1038444 - Detect Flash ads to be played in Shumway

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1134284

(Firefox Graveyard :: Shumway, defect, P1)

Description

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

We can detect Flash ads by looking for common ad dimensions, `clickTag` SWF URLs, or known ad servers.

Comment 1

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Yury: Till said you might work on ad detection for whitelisting compatible ads.

Comment 2

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Till suggests building a whitelisting infrastructure that can take three things into account:

* stage dimensions as specified by the embedding page (compared to industry-standard Flash ad dimensions)
* whether a clicktag is supplied as a parameter
* the swf's url, matched by a regexp

Comment 3

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Tobias ran an offline ad detection test of our archive of 90K SWF files from a crawl of Alexa top sites' home pages. Based on ad-like content dimensions or clickTag URL, 22% of the SWFs were categorized as ads. The other SWFs are probably video players, trackers, site navigation menus, or non-standard ad dimensions.

We may still need to implement client-side ad detection even with a Shumway list to avoid playing non-ad SWFs on whitelisted domains. A shavar blocklist to quickly block websites broken by Shumway is probably the most important reason for maintaining a server list.

The TP team's script to import Disconnect's blocklist:

https://github.com/mozilla-services/shavar-list-creation

Comment 4

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Monica strongly recommends that creating a Shumway shavar list block M3, even if the list is just a clone of the TP list to start. The server workflow to import and publish lists is tricky.

Comment 5

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

I am repurposing this bug for the Shumway dev work to detect ads, whether by SWF dimensions, clickTag, or whitelist. I will split the work to create, approve, and serve the whitelist to separate blocking bugs.

Comment 6

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

We will need client-side heuristics in addition to the server whitelist. I added "https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com", a common ad server, to my "shumway.swf.whitelist" pref. It broke some non-ad video content:

http://www.wired.com/2015/04/binge-guide-orphan-black/
http://www.bbcamerica.com/orphan-black/videos/join-the-clone-club/

Comment 7

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Correction: adding googlesyndication.com to the shumway.swf.whitelist pref does NOT break the videos in comment 6. I was testing a number of different whitelist wildcard expressions at the time and I lost track of which expression I was testing.