Has there been any serious thought / discussion about how the cat and mouse chase of the ads vs ad blockers is going to end?
It would be interesting to see where we are in ten years.
It would be interesting to see where we are in ten years.
There is some discussion of the technical cat-and-mouse game he has to play as advertisers try to make their content avoid detection and blend in with the regular programming. In this version of the future, the ad blockers eventually win and network television is destroyed. (The book also features networked computers and email ("telefax"), but the concept of ads appearing on them was still too futuristic for 1985.)
https://books.google.com/books?id=Q6o51-W_z8MC&lpg=PP1&dq=go...
Adnix and Preachnix were the essence of capitalist entrepreneurship, he argued repeatedly. The point of capitalism was supposed to be providing people with alternatives.
"Well, the _absense_ of advertising is an alternative, I told them. There are huge advertising budgets only when there's no difference between the products. If the products really were different, people would buy the one that's better. Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgment. Advertising teaching people to be stupid. A strong country needs smart people. So Adnix is patriotic. The manufacturers can use some of their advertising budgets to improve their products. The consumer will benefit. Magazines and newspapers and direct mail business will boom, and that'll ease the pain in the ad agencies. I don't see what the problem is."
Adnix, much more than the innumerable libel suits against the original commercial networks, led directly to their demise. For a while there was a small army of unemployed advertising executives...
It's clearly always possible to detect whether an ad was seen. Often, the content owners do not bother putting such measures in place, but the advertisers definitely do. (It's even easier from their perspective to check if the ad has been served or not, as many ad blockers prevent the ad from even downloading by sending all requests to that domain into a black hole and so the ad is never even requested from the server.)
I agree that the lobbyists will win. I wish we had politicians with some moral character though.
I love utopian visions of the future.
Personal opinion: Laws are needed to make what advertisers are doing illegal. Advertisers are spying on people to the extent where if the government did it they'd need a warrant.
But when ads block content; include flashing animations, audio, and video; and take up more layout space on a site than the actual content; then people have had enough.
Meaning, if advertisers hadn’t built more and more intrusive ads and had stuck with static ads that don’t severely harm the UX, then I doubt most users would bother with ad blockers.
The advertiser arms race has resulted in a classic tragedy of the commons. That's my diagnosis of the problem. Traditionally regulation is needed to fix that. Exactly what that entails is beyond me.
I think most can agree here this level of spying on users is bad. Its sorta like child labor but a lot less obviously bad, in that it is obviously bad, nobody likes it, but there's enough taking advantage of it not being illegal, so its just socially tolerated thing. But once made illegal it will be looked back on like "how the hell did we think that was okay? how the hell did we willingly let it occur?"
- Chrome is the fast one.
- IE is the one that have to use for some government/old websites.
- Ad Blockers are for safety (akin to anti-virus).
This was from a group that didn’t even know how to install Chrome on the new computers they got this year.
Group knowledge on this topic is largely going to be driven by what they’ve heard in the news or perpetuated by their social circles. And scary things will stick for long after they stop being true.
Unfortunately the water hole has been poisoned, so now I have to block it all.
Kind of like how https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/ is just a sequence of ads being flawlessly delivered to an ad-averse demographic that eats the ads up.
Savvy users will continue to block on machines that aren’t walled gardens and through pi-hole style blocking.
I think the cat and mouse aspect will be completely overshadowed by tech giants continually neutering their users ability to block ads.
Safari on iOS allows for content blocking, and Firefox for Android allows users to install extensions.
And, I was referring to the future and trends rather than the current situation. System wide ad blocking used to be possible on iOS without jailbreaking, now it’s not.
I expect in time google will go similar and change android APIs, or play store rules, to do similar.
It also works inside apps adopting Safari View Controller.
At the very least, though, eventually advertising agencies will hopefully figure out that this sort of tracking is pointless; "newspaper-style" ads are more likely to actually engage with the people encountering those ads (since said ads would be selected based on the page content rather than the person reading that content). This is how DuckDuckGo's ads work; the sponsored results are selected entirely by the actual search query. If content-driven ads (plus affiliate links, but I somehow doubt that's enough of DDG's traffic to be a deciding factor here) is enough to pay for enough computational power (and the development team to run it) to serve up 30+ million queries a day, then there's no reason it can't be enough for any other site.
Security-wise, I think the best we can hope for is more and more OS-like sandboxing and isolation, capability-based security, and other defense-in-depth measures.
Privacy-wise, for defeating tracking and the like, ideally I'd hope for technical countermeasures to win the battle, but if we do end up having rely on legal measures, they have my full support, GDPR and CCPA included.
(Random idea for a technical countermeasure against fingerprinting: have you heard of those projects trying to defeat behavioral tracking where, whenever you visit a page, it simultaneously opens a bunch of other random pages in the background, hidden from you, and simulates activity on them, the idea being that Facebook has no idea what actual websites you like to visit because it's lost in the noise? What if instead, whenever you visit a page, your browser or a plugin or a proxy or whatever opened the same page simultaneously in a bunch of hidden background windows, with a random configuration of audio enabled/disabled, user agent, screen resolution etc fingerprinted characteristics?)
Indeed it is. It is not, however, dependent on running arbitrary Turing-complete code in my browser automatically and without my permission. Write-once-run-anywhere is perfectly possible and feasible under the traditional "download and install this program and run it" model.
I'm optimistic about WebAssembly (on that note) because of its usefulness beyond the browser; like I described in a different comment, it's only a matter of time before we start seeing GUI-enabled WASM runtimes that allow WASM-modules-as-programs to work as desktop or mobile apps indistinguishable from their native (or kinda-native, in the case of Android) counterparts.
You can't build apps without turing complete code. We would be back to downloading and executing applications/programs.
Sure you can. None of these things should require me to run your arbitrary Turing-complete code in my browser:
* Reading an article
* Writing an article
* Shopping online
* Searching for things online
* Reading social media posts/comments
* Submitting social media posts/comments
* Browsing a code repo
* Submitting issues / PRs / etc. to a code repo
* Reading documentation
That (non-exhaustive) category accounts for a solid 80% of everything I do online (and the other 20% are things which I'd rather be doing through native apps). All of these things should be possible (and indeed are possible) entirely with HTML (and optionally CSS) + a server somewhere handling the backend logic. If they're not, then your "app" is over-engineered, or it is indeed better off as something I explicitly download and install, which brings me to...
> We would be back to downloading and executing applications/programs.
Good. That's the direction the mobile world has already been going for a decade now. Native apps actually integrate with the platform. Web pages don't (or at least don't do so well). At least in that situation I'm explicitly "downloading and executing those applications/programs" by my own choice.
We even have things like WebAssembly now, with experiments and effort toward making it usable as a general-purpose compilation target/runtime outside a web browser. No reason why it'd take more than a decade for someone to figure out how to wire a WebAssembly module into some sort of Qt-based (or whatever) runtime + UI and get the best of both worlds.
I genuinely don't understand this argument at all -- either you understand something about native platforms that I don't, or you're working under the assumption that all of your native apps:
a) aren't already vacuuming your data at the same rate as web apps.
b) wouldn't get considerably worse if they replaced the web ecosystem.
On the first point, native sandboxing is almost universally terrible. There's some promising stuff happening (notably with MacOS and with Flatpak/Wayland) but it's all just playing catch-up to where the web was years ago.
Pick just about any company that maintains both a website and a native version of the same app -- almost universally, the web version is safer to use. Nobody should be installing Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit on their phone. In fact, I would say the single best piece of advice I can give to anyone to improve their privacy/security on their phone is to stop installing things.
On the desktop, the situation is better, mainly because the desktop is very slowly turning into a niche platform and the web is a much more attractive place to put skuzzy, privacy-violating software. But this is a bit like the old argument that MacOS was more secure than Windows because no one was targeting Mac with viruses at the time. Get rid of the web and all of those skuzzy developers you hate aren't going to go away, they're just going to start making native apps. Where, again, the current sandboxing for most users and OSes is completely inadequate.
If your security model on the desktop is, "I'll only run code I trust", you can already do that on the web today. You can already turn off Javascript. And if you don't feel like the modern web-app ecosystem accommodates that decision, then what makes you think a theoretical, purely native world would accommodate you running a small, tight system that only includes code you trust? I can run a beautiful, tight Linux system because I don't have to install much software on it.
The unfortunate, horrible problem, is that running code we don't trust is gonna be necessary, no matter what world we move to. Sandboxing and permission systems are something we are going to have to figure out. Web or not, there is never going to be a world where you'll be able to trust all of the code you run on your computer. And currently, despite the many problems that browsers have, they're still still the best consumer-accessible solution for sandboxing code.
Of course integration and app performance suffers on the web. But frankly, neither of those are more important than sandboxing.
And in the proposed 10 years being discussed here, there's no reason to believe locally-installed applications won't have exceeded browser sandboxing capabilities, let alone caught up.
Meanwhile, the web sandbox is actively deteriorating specifically because frontend developers want to do the things locally-installed applications can do.
> Nobody should be installing Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit on their phone.
Not at the current state of native app deployment, no, but that's improving rapidly and substantially, especially in the mobile space. Also: the vast majority of users are doing that anyway, so it's worth investing the time and energy into being able to sandbox apps without needing an entire HTML + CSS + JS engine/stack to do it (and indeed, both Google and Apple have made significant strides on that front in the last 10 years, though there's certainly still room for improvement).
> The unfortunate, horrible problem, is that running code we don't trust is gonna be necessary, no matter what world we move to.
Yes, but at least with a locally-installed app, I'm explicitly opting into that app existing and running on my device. This on its own will at least somewhat cut down on the amount of untrustworthy code running on my system.
Yes, I can do the same thing for a website's JS code (and indeed do so), but it's asinine that I need Javascript enabled to read a blog post or post to social media or do the myriad number of other things that are theoretically and practically possible with server-side processing exclusively.
> Of course integration and app performance suffers on the web. But frankly, neither of those are more important than sandboxing.
No, but sandboxing - again - is a problem that can (and almost certainly will) be solved within the next decade, at which point integration and performance benefits will make local app installation even more attractive than it already is.
What? Sure there is!
1. The reason to believe native apps' sandboxing won't exceed the browser is that any sandboxing that works on native apps would also work on the browser app itself.
2. There's also 2 reasons to believe native apps' sandboxing may always be inferior to the browser:
(a) The Web has wider reach, and people are already more confident/careless visiting strange websites than downloading and running strange apps, so exploits targeting the Web are more valuable and therefore more resources are spent battle-testing it.
(b) Native apps currently have deeper access to the device which makes it easier for them to do bad things, and (similar to reason 1) will never have less access to the device than the browser app which is also an app.
(I'm aware there's arguably a slight exception here about Mobile Safari and W^X, but I don't think that disproves the overarching reasoning.)
> almost universally, the web version is safer to use. Nobody should be installing Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit on their phone.
Not only is this true, this would be even more true without JavaScript—if those sites were still usable, which they definitely could be, they just choose not to be. (Well, maybe except Facebook Live, but that could be an optional standalone app.)
> you can already do that on the web today. You can already turn off Javascript.
Of course, this isn't really true, precisely because so many websites that could function fine without JS (including things like news sites that should just be static content!) instead choose not to.
Which of course is the real problem with yellowapple's idea. Lots of services cripple their mobile website and push you to install their app instead; if we removed JS from the Web, everyone who could would just start doing the same on desktop too, right? Upstarts trying to maximize growth probably will work great on the Web, but as they get more established they'll start pushing people more and more towards their native apps, and existing established players will do that from Day 1 (of the new, JS-less world), including everyone mentioned so far—Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, GitHub, major news sites, because people will deal with the one-time friction of installing the app in order to access the network or content.
They've already won.
This issue is cross domain tracking like we see with ad network that profile you over many different sites.
In fact, I almost spat out my Coca Cola, I was so surprised that you would think that.
On the other hand I think that it is the one that blends the best and can even have some value. For example I can imagine that people enjoy a car heist movie more if actual cars that exist are being used as opposed to some made up stuff.
In France there are laws against "accidental" advertising so in news and TV almost any brand will be taped over or blurred. It is actually way more jarring and ugly than just leaving it as it is. It is especially funny when you have the logo of national rail company, which is basically a gradient, blurred.
[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.1897 [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08864