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How Google Chrome’s ad blocker works

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Re: How Google Chrome’s ad blocker works

#251

Post by jordigh »

TravelTechGuy wrote: post #246

Google telling us what "better ads" are is like a drug dealer lecturing you about crack quality control. They could have solved it years ago, but made tons of $ by letting the ad space become the wild west of nagware, malware, and tracking bonanza. If they were to provide a real adblocker, allowing people to opt-in to ads on sites they like, while blocking everything else, I'd have considered it, on the basis that an…

To me, "better ads" sounds like "humane torture" or "acceptable manipulation".

The principle of ads is repugnant to me. There's no way to make it better. I don't need to be psychologically manipulated to buy things I don't need. There's no way to make that manipulation ok. What Google considers acceptable, I consider subtle and even more manipulative, trying to sneak it in where most people won't object to the intrusion.

Re: How Google Chrome’s ad blocker works

#252

Post by SquareWheel »

budu3 wrote: post #194
bitmapbrother wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should a browser also not be in the business of alerting a user that they're about to visit a site serving malware and using zero day exploits or is that also the job for 3rd party tools and extensions?

Alerting is fine. Altering the page is not.

Browsers alter the page when they block popups.

Re: How Google Chrome’s ad blocker works

#253

Post by tyler_larson »

ams6110 wrote: post #189
SllX wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two things about ads. They don't seek to inform you so much as they seek to inform you that something exists whilst manipulating your emotions to get a particular reaction out of you and millions of other people. This is particularly blatant in AV ads. The other thing, mainly regarding software ads, is they don't seek to inform you so much as manipulate you whilst tracking your every move to guarantee that the ad was…

Even before ad-blockers, I have never intentionally clicked on an internet ad, whether in search results or on a website. These days, I block ads with extreme prejudice so I never even see most ads. But I don't hate the concept of advertising. I don't deny being influenced by ads, or even sometimes finding them informative. I just reject being tracked and targeted.

I have adblock on my primary chrome profile, but occasionally browse using a profile where it is disabled because [reasons]. My experience has been generally pleasant if you discount the low-quality ads that would be blocked under this new scheme.

Instead, I get ads for interesting new components on DigiKey or Mouser, or the similar, and I find myself clicking on ads several times a week because I'm genuinely interested in what I see -- it's like a news feed for unusual devices.

Imagine if your Twitter feed was served several tweets at a time embedded in other sites you regularly visit. You could argue it's a distraction, but but it's far from unpleasant. "Personalized ads" work a lot the same way for me.

Re: How Google Chrome’s ad blocker works

#254

Post by gboudrias »

jacquesm wrote: post #28
MereInterest wrote: post #13

Google's incentives here are still antithetical to my own, so I'm going to stick with uBlock. For example, on Google search, ads masquerade as legitimate search results. These used to be highlighted in light yellow, clearly marking them as different from organic search results. Now, they only have the word "Ad" in light grey text. This notice is on the right, intentionally where it will be overlooked when reading thr…

Remember when Google claimed that paid inclusion was one of the worst sins a search engine could commit? One so bad that it made it claim other search engines were evil?

I'm always amused by Google's ethical evolution (actually scratch that I unwittingly stole it from Brent Butt, still funny):

Google motto 2004: Don't be evil

Google motto 2010: Evil is tricky to define

Google motto 2013: We make military robots

Re: How Google Chrome’s ad blocker works

#255

Post by drdeca »

JoshMnem wrote: post #250
drdeca wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true. However, I do think that there are a few (possibly rare) cases where advertisements can cause a mutual benefit. If I intend to purchase a product of a certain category, and would like to choose one with a particular property, but am under the assumption that no such product exists, and I see an ad for such a product, correcting my impression, I may, as a result, purchase that product instead of competit…

Saving 10% on a keyboard on a very rare occasion isn't worth the dangers of advertising (privacy, malware, brainwashing).

I wasn't really talking about the 10% savings thing, so I'm not sure how this is relevant to what I said?

I do agree that the malware risk that current ad systems cause is bad, and it would probably be good if consumers behaved in such a way that the sort of ad systems that are a malware risk were no longer more financially viable.

However, I don't think I have any substantial objection to the style of ads on project wonderful, which do not allow embedding any extra JavaScript or anything like that, only permitting an image, a link, and a hovertext value, iirc. No tracking or malware risk there I think. Or, at least negligible risk.

If you have a proposed improvement on how to lead people who desire a product to discover that said product is available, I'd be interested in hearing it?

Re: How Google Chrome’s ad blocker works

#256

Post by tlburke »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #183
Bitcoin_McPonzi wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ADT company hired and trusted convicted serial killer Dennis Rader to install alarms. He'd then defeat the alarms and go in to the houses to bind, torture, and kill his victims. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Rader#Early_life_and_ca... Your analogy is good. Google and Chrome Adblocker is just like ADT and the "BTK Killer".

Did he have a criminal record when ADT hired him?

No. In fact, Rader was once considered to be a pillar of the community.

Re: How Google Chrome’s ad blocker works

#257

Post by BurningFrog »

drngdds wrote: post #103
mabbo wrote: post #89

I think there's good intentions by Google here. That said, let's talk about the worst-case scenario, the thing that Google could actually do that is entirely anti-competitive. Step 1: Google finds a large number of competitors who are doing pretty well playing by their rules. Google finds some trait they all have in common. Google then modifies their own ads to not have that trait. Step 2: Google declares the given t…

I feel like there's a simpler explanation that's still not 'good intentions': 1. Lots of people are using adblockers to block all ads, including Google's, and they don't like that. 2. People mostly install adblockers to block really annoying ads.* 3. By building in an adblocker that blocks annoying ads, people will stop installing full adblockers that also block Google's ads. *There are real issues with non-annoying…

So the intention is to give people a way to remove annoying ads.

I'd say that's obviously a good intention.

The fact that Google also can gain from it doesn't change that to me, but I realize others have different moral philosophies.

Re: How Google Chrome’s ad blocker works

#258

Post by trackingpixel »

Full disclosure: I work in ad-tech.

1. Why do you guys downvote civil, informative posts that just happen to be philosophically different than yours? Seems anti-knowledge, and a net negative to HN.

2. What do you think pays for the internet? This is the first time I've ever engaged in a discussion, but I've been lurking for a year or two, and at least half of the links shared in the comments are ad-supported. Probably more. Sharing information is going to be more difficult when the money dries up and everything is behind a paywall.

3. People are annoyed that they see the same ad over and over again, but "tracking" is a cardinal sin. How is this supposed to work?

Re: How Google Chrome’s ad blocker works

#259

Post by pritambaral »

deckard1 wrote: post #241
manigandham wrote: post #122

This is 100% about reinforcing Google's ad monopoly (along with the AMP initiative). Google owns DoubleClick which is the biggest adserver on the planet and the #1 source of all the bad intrusive ads in the first place. This could've been easily solved years ago.

Yep. And you can see this in a lot of what Google does. Most people think Google's push for HTTPS, both in Chrome and SEO rankings, is somehow related to privacy. It's not. It's about net neutrality and it's about third parties being able to switch out Google's ads for their own, on-the-fly, using a middleman. I interviewed with a stealth-level startup a few years back. They were developing a product, similar to a Wi…

> I interviewed with a stealth-level startup a few years back. They were developing a product, similar to a WiFi router, that would be installed on premise and sit there, filtering out Google/Facebook/etc. ads and replacing them with ads that the owner of the box wanted. You can imagine this box being installed in Starbucks, airports, libraries, and everywhere else.

Funny, I was a similar boat once. They weren't a startup, yet. Good for them, because in both meetings I had to tell them their business idea was impossible unless they broke prime factorization. I was surprised I had to meet them the second time.

Oh, and their business idea was a little more intrusive than merely replacing ads. They wanted to be able to read people's emails and Facebook data and serve targeted advertising based on that.

Re: How Google Chrome’s ad blocker works

#260

Post by magicalist »

kodablah wrote: post #173
ams6110 wrote: post #112

Slightly tangential, but: > ... Google Safe Browsing service. Chrome checks every website you visit against a list of malicious websites that it periodically downloads from Safe Browsing. So I have always disabled Safe Browsing because I assumed it was sending all my browsing activity to Google in real time to be checked. But this sounds like it's checking locally from a downloaded list. Anyone know if that's correct…

It's half and half from what I'm reading. It checks a local list for the sha-256 hash or partial hash. Then, if found, it phones home with the partial hash it found. If you don't want to read [0], I think the Golang parser/lookup at [1] is a reasonable interpretation of what they're doing, but not sure. You can see there that the hashes generated are of different-host-combinations + different-URL-path-combinations. T…

> Surely Google has something that maps the hashes to actual URL patterns, but like the other commenter said, the partial hash you send is only sent when it matches a local DB already.

It sends the first 4 bytes of a 32 byte SHA-256 hash of the URL. There isn't a reasonable map back for that.

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