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Comment by __MatrixMan__ | Hacker News Reader

The next step in the arms race is to provide hosted ad blocking, where the action happens (however nested) in a headless server and an AI looks it over and relays only the stuff that looks like content into a cleaned up session for the user. It would eventually start looking like a CDN where the ad blocker caches the content so it doesn't have to bother contacting the underlying site so often.

I would pay for such a service.

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I wouldn't, because sending all of your browsing history to any third party is going to result in them mining and selling it, or exposing it to state actors or someone else for direct surveillance/malware injection.

Eventually, AI will be something we can run locally on a typical desktop, or even a cell phone, and at that point we could locally host that kind of ad blocking, but trusting all of your traffic to some random company that promises to delete ads but not abuse their position seems naive given our situation today. It preserves the worst dangers of ads while adding even less control and transparency for the user.

I’ve been interested in a desktop AI ad blocker for awhile, but it doesn’t solve the issue of malware being distributed via ad networks, or the performance impact of all that extra js and network traffic.

I think it does.

Run the whole thing in a sandbox and have the AI exfiltrate the content (but not the ads) as a static DOM (no js). Once you know which DOMs go with which URL's you can gossip those peer-to-peer and not bother actually talking to the site at all (although one of us should hit the actual site every now and then, just in case the content changes). Isn't that more or less how cloudflare works?

I believe (but do not know) that ad networks already do some of that.

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