
Princeton’s Ad-Blocker May Put an End to the Ad-Blocking Arms Race - hourislate
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/princetons-ad-blocking-superweapon-may-put-an-end-to-the-ad-blocking-arms-race
======
downandout
The article puts a significant emphasis on the idea that bulletproof ad-
blocking technology, assuming that's what this turns out to be in practice,
will work long-term becuase of legal restrictions imposed by the FTC. If
Google, Facebook, or other multi-billion dollar entities detect an existential
threat arising from this or any other technology, rest assured that the laws
will change as quickly as is necessary to keep them happy. Lobbyists will be
paid, and donations will be made. Anti-ad-blocking laws will be introduced, or
the FTC's ad identification restrictions will be relaxed. Ads aren't going
anywhere, and neither are advertisers.

~~~
shouldbworking
I unfortunately agree with you 100%. Theres too much money tied up in
advertising for it to ever go away.

Google is the greatest conglomeration of Nobel worthy scientists and engineers
in the last century. And their entire organization is built on advertising.
After creating the best search engine and email system, they created the best
web browser and most popular operating system in the world. All of this for
the sole purpose of controlling the advertising platform, their raw
intelligence is unquestionable.

Google's open source contributions are unmatched and this is just a small
sample of the tech they keep hidden away. As much as I find myself in awe of
google, I'm absolutely terrified of the ad laden future they're leading us
towards with open arms. Ad blocking has one single insurmountable problem,
Google, the smartest and most powerful company in the world.

~~~
hueving
>Google is the greatest conglomeration of Nobel worthy scientists and
engineers in the last century.

IIRC both Microsoft and IBM produce way more research than Google. Let's keep
things in perspective.

>And their entire organization is built on advertising.

Similarly the entire government is built on taxation, that doesn't mean
everyone in the government wants to work on taxation or is good at it.

>After creating the best search engine and email system

Sure engine, sure. Email system, only if you restrict to web-based without
privacy.

>they created the best web browser and most popular operating system in the
world

Google didn't create Android, they bought it.

>Google's open source contributions are unmatched

Metrics for this are pretty lame, but even they show this is wrong:
[https://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2016/09/15/in-your-face-
goo...](https://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2016/09/15/in-your-face-google/)

~~~
magicalist
> _Google didn 't create Android, they bought it._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus)

You'd have a better point if you had pointed to the Linux kernel, the many
open source libraries, etc that make it up

> _Metrics for this are pretty lame, but even they show this is wrong:_
> [https://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2016/09/15/in-your-face-
> goo...](https://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2016/09/15/in-your-face-google/)

I doubt GP's claim is correct, but that article is terrible. Those counts are
any contributors to _repos_ in an org, not number of contributors _from_ those
orgs. And you can see the immediate problem with using orgs when you see both
Google and Angular are in the top 10.

~~~
Nexxxeh
Android, Angular, BoringSSL, Chromium, Dart, Go, Kubernete, TensorFlow. Not to
mention the cash and services it ploughs into the OSS in various ways, from
the Millions it gave to Firefox over the years, to people collaborating over
Hangouts, to Project Zero.

I don't think "unmatched" is unreasonable.

~~~
NicoJuicy
Millions to Firefox to be the search engine on the browser.

It wasn't a donation ;)

~~~
bigbugbag
And they made much more from firefox than what they paid.

~~~
dheera
How so? If Firefox didn't exist they'd make the same amount from MSIE.

------
gwu78
I do not have "block ads". I simply do not request them.

Users do not intentionally make requests for ads or pixels from tracking
servers. Browsers do. Automatically.

People writing web pages that aim to cash in on advertising budgets depend on
this "feature". However it is optional. I read hundreds of web pages and never
see any ads. Because for eading the news I do not use a so-called "modern"
browser.

It seems the entire web ad industry requires browsers to operate a certain
way. If browsers do not follow these assumptions, then the user sees no ads.

Despite strange notions like the one in the top-voted comment in this thread,
there is nothing that requires any user to use browsers written by people
whose salaries are paid directly or indirectly from ad sales revenue.

Assuming certain companies were as all-powerful as the commenter suggests,
then why not _require_ users to access pages using software written by
companies who profit from such web traffic? And make the software proprietary?

Surely no one would complain. Thank you sir, may I have another?

Let us not forget some of these "multi-billion dollar entities" are just
websites. If the traffic dies down, the business of selling ads is no longer
feasible. And the company disappears along with the website. It has happened
before.

98% of revenue from web traffic/ad sales.

Castles made of sand.

~~~
ColanR
I'm guessing you use something like w3m or lynx? (if not, I would love to hear
about it) The problem is that text-based browsers of that ilk are not user-
friendly to the general population.

If you have the knowledge to implement that kind of not-requesting of ads, I
bet one of the fringe/experimental browsers (I'm thinking of Vivaldi) would be
a great place to implement what you're talking about.

~~~
shinypotatoe
I use umatrix for not loading ads and for tracking protection. It is a tool to
define from which domains a certain website may fetch resources. It is a bit
less convenient than a adblocker, because for every new site you have to
configure it, but I think it is great. It's really eye opening how many things
some websites load that they do not actually need to show the content I am
interested in.

------
IIIIIIIIIIII
This is not the end of the arms race.

At some point we will have AI designing and AI delivering ads, and while we
may have AI designed to prevent us from having to watch ads we don't want we
will also have AI that watches everything, gathering and filtering information
that is too much for us to handle but tuned to our needs since it's "our AI".
Then the race will be that one AI wants to trick the consumer AI into giving
their information more weight and attention.

So instead of the race humans against humans we'll have a race humans => AI
("sellers" of anything, from goods to news) => AI (consumers) => human (us).

It's going to be a lot more complex: Right now all that people on both sides
have to know is human psychology. In that future they'll have to understand
the potentially _far_ more varied world of possible AIs - and if that isn't
enough the complex interactions between them and also between the AIs and the
humans.

Are we creating the diversity and complexity that we remove from the biosphere
(the ongoing mass extinction and/or reduction of many species) anew but in a
completely different space? In addition to technical systems we are also
getting much better (and better faster!) in controlling biological systems,
creating our own ideas. At least some programmers of the future will write
their code in DNA - or possibly even something more complex, something that
can encode completely new proteins that the current code can't represent. And
then there's combining biology and technology... an explosion of complexity
and diversity?

I studied CS more than two decades ago. I kept up to date and continue to do
the odd course in my field, but what I consider an amazing experience (for an
IT guy) was when I spent the last few years taking hundreds of hours of
courses in biology and medicine. Looking for new ideas? Take an introduction
to biology and genetics course instead of learning an only very mildly
different programming language, for example (free):
[https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-biology-secret-
life-...](https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-biology-secret-life-
mitx-7-00x-5)

~~~
RangerScience
Check out "General Adversarial Networks". It's basically training a two-part
AI via an arms race; one part is trying to fake out the other, the other is
trying to detect the fake.

~~~
kalid
Small fix, I believe it's "Generative" Adversarial Networks.

~~~
RangerScience
You are correct sir.

------
devy
> Another technique used to hide the ad blockers' activities is even more
> impressive. They are able to "create two copies of the page, one which the
> user sees (and to which ad-blocking will be applied) and one which the
> publisher code interacts with, and to ensure that information propagates
> between these copies in one direction but not the other."

So this ultimate ad-blocker would potentially consume twice as much resources
as it would have been?

~~~
randomwalker
Coauthor of the paper here. No --- this is not one of the three techniques
that we implemented. It was a hypothetical suggestion for future work.
Unfortunate that the article didn't make that clear.

Here is the paper [http://randomwalker.info/publications/ad-blocking-
framework-...](http://randomwalker.info/publications/ad-blocking-framework-
techniques.pdf)

Here is our blog post about it: [https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2017/04/14/the-
future-of-ad-bl...](https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2017/04/14/the-future-of-ad-
blocking/)

~~~
wernercd
Just a throw out question:

One of the biggest issues (IMO) is the security threat... if there is a second
copy that "we" don't see, doesn't that mean that the second copy can do "bad
things" still?

Case in Point: Forbes requests you disable ad-blocker... then serves pop-under
malware:

[http://www.networkworld.com/article/3021113/security/forbes-...](http://www.networkworld.com/article/3021113/security/forbes-
malware-ad-blocker-advertisements.html)

I could stomach ads - just like I stomached commercials on TV shows... you get
used to them and they become white noise... if the ads were unobtrusive and
non-invasive (IE: Google Search Results)... it's full screen, pop-up/under,
audio, video, etc. Then throw on top of that malware...

What's to stop the malware from biting on that second copy?

~~~
unholythree
This is what matters most to me. My dislike of ads are out of fear of
malicious code first, tracking second, and wasting my bandwidth third.

The simple gif banner ads of yore were tolerable enough.

------
make3
Just change the alpha values in the `coverContainer` function in `utils.js`
and it actually blocks ads.

Patched `utils.js`:
[https://pastebin.com/YLyN2uJ8](https://pastebin.com/YLyN2uJ8)

~~~
imglorp
Covering is not as good as not loading.

Loading brings all the malware, the tracking, and the bandwidth/load times.

~~~
derefr
"Not loading" doesn't make sense in the case where the ad is inline in the
response body (i.e. "part of the site", like Facebook's ads are.) Which is the
case where this ad-blocker uniquely shines.

Besides which, the algorithm involved is a computer-vision one, so the ad
needs to be rendered before the algorithm can recognize it as an ad.

The best solution here, if you want maximum privacy, would be to use a
traditional ad-blocker as a first-line defence, and this algorithm as a
second-line, for the ads which make it past regular ad-blocking (and which are
therefore probably inline-content ads anyway.)

~~~
the8472
> where the ad is inline in the response body

That only applies to the HTML, which generally is fairly lightweight. They
still load additional images, videos, do XHRs for tracking etc.

------
iamben
At risk of being very unpopular, am I the only person that doesn't mind ads? I
mean some are pretty intrusive, but largely I'm happy to make the trade off.
I'll look at (and maybe click on) your ad, if it means you have the cash to
bring me what I want to look at. It's fantastic to think we live in a world
where the web can support itself without ads, but it's not really practical,
is it? Some stuff I'd support - but the best thing about the web is that I can
dip in and out of sites completely based on one off content, knowing I _don
't_ have to pay before I read.

And the HN crowd is the sharp end of the web. A lot of us ARE likely to
support the web in another way. The blunt end not so much. They're also the
ones more likely to click on ads.

~~~
JBReefer
I have 0 problem with websites that serve up ads that:

1\. Are from their own domain 2\. Are not flash/autoplaying video 3\. Don't
track me/aren't ad tech 4\. Actually have something to do with the content

Run a homebrewing site? Great, run ads for stuff to do with that. I'll
probably click on them, I am looking up homebrewing info! Run a homebrewing
site that serves me ads for refrigerators, because I looked at one on Amazon
three weeks ago? That's creepy, and that's getting blocked. Same with pop ups
pop unders etc.

Advertisers seem to be moving in the same direction - Viacom has reported a
lot of wins over the ad-tech insanity.

~~~
bigbugbag
Apart from duckduckgo, can you share some examples of such websites ?

------
ktta
If anyone want's the source of the proof of concept extension[1] here's a link
to get it. Just use wget

[https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx?response=red...](https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx?response=redirect&os=linux&arch=x86-64&nacl_arch=x86-64&prod=chromecrx&prodchannel=stable&prodversion=57.0.2987.133&x=id%3Dmahgiflleahghaapkboihnbhdplhnchp%26uc)

You should just be able to unzip it.

[1]:[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/perceptual-ad-
bloc...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/perceptual-ad-
blocker/mahgiflleahghaapkboihnbhdplhnchp?hl=en)

~~~
blacksmith_tb
Or you could add some fangs to it yourself[1] by forking it...

1: [https://github.com/citp/ad-
blocking/tree/master/perceptual-a...](https://github.com/citp/ad-
blocking/tree/master/perceptual-adblocker)

~~~
Animats
From the description, it only finds very specific types of ads:

 _For Facebook ad detection, it finds newsfeed items by looking for containers
within the given width constraints and border on the side; it looks for the
sidebar ads by searching for containers with the proper size constraints in a
sidebar. It then determines which newsfeed items are ads by searching for the
"Sponsored" link within them and checking whether this link ultimately goes to
the Facebook "about ads" page._

 _For Adchoices detection, it runs a content script in every iframe which
searches all of the images, (those explicit in an img element, those in the
background-image css, and those drawn as an svg) and then uses fuzzy hashing
to compare them to example Adchoices icons. If any of the images match, it
highlights the iframe as an advertisement._

That won't remove a typical banner ad, or an ad popup.

~~~
hla19
Assuming this is true, why do we need AI for something like this?

We can build a repo of images that's used to show ads, and just block by
images. There's a pretty big multiplier on number of visitors to the number of
ad pictures.

------
throwaway13337
What would a post-ad-supported web looks like?

Only selling user data without a way to use it to target ads?

Consumer software that isn't free?

Sock puppet marketing run rampant?

It would sure be a different world.

~~~
flubert
How does HN pay the server bills, etc.? Is it essentially paid for as a
marketing / recruiting aid out of ycombinator funds? Or is it a charity paid
for by PG?

~~~
mschuster91
> How does HN pay the server bills, etc.?

I believe it's two relatively simple servers running the Arc code of HN, and
Cloudflare as CDN.

HN does not need much processing power or bandwidth - 5 assets
(cacheable+versioned CSS/JS, three tiny gifs) and thanks to gzip usually two-
digit KB sizes of content. The only real expense is the manpower needed for
moderation.

~~~
ythn
> The only real expense is the manpower needed for moderation.

dang, who would want to do that as their job?

~~~
bradknowles
Punmeister Meisterpunner sees what you did there. ;)

------
sharmi
A few days back, I started working on an high powered machine with a vanilla
firefox. Even with just 20-30 tabs open, the software started to crawl. Please
note that most of the pages open were either github pages, hn, stackoverflow
or articles linked for hn (implying fairly reputable sites). Initially I
thought it was the fault of the browser. (That performance was jarring as I am
a tab hoarder, frequently having hundreds of tabs open). Only later did I
realize that I had not installed Ublock Origin. Did it and Poof! The
difference was night and day.

What I am trying to say is that, the advantage of ad-blockers is not just the
removal of ads but also a significant removal of cruft that adds no value and
hogs the system resources. The solution proposed in this article actually
renders the page. So, it solves only one of the issues. It could still be
beneficial to use it in conjunction with UBlock Origin.

------
pavel_lishin
Does this cover the issue of tracking, etc? It seems that in order to
detect/block the ad, it must allow it to load - and at that point, the
malicious payload is already on my machine, and I've already spent part of my
precious allotted bandwidth on someone's idea of profit-making.

~~~
betenoire
This is my thought as well. I avoid ads because of the additional resources
they require, network requests, javascript, etc. Not because my eyes can't
handle them

~~~
Eric_WVGG
Same. I’ve wasted several minutes whitelisting various ad networks for the
maniacs at _Forbes_ and _Wired_ , but when they say “we rely on ads, stop
being a dick” and I try to comply; it turns out they’re not talking about ads
at all.

------
mark_l_watson
Great article, as much for the tension between people wanting free content and
ad free content, and the practical issue of publishers 'keeping the lights
on.'

I subscribe to Blendle (currently I have another tab open to a Wall Street
Journal article by Garry Kasparov about issues with artificial intelligence -
I paid Blendle $0.49 from the funds in my account wallet to read this, so Gary
and the WSJ get paid). Many Blendle articles I read are only $0.09 or $0.15 -
this was an especially expensive one.

I think the 'war' over ad blocking might have a beneficial effect in moving
content providers to easy to use micro payment systems.

Most people I know think that I am crazy for spending small amounts of money
to read stuff, but there are costs in life like supporting things we enjoy and
charities (I really like Google's One a Day charity clearing house - easy to
take 30 seconds and give a dollar or two to some worthwhile cause). The amount
many people spend on coffee each day is more than paying for content and
donating to One a Day.

------
bagacrap
Doesn't this blocker still require you to load and render the ads so they can
apply their vision techniques to them? You won't get any performance win and
you'd still see empty popovers or blank space. I don't see how detecting that
something is an ad is enough on its own to create an effective ad blocking
solution.

The part about defeating known anti-ad blockers seems rather unfair. If this
technique did gain popularity I'm sure there would be ways around it (like
tricking it into thinking the button used to dismiss a popover is itself an
ad).

~~~
news_to_me
It sounds like part of their premise is that won't happen because of legal
reasons - to some extent, ads have to be identifiable.

~~~
pmiller2
It already happens. Misleading ads are one of the big reasons I use an
adblocker.

------
ams6110
I use a hosts file, and uBlock Origin. I can't remember the last time I've
seen an ad on a website. I'm thinking there's not a lot of room for
improvement.

~~~
sdabdoub
There's a lot of background work to keep uBlock and other services current. A
hosts file needs updating when domains change or new ones are added.

That's part of the appeal of this approach, it doesn't matter what domains ads
are served from.

------
mdpopescu
I think these guys haven't read pg's Submarine [1]. Assuming everything works
as they claim (it won't), the ads will just pretend to be articles.

[1]
[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

~~~
darkstar999
Yeah, can this thing block product placement in youtube videos? Didn't think
so.

~~~
BillinghamJ
There are laws about that too, but most YouTubers ignore them unfortunately

------
nyolfen
here's a direct link to the whitepaper:
[http://randomwalker.info/publications/ad-blocking-
framework-...](http://randomwalker.info/publications/ad-blocking-framework-
techniques.pdf)

------
nickbail3y
According to the article, current adblockers like Ublock Origin aren't
searching for keywords in the page elements for ads, they're just using human
maintained lookup lists?

That's very surprising. I would have thought that would be the first avenue of
attack for adblockers.

Also, who wants to help me retrofit this thing to actually block ads?

~~~
LeoPanthera
> they're just using human maintained lookup lists?

That's correct. The lists are maintained here:
[https://forums.lanik.us](https://forums.lanik.us)

~~~
mi100hael
I'm pretty sure at least some of the popular adblockers out there block based
on basic keywords as well. We had some users complain that an adblocker was
blocking valid parts of our web app because some of the page elements had IDs
that started with '#ad-' since 'A.D.' was an internal abbreviation for one of
our features.

------
jagthebeetle
Not seeing a whole lot of discussion about the implementation. Looking through
the extension's code (which should be somewhere under your Chrome app files,
if not online), briefly, it seems like an unsung hero here is Tesseract.js:
[http://tesseract.projectnaptha.com/](http://tesseract.projectnaptha.com/).

The extension itself seems to do OCR (using Tesseract) on images and look for
the string "adchoices", or else the adchoices icon, which yes, is cool: but
just want to clarify that the folks at Tesseract seem to be doing the meaty
"computer vision" part.

EDIT: oh, this isn't markdown.

------
quotemstr
Corey Doctorow predicted this event in his prescient 2012 article "The coming
war on general-purpose computing":
[http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html](http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html)

He's talking about DRM as it applies to downloaded content, but the same
argument applies to web advertising.

------
teaneedz
So much wasted development effort. I applaud Princeton and this team though.
Ad tech is just a flawed attempt to monetize user data which has alienated
users. Online ads are a security and privacy risk. Developers need to stop
supporting ad tech completely. Put the effort into more beneficial endeavors.
If only ... advertisers and publishers had listened and took UX seriously.

------
dlubarov
> Because advertisers must comply with these regulations, the authors imagine
> an "end game" in which consumers—and ad blockers—ultimately win.

I don't entirely agree. Websites have an advantage too: they can withhold the
interesting content until a time of their choosing. For example, a blog could

\- Serve an ad page initially

\- Include some javascript to load the text of the blog post

\- Have the request handler for the text do a sleep(10)

Then there's not much an ad blocker can do.

\- They could hide the ad, but then the user is waiting on a blank screen,
which is probably an even worse experience for most.

\- In some cases they could pre-fetch the text, but you can't always predict
where the user will go, so it would only work sometimes.

\- A more advanced ad blocker could mirror a bunch of content and serve it
with no delays, but that wouldn't work for personalized content like Facebook
timelines.

~~~
bigbugbag
I already encounter similar case with the overuse of unnecessary visual
effects, anti adblock and other dark patterns.

3 things can happen: \- I use firebug to fix this

\- I look at source and extract the URL to actual content

\- I change my user-agent to that of the bot that indexed the content

But 99% of the time I don't waste my time with this useless piece of crap and
move to the next thing. 0,0001% of the time I sent an informative email to the
abuse or contact citing the relevant piece of legislation explaining how this
is illegal and what the punishment for this could be.

------
mattb314
Slightly related question from a non-expert in ad-blocking: is it possible to
block interstitial ads? While the freedom to render a page as you wish seems
to come with controlling the browser on your computer, I can't imagine any way
to circumvent the ads the obstruct the entire page and force you to wait for a
few seconds before seeing content. Obviously you can just choose not to render
them, but if the server can just delay serving article content until X seconds
after the interstitial loads, it seems like the fundamental advantage here
lies with the publisher and not the user. While submarine ads and lobbying are
obvious responses to the Ad-blocker proposed above, wouldn't interstitials
(which personally bother me much more than sponsored facebook posts) also gain
popularity?

~~~
bigbugbag
no script, no interstitial.

------
takeda
Allow me to be a bit skeptic about it.

This reminds me a lot of Bayesian spam filters. Those things worked great very
few false positives and negatives, once Google started using it on a large
scale (GMail) spammers started playing the system and often they are
successful.

~~~
takeda
Also, as an example, I noticed a spam today with a subject: "Magic pill lets
Trump perform better" which is an obvious way to fool bayesian filters.

------
ageyfman
This doesn't address the massive bloat that ads add to the website. I don't
mind seeing ads when I browse the internet. I do mind having websites load for
10 seconds because 20 different ad networks are loading their iframes.

------
peterwwillis
_" A favorable legal climate and the existence of browsers friendly toward ad-
blocking extensions are two key factors that may tip the scales toward
users."_

On the technical side, Google can just close up its browser, prevent ad-
blocking malware, require only compliant browsers to connect to its site, and
all sites that depend on advertising dollars can jump on board.

Unless they decide to simply change the regulations, which doesn't take the
same investment in time, development, and bad PR.

Once faced with having to pay for the internet again, people will be fine with
either of those options.

~~~
bigbugbag
I have a hard time understanding what you are trying to say.

> Once faced with having to pay for the internet again

Don't you have to pay an ISP for your internet connection right now ? Apart
from the ISP when exactly did anyone had to "pay for the internet" ?

------
avaer
Prediction: AI ad blockers become accurate and automatic enough; ads mutate
into AI-based transformation of content to include paid placements.

The price of the news article or Youtube video of the future is that when you
see someone drinking a Pepsi, you can't be sure if they ever actually did
that. Or whether your friends saw the Pepsi when they watched the same thing
in the other room.

And thus ad blockers cease to make sense; you can no longer tell what you'd be
missing if you used them unless you're the centralized corporation that hoards
this data.

~~~
bigbugbag
Disabling script and going to simple html and css would render this AI-based
transformation useless.

------
waylandsmithers
Cool! I wonder if this means all advertising on the web will have to be
superficial, which might not be a great thing.

Maybe eventually we'll feel the same way about ads on the web as we do about
ads in film-- a character can't stare into the camera and tell the viewer to
go buy a Corona, but if he is asked what he'd like out of the cooler at a
barbecue, he can say he wants a Corona.

I personally prefer a middle ground, like when magazines print ads with the
text "ADVERTISEMENT" or "SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION"

------
ziikutv
Interesting read. I like how they took the time to put an update and clarify
about what was not tested. Good journalism.

Additionally: I wanted to plug (not involved with the project) PI-Hole [1].
You route all traffic through the Raspberry PI which points to custom DNS that
filters ads on their end, reducing data usage significantly. This leads to ad
block on all devices without the need to install custom software on any of
them.

[1] [https://pi-hole.net/](https://pi-hole.net/)

Edit: append reference

------
ChuckMcM
That is a pretty clever attack and I think the reasoning is pretty solid, if
the FTC requires that humans can 'tell' that something is an Ad then a machine
learning algorithm can too.

I'd love to see how effective this is on a Google page like a search for 'free
credit card'. The last time I checked that query had exactly 1 organic result
on the page, and if this worked as described you'd get a google page with just
one result. That would be kind of amusing in its own way.

------
yakult
End to the arms race? Hah. The next step is adversarial neural network
generated images that fools the OCR while looking relatively normal to human
eyes.

This war doesn't end until computers pass the Turing test and we build a
complete simulation of the end-user into the adblocker/spam filter/marketing
call blocker/girl-scout-cookie-seller-doorbell-deactivator.

------
polskibus
This is a beginning of a new arms race, not an end. We'll now see an explosion
of machine cheating and computer blinding techniques.

~~~
rhizome
I guess look for salaries to explode in adtech.

~~~
lern_too_spel
If the overall effectiveness of Internet advertising decreases, the amount of
money spent on adtech will decrease correspondingly.

------
tyingq
Guessing it has the same limitation that thwarts other ad blockers....running
well on mobile, especially Android.

Google was smart enough to not allow extensions on mobile Chrome. So you are
relegated to either 3rd party browsers or weird internal proxy solutions, both
of which have downsides.

Still excited about serious resources going into ad blocking though.

------
scottlegrand2
Google doesn't seem to like stuff like this:

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2017/01/05/adnauseam_expel...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2017/01/05/adnauseam_expelled_from_chrome_web_store/)

~~~
srtjstjsj
AdNauseum spams clicks to ad servers, which is likely why it was blocked from
Chrome.

Google doesn't block uBlock, for example.

------
dirkg
What about the many sites who legitimately exist only due to minimal ad
revenue, and don't abuse ads, allow malware etc?

I'm all for supporting them. Its the sites that pose an actual threat or whose
ad:content ration is something ridiculous like 2:3 that are the problem. Esp
on mobile.

------
robrenaud
You don't get to claim you won the arms race until you've actually released
your thing and it's got some significant adoption.

Otherwise you are just landing punches on an opponent who doesn't even know he
is getting touched.

------
usernametbd
Unless the display technology is changed from html, css and js to something
opaque for a client, like a video stream of content, ad blocking will always
be there and effective even if there are laws against it.

------
strokeswan
Nobody mentioned Brave browser ?
[https://brave.com/about_ad_replacement.html](https://brave.com/about_ad_replacement.html)

------
sologoub
Don't buy that this is undetectable - browser sends a lot of signals,
including position of the mouse and interactions with content, so it's not a
big stretch to say that it would be possible to detect interactions or lack
thereof in the area that is supposed to be the ad and determine that it's
likely blocked. Once detected, publishers are free to not let you consume
content via paywalls or simply letting site break.

It's also not going to be able to be effective against stitched video,
especially if the player playlist doesn't let you skip around easily - at best
you'd end up with blank screen for the duration of the ad. Sound is another
problem.

We need better solutions for advertising, not yet another escalation in
blocking that will lead to even more intrusive/annoying behaviors. (Much
louder sound from stitched mid-rolls than the content anyone?)

------
mankash666
State of the art in advertising today, is pusing it via websockets. This
extension failed to detect those ads. PornHub is one example, with plenty
others using webSockets.

~~~
bigbugbag
It seems to me that current content blockers had already addressed websockets
for ads.

here:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/5aqlok/pornhu...](https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/5aqlok/pornhub_bypasses_ad_blockers_with_websockets/)

------
ComodoHacker
So with this new revolutionary tech ads will still be loaded into my browser
and tracking scripts will still track me?

No, thanks, I'll stick with uBlock Origin.

------
mrcactu5
HIV is kind of like that too, when they circumvented CRISPR. I hear the
nearest cure is decades away. Hopefully they have solved ad-blocking.

------
cbhl
I really would rather that banner and pop-up ads go away altogether, and that
they be replaced with native advertising.

This war is silly.

------
alexplainl8ter
I would just wrap all my content in whatever terms the legal restrictions
require, thus blocking everything.

------
accountyaccount
It doesn't work on Facebook's autoplay video ads, so that didn't last very
long...

------
rdiddly
So circumspect are they. There's as much of an 'ethical dilemma' here as
there's a climate change debate. In other words, there's the truth and then
there's a ton of wishful thinking & misinformation trying to sound legitimate.

"A lie ain't a side of the story."

------
maverick_iceman
Didn't detect any 'sponsored' posts in Facebook.

------
strokeswan
Nobody mentioned Brave browser ?

------
gaag2
Ads are necessary for business!

------
downloadthisad
I thought this was hacker news. If you dont want something to be downloaded to
your computer restrict your computer from downloading it. If you dont know how
to do this then learn so. This cannot be stopped.

At the point it can be stopped the computer you have is no longer your
computer. Like when the car you have is being driven by a computer and Tesla
does not allow you to do self maintenance it is no longer your car.

So dont buy computers that restrict you from full access to the software (I
dont think this has been done yet). And dont buy Tesla cars. Unless you like
the product and dont mind renting or dont value complete ownership.

~~~
palunon
>So dont buy computers that restrict you from full access to the software (I
dont think this has been done yet).

It is done, right now, on any (recent) Intel computer.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20161005075537/http://www.alexra...](https://web.archive.org/web/20161005075537/http://www.alexrad.me:80/discourse/why-
rosyna-cant-take-a-movie-screenshot.html)

[https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/intel-me-and-why-we-
shou...](https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/intel-me-and-why-we-should-get-
rid-of-me)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Tech...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Technology)

------
BugsJustFindMe
_" Because advertisers must comply with these regulations..."_

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. _sigh_

------
justboxing
> [DELETED]

~~~
news_to_me
It literally says after that, "'To avoid taking sides on the ethics of ad-
blocking, we have deliberately stopped short of making our proof-of-concept
tool fully functional—it is configured to detect ads but not actually block
them,' Narayanan said."

~~~
nyolfen
perhaps someone will fork it soon?

------
LeicaLatte
Mother of all blockers. Sounds like your typical knee-jerk solution that has
nothing to do with the actual problems.

------
orblivion
The war on ads is like the war on drugs. This is just going to create more
ruthless ad cartels. There is a demand to be met, it will find its way to the
consumer, even if it has to plow over 50 others in the process.

The question is, what is the online ad equivalent of legalizing drugs?

~~~
ouid
in what way, except for the grammatical structure of the phrase, is the war on
ads similar to the war on drugs?

~~~
orblivion
As I alluded to, in both cases, there's a demand to be met, and there's a
strong social resistance to having that demand to be met.

Advertisers annoy 99.9% of us, but there's the 0.1% that demand something that
they don't yet know about. There's money to be made, and satisfaction to be
had, if only the connection of knowledge could be made.

So I'm saying, perhaps instead of thinking in terms of blocking the knowledge,
which will tend to get there one way or another, I wonder if there's a
solution in terms of finding a less disruptive way to get the knowledge there.
It would make advertising less lucrative.

~~~
ouid
you're not making your case very well, these are still superficial parallels.

------
throwaway91111
An ad blocker is worthless without also clicking on ads to inject noise.

Use Ad Nauseum.

------
aub3bhat
Wait they don't even have a fully working implementation, and yet VICE is
already proclaiming it as an end of Ad-blocking wars?

Color me skeptical.

Now I know that the original authors did not write the clickbait headline or
even the article, but working on Ad blocker is a poor use of resources. On a
longer time horizon websites that cannot be supported via Ads will turn into
Apps that require multiple permissions + FB/Google login. This type of effort
is frankly futile, you might win the battle on Ad-blockers but you are
guaranteed to lose the War of economic incentives.

But hey in the meantime some clueless reporter writes a breathless article
about your imaginary triumph on something everyone likes to hate, so why not.

Also as far as their scheme of detecting "adchoices" icon or container sizes,
it can be trivially circumvented. When it comes to circumventing such
algorithms, disorganized hackers routinely do that for far more secure things.
Organized well paid engineers at Ad tech companies can probably beat them in
couple of days if not hours. Worse their scheme penalizes good companies that
opt-in into adchoices. So a site operator is forced to choose shadier ad
networks (guaranteeing higher revenue) which this scheme won't be able to
block. As a result the user gets a worse experience!

As much as it is in vogue to hate advertisers, crippling someone's business
model (whatever your cute ethical reasons might be) while using institutional
resources is not a great idea. Princeton CS might soon find itself on wrong
side of a lawsuit, where upvotes and retweets might not count much.

~~~
quotemstr
These techniques also work fine in the mobile world, and they can be applied
at the OS level, where apps can't observe that their graphical output is being
manipulated.

