In the media

Adblock Radio has received recent press and social media coverage:

  • Hacker News (#1) and Reddit (r/technology)
  • Vice / Motherboard – interview to explain why Adblock Radio is useful to society and why you should support it, despite its controversial nature.
  • Digital Trends – interview that puts Adblock Radio in the broader context of the next-gen, so-called "perceptual" ad blockers (more on that below).
  • Ad Age – interview to reassure fretting-not-fretting podcast ad companies: Adblock Radio is not yet ready for podcasts.

Adblock Radio is a perceptual ad blocker

I have recently published a blog article describing what perceptual ad blockers are and how they will shape the cat and mouse game between ad companies and ad blockers.

In the past year, researchers from Stanford and the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security have studied perceptual ad blockers, including the Adblock Radio machine learning part. Their work was about circumventing them using adversarial machine learning techniques. It is an interesting research path to follow so that detection capabilities can be further strengthened.

Web player is now open-source

The Adblock Radio web player is now free software. The code is available on Github and is open to contributors.

A skilled frontend developer has recently joined the efforts to rewrite the React app with modern standards, paving the way for further fixes and improvements. Kudos and hurray!

Volunteers are welcome to help

Especially for:

  • creating Android / iOS apps to have a top-notch experience on mobile. Native implementation, React native or another framework, to be discussed. It would be nice to embed the inference algorithm itself in the app, so that it would rely much less on Adblock Radio servers.
  • maintaining streams, as described here. Taking care of the filter of a stream requires minimal investment (a few minutes every day or so), but maintaining dozens is a burden for me. Some unmaintained streams may be removed from the web player in the future, so if you care about a stream, please consider volunteering.