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AdFlush
- jarbus 2y agoI didn't realize this was an active area of research, love this.
- alexcason 2y agoLooks like this is the associated repo on GitHub: https://github.com/SKKU-SecLab/AdFlush https://github.com/SKKU-SecLab/AdFlush
- KennyBlanken 2y ago....and of course only a chrome plugin is available.
- Havoc 2y agoHow realtime is this? Or well enough to not be noticeable while browsing
- mrbluecoat 2y agoI'd be okay with a hybrid approach: lists for real-time blocking and machine learning for passive analysis to augment the lists over time.
- 3abiton 2y ago> We tested AdFlush on a dataset of 10,000 real-world websites, achieving an F1 score of 0.98, thereby outperforming AdGraph (F1 score: 0.93), WebGraph (F1 score: 0.90), and WTAgraph (F1 score: 0.84). Additionally, AdFlush significantly reduces computational overhead, requiring 56% less CPU and 80% less memory than AdGraph. We also assessed AdFlush's robustness against adversarial manipulations, demonstrating superior resilience with F1 scores ranging from 0.89 to 0.98 Neat results, I wonder how it compares to uBO or the different blacklists. I assume it self-update with newer techniques and can detect certain patterns?
- Mkengine 2y agoYou can find the comparison to uBO under 5.5
- h4kor 2y agoHow does this compare to list based solutions? An overblocking/underblocking comparison would be great
- nomilk 2y agoAdFlush (F1 Score: 0.98) seems to do better than some other adblockers: AdGraph (F1 score: 0.93), WebGraph (F1 score: 0.90), and WTAgraph (F1 score: 0.84), but it begs the question: why not compare to the most popular adblockers: uBlock Origin, Adblock Plus etc. I think the authors want to compare apples with apples, so they only compare their algorithm to other adblockers that use algorithms, as opposed to those which use crowdsourced lists. The paper somewhat acknowledges this: > However, manual maintenance of these filter lists requires significant human effort Seems like one of those tasks where crowdsourcing scales so nicely (only one person has to report an ad for it to go into a crowdsourced list that blocks it for millions of others) that it makes an algorithmic approach unnecessary.
- 1oooqooq 2y agopractical solutions don't get you published
- ko27 2y ago"Practical solutions" also leave you vulnerable to cat and mouse games against sites that block or bypass adblockers (even with ublock origin). The end game is to have heuristic/AI adblocking which would directly hook into browser rendering so that it becomes undetectable. Obviously leading browsers do not support this for extensions, but forking Chromium wouldn't be so hard.
- 1oooqooq 2y ago"doing thing X work and everyone uses it, so bad actors invest time against things X. While thing Y isn't used by anyone so bad actors aren't spending time to work around it, q.e.d. we prove thing Y is better". i don't really buy your argument
- ko27 2y agoThe argument is that Y is more robust.
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- dale_glass 2y agoThe future is here. If I recall, in Permutation City there's some part where somebody deals with spam with AI. The user tries to use a simulation to listen to potential spam to filter it, while the spam tries to figure out whether a real person is listening to it and only tries to spam when a real person is there. Or something along those lines, it's been a long time since I read it.
- mannycalavera42 2y agohttps://chromewebstore.google.com/search/adflush https://chromewebstore.google.com/search/adflush https://imgflip.com/i/8s3nur https://imgflip.com/i/8s3nur
- marcod 2y agoThe instructions are on their GitHub page https://github.com/SKKU-SecLab/AdFlush/tree/main?tab=readme-ov-file#2-within-chrome-extension https://github.com/SKKU-SecLab/AdFlush/tree/main?tab=readme-... But since the first webpage I tried still had huge ads, I turned uBlock back on ;)
- tjpnz 2y agoI use a combination of UBO, PiHole and AdGuard on my mobile devices. Can't say I've seen an ad in the last year. Is this trying to solve an existing problem or speculating on where things could go in future?
- rgrmrts 2y agoI’m curious why you’re using 3 separate methods. Do you miss things with just one? AFAIK all 3 use similar block lists and are configurable. I’m building a pi-hole type solution for myself and essentially want all the filtering and blocking to happen at my firewall and not on my client (phone, laptop, tablet).
- bluish29 2y agoI think pi-hole (Adguard home) is useful dns level ad blocker which can be used on network/router level. But it is limited, UBO provides you more flexibility to block cosmetics and certain ads that cannot be done via dns. There will be overlap of course but it is worth it. I agree that adguard here seems redundant and UBO itself recommend against using another ad blocker to avoid interference and websites adblock discovery. However you might end up using 1. pi-hole on router 2. Adguard as device level DNS 3. UBO on Firefox (android only) It is possible but not recommended and wasteful. 1/2 and 3 is enough.
- tjpnz 2y agoAdGuard is for things I take off the home network, for example when I'm at work. It's true I could use AdGuard for both scenarios but I do like the additional visibility and configurability Pi-Hole provides.
- zikduruqe 2y agoTry AdGuardHome. https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome I basically have all my devices use it when I am on my network, and when I am off my network, my Wireguard connection (or Tailscale depending...) uses my home DNS server.
- rpastuszak 2y agoOh boy, that didn't take long. Just last year I made Butter https://butter.sonnet.io https://butter.sonnet.io as an excuse to talk about this: > This project is a half-serious, half-assed attempt to demonstrate that in the next few years the process of blocking this type of content could be almost entirely automated. Yes, it would be wasteful from a computational and human potential perspective, and otherwise completely unnecessary, but hey, more money would change hands!
- YmiYugy 2y agoWithout comparison to the accuracy of crowed sourced blocklists it's not that valuable. Maybe there is a group of hopelessly overworked blocklist maintainers/contributors, that I'm not aware of. If so, their cries for help don't seem to make the HN front page. From a user perspective, blocking banner ads feels like a basically solved problem. I think the real pain point here is that for large chunks of the web, there is no distinction between ads and content.
- JAlexoid 2y agoThere will never be a solution to native ads. It's part of the content you choose to consume, that someone produced. The only way to avoid native ads is to stop consuming content that relies on ads.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y agoThat really depends on what you mean by "native ads"; if you mean "blog posts that appear legitimate but push a product" then maybe not (although I wouldn't totally rule it out with LLMs), but if you just mean that the ads are inline I have to disagree since ex. SponsorBlock already exists.
- cess11 2y agoIn some jurisdictions advertising has to be named as such, there it will be at least theoretically possible to create filters if the platform is compliant.
- nemomarx 2y agoStuff like sponsor block works pretty well? If the native ad is seperable from the rest of it you can just skip ahead, and most of those things are still a sign posted sponsor break for now. I can imagine extensions to do something similar in articles by removing affiliate links, etc.
- 93po 2y agoor have LLMs recreate the content without the native ad
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- gastonmorixe 2y agoNice! I’d love to know if AI-Ad / tracking / telemetry / etc blocking could be improved for MITM network layer filtering not just the browser.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- seized 2y ago> We tested AdFlush on a dataset of 10,000 real-world websites, achieving an F1 score of 0.98, thereby outperforming AdGraph (F1 score: 0.93), WebGraph (F1 score: 0.90), and WTAgraph (F1 score: 0.84). ... Has anyone even heard of these ad blockers before?
- flakiness 2y agoThese are all academic research projects.
- pradn 2y agoWhat's fascinating here is AdFlush is a classical feature engineering approach: define a bunch of features on the data manually, and then use ML to figure out the most useful / impactful ones. This is not the "throw terabytes of data and see what happens" approach we see with LLMs. It's a bit funny to even point this out because I don't recall the last time a feature-engineered ML project made it to the HN front page. Features can be brittle, but they are understandable. The paper's appendix [1] lists the 27 features that will likely make a request/resource "ad-related". These include interesting ones like JS AST depth, average JS identifier length, the "bracket to dot notations ration in JS", and a number of graph measures for the graph of scripts. And contrary to what comments in this thread are saying, they do compare against a blocklist-based adblocker: uBlock Origin. That's in section 5.5. They say they outperform uBlock Origin. But even they say they don't reduce overall page time bc their algorithm is expensive. [1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3589334.3645698 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3589334.3645698
- tofof 2y agoMore specifically, page load time was 2.7 seconds without adblocker, decreased to 2.1 with uBlock Origin, but increased by 250% to 6.6 seconds with AdFlush, or increased to 3.4 seconds with AdFlush retaining prior predictions. The superior score was an F1 of 0.86 vs 0.84 for AdFlush vs uBlock Origin, and it's not clear to me that this is a statistically significant difference. They do not claim it is.
- pradn 2y agoThanks for extracting the details. It doesn't seem like they'll be competitive with blocklist-based approaches like uBlock Origin, because their features are fundamentally expensive to compute - parsing JS and such, not just matching URLs against a list of regexes.
- aembleton 2y agoSeems like it could work in the background to build up new rules for uBlockOrigin to deploy
- cimnine 2y agoSo, this begs the question when we'll see ML put in place to avoid AdBlocker detection. Or ads as we know them just disappear from the web and are replaced with other kinds of ML-enabled ads. I imagine deep-fake models used for interchangeable product placement in videos or pictures or so.
- Night_Thastus 2y agoAlways a joy to see efforts in the ongoing battle against advertisements. There are few things I feel radical about, and Ads are one of them. I believe they are a drain in several ways: They waste computational resources and electricity on both ends. They compromise the visual design and layout of webpages. They distract and take mental energy away from the user. They make the internet (and anywhere ads exist) more "ugly" and less aesthetically pleasing - which negatively impacts mental health. They often sell low-quality services/products or outright scams, which harms those least educated and poorest individuals. Death to advertisement! On billboards! On television! On the internet! Ads are a parasite on the human mind that need to go away, forever.
- btbuildem 2y agoThey are a scourge and a tell-tale sign that we've grown far beyond excess and into absurd territory where more effort is spent on bending our minds to consume a thing that it took to make the thing in the first place.
- p3rls 2y agoDeath to small media companies! You should have gotten some VC money if you wanted to make products for people, you poor pieces of shit.
- Terr_ 2y agoUltimately it's about where we draw the line for hacking other people's brains. It's a spectrum: Some level is an unavoidable part of communication ("I like dogs" forces you to think of dogs) some more is considered normal and traditional manipulation ("My food smells nice, that makes you hungry, wanna buy?") and then it goes on into grey-areas, scams, and eventually to potential extremes like "this image induces nausea" or "this sound knocks you out".
- CatWChainsaw 2y agoCareful, apparently not wanting your mind polluted with psychological manipulation makes you a filthy communist..
- karaterobot 2y agoBlocking image ads seems like a relatively well-solved problem. I mean, speaking as someone who can't stand ads, I don't see very many of them anymore when I'm on desktop. The harder, more pernicious type of ads are the modals that pop up when your cursor moves toward the back button, or when you scroll down a certain distance on the page. "Wait! Before you go, take a moment to give us your email address!" Those can be blocked, but by the time you've seen them, they've already done all the damage they can do—which is to say, they've annoyed you. I wish somebody could come up with a way to detect and stop them. I spent an afternoon trying to come up with reusable techniques to detect these popups, but there are just too many possibilities.
- flakiness 2y agoThis can be a Copilot+PC's killer feature :-)
- infogulch 2y agoSo AdFlush beats uBlock Origin with a marginal detection rate advantage of 0.86 vs 0.84, at the cost of significant performance overhead: median 2.7s load time (no ad block); 2.2s (uBO); 6.6s (AdFlush clean); 3.4s (AdFlush cached). I'd like to see a tandem uBO+AdFlush extension that just enables uBO by default, with a "I still see ADs!" button in the extension UI that refreshes with AdFlush enabled and auto-submits any missed ads to a new FlushList filter list.