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Princeton’s Ad-Blocker May Put an End to the Ad-Blocking Arms Race

477 points by hourislate 10y ago

throwaway13337 10y ago
What would a post-ad-supported web looks like? Only selling user data without a way to use it to target ads? Consumer software that isn't free? Sock puppet marketing run rampant? It would sure be a different world.
- jpalomaki 10y ago
  Maybe we will see more "sponsored content".
- news_to_me 10y ago
  I'm hoping it would be something based on micropayments, maybe through a service like flattr. That would keep content accessible (for a small, affordable fee) and completely block out the bad actors (i.e. advertisers).
  - theandrewbailey 10y ago
    I've been hearing lots of good things about Patreon, especially from Youtube personalities. I haven't heard of Flattr being used much recently.
    - LeoPanthera 10y ago
      Patreon works around the concept of subscriptions, rather than one-off payments. One-off payments seems like the better idea, and a cryptocurrency seems like a natural fit. Perhaps not bitcoin, since the fees are so high, but maybe ethereum or litecoin.
      - jerf 10y ago
        The problem with one-off payments is that payments are just that... one-off. If you make $500 this month, the correlation on making $500 next month isn't strong enough for most people to feel very comfortable trying to make a living or reliable hobby out of whatever you're trying to pay them for. The long tail is generally going to have "hits" where they spike up on certain posts or videos or whathave you, but those are unreliable. People don't generally like their income to follow a power law. So I think that's where the core Patreon advantage lies; get around 1000 people to give you 1-5$ a month and you're living a middle class lifestyle with some reasonable assurance that next month you're not going to make 1/50th what you made last month. (It isn't perfect, but nothing is. There is not a single person reading this who can guarantee me with mathematical 100% precision that next month they're going to have positive income.) In fact I'd point out that when it comes down to it, the incentives created by pervasive, automatic micropayments looks almost identical to what we have now. Clickbait, low-effort high-volume articles would rule. There would be fewer trackers, but that would be about it. I like what the Patreon ecosystem puts out waaaay better than that. I think you actually need that bit of detachment between the product and the payment, if you ever want to see a work produced with a thought other than "How many clicks can this exact article get?" Patreon artists are not severed from the need to make sure they stay popular with their base but at least they can go down tangents and be speculative sometimes without it instantly trashing a noticeable portion of their income.
        news_to_me 10y ago
        > The problem with one-off payments is that payments are just that... one-off. That makes it pretty similar to ad-supported sites now. The difference is, the revenue comes from the user, who is more likely to incentivize good content. > In fact I'd point out that when it comes down to it, the incentives created by pervasive, automatic micropayments looks almost identical to what we have now. That's a really good point, and as you mention that's pretty much what we have now. I would think that in a micro-payment based world, where you have to pay a bit to read an article, publishers would gain reputation to protect against this. If it cost a teeny bit of my own money to look at a buzzfeed quiz, I'd probably stop doing that pretty quickly. But I do agree that it isn't the best model for all sites, and it would be nice to offer micro-payments along with Patreon-style subscription, for those who know they'll want content from this site a lot. Kind of like how newspapers used to work.
    - Rmilb 10y ago
      Flattr just got got bought by Adblock Plus...
- jpmattia 10y ago
  > What would a post-ad-supported web looks like? Probably a lot like the pre-ad-supported web.
  - LeoPanthera 10y ago
    Gopher!
  - kalleboo 10y ago
    Minuscule?
- flubert 10y ago
  How does HN pay the server bills, etc.? Is it essentially paid for as a marketing / recruiting aid out of ycombinator funds? Or is it a charity paid for by PG?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - mschuster91 10y ago
    > How does HN pay the server bills, etc.? I believe it's two relatively simple servers running the Arc code of HN, and Cloudflare as CDN. HN does not need much processing power or bandwidth - 5 assets (cacheable+versioned CSS/JS, three tiny gifs) and thanks to gzip usually two-digit KB sizes of content. The only real expense is the manpower needed for moderation.
    - ythn 10y ago
      > The only real expense is the manpower needed for moderation. dang, who would want to do that as their job?
      - bradknowles 10y ago
        Punmeister Meisterpunner sees what you did there. ;)
  - srtjstjsj 10y ago
    PG has explained that HN is an ad for YC, both indirectly, and directly (YC companies inject "sponsored posts" into HN frontpage, to advertise jobs.)
- nkrisc 10y ago
  I imagine part of it might look like some sites already look today. Ads that are not served through third-party ad networks, but are created and displayed by the owners of the site based on direct relationships with advertisers and sponsors.
- dpflan 10y ago
  HTTP 402's and cryptocurrencies (fractional payments for access)? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7857236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7857236 I remember talking to a friend who was trying out 21co's "bitcoin" computer and that 402+cryptocurrency payment seemed like something to evolve from that project. It seems to have changed focus a bit since that discussion. https://21.co/ https://21.co/
  - pjc50 10y ago
    Isn't there a global limit of 3 bitcoin transactions per second and a cost of about $10 in electricity too? 21.co was an obvious scam with near zero sales.
    - Rmilb 10y ago
      7 trans actions per seconds. But there are several changes in the pipline to fix this. One solution is having "off-chain" transactions not on the main blockchain, this would allow us to not record every coffee purchase made in bitcoin to be stored on the main chain. Look up Lightning Network if you are interested in how this is being done. Your main point is correct that Bitcoin can only handle 7 tps while Visa can handle 20,000 tps.
- pmoriarty 10y ago
  It could go the cable television route, where gatekeepers get paid for monthly subscriptions to 200 channels. Similarly, on the web gatekeepers like Facebook could get paid for monthly subscriptions to content from 200 websites (more than anyone could ever need, right?).
- visarga 10y ago
  > What would a post-ad-supported web looks like? It was possible, even though most people disagreed at the time, to make open source thrive and write the largest, most complete encyclopedia. Stackoverflow filled with answers without pay. An ad-free world would be ok, people are creative, we can make our own stuff. I, for example, read mostly comment threads, research papers and watch user made videos. We don't need their content and ads at all.
  - Myrmornis 10y ago
    In an ad-free world, only the affluent members of society would pay for access to intelligent journalism. The rest of society would be a mixture of information-starved, and fed information by special interest groups that provide content more cheaply than the paywalls. EDIT: Just to be clear, my own opinion is that online advertising is a horrifically ugly, cynical blight on the human experience, which causes huge amounts of unintelligent visual content to be put in front of billions of human brains. But an ad-free future is hugely problematic for the maintenance of a well-informed society, and we have seen where a dumb electorate gets us.
    - pg314 10y ago
      Isn't that what we have currently? Quality journalism seems hard to pull off with only online ads. Most of it nowadays is supported by subscriptions and/or print editions. They help subsidize free access to some of the content.
      - Myrmornis 10y ago
        Would you say that, today, most people who read quality journalism do so by paying subscriptions? I'm not sure about that. The Guardian is one obvious exception, but I agree the center-right newspapers have moved to subscription. It's very broken though. The whole idea of paying a subscription for a newspaper is outdated -- it's based on the days when the head of household would select a newspaper and have it delivered to the house before breakfast. Most of the time when I'm reading news online I'm wasting time that I would prefer to be using productively, so there's no way I'm going to pay for that. Additionally, there's so much good free material on the internet that there's not enough incentive to pay for it. I think the major newspapers should accept that the days of a single cathedral-like website for their newspaper where devotees will spend hours are gone; if we could pay a small amount effortlessly on a per-article basis, choosing between many different sources, that might make sense.
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  > What would a post-ad-supported web looks like? Maybe something like steemit
devy 10y ago
> Another technique used to hide the ad blockers' activities is even more impressive. They are able to "create two copies of the page, one which the user sees (and to which ad-blocking will be applied) and one which the publisher code interacts with, and to ensure that information propagates between these copies in one direction but not the other." So this ultimate ad-blocker would potentially consume twice as much resources as it would have been?
- nickbail3y 10y ago
  This was my question as well.
- randomwalker 10y ago
  Coauthor of the paper here. No --- this is not one of the three techniques that we implemented. It was a hypothetical suggestion for future work. Unfortunate that the article didn't make that clear. Here is the paper http://randomwalker.info/publications/ad-blocking-framework-techniques.pdf http://randomwalker.info/publications/ad-blocking-framework-... Here is our blog post about it: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2017/04/14/the-future-of-ad-blocking/ https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2017/04/14/the-future-of-ad-bl...
  - ktta 10y ago
    Looks like you've accidentally repasted the paper URL for the blog post
    - randomwalker 10y ago
      Oops! Thanks, fixed.
  - wernercd 10y ago
    Just a throw out question: One of the biggest issues (IMO) is the security threat... if there is a second copy that "we" don't see, doesn't that mean that the second copy can do "bad things" still? Case in Point: Forbes requests you disable ad-blocker... then serves pop-under malware: http://www.networkworld.com/article/3021113/security/forbes-malware-ad-blocker-advertisements.html http://www.networkworld.com/article/3021113/security/forbes-... I could stomach ads - just like I stomached commercials on TV shows... you get used to them and they become white noise... if the ads were unobtrusive and non-invasive (IE: Google Search Results)... it's full screen, pop-up/under, audio, video, etc. Then throw on top of that malware... What's to stop the malware from biting on that second copy?
justboxing 10y ago
> [DELETED]
- news_to_me 10y ago
  It literally says after that, "'To avoid taking sides on the ethics of ad-blocking, we have deliberately stopped short of making our proof-of-concept tool fully functional—it is configured to detect ads but not actually block them,' Narayanan said."
  - nyolfen 10y ago
    perhaps someone will fork it soon?
- itp 10y ago
  This is research, not an attempt to make an extension for you. They're not looking for beta-testers, or users, or anything other than to have done research and share their work.
- belovedeagle 10y ago
  This is answered in TFA.
- rhizome 10y ago
  Don't mean to jump on you, but yesterday you posted with the interesting fact that you'd never heard of SWOT before. Maybe hang back a bit more next time? Maybe do some Googling so you don't come off like "I'm 12 years old and what is this?"
  - justboxing 10y ago
    I really hadn't heard of SWOT.
    - rhizome 10y ago
      Did we need to know that? Is it an interesting discussion topic?
nyolfen 10y ago
here's a direct link to the whitepaper: http://randomwalker.info/publications/ad-blocking-framework-techniques.pdf http://randomwalker.info/publications/ad-blocking-framework-...
bagacrap 10y ago
Doesn't this blocker still require you to load and render the ads so they can apply their vision techniques to them? You won't get any performance win and you'd still see empty popovers or blank space. I don't see how detecting that something is an ad is enough on its own to create an effective ad blocking solution. The part about defeating known anti-ad blockers seems rather unfair. If this technique did gain popularity I'm sure there would be ways around it (like tricking it into thinking the button used to dismiss a popover is itself an ad).
- news_to_me 10y ago
  It sounds like part of their premise is that won't happen because of legal reasons - to some extent, ads have to be identifiable.
  - pmiller2 10y ago
    It already happens. Misleading ads are one of the big reasons I use an adblocker.
- lol768 10y ago
  > Doesn't this blocker still require you to load and render the ads so they can apply their vision techniques to them? Definitely seems that way from what I understood. Seems like a novel technique, but not something I'd personally flock to use unless my network/element based rules suddenly became ineffective. Rather than being used via an extension in the client's browser though, this technology looks like it could be incredibly useful for automatically figuring out rule changes and updating e.g. the element hiding rules automatically.
- juiyout 10y ago
  It might be possible that for an ad-blocking system that, for all visitors to a specific page, vision analysis only has to be applied once on that specific page and share that post-analytic knowledge publicly. Then all future visitors would benefit from that previous analysis knowledge and block the ad without yet another vision analysis on the same specific page. to scope with pages changing widly, the system can assign 5% of the visitors to each specific page to perform new vision analysis and update the findings.
nickbail3y 10y ago
According to the article, current adblockers like Ublock Origin aren't searching for keywords in the page elements for ads, they're just using human maintained lookup lists? That's very surprising. I would have thought that would be the first avenue of attack for adblockers. Also, who wants to help me retrofit this thing to actually block ads?
- LeoPanthera 10y ago
  > they're just using human maintained lookup lists? That's correct. The lists are maintained here: https://forums.lanik.us https://forums.lanik.us
  - mi100hael 10y ago
    I'm pretty sure at least some of the popular adblockers out there block based on basic keywords as well. We had some users complain that an adblocker was blocking valid parts of our web app because some of the page elements had IDs that started with '#ad-' since 'A.D.' was an internal abbreviation for one of our features.
  - nickbail3y 10y ago
    Very interesting, thank you.
- oxguy3 10y ago
  Blocking a URL or a CSS class name can be done very efficiently/easily with a browser extension, while running OCR on an ad (most ads are images/videos rather than pure text) to find keywords is much more difficult and computationally expensive. Apparently Princeton made it work, but it's definitely a much more difficult approach to take.
  - monochromatic 10y ago
    Finally a reason to upgrade my processor.
- asquabventured 10y ago
IIIIIIIIIIII 10y ago
This is not the end of the arms race. At some point we will have AI designing and AI delivering ads, and while we may have AI designed to prevent us from having to watch ads we don't want we will also have AI that watches everything, gathering and filtering information that is too much for us to handle but tuned to our needs since it's "our AI". Then the race will be that one AI wants to trick the consumer AI into giving their information more weight and attention. So instead of the race humans against humans we'll have a race humans => AI ("sellers" of anything, from goods to news) => AI (consumers) => human (us). It's going to be a lot more complex: Right now all that people on both sides have to know is human psychology. In that future they'll have to understand the potentially far more varied world of possible AIs - and if that isn't enough the complex interactions between them and also between the AIs and the humans. Are we creating the diversity and complexity that we remove from the biosphere (the ongoing mass extinction and/or reduction of many species) anew but in a completely different space? In addition to technical systems we are also getting much better (and better faster!) in controlling biological systems, creating our own ideas. At least some programmers of the future will write their code in DNA - or possibly even something more complex, something that can encode completely new proteins that the current code can't represent. And then there's combining biology and technology... an explosion of complexity and diversity? I studied CS more than two decades ago. I kept up to date and continue to do the odd course in my field, but what I consider an amazing experience (for an IT guy) was when I spent the last few years taking hundreds of hours of courses in biology and medicine. Looking for new ideas? Take an introduction to biology and genetics course instead of learning an only very mildly different programming language, for example (free): https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-biology-secret-life-mitx-7-00x-5 https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-biology-secret-life-...
- deleted 10y ago
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- RangerScience 10y ago
  Check out "General Adversarial Networks". It's basically training a two-part AI via an arms race; one part is trying to fake out the other, the other is trying to detect the fake.
polskibus 10y ago
This is a beginning of a new arms race, not an end. We'll now see an explosion of machine cheating and computer blinding techniques.
- rhizome 10y ago
  I guess look for salaries to explode in adtech.
  - lern_too_spel 10y ago
    If the overall effectiveness of Internet advertising decreases, the amount of money spent on adtech will decrease correspondingly.
ktta 10y ago
If anyone want's the source of the proof of concept extension[1] here's a link to get it. Just use wget https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx?response=redirect&os=linux&arch=x86-64&nacl_arch=x86-64&prod=chromecrx&prodchannel=stable&prodversion=57.0.2987.133&x=id%3Dmahgiflleahghaapkboihnbhdplhnchp%26uc https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx?response=red... You should just be able to unzip it. [1]:https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/perceptual-ad-blocker/mahgiflleahghaapkboihnbhdplhnchp?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/perceptual-ad-bloc...
- blacksmith_tb 10y ago
  Or you could add some fangs to it yourself[1] by forking it... 1: https://github.com/citp/ad-blocking/tree/master/perceptual-adblocker https://github.com/citp/ad-blocking/tree/master/perceptual-a...
  - Animats 10y ago
    From the description, it only finds very specific types of ads: For Facebook ad detection, it finds newsfeed items by looking for containers within the given width constraints and border on the side; it looks for the sidebar ads by searching for containers with the proper size constraints in a sidebar. It then determines which newsfeed items are ads by searching for the "Sponsored" link within them and checking whether this link ultimately goes to the Facebook "about ads" page. For Adchoices detection, it runs a content script in every iframe which searches all of the images, (those explicit in an img element, those in the background-image css, and those drawn as an svg) and then uses fuzzy hashing to compare them to example Adchoices icons. If any of the images match, it highlights the iframe as an advertisement. That won't remove a typical banner ad, or an ad popup.
    - hla19 10y ago
      Assuming this is true, why do we need AI for something like this? We can build a repo of images that's used to show ads, and just block by images. There's a pretty big multiplier on number of visitors to the number of ad pictures.
peterwwillis 10y ago
"A favorable legal climate and the existence of browsers friendly toward ad-blocking extensions are two key factors that may tip the scales toward users." On the technical side, Google can just close up its browser, prevent ad-blocking malware, require only compliant browsers to connect to its site, and all sites that depend on advertising dollars can jump on board. Unless they decide to simply change the regulations, which doesn't take the same investment in time, development, and bad PR. Once faced with having to pay for the internet again, people will be fine with either of those options.
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  I have a hard time understanding what you are trying to say. > Once faced with having to pay for the internet again Don't you have to pay an ISP for your internet connection right now ? Apart from the ISP when exactly did anyone had to "pay for the internet" ?
downandout 10y ago
The article puts a significant emphasis on the idea that bulletproof ad-blocking technology, assuming that's what this turns out to be in practice, will work long-term becuase of legal restrictions imposed by the FTC. If Google, Facebook, or other multi-billion dollar entities detect an existential threat arising from this or any other technology, rest assured that the laws will change as quickly as is necessary to keep them happy. Lobbyists will be paid, and donations will be made. Anti-ad-blocking laws will be introduced, or the FTC's ad identification restrictions will be relaxed. Ads aren't going anywhere, and neither are advertisers.
- deleted 10y ago
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  - deleted 10y ago
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- jpambrun 10y ago
  Not sure Anti-ad-blocking laws are practically enforceable. Even with the ad labeling requirements relaxed, unless it is truly deceptive, a CNN could identify it just as well (or better) than we can.
  - downandout 10y ago
    Interesting question. Given the incredible latitude that courts have afforded to the CFAA, if a site put in its TOS that accessing it with an ad blocker enabled is prohibited, would that be actionable? Could ad blocking companies in such a case be held liable for tortious interference and/or conspiracy to violate the CFAA? I don't know the answer, but I can certainly see a lower court ruling that way before it is decided by the Supreme Court. To be sure, that's where this would be headed if this kind of technology becomes ubiquitous and effective.
  - turblety 10y ago
    Already you have restrictive software/firmware running on your computer. Look into Intel ME (Management Engine) a likely backdoor into your computer you have no control over, don't know what it does, and can not disable it. It already helps many DRM applications to restrict what content you can play and how. Legislation to disable adblocking could be reinforced already be implemented into the next generation of Intel/AMD chips so you bet this could be enforceable.
mdpopescu 10y ago
I think these guys haven't read pg's Submarine [1]. Assuming everything works as they claim (it won't), the ads will just pretend to be articles. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- wtetzner 10y ago
  At least it might prevent ads from causing sites to be unusably slow.
- darkstar999 10y ago
  Yeah, can this thing block product placement in youtube videos? Didn't think so.
  - BillinghamJ 10y ago
    There are laws about that too, but most YouTubers ignore them unfortunately
- Pxtl 10y ago
  Actually, I'm hoping this will be the future - ads hosted by the server instead of fetched by the client. Then when an ad service hosts malicious code it'll infect the server instead my my goddamned machine. What with foreign tracking cookies and ads and whatnot, the ability to refer to content on another domain within a website seems to be a user-hostile feature in the end, as much as allows for creative infrastructure models for providers.
ams6110 10y ago
I use a hosts file, and uBlock Origin. I can't remember the last time I've seen an ad on a website. I'm thinking there's not a lot of room for improvement.
- AndyNemmity 10y ago
  As have I for almost 2 decades now, some variation of a hosts file and an ad blocker. My most downvoted comment ever on reddit was concerning not seeing ads. I had forgotten they existed (I didn't use mobile at the time). It's been a solved problem forever, and yet so few people seem to know about it.
- sdabdoub 10y ago
  There's a lot of background work to keep uBlock and other services current. A hosts file needs updating when domains change or new ones are added. That's part of the appeal of this approach, it doesn't matter what domains ads are served from.
BugsJustFindMe 10y ago
"Because advertisers must comply with these regulations..." Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. sigh
iamben 10y ago
At risk of being very unpopular, am I the only person that doesn't mind ads? I mean some are pretty intrusive, but largely I'm happy to make the trade off. I'll look at (and maybe click on) your ad, if it means you have the cash to bring me what I want to look at. It's fantastic to think we live in a world where the web can support itself without ads, but it's not really practical, is it? Some stuff I'd support - but the best thing about the web is that I can dip in and out of sites completely based on one off content, knowing I don't have to pay before I read. And the HN crowd is the sharp end of the web. A lot of us ARE likely to support the web in another way. The blunt end not so much. They're also the ones more likely to click on ads.
- wtetzner 10y ago
  I wouldn't mind ads so much if they weren't implemented so poorly. Much of the web ends up being unusable, because ads slow down the rendering and mess with the usage of so many web pages.
- eropple 10y ago
  For a long time I didn't adblock, because I do believe in paying it forward. But--set aside the psychological battery enacted to make you Believe In The Brand and still, at this point, advertising is a threat vector. Text ads? Don't mind them. Image-based ads like Project Wonderful? Also fine. But I block a lot of ads now just because I can't evaluate effectively the safety of their payloads.
  - grangerg 10y ago
    This is the only reason I use an ad-blocker. They are often an attack vector for 0day exploits. They remove that risk and the block comes off.
- JBReefer 10y ago
  I have 0 problem with websites that serve up ads that: 1. Are from their own domain 2. Are not flash/autoplaying video 3. Don't track me/aren't ad tech 4. Actually have something to do with the content Run a homebrewing site? Great, run ads for stuff to do with that. I'll probably click on them, I am looking up homebrewing info! Run a homebrewing site that serves me ads for refrigerators, because I looked at one on Amazon three weeks ago? That's creepy, and that's getting blocked. Same with pop ups pop unders etc. Advertisers seem to be moving in the same direction - Viacom has reported a lot of wins over the ad-tech insanity.
throwaway91111 10y ago
An ad blocker is worthless without also clicking on ads to inject noise. Use Ad Nauseum.
aub3bhat 10y ago
Wait they don't even have a fully working implementation, and yet VICE is already proclaiming it as an end of Ad-blocking wars? Color me skeptical. Now I know that the original authors did not write the clickbait headline or even the article, but working on Ad blocker is a poor use of resources. On a longer time horizon websites that cannot be supported via Ads will turn into Apps that require multiple permissions + FB/Google login. This type of effort is frankly futile, you might win the battle on Ad-blockers but you are guaranteed to lose the War of economic incentives. But hey in the meantime some clueless reporter writes a breathless article about your imaginary triumph on something everyone likes to hate, so why not. Also as far as their scheme of detecting "adchoices" icon or container sizes, it can be trivially circumvented. When it comes to circumventing such algorithms, disorganized hackers routinely do that for far more secure things. Organized well paid engineers at Ad tech companies can probably beat them in couple of days if not hours. Worse their scheme penalizes good companies that opt-in into adchoices. So a site operator is forced to choose shadier ad networks (guaranteeing higher revenue) which this scheme won't be able to block. As a result the user gets a worse experience! As much as it is in vogue to hate advertisers, crippling someone's business model (whatever your cute ethical reasons might be) while using institutional resources is not a great idea. Princeton CS might soon find itself on wrong side of a lawsuit, where upvotes and retweets might not count much.
- quotemstr 10y ago
  These techniques also work fine in the mobile world, and they can be applied at the OS level, where apps can't observe that their graphical output is being manipulated.
make3 10y ago
Just change the alpha values in the `coverContainer` function in `utils.js` and it actually blocks ads. Patched `utils.js`: https://pastebin.com/YLyN2uJ8 https://pastebin.com/YLyN2uJ8
- sauwan 10y ago
  This is probably obvious, but where is that file?
  - make3 10y ago
    The chrome extension file (.crx) is a zip file (with meta data). Just unzip it and you'll find the files, including the 'utils.js'.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- imglorp 10y ago
  Covering is not as good as not loading. Loading brings all the malware, the tracking, and the bandwidth/load times.
  - derefr 10y ago
    "Not loading" doesn't make sense in the case where the ad is inline in the response body (i.e. "part of the site", like Facebook's ads are.) Which is the case where this ad-blocker uniquely shines. Besides which, the algorithm involved is a computer-vision one, so the ad needs to be rendered before the algorithm can recognize it as an ad. The best solution here, if you want maximum privacy, would be to use a traditional ad-blocker as a first-line defence, and this algorithm as a second-line, for the ads which make it past regular ad-blocking (and which are therefore probably inline-content ads anyway.)
    - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
usernametbd 10y ago
Unless the display technology is changed from html, css and js to something opaque for a client, like a video stream of content, ad blocking will always be there and effective even if there are laws against it.
mattb314 10y ago
Slightly related question from a non-expert in ad-blocking: is it possible to block interstitial ads? While the freedom to render a page as you wish seems to come with controlling the browser on your computer, I can't imagine any way to circumvent the ads the obstruct the entire page and force you to wait for a few seconds before seeing content. Obviously you can just choose not to render them, but if the server can just delay serving article content until X seconds after the interstitial loads, it seems like the fundamental advantage here lies with the publisher and not the user. While submarine ads and lobbying are obvious responses to the Ad-blocker proposed above, wouldn't interstitials (which personally bother me much more than sponsored facebook posts) also gain popularity?
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  no script, no interstitial.
robrenaud 10y ago
You don't get to claim you won the arms race until you've actually released your thing and it's got some significant adoption. Otherwise you are just landing punches on an opponent who doesn't even know he is getting touched.
pavel_lishin 10y ago
Does this cover the issue of tracking, etc? It seems that in order to detect/block the ad, it must allow it to load - and at that point, the malicious payload is already on my machine, and I've already spent part of my precious allotted bandwidth on someone's idea of profit-making.
- betenoire 10y ago
  This is my thought as well. I avoid ads because of the additional resources they require, network requests, javascript, etc. Not because my eyes can't handle them
  - Eric_WVGG 10y ago
    Same. I’ve wasted several minutes whitelisting various ad networks for the maniacs at Forbes and Wired, but when they say “we rely on ads, stop being a dick” and I try to comply; it turns out they’re not talking about ads at all.
mankash666 10y ago
State of the art in advertising today, is pusing it via websockets. This extension failed to detect those ads. PornHub is one example, with plenty others using webSockets.
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  It seems to me that current content blockers had already addressed websockets for ads. here: https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/5aqlok/pornhub_bypasses_ad_blockers_with_websockets/ https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/5aqlok/pornhu...
teaneedz 10y ago
So much wasted development effort. I applaud Princeton and this team though. Ad tech is just a flawed attempt to monetize user data which has alienated users. Online ads are a security and privacy risk. Developers need to stop supporting ad tech completely. Put the effort into more beneficial endeavors. If only ... advertisers and publishers had listened and took UX seriously.
deleted 10y ago
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quotemstr 10y ago
Corey Doctorow predicted this event in his prescient 2012 article "The coming war on general-purpose computing": http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html He's talking about DRM as it applies to downloaded content, but the same argument applies to web advertising.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
That is a pretty clever attack and I think the reasoning is pretty solid, if the FTC requires that humans can 'tell' that something is an Ad then a machine learning algorithm can too. I'd love to see how effective this is on a Google page like a search for 'free credit card'. The last time I checked that query had exactly 1 organic result on the page, and if this worked as described you'd get a google page with just one result. That would be kind of amusing in its own way.
downloadthisad 10y ago
I thought this was hacker news. If you dont want something to be downloaded to your computer restrict your computer from downloading it. If you dont know how to do this then learn so. This cannot be stopped. At the point it can be stopped the computer you have is no longer your computer. Like when the car you have is being driven by a computer and Tesla does not allow you to do self maintenance it is no longer your car. So dont buy computers that restrict you from full access to the software (I dont think this has been done yet). And dont buy Tesla cars. Unless you like the product and dont mind renting or dont value complete ownership.
- palunon 10y ago
  >So dont buy computers that restrict you from full access to the software (I dont think this has been done yet). It is done, right now, on any (recent) Intel computer. https://web.archive.org/web/20161005075537/http://www.alexrad.me:80/discourse/why-rosyna-cant-take-a-movie-screenshot.html https://web.archive.org/web/20161005075537/http://www.alexra... https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/intel-me-and-why-we-should-get-rid-of-me https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/intel-me-and-why-we-shou... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Technology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Tech...
rdiddly 10y ago
So circumspect are they. There's as much of an 'ethical dilemma' here as there's a climate change debate. In other words, there's the truth and then there's a ton of wishful thinking & misinformation trying to sound legitimate. "A lie ain't a side of the story."
cbhl 10y ago
I really would rather that banner and pop-up ads go away altogether, and that they be replaced with native advertising. This war is silly.
gaag2 10y ago
Ads are necessary for business!
orblivion 10y ago
The war on ads is like the war on drugs. This is just going to create more ruthless ad cartels. There is a demand to be met, it will find its way to the consumer, even if it has to plow over 50 others in the process. The question is, what is the online ad equivalent of legalizing drugs?
- ouid 10y ago
  in what way, except for the grammatical structure of the phrase, is the war on ads similar to the war on drugs?
  - orblivion 10y ago
    As I alluded to, in both cases, there's a demand to be met, and there's a strong social resistance to having that demand to be met. Advertisers annoy 99.9% of us, but there's the 0.1% that demand something that they don't yet know about. There's money to be made, and satisfaction to be had, if only the connection of knowledge could be made. So I'm saying, perhaps instead of thinking in terms of blocking the knowledge, which will tend to get there one way or another, I wonder if there's a solution in terms of finding a less disruptive way to get the knowledge there. It would make advertising less lucrative.
    - ouid 10y ago
      you're not making your case very well, these are still superficial parallels.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
accountyaccount 10y ago
It doesn't work on Facebook's autoplay video ads, so that didn't last very long...
ageyfman 10y ago
This doesn't address the massive bloat that ads add to the website. I don't mind seeing ads when I browse the internet. I do mind having websites load for 10 seconds because 20 different ad networks are loading their iframes.
jagthebeetle 10y ago
Not seeing a whole lot of discussion about the implementation. Looking through the extension's code (which should be somewhere under your Chrome app files, if not online), briefly, it seems like an unsung hero here is Tesseract.js: http://tesseract.projectnaptha.com/ http://tesseract.projectnaptha.com/. The extension itself seems to do OCR (using Tesseract) on images and look for the string "adchoices", or else the adchoices icon, which yes, is cool: but just want to clarify that the folks at Tesseract seem to be doing the meaty "computer vision" part. EDIT: oh, this isn't markdown.
mrcactu5 10y ago
HIV is kind of like that too, when they circumvented CRISPR. I hear the nearest cure is decades away. Hopefully they have solved ad-blocking.
takeda 10y ago
Allow me to be a bit skeptic about it. This reminds me a lot of Bayesian spam filters. Those things worked great very few false positives and negatives, once Google started using it on a large scale (GMail) spammers started playing the system and often they are successful.
- takeda 10y ago
  Also, as an example, I noticed a spam today with a subject: "Magic pill lets Trump perform better" which is an obvious way to fool bayesian filters.
maverick_iceman 10y ago
Didn't detect any 'sponsored' posts in Facebook.
deleted 10y ago
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dlubarov 10y ago
> Because advertisers must comply with these regulations, the authors imagine an "end game" in which consumers—and ad blockers—ultimately win. I don't entirely agree. Websites have an advantage too: they can withhold the interesting content until a time of their choosing. For example, a blog could - Serve an ad page initially - Include some javascript to load the text of the blog post - Have the request handler for the text do a sleep(10) Then there's not much an ad blocker can do. - They could hide the ad, but then the user is waiting on a blank screen, which is probably an even worse experience for most. - In some cases they could pre-fetch the text, but you can't always predict where the user will go, so it would only work sometimes. - A more advanced ad blocker could mirror a bunch of content and serve it with no delays, but that wouldn't work for personalized content like Facebook timelines.
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  I already encounter similar case with the overuse of unnecessary visual effects, anti adblock and other dark patterns. 3 things can happen: - I use firebug to fix this - I look at source and extract the URL to actual content - I change my user-agent to that of the bot that indexed the content But 99% of the time I don't waste my time with this useless piece of crap and move to the next thing. 0,0001% of the time I sent an informative email to the abuse or contact citing the relevant piece of legislation explaining how this is illegal and what the punishment for this could be.
deleted 10y ago
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ziikutv 10y ago
Interesting read. I like how they took the time to put an update and clarify about what was not tested. Good journalism. Additionally: I wanted to plug (not involved with the project) PI-Hole [1]. You route all traffic through the Raspberry PI which points to custom DNS that filters ads on their end, reducing data usage significantly. This leads to ad block on all devices without the need to install custom software on any of them. [1] https://pi-hole.net/ https://pi-hole.net/ Edit: append reference
scottlegrand2 10y ago
Google doesn't seem to like stuff like this: https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2017/01/05/adnauseam_expelled_from_chrome_web_store/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2017/01/05/adnauseam_expel...
- monochromatic 10y ago
  More reason to use Firefox.
- srtjstjsj 10y ago
  AdNauseum spams clicks to ad servers, which is likely why it was blocked from Chrome. Google doesn't block uBlock, for example.
tyingq 10y ago
Guessing it has the same limitation that thwarts other ad blockers....running well on mobile, especially Android. Google was smart enough to not allow extensions on mobile Chrome. So you are relegated to either 3rd party browsers or weird internal proxy solutions, both of which have downsides. Still excited about serious resources going into ad blocking though.
dirkg 10y ago
What about the many sites who legitimately exist only due to minimal ad revenue, and don't abuse ads, allow malware etc? I'm all for supporting them. Its the sites that pose an actual threat or whose ad:content ration is something ridiculous like 2:3 that are the problem. Esp on mobile.
waylandsmithers 10y ago
Cool! I wonder if this means all advertising on the web will have to be superficial, which might not be a great thing. Maybe eventually we'll feel the same way about ads on the web as we do about ads in film-- a character can't stare into the camera and tell the viewer to go buy a Corona, but if he is asked what he'd like out of the cooler at a barbecue, he can say he wants a Corona. I personally prefer a middle ground, like when magazines print ads with the text "ADVERTISEMENT" or "SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION"
ComodoHacker 10y ago
So with this new revolutionary tech ads will still be loaded into my browser and tracking scripts will still track me? No, thanks, I'll stick with uBlock Origin.
sologoub 10y ago
Don't buy that this is undetectable - browser sends a lot of signals, including position of the mouse and interactions with content, so it's not a big stretch to say that it would be possible to detect interactions or lack thereof in the area that is supposed to be the ad and determine that it's likely blocked. Once detected, publishers are free to not let you consume content via paywalls or simply letting site break. It's also not going to be able to be effective against stitched video, especially if the player playlist doesn't let you skip around easily - at best you'd end up with blank screen for the duration of the ad. Sound is another problem. We need better solutions for advertising, not yet another escalation in blocking that will lead to even more intrusive/annoying behaviors. (Much louder sound from stitched mid-rolls than the content anyone?)
sharmi 10y ago
A few days back, I started working on an high powered machine with a vanilla firefox. Even with just 20-30 tabs open, the software started to crawl. Please note that most of the pages open were either github pages, hn, stackoverflow or articles linked for hn (implying fairly reputable sites). Initially I thought it was the fault of the browser. (That performance was jarring as I am a tab hoarder, frequently having hundreds of tabs open). Only later did I realize that I had not installed Ublock Origin. Did it and Poof! The difference was night and day. What I am trying to say is that, the advantage of ad-blockers is not just the removal of ads but also a significant removal of cruft that adds no value and hogs the system resources. The solution proposed in this article actually renders the page. So, it solves only one of the issues. It could still be beneficial to use it in conjunction with UBlock Origin.
yakult 10y ago
End to the arms race? Hah. The next step is adversarial neural network generated images that fools the OCR while looking relatively normal to human eyes. This war doesn't end until computers pass the Turing test and we build a complete simulation of the end-user into the adblocker/spam filter/marketing call blocker/girl-scout-cookie-seller-doorbell-deactivator.
gwu78 10y ago
I do not have "block ads". I simply do not request them. Users do not intentionally make requests for ads or pixels from tracking servers. Browsers do. Automatically. People writing web pages that aim to cash in on advertising budgets depend on this "feature". However it is optional. I read hundreds of web pages and never see any ads. Because for eading the news I do not use a so-called "modern" browser. It seems the entire web ad industry requires browsers to operate a certain way. If browsers do not follow these assumptions, then the user sees no ads. Despite strange notions like the one in the top-voted comment in this thread, there is nothing that requires any user to use browsers written by people whose salaries are paid directly or indirectly from ad sales revenue. Assuming certain companies were as all-powerful as the commenter suggests, then why not require users to access pages using software written by companies who profit from such web traffic? And make the software proprietary? Surely no one would complain. Thank you sir, may I have another? Let us not forget some of these "multi-billion dollar entities" are just websites. If the traffic dies down, the business of selling ads is no longer feasible. And the company disappears along with the website. It has happened before. 98% of revenue from web traffic/ad sales. Castles made of sand.
- ColanR 10y ago
  I'm guessing you use something like w3m or lynx? (if not, I would love to hear about it) The problem is that text-based browsers of that ilk are not user-friendly to the general population. If you have the knowledge to implement that kind of not-requesting of ads, I bet one of the fringe/experimental browsers (I'm thinking of Vivaldi) would be a great place to implement what you're talking about.
  - shinypotatoe 10y ago
    I use umatrix for not loading ads and for tracking protection. It is a tool to define from which domains a certain website may fetch resources. It is a bit less convenient than a adblocker, because for every new site you have to configure it, but I think it is great. It's really eye opening how many things some websites load that they do not actually need to show the content I am interested in.
avaer 10y ago
Prediction: AI ad blockers become accurate and automatic enough; ads mutate into AI-based transformation of content to include paid placements. The price of the news article or Youtube video of the future is that when you see someone drinking a Pepsi, you can't be sure if they ever actually did that. Or whether your friends saw the Pepsi when they watched the same thing in the other room. And thus ad blockers cease to make sense; you can no longer tell what you'd be missing if you used them unless you're the centralized corporation that hoards this data.
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  Disabling script and going to simple html and css would render this AI-based transformation useless.
LeicaLatte 10y ago
Mother of all blockers. Sounds like your typical knee-jerk solution that has nothing to do with the actual problems.
strokeswan 10y ago
Nobody mentioned Brave browser ?
strokeswan 10y ago
Nobody mentioned Brave browser ? https://brave.com/about_ad_replacement.html https://brave.com/about_ad_replacement.html
mark_l_watson 10y ago
Great article, as much for the tension between people wanting free content and ad free content, and the practical issue of publishers 'keeping the lights on.' I subscribe to Blendle (currently I have another tab open to a Wall Street Journal article by Garry Kasparov about issues with artificial intelligence - I paid Blendle $0.49 from the funds in my account wallet to read this, so Gary and the WSJ get paid). Many Blendle articles I read are only $0.09 or $0.15 - this was an especially expensive one. I think the 'war' over ad blocking might have a beneficial effect in moving content providers to easy to use micro payment systems. Most people I know think that I am crazy for spending small amounts of money to read stuff, but there are costs in life like supporting things we enjoy and charities (I really like Google's One a Day charity clearing house - easy to take 30 seconds and give a dollar or two to some worthwhile cause). The amount many people spend on coffee each day is more than paying for content and donating to One a Day.
alexplainl8ter 10y ago
I would just wrap all my content in whatever terms the legal restrictions require, thus blocking everything.

477 points by hourislate 10y ago

What would a post-ad-supported web looks like? Only selling user data without a way to use it to target ads? Consumer software that isn't free? Sock puppet marketing run rampant? It would sure be a different world.

jpalomaki 10y ago
Maybe we will see more "sponsored content".
news_to_me 10y ago
I'm hoping it would be something based on micropayments, maybe through a service like flattr. That would keep content accessible (for a small, affordable fee) and completely block out the bad actors (i.e. advertisers).
- theandrewbailey 10y ago
  I've been hearing lots of good things about Patreon, especially from Youtube personalities. I haven't heard of Flattr being used much recently.
  - LeoPanthera 10y ago
    Patreon works around the concept of subscriptions, rather than one-off payments. One-off payments seems like the better idea, and a cryptocurrency seems like a natural fit. Perhaps not bitcoin, since the fees are so high, but maybe ethereum or litecoin.
    - jerf 10y ago
      The problem with one-off payments is that payments are just that... one-off. If you make $500 this month, the correlation on making $500 next month isn't strong enough for most people to feel very comfortable trying to make a living or reliable hobby out of whatever you're trying to pay them for. The long tail is generally going to have "hits" where they spike up on certain posts or videos or whathave you, but those are unreliable. People don't generally like their income to follow a power law. So I think that's where the core Patreon advantage lies; get around 1000 people to give you 1-5$ a month and you're living a middle class lifestyle with some reasonable assurance that next month you're not going to make 1/50th what you made last month. (It isn't perfect, but nothing is. There is not a single person reading this who can guarantee me with mathematical 100% precision that next month they're going to have positive income.) In fact I'd point out that when it comes down to it, the incentives created by pervasive, automatic micropayments looks almost identical to what we have now. Clickbait, low-effort high-volume articles would rule. There would be fewer trackers, but that would be about it. I like what the Patreon ecosystem puts out waaaay better than that. I think you actually need that bit of detachment between the product and the payment, if you ever want to see a work produced with a thought other than "How many clicks can this exact article get?" Patreon artists are not severed from the need to make sure they stay popular with their base but at least they can go down tangents and be speculative sometimes without it instantly trashing a noticeable portion of their income.
      - news_to_me 10y ago
        > The problem with one-off payments is that payments are just that... one-off. That makes it pretty similar to ad-supported sites now. The difference is, the revenue comes from the user, who is more likely to incentivize good content. > In fact I'd point out that when it comes down to it, the incentives created by pervasive, automatic micropayments looks almost identical to what we have now. That's a really good point, and as you mention that's pretty much what we have now. I would think that in a micro-payment based world, where you have to pay a bit to read an article, publishers would gain reputation to protect against this. If it cost a teeny bit of my own money to look at a buzzfeed quiz, I'd probably stop doing that pretty quickly. But I do agree that it isn't the best model for all sites, and it would be nice to offer micro-payments along with Patreon-style subscription, for those who know they'll want content from this site a lot. Kind of like how newspapers used to work.
  - Rmilb 10y ago
    Flattr just got got bought by Adblock Plus...
jpmattia 10y ago
> What would a post-ad-supported web looks like? Probably a lot like the pre-ad-supported web.
- LeoPanthera 10y ago
  Gopher!
- kalleboo 10y ago
  Minuscule?
flubert 10y ago
How does HN pay the server bills, etc.? Is it essentially paid for as a marketing / recruiting aid out of ycombinator funds? Or is it a charity paid for by PG?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- mschuster91 10y ago
  > How does HN pay the server bills, etc.? I believe it's two relatively simple servers running the Arc code of HN, and Cloudflare as CDN. HN does not need much processing power or bandwidth - 5 assets (cacheable+versioned CSS/JS, three tiny gifs) and thanks to gzip usually two-digit KB sizes of content. The only real expense is the manpower needed for moderation.
  - ythn 10y ago
    > The only real expense is the manpower needed for moderation. dang, who would want to do that as their job?
    - bradknowles 10y ago
      Punmeister Meisterpunner sees what you did there. ;)
- srtjstjsj 10y ago
  PG has explained that HN is an ad for YC, both indirectly, and directly (YC companies inject "sponsored posts" into HN frontpage, to advertise jobs.)
nkrisc 10y ago
I imagine part of it might look like some sites already look today. Ads that are not served through third-party ad networks, but are created and displayed by the owners of the site based on direct relationships with advertisers and sponsors.
dpflan 10y ago
HTTP 402's and cryptocurrencies (fractional payments for access)? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7857236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7857236 I remember talking to a friend who was trying out 21co's "bitcoin" computer and that 402+cryptocurrency payment seemed like something to evolve from that project. It seems to have changed focus a bit since that discussion. https://21.co/ https://21.co/
- pjc50 10y ago
  Isn't there a global limit of 3 bitcoin transactions per second and a cost of about $10 in electricity too? 21.co was an obvious scam with near zero sales.
  - Rmilb 10y ago
    7 trans actions per seconds. But there are several changes in the pipline to fix this. One solution is having "off-chain" transactions not on the main blockchain, this would allow us to not record every coffee purchase made in bitcoin to be stored on the main chain. Look up Lightning Network if you are interested in how this is being done. Your main point is correct that Bitcoin can only handle 7 tps while Visa can handle 20,000 tps.
pmoriarty 10y ago
It could go the cable television route, where gatekeepers get paid for monthly subscriptions to 200 channels. Similarly, on the web gatekeepers like Facebook could get paid for monthly subscriptions to content from 200 websites (more than anyone could ever need, right?).
visarga 10y ago
> What would a post-ad-supported web looks like? It was possible, even though most people disagreed at the time, to make open source thrive and write the largest, most complete encyclopedia. Stackoverflow filled with answers without pay. An ad-free world would be ok, people are creative, we can make our own stuff. I, for example, read mostly comment threads, research papers and watch user made videos. We don't need their content and ads at all.
- Myrmornis 10y ago
  In an ad-free world, only the affluent members of society would pay for access to intelligent journalism. The rest of society would be a mixture of information-starved, and fed information by special interest groups that provide content more cheaply than the paywalls. EDIT: Just to be clear, my own opinion is that online advertising is a horrifically ugly, cynical blight on the human experience, which causes huge amounts of unintelligent visual content to be put in front of billions of human brains. But an ad-free future is hugely problematic for the maintenance of a well-informed society, and we have seen where a dumb electorate gets us.
  - pg314 10y ago
    Isn't that what we have currently? Quality journalism seems hard to pull off with only online ads. Most of it nowadays is supported by subscriptions and/or print editions. They help subsidize free access to some of the content.
    - Myrmornis 10y ago
      Would you say that, today, most people who read quality journalism do so by paying subscriptions? I'm not sure about that. The Guardian is one obvious exception, but I agree the center-right newspapers have moved to subscription. It's very broken though. The whole idea of paying a subscription for a newspaper is outdated -- it's based on the days when the head of household would select a newspaper and have it delivered to the house before breakfast. Most of the time when I'm reading news online I'm wasting time that I would prefer to be using productively, so there's no way I'm going to pay for that. Additionally, there's so much good free material on the internet that there's not enough incentive to pay for it. I think the major newspapers should accept that the days of a single cathedral-like website for their newspaper where devotees will spend hours are gone; if we could pay a small amount effortlessly on a per-article basis, choosing between many different sources, that might make sense.
bigbugbag 10y ago
> What would a post-ad-supported web looks like? Maybe something like steemit

devy 10y ago

> Another technique used to hide the ad blockers' activities is even more impressive. They are able to "create two copies of the page, one which the user sees (and to which ad-blocking will be applied) and one which the publisher code interacts with, and to ensure that information propagates between these copies in one direction but not the other." So this ultimate ad-blocker would potentially consume twice as much resources as it would have been?

nickbail3y 10y ago
This was my question as well.
randomwalker 10y ago
Coauthor of the paper here. No --- this is not one of the three techniques that we implemented. It was a hypothetical suggestion for future work. Unfortunate that the article didn't make that clear. Here is the paper http://randomwalker.info/publications/ad-blocking-framework-techniques.pdf http://randomwalker.info/publications/ad-blocking-framework-... Here is our blog post about it: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2017/04/14/the-future-of-ad-blocking/ https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2017/04/14/the-future-of-ad-bl...
- ktta 10y ago
  Looks like you've accidentally repasted the paper URL for the blog post
  - randomwalker 10y ago
    Oops! Thanks, fixed.
- wernercd 10y ago
  Just a throw out question: One of the biggest issues (IMO) is the security threat... if there is a second copy that "we" don't see, doesn't that mean that the second copy can do "bad things" still? Case in Point: Forbes requests you disable ad-blocker... then serves pop-under malware: http://www.networkworld.com/article/3021113/security/forbes-malware-ad-blocker-advertisements.html http://www.networkworld.com/article/3021113/security/forbes-... I could stomach ads - just like I stomached commercials on TV shows... you get used to them and they become white noise... if the ads were unobtrusive and non-invasive (IE: Google Search Results)... it's full screen, pop-up/under, audio, video, etc. Then throw on top of that malware... What's to stop the malware from biting on that second copy?

justboxing 10y ago

> [DELETED]

news_to_me 10y ago
It literally says after that, "'To avoid taking sides on the ethics of ad-blocking, we have deliberately stopped short of making our proof-of-concept tool fully functional—it is configured to detect ads but not actually block them,' Narayanan said."
- nyolfen 10y ago
  perhaps someone will fork it soon?
itp 10y ago
This is research, not an attempt to make an extension for you. They're not looking for beta-testers, or users, or anything other than to have done research and share their work.
belovedeagle 10y ago
This is answered in TFA.
rhizome 10y ago
Don't mean to jump on you, but yesterday you posted with the interesting fact that you'd never heard of SWOT before. Maybe hang back a bit more next time? Maybe do some Googling so you don't come off like "I'm 12 years old and what is this?"
- justboxing 10y ago
  I really hadn't heard of SWOT.
  - rhizome 10y ago
    Did we need to know that? Is it an interesting discussion topic?

nyolfen 10y ago

here's a direct link to the whitepaper: http://randomwalker.info/publications/ad-blocking-framework-techniques.pdf http://randomwalker.info/publications/ad-blocking-framework-...

bagacrap 10y ago

Doesn't this blocker still require you to load and render the ads so they can apply their vision techniques to them? You won't get any performance win and you'd still see empty popovers or blank space. I don't see how detecting that something is an ad is enough on its own to create an effective ad blocking solution. The part about defeating known anti-ad blockers seems rather unfair. If this technique did gain popularity I'm sure there would be ways around it (like tricking it into thinking the button used to dismiss a popover is itself an ad).

news_to_me 10y ago
It sounds like part of their premise is that won't happen because of legal reasons - to some extent, ads have to be identifiable.
- pmiller2 10y ago
  It already happens. Misleading ads are one of the big reasons I use an adblocker.
lol768 10y ago
> Doesn't this blocker still require you to load and render the ads so they can apply their vision techniques to them? Definitely seems that way from what I understood. Seems like a novel technique, but not something I'd personally flock to use unless my network/element based rules suddenly became ineffective. Rather than being used via an extension in the client's browser though, this technology looks like it could be incredibly useful for automatically figuring out rule changes and updating e.g. the element hiding rules automatically.
juiyout 10y ago
It might be possible that for an ad-blocking system that, for all visitors to a specific page, vision analysis only has to be applied once on that specific page and share that post-analytic knowledge publicly. Then all future visitors would benefit from that previous analysis knowledge and block the ad without yet another vision analysis on the same specific page. to scope with pages changing widly, the system can assign 5% of the visitors to each specific page to perform new vision analysis and update the findings.

nickbail3y 10y ago

According to the article, current adblockers like Ublock Origin aren't searching for keywords in the page elements for ads, they're just using human maintained lookup lists? That's very surprising. I would have thought that would be the first avenue of attack for adblockers. Also, who wants to help me retrofit this thing to actually block ads?

LeoPanthera 10y ago
> they're just using human maintained lookup lists? That's correct. The lists are maintained here: https://forums.lanik.us https://forums.lanik.us
- mi100hael 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure at least some of the popular adblockers out there block based on basic keywords as well. We had some users complain that an adblocker was blocking valid parts of our web app because some of the page elements had IDs that started with '#ad-' since 'A.D.' was an internal abbreviation for one of our features.
- nickbail3y 10y ago
  Very interesting, thank you.
oxguy3 10y ago
Blocking a URL or a CSS class name can be done very efficiently/easily with a browser extension, while running OCR on an ad (most ads are images/videos rather than pure text) to find keywords is much more difficult and computationally expensive. Apparently Princeton made it work, but it's definitely a much more difficult approach to take.
- monochromatic 10y ago
  Finally a reason to upgrade my processor.
asquabventured 10y ago

IIIIIIIIIIII 10y ago

This is not the end of the arms race. At some point we will have AI designing and AI delivering ads, and while we may have AI designed to prevent us from having to watch ads we don't want we will also have AI that watches everything, gathering and filtering information that is too much for us to handle but tuned to our needs since it's "our AI". Then the race will be that one AI wants to trick the consumer AI into giving their information more weight and attention. So instead of the race humans against humans we'll have a race humans => AI ("sellers" of anything, from goods to news) => AI (consumers) => human (us). It's going to be a lot more complex: Right now all that people on both sides have to know is human psychology. In that future they'll have to understand the potentially far more varied world of possible AIs - and if that isn't enough the complex interactions between them and also between the AIs and the humans. Are we creating the diversity and complexity that we remove from the biosphere (the ongoing mass extinction and/or reduction of many species) anew but in a completely different space? In addition to technical systems we are also getting much better (and better faster!) in controlling biological systems, creating our own ideas. At least some programmers of the future will write their code in DNA - or possibly even something more complex, something that can encode completely new proteins that the current code can't represent. And then there's combining biology and technology... an explosion of complexity and diversity? I studied CS more than two decades ago. I kept up to date and continue to do the odd course in my field, but what I consider an amazing experience (for an IT guy) was when I spent the last few years taking hundreds of hours of courses in biology and medicine. Looking for new ideas? Take an introduction to biology and genetics course instead of learning an only very mildly different programming language, for example (free): https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-biology-secret-life-mitx-7-00x-5 https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-biology-secret-life-...

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RangerScience 10y ago
Check out "General Adversarial Networks". It's basically training a two-part AI via an arms race; one part is trying to fake out the other, the other is trying to detect the fake.

polskibus 10y ago

This is a beginning of a new arms race, not an end. We'll now see an explosion of machine cheating and computer blinding techniques.

rhizome 10y ago
I guess look for salaries to explode in adtech.
- lern_too_spel 10y ago
  If the overall effectiveness of Internet advertising decreases, the amount of money spent on adtech will decrease correspondingly.

ktta 10y ago

If anyone want's the source of the proof of concept extension[1] here's a link to get it. Just use wget https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx?response=redirect&os=linux&arch=x86-64&nacl_arch=x86-64&prod=chromecrx&prodchannel=stable&prodversion=57.0.2987.133&x=id%3Dmahgiflleahghaapkboihnbhdplhnchp%26uc https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx?response=red... You should just be able to unzip it. [1]:https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/perceptual-ad-blocker/mahgiflleahghaapkboihnbhdplhnchp?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/perceptual-ad-bloc...

blacksmith_tb 10y ago
Or you could add some fangs to it yourself[1] by forking it... 1: https://github.com/citp/ad-blocking/tree/master/perceptual-adblocker https://github.com/citp/ad-blocking/tree/master/perceptual-a...
- Animats 10y ago
  From the description, it only finds very specific types of ads: For Facebook ad detection, it finds newsfeed items by looking for containers within the given width constraints and border on the side; it looks for the sidebar ads by searching for containers with the proper size constraints in a sidebar. It then determines which newsfeed items are ads by searching for the "Sponsored" link within them and checking whether this link ultimately goes to the Facebook "about ads" page. For Adchoices detection, it runs a content script in every iframe which searches all of the images, (those explicit in an img element, those in the background-image css, and those drawn as an svg) and then uses fuzzy hashing to compare them to example Adchoices icons. If any of the images match, it highlights the iframe as an advertisement. That won't remove a typical banner ad, or an ad popup.
  - hla19 10y ago
    Assuming this is true, why do we need AI for something like this? We can build a repo of images that's used to show ads, and just block by images. There's a pretty big multiplier on number of visitors to the number of ad pictures.

peterwwillis 10y ago

"A favorable legal climate and the existence of browsers friendly toward ad-blocking extensions are two key factors that may tip the scales toward users." On the technical side, Google can just close up its browser, prevent ad-blocking malware, require only compliant browsers to connect to its site, and all sites that depend on advertising dollars can jump on board. Unless they decide to simply change the regulations, which doesn't take the same investment in time, development, and bad PR. Once faced with having to pay for the internet again, people will be fine with either of those options.

bigbugbag 10y ago
I have a hard time understanding what you are trying to say. > Once faced with having to pay for the internet again Don't you have to pay an ISP for your internet connection right now ? Apart from the ISP when exactly did anyone had to "pay for the internet" ?

downandout 10y ago

The article puts a significant emphasis on the idea that bulletproof ad-blocking technology, assuming that's what this turns out to be in practice, will work long-term becuase of legal restrictions imposed by the FTC. If Google, Facebook, or other multi-billion dollar entities detect an existential threat arising from this or any other technology, rest assured that the laws will change as quickly as is necessary to keep them happy. Lobbyists will be paid, and donations will be made. Anti-ad-blocking laws will be introduced, or the FTC's ad identification restrictions will be relaxed. Ads aren't going anywhere, and neither are advertisers.

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jpambrun 10y ago
Not sure Anti-ad-blocking laws are practically enforceable. Even with the ad labeling requirements relaxed, unless it is truly deceptive, a CNN could identify it just as well (or better) than we can.
- downandout 10y ago
  Interesting question. Given the incredible latitude that courts have afforded to the CFAA, if a site put in its TOS that accessing it with an ad blocker enabled is prohibited, would that be actionable? Could ad blocking companies in such a case be held liable for tortious interference and/or conspiracy to violate the CFAA? I don't know the answer, but I can certainly see a lower court ruling that way before it is decided by the Supreme Court. To be sure, that's where this would be headed if this kind of technology becomes ubiquitous and effective.
- turblety 10y ago
  Already you have restrictive software/firmware running on your computer. Look into Intel ME (Management Engine) a likely backdoor into your computer you have no control over, don't know what it does, and can not disable it. It already helps many DRM applications to restrict what content you can play and how. Legislation to disable adblocking could be reinforced already be implemented into the next generation of Intel/AMD chips so you bet this could be enforceable.

mdpopescu 10y ago

I think these guys haven't read pg's Submarine [1]. Assuming everything works as they claim (it won't), the ads will just pretend to be articles. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

wtetzner 10y ago
At least it might prevent ads from causing sites to be unusably slow.
darkstar999 10y ago
Yeah, can this thing block product placement in youtube videos? Didn't think so.
- BillinghamJ 10y ago
  There are laws about that too, but most YouTubers ignore them unfortunately
Pxtl 10y ago
Actually, I'm hoping this will be the future - ads hosted by the server instead of fetched by the client. Then when an ad service hosts malicious code it'll infect the server instead my my goddamned machine. What with foreign tracking cookies and ads and whatnot, the ability to refer to content on another domain within a website seems to be a user-hostile feature in the end, as much as allows for creative infrastructure models for providers.

ams6110 10y ago

I use a hosts file, and uBlock Origin. I can't remember the last time I've seen an ad on a website. I'm thinking there's not a lot of room for improvement.

AndyNemmity 10y ago
As have I for almost 2 decades now, some variation of a hosts file and an ad blocker. My most downvoted comment ever on reddit was concerning not seeing ads. I had forgotten they existed (I didn't use mobile at the time). It's been a solved problem forever, and yet so few people seem to know about it.
sdabdoub 10y ago
There's a lot of background work to keep uBlock and other services current. A hosts file needs updating when domains change or new ones are added. That's part of the appeal of this approach, it doesn't matter what domains ads are served from.

BugsJustFindMe 10y ago

"Because advertisers must comply with these regulations..." Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. sigh

iamben 10y ago

At risk of being very unpopular, am I the only person that doesn't mind ads? I mean some are pretty intrusive, but largely I'm happy to make the trade off. I'll look at (and maybe click on) your ad, if it means you have the cash to bring me what I want to look at. It's fantastic to think we live in a world where the web can support itself without ads, but it's not really practical, is it? Some stuff I'd support - but the best thing about the web is that I can dip in and out of sites completely based on one off content, knowing I don't have to pay before I read. And the HN crowd is the sharp end of the web. A lot of us ARE likely to support the web in another way. The blunt end not so much. They're also the ones more likely to click on ads.

wtetzner 10y ago
I wouldn't mind ads so much if they weren't implemented so poorly. Much of the web ends up being unusable, because ads slow down the rendering and mess with the usage of so many web pages.
eropple 10y ago
For a long time I didn't adblock, because I do believe in paying it forward. But--set aside the psychological battery enacted to make you Believe In The Brand and still, at this point, advertising is a threat vector. Text ads? Don't mind them. Image-based ads like Project Wonderful? Also fine. But I block a lot of ads now just because I can't evaluate effectively the safety of their payloads.
- grangerg 10y ago
  This is the only reason I use an ad-blocker. They are often an attack vector for 0day exploits. They remove that risk and the block comes off.
JBReefer 10y ago
I have 0 problem with websites that serve up ads that: 1. Are from their own domain 2. Are not flash/autoplaying video 3. Don't track me/aren't ad tech 4. Actually have something to do with the content Run a homebrewing site? Great, run ads for stuff to do with that. I'll probably click on them, I am looking up homebrewing info! Run a homebrewing site that serves me ads for refrigerators, because I looked at one on Amazon three weeks ago? That's creepy, and that's getting blocked. Same with pop ups pop unders etc. Advertisers seem to be moving in the same direction - Viacom has reported a lot of wins over the ad-tech insanity.

throwaway91111 10y ago

An ad blocker is worthless without also clicking on ads to inject noise. Use Ad Nauseum.

aub3bhat 10y ago

Wait they don't even have a fully working implementation, and yet VICE is already proclaiming it as an end of Ad-blocking wars? Color me skeptical. Now I know that the original authors did not write the clickbait headline or even the article, but working on Ad blocker is a poor use of resources. On a longer time horizon websites that cannot be supported via Ads will turn into Apps that require multiple permissions + FB/Google login. This type of effort is frankly futile, you might win the battle on Ad-blockers but you are guaranteed to lose the War of economic incentives. But hey in the meantime some clueless reporter writes a breathless article about your imaginary triumph on something everyone likes to hate, so why not. Also as far as their scheme of detecting "adchoices" icon or container sizes, it can be trivially circumvented. When it comes to circumventing such algorithms, disorganized hackers routinely do that for far more secure things. Organized well paid engineers at Ad tech companies can probably beat them in couple of days if not hours. Worse their scheme penalizes good companies that opt-in into adchoices. So a site operator is forced to choose shadier ad networks (guaranteeing higher revenue) which this scheme won't be able to block. As a result the user gets a worse experience! As much as it is in vogue to hate advertisers, crippling someone's business model (whatever your cute ethical reasons might be) while using institutional resources is not a great idea. Princeton CS might soon find itself on wrong side of a lawsuit, where upvotes and retweets might not count much.

quotemstr 10y ago
These techniques also work fine in the mobile world, and they can be applied at the OS level, where apps can't observe that their graphical output is being manipulated.

make3 10y ago

Just change the alpha values in the `coverContainer` function in `utils.js` and it actually blocks ads. Patched `utils.js`: https://pastebin.com/YLyN2uJ8 https://pastebin.com/YLyN2uJ8

sauwan 10y ago
This is probably obvious, but where is that file?
- make3 10y ago
  The chrome extension file (.crx) is a zip file (with meta data). Just unzip it and you'll find the files, including the 'utils.js'.
  - deleted 10y ago
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imglorp 10y ago
Covering is not as good as not loading. Loading brings all the malware, the tracking, and the bandwidth/load times.
- derefr 10y ago
  "Not loading" doesn't make sense in the case where the ad is inline in the response body (i.e. "part of the site", like Facebook's ads are.) Which is the case where this ad-blocker uniquely shines. Besides which, the algorithm involved is a computer-vision one, so the ad needs to be rendered before the algorithm can recognize it as an ad. The best solution here, if you want maximum privacy, would be to use a traditional ad-blocker as a first-line defence, and this algorithm as a second-line, for the ads which make it past regular ad-blocking (and which are therefore probably inline-content ads anyway.)
  - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago

usernametbd 10y ago

Unless the display technology is changed from html, css and js to something opaque for a client, like a video stream of content, ad blocking will always be there and effective even if there are laws against it.

mattb314 10y ago

Slightly related question from a non-expert in ad-blocking: is it possible to block interstitial ads? While the freedom to render a page as you wish seems to come with controlling the browser on your computer, I can't imagine any way to circumvent the ads the obstruct the entire page and force you to wait for a few seconds before seeing content. Obviously you can just choose not to render them, but if the server can just delay serving article content until X seconds after the interstitial loads, it seems like the fundamental advantage here lies with the publisher and not the user. While submarine ads and lobbying are obvious responses to the Ad-blocker proposed above, wouldn't interstitials (which personally bother me much more than sponsored facebook posts) also gain popularity?

bigbugbag 10y ago
no script, no interstitial.

robrenaud 10y ago

You don't get to claim you won the arms race until you've actually released your thing and it's got some significant adoption. Otherwise you are just landing punches on an opponent who doesn't even know he is getting touched.

pavel_lishin 10y ago

Does this cover the issue of tracking, etc? It seems that in order to detect/block the ad, it must allow it to load - and at that point, the malicious payload is already on my machine, and I've already spent part of my precious allotted bandwidth on someone's idea of profit-making.

betenoire 10y ago
This is my thought as well. I avoid ads because of the additional resources they require, network requests, javascript, etc. Not because my eyes can't handle them
- Eric_WVGG 10y ago
  Same. I’ve wasted several minutes whitelisting various ad networks for the maniacs at Forbes and Wired, but when they say “we rely on ads, stop being a dick” and I try to comply; it turns out they’re not talking about ads at all.

mankash666 10y ago

State of the art in advertising today, is pusing it via websockets. This extension failed to detect those ads. PornHub is one example, with plenty others using webSockets.

bigbugbag 10y ago
It seems to me that current content blockers had already addressed websockets for ads. here: https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/5aqlok/pornhub_bypasses_ad_blockers_with_websockets/ https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/5aqlok/pornhu...

teaneedz 10y ago

So much wasted development effort. I applaud Princeton and this team though. Ad tech is just a flawed attempt to monetize user data which has alienated users. Online ads are a security and privacy risk. Developers need to stop supporting ad tech completely. Put the effort into more beneficial endeavors. If only ... advertisers and publishers had listened and took UX seriously.

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quotemstr 10y ago

Corey Doctorow predicted this event in his prescient 2012 article "The coming war on general-purpose computing": http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html He's talking about DRM as it applies to downloaded content, but the same argument applies to web advertising.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

That is a pretty clever attack and I think the reasoning is pretty solid, if the FTC requires that humans can 'tell' that something is an Ad then a machine learning algorithm can too. I'd love to see how effective this is on a Google page like a search for 'free credit card'. The last time I checked that query had exactly 1 organic result on the page, and if this worked as described you'd get a google page with just one result. That would be kind of amusing in its own way.

downloadthisad 10y ago

I thought this was hacker news. If you dont want something to be downloaded to your computer restrict your computer from downloading it. If you dont know how to do this then learn so. This cannot be stopped. At the point it can be stopped the computer you have is no longer your computer. Like when the car you have is being driven by a computer and Tesla does not allow you to do self maintenance it is no longer your car. So dont buy computers that restrict you from full access to the software (I dont think this has been done yet). And dont buy Tesla cars. Unless you like the product and dont mind renting or dont value complete ownership.

palunon 10y ago
>So dont buy computers that restrict you from full access to the software (I dont think this has been done yet). It is done, right now, on any (recent) Intel computer. https://web.archive.org/web/20161005075537/http://www.alexrad.me:80/discourse/why-rosyna-cant-take-a-movie-screenshot.html https://web.archive.org/web/20161005075537/http://www.alexra... https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/intel-me-and-why-we-should-get-rid-of-me https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/intel-me-and-why-we-shou... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Technology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Tech...

rdiddly 10y ago

So circumspect are they. There's as much of an 'ethical dilemma' here as there's a climate change debate. In other words, there's the truth and then there's a ton of wishful thinking & misinformation trying to sound legitimate. "A lie ain't a side of the story."

cbhl 10y ago

I really would rather that banner and pop-up ads go away altogether, and that they be replaced with native advertising. This war is silly.

gaag2 10y ago

Ads are necessary for business!

orblivion 10y ago

The war on ads is like the war on drugs. This is just going to create more ruthless ad cartels. There is a demand to be met, it will find its way to the consumer, even if it has to plow over 50 others in the process. The question is, what is the online ad equivalent of legalizing drugs?

ouid 10y ago
in what way, except for the grammatical structure of the phrase, is the war on ads similar to the war on drugs?
- orblivion 10y ago
  As I alluded to, in both cases, there's a demand to be met, and there's a strong social resistance to having that demand to be met. Advertisers annoy 99.9% of us, but there's the 0.1% that demand something that they don't yet know about. There's money to be made, and satisfaction to be had, if only the connection of knowledge could be made. So I'm saying, perhaps instead of thinking in terms of blocking the knowledge, which will tend to get there one way or another, I wonder if there's a solution in terms of finding a less disruptive way to get the knowledge there. It would make advertising less lucrative.
  - ouid 10y ago
    you're not making your case very well, these are still superficial parallels.
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accountyaccount 10y ago

It doesn't work on Facebook's autoplay video ads, so that didn't last very long...

ageyfman 10y ago

This doesn't address the massive bloat that ads add to the website. I don't mind seeing ads when I browse the internet. I do mind having websites load for 10 seconds because 20 different ad networks are loading their iframes.

jagthebeetle 10y ago

Not seeing a whole lot of discussion about the implementation. Looking through the extension's code (which should be somewhere under your Chrome app files, if not online), briefly, it seems like an unsung hero here is Tesseract.js: http://tesseract.projectnaptha.com/ http://tesseract.projectnaptha.com/. The extension itself seems to do OCR (using Tesseract) on images and look for the string "adchoices", or else the adchoices icon, which yes, is cool: but just want to clarify that the folks at Tesseract seem to be doing the meaty "computer vision" part. EDIT: oh, this isn't markdown.

mrcactu5 10y ago

HIV is kind of like that too, when they circumvented CRISPR. I hear the nearest cure is decades away. Hopefully they have solved ad-blocking.

takeda 10y ago

Allow me to be a bit skeptic about it. This reminds me a lot of Bayesian spam filters. Those things worked great very few false positives and negatives, once Google started using it on a large scale (GMail) spammers started playing the system and often they are successful.

takeda 10y ago
Also, as an example, I noticed a spam today with a subject: "Magic pill lets Trump perform better" which is an obvious way to fool bayesian filters.

maverick_iceman 10y ago

Didn't detect any 'sponsored' posts in Facebook.

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dlubarov 10y ago

> Because advertisers must comply with these regulations, the authors imagine an "end game" in which consumers—and ad blockers—ultimately win. I don't entirely agree. Websites have an advantage too: they can withhold the interesting content until a time of their choosing. For example, a blog could - Serve an ad page initially - Include some javascript to load the text of the blog post - Have the request handler for the text do a sleep(10) Then there's not much an ad blocker can do. - They could hide the ad, but then the user is waiting on a blank screen, which is probably an even worse experience for most. - In some cases they could pre-fetch the text, but you can't always predict where the user will go, so it would only work sometimes. - A more advanced ad blocker could mirror a bunch of content and serve it with no delays, but that wouldn't work for personalized content like Facebook timelines.

bigbugbag 10y ago
I already encounter similar case with the overuse of unnecessary visual effects, anti adblock and other dark patterns. 3 things can happen: - I use firebug to fix this - I look at source and extract the URL to actual content - I change my user-agent to that of the bot that indexed the content But 99% of the time I don't waste my time with this useless piece of crap and move to the next thing. 0,0001% of the time I sent an informative email to the abuse or contact citing the relevant piece of legislation explaining how this is illegal and what the punishment for this could be.

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ziikutv 10y ago

Interesting read. I like how they took the time to put an update and clarify about what was not tested. Good journalism. Additionally: I wanted to plug (not involved with the project) PI-Hole [1]. You route all traffic through the Raspberry PI which points to custom DNS that filters ads on their end, reducing data usage significantly. This leads to ad block on all devices without the need to install custom software on any of them. [1] https://pi-hole.net/ https://pi-hole.net/ Edit: append reference

scottlegrand2 10y ago

Google doesn't seem to like stuff like this: https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2017/01/05/adnauseam_expelled_from_chrome_web_store/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2017/01/05/adnauseam_expel...

monochromatic 10y ago
More reason to use Firefox.
srtjstjsj 10y ago
AdNauseum spams clicks to ad servers, which is likely why it was blocked from Chrome. Google doesn't block uBlock, for example.

tyingq 10y ago

Guessing it has the same limitation that thwarts other ad blockers....running well on mobile, especially Android. Google was smart enough to not allow extensions on mobile Chrome. So you are relegated to either 3rd party browsers or weird internal proxy solutions, both of which have downsides. Still excited about serious resources going into ad blocking though.

dirkg 10y ago

What about the many sites who legitimately exist only due to minimal ad revenue, and don't abuse ads, allow malware etc? I'm all for supporting them. Its the sites that pose an actual threat or whose ad:content ration is something ridiculous like 2:3 that are the problem. Esp on mobile.

waylandsmithers 10y ago

Cool! I wonder if this means all advertising on the web will have to be superficial, which might not be a great thing. Maybe eventually we'll feel the same way about ads on the web as we do about ads in film-- a character can't stare into the camera and tell the viewer to go buy a Corona, but if he is asked what he'd like out of the cooler at a barbecue, he can say he wants a Corona. I personally prefer a middle ground, like when magazines print ads with the text "ADVERTISEMENT" or "SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION"

ComodoHacker 10y ago

So with this new revolutionary tech ads will still be loaded into my browser and tracking scripts will still track me? No, thanks, I'll stick with uBlock Origin.

sologoub 10y ago

Don't buy that this is undetectable - browser sends a lot of signals, including position of the mouse and interactions with content, so it's not a big stretch to say that it would be possible to detect interactions or lack thereof in the area that is supposed to be the ad and determine that it's likely blocked. Once detected, publishers are free to not let you consume content via paywalls or simply letting site break. It's also not going to be able to be effective against stitched video, especially if the player playlist doesn't let you skip around easily - at best you'd end up with blank screen for the duration of the ad. Sound is another problem. We need better solutions for advertising, not yet another escalation in blocking that will lead to even more intrusive/annoying behaviors. (Much louder sound from stitched mid-rolls than the content anyone?)

sharmi 10y ago

A few days back, I started working on an high powered machine with a vanilla firefox. Even with just 20-30 tabs open, the software started to crawl. Please note that most of the pages open were either github pages, hn, stackoverflow or articles linked for hn (implying fairly reputable sites). Initially I thought it was the fault of the browser. (That performance was jarring as I am a tab hoarder, frequently having hundreds of tabs open). Only later did I realize that I had not installed Ublock Origin. Did it and Poof! The difference was night and day. What I am trying to say is that, the advantage of ad-blockers is not just the removal of ads but also a significant removal of cruft that adds no value and hogs the system resources. The solution proposed in this article actually renders the page. So, it solves only one of the issues. It could still be beneficial to use it in conjunction with UBlock Origin.

yakult 10y ago

End to the arms race? Hah. The next step is adversarial neural network generated images that fools the OCR while looking relatively normal to human eyes. This war doesn't end until computers pass the Turing test and we build a complete simulation of the end-user into the adblocker/spam filter/marketing call blocker/girl-scout-cookie-seller-doorbell-deactivator.

gwu78 10y ago

I do not have "block ads". I simply do not request them. Users do not intentionally make requests for ads or pixels from tracking servers. Browsers do. Automatically. People writing web pages that aim to cash in on advertising budgets depend on this "feature". However it is optional. I read hundreds of web pages and never see any ads. Because for eading the news I do not use a so-called "modern" browser. It seems the entire web ad industry requires browsers to operate a certain way. If browsers do not follow these assumptions, then the user sees no ads. Despite strange notions like the one in the top-voted comment in this thread, there is nothing that requires any user to use browsers written by people whose salaries are paid directly or indirectly from ad sales revenue. Assuming certain companies were as all-powerful as the commenter suggests, then why not require users to access pages using software written by companies who profit from such web traffic? And make the software proprietary? Surely no one would complain. Thank you sir, may I have another? Let us not forget some of these "multi-billion dollar entities" are just websites. If the traffic dies down, the business of selling ads is no longer feasible. And the company disappears along with the website. It has happened before. 98% of revenue from web traffic/ad sales. Castles made of sand.

ColanR 10y ago
I'm guessing you use something like w3m or lynx? (if not, I would love to hear about it) The problem is that text-based browsers of that ilk are not user-friendly to the general population. If you have the knowledge to implement that kind of not-requesting of ads, I bet one of the fringe/experimental browsers (I'm thinking of Vivaldi) would be a great place to implement what you're talking about.
- shinypotatoe 10y ago
  I use umatrix for not loading ads and for tracking protection. It is a tool to define from which domains a certain website may fetch resources. It is a bit less convenient than a adblocker, because for every new site you have to configure it, but I think it is great. It's really eye opening how many things some websites load that they do not actually need to show the content I am interested in.

avaer 10y ago

Prediction: AI ad blockers become accurate and automatic enough; ads mutate into AI-based transformation of content to include paid placements. The price of the news article or Youtube video of the future is that when you see someone drinking a Pepsi, you can't be sure if they ever actually did that. Or whether your friends saw the Pepsi when they watched the same thing in the other room. And thus ad blockers cease to make sense; you can no longer tell what you'd be missing if you used them unless you're the centralized corporation that hoards this data.

bigbugbag 10y ago
Disabling script and going to simple html and css would render this AI-based transformation useless.

LeicaLatte 10y ago

Mother of all blockers. Sounds like your typical knee-jerk solution that has nothing to do with the actual problems.

strokeswan 10y ago

Nobody mentioned Brave browser ?

strokeswan 10y ago

Nobody mentioned Brave browser ? https://brave.com/about_ad_replacement.html https://brave.com/about_ad_replacement.html

mark_l_watson 10y ago

Great article, as much for the tension between people wanting free content and ad free content, and the practical issue of publishers 'keeping the lights on.' I subscribe to Blendle (currently I have another tab open to a Wall Street Journal article by Garry Kasparov about issues with artificial intelligence - I paid Blendle $0.49 from the funds in my account wallet to read this, so Gary and the WSJ get paid). Many Blendle articles I read are only $0.09 or $0.15 - this was an especially expensive one. I think the 'war' over ad blocking might have a beneficial effect in moving content providers to easy to use micro payment systems. Most people I know think that I am crazy for spending small amounts of money to read stuff, but there are costs in life like supporting things we enjoy and charities (I really like Google's One a Day charity clearing house - easy to take 30 seconds and give a dollar or two to some worthwhile cause). The amount many people spend on coffee each day is more than paying for content and donating to One a Day.

alexplainl8ter 10y ago

I would just wrap all my content in whatever terms the legal restrictions require, thus blocking everything.