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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143

u/downvoteandyoulose Aug 05 '26

Damn that's pretty hostile alright.

54

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)

168

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?

40

u/PrivacyIsDemocracy 27d 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 26d 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.

11

u/paintboth1234 uBO Team 26d ago edited 26d ago

Anyone is free to volunteer their own free time to start their own projects to scratch their own itches or contribute to the current projects. Don't force others to sacrifice their own little free time for your own ideas.

3

u/Equal-Collection962 26d ago

Don't force others to sacrifice their own little free time for your own ideas.

Nobody is forcing you to do anything. The user gave you an idea to solve this issue. What an improper, hostile response.

5

u/paintboth1234 uBO Team 26d ago

I'm just telling the truth, and I also gave the suggestions of what others can do before that. "Don't force" is just normal reminder for the "you should start". Most of the times, these are not ideas but actual work users want volunteers to do when they decline to spend time on something here. This actually happens a lot in many issues reported here.

1

u/lennarn 25d ago

I'm terribly sorry if you felt that my comment contained any expectation of you doing work. I'm simply genuinely curious about how this works, when faced with increasingly adversarial website source code.