty much completely unaffected ads, but then so does almost everybody else.
    - stagbeetle 10y ago
      Be careful with "I believe that I am pretty much completely unaffected ads, but then so does almost everybody else." This is in the same vein of inductive reasoning as "just snap out of your [insert mental illness/addiction/etc.]." "People," in this context, isn't defined either. If however we were to say that by "people" you mean millennials, then you would be wrong. But if you meant "the population at large" you would be correct. Although, the second statement is tangential to the article at hand.
      - SamBam 10y ago
        ...? I think you're misreading my comment. I was suggesting that most people may think they are unaffected by ads, but probably are overestimating their immunity. My second statement was highlighting how ones own opinion of oneself is not objective.
        stagbeetle 10y ago
        > My second statement was highlighting how ones own opinion of oneself is not objective. And I retorted that ones own view of oneself can not be extrapolated onto the population at large if it is not objective. But I should have been clear, when I mean "second statement" I mean so inside my own post. Ex: 1st Statement: "People," in this context, isn't defined either. If however we were to say that by "people" you mean millennials, then you would be wrong." 2nd Statement: "But if you meant "the population at large" you would be correct." Which was in defense of the tech-literate and the young, but after researching some more my statements were based on old information. The only people that come to mind who are easily susceptible to ads are the old and tech-illiterate, i.e those who don't have much experience with ads. Though this is just conjecture.
      - majewsky 10y ago
        The emphasis makes it pretty clear that the statement you're quoting was an ironic one.
        stagbeetle 10y ago
        What's your interpretation of it, because I still don't see it.
        SamBam 10y ago
        "Sure I believe" was quite clearly not meant to be taken literally, as evidenced by the very next half of the sentence. It's like saying "sure, I think think that I'm smarter than everybody else, but then so does everybody else." My point was that people should not take their own assessment of themselves as strong objective evidence about themselves.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - Bedon292 10y ago
      True. I am not meaning to say I am perfect (or that anyone can be), the hunch is just the expected click through rate of someone such as myself is likely much lower than someone who doesn't even know what an ad blocker is.
      - bitJericho 10y ago
        You're more likely to look at an ad if you have an ad blocker. That makes you a prime target.
        stagbeetle 10y ago
        How do you suppose that is? Is it because you believe people use ad-blockers because they're impulsive and can't hold their gaze?
        devonkim 10y ago
        I think it's based upon the idea that people with ad blockers see less ads and so are still sensitive to ad impressions. In contrast, advertisements in really crowded situations (most people that walk about in urban areas, for example) require more effort to stand out as advertising saturation point hits. I mostly combat any ad influence on me by making a point to _not_ buy anything that is advertised. Works out pretty well for helping me keep my sanity and conscience a little.
        bitJericho 10y ago
        That's it exactly. On top of that, you're shocked an ad got through!
Bedon292 10y ago
You would just block *.addomain.com at that point. Which is already what is being done on many of the blockers. There will always be domains to block, even if they add new domains, the blockers will probably be able to block them just as fast.
- SamBam 10y ago
  How about if they load them through *.google.com? Sure, you could whitelist www.google.com, mail.google.com, etc, but couldn't they keep ahead of you if they were ok with using their main domain? They could even start using www.google.com/ad-id
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    Would Google really want to do that? It might be the impetus some people need to say "fuck it" to Google.
  - j_s 10y ago
    Yes, domain fronting through Google App Engine is already helping Signal bypass censorship: https://whispersystems.org/blog/doodles-stickers-censorship/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/doodles-stickers-censorship/ Currently domain-based filtering is probably too small a proportion of traffic to even care about, but as ease-of-use comes to the masses there may come a point where the pro-ad side will implement this.
    - Xylakant 10y ago
      As far a I understand domain fronting works by sending a different host in the SNI header than later in the actual http request, thus hiding the actual requested host from an adversary watching the connection from the outside. This would require cooperation from the sending http stack, in this case the browser. I doubt that this is a viable option in this case.
  - Xylakant 10y ago
    You really wouldn't want them on google.com/something since restricting cookies to sub-uris is a painful mess. Subdomains is slightly easier, but also easier to block.
ggcdn 10y ago
Could the website server make the requests to the ad networks, then serve the responses as if it were native content? Current browser-based blocking tech would be rendered useless, right?
- taejo 10y ago
  No, adblockers also use things like div ids, and potentially even heuristics like image shape.
  - tajen 10y ago
    Safari itself is an ad-blocker, with its "reader mode". I could hardly imagine opening a newspaper page without it. Actually, my iPad 2 isn't powerful enough anymore to open a newspaper page, except if I use the reader mode.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      Firefox as well. I use Pocket as a perferred reader generally, though its failure to provide a means of navigating directly to sites, or of showing a navbar, is annoying. (Pocket ... has multiple annoyances. It's better than the alternatives, so far as I've tried, but that is one hellaciously low-set bar.)
legohead 10y ago
Ad blockers do a lot more than just block domains. They look for and remove divs/DOM elements that contain known ad naming schemes and remove them from the page. And if a site decides to start combating the ad blockers, the adblock list providers will update their rules specifically for the site in question. Adblock users get upset whenever they see ads, and report them pretty quickly. The business I work for tried blocking adblockers and after a bit of back and forth they trumped us by blocking all AJAX requests on our site. We gave in after that.
- ikeboy 10y ago
  Start loading essential content via AJAX?
  - legohead 10y ago
    When over 30% of your userbase is adblocking, it's not worth it. Your users will complain to you, not the adblockers. They don't even understand what's going on. Asking your users to whitelist the site doesn't work, either.
    - majewsky 10y ago
      Pro-tip: Lazy-load the imprint link and support form so that these adblocking bastards cannot annoy you. /s
      - dserodio 10y ago
        I got bitten by this on https://about.gitlab.com/contact/ https://about.gitlab.com/contact/ I thought "hey, the Newsletter and Security Notices icons aren't clickable", opened a ticket, and found that the input and submit elements that should be under those icons were being blocked by disconnect.me :)
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    How about eschewing shitty ad networks and actually delivering relevant ads?
dbg31415 10y ago
Not that enough people use them at the moment, but loading from random sources would mess up Content Security Policies. * Security/Guidelines/Web Security - MozillaWiki || https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Guidelines/Web_Security#Content_Security_Policy https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Guidelines/Web_Security#Co... Mozilla makes a good tool to let you scan and report on this sort of thing for any site. * Observatory by Mozilla :: Scan Results for news.ycombinator.com || https://observatory.mozilla.org/analyze.html?host=news.ycombinator.com https://observatory.mozilla.org/analyze.html?host=news.ycomb...
jcfrei 10y ago
The most promising front against ad blockers is forcing users to access your content with an application you control. That's why more and more websites want you to install their apps (Google search is installed by default on lots of android devices). It's very unfortunate that the incentives of users and content creators / advertisers aren't aligned very well and we will probably end up with most content creators dumbing down their web experiences in favor of better mobile applications.
- hedora 10y ago
  I think pi-hole will at least partially block such things -- it intercepts at the network level. I guess you could have the app break itself if the ads won't load, but you can (mostly) do that in a browser. I guess, for network level ad blockers, I'm not seeing obvious advantages to a program written as an app vs a program written to run in a browser.
  - jcfrei 10y ago
    As others have mentioned, you could just serve ads and content from domains which you wouldn't want to block, like www.google.com. And if an app receives its content encrypted (eg. SSL) you can't do a lot of filtering at the network level apart from domain names.
    - hedora 10y ago
      True. I want to be able to add my own root ssl cert to my phone for this exact reason. Then it will think that my MITM adblock proxy is the real deal. This should work great for web browsers. It does get a bit nastier for apps.
    - literallycancer 10y ago
      Yeah, you can always make it a pain to block ads.. but then who will use it?
    - Sunset 10y ago
      We'll just move to neural networks to detect and remove ads.
benologist 10y ago
I think Google can save ads about as effectively as AOL can save dialup. Probably their plan is to just milk advertising until the last Windows 95 computer dies too.
- sfifs 10y ago
  Unfortunately, ads pay for a lot of web content just like they pay for most TV content. The 5% (of which pretty much all of HN is a part of) can probably afford to pay for the cost of creating that content. The 95%, consisting of not just hourly wagers but also salaried folks generally can't afford to. The trade off is ad supported content. So it's very unlikely to die off.
  - benologist 10y ago
    Something like 2/3 of millennials are blocking ads which means Google has already encountered just about everyone willing to consume their advertising. Ad-supported websites would be unprecedented if anyone really cared about them not having to find a new way to make money. Nothing truck drivers want is going to make driving trucks a career forever either.
agumonkey 10y ago
Decreasing ads will hurt sites that aren't providing enough value I guess. Maybe others that could but were fragile. Cynically a natural selection of some sort.
JoshMnem 10y ago
Google makes efforts to prevent ad-blocking: - Google Chrome for mobile doesn't allow add-ons so you can't install ad-blockers. (You can install browser extensions with Firefox for Android.) - Google Chrome uses a dark pattern where the address bar tends to send users to the Google search results page instead of to their final destination (compare the behavior with Firefox's). That means that even if you have an ad-blocker, many users are likely to click on Google ads on the way to the destination site, even if they are blocked on the destination site. - Android doesn't provide fine-grained permissions control or root access, so users can't block ads. - Some of their content is designed to coerce users to buy restricted Android-based content-consumption devices. For example, you can't buy movies on YouTube and watch them HD in Google Chrome (at least on my computer). You have to buy another computer that doesn't have root access (an Android device) in order to consume the videos in HD. Once you're on the restricted device, it's harder to block ads. - Google introduces projects like AMP that try to convince webmasters to restrict their monetization options and make it easier to appify the WWW. AMP even serves your content from Google's servers. The more control of the content they have from server-to-eyeball, the more options they have for stopping ad-blockers (and the worse it is for open technology).
- CannisterFlux 10y ago
  Here's another one I spotted recently: - Android apps like YouTube and Google News use a built-in browser frame to show navigated-to web pages, rather than opening them in an external browser. The built-in frame uses Chrome tech, without add-ons. They used to allow you to open links by default in an external browser, but not any more.
  - arthurfm 10y ago
    > The built-in frame uses Chrome tech, without add-ons To block ads in Chrome Custom Tabs [1][2] you can either use Chromer [3] to change the custom tab provider to Brave [4] or use the article mode in Chromer. [1] https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/android/customtabs https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/android/customtabs [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/5ahlfq/dev_psa_chromer_already_supports_the_newly/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/5ahlfq/dev_psa_chr... [3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=arun.com.chromer https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=arun.com.chrom... [4] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brave.browser https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brave.brow...
m-p-3 10y ago
Some devices like the Chromecast and some Chromebook do not use your network DNS settings by default and rely on 8.8.8.8 / 8.8.4.4 for DNS queries.
- 24gttghh 10y ago
  Seems like one could block google's DNS servers -or perhaps even all DNS requests not destined for your pi-hole server in this example- on the router side and the Chromecast will fallback to what DHCP is providing.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Firewall rewrite rules, direct to the DNS server of your choice. IP (and BGP) are ultimately concensus realities.
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
> With all the ad blocking technologies that are coming up, I wonder if Google is devising something to counteract these efforts. AMP
7ewis 10y ago
I believe Pi Hole have tried to block YouTube Ads but Google randomise the domains they serve those ads from, and also from what I have read, they also serve some fundamental features via those domains too. So if you kill the ads, you kill YouTube.
- ashark 10y ago
  Could youtube-dl the video then redirect the browser to a locally-served (locally from the pi-hole device, that is) page embedding the video, provided you've got the disk space to cache it and don't mind waiting a bit for the video to download (admittedly a lot of caveats here, but could work for many people). That'd actually be a better experience for most sites youtube-dl supports, I'd think, not just Youtube.
- dghughes 10y ago
  I used a PiHole for a while and when using it YouTube had no ads at all zero ads but I wasn't sure if it was the Samsung TV YouTube app or Google. Before that I would be bombarded by ads for every video and then in the middle of any video that ran more than 30 minutes. I don't mind a few ads I get the concept but 95% of the ads were just two companies Wix and Grammarly over and over.
- majewsky 10y ago
  Youtube ads can be blocked when you whitelist domains. I never see Youtube ads in my uMatrix-equipped browsers with a whitelist of: youtube.com apis.google.com script allow youtube.com googlevideo.com * allow youtube.com gstatic.com * allow youtube.com s.ytimg.com script allow youtube.com ytimg.com * allow
arjie 10y ago
First party advertising. And native advertising.
glasslobster 10y ago
The web advertising firm I work for has random looking domains for that purpose. The current domain generation algorithm seems to be using one to two domains a month. Although I've don't have access to any of the frontend code, I can only assume the DOM elements on the page are also obscured/randomized to an extent. It is also my understanding that some of our boxes are here solely to proxy requests (either assets or websockets, which are increasingly popular in the field) to 3rd parties, to make sure it bypasses client side countermeasures.

fwn 10y ago

Since all the popular filter lists are public, you could even scan them on the fly to evaluate your likelihood of being blocked. But in the end you probably won't win against someone who really hates ads. - and that's probably better for users as well as advertisers.

Bedon292 10y ago
That's another good point. The people who are actively blocking ads are probably not the ones going to click them, even if they are not blocked. So not worth the money to invest in unblocking the ads going to people who aren't going to click them.
- SamBam 10y ago
  People greatly overestimate their ability to completely ignore ads, and to make purchasing decisions free from influence. Sure, I believe that I am pretty much completely unaffected ads, but then so does almost everybody else.
  - stagbeetle 10y ago
    Be careful with "I believe that I am pretty much completely unaffected ads, but then so does almost everybody else." This is in the same vein of inductive reasoning as "just snap out of your [insert mental illness/addiction/etc.]." "People," in this context, isn't defined either. If however we were to say that by "people" you mean millennials, then you would be wrong. But if you meant "the population at large" you would be correct. Although, the second statement is tangential to the article at hand.
    - SamBam 10y ago
      ...? I think you're misreading my comment. I was suggesting that most people may think they are unaffected by ads, but probably are overestimating their immunity. My second statement was highlighting how ones own opinion of oneself is not objective.
      - stagbeetle 10y ago
        > My second statement was highlighting how ones own opinion of oneself is not objective. And I retorted that ones own view of oneself can not be extrapolated onto the population at large if it is not objective. But I should have been clear, when I mean "second statement" I mean so inside my own post. Ex: 1st Statement: "People," in this context, isn't defined either. If however we were to say that by "people" you mean millennials, then you would be wrong." 2nd Statement: "But if you meant "the population at large" you would be correct." Which was in defense of the tech-literate and the young, but after researching some more my statements were based on old information. The only people that come to mind who are easily susceptible to ads are the old and tech-illiterate, i.e those who don't have much experience with ads. Though this is just conjecture.
    - majewsky 10y ago
      The emphasis makes it pretty clear that the statement you're quoting was an ironic one.
      - stagbeetle 10y ago
        What's your interpretation of it, because I still don't see it.
        SamBam 10y ago
        "Sure I believe" was quite clearly not meant to be taken literally, as evidenced by the very next half of the sentence. It's like saying "sure, I think think that I'm smarter than everybody else, but then so does everybody else." My point was that people should not take their own assessment of themselves as strong objective evidence about themselves.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Bedon292 10y ago
    True. I am not meaning to say I am perfect (or that anyone can be), the hunch is just the expected click through rate of someone such as myself is likely much lower than someone who doesn't even know what an ad blocker is.
    - bitJericho 10y ago
      You're more likely to look at an ad if you have an ad blocker. That makes you a prime target.
      - stagbeetle 10y ago
        How do you suppose that is? Is it because you believe people use ad-blockers because they're impulsive and can't hold their gaze?
        devonkim 10y ago
        I think it's based upon the idea that people with ad blockers see less ads and so are still sensitive to ad impressions. In contrast, advertisements in really crowded situations (most people that walk about in urban areas, for example) require more effort to stand out as advertising saturation point hits. I mostly combat any ad influence on me by making a point to _not_ buy anything that is advertised. Works out pretty well for helping me keep my sanity and conscience a little.
        bitJericho 10y ago
        That's it exactly. On top of that, you're shocked an ad got through!

Bedon292 10y ago

You would just block *.addomain.com at that point. Which is already what is being done on many of the blockers. There will always be domains to block, even if they add new domains, the blockers will probably be able to block them just as fast.

SamBam 10y ago
How about if they load them through *.google.com? Sure, you could whitelist www.google.com, mail.google.com, etc, but couldn't they keep ahead of you if they were ok with using their main domain? They could even start using www.google.com/ad-id
- M_Grey 10y ago
  Would Google really want to do that? It might be the impetus some people need to say "fuck it" to Google.
- j_s 10y ago
  Yes, domain fronting through Google App Engine is already helping Signal bypass censorship: https://whispersystems.org/blog/doodles-stickers-censorship/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/doodles-stickers-censorship/ Currently domain-based filtering is probably too small a proportion of traffic to even care about, but as ease-of-use comes to the masses there may come a point where the pro-ad side will implement this.
  - Xylakant 10y ago
    As far a I understand domain fronting works by sending a different host in the SNI header than later in the actual http request, thus hiding the actual requested host from an adversary watching the connection from the outside. This would require cooperation from the sending http stack, in this case the browser. I doubt that this is a viable option in this case.
- Xylakant 10y ago
  You really wouldn't want them on google.com/something since restricting cookies to sub-uris is a painful mess. Subdomains is slightly easier, but also easier to block.

ggcdn 10y ago

Could the website server make the requests to the ad networks, then serve the responses as if it were native content? Current browser-based blocking tech would be rendered useless, right?

taejo 10y ago
No, adblockers also use things like div ids, and potentially even heuristics like image shape.
- tajen 10y ago
  Safari itself is an ad-blocker, with its "reader mode". I could hardly imagine opening a newspaper page without it. Actually, my iPad 2 isn't powerful enough anymore to open a newspaper page, except if I use the reader mode.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Firefox as well. I use Pocket as a perferred reader generally, though its failure to provide a means of navigating directly to sites, or of showing a navbar, is annoying. (Pocket ... has multiple annoyances. It's better than the alternatives, so far as I've tried, but that is one hellaciously low-set bar.)

legohead 10y ago

Ad blockers do a lot more than just block domains. They look for and remove divs/DOM elements that contain known ad naming schemes and remove them from the page. And if a site decides to start combating the ad blockers, the adblock list providers will update their rules specifically for the site in question. Adblock users get upset whenever they see ads, and report them pretty quickly. The business I work for tried blocking adblockers and after a bit of back and forth they trumped us by blocking all AJAX requests on our site. We gave in after that.

ikeboy 10y ago
Start loading essential content via AJAX?
- legohead 10y ago
  When over 30% of your userbase is adblocking, it's not worth it. Your users will complain to you, not the adblockers. They don't even understand what's going on. Asking your users to whitelist the site doesn't work, either.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    Pro-tip: Lazy-load the imprint link and support form so that these adblocking bastards cannot annoy you. /s
    - dserodio 10y ago
      I got bitten by this on https://about.gitlab.com/contact/ https://about.gitlab.com/contact/ I thought "hey, the Newsletter and Security Notices icons aren't clickable", opened a ticket, and found that the input and submit elements that should be under those icons were being blocked by disconnect.me :)
- Spooky23 10y ago
  How about eschewing shitty ad networks and actually delivering relevant ads?

dbg31415 10y ago

Not that enough people use them at the moment, but loading from random sources would mess up Content Security Policies. * Security/Guidelines/Web Security - MozillaWiki || https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Guidelines/Web_Security#Content_Security_Policy https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Guidelines/Web_Security#Co... Mozilla makes a good tool to let you scan and report on this sort of thing for any site. * Observatory by Mozilla :: Scan Results for news.ycombinator.com || https://observatory.mozilla.org/analyze.html?host=news.ycombinator.com https://observatory.mozilla.org/analyze.html?host=news.ycomb...

jcfrei 10y ago

The most promising front against ad blockers is forcing users to access your content with an application you control. That's why more and more websites want you to install their apps (Google search is installed by default on lots of android devices). It's very unfortunate that the incentives of users and content creators / advertisers aren't aligned very well and we will probably end up with most content creators dumbing down their web experiences in favor of better mobile applications.

hedora 10y ago
I think pi-hole will at least partially block such things -- it intercepts at the network level. I guess you could have the app break itself if the ads won't load, but you can (mostly) do that in a browser. I guess, for network level ad blockers, I'm not seeing obvious advantages to a program written as an app vs a program written to run in a browser.
- jcfrei 10y ago
  As others have mentioned, you could just serve ads and content from domains which you wouldn't want to block, like www.google.com. And if an app receives its content encrypted (eg. SSL) you can't do a lot of filtering at the network level apart from domain names.
  - hedora 10y ago
    True. I want to be able to add my own root ssl cert to my phone for this exact reason. Then it will think that my MITM adblock proxy is the real deal. This should work great for web browsers. It does get a bit nastier for apps.
  - literallycancer 10y ago
    Yeah, you can always make it a pain to block ads.. but then who will use it?
  - Sunset 10y ago
    We'll just move to neural networks to detect and remove ads.

benologist 10y ago

I think Google can save ads about as effectively as AOL can save dialup. Probably their plan is to just milk advertising until the last Windows 95 computer dies too.

sfifs 10y ago
Unfortunately, ads pay for a lot of web content just like they pay for most TV content. The 5% (of which pretty much all of HN is a part of) can probably afford to pay for the cost of creating that content. The 95%, consisting of not just hourly wagers but also salaried folks generally can't afford to. The trade off is ad supported content. So it's very unlikely to die off.
- benologist 10y ago
  Something like 2/3 of millennials are blocking ads which means Google has already encountered just about everyone willing to consume their advertising. Ad-supported websites would be unprecedented if anyone really cared about them not having to find a new way to make money. Nothing truck drivers want is going to make driving trucks a career forever either.

agumonkey 10y ago

Decreasing ads will hurt sites that aren't providing enough value I guess. Maybe others that could but were fragile. Cynically a natural selection of some sort.

JoshMnem 10y ago

Google makes efforts to prevent ad-blocking: - Google Chrome for mobile doesn't allow add-ons so you can't install ad-blockers. (You can install browser extensions with Firefox for Android.) - Google Chrome uses a dark pattern where the address bar tends to send users to the Google search results page instead of to their final destination (compare the behavior with Firefox's). That means that even if you have an ad-blocker, many users are likely to click on Google ads on the way to the destination site, even if they are blocked on the destination site. - Android doesn't provide fine-grained permissions control or root access, so users can't block ads. - Some of their content is designed to coerce users to buy restricted Android-based content-consumption devices. For example, you can't buy movies on YouTube and watch them HD in Google Chrome (at least on my computer). You have to buy another computer that doesn't have root access (an Android device) in order to consume the videos in HD. Once you're on the restricted device, it's harder to block ads. - Google introduces projects like AMP that try to convince webmasters to restrict their monetization options and make it easier to appify the WWW. AMP even serves your content from Google's servers. The more control of the content they have from server-to-eyeball, the more options they have for stopping ad-blockers (and the worse it is for open technology).

CannisterFlux 10y ago
Here's another one I spotted recently: - Android apps like YouTube and Google News use a built-in browser frame to show navigated-to web pages, rather than opening them in an external browser. The built-in frame uses Chrome tech, without add-ons. They used to allow you to open links by default in an external browser, but not any more.
- arthurfm 10y ago
  > The built-in frame uses Chrome tech, without add-ons To block ads in Chrome Custom Tabs [1][2] you can either use Chromer [3] to change the custom tab provider to Brave [4] or use the article mode in Chromer. [1] https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/android/customtabs https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/android/customtabs [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/5ahlfq/dev_psa_chromer_already_supports_the_newly/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/5ahlfq/dev_psa_chr... [3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=arun.com.chromer https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=arun.com.chrom... [4] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brave.browser https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brave.brow...

m-p-3 10y ago

Some devices like the Chromecast and some Chromebook do not use your network DNS settings by default and rely on 8.8.8.8 / 8.8.4.4 for DNS queries.

24gttghh 10y ago
Seems like one could block google's DNS servers -or perhaps even all DNS requests not destined for your pi-hole server in this example- on the router side and the Chromecast will fallback to what DHCP is providing.
dredmorbius 10y ago
Firewall rewrite rules, direct to the DNS server of your choice. IP (and BGP) are ultimately concensus realities.

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

> With all the ad blocking technologies that are coming up, I wonder if Google is devising something to counteract these efforts. AMP

7ewis 10y ago

I believe Pi Hole have tried to block YouTube Ads but Google randomise the domains they serve those ads from, and also from what I have read, they also serve some fundamental features via those domains too. So if you kill the ads, you kill YouTube.

ashark 10y ago
Could youtube-dl the video then redirect the browser to a locally-served (locally from the pi-hole device, that is) page embedding the video, provided you've got the disk space to cache it and don't mind waiting a bit for the video to download (admittedly a lot of caveats here, but could work for many people). That'd actually be a better experience for most sites youtube-dl supports, I'd think, not just Youtube.
dghughes 10y ago
I used a PiHole for a while and when using it YouTube had no ads at all zero ads but I wasn't sure if it was the Samsung TV YouTube app or Google. Before that I would be bombarded by ads for every video and then in the middle of any video that ran more than 30 minutes. I don't mind a few ads I get the concept but 95% of the ads were just two companies Wix and Grammarly over and over.
majewsky 10y ago
Youtube ads can be blocked when you whitelist domains. I never see Youtube ads in my uMatrix-equipped browsers with a whitelist of: youtube.com apis.google.com script allow youtube.com googlevideo.com * allow youtube.com gstatic.com * allow youtube.com s.ytimg.com script allow youtube.com ytimg.com * allow

arjie 10y ago

First party advertising. And native advertising.

glasslobster 10y ago

The web advertising firm I work for has random looking domains for that purpose. The current domain generation algorithm seems to be using one to two domains a month. Although I've don't have access to any of the frontend code, I can only assume the DOM elements on the page are also obscured/randomized to an extent. It is also my understanding that some of our boxes are here solely to proxy requests (either assets or websockets, which are increasingly popular in the field) to 3rd parties, to make sure it bypasses client side countermeasures.