Detect if a website uses Anti-adb

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gotitbro
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Detect if a website uses Anti-adb

Post by gotitbro »

I see that many people don't like visiting websites which block users using adblock, and would like to simple avoid visiting these websites.
Can we automatically detect if a website in question is using anti-adb. Is this possible with say automated scripts?

I know that some of these sites don't show anti-adb warning when visited by bots.

Thanks
zyme
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Post by zyme »

If they have an exception for bots, that's an easy fix. Only difference with a bot (aka web crawlers) is the user agent string reported to the website. FF/Chrome both have many extensions available to let you change yours, and it's quite effective with websites like those which let search engines see a webpage but then ask users to pay a subscription fee when they try to visit the page. You can easily lookup the user-agent string used by search engines or whatever-bot (like google) and appear to be one of them - most websites using such security through obscurity won't have a system in place to verify that google actually owns the IP address your on =)

I think the only way to successfully do what you're asking for other sites however, would be to duplicate each request, each action as if you had two tabs open, one with adblock disabled and the other without.. and since ad's tend to be fairly random you would need a person to distinguish the difference. perhaps one could be done in the background and a window/pop-up showing a comparison of the differences in html loaded could could work for most pages if the user is knowledgeable enough, but there's many times this wouldn't work, like changing settings or submitting votes where whichever registered as after the other would likely get an error message or working in a bad way and submitting two duplicate messages to a forum or two purchase orders with your cc#. -- It's not really practical.

Best thing to do is try disabling adblock on that page or url after an unsuccessful attempt at loading, and hope they don't put a temp+ timed ban on your IP, though once IPv6 is everywhere then we could all have loads of IP's so it wouldn't be a very capable strategy for long =).

There's an anti-adblocker subscription filter list that's trying to combat those sites, but the problems I know of include websites constantly finding new ways to detect (and it goes back and forth) - while the less well known sites *and* methods can go a long time with no detection avoidance ever being created, *especially* if they do something subtly different like a general page cannot be found/displayed or changing the content in any other way besides posting a big sign saying your using an adblocker and they know it...


A really aggravating example (for/from me): Earlier today I saw a very dynamically changing website where the url's were completely different each refresh, and certain blocks or clicks would call a series of page redirects with a series of scripts, one of which had to return a specific message within a specific time period. I tried reviewing each request and submit forum with tamper data to change and block each one while reviewing it but the page would quickly timeout and reload the source page invalidating the old submit forms urls. If I let it open without any blocking perhaps I would've been able to tcpdump a packet log with wireshark or something and pinpoint something to look for and an appropriate modification rule (might have required greasemonkey or something else a little more complex) but I it was faster and easier to go elsewhere online (at least this was an option =).

Sorry that was so long winded, I hope it made sense because I need a good break before I think about rereading it; lol.
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