Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Monday August 28 2017, @04:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the your-browser-my-way dept.

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]


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2, Disagree) by Pino P on Monday August 28 2017, @06:52PM (1 child)

    by Pino P (4721) on Monday August 28 2017, @06:52PM (#560406) Journal

    I know Chrome includes proprietary Adobe Flash Player, MPEG-4 decoder (AVC+AAC), Widevine DRM for Hollywood movies, and optional crash reporting. (Source [googlesource.com]) Remove those and you have Chromium, which is libre. And come the end of 2020, Flash Player won't work anyway.

    Let's repeat this for Pale Moon. A quick web search turns up a list on the forum [palemoon.org]: web installer, profile migration, Commander extension, and (again) Flash Player. How practical would it be to make Pale Moon-libre without these?

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   0  
       Disagree=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Disagree' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @08:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @08:27PM (#560472)

    what? it doesn't have Flash Player. What you are referring to is the tool used to run flash in protected mode.

    It's great you included the link, because it doesn't state what you are claiming.

    What you've written is like stating no-script has Flash installed because it has a Flash blocker.

    You need to have Flash installed for Palemoon or noscript to do anything with Flash. What you wrote is very misleading and you didn't even verify this before admonishing the product for doing a bad thing.