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Comment by AgentME | Hacker News Reader

How is this any different than getting ads from minified blobs of javascript?

doesnt matter if its minified as long as you can

    window.console.clear = function arsehole() {console.log(arsehole.caller, "Asshole script called console.clear()")}

before it executes

Stuff state of the art adblockers (uBO) inject to block ads today: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/uBlock-user/uBO-Scriptlets...

You cannot disable wasm.

This isn't true. If you block javascript from running, then that will include blocking WebAssembly. WebAssembly is only started through javascript, and if things ever changes so that webpages can include WebAssembly directly, presumably it will also be controlled by the same browser settings that control whether javascript is executed.

Yeah, but then you block everything and not only wasm.

Why would you want to block wasm specifically? There's nothing it can do that javascript can't.

    WebAssembly
    WebAssembly {compile: ƒ, validate: ƒ, instantiate: ƒ, compileStreaming: ƒ, instantiateStreaming: ƒ, …}
    delete WebAssembly
    Uncaught ReferenceError: WebAssembly is not defined

Great, now do that in a check box like JavaScript settings on browsers, without extensions.

I have this running as a uBO scriptlet injected into every website before content javascript starts to execute

    *##+js(myscript)

does various things, disables webassembly, websocket, AudioContext, serviceworkers, openDatabase and indexedDB, navigator.sendBeacon and window.opener, some fingerprinting randomization stuff, etc. I wish there was a Browser on the market actually letting you configure such things _per domain_ as Opera Presto used to, alas we are on our own now :(.

i can usually block those scripts and still have a functioning page

You can still block those blobs, as they too are loaded by URL.

what i am envisioning here is the content of a webpage compiled with ads therein. it would be desirable by the googles of the world for this very reason.

This is still possible using JavaScript, and yet it is not widely seen.

You can think of WebAssembly as another mechanism for executing code in the browser in the context of a web page. JavaScript is still required to (1) load the wasm binary, (2) evaluate it and (3) connect it to DOM APIs or really anything outside of the isolated wasm execution context.

How you block some forms of tracking/ads is you inject your own STUB javascript functionality before the offending script loads.

https://github.com/uBlock-user/uBO-Scriptlets

This wont work with webassembly.

None of these scriptlets would break if a site uses WASM, they're utilities for things like adding/removing/mutating elements from the DOM, modifying localStorage, stopping alert()

executesitefunction.js could arguably be effected, but that relies on a site installing a particular function on window, which isn't required when using JS, and could be still done where the function is backed by WASM

Hmm this repo doesnt have the currently used scriptlets.js file, weird. I think this is the official one https://git.furworks.de/opensourcemirror/ublock-origin/src/b...

A lot of stubs, a lot of functionality to kill a script when tripping certain trigger action, or force some properties.

Don't worry, won't be likely to happen - the ads that are displayed now as banners are literally bid on when it's loading, so at most the ad serving code would be bundled, but you would still be able to block the binaries they load.

This can happen as it stands with JS too, though.

Advertisers would hate that kind of model. They want perfectly targeted and customized ads for each individual viewer. Baking the ads into the content or page itself would be going back about 20 years in their world.

They can bake the ad servers side in the binaries.

They could do bake ads in JS too, but websites aren’t really incentivized to do so as it would increase latency and complexity.

And also advertizers rightly do not trust the content provider not to lie about how many times they showed the ad.

wasm has no effect on that...

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