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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: 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.