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Ad-Blocking Superweapon May End Ad-Blocking Arms Race

posted by martyb on Saturday April 15 2017, @03:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the End-of-Facebook,-Google,-et-al? dept.

DannyB writes:

Princeton's Ad-Blocking Superweapon May Put an End to the Ad-Blocking Arms Race

An ad blocker that uses computer vision appears to be the most powerful ever devised and can evade all known anti ad blockers.

A team of Princeton and Stanford University researchers has fundamentally reinvented how ad-blocking works, in an attempt to put an end to the advertising versus ad-blocking arms race. The ad blocker they've created is lightweight, evaded anti ad-blocking scripts on 50 out of the 50 websites it was tested on, and can block Facebook ads that were previously unblockable.

This fulfills the dream, that I'm sure I'm not alone in having, of "what if something could see the entire page, and show me a copy of the page with the ads visually blocked, but with the advertiser's scripts interacting with the original copy filled with thousands and thousands of blinking, dancing, flashing, seizure inducing ads."

Ads ruin everything they touch. Radio. TV. Magazines. Newspapers. Billboards. I could go on, but on the web ads, like they always do, started out unobtrusive. Then there were deceptive ads designed to lure you to "punch the monkey". Then more deceptively to look like an OS dialog warning of something with horrible consequences demanding immediate response luring you to install malware. Ads. Ad blockers. Ad blocker blockers. Then better ad blockers. Now this. Maybe something that will finally kill ads dead.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @04:31PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @04:31PM (#494470)

    Uh oh, now most of the YouTubers would have to go get a real job

    What is a "real job"? Is something only a "real job" if it makes you miserable? Is this at all related to the True Scotsman?

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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @05:30PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @05:30PM (#494492)

    I think we can reasonably conclude that True Scotsmen all work Real Jobs.

  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday April 15 2017, @06:28PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Saturday April 15 2017, @06:28PM (#494512) Journal

    A real job is something that makes people confuse exhausted with making a difference.
    Even Einstein had a real job as a patent clerk. And then he stop doing a real job....
    He even avoided real slaughter.

  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday April 16 2017, @07:23AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday April 16 2017, @07:23AM (#494718) Journal

    A real job is a job people are willing to pay you for doing it.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.