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This discussion has been archived.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: 2) by kaszz on Saturday April 15 2017, @06:35PM (1 child)

    by kaszz (4211) on Saturday April 15 2017, @06:35PM (#494514) Journal

    3) It's simply the assumption that without advertising content would dry up. How would we know? We've never tried.....

    Actually it has been tried on the internet before advertising there was a thing. The consequence is that amount of content decreases largely but there surely is a bottom level which is substantial. Also professionally managed servers will not be around.

    Otoh, on the internet everybody is free to use sites that isn't ad financed. The choice can be made at any clock cycle.

    There are a lot of slime that takes advantage of any situation and push it as long as they can. But it won't take away the bottom logic. Machines need to be manufactured = $, needs connection and power = $, needs attention span of people = $.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday April 16 2017, @07:26AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday April 16 2017, @07:26AM (#494721) Journal

    Otoh, on the internet everybody is free to use sites that isn't ad financed.

    Of course. Everyone here does so for at least one site. Determining what site that is is left as an exercise to the reader. :-)

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