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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: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @05:04PM (10 children)
And farther down the thread, the significance of those levels was clarified:
I can kinda see both sides of the argument over this extension, but this response seems very reasonable to me.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @05:28PM (8 children)
If there's doubt about whether or not an extension should be blocked, then the sensible thing to do is to not block it.
This lets the users make the choice about using the extension for themselves. If they want to use it, then they can use it. If they don't want to use it, then they don't have to use it.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday August 28 2017, @06:05PM (6 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @06:30PM
No, they can't just use it, like they can with so many other extensions.
A Pale Moon user who wants to use this particular extension would need to jump over some artificial barriers and take very specific actions (such as fucking around with about:config values) in order to use this extension.
That's why this whole debacle is even happening. Actions are being taken to interfere with which extensions Pale Moon's users can use.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by edIII on Monday August 28 2017, @07:12PM (4 children)
The part that you don't seem to be getting is the bigger argument about ideology. It's not that you CAN get it to work, it's that the Pale Moon developers DON'T WANT YOU TO AND BELIEVE ITS BAD. Categorizing Ad Nasuem as malware is very, very, very, fucking much a political statement in support of Big Data and against the Pale Moon user base taking the fight to them.
All of the logic involved is utter bullshit. Economic damages? You mean like the ones the MAFIAA claim all the time from all the revenue they aren't receiving? Those kinds of illusory damages? Talk about a slippery slope! Just about every single adblocking, flashblocking, pop-up blocking, etc. technology could be argued to be economically damaging. If that's the line, it's vague as fuck and allows Pale Moon to arbitrarily support, and indeed make strong claims, about the morality of the software we would use with it. Just about any corporation can make some bullshit argument about economic damages, especially indirectly. That kind of specious logic doesn't serve the REAL customer; The person web surfing with Pale Moon.
If we take apart what this plugin does in particular, it LIES. Every single link is clicked which leaves the site operators, and the true aggrieved parties, the big data players holding data that isn't valuable at all to the final intended customer; Other businesses.
So what Pale Moon has told me is that they support big business on the web, are against Bayesian poisoning (which is arguably more effective than blocking), and are against all indirect and direct economic damages incurred by site operators from Pale Moon users. In particular, the loss of ad revenue and big data products and services derived from tracking data. Considering that the line is vague as fuck, and any corporate sycophant like Khallow could engineer some bullshit showing indirect damages from users, Pale Moon leaves it wide fucking open which plugins will be undesirable next.
Interesting. So does the mean that Pale Moon is against its use with TOR? That could arguably cause indirect and direct damages since we are hiding our IP address by using somebody else's, which blends all the tracking data together.
Well.... good to know. I haven't installed Pale Moon on my new system, and now never will. R.I.P. Pale Moon. It was good while it lasted.
Maybe if some Pale Moon developers are upset too they can fork, merge with Ad Nauseum, and then make a browser specifically designed to give false data to Big Data, up to and including its headers to fake other browsers. It's sounding like fork time to me, and that would be a good project. In any case, I predict a dwindling user base for Pale Moon. At least by ONE ;)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Monday August 28 2017, @07:25PM
look for 'brightsun.org' browser to come into existence in the next few weeks.
(lol)
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @08:22PM (2 children)
You are missing a possible motivation on the side of the Palemoon devs though. Palemoon is a young project with a small userbase. It's mostly compatible to Firefox with regard to rendering HTML, yet it transmits its own User Agent string. This causes problems with some websites, causing site operators additional work if they want to support Palemoon.
If the impression arises that a significant portion of Palemoon users are not just adblocking, but actively sabotaging ad networks, motivation to support Palemoon amongst site operators in bed with the ad networks will... shall we say "drop off"? A cliff?
This in turn would worsen the user experience of newly won over Palemoon users who don't know about the technicalities of browser switches on the server side or how to spoof the UA string. So I'd say from their perspective, this is about self preservation to at least have a chance to grow their user base.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday August 28 2017, @08:42PM (1 child)
So.... this plugin doesn't work in Chrome, Firefox, Edge/IE, Opera, or Safari? I'm not sure why Pale Moon would be singled out over the others, unless this plugin is targeting Pale Moon specifically, which would be weird.
That's a good reason you've brought up. If it was the true motivations, why not elucidate on the website for all us to understand? It's still allowed, but the default Pale Moon policy is to block it in order to still receive support from major site operators. THAT is something the user base can understand, debate, and process. I get it, and I'm fully committed to absolute fucking war against Big Data & Big Advertising.
We were given the bullshit of indirect or direct damages to site operators from fighting tracking and advertising, which happens on ALL PLATFORMS. Yes, it's a possible motivation, and one that Pale Moon has not felt it needs to confirm or deny. Since we are not hearing that from Pale Moon, I need to fall back to what I can understand from their statements. Those simply point to Pale Moon cuddling the balls of Big Data & Big Advertising, while deriding their collective enemies.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @11:26PM
I would wager that a large portion of Palemoon users right now have actually switched from Firefox because they don't like the direction Mozilla is taking, cuddling up to Big Data and Big Content.
It's reasonable to assume that many of these early adopters are authorities on tech matters within their social networks of less tech-savvy friends. If they recommend to their friends "try Palemoon with such and such extensions" and all those extensions but AdNauseam install without a hitch, said friends will probably forget all about it and still be happy.
With that in mind, there's bound to be a huge wave of Firefox users asking their tech friends about a possible replacement once Mozilla breaks compatibility with most existing extensions.
On the upside, this is the first time I've heard about AdNauseam. Been a Palemoon user for some time and will try out AdNauseam thanks to the Palemoon devs giving it some publicity :)
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Monday August 28 2017, @06:20PM
That's a silly argument. You could argue exactly the same for the stance of Palemoon. Let me spell that out for you:
I highly doubt anyone on SN exists that has never entered about:config.
Hell, most of us would be able to take an open source project, change the code to remove a block, recompile, and run that browser.
And if there's enough people who care, fork that stuff!
If not, just shut up and enjoy your unpaid software.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday August 28 2017, @10:06PM
Why should there be a response in the first place? And what happens, if the controllers of Pale Moon decide to escalate to a more serious response that prevents the extension from working at all?