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Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension

forum.palemoon.org

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Re: Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension

#171

Post by daodedickinson »

notgood wrote: post #70

You guys do realize what's going to happen as soon as a webpage can detect you have AdNauseam installed right? They gonna block you completely from their websites -I mean IP-tables blockage- and rightly so. If you don't like a website just don't use it; it's really really simple; when you start attacking every ad network the creator of the extension deems "evil" you are basically just another bot in his botnet attack…

Agreed. AdNauseum has no more of a fair trial system, ability to be held accountable, or potential for appeal than the SPLC hate group list. I met a group of nuns listed by the SPLC, and they were a very racially diverse group of exceedingly kind people. Their group was listed in the 80s because a male bishop associated with their convent recommended some books with anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. He is dead now and our local paper did an investigation this year on the listing and found that the nuns are on good terms with local Jewish congregations with whom they respect and accomplish good in the community. The local Jewish groups couldn't get the time of day from the SPLC to reconsider their listing of the nuns, even though the SPLC explanation of the listing doesn't cite evidence of anything done by a woman or by a human currently living or done before the 1980s. And yet the SPLC is gaining more power to censor than most governments on Earth as some tech giants experiment with giving them powers to secretly make content disappear.

Re: Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension

#172

Post by fish_fan »

dane-pgp wrote: post #109
confusedrobot wrote: post #86

If a program does as it states and allows people to consent to its effect on them it isn't malware. I don't see how they can class it as such in good faith.

I don't know if anyone has been arrested for "click-fraud" yet, but we have seen an attempt to use the DMCA to force people to view adverts, under the theory that the adverts are part of "a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14989742 If the terms of use of a website forbid you accessing that site with an ad-blocker installed, then arguably…

Then they should allow an http header saying "if you're going to serve ads, don't bother, i'd rather look at nothing".

Re: Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension

#174

Post by fish_fan »

KGIII wrote: post #135
sanxiyn wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google terms of service does not forbid users from producing invalid clicks either. (Point 1, it's called invalid, not fraudulent. Point 2, Google does forbid website owners, but not users.) I am just objecting to your statement that when one uses Google's service, one is making any sort of agreement that one wouldn't block ads or produce invalid clicks. There is no such agreement.

No, I'm sticking with fraudulent. The intent is to defraud. Even if you say there is no specific agreement, there's the morality issue. Your morals may allow you to essentially vandalize, mine do not. The agreement may not be written down, but I think it's covered in the 'don't be an ass' part of the social contract.

It's not on me that clicks are considered meaningful—that's the site owner's problem.

Re: Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension

#175

Post by jedberg »

davidgerard wrote: post #170
jedberg wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about people who install a program to defraud advertisers. The complaint was, "we're sticking it to people who censor and use social control." "The rules" in this case are that censorship and social control (presumably) exist on the platform. If you don't like that, don't participate. But don't say, "OMG censorship" and use that to justify defrauding advertisers while continuing to use the free site tha…

You didn't answer the question: Do you offer legally enforceable indemnity against people getting malware from ads you serve? If not, then you can't really tell them not to block the ads.

I don't work for reddit anymore, so I don't offer anything. But no, I don't think reddit offers that, as no site does. That's a perfectly fine excuse to run adblock, but my original thesis was that people say, "If you let me remove ads I'll pay" and those people are being disingenuous when they don't pay.

It still doesn't justify the topic at hand, which is a program that attacks the ad networks and defrauds the advertisers.

Re: Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension

#176

Post by vectorpush »

BastardGas wrote: post #140
jedberg wrote: post #124

I hear a lot of people in here saying, "Yay for AdNauseum, they are fixing the broken ad system! If sites start charging instead of ads, I'll totally pay!" Let me add a little perspective. A long time ago at reddit we launched reddit gold. At the time, one of the biggest benefits was that if you had gold you could turn off ads. This was in direct response to people saying, "I would rather pay you then use adblock". Y…

Use of AdNauseum is more of a "fuck you" to companies like reddit or google who have turned the internet from a forum for free expression to a tool for censorship and social control.

This makes no sense. Have you ever used a web forum before reddit? People get banned all the time for arbitrary reasons on forums all over the web, why should reddit be any different? "The internet" has not been turned into anything, it remains the same as it has always been, a place where communities of varying interests can interact at their own discretion, a freedom which includes the prerogative to exclude anything the administrators deem off topic, offensive, annoying or even boring.

The internet gives everyone the freedom to create a community of their own, and it's easier, cheaper and the experience is better than ever when doing so. There are already popular "anything goes" discussion forums (e.g. 4chan, voat) that give much wider room to "freedom of expression", so how have companies like reddit or google prevented others from operating in any fashion they find acceptable within the confines of their own communities? The answer is they haven't.

Re: Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension

#177

Post by kuschku »

cookiecaper wrote: post #152
ams6110 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then that tells you that the content you are providing isn't worth much.

I don't think it tells them that. There is not much incentive to provide any vendor with a special altruistic dispensation when you're already getting the desired experience at no cost. This is the case regardless of the value or importance of the experience provided. The simple fact is that if people don't have to pay for something, most of them won't. And that makes plenty of sense.

Or, and that’s the other option, if you can get the same offering at a lower cost.

For example, for me, as a user, IRCCloud is far too expensive, because for half the monthly cost I can run a Quassel core (an open IRC bouncer with similar functionality) for 10 users.

So, to me, I have a choice between 4 bucks a month for a product, or 0.20 bucks a month for the same product.

A big issue with this are the silicon valley wages. Most of these services are priced for users in Silicon Valley, where 5 bucks a month are nothing.

But out in the rest of the world, money is worth a lot more, and as a result, the entire cost/use equation changes, making many of these products impossible to afford.

Re: Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension

#178

Post by kuschku »

norikki wrote: post #116
donohoe wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But thats just it. The extension, by trying to provide a "unbiased browsing experience" to the user but sending false clicks to the networks, is punishing the author/publisher in the middle. This is a bad analogy but the closest I can find: Its like saying I don't like big book publishers so I'm not going to pay for the book at the independent book store. Again, that analogy quickly falls apart but the initial point…

It's more like when the book store asks you for your phone number, home address, and driver's license before they will accept your credit card, and so you simply pay them with cash.

After giving them a fake phone number that costs $5.99 per minute, a home address on the top of Mt. Everest where shipping ads to costs them hundreds of dollars, and a fake credit card numbers.

And yes, this cost is one that they should simply accept, if they want to ship malware. You try to destroy my system, I’ll try to destroy yours.

Re: Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension

#179

Post by FullMtlAlcoholc »

jedberg wrote: post #124

I hear a lot of people in here saying, "Yay for AdNauseum, they are fixing the broken ad system! If sites start charging instead of ads, I'll totally pay!" Let me add a little perspective. A long time ago at reddit we launched reddit gold. At the time, one of the biggest benefits was that if you had gold you could turn off ads. This was in direct response to people saying, "I would rather pay you then use adblock". Y…

To add to your point, I gleaned this from the Economist:

" Consumers tend to respond much more strongly to “free” offers than to prices that are only fractionally higher than zero. When Amazon first offered free shipping in European countries, orders surged—but not in France, where by mistake it charged around ten cents.

Researchers talk of the “privacy paradox”: when asked, people say that they care much more about their privacy than their actions would suggest."

This leads to another issue. If governments and companies are making important policy decisions based upon data, is it fair or right to access their online behavior in addition to surveys, as people often lie in surveys to project a better image of themselves.

Re: Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension

#180

Post by jd3 »

jszymborski wrote: post #39

Frankly, I always thought that the Pale Moon project had more attitude than rationale. You've really got to have a decently sized team to assure that the changes you've made aren't going to cause security holes in the browser. The things that they rip out of Firefox also doesn't make much sense to me... Australis is such a weird thing to get rid of, especially when the compact theme is pretty similar to the original,…

The whole Pale Moon project doesn't even make sense to me. They could have just broken the browser toolkit out of comm-central (SeaMonkey) and built on top of that if the 'Classic' interface is what they are looking for. This solves the problem of the classic interface, current security patches, and modern Firefox HTML5 support.

There is no way that their tiny team can resurrect all of the old APIs that Mozilla has been decimating recently (XUL/XPCOM extensions/add-on SDK, complete themes, non multi process extensions, unsigned extensions, etc.)

With all of the talk about breaking Thunderbird (and, ostensibly, SeaMonkey) out of the core Mozilla infrastructure, the future does not look bright. I am honestly unsure as to what I'll do when SeaMonkey finally dies. I use an xpfe complete theme, maintain a SM/Thunderbird add-on that directly modifies the browser XUL to display picons/X-Faces/Faces/X-Image-URLs/etc, maintain an add-on that loads the old add-on manager in a separate (non-incontent) XUL window, etc.

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