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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: 2) by Justin Case on Sunday April 16 2017, @02:04PM (4 children)
Advertisers ruin every form of communication. A couple years ago I disconnected my land line because it was 99.8% telemarketers.
The web was better before it got saturated with
contentclickbait. Pretty much every ad-supported site we'd be better off without.Staying below the marketer's radar is becoming more and more impossible. You block a thousand spies and then one gets your info and you're sunk.
Who has tried the opposite tactic: jam their databases with noise? Maybe we need a spider that "clicks" every ad, fills out every form with random zip code etc. until they can't find the signal under all the static. Of course that doesn't solve the bandwidth problem. And the spider would probably have to run in a VM that auto-resets every hour to flush out the malware, cookies, etc. Probably needs to randomize user-agent and other trackable elements. Oh the glory day when they decide they have to make us fill out a CAPTCHA before showing an ad!
I think parts of this exist... has anyone come up with something that puts it all together?
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday April 17 2017, @05:38AM (3 children)
What OS and browser are you running? most of these troubles have a technical solution.
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Monday April 17 2017, @05:05PM (2 children)
Linux, Firefox, NoScript, HTTPS Everywhere, RefControl, RequestPolicy, 15K hosts blocked in /etc/hosts...
but even so I only have to make one mistake and my info leaks, and once it does, The Net Never Forgets. So I'm thinking of the opposite approach: bury them with noise.
Also, ideally, it wouldn't involve finding, configuring, and maintaining the right combination of plug-ins or tools, but rather one thing that integrates it all.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday April 17 2017, @08:12PM (1 child)
I can see at least one problem here and that is the strategy of the "enumeration of bad". Ie decide what is allowed, forbid everything else. Somewhere there you can add mechanism to stuff their spying with junk.
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Monday April 17 2017, @08:40PM
Which is exactly why I am asking for better ideas that anyone else may have tried.
However, NoScript has a whitelist mode where you allow scripts on trusted sites (for me, that = 0) but default deny all others. So my strategy is not exclusively "enumeration of bad" unless you consider scripts an instance of enumerated bad. I couldn't argue with you there.