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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: 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).
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.