[VeilEm]

How are they going to detect ad blocking? They're going to have to spend a long time fighting anti-ad block detection.

You can't trust the client. Ads are displayed in the client. It would take hardware level ad serving to make ad serving and anti-ad blocking feasible.

[fiatmoney]

Trivial answer: the webpage is a monolithic PNG. Good luck building a general-purpose image parser & modifier, especially on a webpage with embedded animations.

There are ways to make it very difficult to distinguish between content and ads, that's all you need to do. At the highest level, the content is the ads, which is usually what ends up happening to trade publications anyway.

[VeilEm]

A monolithic PNG wouldn't have annoying animated ads or videos that push down content, they wouldn't pop over. They wouldn't be serving malware since it would come from wired. I would miss the ability to select text, but I wouldn't be bothered by the ads anymore.

Maybe now if they served a canvas element, and put all the content in that with animated ads, that would be more bothersome.

[jacquesm]

This might happen. But I can tell you there will be some very vocal opposition to this (users of screen readers for instance, and anybody living in a country with accessibility laws will be very happy to give you merry hell).

[bbradley406]

As everyone else has said, I would prefer that (if I were browsing with no filtering).

Here's the trivial client blocking method: OCR and break the result into different groups by page location, font size and color; the article will be the largest groups of text with the same font. Large images and charts that were part of the original article would be cropped out and re-inserted into the final document. Within a few days you would see a browser extension made with adaptable filtering for most sites that used the monolithic PNG.

[lagadu]

A monolithic png doesn't track your browsing, clickjack you or even allow you to click on ads. That'd be terrible for advertisers.

[leni536]

I always wondered why didn't youtube concatenate the ad content directly to the main content stream. It should be possible without reencoding and maybe a minimal muxing overhead (hell DASH is not even multiplexed). It would be quite hard to block that.

[tomjen3]

If somebody did that monolithic PNG a bunch of hackers would see it as a challenge and there would be a "Show HN: how to get around wireds new png system" within a week.

[tremon]

Trivial answer: the webpage is a monolithic PNG

Yes, please! If they are going to serve every article as a single static file, then I might actually consider paying for it.

[tristor]

Exactly. The best part is it doesn't even need to be blocked in the client. I'm running Pi-Hole:https://pi-hole.net/ with DNS Crypt:https://dnscrypt.org/ on a couple of Raspberry Pi 2s on my network acting as internal caching name servers. Sure, I also run uBlock, but I don't even see ads on mobile apps because they're all blocked via DNS long before the client even has to parse it.

[ariwilson]

Do you want to start a tit-for-tat war? Publishers could redirect ads using their sites as a proxy.

[tristor]

There's no war. It's simple. I choose what I allow to run on my computer. End of story. It's the height of arrogance that all of these companies, both the publishers and the ad tech firms, think they can do whatever they want to users with no recourse. I bought the computer to serve my needs, I have control over how it functions to do so.

[hsod]

But if your usage of your computer that you bought depends on their servers, it seems they would have some sort of say in how you use it.

That is, they can negotiate with you using your desire to access their servers as leverage.

You can refuse to negotiate, in which case they can take steps to block your access to their server. You can use technological means to get around that, but then they can adjust their own technology to block your new strategy.

And then you're in a war.

[tristor]

There's a reason why protocols (such as HTTP) intended for use in the public space refer to a client connection as a "request". I am asking them for a specific set of data, they are welcome to choose whether to provide it or not. Once I've received it, and it's on my computer, I get to choose whether or not to let it run. In the case of advertisements, I have more security concerns than mere annoyance, so I choose to block them. If you don't wish to serve me content, go right ahead, just be aware that there is nothing you can do to force me to expose my system to your potentially malicious advertisements.

[hsod]

I wasn't saying that you're obligated to look at ads. I said that if you want to use someone else's servers AND want to block ads, you're going to end up in a technical war.

You said "there is no war", but obviously there is.

Your choices are:

* use the servers and look at ads * don't use the servers at all * use the servers and try to block ads

In this third option (which seems to be the one you chose), the people who own the servers can then try to block your access to the site. You can then try to circumvent that block, then they can try to block you again.

This is a war. You said "there is no war".

The subtext here is that, grand proclamations about sovereignty over your computing devices aside, by making other people's servers a crucial component of your computing you are ceding to them some leverage and therefore control.

[tacticus]

Which will be funny when they start serving malware directly from their servers.