271–280 of 953 posts
I wonder if it's time to step it up a little bit. We have all the LLMs that are great at looking at code and processing it so perhaps the future of ad blocking is letting the LLM handle it. Has anyone thought about building something like this?
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the ONLY way my county communicates emergency alerts is facebook. it's absolutely wild. how do I know if I'm in a state of emergency? facebook. :)
Your country has sold your safety to private interests. Demand better from them.
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That's not true. If your ad placements don't perform, people are not going to book them. If ads are loaded or not is also often verified by independent third party trackers that you have to embed on your page next to the ad. There's whole industries built on this stuff and it's not as simple as "we sell the slot and don't care if people see it or click on it".
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if nobody clicks on the ads nobody's going to buy ad space because people who place ads care about whether their ads translate into sales. So of course Facebook cares, and ultimately only cares about how many people respond to them because how much money they'll make depend on how much money the ads make.
That's why FB has invested ungodly sums into trying to figure out the preferences of their users.
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That's not true. If your ad placements don't perform, people are not going to book them. If ads are loaded or not is also often verified by independent third party trackers that you have to embed on your page next to the ad. There's whole industries built on this stuff and it's not as simple as "we sell the slot and don't care if people see it or click on it".
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He did.
I wonder if it's time to step it up a little bit. We have all the LLMs that are great at looking at code and processing it so perhaps the future of ad blocking is letting the LLM handle it. Has anyone thought about building something like this?
So you'd have a low-memory-usage super high latency ad blocker with a monthly bill, or an ad blocker that uses up several gigabytes of RAM/VRAM for slightly less high latency. Compelling.
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I'm keen to see this simple script, and to understand why it's simple given that ublock origin finds it hard.
Ublock origin doesnt use javascript. The script just involves a tree traversal of the dom and removal of any node that says ad. The issue is facebook obfuscates selectors so you cant easily do it the way ublock prefers.
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Marketplace. It's horrible, but the area I live in has mostly abandoned craigslist and if you want to buy/sell used stuff, marketplace is where you have to be.
I recently perused Marketplace, and it appears to be so thoroughly infested with barely disguised scams, bogus prices and other garbage as to be usable by only the most intrepid and determined shoppers.
My guess is that the default state is the scam garbage. It quickly learns your preferences. Which I hate. I miss having my 5 sections of craigslist I could browse over my morning coffee and not feel like I'm missing a deal.
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.
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Ublock origin doesnt use javascript. The script just involves a tree traversal of the dom and removal of any node that says ad. The issue is facebook obfuscates selectors so you cant easily do it the way ublock prefers.
Sorry, still don't understand. The dom is not complete until JavaScript has run, no? So the ublock extension can do dom traversal on the rendered page, but the proxy can only operate at the request level. I assume your not running a headless browser on your squid box, lol. I'm aware that a proxy can tweak html and js, but the js will be challenging to analyse statically. If you're only blocking requests to ad domains…
I know this is probably a very naive question, but what is the end goal putting so much effort into getting past ad blockers? Surely, someone with an ad blocker installed is not going to click on their ads and buy the advertised products anyway. I don't really know what I am talking about, but I guess it's all about ad impressions that generate money, but doesn't this strategy end up making less money, because the mo…
Facebook and Youtube are just the newest battlefields. If it's not politician ads, it's military ads, partisan "nonprofit" ads, or ads for podcasts. I don't need to see any of them.
That said, as long as UBO keeps up the good fight on the open web, I'm good. Facebook is basically a memory now, and there are other ways to access Youtube that are actually less taxing on their bandwidth because they don't have auto-play enabled and don't show a 45-minute podcast episode as a pre-roll.