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wespiser_2018

There is a great paper on the arms race between Ads and Ad Blockers out of a group in Princeton.

They propose a perceptual ad-blocking scheme where ads are always rendered in a DOM, but elements only displayed to the if they are not "ad like". This is makes it much easier to evade ad-block detectors, since your browser appears as if it does not have an ad-blocker! https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/ad-blocki...

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The alternative to the arms race is to stop having browser extensions. In a browser like chrome made by an advertising company with 80% of the browser market last I checked, the results could be devastating for the vast majority of internet users. We nerds will always be fine.

Mobile will of course fare far worse unless you root your device, for ios and android. Can't wait for the inevitable day where the unskippable 10 min youtube ad pauses if I look away from the screen...

There is another interesting paper on a similar topic that proves that this approach is vulnerable to different adversarial attacks, for instance, you can make it block legitimate content, or you can conceal ads by adding an overlay invisible to a human eye.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.03194

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