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Comment by pdkl95 | Hacker News Reader

Remember that WebAssembly means no more ad blockers as soon as someone ports freetype. The behavior of a program written in a Turing complete language cannot be predicted without running the program[1]. Ad-blocking by regexp or DOM element doesn't help when the entire contents of the page - including the ads - is just a bunch of {canvas,WebGL} draw calls generated by a blob of obfuscated code.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

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Why is WebAssembly special in this regard? Javascript is also a turing complete language that can just do a bunch of canvas / WebGL draw calls.

Yep. Also this could be approached as an adversarial machine learning problem, analogous to a spam filter. Modern spam filters re pretty good, so if push comes to shove, I'm pretty confident adblockers will adapt to more creative ways to circumvent adblocking

If it leads to an arms race of adblockers vs. websites wanting to serve ads, the longer the race goes on, the longer web-page loading times become. So eventually a website will lose because its loading times will get too long and users, even non-adblocking ones, will go elsewhere

> when the entire contents of the page - including the ads - is just a bunch of {canvas,WebGL} draw calls generated by a blob of obfuscated code.

Your site would also be unreadable by Google, meaning that you'll be heavily penalized in search ranking and no one will find your abomination of a website designed this way.

Yeah, no.

Google is an ad company. They will simply open an API for content providers to push content into their search engine. They don't have to maintain their crawlers, users can't block their ads, and both Google and the content providers get more revenue. It's a win-win situation.

Oh, I forgot the users: they obviously lose! But hey, at least you can write rich applications :^)

>They will simply open an API for content providers to push content into their search engine

Ah, clickfarmers and adfraudsters will welcome that with open hands.

Obviously, it will be protected via client certificates.

If it becomes the norm Google crawler will start running the pages and looking at the content.

It already does

Google crawler can already index client side rendered react apps

People never had any problem finding Flash and Silverlight websites.

Hmm... How exactly do you know that? I can only think of a handful of full Flash sites I ever used, and of those, I learned of them from word-of-mouth advertising, not through a search engine. (e.g. Homestar Runner). There could have been tons of relevant sites locked up in Flash navigation (back when that was fad) that I never found out about because of their poor SEO -- the world would look the same to me whether they existed or not...

Currently you can block many ads based on their url (which is from a third party provider). Using umatrix, ad and tracking is often clearly marked in red, and the corresponding js never even loaded. I don't think that would change with webasm?

Websites will be obfuscated blobs downloaded from a single server.

That's possible now. You can serve the ad so its indistinguishable from any other image. Redirect it and clicks through your server. Give it an obfuscated DOM path.

Its just a hassle and can't be done with pasting a line of code

Pretty off-topic, but the reason why it isn't done is tracking, not ease of use.

Ad-networks want the ads pulled from their servers so they can track views. If web-owners serve the ads themselves, then the ad-network must trust whatever the web owner says about the numbers of visits/clicks/etc.

For now the ad-networks just don't care about ad blockers, because they are making money hand over fist anyway. If things ever get hairy for them, I suspect they'll switch to a reverse-proxy model. You point your domain to their servers as you do with cloudflare, and they they serve your content with ads injected in the right places, served under the same domain. This would be pretty easy for web-owners and completely nullify ad-blockers in their current incarnation.

The more important reason this isn't being done more often is that advertisers want to push their own code and make connections to their own servers in order to protect themselves against ad fraud, and because they want their own tracking data.

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