Comment on What kind of special knowledge or equipment does piracy groups have?
GrammarPolice@lemmy.world 1 month agoI might be asking a dumb question, but why can’t the companies host their ads on the server-side? Do the ads have to be on my computer for me to see them? What does being on my computer even mean in this context?
Sorry if this is a stupid question
They do host them on their servers, sort of (if you’re asking how ad brokers work that’s a bit of a different scope).
Does poo have to be on your desk to smell it? The post office (website) is telling you (your computer) to go over and pick up a parcel of poo that’s there for you. You say no, I don’t think I will (adblock/poo block)
That is one hell of an analogy
What I mean by “on your computer” is not that it originates on your computer, but that some form of it exists there–namely this is going to be images, text, links, etc that the ad company hosts and a website will normally download temporarily along with the rest of the site’s content. Once your computer has that site’s information you can do anything you want with it. Importantly what exists on your computer is a local copy of what the ad servers host. If you decide to color ads blue on your computer that only affects your copy. The original ad, and everyone else’s copies remain intact.
I think I understand now. Thanks.
CallOfTheWild@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Some do. YouTube switched their ad service so the main video and ads come from the same server. To get around this uBlock now blocks the script on the browser side that shows the ad, then returns a signal that the timer is up.
It’s a constant game of cat and mouse to get around ad blockers then block that new method.
count_dongulus@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I don’t think the new strategy of injecting ads directly into the video stream can be defeated in realtime though. It’s like how you cannot defeat tv ads…you can blank the screen, or record and restitch without the ads, but the content itself has the ad. YouTube is a bit different where you can theoretically skip ahead, but your device has to tell Youtube that it wants to skip ahead in order to actually even get the video content, and youtube can look at request timestamps to know you didn’t see the whole injected ad and just re-inject it in the video stream.