Wait they don't even have a fully working implementation, and yet VICE is already proclaiming it as an end of Ad-blocking wars?
Color me skeptical.
Now I know that the original authors did not write the clickbait headline or even the article, but working on Ad blocker is a poor use of resources. On a longer time horizon websites that cannot be supported via Ads will turn into Apps that require multiple permissions + FB/Google login. This type of effort is frankly futile, you might win the battle on Ad-blockers but you are guaranteed to lose the War of economic incentives.
But hey in the meantime some clueless reporter writes a breathless article about your imaginary triumph on something everyone likes to hate, so why not.
Also as far as their scheme of detecting "adchoices" icon or container sizes, it can be trivially circumvented. When it comes to circumventing such algorithms, disorganized hackers routinely do that for far more secure things. Organized well paid engineers at Ad tech companies can probably beat them in couple of days if not hours. Worse their scheme penalizes good companies that opt-in into adchoices. So a site operator is forced to choose shadier ad networks (guaranteeing higher revenue) which this scheme won't be able to block. As a result the user gets a worse experience!
As much as it is in vogue to hate advertisers, crippling someone's business model (whatever your cute ethical reasons might be) while using institutional resources is not a great idea. Princeton CS might soon find itself on wrong side of a lawsuit, where upvotes and retweets might not count much.
These techniques also work fine in the mobile world, and they can be applied at the OS level, where apps can't observe that their graphical output is being manipulated.
Color me skeptical.
Now I know that the original authors did not write the clickbait headline or even the article, but working on Ad blocker is a poor use of resources. On a longer time horizon websites that cannot be supported via Ads will turn into Apps that require multiple permissions + FB/Google login. This type of effort is frankly futile, you might win the battle on Ad-blockers but you are guaranteed to lose the War of economic incentives.
But hey in the meantime some clueless reporter writes a breathless article about your imaginary triumph on something everyone likes to hate, so why not.
Also as far as their scheme of detecting "adchoices" icon or container sizes, it can be trivially circumvented. When it comes to circumventing such algorithms, disorganized hackers routinely do that for far more secure things. Organized well paid engineers at Ad tech companies can probably beat them in couple of days if not hours. Worse their scheme penalizes good companies that opt-in into adchoices. So a site operator is forced to choose shadier ad networks (guaranteeing higher revenue) which this scheme won't be able to block. As a result the user gets a worse experience!
As much as it is in vogue to hate advertisers, crippling someone's business model (whatever your cute ethical reasons might be) while using institutional resources is not a great idea. Princeton CS might soon find itself on wrong side of a lawsuit, where upvotes and retweets might not count much.