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It's being reported on HackerNews that the Pale Moon Browser is blocking the AdNauseum extension, an ad blocking extension designed to obfuscate browsing data and protect users from tracking by advertising networks.
The main story link is to the Pale Moon Forum which summarises the issue as follows:
After investigating the AdNauseam extension's behavior and the results for web publishers, the extension has been added to the Pale Moon blocklist with a severity level of 2 (meaning you won't be able to enable it unless you increase the blocking level in about:config to 3). For those unfamiliar with this extension: it generates false ad "clicks" to ad servers in an attempt to generate "noise" for the ad networks in a protest against the advertising network system as a whole.
While the premise behind this is similar to poisoning trackers with false fingerprints (which we are proponents of, ourselves), and we normally let users decide for themselves what they want to do with their browser, we are strictly against allowing extensions that cause direct damage (including damage to third parties). There is a subtle but important difference between blocking content and generating fake user interaction.
[...] Because this extension causes direct and indirect economic damage to website owners, it is classified as malware, and as such blocked.
From the forum threads this decision has been slightly controversial with some users.
If you're not familiar with Pale Moon, it is an Open Source web browser, forked from a mature Mozilla code release, and has been covered on SN before.
[Update: Added text re: blocking level; bolded text that was bold in the original posting. --martyb]
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Monday August 28 2017, @04:57PM (7 children)
Good points. I definitely don't like the standard of treating "economic damage" as real, actionable harm. That said, there's a difference to me between passively not viewing or even requesting ads from servers, versus actively sending traffic to a server. At some point you cross a line and that traffic/noise becomes some sort of DOS attack. I don't know if this extension crosses that point or where that point really is.
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 28 2017, @05:08PM (1 child)
Some of us would turn that argument around. We pay for our internet access, only to be exposed to a continuous DOS attack by the advertising companies. The stuff I really want to see is mostly measured in kb. The ad companies try to shove megabytes, and even tens of megabytes at me, with each few kilobytes I ask for. The content that I am looking for loads very slowly, as a result.
While it's true that two wrongs don't make a right, no one has figured out how to make the situation right. So, if they are going to hammer me, why not hammer tham back?
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday August 28 2017, @05:47PM
You can just adblock and save the bandwidth. They can't hammer you.
Adblock also saves your time, the advertiser's bandwidth.
You don't actually even hurt the website you were visiting, because you weren't going to click those ads anyway.
(The industry is pay per click, not pay per impression).
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(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday August 28 2017, @05:42PM (1 child)
Its more than a DOS attack. Its a revenue shifting scheme.
If you don't block ads, but you ignore them, the advertiser is not harmed. That much non-productive web traffic was already expected in their advertising budget.
If you fail to request an ad, (by ad-blocking) you cause no harm to the advertiser, you actually help them by reducing their costs, as well as user costs.
But If you don't block ads, and then you simulate clicks on those ads, (but again don't show any ad content), you cost the advertiser the same bandwidth and ad serving overhead, and then you pile on the cost of the actual site visit (page serving) to the advertiser's overhead. Further, since the wed advertising industry is built around pay per click, (not pay per impression) you induce some revenue transfer from the advertisers to the website hosting the links. (Sort of like Click Fraud).
You further increase the cost to the user, bandwidth, electricity, clogged pipes, etc. (You DOS the user).
So the AdNauseam plug in increases EVERYBODY's cost except the web site hosting the link and the everyone's internet provider.
Those guys make MORE money.
From the AdNauseam page
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(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Friday September 01 2017, @10:59PM
So kind of like an inverse neutron bomb? Kills advertisers but leaves the website standing?
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday August 28 2017, @05:51PM
But if you view the site without an ad-blocker, you're going to be sending that same traffic to a server. It only becomes a DOS attack if it's far more traffic than you'd send by viewing the ad. (Disclaimer: I did not read TFA.)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @06:02PM (1 child)
"At some point you cross a line and that traffic/noise becomes some sort of DOS attack."
Bullshit. The traffic being sent is exactly what the website wanted sent. If the browser was sending information back to the website 100+ times per page view, instead of once, I could accept that kind of argument. But that's not what's happening.
If a webserver is DOSed by it's own ad traffic being returned as requested, then perhaps they should rethink what information they're requesting. Just because people refuse to look at the results is not the problem. And in fact forcing people to view ads they don't want to view can be more damaging to the website than what this plugin does. For instance, I personally make mental notes of anything being aggressively advertised to me. And then I fucking boycott it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 29 2017, @01:45AM
I think the real answer is for advertising companies to stop being malicious by conducting mass surveillance on the populace. Others, as well, since advertising companies are hardly the only ones we have to worry about. We need more of this kind of extension for other things.