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Ad blocking seems to be a perfect use case for machine learning. Ads can usually be trivially spotted by humans. Why not have the ad blocker "look at" the web p

Ad blocking seems to be a perfect use case for machine learning. Ads can usually be trivially spotted by humans. Why not have the ad blocker "look at" the web page before you see it and decide what it thinks are ads regardless of where they come from or how they got onto the page.

CharlesColeman 7y ago
The issue here is tracking, not ad-blocking. Tracking does not need to provide any visual indication to the user.
- davidhyde 7y ago
  I see. To keep tracking under control I have my browser delete all cookies on exit except a couple of whitelisted sites I wish to remain logged into. I use the firefox CookieBro plugin for this. I also run the firefox "I don't care about cookies" plugin to stop those nuisance banners you get when you visit a site for the first time. Lastly, I use ublock origin to clean things up.
ojosilva 7y ago
Very hard to do. Humans get tricked into ads all the time, so imagine AI. Besides, an AI trying to understand the intentions and meaning of a Turing-complete system from a slice of its code and data is like a brain trying to guess another brain's intentions from looking at partial imaging of its neurons. Actually think about the problem the other way around, as it seems easier to do the opposite in most cases (or at least for news/articles sites such as liberation.fr): a page readability extraction plugin, sometimes called summarization. It identifies the "meat" (ie. the main article or video), extracts it and gives it to the user bare bones. No ads, no tracking. At least that's what I'd prefer once everything else fails, and that's why I'm using Firefox's reader mode and Pocket a lot these days, and if ads take over again like in 1998 that's were I'll be surfing the readable web.
- davidhyde 7y ago
  This is true. Those "Download Now" ads on download pages are case in point.
hombre_fatal 7y ago
Go to https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/ https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/ or https://www.nytimes.com/ https://www.nytimes.com/ and tell me which content are ads and which aren't. We're reaching the end of the golden era of ad-blockers where we thought we were ad-free by just blocking a banner ad.

CharlesColeman 7y ago

The issue here is tracking, not ad-blocking. Tracking does not need to provide any visual indication to the user.

davidhyde 7y ago
I see. To keep tracking under control I have my browser delete all cookies on exit except a couple of whitelisted sites I wish to remain logged into. I use the firefox CookieBro plugin for this. I also run the firefox "I don't care about cookies" plugin to stop those nuisance banners you get when you visit a site for the first time. Lastly, I use ublock origin to clean things up.

ojosilva 7y ago

Very hard to do. Humans get tricked into ads all the time, so imagine AI. Besides, an AI trying to understand the intentions and meaning of a Turing-complete system from a slice of its code and data is like a brain trying to guess another brain's intentions from looking at partial imaging of its neurons. Actually think about the problem the other way around, as it seems easier to do the opposite in most cases (or at least for news/articles sites such as liberation.fr): a page readability extraction plugin, sometimes called summarization. It identifies the "meat" (ie. the main article or video), extracts it and gives it to the user bare bones. No ads, no tracking. At least that's what I'd prefer once everything else fails, and that's why I'm using Firefox's reader mode and Pocket a lot these days, and if ads take over again like in 1998 that's were I'll be surfing the readable web.

davidhyde 7y ago
This is true. Those "Download Now" ads on download pages are case in point.

hombre_fatal 7y ago

Go to https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/ https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/ or https://www.nytimes.com/ https://www.nytimes.com/ and tell me which content are ads and which aren't. We're reaching the end of the golden era of ad-blockers where we thought we were ad-free by just blocking a banner ad.