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The PDF contains the full paper (14 pages), but also includes the following abstract:
Abstract—Millions of people use adblockers to remove intrusive and malicious ads as well as protect themselves against tracking and pervasive surveillance. Online publishers consider adblockers a major threat to the ad-powered "free" Web. They have started to retaliate against adblockers by employing anti- adblockers which can detect and stop adblock users. To counter this retaliation, adblockers in turn try to detect and filter anti-adblocking scripts. This back and forth has prompted an escalating arms race between adblockers and anti-adblockers.
We want to develop a comprehensive understanding of anti- adblockers, with the ultimate aim of enabling adblockers to bypass state-of-the-art anti-adblockers. In this paper, we present a differential execution analysis to automatically detect and analyze anti-adblockers. At a high level, we collect execution traces by visiting a website with and without adblockers. Through differ- ential execution analysis, we are able to pinpoint the conditions that lead to the differences caused by anti-adblocking code. Using our system, we detect anti-adblockers on 30.5% of the Alexa top- 10K websites which is 5-52 times more than reported in prior literature. Unlike prior work which is limited to detecting visible reactions (e.g., warning messages) by anti-adblockers, our system can discover attempts to detect adblockers even when there is no visible reaction. From manually checking one third of the detected websites, we find that the websites that have no visible reactions constitute over 90% of the cases, completely dominating the ones that have visible warning messages. Finally, based on our findings, we further develop JavaScript rewriting and API hooking based solutions (the latter implemented as a Chrome extension) to help adblockers bypass state-of-the-art anti-adblockers.
The conclusion is as follows:
We presented a differential execution analysis approach to discover anti-adblockers. Our insight is that websites equipped with anti-adblockers will exhibit different execution traces when they are visited by a browser with and without an adblocker. Based on this, our system enables us to unveil many more (up to 52×) anti-adblocking websites and scripts than reported in prior literature. Moreover, since our approach en- ables us to pinpoint the exact branch statements and conditions involved in adblocker detection, we can steer execution away from the anti-adblocking code through JavaScript rewriting or hide the presence of adblockers through API hooking. Our system can bypass a vast majority of anti-adblockers without causing any site functionality breakage (except one with Javascript rewriting).
We anticipate escalation of the technological battle between adblockers and anti-adblockers — at least in the short term. From the perspective of security and privacy conscious users, it is crucial that adblockers are able to keep up with anti- adblockers. Moreover, the increasing popularity of adblocking has already led to various reform efforts within the online advertising industry to improve ads (e.g., Coalition for Better Ads [5], Acceptable Ads Committee [2]) and even alternate monetization models (e.g., Google Contributor [6], Brave Payments [4]). However, to keep up the pressure on publishers and advertisers in the long term, we believe it is crucial that adblockers keep pace with anti-adblockers in the rapidly escalating technological arms race. Our work represents an important step in this direction.
I found it an interesting read, although I accept that the whole 14 pages might be a little too heavy for some.
(Score: 5, Informative) by meustrus on Wednesday December 27 2017, @10:24PM (3 children)
It's only infringement if you redistribute. And patches are generally not considered derivative works unless they contain context from the original source.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by arcz on Friday December 29 2017, @04:57AM (2 children)
Except in the United States. Where modifying a copyrighted work is infringement, 17 U.S. Code § 106 (2).
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Friday December 29 2017, @04:24PM (1 child)
Interesting. I can't imagine any ways in the pre-internet world to enforce a rule that forbids the equivalent of writing secret fan fiction. How old is that statute? I find it curious that something so plainly unenforceable would be written into law.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 1, Troll) by arcz on Saturday December 30 2017, @08:23PM
It actually is enforced, rarely. Obviously they aren't going to enforce it when you modify stuff on your own computer. Where it matters is the concept of induced infringement, where someone does something to induce another to infringe. Making an adblockers that modifies content falls under this category, you'd be inducing others (the users of the adblock software) to infringe copyright. So this is a form of indirect infringement of copyright, which does include damages, though not direct infringement.
Writing fan fiction is technically infringement, but a company has no standing to sue unless that fan fiction somehow damages the company. Usually that isn't the case unless the fan fiction is sold.
(IANAL)