
The Future of Ad Blocking: An Analytical Framework and New Techniques [pdf] - lainon
http://randomwalker.info/publications/ad-blocking-framework-techniques.pdf
======
ravenstine
We wouldn't need any of these techniques if advertisers weren't so abusive.(i
know it's been said many times over) If you ever watch really old game shows
like "What's My Line?", they sometimes show the same commercials from the
1950s; it's astounding to see commercials and promotions that are relatively
short, not overtly distracting, and mostly focus on the merits of the product.
If commercials were still like that, I'd probably still have a cable
subscription, I _might_ even be paying for Hulu, and I would even have adblock
turned off. But the nature of the advertising industry is that if you give
them an inch, they'll take a mile and then some. So while there is certainly a
valid ethics debate around advertising and ad blocking, until the advertising
industry changes their methodology that they've had in place long before ad
blocking plugins were invented, I will have next to no sympathy for them no
matter how unethical a piece of adblocking software might go. Though it's been
said numerous times before, turning off adblock after having it on for a
significant amount of time(e.g. to denormalize the prevalence of ads) is all
the evidence one needs to see how completely messed up digital advertising
still is.

Fortunately, many YouTubers and a lot of podcasters have already figured out
that the way to go for advertising revenue is not through AdSense or stock
preroll ads, but through having hosts themselves endorse a product for a
portion of the show(that they have supposedly tried themselves) and making up
the rest through Patreon. This harkens back to how many radio shows used to be
and, honestly, it works because it's not very repetitive and the fact that the
host is speaking for it says something. The corporate world either doesn't
understand or like this, and are still gung ho to ram advertising down our
throats. Better than adblocking, I rather just don't pay for their overvalued
media to begin with. I don't pay for cable, I rarely go to the movies or buy
them, I don't pay for Hulu, and I support internet shows that don't rely on
AdSense. Life is actually pretty good when you pull most of your plugs.

~~~
majewsky
> turning off adblock after having it on for a significant amount of time(e.g.
> to denormalize the prevalence of ads) is all the evidence one needs to see
> how completely messed up digital advertising still is.

I have this experience every time I visit friends who don't have an adblocker.
When we watch some videos or stuff, I'm like "Holy shit, _this_ is what your
internet looks like!?"

~~~
H4CK3RM4N
YouTube in particular is really unbearable without adblock.

------
d33
"Our work refutes the belief that the battle between publishers and users is
leading to a permanent arms race between the two parties, and presents a much
more nuanced picture."

"There is a significant need for follow-on technical work into the expansion
of techniques that we have introduced as well as a debate on the ethics of ad
blocking."

Is there really a need for debase on the ethics of ad blocking at all? How
could you defend presenting ads as being ethical at all? Do they really
provide any value to our lives? I keep seeing it just as a waste of human
attention and wondering what humanity would be like if we rejected the concept
of spamming us with advertisements via every possible channel. Is it just me
or we should stop accepting them and start working on building society where
this is not accepted or at the very least, greatly excised?

~~~
libertine
From the moment that some ad sets you in contact with a product/service or a
brand that brings value to you, it will become valuable to your life - on that
particular moment.

Else how would you reach out to your possible customers, that would find your
product/service of great value to them?

Do not fool yourself by saying that advertisement doesn't work... it does, and
I bet it has influenced your decision plenty of times in your life - and I
mean this in a positive way, not in a "mind controlling" way.

The problem of spamming is just a matter of cheap distribution, a lot of
inventory and the need to monetize free content.

~~~
Sir_Substance
>or a brand that brings value to you

I have, exactly once in my life, connected with an ad in this way.

I remember it vividly, because even at the time, it struck me as amazingly
strange an ad would actually be anything other that pointless noise.

I'd been house sitting at a friends place for a week, and so had been to all
the takeout joints in the area several times. I didn't really want any of the
options again, but was kinda hungry for lunch. At that moment a subway ad came
on TV, and I remembered that there was a tiny subway tucked away off the main
street, so I went there for lunch.

That's it, that's my story of ads putting me in contact with a brand that
brought value to me. It happened once, and only once, and it happened at
Norwood, South Australia.

I feel like I could have dug deep and lived without that brand connection.

~~~
libertine
I wonder if you ever clicked on a Google Adwords ad, after you searched for
something.

~~~
Sir_Substance
No. Even in the cases where the adword result is at the top and the exact same
result is right below it, I choose to click the non-ad version.

That situation is, in fact, a classic example of why adwords results are not
relevant, ever. Either the actual google search result is literally the same
as the ad word result, or the google result is more on point.

Never has there been a case where the ad word result has been what I wanted,
but Google couldn't find it, and that's not surprising because Google is the
one assembling both the search results and the ads, so if they can't find it
in the search they also can't find an ad for it.

------
soared
I think adblockers will lead to something worse: extremely in-depth data
harvesting. When publishers can no longer make money on ads, they will turn to
companies offering them similar amounts of income ($1 per 1000 pageviews) for
just placing a tracking pixel on the page. The pixel will just track absurd
amounts of data, enough to justify the cost.

My example is Ibotta [1]. You can your entire shopping receipt and they give
you cash back for buying certain products. While these 'coupons' prompt you to
buy a product, Ibotta's real profit comes from data harvesting. They create a
profile that knows where you shop, what you buy, how often, how much you
spend, where you live, etc. etc. This data can be sold to companies like P+G
for marketing intelligence ('Who is actually buying our products, for how
much, how often? etc')

[1] [https://ibotta.com/](https://ibotta.com/)

~~~
throwaway2048
ad-blockers can block tracking pixels just as easily. If they want to move it
server side, well the same could be done with ads too, the problem is that
website owners can then manipulate and defraud extremely easily.

~~~
soared
Ads can't be moved served nearly as easily as a single tracking pixel. Fraud
on server side code is a good point, but that seems like a technical hurdle
that could be solved.

------
ComodoHacker
> But the model makes clear that no further escalation is possible. That is
> because active ad blocking runs at a higher privilege level than publisher
> code, so it cannot in turn be disabled — at best it can be evaded.

This is arguable. HTML5 EME can be used to mix ads into video in realtime. EME
_must_ run in isolation, so even browser vendor can't implement neither active
blocking, nor ad detection. Still banners also can be implemented as video
elements.

~~~
Mathnerd314
DRM is basically in the same boat as ads, the user / operating system has all
the power. The code is running in a sandbox; it can do integrity/sanity checks
of the sandbox, but if the emulation is good it can't look outside the sandbox
to discourage "bad behavior" like blocking ads or recording the stream for
later.

To paraphrase an old thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8439165](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8439165)

> Nobody cares about cracking Widevine to extract 4 Mbps Netflix streams when
> Blu-ray rips are already available on the Pirate Bay. But Netflix's content,
> which people do care about, is being shared on torrent sites. DRM is
> effectively useless.

------
FrozenVoid
Eventually advertising will either 1.Merge with content: a single jpg/png
render of a webpage + imagemaps for links. 2.Use canvas and emulate the
browser output in it(webkit.js which creates a browser-within-browser
contraption) 3.Require loading ads to function: some already merge
functionality with ad javascripts. Since there is commercial pressure to have
working ads, one of the methods will become commonplace eventually and will be
really hard to filter(if at all possible).

For #1 machine learning to recognize what an ad looks like and replace it with
black rectangles or if imagemap block its coords, for #2/#3 there will be some
sort of javascript filter/hijacker that would remove the ad code from
content/emulated browser. But with WebAssembly these methods will not works,
as content will become obfuscated binary stream which has to be decompiled&
deobfuscated to even begin searching for offending "javascript"(essentially
something like a virus pattern in binary).

~~~
eddyg
The prospects of everything "bad" that will be done in the future via
WebAssembly makes me cringe. It seems like it could be a major tipping point.

~~~
orangecat
WebAssembly bytecode is relatively simple; it shouldn't be any worse than
dealing with obfuscated JS today.

~~~
FrozenVoid
It isn't a single javascript can map to many bytecodes streams. i.e. inserting
dummy instructions, alternative code paths, etc, all the tricks malware uses
to escape detection.

------
pilooch
Ads are targeted with machine learning, the only possible long term defence is
fighting back with machine learning. It's already been done and both sides
will still improve over the next few years. But in the end, much like spam,
online ads will go away, automatically. On the tech side, using character
based convolutional networks already frees the defense from writing endless
rules, image ads can be nuked with another convnet, there's no technological
lock.

------
frik
We need a future of advertising, a company that disrupts that sad state of
ads. Leaner ads, less junk, bare pics, little JS, more trusted content, more
generic content related to the page itself, less specific to the visitor and
his browsing history. An ad about something I bought already last week on a
completely unrelated site still freaks me out, and not only me. </r>

~~~
manigandham
This already exists - our company has been doing this for years, amongst
several others.

The problem is a major global 12-figure industry with little oversight or
regulation combined with tons of subpar talent and overloaded with politics.
Until the major advertisers learn and want to do better, the (good) vendors,
websites and users will suffer.

------
HedleyLamar
If ads were served from the same domain the page came and integrated into the
page so it didn't affect the navigation of the website or grab the navigation
from you if you're trying to read the page, far fewer people would object. It
would be like the way ads used to be in newspapers or magazines. You look at
it, and if you're not interested, you turn the page.

