Mastodawn

Reading https://thatshubham.com/blog/news-audit ( HT @pluralistic ) and I'm astounded.
I had heard of web ad auctions.
I had heard of edge computing.
I did not realize they were pushing their ad auction calculations onto your device!
Knowing this, I think ad blockers are too polite a response. Are there any browser plugins that send them something like a decompression bomb? Or maybe that interferes in the ranking so the cheapest bid is returned as the winner? My device is the one deciding, after all!

The 49MB Web Page

A look at modern news websites. How programmatic ad-tech, huge payloads and hostile architecture destroyed the reading experience.

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Windy city Mar 16

@rndeon @pluralistic Author here, thanks so much for reading! I was just as blown away when I first dug into this and had the same reaction.

What is wild is that the logical fix for this, something called Server-to-Server (S2S) auctions like prebid server already exists. It offloads the compute and saves massive amounts of bandwidth. But because of certain data-matching limitations between servers, ad-tech prefers to hijack our browsers to keep revenue high.

To your point about messing with the bids, it is a brilliant thought! But currently, the client just collects the bids...the final clearing price is validated server-side by the primary ad server AFAIK. Spoofing the bid might just break the iframe or serve you a cheap fallback ad if they've built contingency measures(which I'm sure they have).

Dropping the requests entirely with an ad blocker is an incredibly effective and sane response! But I'm always open to hearing from smart people. Thank you for sharing 🙏✨

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Asta McCarthy

@pheonix @rndeon @pluralistic Checkout https://adnauseam.io/
They click the winning ad, and hide it.

AdNauseam - Clicking Ads So You Don't Have To

A browser extension that clicks on every blocked ad to fight advertising surveillance.