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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 Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @05:24PM (1 child)
The problem isn't that Moonchild has an opinion.
The problem isn't that Moonchild's opinion differs from the opinions held by many Pale Moon users.
The problem is that Moonchild is using Moonchild's position of authority to impose Moonchild's opinion on Pale Moon users who don't share Moonchild's opinion.
If Moonchild doesn't want to use this extension with Moonchild's own installation of Pale Moon, then that's fine.
But Pale Moon users feel that Moonchild shouldn't be using Moonchild's authority within the project to control (to whatever degree) what extensions Pale Moon's users can use.
And I don't think that the Pale Moon users are "over reacting". After seeing how similar unilateral decrees caused so many problems with Firefox, these users should rightfully be very worried.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday August 29 2017, @07:11PM
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