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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: 4, Interesting) by nitehawk214 on Thursday December 28 2017, @12:07AM (2 children)
With that logic, writing in a book that I own would be illegal. If I allow and adblocker on my computer to later a webpage that I am viewing, that is my business and none of anyone elses.
Is this app illegal? https://kickassapp.com [kickassapp.com]
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by arcz on Friday December 29 2017, @04:34AM
Writing in a book you own would indeed be modifying the book, but allowed under the first sale doctrine and the fair use doctrine. Since you didn't pay for the article, you can't rely on the first sale doctrine, and I doubt it would fall under fair use either.
(Score: 2) by arcz on Friday December 29 2017, @04:50AM
The reason why removing ads is sometimes copyright infringement and sometimes not is that certain methods of blocking ads create a derivative work. If you block ads by refusing to load them, that's allowed, you're simply making the browser refuse to request ads. The problem is when you edit JavaScript. That's different from simply refusing to load it, you're now creating a derivative (modified) work. It doesn't matter if you distribute the derivative work or not, it isn't allowed per 17 U.S. Code § 106 (2). So in summary, your browser can legally block ads by blocking HTTP/HTTPS requests, but it cannot edit the content of pages. (refusing to load html requests does not actually edit the page in any way, it simply causes the element not to be included in the normal way that elements do not appear when an HTTP request fails). Where adblocking gets illegal is when the website uses anti-adblock technology. If the same script is loading ads, checking that the ad actually displays, and then loading the content after it has confirmed that the ad has displayed, you cannot legally block that ad without blocking the content, as you'd need to edit the JavaScript to do so. This is because editing the JavaScript creates a derivative work. So what about cutting ads out of newspapers? Well, probably not copyright infringement, since the first sale doctrine usually applies to newspaper sales. If you got the newspaper for free, you might be infringing copyright, but it would probably be considered de minis. (IANAL)