Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 282 posts

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#121

Post by __jal »

sanswork wrote: post #37
_m7bj wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>3. I dislike activism without clear objectives. I see no list of guidelines here or good behavior that companies could adopt to immediately place them on the side of the good guys. The goal highly specific. It is to make Internet advertising artificially expensive, and it is to make harvested data about users inaccurate. There are no "good guys" on the other side. People shouldn't track me, that one's obvious, but t…

It's not like the ads just appear while you're sitting around doing nothing. You see the ads when you are receiving something with them. The ad companies are paying for your attention with the content you consume.

The facts are these.

If I connect to, say, port 80 on www.cnn.com and send some particular ASCII, then the machine on the other end will likely respond with some text. The owners of that machine invite these connections.

I can then: pipe that to /dev/null; read it in a text editor; read it with a web browser; print it out; file it away somewhere. (There are of course other options.)

So pray-tell, if my browser is `wget | html2txt | more`, do you consider me in the moral wrong for failing to also send various bits of PII to whomever CNN considers a Trusted Sponsor today and retrieve images, flash cruft, malware, or whatever else those Trusted Sponsors choose to respond with?

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#122

Post by rdw »

deadbunny wrote: post #119
TeMPOraL wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do not see the direct benefit of this for the end user... The hope is that publishers will understand why they're getting hit by the collateral of the fake-click barrage and move out of the blast range by changing their ads into unobtrusive ones, or even moving away from ads entirely into models like: - treating your webpage as an investment - sponsorship / patronage - subscriptions - paywalls Additional hope is…

How naïve. You think the entire advertising industry is going to throw their hand up and say "Hey, you got us. We'll just cave to your demand and drastically reduce our profits"? This will just be another volley in the ever escalating ad arms race.

It creates opportunity for disruption. The established players see their costs go up and effectiveness go down. A new player comes in who has non-obtrusive ads, and sees outsized success. Everyone else either dies off or fast-follows.

I'm curious how The Deck is doing these days, seemed like they could have been that player.

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#123

Post by tomc1985 »

dispose13432 wrote: post #116
TeMPOraL wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kill advertising and you'll take the content with it Good. Let it die. There's enough better content available for free and without ads. Somehow, it so happens that people who have something interesting or meaningful to say tend to say it anyway, and either pay for it themselves or ask nicely for something in return. I honestly do believe the content quality is inversely proportional to the amount and obtrusiveness…

The problem is the "long-tail" of content. Sure, Wikpedia will stick around post adblock, and so will big conglomerates (they can afford to put up paywalls, like WSJ and others). Many content-farms will just stick to being a "review for hire" gig. The problem is that the small shops will close down.

You know who else will stick around?

All the guys with cheap hosting accounts making web pages like the 1990's. Ironically they seem to be the only ones with content worth reading...

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#124

Post by djsumdog »

k1m wrote: post #98
_m7bj wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>3. I dislike activism without clear objectives. I see no list of guidelines here or good behavior that companies could adopt to immediately place them on the side of the good guys. The goal highly specific. It is to make Internet advertising artificially expensive, and it is to make harvested data about users inaccurate. There are no "good guys" on the other side. People shouldn't track me, that one's obvious, but t…

> There are no "good guys" on the other side. People shouldn't track me, that one's obvious, but they also shouldn't advertise at me, ever. Agree. I think it's unfortunate that so much of the debate around advertising, especially from many on the side of ad blocking, focuses only on the evils of tracking and privacy erosion. This project does it too. From their FAQ: "It is not advertising we are protesting, but adver…

I've hated ads since I was a kid. I never realized it until back around 2010 when I overheard my friends say, "he really hates advertising. Have you noticed that?" and I was like, "Wait, it's .. noticeable?"

Modern advertising is specifically engineered to evoke an emotional response in order to buy a product. The mother/fathers of modern advertising are none other than Edward Bernays and Anna Freud. (Sigmund Freud's nephew and daughter). There's a lot of evidence that Freud resented both of these family members for using his psychoanalyst tools to help industry and government gain profit and power. At the same time, Edward was instrumental in promoting the English version of Freud's book, keeping Sigmund out of the poor house.

I highly recommend watching The Century of the Self. It's a multi-part BBC documentary that goes into the history of advertising and consumerism as we see it in our current age.

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#125

Post by Sir_Substance »

sanswork wrote: post #111
Sir_Substance wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stating an untrue statement as fact and hoping your opposite number will debate it, thus tacitly accepting it, is an extremely low quality argumentative technique, sitting somewhere between "responding to tone" and "ad hominum" on the hierarchy of arguments[1]. You strike me as a standup chap who would not resort to such techniques, so I'm sure you'll now be willing to explain to me how you came to such a conclusion,…

You're calling for a minimum income for them or suggesting they just do it as a side project(supplemented with a regular income). The fact is a lot of great content is expensive to produce.

Ah, I see the problem. Because I have suggested that content can be created as side projects or could be encouraged by a basic minimum income, you have made an inference that I do not understand the costs involved in making good content.

I'm afraid to inform you that the facts you have stated do not contain sufficient information to make such an inference. You cannot know with any certainty based on these facts alone whether I understand the costs involved in making good content.

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#126

Post by sanswork »

__jal wrote: post #121
sanswork wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like the ads just appear while you're sitting around doing nothing. You see the ads when you are receiving something with them. The ad companies are paying for your attention with the content you consume.

The facts are these. If I connect to, say, port 80 on www.cnn.com and send some particular ASCII, then the machine on the other end will likely respond with some text. The owners of that machine invite these connections. I can then: pipe that to /dev/null; read it in a text editor; read it with a web browser; print it out; file it away somewhere. (There are of course other options.) So pray-tell, if my browser is `wg…

I didn't say I consider ad blockers morally wrong.

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#127

Post by davidgerard »

chokma wrote: post #27

Hm... From the perspective of the ad network: Lower click quality drives up the merchant's cost of sale (COS). Sitting between the merchant and the publisher, the ad network tries to balance this out, by - mixing good and bad traffic sources - encouraging the merchant to spend more money so they can buy better traffic and/or rank the offers higher on their publisher's sites - punishing the publisher for sending bad t…

> I do not see the direct benefit of this for the end user...

I posted it to my Facebook earlier. So far the response has been unbridled glee. I think you're tremendously underestimating the sheer joy people have at being handed a method of striking back at the people making their lives a misery, and need to recalibrate your model of how people will react to this.

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#128

Post by davidgerard »

Balgair wrote: post #106

Ok, so I may or may not have actually used this extension in the past (I may or may not be really vague as I don't really understand if this is legally fraud). The extension may or may not suck really bad. It may or may not lock up your browser when it clicks all the ads on a site. It may or may not 'work' at all in conjunction with TrackMeNot (a similar extension that flak-cannons trackers) and BSOD your laptop all…

Don't worry! I've been using it all today and so far it's had none of the bad effects you describe whatsoever. I plan to continue using it.

It does actually let through ads uBO doesn't (though it embeds uBO and uses the same filter lists), but nothing I can't live with. Doing my bit to make Internet advertisers' lives that little bit more miserable is pretty much an ethical obligation at this stage.

The FAQ does say only to run it if you know what you're doing. But I think anyone who reads HN will have no problems whatsoever in running this extension. If they do, the code's right there.

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#129

Post by gfody »

toby wrote: post #76
gfody wrote: post #68

They say it silently clicks all the ads in the background - doesn't that just help them? They want clicks right? Obviously the customer wants legitimate leads but the advertiser the guy we hate doesn't care if the clicks are legit or not. For him the more clicks the better, no?

By "advertiser guy we hate" you mean the publisher? The one who built the page you went to?

Well yeah, but we don't literally hate him, we just hate that he's using invasive ads right?

Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

#130

Post by deadbunny »

rdw wrote: post #122
deadbunny wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How naïve. You think the entire advertising industry is going to throw their hand up and say "Hey, you got us. We'll just cave to your demand and drastically reduce our profits"? This will just be another volley in the ever escalating ad arms race.

It creates opportunity for disruption. The established players see their costs go up and effectiveness go down. A new player comes in who has non-obtrusive ads, and sees outsized success. Everyone else either dies off or fast-follows. I'm curious how The Deck is doing these days, seemed like they could have been that player.

So lets imagine somehow beyond all odds this doesn't result in escalation and actually has the effect you describe;

How does AdNuseum detect the good from the bad?

How does a "good" advertiser submit themselves to some kind of whitelist?

How does AdNuseum verify the advertisers claims?

Post reply on HN