Explain Like I'm Five

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ELI5: How are these massive adblock lists kept updated so regularly? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Do they get some kind of real-time feed that tells them "hey this URL popped up in the web today, but it is a tracker, so block it", or is this exercise is mostly helped by the crowd ?

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

So there's like a Wikipedia crew of ad blocker contributors? I had no idea, that's pretty cool. Thank you adblock crew.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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!