Concept

Ad blocking

Ad blocking or ad filtering is a software capability for blocking or altering online advertising in a web browser, an application or a network. This may be done using browser extensions or other methods. The first ad blocker was Internet Fast Forward, a plugin for the Netscape Navigator browser, developed by PrivNet and released in 1996. The AdBlock extension for Firefox was developed in 2002, with Adblock Plus being released in 2006. uBlock (now called uBlock Origin) was first released in 2014. Online advertising Online advertising exists in a variety of forms, including web banners, , animations, embedded audio and video, text, or pop-up windows, and can even employ audio and video autoplay. Many browsers offer some ways to remove or alter advertisements: either by targeting technologies that are used to deliver ads (such as embedded content delivered through browser plug-ins or via HTML5), targeting URLs that are the source of ads, or targeting behaviors characteristic of ads (such as the use of HTML5 AutoPlay of both audio and video). Use of mobile and desktop ad blocking software designed to remove traditional advertising grew by 41% worldwide and by 48% in the U.S. between Q2 2014 and Q2 2015. As of Q2 2015, 45 million Americans were using ad blockers. In a survey research study released Q2 2016, Met Facts reported 72 million Americans, 12.8 million adults in the UK, and 13.2 million adults in France were using ad blockers on their PCs, smartphones, or tablet computers. In March 2016, the Internet Advertising Bureau reported that UK ad blocking was already at 22% among people over 18 years old. As of 2021, 27% of US Internet users used ad blocking software, a trend that has been increasing since 2014. Among technical audiences the rate of blocking reaches 58% as of 2021. For users, the benefits of ad blocking software include quicker loading and cleaner looking web pages with fewer distractions, protection from malvertising, stopping intrusive actions from ads, reducing the amount of data downloaded by the user, lower power consumption, privacy benefits gained through the exclusion of web tracking, and preventing undesirable websites from making ad revenue out of the user's visit.

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_blocking

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related courses (2)

CS-523: Advanced topics on privacy enhancing technologies

This advanced course will provide students with the knowledge to tackle the design of privacy-preserving ICT systems. Students will learn about existing technologies to prect privacy, and how to evaluate the protection they provide. ...

PHYS-739: Conformal Field theory and Gravity

This course is an introduction to holography, the modern approach to quantum gravity. ...

Related lectures (21)

Internet Capsules: Security and Privacy

Covers internet security, privacy, TLS, blocking, filtering, surveillance, and espionage.

Online Advertising: Global Issues

Explores global issues in online advertising, covering major companies, two-sided markets, search engines, ad targeting challenges, data sharing by mobile apps, surveillance capitalism, and Tim Berners-Lee's Solid project.

Internet Advertising Giants: Google & Facebook

Explores the dominance of Google and Facebook in internet advertising, covering revenue, user statistics, ad auctions, and data privacy.

Related publications (9)

Allowable complex metrics and the gravitational index of AdS 5 black holes

We discuss the Kontsevich-Segal-Witten criterion for the allowability of complex metrics, in the context of the gravitational path integral that calculates the supersymmetric index. We focus on the saddle points that capture the contribution of supersymmetric black holes in AdS 5 space. We show that, for such black holes with two independent angular momenta, the conditions imposed on the corresponding saddle point by the KSW criterion are equivalent to the ones arising from the convergence of the microscopi

IOP Publishing2026

Rakaia: Scalable In-Kernel Scheduling For TCP-Based RPCs

Delivering RPCs with high throughput and low latency demands work-conserving scheduling across many CPU cores and eliminating head-of-line (HOL) blocking across all messages. By exposing per-connection byte streams rather than messages to userspace, the POSIX TCP API inherently induces HOL blocking both within and across connections. To mitigate HOL blocking, RPC frameworks such as gRPC must reconstruct message semantics in userspace through additional abstractions including dedicated I/O threads, work queu

Usenix Association2026

SmartRabbit : An Interactive Query Processor

Traditional relational database systems optimize analytical queries to minimize their end-to-end latency. The resulting optimal plans are usually blocking, forcing users to wait until full query completion before seeing any results. This execution model precludes interactivity, i.e., users cannot observe partial results or gain early insights for long-running queries. Query optimizers rarely choose plans that promote interactivity, since such plans either incur prohibitively large latencies or involve opera

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)2026

Graph Chat

Chat with Graph Search

Ask any question about EPFL courses, lectures, exercises, research, news, etc. or try the example questions below.

DISCLAIMER: The Graph Chatbot is not programmed to provide explicit or categorical answers to your questions. Rather, it transforms your questions into API requests that are distributed across the various IT services officially administered by EPFL. Its purpose is solely to collect and recommend relevant references to content that you can explore to help you answer your questions.

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_blocking

About this result

Related courses (2)

CS-523: Advanced topics on privacy enhancing technologies

PHYS-739: Conformal Field theory and Gravity

This course is an introduction to holography, the modern approach to quantum gravity. ...

Related lectures (21)

Internet Capsules: Security and Privacy

Covers internet security, privacy, TLS, blocking, filtering, surveillance, and espionage.

Online Advertising: Global Issues

Internet Advertising Giants: Google & Facebook

Explores the dominance of Google and Facebook in internet advertising, covering revenue, user statistics, ad auctions, and data privacy.

Related publications (9)

Allowable complex metrics and the gravitational index of AdS 5 black holes

IOP Publishing2026

Rakaia: Scalable In-Kernel Scheduling For TCP-Based RPCs

Usenix Association2026

SmartRabbit : An Interactive Query Processor

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)2026

Related people (3)

Touradj Ebrahimi

Touradj EBRAHIMI received his M.Sc. and Ph.D., both in Electrical Engineering, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1989 and 1992 respectively. In 1993, he was a research engineer at the Corporate Research Laboratories of Sony Corporation in Tokyo, where he conducted research on advanced video compression techniques for storage applications. In 1994, he served as a research consultant at AT&T Bell Laboratories working on very low bitrate video coding. He is currently Professor at EPFL heading its Multimedia Signal Processing Group. He is also the Convenor of JPEG standardization Committee. He was also adjunct Professor with the Center of Quantifiable Quality of Service at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)from 2008 to 2012. Prof. Ebrahimi has been the recipient of various distinctions and awards, such as the IEEE and Swiss national ASE award, the SNF-PROFILE grant for advanced researchers, Four ISO-Certificates for key contributions to MPEG-4 and JPEG 2000, and the best paper award of IEEE Trans. on Consumer Electronics . He became a Fellow of the international society for optical engineering (SPIE) in 2003. Prof. Ebrahimi has initiated more than two dozen National, European and International cooperation projects with leading companies and research institutes around the world. He is a co-founder of Genista SA, a high-tech start-up company in the field of multimedia quality metrics. In 2002, he founded Emitall SA, start-up active in the area of media security and surveillance. In 2005, he founded EMITALL Surveillance SA, a start-up active in the field of privacy and protection. He is or has been associate Editor with various IEEE, SPIE, and EURASIP journals, such as IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, IEEE Trans. on Image Processing, IEEE Trans. on Multimedia, EURASIP Image Communication Journal, EURASIP Journal of Applied Signal Processing, SPIE Optical Engineering Magazine. Prof. Ebrahimi is a member of Scientific Advisory Board of various start-up and established companies in the general field of Information Technology. He has served as Scientific Expert and Evaluator for Research Funding Agencies such as those of European Commission, The Greek Ministry of Development, The Austrian National Foundation for Scientific Research, The Portuguese Science Foundation, as well as a number of Venture Capital Companies active in the field of Information Technologies and Communication Systems. His research interests include still, moving, and 3D image processing and coding, visual information security (rights protection, watermarking, authentication, data integrity, steganography), new media, and human computer interfaces (smart vision, brain computer interface). He is the author or the co-author of more than 200 research publications, and holds 14 patents. Prof. Ebrahimi is a member of IEEE, SPIE, ACM and IS&T. See the URL below for more details: http://mmspl.epfl.ch

Carmela González Troncoso

SPRING Lab Our research focuses on building secure and privacy-preserving systems. We aim to develop tools and methodologies to help engineers embedding strong security and privacy guarantees in their designs, as well as techniques that help them to systematically quantifying the information that an adversary can infer from data she may have access to.More information about our activities here: https://spring.epfl.ch/ Teaching & PhD PhD Students Saiid El Hajj Chehade, Eric Jollès, Christian Knabenhans, Boy

Michael Graetzel

to be added

Related concepts (22)

Google Chrome

Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS, iOS, and also for Android, where it is the default browser. The browser is also the main component of ChromeOS, where it serves as the platform for web applications. Most of Chrome's source code comes from Google's free and open-source software project Chromium, but Chrome is licensed as proprietary freeware.

Hosts (file)

The hosts is an operating system file that maps hostnames to IP addresses. It is a plain text file. Originally a file named HOSTS.TXT was manually maintained and made available via file sharing by Stanford Research Institute for the ARPANET membership, containing the hostnames and address of hosts as contributed for inclusion by member organizations. The Domain Name System, first described in 1983 and implemented in 1984, automated the publication process and provided instantaneous and dynamic hostname resolution in the rapidly growing network.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a marketing arrangement in which affiliates receive a commission for each visit, signup or sale they generate for a merchant. This arrangement allows businesses to outsource part of the sales process. It is a form of performance-based marketing where the commission acts as an incentive for the affiliate; this commission is usually a percentage of the price of the product being sold, but can also be a flat rate per referral.

Related exercises (1)

Spring in a box

A closed box of mass M is resting on a table. Inside the box is a marble of mass m, attached to the lid by a spring with spring constant k and rest length l₀. What’s the minimal amplitude A of the marble’s vertical oscillation for the box to lift from the table? We assume l₀ and k to be large enough for the marble to avoid hitting the lid or the table before the box takes off. u2005 Indication: treat both the box and the marble as material points. The box will take of if its bonding force with the table

Related notebooks (3)

Filtering Music: Extracting Audio Frequencies Using Filters

Filtering Music[1]¶

                                      [2]Paolo Prandoni, [3]LCAV, EPFL

In this notebook we will design and use filters to extract specific audio frequencies from a music file. In [1]: %matplotlib inline import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import numpy as np import IPython import scipy.signal as sp from scipy.io import wavfile infringment...) In [2]: IPython.display.Audio(s, rate=SF) Out[2]: Your browser does not support the audio element.

Extracting the bas

Block Processing of Audio Files Using Stateful FIR Filters

Block-processing of audio files[1]¶

                                      [2]Paolo Prandoni, [3]LCAV, EPFL

This notebook shows a simple way to process audio files (in WAV format) in a block-by-block fashion; this is useful in two cases 1. when you want to process a data stream in real time but you can accept a small processing delay; in this case a buffered approach can yield computational gains 2. when you need to process a large file that does not fit entirely into

Implementing a Fractional Resampler using Local Lagrange Interpolation

FIR Resampling[1]¶

                                      [2]Paolo Prandoni, [3]LCAV, EPFL

In this notebook we will implement a simple fractional resampler that uses local Lagrange interpolation. The resampler can be used to perform any rational sampling rate change (but beware of aliasing when downsampling!) In [1]: import numpy as np import IPython from scipy.io import wavfile Local Lagrange interpolation[4]¶ To perform resampling we will need to compute subsample values and, in

Related people (3)

Touradj Ebrahimi

Carmela González Troncoso

Michael Graetzel

to be added