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How about an opt in botnet extension for your browser that focuses it's energy on sites with this sort of dark pattern behaviour. i.e. You install the extension
by northwest65 5y ago
How about an opt in botnet extension for your browser that focuses it's energy on sites with this sort of dark pattern behaviour. i.e. You install the extension, when you come across a site like this you vote it for getting punishment, once the site gets enough vote the botnet occasionally focusses it's energy on the site in question when the participants browser is otherwise sitting idle. The punishment could potentially be anything (follow subscribe links, consuming traffic in the background, a simple DoS), but ideally something that reduces the offending servers ability to do what it's supposed to.
- isamuel 5y agoWhy stop there? Maybe websites you don’t like should have a crowdsourced assassin come to kill the relevant developers.
- northwest65 5y agoThere's an argument to be made that the developers are the new crackers, the new enablers of abusive behaviour. Perhaps they should feel some burn for their actions.
- throwawaylinux 5y agoSo long as all the developers of DoS and assassination extensions "felt the burn" before they could complete their abusive-behavior-enabling technology, I would be fine with that.
- tejtm 5y agoSelective pressure for programmer ethics. May take a more than a few generations to cut through all this cash.
- thomascgalvin 5y agoI've heard rentahitman.com is great. For example: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/rent-a-hitman-wendy-wein-murder-for-hire-sting-operation-1066756/ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/rent-a...
- emptyparadise 5y agoAd blocking grows from the barrel of a gun?
- sroussey 5y agoYeah, so I’ve been a host of things a few times, and got the hate mail, bomb threats and various lawsuits that were aimed at other people but landed with me. The bomb threats and car bomb threats did get me talking to the sheriff about concealed carry permit, but I backed away. The poor woman that answered the phone for a shared office space quit. At Weebly, people bought DDOS but didn’t realize that every site had the backing of our entire infrastructure.
- the_only_law 5y agoAlthough you joke, I’ve seen slightly less extreme propositions that were only half-jokes.
- stavros 5y agoBecause why? Just don't visit these sites if they annoy you. I don't burn down jazz bars just because I don't like jazz.
- noah_buddy 5y agoI'm inclined to agree that committing felonies to avoid patronizing or supporting businesses is a little extreme.
- wffurr 5y agoWhat if you are trying to go to jazz bars but they inexplicably play an extremely loud high pitched tone over the jazz music?
- stavros 5y agoI would go to jazz bars that didn't do that. Still wouldn't burn them down.
- mcbits 5y agoNo need to burn it down. Just buy a bunch of gift cards for the bar and hand them out to people recently released from jail for drunk & disorderly conduct. If the bar is trying to optimize for maximum traffic at the expense of all other quality metrics, surely they won't mind.
- nkrisc 5y agoThis analogy is getting stretched a bit thin, but: you leave.
- northwest65 5y agoWhy, are you paying for said jazz bar in your taxes ala the BBC news site?
- gruez 5y agoMy taxes fund the DEA and I don't like them, but that doesn't mean the way to oppose them is to firebomb their offices.
- brutal_chaos_ 5y agoI like this idea a LOT. However, the potential for abuse is, forgive me, too damn high. The extension owner can extort sites to not be attacked or attacked less. (a la AdBlock Plus, ghostery(?), etc).
- northwest65 5y agoHow about if it merely followed links at a rate not high enough to impact the server itself, but enough to poison the analytics well as much as possible, and rather than opt sites in, it just randomly disrupts the 10,000 largest sites.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ronsor 5y agoThat extension would be banned in minutes because that's illegal.
- smoldesu 5y agoHow exactly do you ban a browser extension? How do you consider legitimate traffic illegal?
- gruez 5y ago>How exactly do you ban a browser extension? browser vendors can blacklist it. >How do you consider legitimate traffic illegal? It's fairly obvious that sending traffic for the sake of generating traffic isn't "legitimate" by any means. Your excuse is flimsier as websites that sell ddos services as "stress testing" services.
- johnisgood 5y ago> browser vendors can blacklist it. How would they do that? They can remove them from their list of extensions, but I can just download it from elsewhere and add it manually, right?
- megous 5y agoIf you hadn't noticed, extensions have to be signed by the browser vendor, so that you can run them. A few people who re-compile their Firefox or Chromium to get rid of that requirement will not make a great DDoS botnet.
- johnisgood 5y agoWell, I have not noticed, because last time I wrote a Chrome extension, I just had the .js files in a directory and I could easily add it to Chrome with developer mode on. I imagine it would be possible with this extension as well. Things may have changed since then, I have not checked.
- tedunangst 5y agoWhy not just use a browser that doesn't do things you don't like?
- dredmorbius 5y agoCare to implement the W3C or WATWG browser spec over the next week? How many independent browser engine variants are viable today? Three? Ramping the difficulty of that problem has specifically limited choice and options. One class of devices (iOS) mandates a single browser engine (Webkit / Safari). Android has a slight pretense of greater openness, but bundles Chrome into most apps. https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....
- Barrin92 5y agothat is vigilante justice and it will end about as well as Reddit trying to catch the Boston bomber. What actually to do when you find someone's website annoying: Don't go there, it's not your site. Same thing I do when I don't like a bar, I leave, I don't start clogging the drain with toilet paper
- sseagull 5y agoThis is a bit like the Blue Frog anti-spam project from years ago https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Frog https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Frog
- sheprogrammer 5y agoThat's an awful idea. Illegal, immoral, and would be abused.
- millzlane 5y agoInstead of the botnet just make the extension block the site with an explanation. Doesn't uBlock Origin do this?
- GabeIsko 5y agoI think the default filter lists don't seek to block video content like this, but you can definitely accomplish this with custom filters. I have filters set up to block these videos on cnn.
- leeoniya 5y agoyou're describing https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/
- 3np 5y agoEven if you assume the server operator is benevolent, that would be trivial to fork (and no one should run a closed-source version of that in the first place) bu someone just forking the extension and using it to trivially DDoS sites for other purposes. Or just break out that part of the code and use it in other malicious client code. Consider also the sybil vector; I could just use a proxy network to vote millions of times for a site I'd like to see targeted. Or how do you ensure that 1 human = 1 vote? Throw in some PoW? No. I'm not for building easily available tools for remotely and unilaterally coordinating DDoS attacks.
- unclebucknasty 5y ago>when you come across a site like this you vote it for getting punishment...botnet... Or just share the site's reputation with other extension users.
- scrose 5y agoLegality aside(on both sides), you assume a media site will take an increase in ‘impressions’ on their site as negative on its own. A lot of these places just care about making it look like there’s eyeballs looking at their stuff so they can sell that ad space at a premium, not whether there actually is. Ie. The places that put these auto play videos.
- xmprt 5y agoDo advertisers actually believe these impressions metrics are valuable? It's strange that they put value in these metrics that everyone hates while completely shunning other forms of content like porn. I'm not suggesting that advertisers start showing their ads next to porn but rather questioning why they are showing their ads next to news websites based on what are essentially fake metrics.
- npsimons 5y agoTempting as this is, it's a colossally bad idea: just as one point, how long do you think it would take for the usual operators of botnets (spammers, those attempting DDoS for other purposes, etc) to target the C&C for this botnet? Why go to the trouble of building a botnet when someone else has already done it for you!
- coretx 5y agoAd nauseam browser plugin
- __MatrixMan__ 5y agoInstead, how about we make a combination browser extension/hosted service which renders the page server-side, extracts the content, and serves it clean. Users can leave bounties on sites and once the bounties pile up high enough somebody will come along, sanitize it for everybody, and collect the bounty. Sorry about your ad revenue, next time don't piss off the masses. The bounties will be public, so site maintainers can see if they're on the list and address the issues. If the community decides that the redesign addresses the problem, the bounty goes back to its issuers.
- SilasX 5y agoThat sounds like the Blue Frog model from 10-15 years ago where IIRC each spam email would trigger one “please opt me out” request from everyone on the user base. Then the spammers started trying to DDOS them back. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Frog
- gkya 5y agoThe replies to this are so funny :D "It's illegal! Immoral! Assassination! Theft! Murder! Felony! To the gallows!" Yeah, no. So it's legal, moral, and acceptable that software and websites are made, by you folk reading this here website no less, to consume orders of magnitude more resources than they need to, just so that web companies---you folk, remember---can make some stats go up and turn them into money. It's okay to make the web less accessible to poor people, disabled people, people in places with bad internet connection, perfectly functional devices which have only become unusable because of this whole bullshit &c, it's okay to mine shitcoins in people's browsers, to sell their life for profits, it's okay to literally get into their private life and play loud videos in there if they don't know how to make that stop, but it's immoral, illegal, unacceptable to retaliate? Immoral and triggering for you lot for folk to just jokingly entertain such idea? This whole business is basically turning wasted money and energy into dollars, not really different than blockchain bullshit essentially. Imagine the resources wasted to produce and consume this nonsense went to making computers user friendly, programmable and accessible. Like, why should my browser occupy ~6G of memory for ~50 pages which could all be just pure HTML and a couple PDFs? Why should I need 6G of memory when 1 or 2GB must do? Why tf a computer with 1GHz or 666MHz CPU can't handle the web, ie a bunch of text documents? This whole bubble is creating immense amount of waste, and it's nonsensical to just limit your thinking to "oh, some annoying websites, just run uBlock". IMHO comes from the same place with "if car-dominated cities bother you and you feel unsafe, just get a car, or better, an SUV". What about fixing the city? What about climate and pollution?.
- the_pwner224 5y agoIt is sad that most of the web is like this, but no, there's nothing illegal, immoral, or unacceptable about people offering to you (for free) shitty services which are a hassle (cost you resources) to use. You're free to not use them if you don't like them. Your argument is like saying if a barbershop always has 2 hour wait times and has crappy music playing on an excessively loud radio, it's ok to retaliate against them. If every barbershop is like this, that's sad and should be fixed, but it still doesn't make it ok to retaliate against them.
- 5y ago