281–290 of 953 posts
The Web started as a document display and delivery framework. Now it has turned into an application delivery framework, which uses the old document-rendering abilities to display the UI, with many quirks and workarounds, because DOM was never intended as a performant dynamic medium. With canvas and WebGL taking more and more, it will turn back into an X terminal, with more advanced network capabilities. If most impor…
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WASM plus encryption will mean it could be illegal to decrypt/alter website code just like a Netflix video stream. Adblock criminalization is close.
Adblock / pihole technical impossibility, too.
Ever since WebAssembly was first introduced, I thought it was obvious[1][2] that the end game for those that want to control the web is sending opaque binary blobs of code that only use the browser for the canvas tag's framebuffer. Font rendering and layout can all easily be accomplished by embedding libraries like freetype. This breaks all forms of user control - like ad blockers - and turns the web back into cable…
Of course there will be scrapping, using machine learning and GPUs and whatnot but it's... maybe I'm just old.
Ever since WebAssembly was first introduced, I thought it was obvious[1][2] that the end game for those that want to control the web is sending opaque binary blobs of code that only use the browser for the canvas tag's framebuffer. Font rendering and layout can all easily be accomplished by embedding libraries like freetype. This breaks all forms of user control - like ad blockers - and turns the web back into cable…
This is what Flutter on the web is, by the way. You can try it out here: https://gallery.flutter.dev/#/ and marvel at the impossible to select text, one of the many affordances violently excised here. If it wasn't still incredibly slow even on a cutting-edge Zen3, Nvidia 3070 system they might almost be on to something here.
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I should have chosen my words more carefully, but the blobs with ads will have some sort of DRM on them, which is technically illegal to decrypt and cut out.
Removing DRM on something you own for personal use is perfectly legal.
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How does it help here? They can trivially include ads server-side, pi-hole would see nothing at all.
You can do it, but it’s not done commonly. The most common way ads get onto the page is by including a third party script which is easily blocked.