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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, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @06:34PM (2 children)
Can you provide a link?
I want to know which places to avoid (besides the obvious answer of "the entire US").
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday August 29 2017, @12:02AM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 29 2017, @05:25AM
The Tsunami Case: 'a system penetration and software tester' uses his credit card etc on a site and then goes 'oh noes, this might be dodgy, let's see if I can do a 'directory traversal' on it to see what's going on'..and then the fun begins.
The main act of stupidity in this case was that the 'system penetration and software tester' lied to the 'PC plod' he must have though they sent to interview him, pity that, the 'plod' actually knew his subject and caught him out, so the CPS went ahead with a prosecution based on his 'sketchy' behaviour.
The Domestic and General Case: Disgruntled ex-employee mailbombs his old company and gets away with it.
The main act of stupidity in that case being that the CPS chose the wrong bit of legislation to prosecute the bugger with, so the court had no option but let him walk free on points of law.
Oh sure, stupidity abounds here in Britain, and there's legal trickery out there written in such a manner as to make almost anything a prosecutable offence, I know that there's a good chance that some of my antics manipulating URLs to bypass limitations of borkedly 'coded' websites could be regarded as offences under the old Computer Misuse Act here in the UK, and the CPS and Procurators Fiscal would write up the charges in such a manner as to try and guarantee a conviction.
I run Linux on most of my desktop machines, for some reason this seems to lead to...weirdness when browsing a number of web sites (e.g. a local bus company's timetables are downloadable as pdfs from their site, but this only works on windows boxes, both Macs and Linux boxes fail to download them).
Even at work where I use a windows box we have Firefox installed as well as Chrome for those sites which seem to fail to load properly on one or t'other, and for the seriously stupid sites which still insist on it, there's always IE... (there's at least one site that our admin staff need to use on a daily basis which borks horribly on anything other than IE, I shit thee not)