Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Sentinel is Online · 2018-06-27 16:05 by Tom Woolford
Are you ready to feed the machine?
Blocking ads is a game of cat and mouse. Ad companies don’t really have your best interest at heart, and they don’t respect your right to choose to see ads. That’s why they spend huge amounts of money trying to find new and tricksy ways to circumvent, block and annoy ad blocking users.
This means that Adblock Plus and all the volunteers that work on filter lists are constantly working to find ways around the circumvention companies. In fact, we recently assembled a team to assist open source volunteers in the battle against the rickety anti-user technology peddled by circumvention companies. More on that coming soon.
For now, thanks to recent advances in self-driving cars and machine learning in general, we may have found a way to take ad detection into the future.
Announcing Sentinel
We would officially like to introduce you to SENTINEL. Powered by a convolutional neural network (with some help from you), SENTINEL is learning to detect ads visually, using the power of science!
How you can feed the machine
We can’t train SENTINEL alone. We need you to help. All you have to do is take a screenshot of your desktop Facebook news feed that contains an ad, and send it to our Messenger bot. SENTINEL will try to identify the ads contained in the screenshot, and will learn as it receives more images. To do so, all you have to do is visit our Sentinel’s new home: adblock.ai.
As you know, everything we do at Adblock Plus takes your privacy seriously. After SENTINEL analyzes your image, it will discard it or ask your explicit permission to keep the image for AI training purposes.
SENTINEL is waiting.
Comment [1]
Commenting is closed for this article.
Ferdinand · 2018-06-30 07:56 · #
It would be more fun if adblockplus puts a button in the toolbar that:
1. loads the page with ads
2. takes a screenshot
3. reloads the page without ads (AB+)
4. takes a screenshot
5. put the images side by side or blur them 50% into each other
6. let us click all the ads AB+ missed
7. let us click all the stuff AB+ incorrectly removed