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by fuzzy2 2307 days ago
Why WebAssembly? Just bake ad code into a SPA and that's it. Random elements with random names at random positions in the DOM, positioned using styles. Quite low-tech. If implemented properly, it cannot be blocked. At all. Except blocking all scripts of course, which means the SPA will stop working.

And then I'll just stop visiting. (:
1 comments
strbean 2307 days ago
Nobody wants to host ad content / pay for the bandwidth themselves though. I think URL blacklisting will continue to work.
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Reelin 2307 days ago
> Nobody wants to host ad content / pay for the bandwidth themselves though.

Actually the issue is that the companies paying you to run the ads don't want you to host it yourself.

* They're paying for impressions, and they don't trust you to report those honestly.

* Real time bidding means the ad to be displayed often hasn't been determined until a few milliseconds before the page loads in your browser.

* They can't (as easily and reliably) collect demographic and behavioral data (ie spy on you) if you don't contact their servers directly.

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strbean 2307 days ago
True! More (and more important) reasons why URL blacklisting will continue to work in the WASMy browser-in-browser age.
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Blackthorn 2307 days ago
No, they just want to squeeze out every penny they can not thinking of the users they end up losing in the process. Personal experience time!

I ran a pretty popular wiki for Dungeons and Dragons homebrew on what used to be called Wikia. At some point they decided they available needed to have some terrible new skin that was stuffed with ads and unbelievable ugly. We pushed back but they were adamant about forcing it, so I took all the content and all the users and self hosted it for almost a decade afterward. The Wikia site was completely dead. Sucks for them but their choice.

I paid $10/mo or $10/mo for the site depending on the year, and never ran ads. At one point I got an offer from a company in the same hobbyist space to buy it from me. At that point I was extremely sick of being my own sysadmin and worrying about security vulns so I accepted it. Now some time later they're trying to pull the "stuff it full of ads in the worst places!" routine. Users are getting pissed and starting to ask me about taking all the content...and users...and going off to a server adminned by me again.

If I do this, it will be completely devastating for the site and tank their traffic. Do they care or realize? Guess we'll see.

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