Do they get some kind of real-time feed that tells them “hey this URL popped up in the web today, but it is a tracker, so block it”, or is this exercise is mostly helped by the crowd ?
Regular expression magic.
A lot of ad networks have a pattern to the name or the window the advert appears in.
Using regular expression you can find just the adwindow and ignore the actual content.
Now what is regular expression? A wizard language.
ask any programmer about RE after 4 beers and watch the hate wash over their face.The first language I learned was Perl, so regex are very close to my heart. I’m also quite excitable when I drink (I’m a happy drunk), so ask me and I’ll give you a very enthusiastic explanation while not noticing that you aren’t interested in my detailed explanation and examples. Do it. I dare ya.
Zawinski’s second law - “Sometimes a person looks at a problem and says ‘I know what I’ll do, I’ll use regular expressions’. And now they have two problems.”
As someone who runs a popular blocklist collection, I’ve come to find that most of the MASSIVE lists are people who collate a whole bunch of lists together and then promote their “one size fits all” solution alongside their donation link. There are very few original high quality ad-blocking lists maintained (where originality is defined as a sizeable amount of unique entries not shared by other lists) and almost all don’t appear to openly discuss the magic sauce behind their lists, outside of the obvious case of user submissions.
Nice try, ad company.
Lol
