AdTrap removes ads between your modem and router

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/600284081/adtrap-the-internet-is-yours-again

by extraio • 14 years ago

43 52 14 years ago

diminish• 14 years ago

I m confused how this is implemented. First of all only as a proxy it can intervene ssl traffic. Without monthly fees how will they keep updating the ad detection for diverse types of ads from text, image to video.

desas• 14 years ago

They'll need to update their detection anyway for devices sold in future. I would assume that the only cost of updating existing devices is the bandwidth cost to download the rules or whatever.

rshm• 14 years ago

I think, new user would offset for the cost of updating the ad-block rules. I dont think, any could make a perfect adblocker. A good enough blocker would cover 90% of the market anyway.

adg0012• 14 years ago

What will prevent modem/router manufacturers from embedding an ad-filtering proxy into their devices (ie, eroding the need for a specialized AdTrap)?

relix3• 14 years ago

Because like it or not, ads are a vital part of the internet.

adg0012• 14 years ago

I didn't questioned the ad-based internet ecosystem.

My question was about the AdTrap competitive advantage, if any.

I should have stated it better: assuming, for the sake of discussion, that we want an ad-blocking device, what will prevent modem/router manufacturers from embedding an ad-filtering proxy into their devices, tomorrow?

From the OEM perspective, more features means bringing more value. In turn, an ad-blocking router/modem would erode the need for a specialized device a la AdTrap.

webjunkie• 14 years ago

No ads on the Internet? Seriously, how do you think the economy would work without ads? If everyone got one of these, I could tell my boss on monday to close the company.

hyperbovine• 14 years ago

Radical new model: charge money in return for services. I'd gladly pay Google a nontrivial amount of money each month if it meant I could search and use Gmail without having to worry about them amassing enough personal information to predict the time and location of my bowel movements.

imtyler• 14 years ago

I visit hundreds of websites every week, not just Google. Would that mean I have to pay them all "nontrivial" amounts of money? The internet is largely ad-supported; you're talking about a (admittedly) radical shift in the _entire_ internet ecosystem. Kind of audacious, no?

relix3• 14 years ago

That already exists for Gmail and it's called Google Apps, $50 per year, http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/pricing.html

jiggy20113• 14 years ago

Works for some things, but what about the phpBB forum for enthusiasts of some obscure classic car that is run not-for-profit by an enthusiast who pays the hosting bill by running a few banner ads from a company that sells refurbed parts?

People who host these type of sites often give donate options but in most cases the donations would not cover the hosting costs.

mibbitier• 14 years ago

If everyone got one of these, websites would just change a bit of code, and ads would work again. Thankfully, most people find advertising a useful part of their lives - adblock usage is still something like 1% of users.

blocking ads is as ridiculous as trying to block porn.

Ever tried getting past adblock? It's very trivial.

Also I'm not convinced this method of removing ads would work on ads served over https, where they can't inspect the traffic.

kylec2• 14 years ago

Presumably they'll keep the devices continually updated to keep up with the changing code of websites. Plus, they don't really have to block everything everywhere - this would still be useful even if it only blocked most or even some ads.

Regarding SSL, they could have the device issue an SSL certificate that you install on your devices and it could intercept that traffic as well.

Karunamon3• 14 years ago

>Ever tried getting past adblock? It's very trivial.

Ever tried getting past someone who thinks they can force you to watch ads? Also trivial.

glassx• 14 years ago

> most people find advertising a useful part of their lives

Citation needed. "Most people" might not use AdBlock because they don't know about it or don't know how to install it.

jrabone2• 14 years ago

Good. It's time for a better business model. Ads suck - they're badly implemented, bloated, bug-ridden, privacy invading security holes at worst, and not much better at best. Every network I have admin for gets a Privoxy HTTP proxy by default and adblock plus/noscript/requestpolicy as strongly advised. My users love it. These guys are right - it's time for change.

coderdude• 14 years ago

You say that the creators of this device are right about something that I don't believe they set out to change. If sites stopped displaying ads then no one would buy their product. If the creators become successful in selling this device then they can only continue being successful as long as ads are a problem to a large enough number of people. The ideal world in which their business model can thrive is one where ads are awful and stay that way.

jakejake• 14 years ago

I feel like most people are OK with a certain amount of ads when they're getting a free product.

The problem seems to me that a publisher with one ad makes 1x dollars. Then a marketing genius comes up with a great idea, lets put two ads on the page and make 2x dollars! The 2x dollars maybe lasts for a little while until the advertisers realize they aren't getting 2x the sales so the value of the ad goes down. Marketing genius gets another idea. Hey, how about three ads? Four ads? Pop-up ads..?! Now you just have an overload of cheap, crappy ads that everybody hates and people start figuring out ways to block them.

A better solution would be for smaller number of ads with higher cost to the advertiser. They would all be more valuable and get more clicks because we're not so over-saturated with ads.

I don't see how it could ever be that way due to human nature, greed, etc. But it would make a lot more sense.

PanMan• 14 years ago

Interesting to do this in hardware, as it will work for all devices on your network: also tablets and so on. However, I wonder how many people have separate modems and routers: Most providers (here at least) have modem/wifi AP combo's, which makes it impossible to put this in between.

Also, I wonder if some sites will stop working: e.g. I can imagine a video with a pre-roll just never starting, when the pre-roll can't be loaded. And it being hardware, this will be harder to skip.

samstave• 14 years ago

At home I have a cable modem attached to my d-link WAP/router.

24/7 I have a verizon MIFI device as a hotspot for work.

I have been wanting an in-line wire filter for a long time. While I am not concerned with ads as much, I'd love an inline wire FW that would be configurable.

joeblau• 14 years ago

It's not technically being done in "hardware" although it's a separate hardware device. I think the Kickstarter "ad" mentions that they use a version of Linux on there and I'm guessing that their software sit's on top of that.

buro92• 14 years ago

Interesting.

Would love to see how they work on picking adverts out of SSL pages.

Would also love to see how they deal with tracking and affiliates stuff in addition to banner adverts.

That latter one is an issue for me, I've found some sites to be simply unusable if AdBlock or Ghostery is running in my browser.

It's usually tracking code (LinkedIn Inbox is useless to me as are sites that add Omniture to their shop button), and occasionally I go to buy something which is an affiliate link and it gets treated as an advert click and stopped.

So it's important not to go too far and break the internet either (though in my view it is the sites that add all this stuff that are breaking it).

If this stuff is all in a black box without external configuration... then how do you correct the false positives?

makira• 14 years ago

You can block many ads on SSL pages just by denying any DNS resolving to hostnames associated with ads.

But that won't catch everything.

buro92• 14 years ago

That was the problem with the false negatives.

I noted a friend who used this http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero/

All looked good, but as it includes more than just banner advertisers (shock sites, tracking sites - privacy issues) he'd have more false positives than I did.

Ghostery and the like (browser plugins) are reasonably easy to just disable when you come across an instance that it breaks functionality in a web page. But using a hosts file or DNS block, it was much more opaque about why it was failing as you'd have to remember something you'd forgotten about: You've blocked this thing at the DNS level, it wouldn't resolve. Or more to the point, it would resolve to a local web server that served up zero bytes.

That's my worry with a black box on the line... how easy is it to override in those edge cases, and will they play safe by sticking just to known banner adverts and not tracking sites which are sometimes necessary parts of functionality (due to the fact that links are redirected via the tracking site).

EvanAnderson• 14 years ago

Invariably the device will have security vulnerabilities. The potential man-in-the-middle access this thing will afford an attacker would be a treasure-trove, especially if it has SSL bump-in-the-wire functionality.

jrabone2• 14 years ago

Why is it any worse than the current state of the browser SSL world? When was the last time anyone went through the built-in CA certificate list and deleted all the ones from countries with dubious human rights records, or companies with less-than-stellar security history?

dsr_• 14 years ago

So this is a bridge-mode transparent HTTP proxy with Privoxy running on it? [Or the equivalent thereof?]

Or does it do an SSL MITM attack on all your traffic?

The former is interesting mostly because it doesn't require end-user configuration, so to a naive user it really is plug-it-in-and-works. The latter is, as several have now pointed out, horrendously awful.

What nobody seems to have mentioned yet, though, is that you can turn the first into the second with a code update.

nivla• 14 years ago

I think all it does is to block/poison ad-based domain from resolving to their respective IPs. Very low overhead and gives you the same result. You can also achieve the same thing if you have a dd-wrt installed router: http://www.howtogeek.com/51477/how-to-remove-advertisements-...

kylec2• 14 years ago

This is actually a really interesting product, but there are very few details. My big concern is one of trust - if I'm going to literally route all my network traffic through this device, how can I trust that it's not doing something nefarious? Also, what kind of performance does this device offer? Given that it's inspecting every connection, this might put a limit on the throughput it can provide and/or add additional latency. Also, how transparent is it to the network? Does it do its own version of NAT or does it just passively inspect the traffic that passes through?

Karunamon3• 14 years ago

>If I'm going to literally route all my network traffic through this device, how can I trust that it's not doing something nefarious?

How do you know that your modem, router, and ISP aren't doing something nefarious? Somehow I doubt a product which explicitly does Bad Things© to your datastream will sell well.

vegardx2• 14 years ago

Because they already have my data, no way that they would go through the hoops of installing a device at my home to do it. But I'm not saying that it's a ridicules idea to be worried about. It would be too damn easy to detect.

spindritf• 14 years ago

> How do you know that your modem, router, and ISP aren't doing something nefarious?

I run Linux on my router and encrypt traffic of any value beyond it. This being HN, it's probably not a particularly unusual setup.

Which brings me to the most important question about that device, why not move its functionality to the router? Why yet another box?

mikeash• 14 years ago

Each additional entity that has access increases the risk. You have no choice but to trust somebody for the modem, router, and ISP, but an ad blocker is entirely optional.

eli• 14 years ago

Interesting idea. If it screws up and blocks the wrong thing, I can imagine it would be hell to troubleshoot.

cracell• 14 years ago

If it had a simple log of everything is blocked and you were a technical person aware of it being on the network then it would be easy to troubleshoot such situations.

brennenHN• 14 years ago

We're all pretty sold on the idea that ads are a bad thing, but would we rather pay for all of the content that is ad-supported?

mischov• 14 years ago

Obviously we would not rather pay. The internet is the bastion of free (beer) information/stuff-that-can-be-transferred-electronically, and I think a great percentage of users prefer said free-ness.

All the same, I am more and more convinced that subscription funded, high-quality digital content production is the correct path for the future.

amalag• 14 years ago

I am willing to see ads in return for the free services I get. I get free TV shows without cable and free movies on Youtube. Really, what business model does this kickstarter project advocate?

derleth2• 14 years ago

> what business model does this kickstarter project advocate?

One where ads are not so annoying people go to the trouble of buying this and setting it up. Malware ads, video ads, ads deliberately designed to fool people into thinking they have a virus and need to CLICK NOW! are all reasons why people would be considering going to the immense trouble of getting this little piece of gear and making it work for them.

momoney• 14 years ago

There will always be new bad ads- so that's not a valid argument

sparkplug• 14 years ago

"Your failed business model is not my problem."

- Meg Hourihan, co-founder of Blogger

halayli• 14 years ago

I wonder what approach they'll take to advertise this product to the public.

ig1• 14 years ago

Could you just do this with a raspberry pi and at a much cheaper cost ?

AdTrap removes ads between your modem and router

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