61–70 of 112 posts
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They day Google starts blocking ad blocking users is the day the exodus starts from Google services.
I think you're overestimating the number of people who 1) care and 2) use adblocking extensions or any extension for that matter. Google knows what will likely happen, and pays people lots of money to know.
Without comparison to the accuracy of crowed sourced blocklists it's not that valuable. Maybe there is a group of hopelessly overworked blocklist maintainers/contributors, that I'm not aware of. If so, their cries for help don't seem to make the HN front page. From a user perspective, blocking banner ads feels like a basically solved problem. I think the real pain point here is that for large chunks of the web, there…
There will never be a solution to native ads. It's part of the content you choose to consume, that someone produced. The only way to avoid native ads is to stop consuming content that relies on ads.
Features can be brittle, but they are understandable. The paper's appendix [1] lists the 27 features that will likely make a request/resource "ad-related". These include interesting ones like JS AST depth, average JS identifier length, the "bracket to dot notations ration in JS", and a number of graph measures for the graph of scripts.
And contrary to what comments in this thread are saying, they do compare against a blocklist-based adblocker: uBlock Origin. That's in section 5.5. They say they outperform uBlock Origin. But even they say they don't reduce overall page time bc their algorithm is expensive.
Looks like this is the associated repo on GitHub: https://github.com/SKKU-SecLab/AdFlush
https://chromewebstore.google.com/search/adflush https://imgflip.com/i/8s3nur
https://github.com/SKKU-SecLab/AdFlush/tree/main?tab=readme-...
But since the first webpage I tried still had huge ads, I turned uBlock back on ;)
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My understanding is that under manifest v3[1] only a list of rules is allowed. An algorithmic ad blocker wouldn't be able to work at all . [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/google-chrome-will-l...
This is true. Extensions currently (manifest v2) are able to evaluate net requests dynamically, and are able to modify requests according to a dynamic ruleset that the extension can retrieve from some filter list published on the internet. Under manifest v3, extensions are not able to dynamically inspect requests, instead, they may only apply rules to net requests. Even worse, there is a limitation of only 5000 rules…
[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/d...
There are few things I feel radical about, and Ads are one of them. I believe they are a drain in several ways:
They waste computational resources and electricity on both ends. They compromise the visual design and layout of webpages. They distract and take mental energy away from the user. They make the internet (and anywhere ads exist) more "ugly" and less aesthetically pleasing - which negatively impacts mental health. They often sell low-quality services/products or outright scams, which harms those least educated and poorest individuals.
Death to advertisement! On billboards! On television! On the internet!
Ads are a parasite on the human mind that need to go away, forever.
I use a combination of UBO, PiHole and AdGuard on my mobile devices. Can't say I've seen an ad in the last year. Is this trying to solve an existing problem or speculating on where things could go in future?
I’m curious why you’re using 3 separate methods. Do you miss things with just one? AFAIK all 3 use similar block lists and are configurable. I’m building a pi-hole type solution for myself and essentially want all the filtering and blocking to happen at my firewall and not on my client (phone, laptop, tablet).
That's why I use uBlock and PiHole, which I deem is enough.
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I guess that's why uBO Lite exists :) I started using it a couple of months ago instead of Ublock Origin, and still haven't seen any ads since. https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home
I think eventually there is nothing that can stop certain adds on Chrome once specific API's are removed, even using manifest 3. Maybe someone could chime in on this as its really confusing now since Google keeps pushing back the date to remove manifest 2. (This might be outdated info)
I hope we'll not end up in a DRM-like system where ads are somehow really baked in and content stops working for lay-people if they try to circumvent ads.