Advertising
As practice shows, the struggle of advertising blockers with advertising turns into an endless arms race. Publishers are rolling out new formats of advertising, which is difficult to distinguish from user content. And ad blockers quickly find ways to define and block these formats. In turn, publishers change the code again to bypass filters. And so on indefinitely.
The developers of the first perceptual advertising blocker believe that this game of cat and mouse will not last forever. Specialists from Princeton and Stanford universities offer a radically different approach to blocking banners – to recognize ads not on HTML markup, but on visual advertising markers. Just like people do. This negates the attempts of some sites to implement the blocking of ad blockers.
The idea is based on the basic premise. In accordance with regulatory documents, publishers are obliged to explicitly allocate advertising so that it can be discerned by people. If a person can distinguish it, then the computer can.
Researchers believe that the current “arms race” between publishers and developers of advertising blockers is a security issue . First, blockers can be considered a function that improves the security of the system, because it does not allow the execution of potentially malicious scripts on the computer. Secondly, the game of cat and mouse resembles the eternal struggle of viruses with antiviruses: these are mutually hostile processes that are performed in a common environment – in the browser. But legal regulation links the hands of publishers, so that ad blockers get a big head start in comparison with antiviruses.
In this mutual struggle, however, the blockers have more privileges in the system, so they always have the last word. That is, in this four-state system, which is the complete model of the system, it is the blockers who must win in the end (states 2 and 4).
This model is divided into three “mini-battles,” which are relatively easy to analyze, the authors of the scientific work write.
The architecture of the perceptual advertising blocker is depicted in the illustration below. The main part of the work is done in the “perceptual library”, which must quickly adapt to new techniques of advertising marking.
For example, Facebook tags advertising banners in several ways that are easily identified by eye And are recognized by the perceptual blocker.
So far, the authors have released an innovative blocker only as an extension for the Chrome Facebook Ad Highlighter. The very first preliminary version was released on August 11, 2016. It was minimally dependent on the analysis of HTML markup. Interestingly, Facebook noticed the appearance of a new tool – and changed the markup to bypass the perceptual blocker. In response, the authors of the scientific work released a new version, in which the dependence on markup is completely removed. True, expansion now has limited functionality. It only allocates advertising, but does not cut it from the page. This is done especially because scientists do not want to get involved in ethical conflicts, says one of the authors.
As there are not so many ways to mark advertisements on the Internet, this blocker is quite universal Tool and very light-weight. You do not need to update it frequently, and every new module (against the new tagging technique) requires only a few dozen lines of code. During testing, he successfully blocked ads on 50 of the 50 sites tested.
Tests showed that the blocker slows down page loading by only 0.53 ± 0.15 seconds. But this is only if you disable the OCR text recognition module, which quite brakes the work (about +1 s). But the blocker showed about the same high efficiency even with the OCR module disabled. The developers say that if you implement native text recognition, then the performance should increase significantly, because they used the implementation in JavaScript in their concept. Testing the implementation of Tesseract C ++ showed a speed of about 10 times higher than JavaScript.
Despite this slight slowdown in download speed, users still win, because banner ads and scripts on the page themselves slow down the pages, On average, by 44%, in addition, unnecessarily stressing the CPU, which leads to an extra expense of battery power on mobile devices. And as it was said above, they themselves are a threat to security, because through the banner networks often spread malicious code, not to mention the surveillance of users through tracking cookies.
According to some experts, online advertising now Is a serious problem and conflict. This conflict is not between users and advertisers, but between advertisers and publishers. Advertisers are very upset by the fact that online advertising causes problems for users, poses a threat to privacy and security. They do not need such advertising. And this is the problem of publishers who can not offer sane formats. In this sense, ad blockers eliminate imbalances and help find an acceptable solution for introducing more adequate advertising.
