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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: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @07:44PM (1 child)
Malware is defined by its malicious intent, acting against the requirements of the computer user. [wikipedia.org]
The Ad Nasuem malware extension seems that neither acts against the user's requirements nor has any malicious intent towards the user.
Calling Ad Nasuem malware is plainly a poor excuse in the form of a neo-language falacy to impose a political default choice.
It's obvious that even if the user can relax the requierements (and their security) to be able to install the extension, the PaleMoon's intent is to inconvenience the users that consciously want to use it.
Right, right. You always can compile it yourself. Isn't it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 29 2017, @07:22AM
What other term is better suited for an extension that enables the very definition of "click fraud"?
My old collection of IRC winnuke tools is classified as virus/malware by ClamAV. This deeming malicious software as 'malware' - even if the user explicitly wants to use said software - is not new nor limited to Pale Moon devs.