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AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse
- gcb0 10y agothis is so crazy it might work. Automatically sending the click beacon for every blocked ad will increase advertising costs but it will also increase vendor profits, motivating them to add even more ads. Until the 3rd party click validators start to filter out clicks generated by this somehow. And then we will have yet another arms-race besides the adblockers one.
- lotsoflumens 10y agoWe are all going to need a lot more bandwidth!
- gcb0 10y agobandwidth nowadays is a given. the only problem now is latency. but we don't care about that for background stuff.
- lotsoflumens 10y agoSo true! Latency may be very difficult to reduce given our reliance on the internet protocol.
- eli 10y agoNot really. It mostly just devalues the ad units. Since none of these fake clicks result in any action on the advertiser's site, the per-click price the advertiser is willing to spend goes way down. And at least in its current implementation, I would guess most 3rd party click validators already filter it out. (disclaimer: ad-supported news sites pay my bills)
- mikestew 10y agoAs someone in another, related, thread said: AdNauseum users will account for X% of clicks, and advertisers/publishers will simply take clicks - X% to get the real number, and we're back to where we started. (EDIT: credit where credit is due: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13221653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13221653)
- sanbor 10y agoIt would take a while for the ad industry to adapt to that. Also there might be technical limitations.
- eli 10y agoIt's essentially just another form of click fraud, which is a tricky problem but the ad industry already largely has tools in place to deal with it.
- ma2rten 10y agoI was the one who made the original comment. The ad industry does not have to adopt at all, because they use a bidding system. Just advertisers have to adopt by bidding less. Sophisticated advertisers will automatically do that because they keep track of conversions.
- mcbits 10y agoMaybe an auto-clicker could use ABP's acceptable ads filter to focus on reducing the effectiveness of "unacceptable" ads. (But the ad networks are just going to figure out how to detect the clicks and mark them fraudulent anyway.)
- guitarbill 10y agoWho cares? The privacy increase should be worth it. The tracking is the problem, not the ads themselves. (edit: if it works. someone else has written that these fake clicks simply get filtered)
- ljoshua 10y agoI dislike ads as much as the next person (and indeed run uBlock on nearly every site), but I'd feel wrong using this because of the cost to the advertisers. It would be further lining the pockets of ad networks while increasing expenses for, at least in some cases, legitimate businesses. Sure, it's a bit of fighting fire with fire, but I'd rather not be an unnecessary expense for someone in my fight against intrusive ads.
- eli 10y agoAdvertisers will just lower their bids, so it mostly hurts the publishers of the websites you visit.
- amelius 10y ago> Advertisers will just lower their bids, so it mostly hurts the publishers of the websites you visit. ... who will then have to revert to a more sane monetization scheme, which doesn't mess with their visitors' data.
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoI doubt it. More likely, who will progress to even more insane monetization schemes...
- TeMPOraL 10y agoThe law is the ceiling, per the wise saw that any sufficiently advanced business model is indistinguishable from a scam. I hope we'll reach peak insanity soon, and then some trace amount of humanity will return to the industry.
- eli 10y agoI understand where you're coming from, but this seems an awfully aggressive way to send that message to websites that you presumably like and find useful. Merely blocking ads isn't enough?
- Animats 10y agoI'd considered doing that in Ad Limiter, but didn't want the headaches. I was considering replying to all ad links from an add-on to see where they ended up after redirection, so the final destination site could be rated properly. But the bandwidth usage is excessive. I should try sending HEAD requests to ad servers, to see if they return a redirect. No idea what the ad brokerage systems will do with those.
- CaptSpify 10y agoHm... The element picker doesn't seem to work, and the default color-scheme is horrible. I don't see any way to change that. I like the premise though. Hopefully it will improve with time.
- davidgerard 10y agoThis is literally a link to the code :-)
- WhitneyLand 10y agoI'm out on this. 1. They say it's legally not click fraud. To me it sounds like regular fraud: "deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right". I'm not concerned with breaking the law I just don't want to act in the spirit of it. 2. This could hurt small startups that are very carefully managing an ad budget. They say the market will adjust, but until it does small startups take a hit. People we know. 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.
- nkrisc 10y agoWith regard to the first point, maybe I'm just being naïve, but I could manually click on every ad with no intention of every purchasing everything, this just automates it.
- sbarre 10y agoI think #3 is the key thing here.. Is this really activism or just vandalism?
- lhc- 10y agoIf your cause is to decrease advertising on the web, and these actions diminish its effectiveness and potentially lead to decreased advertising in search of a better revenue stream, well that sounds like effective activism to me.
- throwanem 10y agoThat doesn't mean it's not vandalism, too. The fact that no property is actually destroyed does mean that, but I think there is a qualitative difference between blocking ads and attempting to swamp ad-pricing signals with injected noise.
- jalfresi 10y agoIt's my bandwidth, my browser. I'll automate clicking any goddamn thing I like. Don't like it? Don't serve it.
- hidden_forest 10y agoI block all ads, tracking, beacons, etc. because they are now the single largest vector for malware. I use Firefox largely because it's the most hackable browser. I tweak Firefox to do and not do several things: - I don't allow sites to see my history - I don't allow peerconnect - I don't allow WebRTC (shows private address schemas) - I don't allow much JS - I don't allow fingerprinting beyond pure basics - I don't allow HTTP/S referrer I do block everything not associated with the pure content of the page. This is getting more difficult, but the tools to help are keeping pace.
- _tulpa 10y agoWould you mind elaborating on the tools you use?
- hidden_forest 10y agoSorry for the delay in answering your question. I don't use anything elaborate. I use the following Firefox addons: - uBlock Origin - Disconnect - Decentraleyes - Webmail Ad Blocker I make the following changes in Firefox's about:config: layout.css.visited_links_enabled (Toggle to false) media.peerconnection.enabled (Toggle to false) network.prefetch-next (Toggle to false) network.http.sendRefererHeader (Set to 0 (zero)) network.http.sendSecureXSiteReferer (Set to false) I also sometimes set dom storage to false, but this can sometimes interfere with some webmail clients. If you're unsure of a setting, reference the Mozilla KB: http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries
- antisthenes 10y agoI'll second _tulpa's request. It would be nice to see your configuration for this.
- chatmasta 10y agoYou realize that by blocking all that stuff you're only making your fingerprint more unique?
- unexistance 10y ago
- siegecraft 10y agoI feel like this would be better if it didn't click every ad, but had some sort of method (even if it was random) to pick ads.
- douche 10y agoSeems like it'd be easy enough to slap in there https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/blob/master/src/js/adn/core.js https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/blob/master/src/js/adn/co...
- have_faith 10y agoIf I'm already blocking the ads and their tracking scripts, why would I let it load them first, 'click' them and then block them afterwards? Doesn't it just re-open the attack vector?
- jalfresi 10y agoI'd love for this to be inside some kind of proxy server - stripping ads for my browsing whilst simultaneously clicking every one of them under a fake profile of some kind...
- chokma 10y agoHm... 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 traffic by lowering the amount the publisher is paid for each click - filtering out extraordinarily bad traffic AdNauseam will increase the amount of bad traffic. Merchants have to pay more money to get their ads through to those people who do not create fraudulent clicks. Publishers will receive less money per click. Ad networks will try harder to invade your privacy(1) so they can get more comprehensive data about those people who are worthy to be targeted. Startups which promise to detect fake traffic will get a boost. Companies which manage advertising via social influencers or in-game mobile ads etc cannot care less. I do not see the direct benefit of this for the end user... (1) for example by paying more money to antivirus providers to send your browsing habits their way. edit: formatting
- TeMPOraL 10y ago> 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 that the whole ad industry finally implodes.
- deadbunny 10y agoHow 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.
- rdw 10y agoIt 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.
- elorant 10y agoI don’t like this. While I strongly oppose tracking and have a variety of privacy extensions installed on my browser, clicking on ads is simply wrong. Someone will have to pay for those clicks. Not to mention that if something like this gets wide adoption then it will make click fraud detection even harder. A bunch of browser sessions randomly clicking on ads will have no difference from a bot doing the same thing.
- alkonaut 10y agoWhile I don't believe this works (clicks filtered etc) I don't mind screwing over the advertising websites in addition to the ad networks and the advertisers. If you try to finance your site using tracking ads, or if you advertise through networks that use invasive tracking ads, or you are a network that distribute such ads - then I have no problem helping taking you out of business.
- criddell 10y ago> Someone will have to pay for those clicks. Not to mention that if something like this gets wide adoption then it will make click fraud detection even harder. A bunch of browser sessions randomly clicking on ads will have no difference from a bot doing the same thing. I believe that's the point of it.
- Aldo_MX 10y ago> Someone will have to pay for those clicks Someone will get infected with malware by using the shady ad-network with a higher revenue, so what's the difference?
- dollaholla 10y agoI'm not sure the folks who created this understand how ad tracking works. Clicks are such a small part of the equation that this is laughable.
- confounded 10y agoAside from driving up costs, from a privacy perspective, would this offer any advantage over simply never clicking on ads? I worry that it might flag me as a high-engagement/ad-tolerant user.
- xwvvvvwx 10y agoFrom a privacy perspective, is there a difference between never clicking an ad and clicking all the ads?
- hughes 10y agoI like to fight against invasive ads by using Google Contributor, which prevents Google-based ad networks from even serving me the content. That way, the sites I use are still supported and I am seemingly protected. Only costs me a couple bucks a month too.
- 1propionyl 10y agoGood. I'm done being nice to advertisers. They are actively poisoning the internet in more ways than one. They had their chance to work out better ways to advertise, and they instead redoubled assaults on attention. This is getting installed on all of my browsers on all of my PCs. If your startup is advertising based, find a different model, or do without my business. I have no obligation to help you fund yourself or use your product if I find the monetization model insidious.
- gfody 10y agoclicking all the advertisers links seems like an awfully nice thing to do for them, assuming they're paid per click
- TeMPOraL 10y agoIt may seem nice at the beginning, but as you saturate the service with fake clicks, the PPC value will drop to near-zero.
- harigov 10y agoAssuming they don't know how to separate fake clicks, which can be done within a reasonable level of accuracy. It ends up being a war between digital ad agencies and the users. I can see who has the most motivation here and therefore higher chances of winning.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoTangential, but makes me think: could all those happy campers who like to DDoS GitHub and Freenode in their spare time target an ad bidding node instead? I'd love to see that happen. Do it for teh good old-school lulz.
- Thimothy 10y agoHum... I just thought that we rarely see here a tech showdown from ad companies, or employees (It might be because they'd be bullied to hell), for what we know they could have the most impressive anti-DDoS tech in the world.
- gfody 10y agoThey 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?
- godmodus 10y agok-anonimity is an awesome concept, and truly the only way to protect outselves these days - it's however difficult to successfully implement. glad to see more software out there based on this concept.
- eikenberry 10y agoAnyone else find the Author/Developer separation odd. I mean it is a software project, so the developers are the authors. If you don't write the software, what are you the author of?
- ryan-allen 10y agoIt's not too different to having capital, employing programmers to do the work, yet you own the business/IP.
- Balgair 10y agoOk, 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 the frickin time. I may or may not have uninstalled the extension within a hour due to how bad things got. I think it's a fun concept, but the implementation of it may or may not be something that you want to fight with for less than a day before swearing it off. It's possibly so bad that I think it may have been written in order to turn people off from this 'attack' towards trackers as it may or may not remind one of the repulsion that rotten milk has upon first sniff.
- davidgerard 10y agoDon'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.
- djfm 10y agoAt least the name is great. I think it's reason enough to install it.
- lqdc13 10y agoWorst case is if this leads to "sponsored stories" where an article is about one thing and they sneak an infomercial in there for ad revenue but in a very subtle way such that it doesn't name a product even. Effectively, this would make it impossible to tell ads from not-ads leading to a much worse experience for everyone.
- belorn 10y agoWhich ever publisher that do so hopefully live in a country which doesn't have advertisement laws (and tax laws, if they try to be sneaky with the source of this new revenue). There is currently several cases in Sweden, and I heard similar tales in several other countries including the U.S. I would say that for once, the law is actually catching up with Internet activity that would clearly be illegal if done on a physical paper.
- lqdc13 10y agoHow can it possibly be illegal? I can understand if it's a public newspaper, but private media companies can do whatever they want. Like are you going to fine a movie studio for having an actor in a movie drinking Coca-Cola or driving a Volvo? Which specific laws are banning this practice in Sweden for private entities?
- belorn 10y ago> are you going to fine a movie studio for having an actor in a movie drinking Coca-Cola or driving a Volvo? Just a few months ago a case was started in Sweden based on such situation. The movie studio got hit by breach of contract by the publisher along with charges of illegal advertisement. > Which specific laws are banning this practice in Sweden for private entities? Marknadsföringslagen (2008:486) is the primary source for laws that regulate advertisement for private entities, however there is actually more. The European Advertising Standards Alliance has a local representation called Reklamombudsmannen, which is a self-regulating entity for advertisement. This one has some support by law, and some support by other means such as black-lists, and can issue fines. Last there is also the International Chamber of Commerce. Publishers in any form of media can also loose the right to publish, which is an automatic granted right which the court can take away. Since TV and radio is attached to spectrum allocation, there is also additional conditions on them in regard to advertisement (which is the reason why the movie studio got hit by a breach of contract in the above case).
- _audakel 10y agodoes AdNauseam work if I have something like Ghostry (ad blocker) running?
- megous 10y agoI approach this differently. There are a few use cases I go to the web for. For each use case that is not a free browsing I create an electron app, that never executes any code from the web or uses any external style. It only uses XHR to fetch html pages/json data/other static stuff and then transforms that data and uses it in the custom UI designed for the use case. For example one use case is collection of news. My app looks almost like a typical RSS feed reader, except that article content is full and interactive. I can inline stupid image galleries that break article flow, I can convert custom video players into a simple <video> tag, I can drop what I don't care for. I can switch between tor/non-tor mode in a secure way that doesn't leak anything and is probably more secure than torbrowser. I have direct access to any OS programs, so I can easily open m3u8 videos in mpv player on one click or using a keyboard shortcut, or I can download streaming videos locally and convert them to mp4 on the fly, save useful content of the pages to the database, including relevant images, etc. All JS code is controlled by me, web servers serve me only as data sources. What is key to make this fun and useful is structuring the app as a unified UI for multiple data sources and to be able to define data sources quickly. Fortunately ES6 generators can be used in a way that makes fetching and transforming data without the need for callbacks, or promises very easy and clear. Adding a new source is usually a matter of minutes. It is also nice that when improving the UI, I get a new feature for all the websites that I frequent at once. It allows me to consume content the way I want, without much exposure to tracking. All the website gets from me is an access_log entry, no cookies, nothing. I'd say I'm quite ahead of the "war" between users and advertising networks.
- lighttower 10y agoThis is brilliant. Can you point us to a repo with MVP to build on?
- hxegon 10y agoDo you have a repo up with the code?
- TeMPOraL 10y agoSeconding. I totally want to start doing this myself. That, and finally write a decent Hacker News suite for Emacs.
- placeybordeaux 10y agoInteresting idea, but clicking on a temporally stable subset of ads would be way harder to deal with than a user session that clicks on all ads.
- phyller 10y agoAt first I thought this was a great idea, but then I thought about it more. I think this is the digital equivalent of an angry mob throwing bricks through windows. We aren't doing any good, just destroying the community we live in. What would it be like if all the content creators that are incentivized by ad revenue lost their revenue? And we lost their content? I don't like being placed into an artificial bubble of customized content by tracking services, but i don't think this is the solution.
- CaptSpify 10y agoThey aren't losing their revenue. They are losing a poor method for generating said revenue. Revenue can and is gained via better methods.
- rdw 10y agoFalse dichotomy. There is a third alternative: a non-abusive advertising model takes over the industry. It's certainly plausible. All pre-internet advertising avoided tracking of individuals. There exist even now advertising agencies that cannot possibly serve up malware to their customers. Arguably Google achieved its great success by being a less-abusive advertising platform in its day.
- phyller 10y agoWhat advertising model are you suggesting? Perhaps it could be added to the Readme on the repo to help point advertisers in the right direction.
- pdkl95 10y agoClicking ads isn't vandalism, property destruction, or incitement to riot. Describing automated following of ad URLs as an "angry mob throwing bricks through windows" misleadingly associates an ad clicker with violence. This is a problem because it tends to lead to ... > destroying the community we live in. ... thinking in terms of violence.
- sanswork 10y agoYou sound like a child who is trying to sound like a lawyer right now. There is no contract required nor have I indicated there needs to be. I don't know why you lot keep going back to "I didn't sign a legally binding contract!". Why did you walk in if you had no clue what was in there? Why did you click the link if you had no clue what was on the other side? Because you wanted the content. I'm not saying to have to observe everything in the room or respond to it. I'm not even arguing against ad blocking as you would know had you read the thread.
- dang 10y ago> You sound like a child > as you would know had you read the thread Comments like this break the HN guidelines by being uncivil. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226458 and marked it off-topic.
- sanswork 10y agoApologies.
- hellbanner 10y agoSo these click the ads presented to the user -- from their IP, so the user is still identified?
- chayesfss 10y agoActually slows down browsing for me, going back to ublock for now
- _andromeda_ 10y agoVery cool name. Fitting.
- homero 10y agoWhat if you get someone's adsense account banned
- cyborgx7 10y agoI don't see what the problem is.
- mirimir 10y agoThis is rather cool. But you still download ads, which wastes bandwidth. I wonder if ads could get routed to a VPS, running AdNauseam. Ads aren't private, and normally aren't HTTPS. Would that be doable with an add-on?
- jakozaur 10y agoThere is some bad concept, but clicking on every ad is problematic. I would love to target specific ads from unethical business or deceptive.
- cyborgx7 10y agoHow am I just now learning about this? Been looking for something that does this for a long time. Will start using today.
- partycoder 10y agoNot sure if this may be in violation of terms of service in some websites.
- redner 10y agoI dont understand. Why adnauseam clicks ads? isnt that against the purpose of an ad blocker?