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Ask HN: Will ablocker wars force ad-tech to start serving pages as canvas?

5 points by ale22 ↗ HN
I see a constant game of cat and mouse between client side adblockers and ad publishers. Does this mean that eventually all webpages will start to be served on a canvas? Or maybe something like flash based pages where the ads can't be blocked at all?

6 comments

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ffsanotheracct
Sure, if they don't want to be indexed by search engines. And if they do, suddenly browsers are going to have user agents that look a lot like search engines. And failing that, anyone who tries this had best pray they're the ONLY source of that content, because otherwise their traffic will dry up like a piece of chewed up gum in the Mojave (and even if they ARE the only source, if it's worth anything at all, it'll be quoted whole and reposted all over so it can be read by people unwilling to put up with any of that).
headbansown
The endgame is requiring a non-extensible browser with TPM and remote attestation so that the ads can't be removed client side with a bonus layer of DRM preventing scraping the screen (at least on the same endpoint) and hiding the ads that way. But a critical mass of "content" would have to require this before it could be universally enforced. Would probably be happening with online banking already had it not been for the rise of mobile.

Bottom line, though: it only takes one person to copy the "content" and repost it to make all that for naught.

ale22
Heads up @headbansown and @ffsanotheracct, I can only see your comments after I've updated my profile to showdead comments.

Possible your accounts are temporarily dead?

ffsanotheracct
Hey, thanks - on Tor and just created, so probably shadow banned. Thought it was not a bad comment that would make it through a mod queue, but w/e. Thanks for letting me know and hope you get some visible comments!
dang
Please don't post like this. It's off topic and once the comments get vouched for or unkilled by mods, it sticks around as a dangling reference that never gets garbage collected.

If you a [dead] post that shouldn't be dead, you should vouch for it by clicking on its timestamp, then clicking 'vouch' at the top of its page. This is why we added that feature. There's a small karma threshold (> 30) before vouch links appear. Alternatively, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll take care of it. Moderators review many of the software-killed comments but there is a time lag before we get to them, since we are not software.

Edit: also, could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Users needn't use their real name, but do need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

[dead] ale22
Understood, though, is my account dead right now?