SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Insightful) by Virindi on Monday August 28 2017, @07:46PM
I'd like to add a bit to my comment as well.
As someone who at times has been a software developer, I use that definition ("software that acts against the user's interest without the user's permission") as a moral imperative as well. When you run my code on your device, you are implicitly placing trust in me that I will not turn your machine against you and that I will respect that it is your machine. Thus when developing a feature, I think we must always ask ourselves, are we acting in the interest of the machine owner? Are we genuinely doing what we think they would want us to do, if they knew all the facts that we do about the situation? Or are we turning someone else's machine to our selfish desires, or causing it to turn on its owner?
This moral code does not preclude things like automatic updates when they are genuinely intended to help the user. As an example, it would preclude pushing an update without consent designed to add restrictions to how a user may use an existing feature (say, so that we could sell them a new product). It would also prohibit code which prevents the user from running a particular extension (or tries to make it more trouble than it is worth) because we don't like it even when the user's clear intent is to use it.
I understand that this moral code of software will fall away for a lot of people because they have no choice but to feed their family. But, at least we could keep high morals in free, open source, and/or noncommercial software.