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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

#231

Post by pducks32 »

shouldbworking wrote: post #203
downandout wrote: post #36

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 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 s…

I believe that distinction still goes to University of Chicago.

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

#232

Post by btown »

daxelrod wrote: post #199
JoshTriplett wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Website terms of service are not law, no matter how people have abused the CFAA. You can't control how a browser displays content, whether it does so with a browser, screen reader, or musical interpretive dance. I look forward to seeing that battle play out.

You may be interested in MDY Industries, LLC v. Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.[1] (the WoW Glider case). World of Warcraft's Terms of Use prohibited bots. The court found that users who used the Glider bot with WoW were violating the Terms of Use and therefore were not licensed to use WoW in that way. Because users running WoW must copy its content from their hard drives to RAM to run it, the court found that using Gli…

HN strips trailing periods from URLs; add a period at the end, or click the Search link at the page the above links to, to see the case. The raw opinion is here: https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/0...

It's a very interesting finding. The appeals court actually did reverse parts of the decision, including the hard-drive-to-RAM argument, ending up in favor of MDY for many of the claims!

But the devil is in the details. Even though MDY wasn't found to be infringing copyright by breaking the covenants of the license agreement against botting (simply copying static code to RAM was not considered sufficient "reproduction" to be infringement)... it was found to violate the DMCA because it was circumventing Blizzard's Warden framework designed to protect access to dynamic server-side materials. MDY therefore had the lower court's "permanent injunction" against doing so upheld.

So if you were to create an ad-blocker detector that detected all current ad-blockers, and required that detector to digitally sign a request for dynamic content, but then someone circumvented that detection by subsequently creating an ad blocker that wasn't detected, would it fall under this precedent and violate the DMCA?

And there's also fuzziness around whether MDY was tortiously interfering ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference ) with Blizzard's contracts with its subscribers. In this case, it wasn't, because MDY arguably was behaving as a good steward here. For instance, the opinion cites how MDY "enhances some players' experience of the game, including players who might not otherwise play WoW at all." One could see an argument that an ad blocker would encourage more visitors... but if there's no other revenue source other than ads, does the pendulum swing in the opposite direction in favor of the content creator?

Very difficult to tell. Just because Adblock Plus avoided a lawsuit in Germany, and (as the research paper from the OP http://randomwalker.info/publications/ad-blocking-framework-... points out) most ad embeddings today are "trivial" overlays that wouldn't be considered DRM per the DMCA, that doesn't mean that advertisers won't evolve another piece of ammunition in this war.

(I am not a lawyer; the above is not legal advice.)

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

#233

Post by sharmi »

pducks32 wrote: post #231
shouldbworking wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I believe that distinction still goes to University of Chicago.

I am sorry, but I do not get the reference? What does it point to?

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

#234

Post by cprayingmantis »

randomwalker wrote: post #18
devy wrote: post #4

> 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 r…

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-... Here is our blog post about it: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2017/04/14/the-future-of-ad-bl...

Here's what probably amounts to a dumb question why couldn't we just have an AI act like a real person and click on some of the ads that it deemed 'safe' and in a separate sandbox type browser instance? This would reduce the negative effects of adblockers on content publishers.

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

#235

Post by sologoub »

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?)

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

#236

Post by sharmi »

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.

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

#237

Post by zitterbewegung »

sharmi wrote: post #233
pducks32 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that distinction still goes to University of Chicago.

I am sorry, but I do not get the reference? What does it point to?

U of C has the most people that have won the Nobel prize historically which points toward people part of the university to win more Nobel Prizes.

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

#238

Post by yakult »

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.

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

#239

Post by zdragnar »

Svexark wrote: post #226
JoshTriplett wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Website terms of service are not law, no matter how people have abused the CFAA. You can't control how a browser displays content, whether it does so with a browser, screen reader, or musical interpretive dance. I look forward to seeing that battle play out.

It's a felony to access a computer system without authorization, access a computer system to obtain unauthorized computer services, degrade or disrupt a computer system, take data without authorization, or to use data obtained through misuse of a computer system. The law is so vague everyone technically commits a felony every time they load a web page. Did ycombinator give you explicit permission to use this server?…

The law isn't nearly so cut and dry as that. After all, if something operates as a business, and also has a brick-and-mortar storefront, then it is also liable to accessibility guidelines per the ADA (see the lawsuit against Target a few years back).

As such, publicly accessible websites are, in effect, no less common areas than storefronts.

Of course, there's a way around this; websites could establish 'membership requirements' such as using a browser that does not have an ad blocker enabled; the content for most of the website would require being a member and volunteering to abide by membership rules to access. Violate those rules, and you would risk losing your membership and access to the content, though I seriously doubt grounds could be established for a lawsuit over it.

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

#240

Post by HillaryBriss »

shouldbworking wrote: post #203
downandout wrote: post #36

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 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 s…

as you say, the search engine, email system, and web browser are the best, but the operating system is merely the most popular.

that does sound about right.

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