For a while now the transition away from Manifest V2 (MV2) to MV3 has been on-going and it looks like it is entering its final phase of deprecation, at least, in the case of Google Chrome. A recent discussion thread in the w3c WebExtensions Community Group GitHub repo has highlighted how the latest and upcoming versions of the most popular browser are expected to be its final releases with support for MV2 extensions.
What this essentially means is that the tricks and bypasses that were used to keep MV2 extensions like uBlock Origin and others alive will not work any more on Chrome, or at least not for very long. For example the Windows Registry mod that could extend MV2 availability will cease to function after Chromium version 151.
Fine. I propose we create a proxy for hostile web browsers. Install the proxy on your device to run locally. Browser tells proxy to fetch the page. Proxy unfucks it before handing it over to the browser. Someone likely already has something like this out there somewhere.
If they want to turn this into an arms race they absolutely will lose.
Problem is this requires SSL intercept- the browser has to blindly trust the proxy otherwise SSL verification will fail on the browser level
Antiviruses have been doing this for years.
Basically pihole which blocks adverts at the DNS level so they don’t even connect to their servers at all.
So long as they get paid while the ship sinks, they don’t care.
Why give a shit about the digital commons if it isn’t making you, specifically, money hand over fist. Short sighted idiots.
“Why did we teach peasants to read? We have AI to do that now.”
I actually believe this is an unwinnable scenario for clients. Just whenever the block app/db updates, automatically check if ads are blocked. If they are, have an engineer or AI iterate until it no longer is the case.
And the reason why blocking solutions can’t do the same is that there’s cery kittle money in it and not enough people working for free on it. Or that’s atleast my hypothesis…
So train the AI to recognize and respond to obfuscation attempts. Hell, make the web whitelist only. People subscribe to the vetted whitelists and anything sus gets blocked by default.