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