61–70 of 367 posts
If you don't mind getting rid of every post in the timeline, there's News Feed Eradicator for Facebook: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
Got the same effect by unfollowing all of my contacts.
Nothing of value was lost
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of my first thoughts when I saw this was about screen readers. If searching "Sponsored" in Chrome doesn't match the posts, I'd wager screen readers would just go ahead and try to pronounce all the extra 'S's.
It works fine. Screen readers obey CSS, this uses CSS to hide all of the additional elements (display: none). Screen readers are also designed to work when text is broken up by other inline elements e.g.: He llo world In this case it reads out both the words Sponsored and Public. > If searching "Sponsored" in Chrome doesn't match the posts That also worked perfectly fine in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. Did you scroll e…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It works fine. Screen readers obey CSS, this uses CSS to hide all of the additional elements (display: none). Screen readers are also designed to work when text is broken up by other inline elements e.g.: He llo world In this case it reads out both the words Sponsored and Public. > If searching "Sponsored" in Chrome doesn't match the posts That also worked perfectly fine in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. Did you scroll e…
So the technology to defeat this kind of obfuscation has already been developed and is reliable?
These techniques work because some blockers only support a limited subset of what a full browser can do (namely block resource locations and specific HTML elements).
I interviewed at FB recently (didn't pass the in-person) and the one question I asked each interviewer was "tell me about the parts of FB I don't see" - because they have an odd hiring process where you don't figure out what team you'd be working with until after you are hired...and I had no interest in pushing Ads, but understood that wouldn't be a great pitch from my side. Turns out there is a LOT about ads at FB.…
That sounds like hell. I need to meet the team I'll be working with before accepting an offer. It's the only way to know if they're competent, can communicate, and are not assholes.
I'm really thankful I haven't yet had a job where all I'm developing is new ways to force people to see ads. Imagine working on a 'feature' like this for weeks or months, and the end result is simply that people who don't want to see ads now have to see ads.
Ethics aside, this actually sounds kind of fun to me. It's the kind of clever puzzle solving many of us love about programming - it's basically a cat and mouse game.
I wonder at which point will we just stream pages as interactive video content with a text optimized codec. Most pages on the internet are bloated to the point where it might just make sense. (I am not advocating, I am predicting)
Of course locking down the computer helps.
Anyone who has written a few scrappers knows how brutally ineffective this is. Yelp tried to pull the same thing and it took me about 3 minutes to rectify my "for fun" scraper. It's also really not that difficult to write a smart scraper that you say, "Look for these things in this post. However you find them, replicate it for the others". Which is ultimately what I made my Yelp scraper do. If there's a pattern, I wi…
Even if you absolutely mangled the HTML/selectors/DOM/etc. I feel you could always have it process screenshots of the interfaces to rip text/figure out how to interact etc. If it's human readable, it's bot readable imo. (but in years of botting it's never came to this - I've always been able to figure out how to use the existing DOM/selectors to do my work even with anti-bot measures)
Anyone who has written a few scrappers knows how brutally ineffective this is. Yelp tried to pull the same thing and it took me about 3 minutes to rectify my "for fun" scraper. It's also really not that difficult to write a smart scraper that you say, "Look for these things in this post. However you find them, replicate it for the others". Which is ultimately what I made my Yelp scraper do. If there's a pattern, I wi…
Yep, seems like a total waste of time. The people scraping will spend the necessary time to get around this (and then distribute that knowledge to the masses) so it seems like a pointless arms race. Facebook employees could better use their time on developing actual features that bring value.
It makes it copy pasteable when rendered, while not incurring any funky processes or having to write new classes.