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I'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 vi

• nkrisc 10y ago
  With 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 ago
  I think #3 is the key thing here.. Is this really activism or just vandalism?
  • lhc- 10y ago
    If 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 ago
      That 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 ago
        It's my bandwidth, my browser. I'll automate clicking any goddamn thing I like. Don't like it? Don't serve it.
        • TeMPOraL 10y ago
          This. Don't want me clicking on things? Don't send the URLs to me. <a href...> literally means "if you want to see this, go there". (Now, generating new links with a for loop would be a crime, at least in the US, so I definitely won't do that.)
        • throwanem 10y ago
          I don't believe I have said you should do otherwise.
        • sbarre 10y ago
          Ugh, we've had this argument so many times.. By your logic, the website operator can also say "it's my website, I'll serve the ads I want the way I want.. don't like it? don't visit my site" And yet, there you are anyways, with your ad blocker.. hard to take the high ground I think..
          • pdkl95 10y ago
            > I'll serve the ads I want the way I want. Indeed they should. In most cases, they still send the page when requested. The problems start when authors decide they don't just want to control what they serve at their website. The advertising model also requires control of the client to guarantee that the ads are shown. That kind of control is possible with a contract (e.g. a paywall or similar controlled access). Instead, a lot of "content creators" want to have the benefits of a contract but only from one side. > And yet, there you are anyways, with your ad blocker So stop sending them data when they ask for it. In the meantime, ad blockers are going to show exactly how little some "content" was actually worth. If your content is worth so little that nobody is willing to pay for it in money or time, don't be surprised when attempts to force payment (in time or attention) results in blowback. > hard to take the high ground I think It isn't unethical to use as desired data that you were freely given. The only people that are ceding ethical high ground are "content creators" that want to control how people use their website. Delusional beliefs about what they think contract law ought to be is no substitute for a business model that understands what the internet actually is. -- TL;DR - We aren't ethically obligated to prop up your business plan that relies on artificial scarcity. If you don't want people to read your web pages, stop sending those pages without pre-{payment,authorization}. I suggest finding a better business plan.
  • intrasight 10y ago
    If I don't have to worry about the police coming and knocking on my door then it is not vandalism.
  • amelius 10y ago
    > Is this really activism or just vandalism? Analogy time. A guy sits outside my house with a camera, making pictures through a 10cm slit between the curtains. I come out of the house, take his camera and smash it. Vandalism? Don't think so. Activism? Not really. Basically, this is just self-protection. Preventing this from happening in the future (or at least making a good attempt at it).
• Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
  Regarding #3, I'm personally 100% against any online advertising in any form. So this punishes those who support it. Ditto for #2. As for #1, I'm not gaining anything, and no one is being deprived for their rights. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make there? If anything prosecutors should start with the rampant fraud being committed by companies in the online advertising space before they even think about looking at consumers. FTR: I don't use AdNauseam because I'd prefer to nuke trackers and ads alltogether, but I'm supportive of the project.
  • spott 10y ago
    >Regarding #3, I'm personally 100% against any online advertising in any form. What is your preferred method of paying people on the internet for their content? Do you think that micropayments would be a valid way to deal with this compensation gap?
    • Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
      Depends on the content. I like Patreon-style for YouTube, and that also occasionally fits with other things. I would also subscribe to a good source of news, though I haven't found one that qualifies as such yet.
    • enraged_camel 10y ago
      Not the OP, but I prefer subscriptions. It's a direct exchange of money for value, and doesn't involve a creepy middleman whose incentive is to track you across the web.
    • kuschku 10y ago
      I pay for the news that I read online by having subscribed to them also in paper form, or by paying taxes. Most other services I use are paid via subscription fees, or are run ad-free by people as hobby projects. Almost all the ad-supported services I use are monopolies anyway, have strict network lock-in effects, and shouldn't be in private hand anyway, instead they should be run by a cooperative, foundation, or government. (For example, web search, maps, phone books, etc). This leaves us with a few ad-supported pages which likely couldn’t directly survive in this new environment, but which rely on content creators for their business anyway – such as YouTube. For such cases, something like Flattr, but paid out by view, would be useful – something like the Datenträgerabgabe for the GEMA and VG Wort, but paid per month, not per empty CD bought.
• freshhawk 10y ago
  I don't understand #1, it's obviously not click fraud but how is it regular fraud? They want to track my clicks in order to gather profiling information about my personality in order to better influence/manipulate me. So now I use some technology to help me fuzz this information, I could do the same by clicking myself and browsing websites I dislike myself. Which would be boring and time consuming, hence the automation. Where in the spirit of the law is the ability to surveil consumers reading choices in order to influence their spending enshrined? It just emerged when people realized that the information was valuable. There were similar projects involving sharing customer loyalty card numbers for grocery stores, and I never saw the argument that sharing your card number with others was fraud. I think you are seeing that if consumers protect themselves against this type of surveillance then the lazy (and cheap to measure) metric of clicks becomes a less effective metric for measuring advertising placement value. It exposes the fact that those measuring this were barely providing value to advertisers and publishers in the first place. That doesn't make it fraud, that just inconveniences a large industry that pays a lot of bills. Those are very different things, both ethically and legally. As to 3, this has clear objectives, they are apparently just much farther reaching than you are comfortable with or agree with. I get it, I worked in the online advertising ad network business for many years, however I never fooled myself that this business was anything other than an unethical anti-consumer endeavour. That's why I don't do it anymore.
• Sir_Substance 10y ago
  >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 they also shouldn't advertise at me, ever. Human attention is extremely valuable, by far the most expensive commodity on the planet. If advertising companies want my attention so damn bad, they can pay me ~$65000 a year for it, same as my employer does. Otherwise, they can piss off.
  • sanswork 10y ago
    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.
    • dumb-saint 10y ago
      They are not paying for anything. No one entered an agreement or signed a contract. They are trying to exploit the content in a certain way, and the receiver of the content is free to take counter-measures.
      • sanswork 10y ago
        They are paying the content providers who are paying you in content. They are free to take "counter measures". But that doesn't stop the fact that they are paying for both your time and the content.
        • dumb-saint 10y ago
          Nope, they are not paying me for anything. Again, I did not enter into any agreement. I just clicked a link. They are expending their resources in an attempt to capture and profit from my attention. Those are very different things. Many times they also payed to make it hard for me to get to the content that I actually wanted. This is commonly known as SEO.
• nemoniac 10y ago
  There is nothing fraudulent about this. Clickable ads are put there to be clicked on. It's like inverse spam. Spam email is a nuisance because it's cheap to send to many. Well now it's cheap to click on many ads.
• dumb-saint 10y ago
  I don't see how 1. applies. People using this plugin are not securing any gain and no one is being deprived of any right -- unless you use it on a website that first makes you explicitly accept to be tracked and served ads in exchange for the content.
• tomc1985 10y ago
  > 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. Seems very clear to me: destroy advertising/advertisers. Where do I sign up?
• __jal 10y ago
  1) If other people want to write contracts with each other that obligate them to do things for each other in response to bit patterns generated by my computer, that's none of my business. Legally, you might get Tortious Interference pass the laugh test, but who is interfering? The author (if they're cautious) isn't running it, so you're likely looking at RIAA-style fishing for IP addresses for random people who installed the plugin and contributed a tiny amount, and we've seen that show already[1]. 2) It could. Things have hard-to-predict effects. I see no reason why I should weight small startups as more important than the set of everyone disgusted by the invasion of every metaphorical orifice with surveillance tentacles. 3) Good on ya. I don't know if I'm going to run this plugin or not. But this is exactly the sort of thing needed to level the playing field between the commercial surveillance shops (Facebook, Google, the other ad shops, on down the spectrum to phishers and other outright criminals) and actual humans. We know that any form of legal or illegal online surveillance that has a chance of being commercially self-sustaining will be at least trialed. This has been demonstrated repeatedly. Legally, this is difficult to address sensibly because of the mismatch between the legal system speed and the tech-landscape speed (not to mention the inevitable unintended-consequence shakeouts, and the slowness of general wisdom in times of change). And that's even if assuming the Powers that Be want to address them, which is unlikely in the U.S. while a con-artist setting the agenda. So that leaves making as much of the surveillance business model untenable as possible. I don't know what the right approach is, but it will likely be one that involves feeding the watchers lies. I really don't like pissing on other people's work. But if that work is dedicated to things that make my life worse, I retain a right to, among other things, lie to their creation out of self-defense. It is that simple. Random, related aside: I'm unlikely to have time to make this happen, but one thing I've thought would be fun is to see about how tricky it would be to repurpose some test equipment to be, say, a whole herd of Bluetooth phones[2] taking a walk by those iBeacons. Being more subtle would likely be a lot more fun, depending on the target, and would serve as a useful reminder of what 'unlicensed spectrum' means. [1] Spoiler, here's the ending: https://popehat.com/2016/12/16/the-prenda-saga-goes-criminal-steele-and-hansmeier-indicted-on-federal-charges/ https://popehat.com/2016/12/16/the-prenda-saga-goes-criminal... [2] What's the collective noun for phones?
  • TeMPOraL 10y ago
• davidgerard 10y ago
  yeah, that's great thanks. Internet advertisers are almost 100% reprehensible and fully deserving of what happens to them. They've spent years pissing in the pool, there is zero reason they shouldn't be force-fed the results. The key moral argument in play in this entire matter is: "fuck these people and fuck everything about them." I owe advertisers nothing. They are loathsome abominations and have turned the Internet into surveillance capitalism malware soup. Causing them pain is pretty much an ethical obligation. (BTW, I was surprised and pleased AdNauseam didn't act against Project Wonderful, the closest I've seen to a non-reprehensible advertising network and one I unblocked specifically in uBO. But the rest can frankly go and get fucked.)
• lvs 10y ago
  What? There is absolutely no criminal or civil statute nor legal principle in any American or European jurisdiction that binds users to respond to advertising in an accurate or forthright way. To have such a law on the books would be utterly ridiculous: how could you ever prove in court that I did or didn't properly reflect my forthright intentions when I clicked on a "one weird trick" advertisement? And under what possible principle could I have implicitly contracted to give you an honest assessment of my interest in your advertisement? Your proposition is perhaps one of the most insane ones I've ever heard argued about advertising, because it claims that you not only have a contractual right to knowledge of my consumerist tendencies, but -- amazingly -- that you believe that contract is with society writ large (i.e. where breach is a criminal fraud) rather than with you (i.e. civil breach) as a service provider.
• rahimiali 10y ago
  >This could hurt small startups that are very carefully managing an ad budget. I'm all for helping fellow startuppers, but no part of me feels that startups that buy ads are an endangered species worth nurturing. The whole ad model leaves the world worse off, and it sucks that startups are left with no option but to participate in it.
• imagist 10y ago
  > 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. There isn't a god-given right to make money via your chosen business model. Ads are a sleazy way to make money, and if you choose that, you should pay the consequences. Appealing to "people we know" as if that makes their behavior better? Ugh. > 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. I can't speak to the goals of everyone who is anti-advertising, but my goals here are: 1. Users should be customers, not products, so that companies act in the interest of users, not in the interest of other companies. 2. Users' attention should be respected, only giving users content they ask for. 3. Companies should create products users value enough to pay for, and compete on quality, rather than competing on how many users they can shove idealized presentations of their product (often outright lies) in front of.
• redner 10y ago
  there is a lot of ways of doing advertisement, besides polluting people's browsers, give freebies, discounts, ...... etc.