Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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

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

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @04:41PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @04:41PM (#494475)

    Somehow the Roman Empire managed to pay a dole while conquering most of Europe. By historical standards, America is an utter failure as a superpower.

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +1  
       Interesting=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   1  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @05:09PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @05:09PM (#494480)

    By historical standards, America is an utter failure as a superpower.

    Well, why don't you tell that to Nazi Germany, Imperialist Japan and the Soviet Republic.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @12:12AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @12:12AM (#494605)

      Draft-dodging Donnie Tiny Hands is one of those who is stuck in the past.

      Now let's move on to something that happened since the 1940s.

      In the 1950s, USA poured a bunch of men and materiel into an Asian peninsula.
      Both sides signed a ceasefire in 1953 but that scrap never officially ended.
      IOW, USA fought to a draw with a "demilitarized" zone established at the 38th parallel.

      In the 1970s, some guys in black pajamas crossed the 17th parallel [google.com] and kicked the ass of the never-should-have-been-there USA, chasing it out.

      ...then, this century, there's the ragheads that have kept USA tied up without a victory for 14 years (even longer than the pajama-wearing guys--it just keeps getting worse).

      -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @05:14PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @05:14PM (#494483)

    I'm not sure that's comparable. The roman empire had to pass laws preventing the freeing of slaves to keep their system going:

    These limitations on manumissions were made when the number of manumissions were so large (at the end of republic and the beginning of empire), that they even questioned the social system of the time.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Aelia_Sentia [wikipedia.org]

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Chromium_One on Saturday April 15 2017, @06:45PM

      by Chromium_One (4574) on Saturday April 15 2017, @06:45PM (#494518)

      Consider the productivity of a slave kitchen vs. an industrial kitchen in the modern world ; how many loaves on bread per man-hour in each? Consider as well for modern farming techniques, transport, etc. From a sheer logistics point of view, there is no reason we cannot provide a [very basic] minimum standard of living while steamrolling over the rest of the world at this point. There's just no real political will to do either.

      --
      When you live in a sick society, everything you do is wrong.