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Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

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Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#151

Post by MarsAscendant »

jordan801 wrote: post #12

Anyone who has written a few scrappers knows how brutally ineffective this is. Yelp tried to pull the same thing and it took me about 3 minutes to rectify my "for fun" scraper. It's also really not that difficult to write a smart scraper that you say, "Look for these things in this post. However you find them, replicate it for the others". Which is ultimately what I made my Yelp scraper do. If there's a pattern, I wi…

> it took me about 3 minutes to rectify my "for fun" scraper.

Did you mean to say "rectify" as in "fix/adjust"? It sounds like you might have meant "reify" – as in, "create" – but I don't know whether you had the scrapper before that.

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#152

Post by _underfl0w_ »

hamandcheese wrote: post #140
dsr_ wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A dentist's parents are usually proud of them. "What are you doing at work these days, kid?" "I'm inventing new ways to make people see advertising." "Have you considered doing something positive with your life?"

“I’m working a super cushy job making twice as much as I could most other places, mom!” “Proud of you!”

This is the realistic scenario, unfortunately, since the "users" in this scenario wouldn't understand the distinction between one tech job and another.

Substitute that job for one selling drugs with better, more consistent pay and... well... then it's culturally frowned upon by non-tech-savvy people.

Deliberately spreading "fake news" is the advertising equivalent.

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#153

Post by b123400 »

I read it somewhere that Chinese websites are taking this kind of obfuscations to the next level. The simple ones are randomly ordered divs re-layouted by JS at runtime. The complicated ones include custom font files which characters and glyph don't match, so for example abc would look like "123".

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#154

Post by Marsymars »

asdkhadsj wrote: post #107
duxup wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like a fun challenge. It's just ads. If we're talking about some ad for a coffee maker, whatever. Now their whole selling data to unscrupulous folks, taking money from parents via their kids, selling fake news that makes people hate other people (now that gets into the ad space...) .... That's where I'd want to nope out.

Thank you. I feel like ads have such a bad rap because of the state of the internet. Yet, what does everyone expect? Is it shocking that content providers want money for their product? And yes, I know, some sites and ads do terrible things. The actively hurt viewership. BUT, isn't that the same with everything ? Even my groceries are getting worse as companies seek ways to increase profits without pissing me off; the…

> Even my groceries are getting worse as companies seek ways to increase profits without pissing me off; they swap out quality ingredients with cheaper ingredients. They change the shape of the bottle to reduce volume and hope I don't notice that the price effectively went up. Etc.

If you stick to fresh produce and bulk dry goods, you're pretty much immune to those problems. Incidentally, those happen to be products that never get advertised for.

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#155

Post by johnisgood »

asdkhadsj wrote: post #107
duxup wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like a fun challenge. It's just ads. If we're talking about some ad for a coffee maker, whatever. Now their whole selling data to unscrupulous folks, taking money from parents via their kids, selling fake news that makes people hate other people (now that gets into the ad space...) .... That's where I'd want to nope out.

Thank you. I feel like ads have such a bad rap because of the state of the internet. Yet, what does everyone expect? Is it shocking that content providers want money for their product? And yes, I know, some sites and ads do terrible things. The actively hurt viewership. BUT, isn't that the same with everything ? Even my groceries are getting worse as companies seek ways to increase profits without pissing me off; the…

As I see it, the issue is that ads are being sold to us as something that is for our own benefit, and then go on to collect data for personalized ads that we do not even want.

It is not shocking that content providers want money, but perhaps it would be better if it would not be forced, and if developers would not actively try to make it more and more difficult for us to get rid of. You could just ask instead. Wikipedia seems to do fine.

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#156

Post by loosetypes »

sly010 wrote: post #26

I wonder at which point will we just stream pages as interactive video content with a text optimized codec. Most pages on the internet are bloated to the point where it might just make sense. (I am not advocating, I am predicting)

If you stream movies from sites like 123movies, they play a similar obfuscation game but are moving towards your hypothetical.

While many players, despite deeply nested html, still point directly to where the content is hosted (ex, a file on openload.co), an increasing number take your mentioned approach and load the content as a blob so folks won't bypass their ads.

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#157

Post by majewsky »

testplzignore wrote: post #142
mholt wrote: post #121

A few days ago [1], I found this filter for UBlock Origin to be working for me so far: facebook.com##[id^=hyperfeed_story_id_]:has([id*=feed_sub_title_]):has(span:has-text(/S.*p.*o.*n.*s.*o.*r.*e.*d/)) GitHub issue: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/3367 [1]: https://twitter.com/mholt6/status/1092191140168622080

If I worked at Facebook and was evil, I'd put some text in that span that caused catastrophic backtracking :)

Regexes can be evaluated in linear time, so you'd have to send gigabytes worth of text to cause any noticeable slowdown.

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#158

Post by corry »

Obligatory Hammerbacher quote: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks."

Wonder what the opportunity cost of so many talented people spending their time at FB working on stuff like. Or maybe I'm overreaching, and the business model is a necessary evil for a powerful social good that FB provides by "connecting the world".

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#159

Post by throwawayjava »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #145
asdkhadsj wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. I feel like ads have such a bad rap because of the state of the internet. Yet, what does everyone expect? Is it shocking that content providers want money for their product? And yes, I know, some sites and ads do terrible things. The actively hurt viewership. BUT, isn't that the same with everything ? Even my groceries are getting worse as companies seek ways to increase profits without pissing me off; the…

I run an old collaborative writing (roleplaying) forum populated mostly by teens that's paid for by a banner ad. When I read HN comments about ads, I see people who are forgetting what ads have actually gotten us: more people able to create more things that are available to everyone for free. HNers like to say "well, then adapt your business model," but look at the incredibly friction that exists for getting people t…

I've run a similar role playing style site since middle school. It introduced me to more than just a habit of writing. It also introduced me to programming at a young age and in a community and school system where that would not have happened otherwise.

I run mine as a charity now. Its less than 200 dollars a year. The ads just aren't even worth keeping up. Before and during college, when I couldn't afford the 200, I solicited donations from former users who had used the site as a teen but since grew out of it. That worked really well.

Good luck.

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#160

Post by eropple »

matz1 wrote: post #115
eropple wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps reconsider. "If it paid well" externalizes the ills it inflicts on other people. And they matter, too .

sure, thats why I said what everyone consider 'matter' are different, for me this doesn't matter that much.

...And I am lightly suggesting that maybe it should matter.

Hurting others unnecessarily is the only sin in the world. Don't ever, ever be That Guy.

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