Features can be brittle, but they are understandable. The paper's appendix [1] lists the 27 features that will likely make a request/resource "ad-related". These include interesting ones like JS AST depth, average JS identifier length, the "bracket to dot notations ration in JS", and a number of graph measures for the graph of scripts.

And contrary to what comments in this thread are saying, they do compare against a blocklist-based adblocker: uBlock Origin. That's in section 5.5. They say they outperform uBlock Origin. But even they say they don't reduce overall page time bc their algorithm is expensive.

[1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3589334.3645698

I think the authors want to compare apples with apples, so they only compare their algorithm to other adblockers that use algorithms, as opposed to those which use crowdsourced lists. The paper somewhat acknowledges this:

> However, manual maintenance of these filter lists requires significant human effort

Seems like one of those tasks where crowdsourcing scales so nicely (only one person has to report an ad for it to go into a crowdsourced list that blocks it for millions of others) that it makes an algorithmic approach unnecessary.

Neat results, I wonder how it compares to uBO or the different blacklists. I assume it self-update with newer techniques and can detect certain patterns?

If I recall, in Permutation City there's some part where somebody deals with spam with AI. The user tries to use a simulation to listen to potential spam to filter it, while the spam tries to figure out whether a real person is listening to it and only tries to spam when a real person is there.

Or something along those lines, it's been a long time since I read it.

The harder, more pernicious type of ads are the modals that pop up when your cursor moves toward the back button, or when you scroll down a certain distance on the page. "Wait! Before you go, take a moment to give us your email address!"

Those can be blocked, but by the time you've seen them, they've already done all the damage they can do—which is to say, they've annoyed you.

I wish somebody could come up with a way to detect and stop them. I spent an afternoon trying to come up with reusable techniques to detect these popups, but there are just too many possibilities.

There are few things I feel radical about, and Ads are one of them. I believe they are a drain in several ways:

They waste computational resources and electricity on both ends. They compromise the visual design and layout of webpages. They distract and take mental energy away from the user. They make the internet (and anywhere ads exist) more "ugly" and less aesthetically pleasing - which negatively impacts mental health. They often sell low-quality services/products or outright scams, which harms those least educated and poorest individuals.

Death to advertisement! On billboards! On television! On the internet!

Ads are a parasite on the human mind that need to go away, forever.

I'd like to see a tandem uBO+AdFlush extension that just enables uBO by default, with a "I still see ADs!" button in the extension UI that refreshes with AdFlush enabled and auto-submits any missed ads to a new FlushList filter list.

> This project is a half-serious, half-assed attempt to demonstrate that in the next few years the process of blocking this type of content could be almost entirely automated. Yes, it would be wasteful from a computational and human potential perspective, and otherwise completely unnecessary, but hey, more money would change hands!

https://imgflip.com/i/8s3nur

... Has anyone even heard of these ad blockers before?

Is it that easy? Sounds very abusable