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

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

#81

Post by whywhywhywhy »

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.

You're trying to stop ads because they're malicious but you think they'd be honest with their alt text?

Ignoring that users care deeply about images so a browser that did this would be considered broken from the get go.

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

#82

Post by whywhywhywhy »

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?

Cost issues aside yeah image embedding tech is really good and can already do tasks like this, LLMs with native image understanding are even better at it.

Reasons this wouldn't work are you'd really need to get it to a good enough and small enough model to run low energy use and very fast to not impact browsing. The other issue is it'll be a fixed target for a period of time so the ads could be tweaked to find how to get them through it.

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

#83

Post by zenoprax »

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 counter example: I got caught out by the deprecation/sunsetting of anonymous "old.reddit.com" yesterday but it turns out uBlock can filter out the ads, boilerplate, sidebars, join/login buttons etc on the main site. It's actually faster and more usable than the old site now.

Small win.

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

#84

Post by Terretta »

pjc50 wrote: post #59
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Worth a white paper to see which costs less energy, using Apple's built in LLM, or downloading and displaying all the FB ads using radio, playback, and screen animation energy.

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

#85

Post by pjc50 »

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.

I was under the impression that America had very few legal restrictions on ads at all.

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

#87

Post by molticrystal »

If anybody want to take a crack at fixing and maintaining the issue, while the team has been worn out to the treads, they are still open to pull requests [0], here is the statement that is alluded to in the article:

>paintboth1234 uBO Team wrote:

>The project is FOSS. Anyone else who wants to deal with this disgusting site is free to make pull requests with working solutions themselves.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5/about...

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

#88

Post by Marsymars »

qup wrote: post #79
Marsymars wrote: post #72

The immediate fix to this is regulatory action. Facebook has made itself indispensable in a number of areas that are in the public interest and should be treated as a public good for these purposes. Ads are pollution, and Facebook is forcing people to choose between ingesting pollution and using facebook marketplace, or throwing their used but functional goods in the garbage.

IMO you shouldn't get to be in charge of a company just because it became successful. Facebook is allowed to make ads show on their own product. I hate their product, but it's theirs.

> IMO you shouldn't get to be in charge of a company just because it became successful.

In a macro sense, the prerogative there is really up to the public. Companies only exist in the first place because the public has granted them the legal and social framework to exist, and the public can adjust that framework as they so choose.

In a more specific sense, the math there changes once a company makes itself indispensable to the public good. There are any number of analogies I could run with, but I'll go with the analogy of a landfill. Suppose all the landfills in your city have been privatized, have a habit of burning garbage, and employ armed thugs to prevent any visitors to the landfill from wearing masks. If you've got a truckload of garbage to dispose of, you can either ingest burning garbage fumes, or dump it on the side of the road somewhere. It's absolutely in the public's interest to regulate the landfills' behaviour to prevent them from both burning garbage and from stopping people from wearing masks when they visit the landfill.

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

#89

Post by Terretta »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #77

The approach they should have taken is to start whitelisting the components that are not ads. Think of how the structure of Meta is gonna work, there's some team in charge of ads who has a sub team now in charge of messing with the ads to stop them being blocked. If you start whitelisting everything that isn't an ad you move the problem into an area the team in charge of blocking the ads don't have control over. High…

Over a decade ago, web framework and web site generation tooling had already ruined any kind of automated anything, as the frameworks and tools started using what amount to GUIDs for identifiers. I suppose the charitable take on why is as only machines needed to read it, and css styles and div IDs had become token gibberish anyway, so semantics were irrelevant.

Whether selecting for ads or content, one had to figure different ways of getting after it, whitelisting was already off the table.

We'd found "structure" could work, but had to be fuzzy and adaptive as marketing shuffles pages around constantly, not just on the whole, but for A/B runs and personalized "experiences".

So that seems back to, hey, models could help.

(Though none of them, to date, attain as high success as latest hand coded "reader" tools, worth inspecting for how this could be generalized.)

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