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AdFlush

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Re: AdFlush

#91

Post by p3rls »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #68

Always a joy to see efforts in the ongoing battle against advertisements. 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 "…

Death to small media companies! You should have gotten some VC money if you wanted to make products for people, you poor pieces of shit.

Re: AdFlush

#92

Post by hathawsh »

kmlx wrote: post #57
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Domains are cheap, don't serve content on an ad domain maybe? Sounds like perhaps your task was to ensure a company's ads got through an adblocker?

my task was to rectify an issue in one of these crowd sourced lists of ad servers. they were blocking a whole domain instead of blocking the ad-serving subdomain. the issue was rectified, the main domain was replaced by the ad-serving subdomain.

Still, as pbhjpbhj suggested, if I were publishing both content and ads, I would consider publishing the ads on a different domain (not just a subdomain) to reduce technical issues. Domains with ugly names are very cheap.

Re: AdFlush

#93

Post by specialist »

downrightmike wrote: post #74
ladzoppelin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (This might be outdated info)

We'll create a shim to render the page in the background and use AI to remove ads and then serve the result to the user, at the least. Fuck ads and malvertising

Yes and: There will be a tipping point where it'll be easier to allow the content rather than blocking the garbage. Dynamic screen scrapping, more or less.

Re: AdFlush

#94

Post by infogulch »

So AdFlush beats uBlock Origin with a marginal detection rate advantage of 0.86 vs 0.84, at the cost of significant performance overhead: median 2.7s load time (no ad block); 2.2s (uBO); 6.6s (AdFlush clean); 3.4s (AdFlush cached).

I'd like to see a tandem uBO+AdFlush extension that just enables uBO by default, with a "I still see ADs!" button in the extension UI that refreshes with AdFlush enabled and auto-submits any missed ads to a new FlushList filter list.

Re: AdFlush

#95

Post by Terr_ »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #68

Always a joy to see efforts in the ongoing battle against advertisements. 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 "…

Ultimately it's about where we draw the line for hacking other people's brains.

It's a spectrum: Some level is an unavoidable part of communication ("I like dogs" forces you to think of dogs) some more is considered normal and traditional manipulation ("My food smells nice, that makes you hungry, wanna buy?") and then it goes on into grey-areas, scams, and eventually to potential extremes like "this image induces nausea" or "this sound knocks you out".

Re: AdFlush

#96

Post by uyzstvqs »

GioM wrote: post #58
AlexandrB wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If Manifest v3 is really this bad then it's probably still possible to build adblockers by DLL hooking the browser. It should also not affect browsers with built-in adblocking like Brave and Vivaldi.

Re: AdFlush

#97

Post by jonathankoren »

avmich wrote: post #88
jonathankoren wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I honestly don’t think they think about a nonchromium browser, and if they do think of it, they reject it for unfounded reasons. If they did use a nonchromium browser, Firefox would have a larger market share.

Re: AdFlush

#98

Post by zx8080 »

GioM wrote: post #58
AlexandrB wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How complex is to revert changes to manifest to bring supporting v2 back to Chromium? Or is it intentionally made super complex by Google?

Re: AdFlush

#99

Post by vrc »

Spoom wrote: post #40
inversetelecine wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 commenting on Google[1], I think this sort of thing is true in the short term but less true in the long term. I expect that, were Chrome to ban ad blockers, technical folks will start to teach non-technical folks in their orbit how to e.g. install Firefox to regain ad-blocking capability. I think it would take some number of years but there would be a pushback in the medium- to long-term. 1. Googler, opinion…

This is ironically how Chrome got its big push into the mainstream. Would be great if that’s how it got pushed out. But the world of influential techies, especially amongst the younger, seems to have gotten smaller. Perhaps I’m wrong

Re: AdFlush

#100

Post by andirk »

dylan604 wrote: post #89
andirk wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 equi…

> You are obviously in the camp that feels entitled...

Not at all. I use Brave and "shield down" websites that I like and generally keep their ad situation under control (incl. 3rd party). But your point of hosting vs 3rd party is a good one and especially because often one 3rd party connects to another.

Likewise, I "block" annoying parts of websites like Yahoo Fantasy Football's enormous top nav that's not even an ad.

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