Princeton’s Ad-Blocking Superweapon May Put an End to the Ad-Blocking Arms Race

A team of Princeton and Stanford University researchers has fundamentally reinvented how ad-blocking works, in an attempt to put an end to the advertising versus ad-blocking arms race. The ad blocker they've created is lightweight, evaded anti ad-blocking scripts on 50 out of the 50 websites it was tested on, and can block Facebook ads that were previously unblockable.
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The Federal Trade Commission regulations require advertisements to be clearly labeled so that a human can recognize them, which has created a built-in advantage for consumers and, now, ad blockers. The team used several computer vision techniques to detect ads the same way that a human would, which they call "perceptual ad blocking." Because advertisers must comply with these regulations, the authors imagine an "end game" in which consumers—and ad blockers—ultimately win.
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A proof of concept is now available for Chrome, but is not fully functional (as in, it only detects ads, it doesn't block them): "To avoid taking sides on the ethics of ad-blocking, we have deliberately stopped short of making our proof-of-concept tool fully functional—it is configured to detect ads but not actually block them," Narayanan said.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/princetons-ad-blocking-superweapon-may-put-an-end-to-the-ad-blocking-arms-race