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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

#141

Post by propogandist »

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…

> 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

Google's AMP technology aims to do this, although they will claim to have more altruistic motivations

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

#142

Post by ameshkov »

wespiser_2018 wrote: post #135

There is a great paper on the arms race between Ads and Ad Blockers out of a group in Princeton. They propose a perceptual ad-blocking scheme where ads are always rendered in a DOM, but elements only displayed to the if they are not "ad like". This is makes it much easier to evade ad-block detectors, since your browser appears as if it does not have an ad-blocker! https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/ad…

There is another interesting paper on a similar topic that proves that this approach is vulnerable to different adversarial attacks, for instance, you can make it block legitimate content, or you can conceal ads by adding an overlay invisible to a human eye.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.03194

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

#143

Post by Reelin »

strbean wrote: post #84
fuzzy2 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why WebAssembly? Just bake ad code into a SPA and that's it. Random elements with random names at random positions in the DOM, positioned using styles. Quite low-tech. If implemented properly, it cannot be blocked. At all. Except blocking all scripts of course, which means the SPA will stop working. And then I'll just stop visiting. (:

Nobody wants to host ad content / pay for the bandwidth themselves though. I think URL blacklisting will continue to work.

> Nobody wants to host ad content / pay for the bandwidth themselves though.

Actually the issue is that the companies paying you to run the ads don't want you to host it yourself.

* They're paying for impressions, and they don't trust you to report those honestly.

* Real time bidding means the ad to be displayed often hasn't been determined until a few milliseconds before the page loads in your browser.

* They can't (as easily and reliably) collect demographic and behavioral data (ie spy on you) if you don't contact their servers directly.

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

#144

Post by Mountain_Skies »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #88
samatman wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be a more attractive option if it didn't amount to 'cede yet another part of the Internet to Google'.

Reminds me of when Microsoft took over. Many of their competitors destroyed themselves in the 80s and 90s.

In my final year of university during the late 90s, we'd have different companies come in to do presentations on what they do and why we should work for them. Microsoft did a two hour presentation on how great of a place Microsoft is to work at. About a month later Sun came in and did a two hour presentation on how much Microsoft sucks and how stupid you'd have to be to go work there. We learned almost nothing about Sun from their presentation. After that I really started noticing just how much Sun allowed their business decisions to be guided by antagonizing Microsoft rather than providing products and services to their customers. I wasn't surprised at all by their eventual failure.

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

#145

Post by mwsfc »

jiveturkey wrote: post #139
throwaway9878 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

how's that related to parent's question? I can't find a correlation. are you suggesting he not use chrome? that's isn't much of an answer. parent: I've not seen this problem. I only use chrome on mac. maybe on windows/linux it's doing something differently. as each new tab is a new process, it smells like a goofball file system permissions issue to me. does it still happen if you create a new profile? it works as you…

Yes, agree, expect would have seen more of an uproar if this was wide spread. Was trying to stay out the troubleshooting rabbit hole, thus posting the Q here in case other have observed the same. Still, with the other browsers proclaiming more privacy features and google somewhat begrudgingly trying to slow that conversation its hard to know what to expect in chrome without going deep into their roadmap.

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

#146

Post by username90 »

postalrat wrote: post #101
jaywalk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's actually a great way to make Google penalize your site. It's explicitly against their Webmaster Guidelines: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355

Tell that to linkedin, pinterest, and dozens of news sites.

Linkedin used to trick people into thinking you have to pay to see someones profile when you can see it just fine by logging out. That is not against Googles policy. Not sure if they still do that, but I used the logout trick a lot a few years ago.

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

#147

Post by fwn »

jedberg wrote: post #69
bambax wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many websites indeed pester us to download their mobile app but I have yet to find one that forces me to? Do they actually exist?

Instagram. Can't read messages unless you use the app. Snapchat is of course app only.

That was true for a while but they added this feature some time ago.

https://www.instagram.com/direct/inbox/

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

#148

Post by korethr »

robertlagrant wrote: post #138
SignalsFromBob wrote: post #109

I feel that we've done ourselves a disservice by referring to them as ad blockers rather than content blockers or, better yet, virus blockers. With malicious ads being the primary vector for compromising a person's computer, calling these tools virus blockers would not only be more accurate, but it would make it harder for sites to counter their use from a public relations point of view. Could you imagine visiting a…

> With malicious ads being the primary vector for compromising a person's computer, calling these tools virus blockers would not only be more accurate, but it would make it harder for sites to counter their use from a public relations point of view. I don't understand this. How are malicious ads the primary way to compromise a computer?

It depends on the ad. In the before time, long ago, ads were a simple static image or body of text. And in that case, while not impossible, it's rather hard to compromise a computer with a static image or block of text. You'd have to have a fairly specific image crafted to adversarially target a specific bug in the rendering of images to get code execution, and thus compromise a computer.

It is no longer the before time.

In the now time, ads frequently contain not just text or images, but javascript as well. And already having code execution by virtue of javacript, it is a lot easier to escalate the privileges of that code execution from the limited environment of the browser to installing code on the computer running that browser. Want to deploy your bot? Buy an ad that includes your malicious javascript payload. Now, anyone who goes to a site and views your ad will execute your javascript for free in addition to your offer to sign them up for credit score monitoring.

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

#149

Post by ck2 »

When adsense first came out it was text only and ads were actually fascinating and interesting to read. They were regulated and meaningful.

Then images and javascript were eventually allowed and it was all downhill from there. Now it's a race to the bottom of how many hundreds of external objects and tracking that can be added to a page as well as malware since so many badly behaving ads slip right through any attempt at automated bans.

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