Image interception software, also known as computer vision, enables applications to understand images and/or videos. With the following software/hardware, images are taken as an input, and a computer vision algorithm provides an output.
Ad Blockers
Ad blockers prevent visited sites from loading ads. They do this using filter lists, stores of information that is used to identify what is and is not an ad. Not only are the ads not displayed, their data is never transferred to begin with. This reduces the amount of data loaded when browsing the internet. Ad blockers can function as browser extensions or globally by using DNS filtering.
Ad blockers are almost as old as internet-based ads themselves. Since then, ad blockers have become much more sophisticated and widely used. They can help a user to stay clear of badware and can frustrate advertisers’ attempts to track their browsing patterns. The latter also means that companies hate them. Google, for example, removed ad blockers from its app stores and search results. It is an arms race between people who don’t want to be bombarded with ads and ad-serving corporations.
Cloudfare, Youtube, Sponsorblock
Cloudflare offers a scanning tool which will block CSAM from a (paying customer’s) website. It does this using block lists provided by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and other groups like it.
Youtube has been testing a new feature to prevent people from blocking their ads. When an ad blocker is detected, the user receives a warning. If they ignore the warning they will be able to watch three videos before the videos stop loading.
Sponsorblock is an ad blocker, but it is quite different than what you might think. It skips ads that are embedded in creators’ videos, not external ads! This would be very tricky to detect using only code. To get around this, sponsorblock sources the information on the ad’s stand and end times from its users.
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