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This discussion has been archived.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: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Saturday April 15 2017, @06:19PM (4 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Saturday April 15 2017, @06:19PM (#494506)

    How did great sculptures, great paintings, great music, and great theater get made before advertising?

    Through a model called "patronage". Rich people paid the artists to make stuff for them. It worked out well if you were one of the very best artists, but it didn't exactly support a lot of arts, because there were only a small number of people that rich. Most people were dirt poor.

    They've tried this model on the internet, with things like "Patreon". It doesn't work (or maybe I should say, it doesn't scale). A tiny number of people might make a living off their artwork that way, a much larger number will make some extra spending money (but nowhere near enough to live on), and that's it. Some non-profit stuff gets funded that way: an example is the Star Trek fan-made series such as Star Trek Continues. But no one's making any kind of money to live on there (it's explicitly disallowed by Paramount); all the money goes solely to fund the production work (sets, post-processing, etc.), so all the actors and talent and even construction workers are just unpaid volunteers. There just aren't that many people willing to donate to artists (or journalists) they like. So we have things like paywalls on news sites now to try to force people to pay, through subscriptions (rather than commissions or one-time donations). Time will tell if those are successful, but I suspect not.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Insightful=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3  
  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday April 15 2017, @06:23PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Saturday April 15 2017, @06:23PM (#494509) Journal

    There are groups of journalists that live good of donations alone. But the bar to accomplish that is to deliver something that is really worthwhile to read.

    Kickstarter perhaps is another path were a working pay can be made.

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @06:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @06:53PM (#494520)

    Works made by people that know the material and love their craft and want to share will survive. A hobby might not pay the bills but that's not really the point of hobbies. If you can't make a living doing something, then maybe that something doesn't quality as a paying job - that would be about 90% of the blogs, youtube videos, and general crap on the 'net.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @07:12PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @07:12PM (#494529)

    That sounds like a Republican's wet dream healthcare plan.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @10:59PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @10:59PM (#494580)

    Through a model called "patronage". Rich people paid the artists to make stuff for them. It worked out well if you were one of the very best artists, but it didn't exactly support a lot of arts, because there were only a small number of people that rich. Most people were dirt poor.

    So it wouldn't have supported the mass-production of autotune pop? Cry me a river.

    Looking back, "didn't exactly support a lot of arts" really was a problem, because it means that a lot of the culture was only available to the 1% -- but when you can infinitely, losslessly replicate almost every kind of art, you don't need "a lot of arts". Haven't you heard idiots complaining about "peak TV", the idea being that there's too much new art produced now to even keep up with all the worthwhile stuff, let alone have time to delve into anything from before they were born? And IMO that is an idiotic thing to whine about, but it still goes to show we can certainly live with a lot less quantity.

    They've tried this model on the internet, with things like "Patreon". It doesn't work (or maybe I should say, it doesn't scale).

    So it works without rich people (given the right infrastructure to allow consolidating large numbers of tiny payments from poor people), and it only supports interesting things, rather than the commoditized churn (I mentioned music, but think hollywood blockbusters, too) that is so much of our pop culture today? Sounds great!

    Also, even if you're right that it fails to scale (and I think it may be a little early to state that conclusively -- Patreon has been around for 4 whole years, and Kickstarter for 8), it's important to note that it's failing when competing with deeply entrenched players in each content industry that "everyone knows" are the way things get done -- it doesn't prove it wouldn't scale in the absence of those players.