I posted this deep in a thread but feel like it should be a higher level comment so here we go.
Websites can be so ridiculously short sighted and just want to squeeze out every penny they can not thinking of the users they end up losing in the process. And they do lose users And fast. Personal experience time!
I ran a pretty popular wiki for Dungeons and Dragons homebrew on what used to be called Wikia. At some point they decided they available needed to have some terrible new skin that was stuffed with ads and unbelievable ugly. We pushed back but they were adamant about forcing it, so I took all the content and all the users and self hosted it for almost a decade afterward. The Wikia site was completely dead. Sucks for them but their choice.
I paid $10/mo or $20/mo for the site depending on the year, and never ran ads. At one point I got an offer from a company in the same hobbyist space to buy it from me. At that point I was extremely sick of being my own sysadmin and worrying about security vulns so I accepted it. Now some time later they're trying to pull the "stuff it full of ads in the worst places!" routine. Users are getting pissed and starting to ask me about taking all the content...and users...and going off to a server adminned by me again.
If I do this, it will be completely devastating for the site and tank their traffic. Do they care or realize? Guess we'll see.
All of this could be avoided if they just made the ads less shitty. Not showing up in the middle of navigation bars. Not being bigger than the surrounding content, so it completely stretches it and ruin's the site layout. Not having a completely clashing background color to the site. All extremely simple stuff.
I occasionally go The Guardian's web site, and they displayed a nag say I should not be blocking their way of making money out of a non-subscriber. I thought "fair enough" and disabled my ad blocker. About 2 minutes later, which is what it took for their web site to load with the ad blocker off, I turned it back on again.
In the end solved my attack of the guilts by becoming a subscriber. However, I had no sympathy for them no getting money form ads. That was totally self inflicted. The ad blocker, the thing they were blaming, wasn't the problem. Without the ad blocker I would not be visiting their site at all.
This reminds me of A/B testing that likely was the method Google unwittingly used to obfuscate sponsored results in Search. The A/B test KPI they were measuring clearly was creating more click through to sponsored properties and it eroded trust and utility in exchange. I am sure they increased their short term Ad Words profits.
What do you suppose the lifecycle is of something like this?
Does the new owner, under their own power, set about adding ads to their site? Do they install a 3rd party ad tool that does the dirty business? Or does some smooth talker show up and tell them they'll take care of everything for a modest cut of the profits and that person makes a hash of everything?
Because it really does feel to me like there's a certain detachment from the userbase. If the owners are the actors instead of just complicit, maybe they're 'doing us a favor' by showing us how they really feel.
I feel that we've done ourselves a disservice by referring to them as ad blockers rather than content blockers or, better yet, virus blockers. With malicious ads being the primary vector for compromising a person's computer, calling these tools virus blockers would not only be more accurate, but it would make it harder for sites to counter their use from a public relations point of view.
Could you imagine visiting a web site only to have it tell you to disable your virus blocker to view the web page? Yet, web sites make the same requests of your "ad blocker" even though the end result is the same. They want you to disable your security protections and risk infection to view a web page.[1]
Sadly, I believe we've already lost this battle and are worse off for it.
Great article! It's funny to finally see ad blockers go "mainstream".
My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking (and the end of a web of connected web sites). Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed.
Then ad blocking (and other customization) will be limited to "the analog hole" - trying to image detect or OCR things.
I hope I'm wrong, but I've also been asked countless times over the years to "stop people copy/pasting our text" and "stop people seeing our code" and "stop people downloading our images"... the browser-in-a-browser feels inevitable!
> Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed.
This has already happened: Just look at how many websites pester you to download their mobile app or even block content unless you access from the app. From a user functionality perspective the vast majority of apps do nothing a browser can't do. But the killer feature for apps is how much easier it is for the developer to get your location data, contact list, and importantly show you unskippable, auto-playing, 90s-era-popup-level-annoying ads
Don't paint webassembly as something terrible. Webassembly does not add anything substantial to what's already in web. You could compile C code to JavaScript before. Webassembly does not provide new API unavailable from JavaScript. Webassembly is just an optimization. Some code will work faster and consume less memory, that's all. You could write website which paints itself on canvas with JavaScript years ago. The fact that nobody goes this route means that there are inherent problems with this approach. For example that website will be completely inaccessible for Google.
A lot of the future of ad blocking will depend upon why people are blocking ads. Some of us have nothing againsts ads in principle, but do not like the practices of the advertising industry. This includes things like tracking people across websites, intrusive advertising, excessive bandwidth usage, deceptive advertising, and so on. Blocking the "analog hole" would be irrelevant in most of those cases.
I second this. I also hate how links behave nowadays. I used to right click and open in a new tab or save the link but in many cases it no longer works and is quite annoying.
If ads were more expensive to purchase we'd see a lot fewer of them and they would not be as intrusive. But this ain't so and we need adblockers.
They (the advertising industry) come back with a stronger system that is harder to ad block and we retaliate with something else. What baffles me is that they don't see that we are resisting, they produce something that nobody really wants. The whole advertising industry is something questionable.
Why WebAssembly? Just bake ad code into a SPA and that's it. Random elements with random names at random positions in the DOM, positioned using styles. Quite low-tech. If implemented properly, it cannot be blocked. At all. Except blocking all scripts of course, which means the SPA will stop working.
>> My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking
The answer to that is to disable Web Assembly, much like a lot of people disable JS. The whole idea of running other peoples code on your machine is the problem, and it baffles me that browser companies are still trying to enable more and more of this. I don't want your code running on my computer.
> Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed.
For the time being, you can thank the threat of an accessibility lawsuit for slowing this future down. Building a custom renderer might not be as challenging as supporting the myriad accessibility needs of disable users.
Actually, Web Components and Shadow DOM bother me more than Web Assembly. You cannot "pierce" into a shadow DOM from the outside and this creates an impenetrable barrier for content blockers. We've already seen examples of whole web pages transformed into a shadow-dom web component.
I think ads will be the reason Web Assembly takes off in a massive way, actually. Much harder to block ads if the site ships its own renderer and manages to hide or obscure its traffic. Then you're in to serious application-cracking territory if you want to block ads & tracking.
I have disabled wasm in firefox and I don't intend to enable it ever. If someone wants to force "activex" on me again to use a site I won't use the site :)
It's absolutely going to happen. WASM isn't required for this future-- it just helps optimize it. There is a ton of money out there for the company who makes a performant and compatible browser-in-a-browser w/ proper accessibility. Somebody will eventually take the "deal with the devil" to develop it.
It doesn't bother me if ad-blocking moves towards OCR and computer vision. These things need to be created anyways because as blockers don't always filter everything I want anyways.
Personally, I would prefer to browse the web in reader mode. While we're at it we could do the have the same for PDFs.
I'd like to see (and might even work on), and overlay filter to plug that analog hole. This would probably be entirely outside of the web browser (perhaps as a custom VNC client) and would simply grey out ads and other obnoxious content. It wouldn't stop any downloading, but it might be smart enough to X out of those stupid pop-up ads automatically.
Easier said than done, of course.
For the record, I've no problem with "fair" advertising, the kind that used to appear in newspapers and magazines in the 1970s, for example. (Well, aside from its use as a virus vector.) But modern day web ads are simply abusive in too many cases.
That seems far more likely to me than I would like to admit. I can even see a rational that doesn't start that way, but with a homegrown solution in Webassembly it would be fast enough that you could write your own font and text layout algorithms that are better than what the browser does -- so your newspaper could do a proper justified text with great kerned headlines that would also look the same way in all browsers.
Then, naturally, there is no dev time set aside for copy and paste, because there is no business justification.
The good outcome would be that after analog hole is plugged on the web, we can start plugging it IRL (if AR gear and/or spray paint drones mature by the time). Imagine physical space with no ads!
> Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed
Google's AMP technology aims to do this, although they will claim to have more altruistic motivations
> The very beginning of ad blocking is the 90s, just when the ads appeared. In 1993, GNN, the very first web advertising service, was launched. Then in 1994, the first-ever banner was sold. In the blink of an eye, the online ad industry was worth billions of dollars. Double Click emerged, Yahoo started to sell ads. And that's when the very first ad blocker was created.
GNN (Global Network Navigator) was not an advertising service. It was the first commercial online magazine. O’Reilly & Associates, the publisher of GNN, wanted to see if a website like GNN could be supported through commercial sponsorship. GNN’s ads were informational — much more like whitepapers than a display ads. (Wired’s HotWired site, which launched at almost exactly the same time as GNN in the fall of 1993, invented the banner ad, which of course is what most adblocking tech has targeted. Cookies for tracking didn’t come along until later.)
Source: I worked on GNN as technical director, and in fact my first job there, in the summer of 1993 about a month before we launched, was to assemble the first ‘ad’ — a set of articles about intellectual property law, sponsored by the now-defunct Bay area law firm Heller Ehrman.
So a survey article about adblocking without mentioning the main ad blocker in the world (and their competitor), ublock origin. Well played! As for the history lesson, the main meta lesson is that adblockers need to be completely detached from any monetory incentives. No company, however noble, should be trusted at all. Only open source + community ad blockers have survived and flourished. Time and again, people have tried to make a quick buck by becoming the middlemen in the adblocking industry by promoting their flavour of ads, whitelisting ads, or just hijacking ads.
If I can't block the ads on a page I'm simply not going to visit it ever again. I've never seen a website that was actually necessary for me to visit that had ads or couldn't be blocked.
I feel the same. There is nothing on the web I need to read so badly that I am willing to put up with advertising to get it; I can just go waste my time somewhere else.
Commercial companies being able to force themselves onto our consciousness is unacceptable.
Personally, seeing ads in public spaces feels just like in totalitarian countries you would see large portraits of the supreme leader or government propaganda. Somehow this is legitimized because they're private corporations. Not in my book.
More power to ad blocker authors, and a particular shoutout to:
Websites started off with a glass storefront and an open door. You kinda had to poke your head in the door to look around to see if you wanted to go in. Then the glass storefront had some sales prices shown. Then slowly you could no longer even see the glass storefront for all the ads. Then the spinning sign men showed up to annoy. Now, there's a bouncer with a clipboard blocking you from getting in.
It's mostly just not worth the effort any more unless you have an ad blocker in some form.
Who is honestly clicking on all these ads that makes advertising worthwhile?
I am honestly baffled sometimes how this all works... In my 30+ years of internet usage in one form or another I have rarely, rarely, rarely ever clicked on a freakin ad. Yes, I've generally had them blocked for the most part. But when they aren't blocked, I see what the content is and why would I even want to click on one!
Color me confused who is keeping the web running by clicking on ads.
Basically ad blocking makes the internet useful again. I am no longer bombarded with popups or distractions. Therefore I won. Tracking is pathetically useless on the internet. It's easy to screw with the metrics and your "profile" but even without doing so tracking is simply snake oil
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...
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.
>A combination of this "carry anywhere" device and a global information utility such as the ARPA network or two-way cable TV, will bring the libraries and schools (not to mention stores and billboards) or the world to the home. One can imagine one of the first programs an owner will write is a filter to eliminate advertising!
I don't turn off my virus blocker for anyone. No way no how no sir. Sites that refuse to show content without opening up for viruses are intrinsically suspicious, no matter how fancy their brand name.
When adsense first came out it was text only and ads were actually fascinating and interesting to read. They were regulated and meaningful.
Then images and javascript were eventually allowed and it was all downhill from there. Now it's a race to the bottom of how many hundreds of external objects and tracking that can be added to a page as well as malware since so many badly behaving ads slip right through any attempt at automated bans.
"It means that an ad blocker of the future will have to monitor traffic of the entire network." (towards the end)
This is already a concern in the DNS world, with Response Policy Zones (RPZ) on one hand for DNS-based control (https://dnsrpz.info/) and DNS Over HTTP(S) (a.k.a. DoH) on the other.
I wonder if the legal action against AdBlock Plus / Palant made a dent in the download or use of ad blockers in general. The article doesn't provide any evidence of this.
Also - don't get your apps on Google or Apple's app stores! Use APKMirror, APK pure, etc. Some of these even have app-store-like apps to use instead of Google's, that don't need a Google account.
Also, there's at least one app "store" app specializing in FOSS purely: https://f-droid.org/en/
I feel like the article is missing an important milestone about release of Brave browser for Android circa 2017/2018 (it's only briefly mentioned at the end).
It changed the landscape on Android in my opinion: it was the first browser that was as good as Chrome (fast, same look & feel -- being a fork of Chromium -- plus regularly updated and having strong, credible technical team behind it) but also having ad blocking built-in and other additional privacy measures. Soon Opera added ad blocking as well, and other browsers (except Chrome) followed.
[+] [-] Blackthorn|6 years ago|reply
Websites can be so ridiculously short sighted and just want to squeeze out every penny they can not thinking of the users they end up losing in the process. And they do lose users And fast. Personal experience time!
I ran a pretty popular wiki for Dungeons and Dragons homebrew on what used to be called Wikia. At some point they decided they available needed to have some terrible new skin that was stuffed with ads and unbelievable ugly. We pushed back but they were adamant about forcing it, so I took all the content and all the users and self hosted it for almost a decade afterward. The Wikia site was completely dead. Sucks for them but their choice.
I paid $10/mo or $20/mo for the site depending on the year, and never ran ads. At one point I got an offer from a company in the same hobbyist space to buy it from me. At that point I was extremely sick of being my own sysadmin and worrying about security vulns so I accepted it. Now some time later they're trying to pull the "stuff it full of ads in the worst places!" routine. Users are getting pissed and starting to ask me about taking all the content...and users...and going off to a server adminned by me again.
If I do this, it will be completely devastating for the site and tank their traffic. Do they care or realize? Guess we'll see.
All of this could be avoided if they just made the ads less shitty. Not showing up in the middle of navigation bars. Not being bigger than the surrounding content, so it completely stretches it and ruin's the site layout. Not having a completely clashing background color to the site. All extremely simple stuff.
[+] [-] rstuart4133|6 years ago|reply
In the end solved my attack of the guilts by becoming a subscriber. However, I had no sympathy for them no getting money form ads. That was totally self inflicted. The ad blocker, the thing they were blaming, wasn't the problem. Without the ad blocker I would not be visiting their site at all.
[+] [-] birdyrooster|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hinkley|6 years ago|reply
Does the new owner, under their own power, set about adding ads to their site? Do they install a 3rd party ad tool that does the dirty business? Or does some smooth talker show up and tell them they'll take care of everything for a modest cut of the profits and that person makes a hash of everything?
Because it really does feel to me like there's a certain detachment from the userbase. If the owners are the actors instead of just complicit, maybe they're 'doing us a favor' by showing us how they really feel.
[+] [-] binarytox1n|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SignalsFromBob|6 years ago|reply
Could you imagine visiting a web site only to have it tell you to disable your virus blocker to view the web page? Yet, web sites make the same requests of your "ad blocker" even though the end result is the same. They want you to disable your security protections and risk infection to view a web page.[1]
Sadly, I believe we've already lost this battle and are worse off for it.
1. https://www.networkworld.com/article/3021113/forbes-malware-...
[+] [-] mrspeaker|6 years ago|reply
My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking (and the end of a web of connected web sites). Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed.
Then ad blocking (and other customization) will be limited to "the analog hole" - trying to image detect or OCR things.
I hope I'm wrong, but I've also been asked countless times over the years to "stop people copy/pasting our text" and "stop people seeing our code" and "stop people downloading our images"... the browser-in-a-browser feels inevitable!
[+] [-] ukoki|6 years ago|reply
This has already happened: Just look at how many websites pester you to download their mobile app or even block content unless you access from the app. From a user functionality perspective the vast majority of apps do nothing a browser can't do. But the killer feature for apps is how much easier it is for the developer to get your location data, contact list, and importantly show you unskippable, auto-playing, 90s-era-popup-level-annoying ads
[+] [-] vbezhenar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] II2II|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tartoran|6 years ago|reply
If ads were more expensive to purchase we'd see a lot fewer of them and they would not be as intrusive. But this ain't so and we need adblockers.
They (the advertising industry) come back with a stronger system that is harder to ad block and we retaliate with something else. What baffles me is that they don't see that we are resisting, they produce something that nobody really wants. The whole advertising industry is something questionable.
[+] [-] pmlnr|6 years ago|reply
HTTP/HTML will become the next gopher, and this makes me incredibly sad
[+] [-] fuzzy2|6 years ago|reply
And then I'll just stop visiting. (:
[+] [-] phkahler|6 years ago|reply
The answer to that is to disable Web Assembly, much like a lot of people disable JS. The whole idea of running other peoples code on your machine is the problem, and it baffles me that browser companies are still trying to enable more and more of this. I don't want your code running on my computer.
[+] [-] jameslk|6 years ago|reply
For the time being, you can thank the threat of an accessibility lawsuit for slowing this future down. Building a custom renderer might not be as challenging as supporting the myriad accessibility needs of disable users.
[+] [-] BiteCode_dev|6 years ago|reply
Which in turn will start a new trend of website that are "open".
It's a cycle.
[+] [-] ameshkov|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karatestomp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyfon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EvanAnderson|6 years ago|reply
An obligatory link to an important talk: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
[+] [-] vkou|6 years ago|reply
The way to fight this is to work together with accessibility advocacy agencies, like the ADA.
[+] [-] bobajeff|6 years ago|reply
Personally, I would prefer to browse the web in reader mode. While we're at it we could do the have the same for PDFs.
[+] [-] downerending|6 years ago|reply
Easier said than done, of course.
For the record, I've no problem with "fair" advertising, the kind that used to appear in newspapers and magazines in the 1970s, for example. (Well, aside from its use as a virus vector.) But modern day web ads are simply abusive in too many cases.
[+] [-] tomjen3|6 years ago|reply
Then, naturally, there is no dev time set aside for copy and paste, because there is no business justification.
[+] [-] birdyrooster|6 years ago|reply
They would need to server side render pages like a streaming game client would.
[+] [-] UnFleshedOne|6 years ago|reply
So, bring it on?
[+] [-] propogandist|6 years ago|reply
Google's AMP technology aims to do this, although they will claim to have more altruistic motivations
[+] [-] adrr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JMTQp8lwXL|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the8472|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jslabovitz|6 years ago|reply
> The very beginning of ad blocking is the 90s, just when the ads appeared. In 1993, GNN, the very first web advertising service, was launched. Then in 1994, the first-ever banner was sold. In the blink of an eye, the online ad industry was worth billions of dollars. Double Click emerged, Yahoo started to sell ads. And that's when the very first ad blocker was created.
GNN (Global Network Navigator) was not an advertising service. It was the first commercial online magazine. O’Reilly & Associates, the publisher of GNN, wanted to see if a website like GNN could be supported through commercial sponsorship. GNN’s ads were informational — much more like whitepapers than a display ads. (Wired’s HotWired site, which launched at almost exactly the same time as GNN in the fall of 1993, invented the banner ad, which of course is what most adblocking tech has targeted. Cookies for tracking didn’t come along until later.)
Source: I worked on GNN as technical director, and in fact my first job there, in the summer of 1993 about a month before we launched, was to assemble the first ‘ad’ — a set of articles about intellectual property law, sponsored by the now-defunct Bay area law firm Heller Ehrman.
[+] [-] bubblethink|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] izzydata|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marssaxman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] einpoklum|6 years ago|reply
Personally, seeing ads in public spaces feels just like in totalitarian countries you would see large portraits of the supreme leader or government propaganda. Somehow this is legitimized because they're private corporations. Not in my book.
More power to ad blocker authors, and a particular shoutout to:
* Raymond Hill of uBlock Origin fame: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/
* The EFF, for blocking trackers and other 3rd party nasties with Privacy Badger: https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
[+] [-] throwaway55554|6 years ago|reply
It's mostly just not worth the effort any more unless you have an ad blocker in some form.
[+] [-] mrlala|6 years ago|reply
I am honestly baffled sometimes how this all works... In my 30+ years of internet usage in one form or another I have rarely, rarely, rarely ever clicked on a freakin ad. Yes, I've generally had them blocked for the most part. But when they aren't blocked, I see what the content is and why would I even want to click on one!
Color me confused who is keeping the web running by clicking on ads.
[+] [-] jsjddbbwj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulie_a|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wespiser_2018|6 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] asdff|6 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] ameshkov|6 years ago|reply
https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.03194
[+] [-] kurehajime|6 years ago|reply
---
A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages
Alan C. Kay
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 1972
https://www.mprove.de/visionreality/media/kay72.html
>A combination of this "carry anywhere" device and a global information utility such as the ARPA network or two-way cable TV, will bring the libraries and schools (not to mention stores and billboards) or the world to the home. One can imagine one of the first programs an owner will write is a filter to eliminate advertising!
[+] [-] droithomme|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck2|6 years ago|reply
Then images and javascript were eventually allowed and it was all downhill from there. Now it's a race to the bottom of how many hundreds of external objects and tracking that can be added to a page as well as malware since so many badly behaving ads slip right through any attempt at automated bans.
[+] [-] superkuh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m3047|6 years ago|reply
This is already a concern in the DNS world, with Response Policy Zones (RPZ) on one hand for DNS-based control (https://dnsrpz.info/) and DNS Over HTTP(S) (a.k.a. DoH) on the other.
[+] [-] 8bitsrule|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] einpoklum|6 years ago|reply
Also - don't get your apps on Google or Apple's app stores! Use APKMirror, APK pure, etc. Some of these even have app-store-like apps to use instead of Google's, that don't need a Google account.
Also, there's at least one app "store" app specializing in FOSS purely: https://f-droid.org/en/
[+] [-] jakub_g|6 years ago|reply
It changed the landscape on Android in my opinion: it was the first browser that was as good as Chrome (fast, same look & feel -- being a fork of Chromium -- plus regularly updated and having strong, credible technical team behind it) but also having ad blocking built-in and other additional privacy measures. Soon Opera added ad blocking as well, and other browsers (except Chrome) followed.