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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

#51

Post by AlexandrB »

vintermann wrote: post #20
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.

Yes, it's a near-universal legal requirement that humans be able to tell if something is an ad or not. So once they sabotage that, they're in hot water.

Is there any enforcement of this? Like at all? All the review bots and bots promoting random crap on reddit say otherwise. Traditional media still pays lip-service to this, but only barely.

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

#53

Post by sentrysapper »

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.

You anticipate a large language model to understand visual queues for an advertisement?

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

#54

Post by benj111 »

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…

Trust?

In ye old days, you had newspapers who sold ads, and had to at least satisfy their customers. What the newspaper advertised reflected on the newspaper, and where the advertiser advertised, reflected on the advertiser. Now we have a situation where no one is accountable. Spammy ad sites are a thing, because there isn't that direct relationship between advertiser and website.

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

#56

Post by triceratops »

sentrysapper wrote: post #53
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.

You anticipate a large language model to understand visual queues for an advertisement?

Cues, not queues. And yes that sounds workable.

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

#57

Post by VCFundedGenYer »

Facebook is trying so hard to defeat adblockers that the actual website is borderilne unusable. I have found in the past year or so that pages just get hung on "loading" transitional screens way more often, even in normal circumstances.

They need to surrender this whole anti-adblocker crusade because it will kill them in the long run (along with the billion other problems FB has)

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

#58

Post by VCFundedGenYer »

The-Old-Hacker wrote: post #6

I use a browser extension called F.B. Purity. It's worked across multiple browsers for years. https://www.fbpurity.com/

Same. FBP has been effectively perfect for over a decade now. I don't understand how uBlock Origin can't just take what FBP is doing and apply it there.

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

#59

Post by pjc50 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #40
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.

> so it's very hard to write selectors against This sounds perfectly matched for an on-device LLM?

The power cost of doing this widely would be staggering, surely?

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

#60

Post by mcintyre1994 »

benj111 wrote: post #43
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.

Based on inspect element on their homepage, they probably are.
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