AdNauseam Browser Extension: Clicking Ads So You Don't Have To | Hacker News Reader

AdNauseam Browser Extension: Clicking Ads So You Don't Have To

adnauseam.io

98 pointstshtf72 comments

The source is here:

This actively poisons the advertiser/publisher relationship, which in my opinion is a much harder stance than simply blocking ads.

edit: I've tried it using the abp/adnauseam combo but it only worked on one out of 5 heavily ad laden pages. It's funny, I have so many layers of this stuff running that it took me quite a while before I managed to see any ads at all and then to re-enable just ABP. So, on FF at least, not really recommended by me, maybe someone else has a different experience. (tried it on two different machines)

By poisoning the advertiser/publisher relationship they are also poisoning the publisher/user relationship. Like it or not publishers have to pay the bills and these types of efforts are either going to result in paywalls (which users of this plugin will no doubt try to circumvent) or by the content going away all together.

I think a much better option for those opposed to advertising is to just not visit those publishers. Anything other than that strikes me as theft of service.

> Anything other than that strikes me as theft of service.

How so?

Theft of service requires a couple of other bits to flip in my view, after all, you're not actually required to view the ads on webpages when they're there, you're not required to click and you're not required to buy any products. It's no more theft of service than zapping to another channel when there are ads on the TV or switching off the radio when advertising starts.

Excepts adds are often sold on a cost-per-click basis so you are causing a transaction with the advertiser for which they got nothing (no visit to their website to at least consider their wares for a few seconds).

But that's not what the GGP said, he said that "anything other that not visiting those sites is theft of services", that is definitely not limited to false clicking ads, but it also includes simple ad blocking.

Except why whould I care? The rules of transaction between the advertiser and the website owner are their business, in which I have no say except being its victim (er, resource), so why should I cater to their needs? I get appeals to decency, but it definitely does not warrant calling it "theft of service" or "fraud".

I'd be totally cool with a paywall instead of slow and distracting ads.

Here's an idea - why don't a bunch of publishers (or a third party) get together and build a subscription service for a reasonable monthly fee that automatically gets me through their paywall when I visit their sites. In theory it would be open for any publisher to join, and they get to split my monthly fee based on pageviews.

It would be 10 or 100 such subscriptions to various "networks" of sites, and in the end these micropayment-networks would live more from selling the visitors' behaviour patterns than from the fees themselves (just like ad networks are in the bulk information collection business).

The solution imho is a good micropayment system where I can choose to view a page for $.01 or view it for free with ads.

I personally wouldn't mind. They could track me all day long (except why would they - they aren't doing ads any more) as long as the Internet gets free of the shit that's eating everyone's bandwidth, battery power, CPU cycles and sanity.

If your sanity is so easily upset by advertising, I suggest you get off the internet, and avoid TV, radio and print altogether.

I avoid TV, radio and print already. But why should I get off the Internet when I can just use an ad blocker?

Being on the internet or not is no longer optional. In lots of places governments now require that you communicate with them via their website, it's the way people stay in touch with each other (and you'll be left out if you don't) and it is the way companies do business, hire people and communicate between each other.

Advertising is not an essential part of the internet, but everything else is. Remember: the internet was doing just fine before advertising rolled along.

You'd think that would exist already: A service that costs, say, 8$ a month. It should remove ads and paywalls, and pay the publishers some amount relative to how much I've browsed their site.

There is! It's called Google Contributor - https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ - and people seem to like it. I'm not sure it's gained a lot of traction, but it's a good idea, and Google's the one to do it, given their domination of the ad market.

It doesn't remove the paywall though?

It would be nice if it did but the incumbents seem to be more interested in all out war against the internet as opposed to finding a workable solution?

$8 a month is a pittance. You can't even get the NYT alone for that. You can't get the WSJ either. You can, just barely, get the Linux Weekly Newsletter for that much.

This is like the GMail-without-ads idea. The provider and the user are far out of sync with each other. You _can_ get a Gmail without ads today, if you want. It'll cost you $50 / year.

To make it worse, that decreases the value of your advertising space. When you have a free-only service, the value of your advertising is the benefit of showing the people who can afford things ads. If you have a free and a paid ad-free service, the value of your advertising is significantly lower, because the people with money (and willing to spend it) are no longer going to be shown the ads.

Great, now I'm going to advertise to a bunch of poor people and skinflints. There's no chance I'm going to pay the publisher an equal amount for those ads as I'm going to pay them for the rest. So that publisher will have to charge paying users enough to make up the shortfall.

I dunno how many sites I visit each month, maybe a couple thousand? And what's the CPM these days, maybe 2$? So 10$ per month doesn't seem unreasonable at least for ad supported websites.

For paywalled websites, I'd say that the cost is set very high because the number of paying customers compared to the total number of readers is small.

> $8 a month is a pittance. You can't even get the NYT alone for that. You can't get the WSJ either. You can, just barely, get the Linux Weekly Newsletter for that much.

It would work poorly for the regular NYT readers, but I'd argue that's not most of the Internet. People don't browse websites, they read articles they found using a search engine or were linked to somewhere. I'm not paying NYT, the Economist, WSJ, The Atlantic, and a hundred other websites $10 each, when I read on average one article every two month on each of those sites. So I think the idea mostly works, but we need to make sure that those who read more articles from a single site pay correspondingly more to it.

> Great, now I'm going to advertise to a bunch of poor people and skinflints. There's no chance I'm going to pay the publisher an equal amount for those ads as I'm going to pay them for the rest. So that publisher will have to charge paying users enough to make up the shortfall.

So the system stabilizes at some price point and there are no ads? I'd say "mission accomplished" :).

Blendle [0] aims to do something like this - actually a pay-per-article model. I'm waiting for it to launch in the UK.

[0] https://launch.blendle.com/

One of the nordic countries has done exactly that, if I recall right. I can't remember the name of it though?

I was under the impression there is already widespread automated ad clicking [1] - if that's the case perhaps this merely makes public a problem that advertisers have known about in private for ages.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_fraud

Click fraud hasn't been a user choice thus far.

Maybe I misunderstand. Although it's nice not to load and see ads, and it's really nice not to be tracked and correlated, it's really really nice for an advertiser not to be aware of me personally, at all, correlated or not.

So this thing poisons the stream, but it also says "there's a person here, put him in the database." It's like responding to spam; there's no future in it.

I don't mind advertising at all, and when I used to read physical magazines and papers, none of the ads bothered me, I'd either look at them, ignore them, or throw away a whole section if that's all it was.

It's tracking ads, and the ad networks more generally, that I object to.

If a site just sold and showed static ads, with no information about me personally sold to or detected by the ad buyer, I'd be among the first to whitelist such a site. Until then ... fuck off.

EDIT: Actually I guess there'd be no need for whitelisting, the ad would just show up with the editorial content. So, Wired, when you whine at me for using a blocker, why not instead just show me a picture of Suntory? http://whiskey.wikia.com/wiki/Bill_Murray_and_Suntory

Quite. What does it matter to an advertiser selling cars if I also indicate that I like holidays to El Salvador, Dove washing liquid, and videos about giraffes? They will still think that I want to buy a car.

Apparently it matters a lot, because they pay for that information.

It'll make no difference if you do it.

If say 30% of people do it, then it'll make their databases of who clicked on what quite worthless.

Unfortunately I don't see it reaching critical mass without providing some direct benefit to the user.

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This looks interesting. I personally think the anti-tracking brouhaha is overblown and don't mind if "corporations" send me fewer irrelevant ads thanks to tracking. But for those militantly opposed, this seems like a clever way to fight back.

What happens is first you get "relevant ads". Then you get a different price of the book on Amazon than I do, because you discussed buying it in a "private" chat on FB with a friend.

Next you visit an airline website and you get a higher fare becuase of the knowledge that you have already booked a hotel in that city so they know what day you have to travel. What part of that do you believe is already here, and what part is dystopian future?

I'm against the whole idea of information as a commodity, and the ad business today is just that: it's customer information as a bulk commodity. I don't mind being shown ads I just don't want my information collected and used. You could argue that website owners actually give me something (the content) and want something in return (a payment or an ad impression), but I disagree with how the transaction takes place without my knowledge. Just use static image ads served from your domain, then my browser can't know it's an ad. It will be a "dumb" ad, but those have worked in magazines and bus stops since forever.

I hear you. You click on an ad because you might be interested in a trip and now you're penalized all over the web because you actually showed some interest in an ad?!

Worse, you'll be penalized because your mom clicked an ad, and they know you are related, for example.

When you install an ad blocking browser extension, you are trading limited, specific, mostly non-personal data sharing with publishers, for complete, unrestricted, uncensored data sharing with extension providers.

Extensions can see the entirety of every page a user visits. This includes their bank account, what they searched on google, what they searched on duck-duck-go when they didn't want their search to be recorded, what sites they are a member of, how frequently they visit those sites, at what times they visit those sites, what emails they have sent and received, what they typed in their encrypted proton-mail account, what 20 word passphrase they chose for their bitcoin wallet, what they posted anonymously on 4chan...

From a pure privacy perspective, it's a huge net loss.

Even if you only enable extensions on non-sensitive sites, the difference in the amount of data being given to the extension provider vs the data being restricted from the ad provider, is very large during that time.

Except that those extension providers don't as a rule upload that data to their server without authorization in the form of an opt-out process.

This has been my thought too for a long time. Who's watching the watcher so to speak.

Well the standard blocking software is open source, simple and controversial. Controversial open source software gets checked by lots of people and because it is simple issues would get flagged.

Had you not added "simple", I'd have had a strong case in point with OpenSSL. OpenSSL has always been at least a bit controversial (i.e., breaking binary compatibility on not just a patch release aka x.y.Z, but a semantic level even lower) and issues have still gone undetected for a long time.

> Extensions can see the entirety of every page a user visits. This includes their bank account, what they searched on ...

At this point why do you even trust your browser, or the OS it's running on both of which have access to all of that and more? I browsed through the code of uBlock and uMatrix and found nothing suspicious, it's not exactly a large code base. Sure, it's not a formal audit or anything but it's enough where I trust it.

I have to trust a single piece of software whose source is totally transparent to me, compared to trusting every single ad network on every site I visit, and every agency that data is sold to, and every state that data travels to. From a privacy standpoint it's a huge net benefit as all that data the extension has access to is never recorded and doesn't leave my machine.

>At this point why do you even trust your browser

I don't trust my browser :) and do expect some major data breach of my browsing history at some point in the next 20 years - but it's worth it to be able to browse.

Here people are trying to attain privacy by opening themselves up to possibly much less privacy - just want to make sure they know what they are paying.

Are you people really that naive? Any decent adtech company will detect this as click fraud and filter it. This does nothing but waste computing and network resources for everyone.

Oh, so it only DDoS the ad networks who aren't adhering to No Tracking standards. Alright.

Ad companies have no qualms wasting our computing and network resources.

As someone who runs a number of blogs, I have been following the "adblocker wars" with interest. Here is my opinion on a not malicious alternative for publishers looking to monetize:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/11/surviving-an... http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/11/how-to-make-...

I will suggest you promote that idea if you really want to see fewer ads and not have to debate (internally) the morality of whatever of poisoning the stream, etc. I think it is a payment model that can work. Your readers need to value what you offer, but, ideally, they should be there for that reason anyway.

This will only help advertisers. If a large group of users click ads and bounce immediately it will be obvious they are using this service. Send them a fake ad, see it they click. If they do, don't count/charge for their clicks anymore. Now Google has effectively found everyone who don't convert with ads, and doesn't target them. This makes normal ads more targeted, increases conversions rates, increases ctrs, and lets Google charge advertiser more.

Why is Hacker News encouraging a project that aims to defraud advertisers and websites? It's hard enough to run an ad-based business without having to deal with getting blocked by Google from fraudulent clicks. If you don't like ads, the solution is simple -- don't go to sites that have them.

It's not Hacker News (site) encouraging a project, it's users of Hacker News.

Also, I don't see how this is defrauding (in legal sense), it's just shoving shitty behaviour back at the source.

Also, even if you don't like it, it's still more ethical than what Uber is doing, so I think it should be encouraged at least as much in the tech world. ;).

Because Uber, a company in a completely unrelated field, is engaging in what you see as unethical behavior does not give you the right to defraud other companies of any kind.

It's fraud because it aims to register false clicks to deceive and confuse the companies that provide ads. It causes trouble for website owners, who can easily lose their entire income stream because they will be banned if the amount of false clicks on their site is deemed to be too high. If you don't like ads, don't go to sites that have them.

Uber is related here because you asked about HN (site or community) supporting something, and Uber is one of the most popular startups in the tech crowd. I further conclude that if said crowd doesn't seem to mind Uber's behaviour then it definitely shouldn't mind this extension, because it also provides value to users and, as opposed to Uber, is not actually illegal.

But let's drop that, it was just me being snarky in the morning.

It's not a fraud, no matter how advertisers want to call it. It wouldn't fly in court. You serve me some buttons, I click them. I haven't signed any document, implicitly or explicitly, between me and ad network that would oblige me to view or click their buttons in a way they want it to. So let's not use strong words where they don't belong.

Yes, it aims to register false clicks to deceive and confuse the companies that provide ads - because those companies give negative utility to users an it's in everyone's personal interest to get rid of them. It's tracking, it's spreading malware, but it's also simply shoving ugly shit in users' face. We have a right to strike back.

> It causes trouble for website owners, who can easily lose their entire income stream because they will be banned if the amount of false clicks on their site is deemed to be too high.

I say, good riddance. Site quality and trustworthiness is anti-correlated with ad count anyway.

> If you don't like ads, don't go to sites that have them.

No. If you don't like people not viewing your ads, paywall. Oh, but your paywall has to be leaky or else Google goes away? Well, welcome to the Internet. It was supposed to be a medium of information exchange, not a shopping mall.

Some men just want the world to burn.

And some just want to burn out the weeds that have taken over the garden.

You should consider it lucky that we're only talking about this extension. Per the other article that's currently on the front page[0], we could instead build an army of robots that would roam the world and punch advertisers to keep them down.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10611053

An income stream means nothing when you spy on all your users for a couple of bucks. Maybe next time show them a huge red sign saying "to use this site, you must let us collect and sell all your private information". No legalese, just plain english, let the users know what they're getting into. Then we can talk about contracts and frauds.

Fortunately, ad blockers are pretty popular right now and the agencies will have to get their shit together wether they like it or not. Or maybe come up with even more evil techniques, who knows.

Why do you think that random internet commenters posting interesting links and other people discussing them constitutes "Hacker News" encouraging anything? As if this site is a monolithic entity that supports all of your own views?

Stories get flagkilled all the time. This isn't a link to a news story about the product, but a link to the product itself.

Flagkilled means enough users exercised their right to vote to kill the story by means of flagging, not that the site unilaterally decided something.

> don't go to sites that have them

That's not really a viable solution. You cannot know the site you are about to visit has ads on it or not.

It's pretty easy to figure out. You go to the site. You see ads. You stop reading and go somewhere else.

No, it's the site which is free to refuse serving content if you don't view the ads. I'll happily go somewhere else.

Otherwise, I have an ad blocker so that I can go to the site, not see the ads and continue reading. Or if I feel particularly inclined to fight this shitty business model, I may install this ad clicker.

This is not fraud. Please wind down the libellous hyperbolic language.

What a waste. If you can detect the ads and trackers, just block them instead.

Besides which, their claim that 'targeting and surveillance becomes futile' is untrue. You're still letting all the ad networks and trackers watch every web site you visit.

It's not a waste, and not everyone cares primarily about trackers. Some find ads a problem, and this is one possible approach to reduce that problem at the source.

Sure, not everyone cares about trackers. But the people who might care are being misled by the lies on the web page.

Fair enough.

Their point, presumably, is that with enough noise tracking becomes pointless, but I see how this extension doesn't really generate tracking noise, only buying-preference noise.

Well this is amazing!

I honestly think if a majority of people start using this, Click Fraud will eventual become indistinguishable from clicks made my AdNauseam and ad companies for once will worry about milking the ad-cow.

But then... I know this will die in someway or the other.

This won't have the push as ad-blockers, it doesn't have explicit benefits on the user side while sabotage the publishers. So it will be very hard to sell.

Another weak point is that it does end up loading the ads which would slow down the connection and it confirms the pages you've seen to the networks increasing the amount of tracking done.

If there was actually a significant percentage of browsers that had this installed then it would ultimately affect the actual business model of ad sales. It would be really interesting to see what they could possibly come up with if CPC was no longer usable.

I would be very careful with this. It may constitute fraud.

How so?

If a publisher was to use this to click their own ads, it would be fraudulent clicks. If they're charging on a cpc basis it would be defrauding the advertiser.

Ah, you mean the instance where a publisher would install this plug-in. I see, well that would be supremely dumb of such a publisher, but I don't think this plug-in is aimed at publishers to commit click-fraud. I thought you meant fraud on behalf of an ordinary user, your comment made no mention of publishers.

Well I mean in addition, if you work for a competitors company, if you yourself are an advertiser in any capacity etc. There's many scenarios where you could find yourself in trouble.

So, make sure you don't use it when viewing your own sites.

Not saying I approve, but it is illegal for me to click my own ads already. At best, this is a "proviso" that should be put out, of "Hey, if you are using this AND a publisher who is also trying to make money on ads, be mindful of this issue."

Though I have some trouble wrapping my brain around someone both trying to support their own work with ads while also using a product like Ad Nauseum. However, hey, serial killers also exist and I can't wrap my brain around their twisted shit either. (shrug)

Fraud As A Service.

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