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Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

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Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#11

Post by imhoguy »

ameshkov wrote: post #8
mrspeaker wrote: post #4

Great article! It's funny to finally see ad blockers go "mainstream". My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking (and the end of a web of connected web sites). Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed. Then ad blocking (and other customization) will be limited to "the…

Actually, Web Components and Shadow DOM bother me more than Web Assembly. You cannot "pierce" into a shadow DOM from the outside and this creates an impenetrable barrier for content blockers. We've already seen examples of whole web pages transformed into a shadow-dom web component.

The more of pages introducing the solution you describe the more chance ad blockers / browsers will pick up the new challenge ;)

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#12

Post by throwaway9878 »

mwsfc wrote: post #10

Please correct me if I am wrong here regarding Ghostery functionality: In current Firefox & Vivaldi versions it behaves as you would expect....blocks ads according to your settings for every tab load. But in chrome, the default behavior (assume chrome induced) appears to be to auto disable the plugin until you manually re-enable the plugin then reload the tab....repeat process for every new tab load. Do I have a Chro…

https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#13

Post by sp332 »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #3
jsjddbbwj wrote: post #2

I miss the days when barely anybody blocked ads. Those of us who did didn't have to worry with defeating anti ad block systems.

uBlock Origin is shockingly competent at defeating those "please turn off your adblocker" warnings.

Is this with default settings, or did you add another filter list for those?

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#14

Post by zzzcpan »

ameshkov wrote: post #8
mrspeaker wrote: post #4

Great article! It's funny to finally see ad blockers go "mainstream". My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking (and the end of a web of connected web sites). Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed. Then ad blocking (and other customization) will be limited to "the…

Actually, Web Components and Shadow DOM bother me more than Web Assembly. You cannot "pierce" into a shadow DOM from the outside and this creates an impenetrable barrier for content blockers. We've already seen examples of whole web pages transformed into a shadow-dom web component.

> You cannot "pierce" into a shadow DOM from the outside

Why not? You can inject any script into a meta header on document start from an extension or do the same in an intercepting proxy.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#15

Post by jslabovitz »

From the article:

> The very beginning of ad blocking is the 90s, just when the ads appeared. In 1993, GNN, the very first web advertising service, was launched. Then in 1994, the first-ever banner was sold. In the blink of an eye, the online ad industry was worth billions of dollars. Double Click emerged, Yahoo started to sell ads. And that's when the very first ad blocker was created.

GNN (Global Network Navigator) was not an advertising service. It was the first commercial online magazine. O’Reilly & Associates, the publisher of GNN, wanted to see if a website like GNN could be supported through commercial sponsorship. GNN’s ads were informational — much more like whitepapers than a display ads. (Wired’s HotWired site, which launched at almost exactly the same time as GNN in the fall of 1993, invented the banner ad, which of course is what most adblocking tech has targeted. Cookies for tracking didn’t come along until later.)

Source: I worked on GNN as technical director, and in fact my first job there, in the summer of 1993 about a month before we launched, was to assemble the first ‘ad’ — a set of articles about intellectual property law, sponsored by the now-defunct Bay area law firm Heller Ehrman.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#16

Post by mwsfc »

throwaway9878 wrote: post #12
mwsfc wrote: post #10

Please correct me if I am wrong here regarding Ghostery functionality: In current Firefox & Vivaldi versions it behaves as you would expect....blocks ads according to your settings for every tab load. But in chrome, the default behavior (assume chrome induced) appears to be to auto disable the plugin until you manually re-enable the plugin then reload the tab....repeat process for every new tab load. Do I have a Chro…

https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

Thanks! Had not seen this. Will look into.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#17

Post by Karunamon »

karatestomp wrote: post #9
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but doing so, they will lose the ability to be indexed, searched, archived and linked to. Like during the flash era. Which in turn will start a new trend of website that are "open". It's a cycle.

Plenty of sites already give Google something different from what they show everyone else, right?

I thought that was an offense that would get one either severely de-ranked or delisted from search outright?

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#18

Post by Karunamon »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #3
jsjddbbwj wrote: post #2

I miss the days when barely anybody blocked ads. Those of us who did didn't have to worry with defeating anti ad block systems.

uBlock Origin is shockingly competent at defeating those "please turn off your adblocker" warnings.

On most sites, at least. There are a few out there that go well out of their way to be annoying. Facebook likes to construct their ad text out of multiple randomly-named divs. TVTropes uses randomized IDs on their ad popover.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#19

Post by imhoguy »

karatestomp wrote: post #7
mrspeaker wrote: post #4

Great article! It's funny to finally see ad blockers go "mainstream". My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking (and the end of a web of connected web sites). Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed. Then ad blocking (and other customization) will be limited to "the…

I think ads will be the reason Web Assembly takes off in a massive way, actually. Much harder to block ads if the site ships its own renderer and manages to hide or obscure its traffic. Then you're in to serious application-cracking territory if you want to block ads & tracking.

Web Assembly is just a runtime, like obfuscated JS it is sandboxed and still needs to access some standard APIs to at least conform to CORS. I don't see a problem to let plugins/browsers control `window.fetch` or whatever connection method the WASM code is going to use.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#20

Post by ameshkov »

zzzcpan wrote: post #14
ameshkov wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, Web Components and Shadow DOM bother me more than Web Assembly. You cannot "pierce" into a shadow DOM from the outside and this creates an impenetrable barrier for content blockers. We've already seen examples of whole web pages transformed into a shadow-dom web component.

> You cannot "pierce" into a shadow DOM from the outside Why not? You can inject any script into a meta header on document start from an extension or do the same in an intercepting proxy.

Shadow DOM is created dynamically using "attachShadow". You can try overriding Element.prototype.attachShadow, but this is easy to detect.
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