>Facebook is making the HTML of its web ads indistinguishable from organic content so it can slip by adblockers. >Instead, since it serves and measures its own ads rather than using third-parties that leave traces adblockers can spot, it could hide the evidence. Adblockers would have to snoop the JavaScript or actual content shown by Facebook to detect and remove ads, which would significantly slow down load times.
Could this be true? If the user can still tell the difference between ads and people's posts, why can't the adblocker?
Most importantly, nobody cares about Facebook but is this the future for other sites too?
Serving ads locally is only really feasible on large sites. Using a third party to host your ads is the easiest way to keep them up to date and also reduces your bandwidth usage.
Blake Nguyen
> normiebook
Jace Evans
Dumbasses. This is not gonna stop frame-blocking.
Ian Thompson
Simple solution: Don't use Facebook, grandpa.
Brandon Jones
Studies have shown that people that go out of their way to use adblock are the same demographic of people that would not click an advertisement even if it was there. If anything bypassing adblockers is just making websites more moneys due to views, and screwing over the people paying for advertising.
Carter Young
>Adblockers would have to snoop the JavaScript or actual content shown by Facebook to detect and remove ads, which would significantly slow down load times. So what? Are they implying that people who create adblockers and the users of those adblockers will simply throw their hands up in the air in disgust and give up?
You can't stop people from blocking ads.
If a major site like Facebook uses a new way to serve ads then adblock creators will find ways to block the ads.
Owen Scott
>techcrunch
Get fucked.
Elijah Johnson
>serves and measures its own ads rather than using third-parties I dislike 3rd party ad/tracking services. If you serve your own ads, that's perfectly fine with me as long as they are unobtrusive.
Nolan Gonzalez
>it serves and measures its own ads rather than using third-parties that leave traces adblockers can spot
I've wondered why ads have stayed on centralized server domains for so long.
Cooper Mitchell
That's the way it should be.
Henry Thompson
isn't it a bit early for the death knell of online marketing?
i thought most normies still didn't know organic search drives 89% of all eCommerce
Camden Anderson
Why in the fuck would you use facebook as anything other than a way to communicate with acquaintances? Browsing facebook posts is an easy way to kill your brain cells.
Caleb Garcia
What's wrong with techcrunch and what website would you recommend
Andrew Jones
this is called 'getting results'
Liam Gray
Adblockers already have element and path blocking.
If a major site like Facebook, Google or YouTube tried to stop ad blockers working deliberately, they would face two problems: 1. EU authorities (such as .de) are coming to the conclusion that as this overrides the intention of the user, it's breaking the EU privacy laws. 2. GreaseMonkey/TamperMonkey userscripts already exist - Meek's Anti-Adblock Killer requires one to work properly, as an adjunct of the list. If overriding some JavaScript or DOM elements becomes necessary for adblocking to be functional, adblockers will integrate that.
Considering every member of the Facebook security team, along with Mark Zuckerberg, use uBlock Origin in their normal browsing, i question TechCrunch's sources on this.
Rather they're currently actively trying to reduce the clickbait people see on their feeds at the moment. Perhaps TC misunderstood.
Lincoln Lee
>Facebook
Chase Powell
>If the user can still tell the difference between ads and people's posts, why can't the adblocker?
It has to download the content before it can determine if it's an ad or not. (same as humans).
So it's still possible, but you no longer get the speed advantage you get when you don't download any ads.
Nathan Powell
Would be nice if instead, ad blockers would repeatedly re-download all the content from them, ads included all the damn time just to fuck with their data plans
Brandon Edwards
Serving your own ads also greatly reduces the security risk of malware injected ads.
So I agree it would be a good thing....HOWEVER I suspect most sites will continue to use 3rd party ads that just get disguised by a script running on the websites own server. ie: server fetches add from 3rd party, then pushes it to the user as if it was part of the original website.
Lincoln Rodriguez
>using Facebook >not using umatrix
Jose Cox
check'd
Elijah Robinson
i use both µmatrix and noscript..
Christian Edwards
>tfw VR becomes maintstream in 20 years >everything VR >have to "blast" ads away but they can still come back >if it "hits" you have to watch a 30 seconds video on some nonsense. >facebook and VR..
I hate how the future is turning out
Ryder Wright
You've got a wild imagination dude.
Aaron Watson
What's stopping you from pulling an ad yourself a million times without anyone actually seeing it?
Blake Kelly
VR won't be relevant still you can't 100% control it with your brain.
As seen right now, I don't even think most normies know the oculues and vive are out.
Easton Campbell
..what?
Jackson Harris
that's how it's always been though, before the internet people would get up and go to the kitchen during tv ad breaks but tv companies never asked viewers to stay and watch the ads because they didn't give a fuck. They just wanted the stats to show the ad companies.
That's not actually virtual reality and nobody is giving a shit about it.
Carson James
Who the hell still uses grandma book in 2016?
Jaxson Lopez
no one cares if you click it or not. no one "clicks" tv commercial either, but companies still pour millions on a couple of advertisments i think they can still use php to generate a randomly named (and randomly placed) js code for the ad. not sure if you can detect THAT
Zachary Hughes
No im not from Sup Forums or /r/
Jack Davis
But it's not "going out of their way" anymore.
Blocking ads got easy for normies since it can be done trivially with the most popular browsers normies already have now. And the faggots are generally speaking susceptible to ads. Bringing the ads back into their faces is worth it.
Jackson Cooper
Non-webdev here. What if websites just insert ads into the html code as like "image.jpg" How would you block that? I think a blocker couldnt tell if it was legit content or an ad.
Noah Turner
The trick usually is that it's not banner ads paid for by a sponsor of the website.
The internet cancer today is ads that spy on you and whose views need to be counted and that record information on a third party ad company that actually manages them.
Matthew Thompson
Normies ruin everything: piracy, games, and now ad blocking.
Why can't they just stick to their own normie lives why?
Jeremiah Smith
That's exactly what Facebook is planning to do now.
Lucas Perez
Blocking the selector.
Isaiah Hall
quadubs
Luke Murphy
>to detect and remove ads, which would significantly slow down load times
On a slow-to-average connection/computer, I'm willing to bet the blocking of ads would probably result in a net gain in the end anyway. And even if not, I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of page loading time out of pure principal anyway.
Matthew Diaz
Some people need it for business, because normies won't use anything else. Not me, but my relatives for example.
Josiah Flores
Give me one example and I'll give you an example of a bad business practice.
Eli Walker
My cousin makes dolls for a living and uses Facebook to deal with customers and shops willing to sell them.
Jose Russell
>quadruple dubs
Jack Cook
>>Facebook is making the HTML of its web ads indistinguishable from organic content so it can slip by adblockers. get a proper adblocker.
I can literally block any html element on any website if I want to
Jack Turner
>Considering every member of the Facebook security team, along with Mark Zuckerberg, use uBlock Origin in their normal browsing.
Dominic Thompson
That's not the point. There will be no way to distinguish in the HTML code between what is an ad and what isn't. You can block it retro-actively. But when you reload the page, it will be embedded differently and shown again.
Jackson Cox
Ah I see. Ok, that'd be a problem. I think PornHub's been using this system for a while now since one banner that I keep blocking keeps coming back
Kayden Moore
only just noticed how big that image is, here's a resized version
Colton Gomez
London, some months ago. I drank some moderately OK wine and gave them the bad news about just how deep the TPM rabbit hole really goes. They have a nice office, if 'nice' means the reception resembles a nursery.
Zuck (who I did not speak to) also has the webcam covered. That doesn't mean it was his idea of course, and also doesn't mean on-high wouldn't think everyone else's ads are bad but would think their ads are absolutely 100% fine of course. They do, after all, make all their money from ads. I understand that: that doesn't mean I have to agree with their stance.
But, I'm not seeing any ads right now and it's apparently already gone live here, and I'm already running everything I'd need to block any further shenanigans they did pull. I care more about blocking the ads on Facebook than I care about actually using Facebook anymore. (Or, indeed, actually working for them: we had an irreconcilable difference of opinion about the 'real names' policy.)
YouTube already pulled a stunt like this, and it turned out not to be a significant problem when they did.
I don't know if you've ever done a blocklist, but you can block elements behaviourally. Anything that matches any CSS selector, or if you're running TamperMonkey, anything that can be accessed or processed.
Aiden Walker
Who still uses jewbook in 2016? All my valuable friends purged already their accounts, including me. Jewbook is just for underage kids with lack of attention.
Evan Adams
>Most importantly, nobody cares about Facebook but is this the future for other sites too?
>entire thread is so quick to shit on Facebook for le epic nerd cred that it ignores the real issue at hand
Jose Edwards
>thinking I'm using facebook kek, I blocked everything from facebook in my hosts file
Levi Lewis
?
Aaron Gutierrez
[quoted from a post by gorhill, creator of uBlock Origin, from thread on hn]:
>scrambling DOM classes and ids with no discernable pattern That's why I have been beefing up the DOM filtering code in the latest versions -- there are already sites doing this.
There is a lot of untapped potential with the new operators, I am waiting for opportunities to put them to test, and fine-tune them if needed.
