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The next shot in the advertising/blocking war. AdNauseam is a FireFox plug-in, currently in beta, that works in conjunction with AdBlock and clicks ads while it blocks them.
The project was "initiated" by Helen Nissenbaum, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, and Computer Science, at New York University.
As online advertising is becoming more automatic, universal and unsanctioned, AdNauseam works to complete the cycle by automating all ad-clicks universally and blindly on behalf of the target audience. Working in coordination with Ad Block Plus, AdNauseam quietly clicks every blocked ad, registering a visit on the ad networks databases. As the data gathered shows an omnivorous click-stream, user profiling, targeting and surveillance becomes futile.
They also state "AdNauseam serves as a means of amplifying users' discontent with advertising networks that disregard privacy and facilitate bulk surveillance agendas".
Will this help things with online advertising, or make them worse, assuming that's possible?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @01:09AM
I completely disagree with this program.
Adblock works fine and does not disrupt the advertising networks by skewing their analytics of people who legitimately click adds because they have seen a product or service they want to know more about.
Just because we dont like adds doesn't give us the right to disrupt other peoples business.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by TrumpetPower! on Tuesday October 28 2014, @01:23AM
Why the fuck not?
These fucking fuckers fucked up our network but good, so why shouldn't we fuck with them?
I'm not so sure this is a technically good way to fight back, but I'd happily ruin the profitability of advertising in a New York Adman's Minute.
Give me back the pre-commercial days of the 'Net, when people only put things up they gave a damn about rather than some shit they thought they could make money off of. You know? Before September?
No, you probably don't. Kids these days don't remember a time before September. Hell, most of 'em weren't even born until after September....
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @01:57AM
Oh Shoosh. Go preach your technocracy ideals on a BBS .. oh wait..it sucks ass and no one can here you troll.
And secondly your a hypocrite as try convincing anyone on here that you have never made a purchase online because it was either cheaper or more convenient. Ass.
(Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Tuesday October 28 2014, @02:02AM
Go preach your technocracy ideals on a BBS .. oh wait..it sucks ass and no one can here you troll.
Can't troll on a BBS? You must be trolling right now!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @11:18AM
This is only true if you think gopher Usenet was a better network. Remember, back before ads, when UIUC had a single web page listing all the places with WWW servers? I remember filling out the form to get my page listed, and when the list got long enough that they had to split it into categories. I remember manually submitting my site to Yahoo for crawling (of course, the ads had already started by then). Yahoo was so much better then the internet index. Sure, it's fun to be nostalgic for the days when all the web content was created by academics, students, and guys willing to spend $150/month to show pictures of their survival shelter, but essentially everything you do on the network today depends on commercial content and advertising. Deal with it. No one else wants 1993 back, because the content actually sucked.
Or don't deal with it: get a copy of the old network from the Internet Archive - it should fit on a decent sized thumb drive, and you can host the "internet" off a Raspberry Pi. While you're at it, tear the labels off your shoes, the brand-badges off your car, and the logo off your phone. I'm sure you don't want to be a walking billboard for teh ebil companies (and free of charge, at that). Of course, tearing the hood ornament off your own car is just fine; tearing it off someone else's car just because you object to advertising is probably not.
There are still plenty of places you can go to have the old internet-elitist experience. Many of them still run by college students for the four years they get free server space from their university. soylent is a pretty nice example (of elitist, not college-dependent). Of course, based on the progress of the soylent fund-raising bar, it looks like it's only going to be around as long as the core developers are willing to pay for your entertainment.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Gravis on Tuesday October 28 2014, @02:30AM
Adblock works fine and does not disrupt the advertising networks by skewing their analytics of people who legitimately click adds because they have seen a product or service they want to know more about.
Just because we dont like adds doesn't give us the right to disrupt other peoples business.
1) it's "ads" with one d.
2) we have as much right to skew their analytics as they have to show us ads. if they offered a simple way to opt-out of their networks like encasing all their garbage in an tag that is easily ignored, then i would agree with you. however, they have made no attempt to simplify blocking their ads and are costing me processing power->electricity->money to ignore them.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @04:18AM
To elaborate on (2), they don't have the right to collect accurate statistics on us. If they did have such a right, it would be useful to assign each person online a national ID number and require us to be logged in as our true identities at all times. We have the right to lie about our identities, a point of pride in American history: how many of the Founding Fathers published pseudonymous political treatises as "Cato" or "Publius" or "Caesar" or "Brutus?"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday October 28 2014, @02:43PM
Dude, shut up! You'll give them ideas!
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday October 29 2014, @05:41PM
If they did have such a right, it would be useful to assign each person online a national ID number and require us to be logged in as our true identities at all times
What the hell kind of of false-dichotomy/strawman/slippery-slope-fallacy is this?
Please tell me you're trolling.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @11:37AM
Of course, many sites already do this, on purpose. That is, many sites 'fake-click' their own ads in order to raise their ad revenue. The ad hosters know this and they accommodate it. You think they don't know when one person clicks all the ads on a page? Or when one IP clicks on 10x more ads than a 'normal' person? You think they believe those clicks?
It's your computer. You've got the right to make it do just about anything you want. Don't want ads? don't load them. Want to hold a little ad-protest? go ahead and gang-click all the ads. Hell, write a script to crawl the web, loading every ad from every page. Or just continually load random URLs from doubleclick and adsense. But don't pretend it's anything other than petty whining. As a form of civil disobedience or protest, it doesn't even rise to the level of mailing empty "Business Reply" cards.