Not asking for tech support here, just wondering if in theory it would be possible to create a plug-in or even a complete browser that blocks ads in a way that’s impossible to detect. One model that comes to mind is a quarantined / containerized non-blocking virtual browser which queries the web server directly, then the UX filters the content from that container and presents it to the user ad-free. As far as the web server can tell, the containerized browser is just vanilla Chromium.
There is no “perfect”(impossible to detect in this case) in anything. Perfection is a target that keeps changing.
What can you do when for example YouTube decides to bake in ads directly into the video source(they are actually testing this, although its feasibility is questionable)? You can’t block it, for now. In the future, you might be able to detect that with let’s say CV and AI and might be able to block it then. But then YouTube will do something about it.
They’ll probably include a manifest with the video, telling the player what time ranges are un-skippable. A script could hook into that, and auto-skip them
Theoretically, an air-gapped system that is worn on the head, rather than installed to the device would be undetectable.
An AR vision headset that detected known-ad-signatures and could blank or replace ads in realtime, with targetted noise-cancelling to ‘mute’ specific ad audio, could surgically remove ads from any media(billboard, magazine, video, radio, webpage).
Kind of like reverse-Snowcrash augmentation.
I wouldn’t say that it’d be strictly impossible, however if it can be done then it would come at a considerable cost to useability, versatility, etc.
One adjacent concept that comes to mind is the use of the :visited CSS tag to extract a user’s browsing habits. I remember seeing a demonstration of this where an “are you human” captcha was shown but the choice of image in each box was controlled by the :visited tag. I can’t find that post, but this medium article demonstrates a similer concept. There are mitigations to this luckily, but a fullproof solution would be to remove the tag’s functionality altogether, which would make certain websites (like the one we’re on right now!) much more inconvenient to use.
It seems trivial to me for a website to detect user behaviors that indicate the use of an adblocker. For example, if a request for a page is immediately followed by a request for a video on that page, rather than after 5-60 seconds, then they’re likey using an adblocker. If there is an ad placed between two paragaphs in an article, but two distant paragraphs are visible at the same time, it is more likely (although not guaranteed) that they are using an adblocker. If a user triggers an abnormal amount of those heuristics then they get flagged as an adblocking user.
What you’re saying makes sense about detection. I think my theoretical model might work around some of those, but then there are the user behaviors you’re talking about that could still give it away.
I’m having trouble finding it again, but I remember seeing some articles a few weeks / months ago that Google wants to start using some kind of “3rd party authentication” service to make sure you are using an approved and unmodified browser. They want to roll this thing out to as many sites as they can. Of course they will pretend it’s for your security / protection but it’s really to block add-ons / extensions that they don’t like.
If the site tries really hard, they can control serverside how many seconds of ad you watched to decide if you can access any content whatsoever. Something like this is already present on Twitch iirc. So in the endgame the only universal detection-proof solution I can imagine is AI/GPU based adblocker that will visually detect ads on your screen and overwrite them with something else without actually skipping.
That’s kind of what I’m trying to conceptualize. The container, which is invisible and silent to the end user, “watches” all of the ads as normal. But the middle layer then sanitizes that container, almost as if it was a standalone webserver, and then presents the sanitized version to the end user.
Basically it would have to be built into the browser.
You go to a website, the AI enhanced ad blocking browser would then watch the website and then reinterpret what it sees to you the end user minus the ads.
Upside, completely infallible assuming that the website itself is visible to the public. Downside, the entire contents of any website you go to could be hallucinated and you could have a completely separate and unique experience from reality by using said browser.
We really haven’t moved all that far from “pictures of spaghetti”, have we.
The problem isn’t so much blocking the ads on a page, that’s a solved problem, it’s doing so without incurring side effects. The main problem usually comes in two ways.
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Ads are now being pre-baked into the content delivery itself in which there is no easy way to rip it out without destroying the content in some way. Twitch is notorious for this on streams where the ad portion completely replaces the video feed before your browser ever sees what was originally there. You may never recover what was there, but if you try to block the ad playing you trigger problem 2.
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There are departments dedicated to developing ever changing anti-adblock scripts and detectors that enforce ad placements and detect tampering. In some cases this results in punishing the user by refusing to deliver content until the ads load, blocking or kicking the user off the page, throttling connections or access, or in Twitch’s egregious case, more invasive ad interruptions. This has become a never ending arms race with ad blockers to keep up with minefield of invasive scrips monitoring what you do with their website.
TLDR: Ad blockers like UBlock Origin are already filtering how you’re asking for bur advertisers are attacking the plugins themselves and have their own arms race of scripts to punish those who interfere.
