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Hakkin | 1 year ago

uBlock Origin has some advanced filter syntax that can sometimes deal with sites like this. It can intercept, modify or replace JavaScript functions, objects, network requests, parsing data, cookies, etc. That being said, writing filters for sites like these is somewhat of a dark art, it usually involves reverse engineering the page's JavaScript to the point where you understand what it's actually sending and checking for to function correctly, then figuring out a way to bypass those checks by selectively modifying the JavaScript's functionality.

Things like this are why I worry a bit about the proliferation of things like WASM, while JavaScript isn't great, it actually gives a great amount of control to the end user, to both see, understand and the ability to actually modify what is running in their browser. With WASM, all of this becomes highly impractical. Instead of a (semi-)readable, modifiable block of interpreted code, with the ability to inspect and modify the state at almost arbitrary points, you just get opaque binary blobs that you basically can't do anything with. As more and more sites switch to using compiled WASM blobs for their logic, it will become increasingly difficult to observe or modify any behavior of these websites as an end user.

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