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AdFlush

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Re: AdFlush

#81

Post by karaterobot »

Blocking image ads seems like a relatively well-solved problem. I mean, speaking as someone who can't stand ads, I don't see very many of them anymore when I'm on desktop.

The harder, more pernicious type of ads are the modals that pop up when your cursor moves toward the back button, or when you scroll down a certain distance on the page. "Wait! Before you go, take a moment to give us your email address!"

Those can be blocked, but by the time you've seen them, they've already done all the damage they can do—which is to say, they've annoyed you.

I wish somebody could come up with a way to detect and stop them. I spent an afternoon trying to come up with reusable techniques to detect these popups, but there are just too many possibilities.

Re: AdFlush

#82

Post by shpx »

babypuncher wrote: post #75
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The filter based adblockers are at risk though, with Google's new extension thingy that - at least a few years ago, I haven't heard from it since - limited the amount of rules. If there's a non-rule based system that is 98% effective then that would circumvent the arbitrary rule limits that Google set.

Real easy problem to solve by just switching back to Firefox

The first thing you see when you open Firefox is an ad for Amazon and Expedia.

Re: AdFlush

#83

Post by babypuncher »

ndriscoll wrote: post #51
Centigonal wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google controls the APIs that extension writers can use. They are currently using that control to impose limits on what adblocker extensions can do. [1][2] You could download the Chromium source and patch it to change the extensions APIs (or better, just use Firefox), but the majority of users won't do this, and extension writers aren't going to make a version for a patched Chromium browser unless it has significant…

You could always provide an extension that loads itself as a .dll/.so. I don't see much difference in friction between adding an extension through google's website vs. download setup.exe from somewhere. Of course like you say, using less user-hostile software is preferable.

Such extensions would be trivially easy for Google to break with Chrome updates. You also cannot distribute an extension like that through any of the usual extension stores.

Better to just use a browser that actually respects its users.

Re: AdFlush

#85

Post by flakiness »

seized wrote: post #59

> We tested AdFlush on a dataset of 10,000 real-world websites, achieving an F1 score of 0.98, thereby outperforming AdGraph (F1 score: 0.93), WebGraph (F1 score: 0.90), and WTAgraph (F1 score: 0.84). ... Has anyone even heard of these ad blockers before?

These are all academic research projects.

Re: AdFlush

#86

Post by blacksmith_tb »

tofof wrote: post #78
pradn wrote: post #63

What's fascinating here is AdFlush is a classical feature engineering approach: define a bunch of features on the data manually, and then use ML to figure out the most useful / impactful ones. This is not the "throw terabytes of data and see what happens" approach we see with LLMs. It's a bit funny to even point this out because I don't recall the last time a feature-engineered ML project made it to the HN front page…

More specifically, page load time was 2.7 seconds without adblocker, decreased to 2.1 with uBlock Origin, but increased by 250% to 6.6 seconds with AdFlush, or increased to 3.4 seconds with AdFlush retaining prior predictions. The superior score was an F1 of 0.86 vs 0.84 for AdFlush vs uBlock Origin, and it's not clear to me that this is a statistically significant difference. They do not claim it is.

That seems to argue for a first pass with a blocklist to filter out the well-known ad providers, and then possibly a followup step with the ML to catch things that are trying harder to slip by? But the extensions would have to cooperate to make that possible.

Re: AdFlush

#87

Post by aembleton »

pradn wrote: post #79
tofof wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More specifically, page load time was 2.7 seconds without adblocker, decreased to 2.1 with uBlock Origin, but increased by 250% to 6.6 seconds with AdFlush, or increased to 3.4 seconds with AdFlush retaining prior predictions. The superior score was an F1 of 0.86 vs 0.84 for AdFlush vs uBlock Origin, and it's not clear to me that this is a statistically significant difference. They do not claim it is.

Thanks for extracting the details. It doesn't seem like they'll be competitive with blocklist-based approaches like uBlock Origin, because their features are fundamentally expensive to compute - parsing JS and such, not just matching URLs against a list of regexes.

Seems like it could work in the background to build up new rules for uBlockOrigin to deploy

Re: AdFlush

#88

Post by avmich »

jonathankoren wrote: post #72
avmich wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google doesn't control the browser, user does.

Firefox has 2.9%. Safari has 18.12%. Everything else is Chrome or reskinned Chrome, with Chrome itself being 65.3%. Unless you’re running that 20%, Google controls it, and they basically write the standards anymore.

Oh, of course if you run Google-written software without modifications, you're not really controlling it. So if you want to control it, either go inside and tinker with the code, or - easier? - switch to a non-Google browser.

I thought this is rather obvious, at least for those worried about experience. Do you think all those who realize they're suffering from ads don't think about using non-Chromium browser?

Re: AdFlush

#89

Post by dylan604 »

andirk wrote: post #80
pradn wrote: post #63

What's fascinating here is AdFlush is a classical feature engineering approach: define a bunch of features on the data manually, and then use ML to figure out the most useful / impactful ones. This is not the "throw terabytes of data and see what happens" approach we see with LLMs. It's a bit funny to even point this out because I don't recall the last time a feature-engineered ML project made it to the HN front page…

I like the strategy of using flags to say "look into this suspicious part of the code" over a hardcoded block list. And also block shitty JS via "JS AST depth, average JS identifier length" etc even if it's not an ad but just bad code. For Brave browser users, you can see what hardcoded lists you're using at brave://adblock . As for the whole cat and mouse game, how to detect an "ad" if it's served with the content f…

> how to detect an "ad" if it's served with the content fully sever-side? Now _that_ needs some serious ML to decipher.

This has been my red line on where I will allow ads vs blocking them. If a site is hosting their own ads, that's acceptable to me. If they are using an ad provider, that is not. The newspaper example is my go to. If you wanted your ad in a paper, you called the paper and took out an ad. Today's equivalent would be every time you opened the paper, a slight delay while it randomly chose the highest bids for the ad space while potentially also inserting something that would slowly eat your hands. That's a nope.

You are obviously in the camp that feels entitled to be able to read anything at anytime without allowing for a website to earn money by wanting to block all ads regardless of their origin.

Re: AdFlush

#90

Post by YmiYugy »

JAlexoid wrote: post #38
YmiYugy wrote: post #22

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.

I think it depends on what solution space you are willing to explore. There is the possibility for regulatory action that restricts native ads. It's seems plausible that a flood of AI content tanks the prices for native ads, so some might pivot to original content + regular ads, which might also become more profitable if regulatory action weakens the oligopolies of that space. Aside from high level market shifts and regulatory action, there is of course also the possibility of technical solutions that can help you to avoid native ads.
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