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uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

digitalescapetools.com

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Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#41

Post by threetonesun »

jcfrei wrote: post #3

Once LLMs get fast enough at processing real-time images Apple (or anybody really) can just roll out a browser rendering engine that just masks all ads. It will take a few years but the browser ad-business is in it's terminal phase.

If we're just talking about image based ads it would be easier to simply denylist every image on a page and only render alt-text until the user clicks to reveal it.

Worth noting though that Apple injects ads into the News app, which is just a webview, so it's certainly not them that will do this.

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#42

Post by nemomarx »

Ekaros wrote: post #26
ImHereToVote wrote: post #10

I don't understand why websites don't just take ownership of ads. Then it will be impossible to block them.

Most sites are not in business of running ad marketplace. They are in content production and SEO(as in pulling views). I don't think at scale they could operate it would be worth to be ad marketplace. Or would they get the customers(advertisers).

Content based ads work fine for this. If you have a site about some topic, advertisers for that audience can just pay you some amount to put their ad in your posts or embed an image.

Networks are only necessary if you want to run new ads for every year or tie into their browsing history or other algorithmic stuff. But if someone wants to pay you 3k to run a banner ad for a few weeks that would be pretty easy to just embed.

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#43

Post by benj111 »

akersten wrote: post #17

They do this by adding a ton of useless markup and splitting words like "ad" into single-letter spans with random class names and 8-layer deep nests of ` ` so it's very hard to write selectors against. One has to wonder how that div soup affects accessibility as I find it very unlikely that this content is presented nicely to assistive tools. I hope they get all the ADA suits they deserve for this.

Could you not just go after the deeply nested spans? I assume they aren't messing up everything else like that.

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#44

Post by pavel_lishin »

threetonesun wrote: post #41
jcfrei wrote: post #3

Once LLMs get fast enough at processing real-time images Apple (or anybody really) can just roll out a browser rendering engine that just masks all ads. It will take a few years but the browser ad-business is in it's terminal phase.

If we're just talking about image based ads it would be easier to simply denylist every image on a page and only render alt-text until the user clicks to reveal it. Worth noting though that Apple injects ads into the News app, which is just a webview, so it's certainly not them that will do this.

I wonder what percentage of images even has meaningful alt-text.

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#45

Post by greenleafone7 »

neuralkoi wrote: post #39
akersten wrote: post #17

They do this by adding a ton of useless markup and splitting words like "ad" into single-letter spans with random class names and 8-layer deep nests of ` ` so it's very hard to write selectors against. One has to wonder how that div soup affects accessibility as I find it very unlikely that this content is presented nicely to assistive tools. I hope they get all the ADA suits they deserve for this.

I recently found this out the hard way. Instagram’s web app has a super annoying popup. To click the comments button for a post, your cursor has to pass over the username, which just happens to launch a profile preview with the “follow” button exactly where the comments button was, causing you to unintentionally follow the account. I tried to block this popup with uBlock Origin to no avail. No matter what element I s…

Best move you could have possibly done.

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#47

Post by AlexandrB »

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #7
jcfrei wrote: post #3

Once LLMs get fast enough at processing real-time images Apple (or anybody really) can just roll out a browser rendering engine that just masks all ads. It will take a few years but the browser ad-business is in it's terminal phase.

This is the first and only use-case for LLMs that I am genuinely excited about.

Such naïveté. The much more likely scenario is that AI is used to add or replace ads in a website in a way that's now impossible to remove. Running your own AI on the browser will be disallowed to "ensure a safe browsing experience".

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#48

Post by gwbas1c »

inigyou wrote: post #14
ImHereToVote wrote: post #10

I don't understand why websites don't just take ownership of ads. Then it will be impossible to block them.

Because the ad ecosystem has two sides. I used to think my ISP could just magically support IPv6 and didn't need routing protocols or peering agreements, too. (They support it now) Websites with ads need to satisfy the ad buyers. This means running a bunch of JavaScript that's adversarial to the website and fingerprints both the website and the browser to determine where and to whom the ad is actually shown. It's lik…

I think that just goes to prove that content providers and ad providers could defeat ad blockers if they worked together. (And perhaps made the ads less offensive so people don't have motivation to block them.)

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#49

Post by srcnkcl »

neuralkoi wrote: post #39
akersten wrote: post #17

They do this by adding a ton of useless markup and splitting words like "ad" into single-letter spans with random class names and 8-layer deep nests of ` ` so it's very hard to write selectors against. One has to wonder how that div soup affects accessibility as I find it very unlikely that this content is presented nicely to assistive tools. I hope they get all the ADA suits they deserve for this.

I recently found this out the hard way. Instagram’s web app has a super annoying popup. To click the comments button for a post, your cursor has to pass over the username, which just happens to launch a profile preview with the “follow” button exactly where the comments button was, causing you to unintentionally follow the account. I tried to block this popup with uBlock Origin to no avail. No matter what element I s…

“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
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