Hacker News Reader

Comment by qbane | Hacker News Reader

I wrote and shared uBlock Origin filters for Facebook, shared on Reddit and up to a week later they changed the DOM structure bypassed the filters. After some attempts I no longer publish the filters.

View on HN

Could you publish it with a license saying it shall not be used by any Facebook employee or something?

It is like prohibiting LLM consumption by putting a small reminder -- never works if done without using weird tricks (like mentioning nuclear weapon) also if they are forging new DOM structure they are NOT using the filter itself

Maybe a better approach is to convert the page to an image, run OCR over it, use an LLM to remove the ads, present the result to the user.

How would you comment or watch a video if you did that?

You can still do that.

The only thing I'm proposing is to do the filtering on graphical data (what the user actually sees) rather than on the DOM (which can be obfuscated; and which may change every week).

I don’t see how presenting an image would allow you to interact with the page, especially if all you are doing is modify the image you’re presenting, not the page itself.

Think of it as looking at your screen through AR goggles, where the goggles modify the image before it reaches your eyes.

Everything happens at the image level so there's no way Meta can obfuscate the DOM to make ads pass through.

So the ads are still served, just… hidden. Self-defeating, no?

Are you saying you would get the image, detect the ad in the image, then regenerate the HTML without the ad based on where it was located in the image?

You don’t need to regenerate, insert a DOM element to obscure it.

That sounds like an upside.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com