From: Peter Kaczowka <peterk@xxxxxxxxxxxx> > Automatic ad detection is ultimately doomed to fail, much like the > US "Star Wars" missle defense: the counter-measures will always be > easier to implement than the initial measures. I don't think so. What a human can recognize, a computer can recognize - at least some time in futur. That's theoretical. But today it would already be possible (but not cheap!) to use image recognition. Really anoying is to see the same ad over and over again. Once the system knows the ad it will filter it next time... Easier (in Germany) is to use some of my hints I posted some days ago. To recognize a blank/black screen should be quite easy. Films don't tend to show black in timeslices of n*5 seconds. To make it perfect, let the system react, when "it is sure" that the last 1-2 minutes ads were going on. The consumer is now just watching the film "near realtime" 30 minutes later. The ad-detecting system writes into a buffer of up to 30 min. When the system sees a block of ads and "thinks": hey, that must be ads and they started 1' 35'' ago! just remove these block from the buffer. The buffer will shrink, of course... but somewhen the film will be over. > However, the broadcasters won't bother with implementing the > counter-measures until the "measures" are widely used, so > early-adopter hackers could enjoy commercial-free viewing for a > while, until everyone starts doing it. Some of the "easy to recognize" ad-hints are enforced by law in Germany. But generally I think you are right here. Maybe in time of the "coldest ad war" [-: companies use a way to let me consume well adapted ads for me. - I would like it much more to see things I'm really interested in, but that's another story... (Do I have a dishwasher?? - No!) [web scrubbers] > They work mostly based on the size of the ads, which tend to be > standard. The most easiest are URL- and header-filter. I'm using junkbuster for this (linux). > Varying the size a few pixels in either direction without changing > the original image would be trivial, but I don't think anyone is > doing that yet. The reason: hardly anybody runs the scrubbers. I > don't, although I guess I would if there was one for Linux. Better than "junkbuster" is "muffin". It's written in java. It can rewrite header, html, gifs... It knows about java-script, picture size (whith ranges you like :), animation, flash, URLs and much more. > When scrubbers become common, then the owners of pages displaying > ads will care, and then scrubbers will be easily defeated. If owners of companies would care what I do, buy and need, they would write linux drivers for their hardware, would build 4HE 19"-ATX-cases with all ports on the front side, would make watches which can communicate with my linux-PC, would let me see the specs. - I would pay for that. I could consume things much faster this way... [-: Bye, Robert
