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Comment by devy | Hacker News Reader

> Another technique used to hide the ad blockers' activities is even more impressive. They are able to "create two copies of the page, one which the user sees (and to which ad-blocking will be applied) and one which the publisher code interacts with, and to ensure that information propagates between these copies in one direction but not the other."

So this ultimate ad-blocker would potentially consume twice as much resources as it would have been?

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Coauthor of the paper here. No --- this is not one of the three techniques that we implemented. It was a hypothetical suggestion for future work. Unfortunate that the article didn't make that clear.

Here is the paper http://randomwalker.info/publications/ad-blocking-framework-...

Here is our blog post about it: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2017/04/14/the-future-of-ad-bl...

Looks like you've accidentally repasted the paper URL for the blog post

Oops! Thanks, fixed.

Just a throw out question:

One of the biggest issues (IMO) is the security threat... if there is a second copy that "we" don't see, doesn't that mean that the second copy can do "bad things" still?

Case in Point: Forbes requests you disable ad-blocker... then serves pop-under malware:

http://www.networkworld.com/article/3021113/security/forbes-...

I could stomach ads - just like I stomached commercials on TV shows... you get used to them and they become white noise... if the ads were unobtrusive and non-invasive (IE: Google Search Results)... it's full screen, pop-up/under, audio, video, etc. Then throw on top of that malware...

What's to stop the malware from biting on that second copy?

This is what matters most to me. My dislike of ads are out of fear of malicious code first, tracking second, and wasting my bandwidth third.

The simple gif banner ads of yore were tolerable enough.

Neuromarketing proved that they do not become white noise, you just stop consciously noticing them and how they affect you[1]. But even if you somehow developed some kind of immunity, you'd still be affected by ads because advertising costs are factored in product prices, when you buy something even if you never seen any of the ads for this product, you're still paying for them.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromarketing#Study_examples

Here's what probably amounts to a dumb question why couldn't we just have an AI act like a real person and click on some of the ads that it deemed 'safe' and in a separate sandbox type browser instance? This would reduce the negative effects of adblockers on content publishers.

Maybe. We already have front-end libraries that are maintaining a "virtual dom".

i'd wager that it would take a substantial refactor of layout and rendering code to avoid significantly increased resource usage while also preventing sketchy ad code from being able to detect that it's being blocked.

This was my question as well.

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