231–240 of 303 posts
There's a product here that's been waiting to happen for awhile. I've been anticipating somebody cross-compiling another browser engine to WASM but this works, too. Deliver your site only to the "inner browser" (that the user has no control over because it's heavily obfuscated and tricked-out with anti-debugging code) and you eliminate all ad blockers. Throw some DNS-over-HTTPS w/ certificate pinning in for good meas…
It sounds really slow?
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Hopefully that will be literally illegal due to accessibility concerns. Doesn't matter either way. Can't wait for AI-powered ad blocking. Just imagine it. AI parses content and filters out ads, brands, even subtle PR text from pages automatically. Not just textual content either. It also kills ads in audio, video, images. If I can imagine it, it must be possible. I'm sure someone much smarter than me will create this…
If AI-powered ad blocking becomes ubiquitous, it will mean the end of high-quality free services like Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Translate and YouTube, for all of which I much prefer to pay with my attention rather than cold, hard cash. I have no doubt that current AI is capable of this (in fact I'm sure it would be trivial for GPT-3.5 and well within reach of even locally-run LLMs), the question is wh…
That is true, but what is also true is that a few products are currently sucking all of the air out of the system, preventing new entrants from encroaching on the incumbents territory.
Maps, Search and Youtube all serve the Google Search business. Any new ad-supported entrant, by necessity, also has to serve the Google Search business.
If the Google Search Business is crippled, there are only good things that can result from that. I don't see a downside to making Google Search unprofitable due to smart ad-blockers. (I welcome hypothetical scenarios in which the Search Business being limited due to ad-blockers has bad unintended consequences).
Unrelated: I don't understand why this comment is modded so low that I can barely see it? It is not in any way controversial and can be (and is, above) rationally debated.
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I guess we disagree on whether advertising goods and services to people should be considered a crime.
We do. I think advertising of all kinds should be illegal. I consider it to be a form of mind rape when they forcibly insert their brands and products into my mind without my consent.
We aren't talking about a Clockwork Orange type of scneario. You're trivialising real rape when you refer to easily avoidable online-advertising.
Your mind "rape" is in no way or form analogous to rape.
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> Deliver your site only to the "inner browser" (that the user has no control over because it's heavily obfuscated and tricked-out with anti-debugging code) and you eliminate all ad blockers. Throw some DNS-over-HTTPS w/ certificate pinning in for good measure and you kill DNS-based ad blockers too. I'm confused how the "inner browser" meaningfully helps you accomplish this. How is this any easier or more effective t…
Well the idea is stupid and makes no sense but > How is this any easier or more effective than just having a website that hosts its own advertising assets advertisers REALLY don't want you to do that because it's far too easy to cheat.
I expect that they are already cheating as much as possible to convince their customers to continue paying for advertising that has a negligible effect on the bottom line.
Adtech and PR firms would have you believe that it is impossible to sell a product or service online without first paying them $10k/m. It's also why google search is so awful - if they could get you the information you were looking for they are sidelining their customers, so their search has to, by design, be limited so that their customers are more prominent in the search results than non-customers.
Note: I'm not saying that this is by design; they could get to this stable equilibrium simply by each isolated team within search, advertising, etc aggressively pursuing its own metrics.
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The internet advertising industry needs to move past insisting that user machines have to be involved in a business relationship they have nothing to do with and no legal, or ethical, obligation to uphold. All other forms of advertising work that way. The advertiser and host need to figure out how to keep each other honest without involving passers-by.
Thing is, internet adtech involves a rock paper scissors evolution. It's not just a advertisement and a viewer, it's also the bots. Adtech is where it's at now just cause it wants you to see it but because a industry of faking viewership built up around it. No other advertisement has really had to deal with how ads are bought on per viewer basis. All the targeting tech is equally a response to "personalization" as it…
I think that the only way to get to the endgame I want, which is "advertisers simply give up, the sites sell the ad-space directly, with no tracking necessary and no sharing of information between sites" is for everyone to click on more ads for things that they aren't interested in.
Make it a browser plugin: the plugin works quietly in the background, and clicks on every single advertisement it sees, going as far as possible in the funnel, all the way to checkout, but without doing the final payment.
Until the signal/noise ratio of adverts are 99.999% noise, we're still going to have this arms race.
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> Deliver your site only to the "inner browser" (that the user has no control over because it's heavily obfuscated and tricked-out with anti-debugging code) and you eliminate all ad blockers. Throw some DNS-over-HTTPS w/ certificate pinning in for good measure and you kill DNS-based ad blockers too. I'm confused how the "inner browser" meaningfully helps you accomplish this. How is this any easier or more effective t…
Render the inner browser on canvas. Good luck with blocking anything, it's just a picture.
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If AI-powered ad blocking becomes ubiquitous, it will mean the end of high-quality free services like Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Translate and YouTube, for all of which I much prefer to pay with my attention rather than cold, hard cash. I have no doubt that current AI is capable of this (in fact I'm sure it would be trivial for GPT-3.5 and well within reach of even locally-run LLMs), the question is wh…
> If AI-powered ad blocking becomes ubiquitous, it will mean the end of high-quality free services like Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Translate and YouTube, for all of which I much prefer to pay with my attention rather than cold, hard cash. That is true, but what is also true is that a few products are currently sucking all of the air out of the system, preventing new entrants from encroaching on the inc…
A big increase in the use of ad blockers (AI-enhanced or not) would not only cripple Google, but also hurt the multitudes of small business and hobbyist sites that scrape by on what Google pays them to host ads. If users could somehow culturally readjust en masse to the idea of actually paying for online stuff, this would not be a problem -- but I think that's unlikely to happen immediately, and even in the long term, unlikely to happen to the same extent. So there would be a net loss of free (i.e., paid-for-by-Google-ad-money) content and services available to people. Also, it's not like a new wave of smaller, more democratised ad-sellers would arise in Google's wake, since ad-blocking works on them too.
>It is not in any way controversial and can be (and is, above) rationally debated.
Thanks, I appreciate that. Every society has things that are true but which you aren't supposed to say, and it's amusing to me that "Google provides some high quality free services" seems to be one of ours.
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There is no such thing as a high quality ad supported service. Ads make the user experience worse in every single circumstance. I forget how bad Google Search is until I get a new computer/phone without ad blocking enabled
All of the services I mentioned are either directly (Search) or indirectly ad-supported, the latter insofar as Google pays for their development and upkeep somehow, and most of Google's revenue comes from ads. And I think they are all of excellent quality. Ads are irritating, and Google is not supplying these services out of the goodness of their heart, but I think there's no question that the world is a better place…
I would rather have all google products be paid, and lessen the incentive for business to spend a large share of their revenue on advertisement.
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Speaking of Electron... when I start my Slack client for work, there are a series of processes where at least one reports 1.130 terabytes of virtual memory. (Shown in top as "VIRT".) Now, maybe that's just a potential usage that trust-me-bro it'll never actually try to use or access in RAM or on disk... but how on earth is that number for a chat client so much bigger than either Firefox with 100+ tabs or even Java-ba…
V8 allocates a “gigacage” around every wasm memory area on modern 64 bit processors and marks them so the OS will trap on an unexpected access. This is much more efficient than doing a bounds check on every access. These pages are not actually resident. “Big number is scary” is not a good way to understand performance.
Plus, admittedly I didn't think about this thoroughly just now, this sounds like a cheap hack for speed. You could still have an OOB access that would land in some valid memory and thus lead to an exploit, right? It's just made very unlikely by making these areas very large and having ASLR. Proper bounds checks wouldn't have that problem.
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An argument I read that has merit is that ad supported services does democratize the web for developing countries. If for example youtube with all of its information or even Google search required a subscription, suddenly a lot of people who make significantly less than the average for the developed world would no longer be able to access those resources. I still hate the ad surveillance everywhere, but it was a poin…
I am from a developing country. One which banned advertising in its biggest city. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret... There are plenty of online resources which don't require ads. Sibling comment mentions Wikipedia, Open Street Map also comes to mind. We need more of these in this world. Not this ad-supported nonsense.
>There are plenty of online resources which don't require ads
So you claim, but one of the two links you provided contains an ad. Which did not bother me at all, of course -- I'm happy to provide a couple of seconds of my attention in return for the interesting and useful information someone spent time preparing.
If everyone blocks that ad, though, the site will make less money, unless they start charging a fee to view some or all of it. I'm interested enough to read for "free" (paying with a couple of seconds of my attention), but not interested enough to pay cash -- and the world is full of people like me. What do you think will happen to sites like this if everyone blocks ads? Is that what you want?
Yes, there is Wikipedia, which is excellent and free. I think Wikipedia is an outlier, though. It's high-profile enough that people actually donate money to it, which is exceedingly rare. In some countries, the government donates only a small amount to well-known charities like the Blind Foundation or the Red Cross because they are known to be high-profile and trusted enough that large numbers of the public will give to them directly -- but there is a long, long tail of deserving charities that almost no one has ever even heard of, which the government has to subsidise fully. What do you propose to do about the long tail of websites that no one cares enough to donate to, once you shut off their main (and possibly only) source of income?