uBlock Origin's volunteer team will no longer chase Facebook's shifting ad-detection tricks, calling it a 'disgusting anti-user site.' Here's what that means for your feed.
It’s not a matter of technical implementation, but a procedural one. It was never a secret, it was just too expensive and impractical to do. If you changed how you implement ads every single day, the ad blockers would have to change their rules every day. Just keep going forever, and eventually the adblockers won’t have the resources to keep up.
It’s like if a food truck driver was trying to operate without a permit. If they sat in the same spot every day, officials would see them and easily catch them. If they moved to different apots around town every day and repainted their truck, they could evade officials. That’s not a secret, it’s just that it’s more work than it’s worth. While not a great analogy for many reasons, the idea is that it was never a secret how to get past ad blockers. It was just never worth the money. You’d spend more money implementing the evasion than you’d get back from the ad revenue.
At this point yhey are probably using AI to do the job of adjusting ad formats, so humans especially couldn’t keep up. Perhaps AI could be used to counteract it, but that’s expensive to setup and keep running. A free software obviously can’t aford that.
Sure, they could have been silent about it, but they would still get reports about missed ads. There would be enough hubbub online they’d eventually have to address. Maybe this way they can use the attenion to get more contributors
It’s not a matter of technical implementation, but a procedural one. It was never a secret, it was just too expensive and impractical to do. If you changed how you implement ads every single day, the ad blockers would have to change their rules every day. Just keep going forever, and eventually the adblockers won’t have the resources to keep up.
It’s like if a food truck driver was trying to operate without a permit. If they sat in the same spot every day, officials would see them and easily catch them. If they moved to different apots around town every day and repainted their truck, they could evade officials. That’s not a secret, it’s just that it’s more work than it’s worth. While not a great analogy for many reasons, the idea is that it was never a secret how to get past ad blockers. It was just never worth the money. You’d spend more money implementing the evasion than you’d get back from the ad revenue.
At this point yhey are probably using AI to do the job of adjusting ad formats, so humans especially couldn’t keep up. Perhaps AI could be used to counteract it, but that’s expensive to setup and keep running. A free software obviously can’t aford that.
Sure, they could have been silent about it, but they would still get reports about missed ads. There would be enough hubbub online they’d eventually have to address. Maybe this way they can use the attenion to get more contributors