AdNauseam: uBlock Origin fork silently clicking ads on behalf of users

>You’re speaking from the position of someone clearly privileged enough to afford all the services you’d like to continue using.

No, I'm speaking from the position of someone who believes we should use fewer (or even no) services, be it Gmail, or Figma or Spotify free tier, or whatever.

There's always FOSS software. There's also freemium (no ads, just reduced functionality to lure someone to the premium full-featured version), and of course freeware.

Ad-supported also has a cost: the ad-induced consumerist spending is one of the biggest expenses people make (disproportionaly so for poorer people). And there's also the jacking up of product costs to cover an ad budget. Plus the social cost in multitude of ways (from the advertisers having influence over the service provider, to personal data being harvested and sold).

If it's okay for the corporate leviathan to automate the serving of ads, then it should be okay for me to automate viewing them, lol.

While you're at it, why not just not use the internet? And let's ditch the cellphone too because a lot of tracking is happening through them.

> If you put yourself in a place where someone can take everything from you than it's a real risk that they might.

You're exactly right, but absolutely wrong. We've had this conversation about creep for a few decades but it still happened. It is technically possible to live in the modern world without the internet and a cell phone, but it is not a realistic expectation. In fact, removing even one of the tech giants from your life results in a considerable disruption of your life[0].

You're right that people need to make individual choices, but you are missing the fact that a collection of people making choices is called a society. Those decisions have been made by our less tech literate friends and family. The ones we've failed to educate, using our expertise to inform those that are not in the domain. To fail to learn to effectively communicate and warn of the real dangers of what is happening. The truth is that no matter what decisions we make, we are still subject to the decisions of our society. Saying "you should have made better choices" is simply victim blaming. Unless you have been a hermit for the last 30 years and plan to continue this route -- clearly you're not since you're reading this -- then your individual choices were simply not enough. There is a larger game at play and you are still subject to society if you wish to participate. And let's be real, not participating comes with dire consequences and a complete abandonment of much of what it means to be human. So that's not a realistic choice or expectation. We need to think deeper, as its the only way we can solve this problem. It's easy to be dismissive and come to simple conclusions that make a nice pretty bow, but our world is incredibly complex and nothing is as simple as it appears. Anything you think is simple is simply something you do not understand sufficiently.

It is not too late, it never will be. But it is like planting a tree: the best time was 20 years ago but the second best is now. The effects compound, in both directions. So I'll repeat what I've been trying to for most of my life, we need to make meaningful action and stop this spying. The will only control more of our lives if we continue this route and a "high tech-low life" future isn't an unlikely outcome. It's far more likely than seeing AGI, and AGI could only accelerate such a trajectory (it similarly could liberate us, which is why I research it. But there is real danger and we must not hide that fact)

[0] https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-the-big-five-tech-giants-from-my-l...

I don't use AdNauseam but I have been thinking about it more lately, not out of malice but because I wonder if it's simply a more efficient way of preventing trackers from learning about me than by standard blocking. I am concerned no amount of blocking is going to cut it, and there will always be little leaks of my data. If I stop trying to hide from them and instead jam their systems with as much noise as possible, maybe they will have less useful information about me than if I continue to hide while dropping inevitable, accidental breadcrumbs.

I confused what you were referring to, but I think it works with either adnauseum or copyright.

I'm not sure what your definition of terrorism is. It sounds like it's defined as stealing resources from someone else?

The definition of terrorism is not very defined, but I would think it generally means to cause fear in the general public for political gains. Maybe the general public can be replaced by an ad network theft induces fear, but then I think we're on vague territory.

I think for me the main point is just that harm can be justified for good and bad reasons, so we have to discuss how it's harmful and why it's justified or vice versa, rather than just saying it's harmful therefore bad.

In general I'm for "harming" businesses that I believe are actively harming society. I would be more on the side of trying to target their incentives rather than any individual person though. Sanctions, penalties and tax disincentives supposedly do this.