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Re:Designing an audio adblocker by andjd on Tuesday January 08, 2019 @03:03PM (#18859109)
Panoply has developed software for podcasts that allows them to inject targeted ads into downloads, which makes podcast advertising closer to the nightmare that we see on the web.

However, that could offer another avenue for ad-blocking. If you download multiple podcasts from different IPs, you can isolate the ads by finding the parts of the audio that are different.

Re:Designing an audio adblocker by joshfriend on Tuesday January 08, 2019 @03:15PM (#18859212)
That's a great idea if the injected ads are exactly the same length and always get put in the same place. If you have a 30 second ad in one download and 40s in another, 10 seconds of legitimate podcast audio gets interpreted as an advertisement.
Re:Designing an audio adblocker by jldugger on Tuesday January 08, 2019 @03:33PM (#18859372)
It works even if they don't, you just need a more intense algorithm to do similarity matching across all offsets.
Re:Designing an audio adblocker by dest on Tuesday January 08, 2019 @04:11PM (#18859733)
With maximally repeated sequences, you can https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6012115
Re:Designing an audio adblocker by pavel_lishin on Tuesday January 08, 2019 @04:33PM (#18859937)
You "just" need to find all the common segments between different downloads; those are very likely to be the actual content, and not differing ads. Naturally this doesn't work very well if the pool of ads is low and you get repeats.