Google doesn't seem to like stuff like this:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2017/01/05/adnauseam_expel...
Princeton’s Ad-Blocker May Put an End to the Ad-Blocking Arms Race
201–210 of 356 posts
Re: Princeton’s Ad-Blocker May Put an End to the Ad-Blocking Arms Race
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Advertisements are a form of free speech. 6 vs 3 Supreme Court " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorrell_v._IMS_Health_Inc . "
>Advertisements are a form of free speech. ...that can be regulated: "After passage of the billboard-regulating Highway Beautification Act of 1965, Vermont moved to ban billboards outright in 1968. All billboards were gone from Vermont by 1974. Vermont is one of four states to have prohibited by law all billboards from view of highway rights-of-way, except for signs on the contiguous property of the business location…
Wow that makes sense now. Vermont seems so like stepping back in time
Re: Princeton’s Ad-Blocker May Put an End to the Ad-Blocking Arms Race
#203The 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 k…
I unfortunately agree with you 100%. Theres too much money tied up in advertising for it to ever go away.
Google is the greatest conglomeration of Nobel worthy scientists and engineers in the last century. And their entire organization is built on advertising. After creating the best search engine and email system, they created the best web browser and most popular operating system in the world. All of this for the sole purpose of controlling the advertising platform, their raw intelligence is unquestionable.
Google's open source contributions are unmatched and this is just a small sample of the tech they keep hidden away. As much as I find myself in awe of google, I'm absolutely terrified of the ad laden future they're leading us towards with open arms. Ad blocking has one single insurmountable problem, Google, the smartest and most powerful company in the world.
Re: Princeton’s Ad-Blocker May Put an End to the Ad-Blocking Arms Race
#204Just change the alpha values in the `coverContainer` function in `utils.js` and it actually blocks ads. Patched `utils.js`: https://pastebin.com/YLyN2uJ8
I made a repo for the patched extension: https://github.com/byrnehollander/perceptual-adblocker-edite...
Re: Princeton’s Ad-Blocker May Put an End to the Ad-Blocking Arms Race
#205The 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 k…
If an anti-ad-blocking law were to pass, the next step would be link blockers to sites with unwanted ads, tracking or other content. This is what I do for sites I'm sick of landing on only to be told I can't see the content unless they're allowed to track me. I haven't seen a link to WSJ, Forbes, Wired, etc. in months. Wide adoption of such a tool would force sites to find a better means of funding or just disappear.
Re: Princeton’s Ad-Blocker May Put an End to the Ad-Blocking Arms Race
#206Interesting 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.
Edit: append reference
Re: Princeton’s Ad-Blocker May Put an End to the Ad-Blocking Arms Race
#207This 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…
Yeah, "end of the arms race", are you kidding me Vice? I see 13 year olds watching their favorite youtube stars showing off the new products they're being sponsored with this week. How exactly would you block this?
That's a very good point. But maybe it's a theoretical end of the arms race when it comes to predatory ads. I will take ads spoken by the host of a YouTube channel over autoplaying videos, adult dating banners, scrolljacking, and annoying modals any day. If all those things get replaced by advertising that is essentially voluntary and not deceptive or wasteful of computing power, then the ad blocking war may be won. We'll see.
Also, your username. lol
Re: Princeton’s Ad-Blocker May Put an End to the Ad-Blocking Arms Race
#208Google doesn't seem to like stuff like this: https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2017/01/05/adnauseam_expel...
More reason to use Firefox.
Re: Princeton’s Ad-Blocker May Put an End to the Ad-Blocking Arms Race
#209According 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.
Finally a reason to upgrade my processor.
Re: Princeton’s Ad-Blocker May Put an End to the Ad-Blocking Arms Race
#210This 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…
No you won't because that's ilegal. An advertisement must be clearly understood as such (at least in EU) and in fact (for instance) now the channels in here are actually having to tell you that you are about to see advertisements. So, no, we won't have AI tuning the advertisements so that they can't be catch by software like this one because that means it also wouldn't be catch by humans and that a very big no. I can…
I think it's myopic to dismiss this based on legality; companies of all sizes frequently flout laws and regulations. I agree that it's difficult to see the big picture (we didn't even see the paradigm shift of smartphones coming - there's no way anyone can be expected to predict how the advertising landscape will look in 15 years) but I certainly don't envisage a return to vintage era Google Ads. We tend to forget that (mostly due to this echo chamber in which we're participating) that regular people don't think like us and without the momentum of a large group, a reversion is unlikely to be affected.
That said, WRT GP's post, I don't think it's a million miles off. AI will undoubtedly become a cornerstone of modern life and I don't think the scenario they outline is entirely unlikely. Siri is objectively pretty hopeless, particularly when compared to its counterparts but it's been a nice clue as to what we can expect from modern innovation.