The trick is “Works at what? For whom?” The business they launch was yours, but the one that matures is theirs. It’s a Faustian pact of the most banal sort, leaving us with few businesses which have any goals beyond parasitism.
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Sure, if you don’t read anything in between.
Doesn’t this whole paragraph more or less describe chromium’s security model?
Also I think you miss the possibility of ad blockers which record the call-home message and play it back without actually running the ad. Ultimately from the advertiser’s point of view your computer is a black box, the only part that needs to be emulated accurately is the I/O. Sure there could be some attempts to make a call-home signal that’s a complicated hash of various unique data points, but given that the same ad code will run across millions of websites, cracking it should be feasible. You end up in an arms race model similar to the one that lead to hardware dongles shipped with software products, an arms race that was ultimately a loser for the big guy.
My impression is that Chrome just runs each tab in a separate process. Not necessarily behind a VM bubble. They still have full system access.
If blockers sent a canned call-home bit, then ad servers would just make the bits unique to each instance of each ad.
Then ad blockers could be designed to identify the unique call-home bit for each ad without necessarily needing to run the ad’s code at all.
Then the ad servers would obfuscate the call-home bit behind the loading of a second image that’s just a single transparent pixel or other clever line of code.
The chain of escalating responses ends up back in VM bubbles, I think.
That’s a limited understanding. Google call it the sandbox:
http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/sandbox
They regularly hold competitions and hand out cash prizes to anyone who can break out of the sandbox. It’s pretty solid.
Edit: I should acknowledge though, it’s not a VM.
If you run the ad normally, the single pixel image is glaringly obvious in the I/O stream. Anyway, that’s just another step in the arms race. Ultimately, I think…
I think if ads are relying on massively complex client-side computations to produce the call-home signature, they are going to render websites unusable and they are going to quickly lose clients to advertising brokers that don’t pursue such practises. Also, if the call-home signature is so complex that it’s exhausting system resources on the client side, imagine what verifying the signatures is doing to the server that’s trying to serve up a million ads per second.
No, I don’t think it’s a worry in the long term. To me the more pressing concern is legislative attacks.
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That’s quite possible and another nightmare is if you (and if it should come to pass) throw in the IoT (“Internet of things”) into the idea. So take an ever-increasingly bloated and spammy internet; couple that with IoT - could society itself eventually crack up and break down because of that?
You know it is intresting because (I’m from the UK) starting from when I was a kid growing up I’ve pretty much “lived through” the whole computer revolution. Back in the early 80s it was an exception if something contained a computer – back then TVs, radios, phones etc did not. By (best guess) 2030 we’re probably looking at “transition complete”; a time when it will be an exception for something not to have a computer in it.
And if all those devices all require the internt, if it will be almost present everywhere and vastly more bloated and broken than today I do wonder how things survive (if they do at all) in that sort of model.
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Indeed. Presumably we’ll reach the point with network speeds that we’ve already reached with processors, where the laws of physics start to interfere with the rate of progress. Internet speeds level off, net-neutrality is finally compromised, and all the while the background spam is increasing…
Not to mention by that stage 2/3 facebook accounts are algorithmically-generated fakes designed to interfere with data mining 
One day we’re all gonna be telling our kids about the golden age of the internet, where you could put up your own website, post whatever you wanted, and not tell anyone it was you. Back in those days, information roamed free…
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I hope you’re right.
And yes, legislative attacks are definitely scary as hell.
That leads me to ask one question that I’ve asked myself before – how long will it be before just to use the 'net will I have to take the standpoint whereby I begin not by allowing the internet and blocking things but do the opposite - block the entire internet 100% and then just allow a tiny dribble that I use to pass through. Or prehaps if everything ends up broken even that won’t work…
I don’t wish to set myself up as some sort of social expert or anything but when I first got online back in 1996 even then after a short time I wondered just how far and bad things would get (remembering the early attempts at popups, flashing ads, ads that look like ‘windows’); I’m remembering a website like this one which is from I think that late 90s/early 2000s - a website telling everyone how to stop the annoying ads on webpages; it seems like a world away now. Come get your 10MB of free webspace, those were the days… - !
@Sqarr Yeah, I hope I’m not wrong…
@slothpuck I wonder whether you’ll even have the choice of blocking the internet. The way the Chinese government has captured WeChat is particularly worrying. It essentially becomes a platform which replaces the internet, and the main point of interaction with a lot of necessary services, including bills, banking, etc. But now they’re building a reputation system into it. If you voice a dissenting opinion, or if you are so much as friends with anyone who voices a dissenting opinion, it can affect anything from your credit rating to your ability to get a reservation at a restaurant. If all goes well I’m sure having a WeChat account will eventually become mandatory.
Adjust your tin-foil hat accordingly.
Using the Internet without AdBlock or something similar is irresponsible. The best solution would be if the major browsers shipped with built-in adblockers enabled by default.
But, some people say, this would cause major upheaval and kill all ad-financed sites (presumably with Google and Facebook among them)! Yes, please. Good riddance! I’d love to see this happen and see how we’d all get on from there to the Next Thing.
As much as I love some ad-financed sites such as BoingBoing, I really think this is a stone that needs to be turned.
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