[aqfamnzc]

Your "end-game" AI tool sounds good, and would work I think, but I think the opposing endgame strategy for advertisers is fully verified DRM chain all the way from incoming network packets to the display's pixels.

Network -> Web Environment Integrity -> HDCP. No room in there for an AI middleman. :(

[saurik]

While I clearly generally do agree with you--this is why I have that second paragraph about pervasive DRM being the enemy here--and have spent much of my life fighting DRM in various ways, I will at least try to offer you a ray of hope: building functional DRM gets much harder as the analog loophole gets stronger, and now that we are nearly at (not quite, but so damned close to) being able to strap a "retina" screen over our eyes and implement real-time AR on our perceptions, to build DRM that functions is going to end up requiring AI detectives that suss out whether we are actually there or not... it will be ridiculous if we get to the point where instead of merely putting a piece of tape over our webcam we find ourselves having to hang a tiny screen in front of it designed to pretend to the computer that we are awake / present / not wearing a headset.

[Bjartr]

> requiring AI detectives that suss out whether we are actually there or not

Please drink verification can to continue

[aqfamnzc]

What do you mean that the analog loophole gets stronger? Are you saying that the AR technology is getting good enough that ad-blocking can be done there instead? That's true, I guess.

[saurik]

The analog loophole is the idea that I can always just use a camera and/or a microphone to record any content I want to pirate, rather than rip the original exact digital bits. The reason why this resulted in low quality results in the past is that cameras and microphones lose fidelity of the original source... but the technology behind cameras and microphones just gets better over time, and there is only so good that the original digital content with the original hardware playing to the human perception system was going to be in the first place, so if you point a good enough camera at a video and re-render it on a high-quality enough display you don't care that it goes through that analog step anymore, making DRM implemented inside of display protocols meaningless (and yes: opening the door to using the analog loophole to pirate and then modify/remix everything you see and experience in real time using AR).

[freedomben]

Indeed, that's the endgame. End-to-end DRM, and there's enough money behind it that it will happen. I've been advocating heavily against DRM for many years now and nobody cares. Occassionally when somebody has a need in the moment where they are annoyed, and I explain "you can't share <thing> with your spouse/sibling/friend because DRM" they will say something like, "oh yeah, that's annoying" but just continue paying for DRM-ed media.

Unless perhaps people boycott, but that sure ain't gonna happen (in anywhere near large enough numbers to make a difference), Apple, Google, and Microsoft will build it into their platforms, and anyone not on the big three will be unable to consume more and more as time goes on, including most web browsing. It won't happen overnight. It will be an iterative/progressive encroachment where just a little changes each day. Boiling frogs and all that.

[aqfamnzc]

Who knows, maybe the climax of the advertising/drm war will result in an ideological split of the Internet:

On the one side: Big tech. E2E DRM, Chromium is the only browser engine sites will respond to, unavoidable and unblockable ads, siloed content and whitelisted domains only. Verified real identities. Linux clients and VPN IPs completely banned or pushed to captcha hell.

The rebels: Fediverse, the small web, fringe projects, experimentation, perhaps some "indie" ads. (And the problems that come with it: Spam, scraping, etc.)

I know which part I'd like to participate in.