
Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension - 4bpp
https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=16504
======
jedberg
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.

~~~
aphextron
Anyone arguing against AdNauseum is totally missing the point here. We, as
users, could not possibly care less if your site goes out of business because
you are unable to come up with another form of monetization. Something will
rise up to take your place that is more user friendly. The market will find a
way.

I somehow _strongly_ doubt that if the current paradigm of ad based revenue
were to disappear overnight, that no one would figure out something to take
it's place and that the internet would become a barren wasteland devoid of
content. As it is now, there is _zero_ incentive for content developers to
look for any other solution because the status quo is so ingrained in people's
minds that we have just accepted it as "the way things are". This is very
clearly starting to change, and so yes, there will be collateral damage in the
mean time. But the Web that emerges from this change will be better for
everyone involved.

~~~
umanwizard
> We, as users, could not possibly care less if your site goes out of business

Reddit users wouldn't care if Reddit went out of business? I find that hard to
believe.

> Something will rise up to take your place that is more user friendly. The
> market will find a way.

Got any ideas? Nobody has come up with anything that works so far.

> I somehow strongly doubt that if the current paradigm of ad based revenue
> were to disappear overnight, that no one would figure out something to take
> it's place and that the internet would become a barren wasteland devoid of
> content.

What is this suspicion based on?

~~~
aphextron
>Reddit users wouldn't care if Reddit went out of business? I find that hard
to believe.

Sure they would. But if Reddit went out of business, a new Reddit would
immediately take it's place. The value to be extracted from such a large user-
base is too great for this niche to go unfilled. _How_ that value would be
extracted in an ad-free system is yet to be seen. But I have faith in human
ingenuity.

>Got any ideas? Nobody has come up with anything that works so far.

That is precisely my point. No one has come up with any ideas so far because
there is not sufficient incentive. The model that now exists makes money, so
why would anyone try too hard to rock the boat? Sure there a few small bit
players trying to change things. But these limited ideological efforts are
completely different from the full brunt of a capitalist market seeking
profits under constraints that completely disallow advertising.

------
hbbio
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
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.

~~~
zeta0134
On the one hand, I agree with your sentiment in general. However, it's a
double edged sword here. LOTS of people are so sick of advertising networks,
tracking, privacy invasion and malware from compromised ad networks that the
underlying issue, the idea that click and impression based advertising is
fundamentally _flawed,_ is something that people are going to continue to
protest. If the system is so broken that it's susceptible to this kind of
click-jacking, then it was never a really good system to begin with.

Do I think this is the right way to go about it? Probably not. But I do think
the long term solution needs to be for publishers to move away from the third-
party advertising banner model. While forcing your hand isn't the right way to
do things (and will, you're right, cause more harm than good) if nothing else
AdNauseum has sparked a much needed conversation about ad-based revenue, one
that we as a publishing and content consuming internet community desperately
NEED to have. Because content isn't free, and publishers SHOULD be compensated
for their work. We need to develop a better system to take the place of the
obviously flawed model we've come to rely on, so that everyone comes out on
top, publishers included.

~~~
JohnTHaller
Those people are free not to visit our website. Or even to block all ads if
the site gracefully allows it (most do, mine do).

~~~
davidgerard
> Those people are free not to visit our website.

If you meant that, you'd have a paywall up.

Do you offer legally enforceable indemnity against people getting malware from
ads you serve? If not, then you can't really tell them not to block the ads.

~~~
chii
Even though i hate advertising, I'm against weaponizing clicks on ads to
punish sites. Boycott, or block ads.

------
jszymborski
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.

~~~
jd3
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.

------
Paul_S
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
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.

------
wongarsu
>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.

~~~
JohnTHaller
Yeah, no. This sort of purposefully doing fake clicks at websites you're a fan
of thing ups the chances of that website of getting banned from their ad
network. Which is paying their hosting bills. Which simply puts them out of
business.

~~~
anotherbrownguy
Yes, it might put those sites out of business - the websites which rely solely
on web traffic use fake titles, sensationalist headlines, click baits, troll
baits, fake news i.e. most of what is wrong with the internet. It harms them
in the short term... and the most evil company in the history of the world in
the long term. I see it as win-win.

~~~
JohnTHaller
Again, no. How do you think nearly all small legit websites that aren't being
bankrolled by a single passionate person stay up? Ad revenue.

As an example, PortableApps.com isn't exactly small, but without ad revenue
I'd shut it down. It doesn't make enough in donations and a handful of drive
sales to survive.

~~~
smichel17
Ideally we'd find other ways to bankroll websites. Obligatory snowdrift.coop
plug here (best intro, though with outdated visuals, remains
[https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/intro](https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/intro)
)

~~~
JohnTHaller
Ideally. But everything has failed so far except donation-style things for a
handful of specific niches.

~~~
hedora
Why not sell display ads that are relevant to your target audience? Use pay
per impression instead of pay per click. (To the extent AdNauseum succeeds,
pay per click won't pay well anyway)

~~~
JohnTHaller
If there were an ad network or agency that did this with a similar level of
revenue (or even just close), I'd switch. There isn't. I've looked. For years.
I wish there were.

~~~
jhasse
If everyone was using AdNauseam, there would be one.

------
na85
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.

~~~
addicted
So Google, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat have no value? Because those aren't
just little sites, but entire companies that have value solely because of ads.
Take away ads and they don't exist.

~~~
serf
>So Google, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat have no value?

No, not value-less, but I didn't agree to pay for their services with the
total loss of my privacy on-line. (and one doesn't have to use any of those
services in order to be spied upon by them)

~~~
KGIII
One might argue that you do agree, when you make use of their services.

~~~
sanxiyn
No, Google terms of service does not forbid you from blocking Google ads.

And no free rider argument please, I am perfectly willing to pay for Google's
service. If Google wants to get paid, they can make Google Contributor
available in my country. I already pay for YouTube Red.

~~~
KGIII
Blocking is much different than fraudulently clicking.

~~~
sanxiyn
Google terms of service does not forbid users from producing invalid clicks
either. (Point 1, it's called invalid, not fraudulent. Point 2, Google does
forbid website owners, but not users.)

I am just objecting to your statement that when one uses Google's service, one
is making any sort of agreement that one wouldn't block ads or produce invalid
clicks. There is no such agreement.

~~~
KGIII
No, I'm sticking with fraudulent. The intent is to defraud. Even if you say
there is no specific agreement, there's the morality issue. Your morals may
allow you to essentially vandalize, mine do not.

The agreement may not be written down, but I think it's covered in the 'don't
be an ass' part of the social contract.

~~~
fish_fan
It's not on me that clicks are considered meaningful—that's the site owner's
problem.

~~~
KGIII
"I did it, but it's not my responsibility." That's what I read from your
reply. Suffice to say, we have different morals.

And no, I don't have anything that is ad supported. I dislike the tracking and
security implications, but not enough to alter my morality. This is morally
similar to vandalism, in my opinion.

If your okay with that, don't let me tell you how to live. I just can't
justify harming people for something I can just block or ignore.

------
userbinator
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/fe7...](https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/Pale-
Moon/commit/fe75cfd88312409d2b93bcdcbe83b3f8fd5f554d)

 _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
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
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
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.

~~~
kilburn
Your story doesn't add up to me.

> We don't use an ad network, we sell our ad space directly to local
> businesses.

Fine, so you either (a) tell a business that you have XXX page views per month
so they'll get YYY impressions (which may be blocked, but that you can try to
make non-intrusive); or (b) you let the advertiser track the value they
receive from ads placed on your site.

In the (a) case, there shouldn't be any difference between adblock and a fake
clicking blocker. In the (b) case, a sensible advertiser should be able to
weigh the value of the add they placed on your site no matter what mix of real
and fake clicks they get: I ended up selling X USD to visitors coming through
that place's ads, which amounted to Y USD in profit. Y > cost of the ads? Keep
the ads going. Y < cost of the ads? sorry but we're out.

The only situation where fake clicks are bad is that where the advertiser
suddenly realizes that "hey we sent you XXX people" is just a meaningless
figure from which you just cannot infer a proper value metric to decide
whether that ad is worth its cost or not. Which is another way of saying that
it gives ad purchasers a reality check that can only be positive in the long
run, disregarding the short-term loses of people who were selling inflated ad
spaces until now.

~~~
chuckdries
As I understand it, what we do is closer to B. I'm not on the ad sales team,
but the way it was explained to me, our ad partners have analytics on their
website like everyone does these days, and they generally give us a link
specific to our website that they can look at the analytics on and tell how
many people visited that page, therefore how many people clicked the link. I'm
told they see huge spikes in traffic that looks fake and get angry, threaten
to drop us, etc. Basically they accuse us of artificially inflating our
numbers, and without super detailed analysis it's hard to tell what is and is
not fake. If you compare the traffic coming in to their affiliate links to the
traffic we record on our own analytics, I'm told it looks super suspicious.

EDIT: apparently some advertisers have ad content prepared they give us that
uses common advertising tools like doubleclick.net and such.

------
schoen
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
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.

------
belorn
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.

------
jancsika
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
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.

------
confusedrobot
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
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
Then they should allow an http header saying "if you're going to serve ads,
don't bother, i'd rather look at nothing".

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

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

------
mariuolo
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?

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

------
jim-jim-jim
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%.

------
hedora
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
> 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.

------
j3097736
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.

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

~~~
fish_fan
Virtually identical in my experience.

~~~
rosstex
Oh! I'm dumb, I just noticed that it's a fork. Sweet :)

------
wolco
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
Better than tracking and auto-playing videos.

------
rocky1138
Can't people just compile their own version sans-censorship?

~~~
0xndc
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.

~~~
userbinator
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)

------
sweep4r
>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.

------
notgood
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
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.

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

~~~
akerro
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?).

