this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Explain Like I'm Five
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I thought they could just tell by the code if they had a pop up or not and they just have to stay updated on how they keep changing the way they're presented. I could be wrong though.
Maybe a general pop-up blocker which is built into modern browsers now, but something that blocks tracking and ads (for example uBlock Origin, AdGuard Home, PiHole...) works off of a list which is kept up to date by crowdsourcing. I've never contributed to one of these efforts, but there are lots of people dedicated to the cause.
So there's like a Wikipedia crew of ad blocker contributors? I had no idea, that's pretty cool. Thank you adblock crew.
The problem with this approach is that the companies will just change the way ads are shown. DNS blocking is impossible to stop, provides you block every ad website.
DNS blocking is easy to stop, you just host the ads on the same domain instead of putting them on a subdomain. There are plenty of ways to do this already. Only reason it works right now is that lots of them have their own separate ad domain that they host from.
I hate Amazon for this, and won’t use their apps or pages if I can avoid it (including the amazingly brief foray into the Amazon App Store years ago which only served ads from Amazon domains)
Because so much of the world runs off Amazon I really can’t block that domain effectively without breaking large portions of the internet. Tho now that I’m not using Amazon actively for anything, the broken-ness might be fine. Guess we’ll find out!