3.3.0 Now Available!

 Three main updates this time!

First, GIFs will finally be scanned on a frame-by-frame basis rather than simply scanning the first frame. Note that the replacement image logic still has a bit of work so blocked images will often appear as a broken GIF. See the blog post for more details! https://wingman-jr.blogspot.com/2021/12/gift-giving-season-is-here.html

The second feature - default zones - comes from a new contributor, Abdullah! (https://github.com/abdullahezzat1) When the addon starts up, you can now pick which zone is set by default in the settings. This is a great feature and I think it will work especially well with the way some people want to use the plugin. Thanks Abdullah!

Finally, I tweaked the flags on the Tensorflow.js library/model startup (for the WebGL backend). This part of the startup is what causes the several second delay, so it's an important place to try to optimize. With the new settings, I've seen my startup time go from about 10 seconds to 5 seconds, but every computer is going to be a bit different. Let me know in the feedback link how it's working for you!

GIFt Giving Season Is Here!

 ... that's right! True GIF filtering! (with a side of dad jokes)

Just like socks or ugly pajamas you get for Christmas, it's perhaps something you never thought you'd need. In fact, isn't Wingman Jr. already filtering GIFs..?

Well, sort of. From the browser's standpoint, GIFs occupy a strange space between video and static images. This has some implications. Warning: tech ahead!

First, it is easy (and has been for a long time) to load GIFs with the <image> tag. While the <video> tag is great now, it wasn't until HTML5 that the video tag gained the support it now enjoys. What's interesting though is that folks made a choice to not add GIF support for the new(er) <video> tag - GIF's are left solely to the realm of images.

From a lot of web developers' perspectives, that puts them in a bit of a bind. Why? Well, the <image> tag and related API's for manipulating images don't give you any way to control the animation aspects - for example, you can't control what time in the image to show.

How that impacts Wingman is that we only get the default behavior when we're loading and drawing the image to prepare it for filtering - and that behavior is to simply draw the first frame. That means the rest of the frames don't even get a chance to get filtered because we can't indicate that they're a normal video type. To make matters worse, others have done research that use adversarially designed GIFs to defeat image filters by leveraging animation - for example by putting a black frame for a tiny amount of time before showing the full NSFW image.

Back to GIF support: the lack of good GIF support has fortunately not dampened the spirit of web developers. The workaround has typically been to employ a library that parses and decodes GIFs in a Javascript library, rather than in the browser itself. Unfortunately, decoding video truly is something better left for the browser. However, there are some libraries out there to handle this - see gifuct-js, jsgif, or libgif-js.

But as great as these libraries are, the use case for Wingman is a bit more constrained. While it's true that ultimately the images are going to just get rendered onto a canvas like these libraries do, the addon does its best to consider performance, and canvas and drawing management has actually been one area of a bit of optimization over the years. Additionally, there's a difference between parsing and decoding - these libraries choose to do both. Parsing deals with understanding the video frames and the general content, decoding deals with actually decompressing the bulkier image data. And that's a bit problematic: the Javascript has to implement a simple LZW decompressor to decode each frame into essentially pixels. Not so great if you're trying to do that for a page full of images and both your code and the browser maintain a copy of the pixel data. This reason, along with the fact that I do not wish to become dependent on more libraries if possible, has made me hesitant to pull in true GIF support via one of these libraries. However, it's one of those areas lacking support that has bugged me.

But I woke up from a nap the other day with a burst of creativity, and took a look at the GIF format internals once again with a fresh set of eyes. It came to me that instead of trying to solve both the parsing and decoding problems, I could instead solve just the parsing problem and leave the decoding to the browser.

The way the GIF format works, the structure is basically a header followed by an alternating mix of image frames and blocks that indicate a time gap. It allows for the image frames to stream in and update the existing image being displayed. With the way the details work out, it is possible - and indeed relatively easy - to parse out the GIF's header and image frames, then repackage (remux) each frame into a standalone GIF using the header information.

While the GIF format allows for arbitrary patches to be updated over time on an image, the reality is that most GIF's fully replace (or nearly fully replace) the image on every frame. Particularly for images that are more photographic in nature (as many NSFW images are!), it is a bit more difficult to take a patch-based approach to image drawing, so it is generally avoided.

This overall situation is ideal for Wingman: since most images for the NSFW-filtering use case are full replacements, standalone GIFs can be created as the data streams in, and then filtered just like normal images. The code to do the actual parsing/repackaging is quite small (~250 lines), and the actual decompression is left to the browser - letting the browser do what it does best.

I still have some tweaking to do before it's quite ready, but it's up and running fairly smoothly now. If you're feeling adventurous, go check out the GitHub issue for more details and a pointer to the branch under development!

Whitelist Feature?

 Hello everyone!

I got a new feature request here recently from a user who goes by "pakxo" - they're curious if a whitelists feature could get added to save on processing for known good sites.

Currently, there's a basic, non-configurable whitelist. It helps handle the edge case where sometimes captcha images would get blocked, which is quite frustrating.

If anybody else would like to see this added, let me know through the feedback link in the addon! And again - thanks pakxo for the idea!

3.2.0 Released!

 3.2.0 is out now! The main thing in it is a new version of the number-crunching library, Tensorflow.js. I'd been waiting to update from version 2.7.0 because I wanted to ensure that the 3.x series was stable and fast. Well, now it's stable and fast! Their team has been hard at work (see, for example, this bug report) - thank you developers! Your experience may be different, but it was about 22% faster on my computer using the WebGL backend, so hopefully you see a speed boost as well. Enjoy!

3.1.1 Out Now!

 3.1.1 is in the process of getting released now! Do note that Mozilla is currently experiencing some issues with their review process, which may or may not end up affecting public availability.

(Update: it is still in review, there is a discussion about it here)

(Update 2: It is still in review (2021/09/13) after ~3 weeks. This is quite odd for Mozilla, and I'm a bit troubled; more troubling still is that the community rep has largely gone silent on Discourse.)

(Update 3: Still in review 2021/09/25, quite troubled at the lack of communication. Do note that you can always pull the latest release directly from Github if you want to try it out before Mozilla updates.)

(Update 4: Apparently Mozilla had an issue around addons using the "proxy" permission, and have issued a workaround. I added the workaround and have released this as 3.1.1!)

This version has two main improvements:

• Crash detection - Every once in a while something would crash or go wrong in the addon. Everything would seem to be working, but prediction results would be completely wrong. Now the addon will self-check once in a while and reload itself if it doesn't get back an expected prediction result.
• Video scanning improvements - Eventually I'd like to have full MPEG-DASH support. I'm not there yet, but I can now more or less handle peeking at videos that are sequentially read in sections (range requests) - for example, many Reddit videos. Do note that if video scanning is too slow for you, you can turn it off in the addon options area.
  

I hope you enjoy it! Let me know if you have any feedback using the link in the addon's dropdown.

Crash Detection

 Tonight I was working on a bug you may have seen that is sneaky, so I wanted to blog about it quick and let you know I have a basic fix inbound.

First let's start with the symptom. Have you ever had Wingman Jr. loaded and running in the browser for a while, but then it just seems like questionable stuff starts slipping through and the addon might not be working? (You may have seen this an image- or video-intensive site like Imgur.) You can see the issue over at GitHub.

Well, your hunch is correct! But the way in which it is failing is interesting. Some part of either Firefox or Tensorflow.js crashes. But the end result doesn't crash the whole addon, which would cause a reload. No, instead it simply causes the model prediction results to be incorrect. I've most often seen it send all zeroes back for the model prediction, which turns into "safe".

So to fix this I needed to get a bit creative. The addon will now routinely check itself by using a "watchdog" function. It uses one of the silent mode images already packed into the plugin and checks that the prediction results for that image are the same every so often. If they aren't, the "watchdog" checker will give it another chance or so, and then automatically reload the plugin. To make things a little bit performant for your computer, it will temporarily stop checking when Firefox thinks that the user is idle.

Fortunately this solution seems to be fairly reliable so far in testing, but does have the downside that it may cause a pause during the automatic addon reload. Do note that reloading the addon will cause it to go back to its default automatic mode. If preserving this is important to you, please let me know via an issue in Github or in the feedback link in Wingman Jr. itself.

Next Steps

 I've been taking it a bit easier after the release of 3.0.x, thinking about good next steps to work on. But I wanted to write a quick post to keep you in the loop for things I'm thinking about:

• Load Performance - I'm always keeping an eye out for performance improvements; in particular, loading takes so long. This is due to Tensorflow.js model load times, as the first time it does an image prediction it has to do a bunch of extra work. But the team has been hard at work on this and I'm evaluating some work they've already done.
  
• Better Video Support - I've gotten some exit survey feedback that they wished videos/animations were better supported. Well, so do I. I'd like to see if I can think up some ways to support certain DASH and HLS videos a bit better; I have some ideas but we'll see. I think a good next target might be Reddit support.
  
• Model Architecture - AI (or more accurately, machine learning) is a booming field right now, with many strong advancements occurring fairly regularly. Vision Transformers (ViT) as well as certain Unsupervised/Semi-Supervised Learning techniques have been making strides recently, so I'm keeping my eyes open for possibilities there. In particular, I'm intrigued by the hybrid CNN/ViT approach taken by Compact Convolutional Transformers (CCT).

I'd also like to take a moment and thank the Tensorflow.js, Firefox, and mux.js teams for helping make the software that makes this possible!