Adblockers
are either the savior or the nemesis of the web depending on what side of the
fence you are on. But who could resist the spectacle of Facebook taking on
Adblock Plus.
You
can't get away from the fact that Facebook exists to make money and only exists
while it does. So far its only way of making money has been to show its users
adverts. Some of its users don't like adverts and think it's perfectly
reasonable to use an adblocker to see the content without ads. Facebook cannot
afford to allow adblockers to gain the upper hand and so it has declared war -
a war of escalation.
Most
anti-adblockers work on simply detecting the addin and either posting a request
to be white listed or denying the user access to the content. Facebook is
trying something very different. It is attempting to circumvent the adblocker
and show the ads that would have been blocked. This is a much more difficult
proposition but clearly not impossible.
On
Tuesday of last week Facebook announced that it was about to use an adblocker-proof
format. On Thursday Adblock Plus had found a way round the defence. On Friday
Facebook had a counter-counter-measure, or should that be
counter-counter-counter measure as Adblock Plus could already be classed as a
counter measure? Later that afternoon Adblock Plus had a counter^4- measure and
just a little while afterwards Facebook had a counter^5 measure. By now the n
in counter^n measure will probably have
incremented with the winning side being decided by n being odd (Facebook) or n
being even (Adblock Plus).
At
this point we could try to workout who the evil party is and who the righteous
side is - but why bother when there are technical matters to keep us amused.
Ad
blockers generally work by detecting downloads from known ad servers. This is
easy blocking. Facebook doesn't use ad servers and the origin of the material
means that to ad-block Facebook you have to work on algorithms that detect ads
by their content. However, to comply with advertising standards, Facebook has
to make its ads obvious to a user and this means that an ad-block algorithm
doesn't have as hard a task as it might if the ads could be completely blended
in with the rest of the content.
The
fact that an ad-blocker has to be updated, often manually, also tilts the
balance towards Facebook. It can just roll out a modified web page which is
served to all of its users, whereas the new counter measure has to be
downloaded by ad-blocker users to block the new format.
So
we can sit back and watch the battle unfold.
However
there is a deeper question.
Is
this game winnable?
Any
two-person game, and this is a two-person game, has rules and from the rules it
is sometimes possible to work out who wins if a perfect game is played. For
example, the player who goes first in tic-tac-toe always either wins or at
worst draws. So do the rules of this game make an eventual winner inevitable or
is it just a matter of keeping on thinking of new ways around the current
counter measure?
You
might say at this point that the rules of the game are too complicated, but the
question can be boiled down to something simpler.
Is
it possible for a web page to always "know" if it has been tampered
with?
This
is a problem I have been thinking about for some time in a different context,
but it is essentially the same problem as detecting the removal of content.
Sometimes I think I've got it, and it usually involves a digital signature of
some sort, and then I see a way to circumvent the method and I'm back to square
one. Perhaps it isn't necessary to get a solution that is 100% effective,
perhaps defeating it would take too long or degrade the user experience in some
way.
So
is it possible to always detect that a web page has been altered? And remember
an add-in can modify the way a browser works in all sorts of ways.
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