13 ms·

Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension

111 points by 4bpp 9y ago

rocky1138 9y ago
Can't people just compile their own version sans-censorship?
- grenoire 9y ago
  Seems like the block isn't hardcoded, so you don't even have to do that.
  - nonbel 9y ago
    It looks like it is not even "blocked", just placed on a list: >"Probably the biggest issue is (as Grainfrog said) one of word choice, that using the word "blocked" in the title was less constructive than, say, announcing "AdNauseam moved to malware list", and then explaining what this feature is (before now I was not entirely aware of it, personally) and that users may choose to opt out of this feature if they wish to install any of the items listed therein."
- wongarsu 9y ago
  That's a lot of effort. Most people would either switch browser or choose a normal ad blocker instead.
- posguy 9y ago
  Sure, but then it won't auto-update, requires the user to make more than a minimal effort to install, etc.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- 0xndc 9y ago
  You can remove the "censorship" with a 30-second config change. I don't understand why the people on that forum are so up in arms about something this trivial.
  - anonymousab 9y ago
    For a similar reason people get mad about telemetry and other features being opt-out rather than opt-in. I think the more overarching point is that many people went to palemoon in response to actions they viewed as harmful for the web or for browsers, from mozilla and Google. For many people this establishes that it is not the ideologically pure browser they (mistakenly or not) thought they were getting.
  - userbinator 9y ago
    It's more about the position of the Pale Moon maintainer in making this change, than the (lack of) difficulty in reverting it. Even Mozilla currently allows it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/ Google, quite understandably, didn't: https://adnauseam.io/free-adnauseam.html https://adnauseam.io/free-adnauseam.html
    - red023 9y ago
      "Even Mozilla currently allows it" Even? I don't think this is very surprising.
- 4bpp 9y ago
  I don't know about Pale Moon, but at least Firefox was well-known back in the day for being extremely resource-intensive to compile (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/Build_Instructions/Windows_Prerequisites#Hardware_and_software_requirements https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...) - I vaguely remember somebody talking about how they had to cross-compile to obtain the Raspberry Pi build, for instance. Either way, per the developer's post, you can in fact just flip an about:config switch to disable the addon blacklist (not sure if this would also leave you susceptible to actual malicious addons); it's more of an issue of compliance budget/trivial inconveniences, and the implicit message of the action. (Note how the developer is very insistent about referring to AdNauseam as "malware"; if we go with the conventional definition of malware as being harmful to its user, this may paint Pale Moon as perceiving the website and/or ad network operators as being its clientele, rather than the person using the browser.)
  - ChoGGi 9y ago
    (not sure if this would also leave you susceptible to actual malicious addons) If you want the extension without flipping the about:config entry. You can open up the extension in something that can handle zip files, edit install.rdf, and change the extension id to something else. Of course that will need to be done for every update of said extension.
- belorn 9y ago
  The reason people use a fork like pale moon is because they want the changes that the fork provide. If that is no longer the case, they can just go back to Firefox and modify that version to their heart's content.
- JohnTHaller 9y ago
  You only need to make a single change to about:config to allow you to use extensions on the restricted list.
- sandov 9y ago
  Yes. But the whole point of having a free (as in freedom) browser in the first place is so that the user controls it, and not google, apple, microsoft, 'Moonlight', etc.
userbinator 9y ago
From a quick glance at the thread it seems this "extension blacklist" can be quite easily disabled, and the discussion centers more around the position of the author. Perhaps he has a stake in ad companies too? It's not as if it's difficult to revert the change itself either, fork the project, and keep going: https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/Pale-Moon/commit/fe75cfd88312409d2b93bcdcbe83b3f8fd5f554d https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/Pale-Moon/commit/fe7... Because this extension causes direct and indirect economic damage to website owners, it is classified as malware, and as such blocked. The same argument has been applied to adblockers...
- chuckdries 9y ago
  But it's distinctly passive with ad blockers. Sure, you want to read my content without supporting me (some publications prevent you from doing so, but mine does not). You're just affecting you. With AdNauseum, you are actively attacking our ability to make money off of other users. You're punishing me for writing content that you want to read.
  - Rjevski 9y ago
    I am also attacking your ability to track and infect other users with malware, so I am doing a good thing. And no, I am not punishing you - I am punishing a shitty industry for wasting millions of hours of time globally and causing damage with malware. We've seen that pacific methods do not work so the only way to drive change is to actively fight back until the lowlife either adapts (by becoming better) or dies.
    - chuckdries 9y ago
      You are punishing me and only me. We don't use an ad network, we sell our ad space directly to local businesses. Fake ad clicks have been actively hurting our ability to sell ads for about a year now. Our ads are pictures. Pictures are not malware. Also what ads cause damage? Like sure the ads on porn or piratebay are cancerous but no reputable newspaper will have anything harmful, just potentially annoying.
na85 9y ago
That AdNauseam causes potential damage to people running ads and generating revenue from ads by devaluing clicks is a feature, not a bug. My understanding of the plugin is that it views advertising as universally bad, and that if a site cannot survive without ads, it must not be worth much at all, and deserves to die. I wholeheartedly agree with this view.
- chuckdries 9y ago
  Why? I work at a newspaper, we've survived on ads for decades, the way we deliver them has just changed. Most newspapers are like this, are you saying we should not exist?
  - googl3_angst 9y ago
    The recent push for AdNauseam seems to be from the 4chan, free speech crowd, as a reaction to Google efforts aimed at stifling politically incorrect speech on its platforms. See https://ageofshitlords.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/4chan-fighting-google-fake-clicks.png https://ageofshitlords.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/4chan-...
    - chuckdries 9y ago
      This is especially frustrating because we don't use an ad network. We have an ad sales department that sells ad space directly to local businesses. They're not hurting google, just us.
      - icebraining 9y ago
        Are your ads on the Adnauseum lists?
    - etplayer 9y ago
      Slightly off topic, but I find the implication made in the image you linked that Google, a company which profits via wage labour, which owns property, is a "Communist" organisation to be absolutely hilarious if it wasn't a sincerely held view by some poor souls.
sweep4r 9y ago
>Yup. you can all calm down and take some time to educate yourself about the damage this can and will cause to small-website owners You can all calm down and take some time to hear me tell you you have to believe in what I believe.
wnevets 9y ago
I've never heard of this fork before and Im not sure why its on the front page of HN.
- 4bpp 9y ago
  My impression has been that it has commanded somewhat outsize (to its actual utility/userbase) attention ever since its conception, because the promise of an "optimised, bloat-free, classic" version of Firefox clearly is attractive to many outspoken technologists. It gets mentioned on HN periodically: https://www.google.com/search?q=pale+moon+site%3Anews.ycombinator.com&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=pale+moon+site%3Anews.ycombi...
- akerro 9y ago
  Biggest fork of Firefox, apparently not anymore community driven, they tried to "unfuck" Firefox by removing enabled built-in google trackers, business decisions made by Mozilla that community didn't like because they were financially or ideologically driven (like Pocket or Telemetry?).
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- jccalhoun 9y ago
  I don't use Pale Moon but it has been around for a while. It got a boost when Firefox switched to the Australis interface and people who didn't like it switched to Pale Moon. And it has been getting another boost because of Firefox getting rid of the old extension model.
hbbio 9y ago
The motto of Pale Moon is "Your browser, Your way". But apparently not very so... The current ad system is broken and, although I understand Google decision to protect its own profits, I don't see why an open source project that aims to provide an unbiased browsing experience would follow suit.
- chuckdries 9y ago
  You're hurting the publishers. I'm a software developer at a local newspaper. We've been dealing with floods of fake ad clicks for about a year now, and they severely hurt our bottom line. We don't even use an ad network a la google, we sell our own ads to local businesses and such. You're not sticking it to the man, you're punishing me and my colleagues and friends for writing content that you wanted to read. You're directly hurting us. To be clear, I'm not sure a browser should have a say on this in general, but I understand the argument they make on a personal level. EDIT: 1. I misread OP 2. I don't work directly with our ad handling, as I work with the editorial team and generally advertising and editorial are separate for a reason, but I went digging just for fun. We sell our ad space to individual businesses. Our ad sales team does approve every ad we run. We use Google Analytics and Chartbeat, and both the newsroom and ad team have access to those analytics. The ads we serve vary - one ad from a housing complex down the street is literally just an image with an affiliate link, but one ad from our the ASU Foundation appears to load content from doubleclick.net.
  - oh_sigh 9y ago
    Irrelevant of OPs point. Disallowing an extension that a user might want doesn't seem like "your way"
    - chuckdries 9y ago
      True, I misread OP. I don't know that I think the browser should have a say in this discussion.
    - eropple 9y ago
      It isn't "disallowed". You make a change in about:config.
akerro 9y ago
I wasn't convinced if I should install AdNaunseam, now I am. thanks Moonchild :)
wongarsu 9y ago
>Generating this kind of traffic does not achieve its intended goal (providing protest against ad networks or causing advertising to fail for ad networks) since the ones punished are the publishers (those who rely on this revenue) and not the ad networks. I don't think I follow? People don't like the ad networks and want them to change or fail. That's achievable by forcing change at either the advertiser, the network or the website owner. Decreasing the usefulness of ad networks to website owners accomplishes the same thing as hitting the ad effectiveness: it takes away business from the ad network. Which sounds exactly like the intended goal.
- donohoe 9y ago
  It doesn't quite work that way. Yes, it decreases the usefulness of ad networks and hurts them - hopefully inciting change eventually. But between the reader and the ad network is the website owner. They typically have no say or control over the ad network. As fake clicks are detected they are the ones that will get punished. Their CPN can drop meaning a real hit in revenue. If fake ad clicks add up they may be booted form the ad network and then they lose all ad revenue. That is real harm. We can all agree that ad networks can be invasive and we need real change. But lets be honest that there is real collateral damage and this does cause it.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    They typically have no say or control over the ad network. How so? They chose the ad network, no?
    - notgood 9y ago
      So what? What happens next? Do I have to ask every creator of ad attacks extensions like AdNauseam if the ad network I wanna use fits in their definition of "good" before adding it to my site? Do I have to ask them for permission about what HTML/JavaScript can I place in my website? Worse, what happens if they think every ad network that fits my user-base is evil? Then what? I still need to make ends meet so should I try to bribe the AdNauseam devs into whitelisting my site? That's the thing about attacking on the basis of having the moral high ground, you are very likely to end up becoming the thing you hate. EDIT: (cause HN doesn't let me reply) Answer to @icebraining It's way more like, what if I'm pouring red colorant to the rivers, and I know the colorants make absolutely no damage to the river but activists still try to destroy my business because they strongly believe so. So yeah, I find your counter-argument depressing as well; because its not about who is right or wrong but the one who believes themselves in control to determine being both the judge and the executioner. Answer to @wongarsu: After installed this extension silently attacks networks, and you think people is gonna care enough to jump to the next best one... because you think they are constantly reading about the moral basis of the blacklisted ad networks? ...right? You are more delusional than expected and I hope ad networks start pouring money into permanently banning users of this extension from all major websites.
jszymborski 9y ago
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, except even more minimal. Not to mention you can customise the theme all you want. I'm pretty sure this moves comes from the fact that Pale Moon gets revenue from ads on the default start page, which is totally fine in and of itself; but having an extension blacklist for any other reason other than to prevent end-user exploitation is a perfect indicator that the judgement of the development team is not to be trusted.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- jd3 9y ago
  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.
Animats 9y ago
It only hurts pay-per-click advertisers. Ones whose ads directly lead to a sale are unaffected.
belorn 9y ago
The idea that ad networks don't care about click rates and clicks generated by bots seems very incorrect and false on even a surface glance. The revenue from ad networks is based on advertisers getting purchases and through that validate a marketing budget. It would be crazy if the networks did't already have several system to handle bad data and clicks generated by bots. In addition, the argument is that the extension is only punishing the publishers. What it really do is to change the balance between unethical ad networks and ethical alternatives. By only punishing networks that automatically track users, the more ethical networks become better in comparison and will give better returns for each dollar spent on marketing. One could call this strong arming the publisher to chose more ethical, but an other way to see it is to eliminate the race to the bottom and discourage a lemon market. We currently have networks that have no problem with infecting peoples machines with malware, advertising products to children, or target the sick and vulnerable. If I ran AdNauseam and it causes a single website to consider an alternative ad network, I would consider that a major win for the Internet, even if that meant a few % less revenue. Considering that some site has already gone over to more ethical alternatives in order to resolve the problem of ad blocking, it seems we are already making steps towards this future.
notgood 9y ago
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; you didn't were part of the committee that heard both parts and made a rightful judgment in a case-by-case basis, you just decided "yeah this random guy who created this extension probably picked the bad ones, lets hurt them"; so you don't even have the moral high ground you pretend.
- daodedickinson 9y ago
  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.
confusedrobot 9y ago
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.
- dane-pgp 9y ago
  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 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 a user could be guilty under something like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act if they did not comply. Rather than going after the individual users, though, (a tactic which was largely abandoned for dealing with torrenting), the publishers of a website could potentially try suing the makers of an ad-blocker. Under theories of "vicarious infringement" and conspiracy (such as is used against sites like The Pirate Bay and other search engines which ISPs are required to block in some countries), I wouldn't be surprised if we one day see browser makers liable for the extensions they "allow" to be installed in "their" browsers, and then OS distributors held liable for browsers that they allow to be installed on "their" OS. It is worth noting that ultimately it will be hardware-enforced TPM / Secure Boot technology that makes such laws and injunctions feasible. We need to be careful what precedents are set by projects like Pale Moon, and the sort of technological ecosystems we are building.
  - fish_fan 9y ago
    Then they should allow an http header saying "if you're going to serve ads, don't bother, i'd rather look at nothing".
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jancsika 9y ago
How is it that Target will infer that a teenager is pregnant based off the items she has bought over the past few weeks at their stores, but ad networks won't infer which of their potential customers are likely to serve up malware over their networks?
- Simon_says 9y ago
  They make money directly off of one? Whereas the other they potentially can maybe avoid losing some theoretical business or avoid having to pay fines in the future. Probably there's no one who's clear job responsibility is to ensure security.
wolco 9y ago
AdNauseam is foolish because if this is a success adnetworks go back to the good old days of the ugly in your face ads to ensure they count you as seeing there ad on each impression. Remember the exit ad that loaded after you left the page? Remember the expanding full page banner? They will be back.
- jhasse 9y ago
  Better than tracking and auto-playing videos.
- amiga-workbench 9y ago
  They never went away?
Paul_S 9y ago
Never heard of adnauseam before, the developers deserve a Nobel Peace Prize. The argument saying that it damages the publishers and not the ad networks is pure nonsense. By damaging the publisher's ability to make money of ads you also damage the ad network - how is this not clear? ALL and I mean all advertisers can die a slow agonising death as far as I care. They are adding nothing of value to the civilisation. And if your reply is "well, how about I start charging you for my website?" then I'm absolutely fine with it. Please do.
- emerged 9y ago
  The ad industry stops at nothing to force themselves in front of our face and ears. The notion that a completely legal counterattack is somehow unethical is profoundly absurd.
rosstex 9y ago
How does the efficiency/ad coverage compare to uBlock Origin? That's all that matters to me.
- fish_fan 9y ago
  Virtually identical in my experience.
  - rosstex 9y ago
    Oh! I'm dumb, I just noticed that it's a fork. Sweet :)
jedberg 9y ago
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". You know how many people running adblock started paying? Not a lot. Sure, some did, but there were still a whole bunch of people who just wanted a free experience. The ads on reddit weren't even all that heavy CPU and bandwidth-wise. My point is, I don't think a lot of you are being totally honest when you say you'd be willing to pay if the site removed advertising. In a lot of cases, those sites get a lot more money from the advertisers than you would ever be willing to pay, because they simply don't provide that much value to you.
- themusicgod1 9y ago
  I bought reddit gold for ~10 years. And how was I repaid? I was shadowbanned, and when I went to check my old comments that I contributed over the 8+ years I was on reddit most of them were gone. You coopted the world's conversation into a private space where you could profit from it. This might seem OK in lala-land of silicon valley, but what you have done is horribly horribly wrong in that you've moved millions of people into a place where political views can be easily censored, and where groups like The Cabal can gain power over what is and is not seen by millions. Reddit is broken. Everything about it is broken, the ad model, is broken. It is damage to humankind so large that routing around may not be enough.
- sanxiyn 9y ago
  I agree a lot of people are not honest, but some are. I bought Reddit gold, for example.
  - jedberg 9y ago
    Sure. Like I said, some people bought it and then disabled ads, and that's cool. Some people even bought it and left the ads, that was even cooler! But a lot of people, people who directly said, "I will pay you if you let me remove the ads", did not.
schoen 9y ago
A linguistic excursion not related to the substance of this controversy: I'm looking for a term for "jokes or puns where the morphemes between which a clever relationship is drawn are actually true cognates, but the connection is no longer apparent to native speakers". Here that's true because English ad < advertisement < Middle French advertissement < advertir < Latin advertere 'turn towards, notice' is the same ad in "ad nauseam" 'to the point of nausea', both meaning 'toward' in Latin. Does this kind of situation have a well-established name? (There might be subcategories for the case where the cognate preserves a connection in the meaning that's part of the joke, and the case where it's just coincidental, like here.)
- contravariant 9y ago
  Even if you reuse the same word it's still a pun. I don't think there's a different name for puns on homophones, cognates, or homonyms.
imhoguy 9y ago
What a perfect Streisand effect. I am going to check that so much polarising AdNaus...thingie.
j3097736 9y ago
I don't understand what the fuss is all about, last time I tried AdNauseum it barely detected and clicked very few Ads, maybe one or two on really ad-heavy popular websites, and many issues on github confirm that its detector is quite finicky.
hedora 9y ago
I think most people would agree that non-consensual profiling / tracking of users is immoral. AdNauseum directly breaks most business models that rely on that. I don't see the problem. Want to support your site using ads? Why not use display ads? Sell space next to high quality content to advertisers with relevant products. Problem solved, and it puts bottom feeder ad exchanges and content spam websites out of business. (And it probably puts a big wrench in the fake news industry as a bonus)
- clarry 9y ago
  > Want to support your site using ads? Why not use display ads? Sell space next to high quality content to advertisers with relevant products. The hard part is that most sites don't have high quality content, and there are no relevant products.. I can see why people want to damage these sites.
deleted 9y ago
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jim-jim-jim 9y ago
It'd really be no big loss if every site that relied on ad revenue went under because of this. It'd be a net positive actually. No more Content Trough? No more Socialworthy? No more Reddit? Sign me up. There will always be personal sites and phpbb forums run out of pocket for passion not profit. I use Ad Nauseum not because I think "the current advertising model is broken" or whatever. I'm not interested in reform. I'd like people to stop treating the web as a business opportunity. If this extension actively harms the bottom lines of the most shameless sorts of profiteers, then that totally rules and I support it 100%.
mariuolo 9y ago
I feel like most people here are missing the point. The question is not whether it is proper to use AdNauseam or not, the question is whether it should be a personal choice or one imposed upon by the browser. In this case, PaleMoon was championed as the "freedom browser" as opposed to the "designed by a committee" Firefox. If this passes, does it actually mean it will simply be a fork of Firefox that keeps XPCOM support but with the same overall attitude?

111 points by 4bpp 9y ago

rocky1138 9y ago

Can't people just compile their own version sans-censorship?

grenoire 9y ago
Seems like the block isn't hardcoded, so you don't even have to do that.
- nonbel 9y ago
  It looks like it is not even "blocked", just placed on a list: >"Probably the biggest issue is (as Grainfrog said) one of word choice, that using the word "blocked" in the title was less constructive than, say, announcing "AdNauseam moved to malware list", and then explaining what this feature is (before now I was not entirely aware of it, personally) and that users may choose to opt out of this feature if they wish to install any of the items listed therein."
wongarsu 9y ago
That's a lot of effort. Most people would either switch browser or choose a normal ad blocker instead.
posguy 9y ago
Sure, but then it won't auto-update, requires the user to make more than a minimal effort to install, etc.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
0xndc 9y ago
You can remove the "censorship" with a 30-second config change. I don't understand why the people on that forum are so up in arms about something this trivial.
- anonymousab 9y ago
  For a similar reason people get mad about telemetry and other features being opt-out rather than opt-in. I think the more overarching point is that many people went to palemoon in response to actions they viewed as harmful for the web or for browsers, from mozilla and Google. For many people this establishes that it is not the ideologically pure browser they (mistakenly or not) thought they were getting.
- userbinator 9y ago
  It's more about the position of the Pale Moon maintainer in making this change, than the (lack of) difficulty in reverting it. Even Mozilla currently allows it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/ Google, quite understandably, didn't: https://adnauseam.io/free-adnauseam.html https://adnauseam.io/free-adnauseam.html
  - red023 9y ago
    "Even Mozilla currently allows it" Even? I don't think this is very surprising.
4bpp 9y ago
I don't know about Pale Moon, but at least Firefox was well-known back in the day for being extremely resource-intensive to compile (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/Build_Instructions/Windows_Prerequisites#Hardware_and_software_requirements https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...) - I vaguely remember somebody talking about how they had to cross-compile to obtain the Raspberry Pi build, for instance. Either way, per the developer's post, you can in fact just flip an about:config switch to disable the addon blacklist (not sure if this would also leave you susceptible to actual malicious addons); it's more of an issue of compliance budget/trivial inconveniences, and the implicit message of the action. (Note how the developer is very insistent about referring to AdNauseam as "malware"; if we go with the conventional definition of malware as being harmful to its user, this may paint Pale Moon as perceiving the website and/or ad network operators as being its clientele, rather than the person using the browser.)
- ChoGGi 9y ago
  (not sure if this would also leave you susceptible to actual malicious addons) If you want the extension without flipping the about:config entry. You can open up the extension in something that can handle zip files, edit install.rdf, and change the extension id to something else. Of course that will need to be done for every update of said extension.
belorn 9y ago
The reason people use a fork like pale moon is because they want the changes that the fork provide. If that is no longer the case, they can just go back to Firefox and modify that version to their heart's content.
JohnTHaller 9y ago
You only need to make a single change to about:config to allow you to use extensions on the restricted list.
sandov 9y ago
Yes. But the whole point of having a free (as in freedom) browser in the first place is so that the user controls it, and not google, apple, microsoft, 'Moonlight', etc.

userbinator 9y ago

From a quick glance at the thread it seems this "extension blacklist" can be quite easily disabled, and the discussion centers more around the position of the author. Perhaps he has a stake in ad companies too? It's not as if it's difficult to revert the change itself either, fork the project, and keep going: https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/Pale-Moon/commit/fe75cfd88312409d2b93bcdcbe83b3f8fd5f554d https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/Pale-Moon/commit/fe7... Because this extension causes direct and indirect economic damage to website owners, it is classified as malware, and as such blocked. The same argument has been applied to adblockers...

chuckdries 9y ago
But it's distinctly passive with ad blockers. Sure, you want to read my content without supporting me (some publications prevent you from doing so, but mine does not). You're just affecting you. With AdNauseum, you are actively attacking our ability to make money off of other users. You're punishing me for writing content that you want to read.
- Rjevski 9y ago
  I am also attacking your ability to track and infect other users with malware, so I am doing a good thing. And no, I am not punishing you - I am punishing a shitty industry for wasting millions of hours of time globally and causing damage with malware. We've seen that pacific methods do not work so the only way to drive change is to actively fight back until the lowlife either adapts (by becoming better) or dies.
  - chuckdries 9y ago
    You are punishing me and only me. We don't use an ad network, we sell our ad space directly to local businesses. Fake ad clicks have been actively hurting our ability to sell ads for about a year now. Our ads are pictures. Pictures are not malware. Also what ads cause damage? Like sure the ads on porn or piratebay are cancerous but no reputable newspaper will have anything harmful, just potentially annoying.

na85 9y ago

That AdNauseam causes potential damage to people running ads and generating revenue from ads by devaluing clicks is a feature, not a bug. My understanding of the plugin is that it views advertising as universally bad, and that if a site cannot survive without ads, it must not be worth much at all, and deserves to die. I wholeheartedly agree with this view.

chuckdries 9y ago
Why? I work at a newspaper, we've survived on ads for decades, the way we deliver them has just changed. Most newspapers are like this, are you saying we should not exist?
- googl3_angst 9y ago
  The recent push for AdNauseam seems to be from the 4chan, free speech crowd, as a reaction to Google efforts aimed at stifling politically incorrect speech on its platforms. See https://ageofshitlords.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/4chan-fighting-google-fake-clicks.png https://ageofshitlords.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/4chan-...
  - chuckdries 9y ago
    This is especially frustrating because we don't use an ad network. We have an ad sales department that sells ad space directly to local businesses. They're not hurting google, just us.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Are your ads on the Adnauseum lists?
  - etplayer 9y ago
    Slightly off topic, but I find the implication made in the image you linked that Google, a company which profits via wage labour, which owns property, is a "Communist" organisation to be absolutely hilarious if it wasn't a sincerely held view by some poor souls.

sweep4r 9y ago

>Yup. you can all calm down and take some time to educate yourself about the damage this can and will cause to small-website owners You can all calm down and take some time to hear me tell you you have to believe in what I believe.

wnevets 9y ago

I've never heard of this fork before and Im not sure why its on the front page of HN.

4bpp 9y ago
My impression has been that it has commanded somewhat outsize (to its actual utility/userbase) attention ever since its conception, because the promise of an "optimised, bloat-free, classic" version of Firefox clearly is attractive to many outspoken technologists. It gets mentioned on HN periodically: https://www.google.com/search?q=pale+moon+site%3Anews.ycombinator.com&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=pale+moon+site%3Anews.ycombi...
akerro 9y ago
Biggest fork of Firefox, apparently not anymore community driven, they tried to "unfuck" Firefox by removing enabled built-in google trackers, business decisions made by Mozilla that community didn't like because they were financially or ideologically driven (like Pocket or Telemetry?).
- deleted 9y ago
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jccalhoun 9y ago
I don't use Pale Moon but it has been around for a while. It got a boost when Firefox switched to the Australis interface and people who didn't like it switched to Pale Moon. And it has been getting another boost because of Firefox getting rid of the old extension model.

hbbio 9y ago

The motto of Pale Moon is "Your browser, Your way". But apparently not very so... The current ad system is broken and, although I understand Google decision to protect its own profits, I don't see why an open source project that aims to provide an unbiased browsing experience would follow suit.

chuckdries 9y ago
You're hurting the publishers. I'm a software developer at a local newspaper. We've been dealing with floods of fake ad clicks for about a year now, and they severely hurt our bottom line. We don't even use an ad network a la google, we sell our own ads to local businesses and such. You're not sticking it to the man, you're punishing me and my colleagues and friends for writing content that you wanted to read. You're directly hurting us. To be clear, I'm not sure a browser should have a say on this in general, but I understand the argument they make on a personal level. EDIT: 1. I misread OP 2. I don't work directly with our ad handling, as I work with the editorial team and generally advertising and editorial are separate for a reason, but I went digging just for fun. We sell our ad space to individual businesses. Our ad sales team does approve every ad we run. We use Google Analytics and Chartbeat, and both the newsroom and ad team have access to those analytics. The ads we serve vary - one ad from a housing complex down the street is literally just an image with an affiliate link, but one ad from our the ASU Foundation appears to load content from doubleclick.net.
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  Irrelevant of OPs point. Disallowing an extension that a user might want doesn't seem like "your way"
  - chuckdries 9y ago
    True, I misread OP. I don't know that I think the browser should have a say in this discussion.
  - eropple 9y ago
    It isn't "disallowed". You make a change in about:config.

akerro 9y ago

I wasn't convinced if I should install AdNaunseam, now I am. thanks Moonchild :)

wongarsu 9y ago

>Generating this kind of traffic does not achieve its intended goal (providing protest against ad networks or causing advertising to fail for ad networks) since the ones punished are the publishers (those who rely on this revenue) and not the ad networks. I don't think I follow? People don't like the ad networks and want them to change or fail. That's achievable by forcing change at either the advertiser, the network or the website owner. Decreasing the usefulness of ad networks to website owners accomplishes the same thing as hitting the ad effectiveness: it takes away business from the ad network. Which sounds exactly like the intended goal.

donohoe 9y ago
It doesn't quite work that way. Yes, it decreases the usefulness of ad networks and hurts them - hopefully inciting change eventually. But between the reader and the ad network is the website owner. They typically have no say or control over the ad network. As fake clicks are detected they are the ones that will get punished. Their CPN can drop meaning a real hit in revenue. If fake ad clicks add up they may be booted form the ad network and then they lose all ad revenue. That is real harm. We can all agree that ad networks can be invasive and we need real change. But lets be honest that there is real collateral damage and this does cause it.
- icebraining 9y ago
  They typically have no say or control over the ad network. How so? They chose the ad network, no?
  - notgood 9y ago
    So what? What happens next? Do I have to ask every creator of ad attacks extensions like AdNauseam if the ad network I wanna use fits in their definition of "good" before adding it to my site? Do I have to ask them for permission about what HTML/JavaScript can I place in my website? Worse, what happens if they think every ad network that fits my user-base is evil? Then what? I still need to make ends meet so should I try to bribe the AdNauseam devs into whitelisting my site? That's the thing about attacking on the basis of having the moral high ground, you are very likely to end up becoming the thing you hate. EDIT: (cause HN doesn't let me reply) Answer to @icebraining It's way more like, what if I'm pouring red colorant to the rivers, and I know the colorants make absolutely no damage to the river but activists still try to destroy my business because they strongly believe so. So yeah, I find your counter-argument depressing as well; because its not about who is right or wrong but the one who believes themselves in control to determine being both the judge and the executioner. Answer to @wongarsu: After installed this extension silently attacks networks, and you think people is gonna care enough to jump to the next best one... because you think they are constantly reading about the moral basis of the blacklisted ad networks? ...right? You are more delusional than expected and I hope ad networks start pouring money into permanently banning users of this extension from all major websites.

jszymborski 9y ago

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, except even more minimal. Not to mention you can customise the theme all you want. I'm pretty sure this moves comes from the fact that Pale Moon gets revenue from ads on the default start page, which is totally fine in and of itself; but having an extension blacklist for any other reason other than to prevent end-user exploitation is a perfect indicator that the judgement of the development team is not to be trusted.

deleted 9y ago
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jd3 9y ago
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.

Animats 9y ago

It only hurts pay-per-click advertisers. Ones whose ads directly lead to a sale are unaffected.

belorn 9y ago

The idea that ad networks don't care about click rates and clicks generated by bots seems very incorrect and false on even a surface glance. The revenue from ad networks is based on advertisers getting purchases and through that validate a marketing budget. It would be crazy if the networks did't already have several system to handle bad data and clicks generated by bots. In addition, the argument is that the extension is only punishing the publishers. What it really do is to change the balance between unethical ad networks and ethical alternatives. By only punishing networks that automatically track users, the more ethical networks become better in comparison and will give better returns for each dollar spent on marketing. One could call this strong arming the publisher to chose more ethical, but an other way to see it is to eliminate the race to the bottom and discourage a lemon market. We currently have networks that have no problem with infecting peoples machines with malware, advertising products to children, or target the sick and vulnerable. If I ran AdNauseam and it causes a single website to consider an alternative ad network, I would consider that a major win for the Internet, even if that meant a few % less revenue. Considering that some site has already gone over to more ethical alternatives in order to resolve the problem of ad blocking, it seems we are already making steps towards this future.

notgood 9y ago

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; you didn't were part of the committee that heard both parts and made a rightful judgment in a case-by-case basis, you just decided "yeah this random guy who created this extension probably picked the bad ones, lets hurt them"; so you don't even have the moral high ground you pretend.

daodedickinson 9y ago
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.

confusedrobot 9y ago

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.

dane-pgp 9y ago
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 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 a user could be guilty under something like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act if they did not comply. Rather than going after the individual users, though, (a tactic which was largely abandoned for dealing with torrenting), the publishers of a website could potentially try suing the makers of an ad-blocker. Under theories of "vicarious infringement" and conspiracy (such as is used against sites like The Pirate Bay and other search engines which ISPs are required to block in some countries), I wouldn't be surprised if we one day see browser makers liable for the extensions they "allow" to be installed in "their" browsers, and then OS distributors held liable for browsers that they allow to be installed on "their" OS. It is worth noting that ultimately it will be hardware-enforced TPM / Secure Boot technology that makes such laws and injunctions feasible. We need to be careful what precedents are set by projects like Pale Moon, and the sort of technological ecosystems we are building.
- fish_fan 9y ago
  Then they should allow an http header saying "if you're going to serve ads, don't bother, i'd rather look at nothing".

deleted 9y ago

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jancsika 9y ago

How is it that Target will infer that a teenager is pregnant based off the items she has bought over the past few weeks at their stores, but ad networks won't infer which of their potential customers are likely to serve up malware over their networks?

Simon_says 9y ago
They make money directly off of one? Whereas the other they potentially can maybe avoid losing some theoretical business or avoid having to pay fines in the future. Probably there's no one who's clear job responsibility is to ensure security.

wolco 9y ago

AdNauseam is foolish because if this is a success adnetworks go back to the good old days of the ugly in your face ads to ensure they count you as seeing there ad on each impression. Remember the exit ad that loaded after you left the page? Remember the expanding full page banner? They will be back.

jhasse 9y ago
Better than tracking and auto-playing videos.
amiga-workbench 9y ago
They never went away?

Paul_S 9y ago

Never heard of adnauseam before, the developers deserve a Nobel Peace Prize. The argument saying that it damages the publishers and not the ad networks is pure nonsense. By damaging the publisher's ability to make money of ads you also damage the ad network - how is this not clear? ALL and I mean all advertisers can die a slow agonising death as far as I care. They are adding nothing of value to the civilisation. And if your reply is "well, how about I start charging you for my website?" then I'm absolutely fine with it. Please do.

emerged 9y ago
The ad industry stops at nothing to force themselves in front of our face and ears. The notion that a completely legal counterattack is somehow unethical is profoundly absurd.

rosstex 9y ago

How does the efficiency/ad coverage compare to uBlock Origin? That's all that matters to me.

fish_fan 9y ago
Virtually identical in my experience.
- rosstex 9y ago
  Oh! I'm dumb, I just noticed that it's a fork. Sweet :)

jedberg 9y ago

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". You know how many people running adblock started paying? Not a lot. Sure, some did, but there were still a whole bunch of people who just wanted a free experience. The ads on reddit weren't even all that heavy CPU and bandwidth-wise. My point is, I don't think a lot of you are being totally honest when you say you'd be willing to pay if the site removed advertising. In a lot of cases, those sites get a lot more money from the advertisers than you would ever be willing to pay, because they simply don't provide that much value to you.

themusicgod1 9y ago
I bought reddit gold for ~10 years. And how was I repaid? I was shadowbanned, and when I went to check my old comments that I contributed over the 8+ years I was on reddit most of them were gone. You coopted the world's conversation into a private space where you could profit from it. This might seem OK in lala-land of silicon valley, but what you have done is horribly horribly wrong in that you've moved millions of people into a place where political views can be easily censored, and where groups like The Cabal can gain power over what is and is not seen by millions. Reddit is broken. Everything about it is broken, the ad model, is broken. It is damage to humankind so large that routing around may not be enough.
sanxiyn 9y ago
I agree a lot of people are not honest, but some are. I bought Reddit gold, for example.
- jedberg 9y ago
  Sure. Like I said, some people bought it and then disabled ads, and that's cool. Some people even bought it and left the ads, that was even cooler! But a lot of people, people who directly said, "I will pay you if you let me remove the ads", did not.

schoen 9y ago

A linguistic excursion not related to the substance of this controversy: I'm looking for a term for "jokes or puns where the morphemes between which a clever relationship is drawn are actually true cognates, but the connection is no longer apparent to native speakers". Here that's true because English ad < advertisement < Middle French advertissement < advertir < Latin advertere 'turn towards, notice' is the same ad in "ad nauseam" 'to the point of nausea', both meaning 'toward' in Latin. Does this kind of situation have a well-established name? (There might be subcategories for the case where the cognate preserves a connection in the meaning that's part of the joke, and the case where it's just coincidental, like here.)

contravariant 9y ago
Even if you reuse the same word it's still a pun. I don't think there's a different name for puns on homophones, cognates, or homonyms.

imhoguy 9y ago

What a perfect Streisand effect. I am going to check that so much polarising AdNaus...thingie.

j3097736 9y ago

I don't understand what the fuss is all about, last time I tried AdNauseum it barely detected and clicked very few Ads, maybe one or two on really ad-heavy popular websites, and many issues on github confirm that its detector is quite finicky.

hedora 9y ago

I think most people would agree that non-consensual profiling / tracking of users is immoral. AdNauseum directly breaks most business models that rely on that. I don't see the problem. Want to support your site using ads? Why not use display ads? Sell space next to high quality content to advertisers with relevant products. Problem solved, and it puts bottom feeder ad exchanges and content spam websites out of business. (And it probably puts a big wrench in the fake news industry as a bonus)

clarry 9y ago
> Want to support your site using ads? Why not use display ads? Sell space next to high quality content to advertisers with relevant products. The hard part is that most sites don't have high quality content, and there are no relevant products.. I can see why people want to damage these sites.

deleted 9y ago

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jim-jim-jim 9y ago

It'd really be no big loss if every site that relied on ad revenue went under because of this. It'd be a net positive actually. No more Content Trough? No more Socialworthy? No more Reddit? Sign me up. There will always be personal sites and phpbb forums run out of pocket for passion not profit. I use Ad Nauseum not because I think "the current advertising model is broken" or whatever. I'm not interested in reform. I'd like people to stop treating the web as a business opportunity. If this extension actively harms the bottom lines of the most shameless sorts of profiteers, then that totally rules and I support it 100%.

mariuolo 9y ago

I feel like most people here are missing the point. The question is not whether it is proper to use AdNauseam or not, the question is whether it should be a personal choice or one imposed upon by the browser. In this case, PaleMoon was championed as the "freedom browser" as opposed to the "designed by a committee" Firefox. If this passes, does it actually mean it will simply be a fork of Firefox that keeps XPCOM support but with the same overall attitude?