Comment by rewqfdsa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rewqfdsa | Hacker News Reader

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> detect adblock

One does not simply "detect adblock". Browsers are user agents. They run code in an environment optimized for user safety and convenience. These environments will always be able to tell your site's server- and client-side code exactly what it wants to hear while showing something different to the user. You can't stop it. The client will always win.

We may eventually get to the point where clients use various computer vision techniques to recognize ads. If I can clearly distinguish jiggling, improbably large elf anatomy below a flashing yellow "PLAY THIS ONLINE RPG" from content I want to see, so can an algorithm, at least to within an acceptable error rate.

Advertisements that are so borderline that they can't be detected as advertisements are ones I probably don't mind seeing anyway.

Spammers have already tried all available countermeasures and they've completely lost. Spam is so completely ineffective that it's actually dipped below half of email traffic.

No, the client will always win in the end.

Actually, it can (and is routinely) done. https://github.com/brockwhittaker/Detect-Adblockers

It's an arms race. Advertisers may be able to detect ad blockers in the short term, but eventually they will lose. That's because users control their machines and advertisers don't. Widespread use of adblock-blockers will only hasten this inevitable defeat.

The techniques used by the project to which you've linked can be trivially worked around by detecting the script itself and either not running it or telling it what it wants to hear. (Come on: an iframe? You really don't think a browser extension could lie about that? I expected at least some kind of server-client traffic correlation for a serious ad-blocker-blocker attempt.)

That's because users control their machines

That is unfortunately not the case in all situations now (e.g. mobile devices).

http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html

It'll be interesting to see how it pans out. Some sites will play nice. It's easy to imagine buzzfeed just loading their image content from adservers though.

Just clicked the demo http://www.lavancier.com/adblock/ and: "Ads are enabled in this browser. :)"

Now guess if I block ads?

Except this will be blocked by script blockers such as noscript which used to #1 most downloaded extension for firefox.

In the end the client is bound to lose.

The only reason the client can separate certain forms of advertising from content is that advertisers - by and large - don't care. The more advertising and content is intermingled the more difficult it will be to separate them. The intermingling is already happening as we see in the rise of content marketing.

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