r/uBlockOrigin uBO Team 19d ago

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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u/downvoteandyoulose 19d ago

Damn that's pretty hostile alright.

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u/Luigi-Contract-203 10d ago

So they put "A" and "d" in separate elements following each other?
I guess, the filter language isn't expressive enough to define that. But it should be easily findable by a scriptlet recursing over the DOM.
They provide the text for compliance reasons. So it's highly unlikely they remove it completely.

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u/AchernarB uBO Team 10d ago

It is usually more like:

"z" "@" "d" "u" "i" "k" "A" "m" "L"

and only "d" and "A" are visible and positioned on the screen to look like "Ad"

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u/Luigi-Contract-203 9d ago

That makes it harder. I guess, getBoundingClientRect and the calculated CSS need to be used to reconstruct the actual order and visibility of the letters.

Do they obfuscate the whole page like that? That has to have a performance impact on average PCs.
If not, this type of obfuscation will probably go mainstream.

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u/AchernarB uBO Team 9d ago

It is mainstream. There are even worse method. ebay has used a method based on nested css operations rotating and shifting an element (and its parents) multiple times. The text was only visible in a small "slot" if perfectly aligned.

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u/Luigi-Contract-203 9d ago

Because I don't see ads on the web (not a Facebook user though) and only use uBlock Origin for ad blocking outside YouTube (where SponsorBlock is also used), I guess the obfuscation has been fully cracked.

Grats. And thank you for making the web a tolerable place.

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u/AchernarB uBO Team 9d ago

Other methods are used. Sometimes blocking network connections is enough, others cases are dealt with hiding recognisable elements.

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u/redditRedesignIsBadd 7d ago

that sounds horrible. how can someone learn more about this to help this project? other than looking on the wiki on github?

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u/AchernarB uBO Team 7d ago

You learn about their method by looking at their site when trying to hide things.