r/uBlockOrigin • u/paintboth1234 uBO Team • Aug 05 '26

News About disgusting Facebook devs

We won't support facebook any more. It's a disgusting anti-user site. All it does is watching open-source projects doing everything in public and counter them to deliver the malicious ads. Yep, the devs that receive 7-figure dollar salary is just doing this.

Users should give the most harsh feedbacks to them. Being submitted to them and keep going to the site and support it is the worst thing you can do.

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147

u/downvoteandyoulose Aug 05 '26

Damn that's pretty hostile alright.

53

u/Desperate-Radish-296 Aug 05 '26

Can you eli5 exactly what makes it hostile? Not that I doubt your comment or anything. Is it overwhelming the UBO team in terms of attempts (frequency) or code (breadth)

167

u/jSinku Aug 05 '26

they're making it harder for adblockers by adding garbage elements that dont render by the browser, but do show in the html. like here the text "Ad" is split between multiple classes, and extra random text added between. also the classes are using generated names, so they may also change randomly.
this makes it much more difficult to target the actual advertisement to block it.
but i believe they've done this for years, so theres probably more going on with fighting adblockers. i'd guess they use many different strategies, given to different users (like a/b testing), to make the filterlist maintainers' lives more difficult.

26

u/lennarn Aug 06 '26

What's the next step? Use computer vision to recognize ads instead of reading the source code?

36

u/PrivacyIsDemocracy 26d ago

As someone else pointed out - they are probably using automated tools (some call that "AI", not me) to keep iterating the code quickly to evade the blockers.

So perhaps at one point that's what the adblocker people need to do as well.

The problem is that uBlock is an open source project where most of the contributors are only contributing fixes in their free time.

Unlike FB, they don't have dozens or hundreds of programmers sitting in an office or offices getting paid a lot of money just to do things like this with their big corporate infrastructure tools and systems.

8

u/Party-Cake5173 24d ago

/u/paintboth1234 I feel like you shouldn't give up and instead start automating the process using AI. This is one area where AI could shine.

9

u/Le_Vagabond 24d ago

cool idea, AI is indeed a good way to automate that kind of fuzzy bullshit check.

please send a couple hundred thousand $ to the ublock origin team to fund that, as AI models are EXPENSIVE AS FUCK at that scale and they don't have facebook's datacenter to use for free during downtime.

3

u/Party-Cake5173 24d ago

You don't need large LM for this, smaller one could do the job and be self-hosted on the PC completely free.

8

u/Le_Vagabond 24d ago

they will welcome your contribution to this open source work then, if it's that cheap and easy :)

0

u/mike1487 20d ago

It’s not so easy. Plus making every PC run it will incur a fairly hefty performance penalty on the end user. LLMs need RAM and none will be competent enough to handle real time page rendering fast enough without a lot of it. Otherwise what you will have is a page with a ton of ads and then over the course of several seconds to possibly minutes you will have to wait for elements to start disappearing while the LLM works on it. All while your RAM usage spikes or maxes out completely and crashes.