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

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

#41

Post by LeoPanthera »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #23
news_to_me wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I've been hearing lots of good things about Patreon, especially from Youtube personalities. I haven't heard of Flattr being used much recently.

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.

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

#43

Post by rhizome »

justboxing wrote: post #5

> [DELETED]

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?"

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

#45

Post by iamben »

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.

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

#46

Post by pmontra »

IIIIIIIIIIII wrote: post #29

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 gi…

This is an asymmetrical game because most ads are meant to be recognized as such (product placement and sponsored content are subtler than that). So the anti ad AI has an advantage over the ad publishing one. If an ad gets through because the adblocker doesn't recognizes it AI probably the reader won't notice it too.

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

#47

Post by pmoriarty »

throwaway13337 wrote: post #2

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.

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?).

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

#48

Post by wtetzner »

iamben wrote: post #45

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…

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.

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

#49

Post by eropple »

iamben wrote: post #45

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…

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.

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

#50

Post by hayleox »

nickbail3y wrote: post #15

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?

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.
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