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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

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think “staggering” is a pretty accurate way of putting it if blocking ads is in the same ballpark as running a AAA game on max settings.

If the computational requirement is within the realm of another normal day to day task, and if it cannot generally achieved with another cheaper approach, it would be contradictory to say it is staggering. I would agree if this was an easily solvable problem with classical approaches. Clearly it is not, since even uBlock is giving up. At any rate, "staggering" is relative. White-labeled web browsers becoming the most…

Blocking ads should not make my fans spin at full blast.

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

#135
post #128

I wrote and shared uBlock Origin filters for Facebook, shared on Reddit and up to a week later they changed the DOM structure bypassed the filters. After some attempts I no longer publish the filters.

Maybe a better approach is to convert the page to an image, run OCR over it, use an LLM to remove the ads, present the result to the user.

How would you comment or watch a video if you did that?

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

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the computational requirement is within the realm of another normal day to day task, and if it cannot generally achieved with another cheaper approach, it would be contradictory to say it is staggering. I would agree if this was an easily solvable problem with classical approaches. Clearly it is not, since even uBlock is giving up. At any rate, "staggering" is relative. White-labeled web browsers becoming the most…

Blocking ads should not make my fans spin at full blast.

Yeah, it's pretty awful that Facebook has made it such a demanding task.

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

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>I got caught out by the deprecation/sunsetting of anonymous "old.reddit.com" yesterday It appears to still be up for me. ??

You now have to be logged in to reddit to use it.

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

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a better approach is to convert the page to an image, run OCR over it, use an LLM to remove the ads, present the result to the user.

How would you comment or watch a video if you did that?

You can still do that.

The only thing I'm proposing is to do the filtering on graphical data (what the user actually sees) rather than on the DOM (which can be obfuscated; and which may change every week).

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