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False flags and information is the only way to deal with this stuff... If FB thinks you're a 72 yr old retired dentist from OK, and you buy nothing but feminin

by 12xo 7y ago

False flags and information is the only way to deal with this stuff... If FB thinks you're a 72 yr old retired dentist from OK, and you buy nothing but feminine hygiene products and 3 wheel wheel barrels, you're pretty worthless as a consumer. The future of ad block is disinformation. Makes the entire ecosystem worthless

tialaramex 7y ago
Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End" novel has the Friends of Privacy who spew falsehoods into the Network so as to disrupt attempts to track everybody all the time. My first "Agent" contribution when I worked as a researcher was just code which listened in to other conversations and then lied about stuff. If another agent said "X = 4" my agent would state "X is not 4" just to disrupt things. I suspect it's much harder to do this successfully in real life than it is in a novel where it's just an excuse as to why otherwise resourceful intelligence agencies don't know who the central character Rabbit is (Vinge says he's not sure either, to me it seems obvious Rabbit is an AI, surely the whole point of all Vinge novels is that there's a Singularitarian Apocalypse, and in Rainbows End the humans think they've averted that apocalypse but actually the thing that just saved them is the Apocalypse and they ought to be terrified)
msla 7y ago
AdNauseam is here: https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/ It's on in the Firefox extensions site: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/ But not on the Google Chrome site: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/05/adnauseam_expelled_from_chrome_web_store/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/05/adnauseam_expelled_...
- 12xo 7y ago
  Thanks for sharing this. Looks very interesting but with the fraud filtering in place for most ads, I wonder how effective this can be in the long run. Seems as if it'd be filtered out but maybe, that's the point???
  - maximente 7y ago
    i think that's exactly it - hopefully you'd get put on some adnauseum users list where your traffic is just dropped. OTOH maybe google et al just uses that list for working on fraud denial/defeat so you're probably feeding the beast no matter what.
eindiran 7y ago
There is a very cool book on the topic. If anyone is interested in finding out some potential mitigations (some implemented, some theoretical), I'd recommend giving it a read: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/obfuscation https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/obfuscation
- 12xo 7y ago
  Thank you for sharing this. I ordered the book.
fragmede 7y ago
That relies on the majority of people putting in constant vigilance to be implausibly decoded as as 72-yrs old buying feminine hygiene products. Your specific profile may be worthless as a consumer, but unless you can convince 100 of your close friends to similarly feed the system disinformation, you've made it ever so slightly less effective. The metric used evolves (CPC) and the pay rates for them, but until more people actually care to disinform, I don't see that advertising will die any time soon. (Hopefully I'm wrong!)

by 12xo 7y ago

tialaramex 7y ago

Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End" novel has the Friends of Privacy who spew falsehoods into the Network so as to disrupt attempts to track everybody all the time. My first "Agent" contribution when I worked as a researcher was just code which listened in to other conversations and then lied about stuff. If another agent said "X = 4" my agent would state "X is not 4" just to disrupt things. I suspect it's much harder to do this successfully in real life than it is in a novel where it's just an excuse as to why otherwise resourceful intelligence agencies don't know who the central character Rabbit is (Vinge says he's not sure either, to me it seems obvious Rabbit is an AI, surely the whole point of all Vinge novels is that there's a Singularitarian Apocalypse, and in Rainbows End the humans think they've averted that apocalypse but actually the thing that just saved them is the Apocalypse and they ought to be terrified)

msla 7y ago

AdNauseam is here: https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/ It's on in the Firefox extensions site: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/ But not on the Google Chrome site: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/05/adnauseam_expelled_from_chrome_web_store/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/05/adnauseam_expelled_...

12xo 7y ago
Thanks for sharing this. Looks very interesting but with the fraud filtering in place for most ads, I wonder how effective this can be in the long run. Seems as if it'd be filtered out but maybe, that's the point???
- maximente 7y ago
  i think that's exactly it - hopefully you'd get put on some adnauseum users list where your traffic is just dropped. OTOH maybe google et al just uses that list for working on fraud denial/defeat so you're probably feeding the beast no matter what.

eindiran 7y ago

There is a very cool book on the topic. If anyone is interested in finding out some potential mitigations (some implemented, some theoretical), I'd recommend giving it a read: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/obfuscation https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/obfuscation

12xo 7y ago
Thank you for sharing this. I ordered the book.

fragmede 7y ago

That relies on the majority of people putting in constant vigilance to be implausibly decoded as as 72-yrs old buying feminine hygiene products. Your specific profile may be worthless as a consumer, but unless you can convince 100 of your close friends to similarly feed the system disinformation, you've made it ever so slightly less effective. The metric used evolves (CPC) and the pay rates for them, but until more people actually care to disinform, I don't see that advertising will die any time soon. (Hopefully I'm wrong!)