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Show HN: Detecting adblock, without JavaScript, by abusing HTTP 103 responses

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Re: Show HN: Detecting adblock, without JavaScript, by abusing HTTP 103 responses

#11

Post by bawolff »

guitarlimeo wrote: post #5
hedora wrote: post #4

Sounds like it might make sense to drop this early hints feature (whatever it is). I wonder how much longer it will be before the next major escalation happens with ad blockers. I can imagine mainstream browsers that fetch unmodified pages and click ads in the background (do subvert pay per click ad business models and make it harder to compute targeting metrics), but then display an ad/tracking-free version in a sep…

As far as I know, current ad blockers can't block ads from Widevine (DRM protected) streams, so I guess it's only a matter of time until Chromium team comes up with Widevine for webpages and then it's game over for normal consumers.

While i know its evil, i always wished widevine was an option for creating captchas.

Most captcha solutions are defeated by services like 2captcha.net and generally aren't the most privacy respecting.

Re: Show HN: Detecting adblock, without JavaScript, by abusing HTTP 103 responses

#12

Post by lakomen »

Just once and for all understand, people who do not want to see ads and you force ads on them, will not come to your site. All you're doing is making the user experience worse and decreasing your site's worth. And people will remember who was so rude to them.

I've been there.

Don't do it.

Re: Show HN: Detecting adblock, without JavaScript, by abusing HTTP 103 responses

#13

Post by okasaki »

guitarlimeo wrote: post #5
hedora wrote: post #4

Sounds like it might make sense to drop this early hints feature (whatever it is). I wonder how much longer it will be before the next major escalation happens with ad blockers. I can imagine mainstream browsers that fetch unmodified pages and click ads in the background (do subvert pay per click ad business models and make it harder to compute targeting metrics), but then display an ad/tracking-free version in a sep…

As far as I know, current ad blockers can't block ads from Widevine (DRM protected) streams, so I guess it's only a matter of time until Chromium team comes up with Widevine for webpages and then it's game over for normal consumers.

They already tried with the Web Integrity Environment, but it wasn't very popular.

Re: Show HN: Detecting adblock, without JavaScript, by abusing HTTP 103 responses

#14

Post by xyst »

guitarlimeo wrote: post #5
hedora wrote: post #4

Sounds like it might make sense to drop this early hints feature (whatever it is). I wonder how much longer it will be before the next major escalation happens with ad blockers. I can imagine mainstream browsers that fetch unmodified pages and click ads in the background (do subvert pay per click ad business models and make it harder to compute targeting metrics), but then display an ad/tracking-free version in a sep…

As far as I know, current ad blockers can't block ads from Widevine (DRM protected) streams, so I guess it's only a matter of time until Chromium team comes up with Widevine for webpages and then it's game over for normal consumers.

Until quantum computing becomes mainstream and then consumers can break drm on the fly!

Re: Show HN: Detecting adblock, without JavaScript, by abusing HTTP 103 responses

#15

Post by eli »

bawolff wrote: post #7
hedora wrote: post #4

Sounds like it might make sense to drop this early hints feature (whatever it is). I wonder how much longer it will be before the next major escalation happens with ad blockers. I can imagine mainstream browsers that fetch unmodified pages and click ads in the background (do subvert pay per click ad business models and make it harder to compute targeting metrics), but then display an ad/tracking-free version in a sep…

Even without early hints, i assume you could do the same thing with the link http header. Or if you really dont care about performance, just loading the start (e.g. ) of the document and wait a little bit to see which subresources are loaded.

Yeah but the critical piece here is loading Early Hints happens before the HTML is sent to the browser. So the server can change the HTML of the page based on what the browser does. (I wonder about the performance impact of this though.)

Trying to detect adblock via a (or an or a etc) means you have to do the check in javascript, which can be manipulated by the browser.

Re: Show HN: Detecting adblock, without JavaScript, by abusing HTTP 103 responses

#16

Post by eli »

thenewnewguy wrote: post #8

Probably too unreliable to use in real life - for example, I suspect many crappy corporate proxies will block HTTP 103 responses as some unknown danger.

Unfortunately nobody cares enough about Firefox users to bother in the first place.

Re: Show HN: Detecting adblock, without JavaScript, by abusing HTTP 103 responses

#17

Post by 3pt14159 »

guitarlimeo wrote: post #5
hedora wrote: post #4

Sounds like it might make sense to drop this early hints feature (whatever it is). I wonder how much longer it will be before the next major escalation happens with ad blockers. I can imagine mainstream browsers that fetch unmodified pages and click ads in the background (do subvert pay per click ad business models and make it harder to compute targeting metrics), but then display an ad/tracking-free version in a sep…

As far as I know, current ad blockers can't block ads from Widevine (DRM protected) streams, so I guess it's only a matter of time until Chromium team comes up with Widevine for webpages and then it's game over for normal consumers.

If an ad can be rendered on a page or if it uses audio it can be blocked. We have it easy right now with how trivial it has been to block ads, but we could face off against rendering and wiping them in real time if we need to.

Re: Show HN: Detecting adblock, without JavaScript, by abusing HTTP 103 responses

#18

Post by happymellon »

guitarlimeo wrote: post #2

This makes sense, but I guess adblockers could just start loading the data and not show it to the user?

Wasn't this basically what AdBlock Plus did back in the day?

Load a page and replace everything that matched with an empty div when rendering.

Re: Show HN: Detecting adblock, without JavaScript, by abusing HTTP 103 responses

#19

Post by bawolff »

eli wrote: post #15
bawolff wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even without early hints, i assume you could do the same thing with the link http header. Or if you really dont care about performance, just loading the start (e.g. ) of the document and wait a little bit to see which subresources are loaded.

Yeah but the critical piece here is loading Early Hints happens before the HTML is sent to the browser. So the server can change the HTML of the page based on what the browser does. (I wonder about the performance impact of this though.) Trying to detect adblock via a (or an or a etc) means you have to do the check in javascript, which can be manipulated by the browser.

No, not neccesarily.

With the link http header (different from the tag) you just send the http headers, but can still change the response body based on what the browser does.

Alternatively, By sending just the start of the document, then pausing, you can change the rest of the document based on what the browser does with the start, since browsers start loading css/js referenced in the document before the main document completes loading. (Before web sockets were a thing, this was basically the technique used for that sort of thing, called "long polling")

None of this requires javascript.

Re: Show HN: Detecting adblock, without JavaScript, by abusing HTTP 103 responses

#20

Post by soco »

We're all complaining and blaming the big corporations for the pitiful state the internet got to be now but seems we are all contributing our little to bring it even lower. Because corporations pay, I know, but we are the ones pulling the trigger.
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