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Comment by hbbio | Hacker News Reader

The motto of Pale Moon is "Your browser, Your way". But apparently not very so...

The current ad system is broken and, although I understand Google decision to protect its own profits, I don't see why an open source project that aims to provide an unbiased browsing experience would follow suit.

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You're hurting the publishers. I'm a software developer at a local newspaper. We've been dealing with floods of fake ad clicks for about a year now, and they severely hurt our bottom line. We don't even use an ad network a la google, we sell our own ads to local businesses and such. You're not sticking it to the man, you're punishing me and my colleagues and friends for writing content that you wanted to read. You're directly hurting us.

To be clear, I'm not sure a browser should have a say on this in general, but I understand the argument they make on a personal level.

EDIT:

1. I misread OP

2. I don't work directly with our ad handling, as I work with the editorial team and generally advertising and editorial are separate for a reason, but I went digging just for fun. We sell our ad space to individual businesses. Our ad sales team does approve every ad we run. We use Google Analytics and Chartbeat, and both the newsroom and ad team have access to those analytics. The ads we serve vary - one ad from a housing complex down the street is literally just an image with an affiliate link, but one ad from our the ASU Foundation appears to load content from doubleclick.net.

Irrelevant of OPs point. Disallowing an extension that a user might want doesn't seem like "your way"

True, I misread OP. I don't know that I think the browser should have a say in this discussion.

It isn't "disallowed". You make a change in about:config.

What's the point at which it can be said to be disallowed? Editing a file with notepad? Editing it with an hex editor? Compiling from source?

The change is to allow addons marked as malware to be installed. So you are opening yourself up to real harm if you do that.

I think Pale Moon in particular was at least in part marketing itself, whether deliberately or inadvertently, to people who take objection with browser authors presuming to make this sort of moral decision on behalf of the user, independently of whether it is right. More generally, hardware and software being neutral tools in the hand of the user rather than forward-deployed submarines for the vendor's agenda (a morally righteous agenda is still an agenda, no matter how negative a sound that word has acquired, just to be sure) has been a sticking point for the Free Software movement pretty much since its conception.

People installing AdNauseam probably want to hurt you and your colleagues, so it's working as intended.

That is, there are people who believe ad-supported publications on the web should die. If their choice causes your ad-supported publication to die, mission accomplished.

Nailed it. If your business doesn't have a product so you only profit through advertising, you shouldn't be trying to make it a business.

On the one hand, I agree with your sentiment in general. However, it's a double edged sword here. LOTS of people are so sick of advertising networks, tracking, privacy invasion and malware from compromised ad networks that the underlying issue, the idea that click and impression based advertising is fundamentally flawed, is something that people are going to continue to protest. If the system is so broken that it's susceptible to this kind of click-jacking, then it was never a really good system to begin with.

Do I think this is the right way to go about it? Probably not. But I do think the long term solution needs to be for publishers to move away from the third-party advertising banner model. While forcing your hand isn't the right way to do things (and will, you're right, cause more harm than good) if nothing else AdNauseum has sparked a much needed conversation about ad-based revenue, one that we as a publishing and content consuming internet community desperately NEED to have. Because content isn't free, and publishers SHOULD be compensated for their work. We need to develop a better system to take the place of the obviously flawed model we've come to rely on, so that everyone comes out on top, publishers included.

My understanding--and I pretty much hang out in the virtual duck blind studying vile people as a hobby, this isn't second-hand--is that this is largely being pushed by the 4chan/alt-right/white-supremacist crowd that's mostly mad at Google for not partying down with them. (People in the comments are referring to 4chan's /g/ board in that thread.)

You are right that we need to figure out how to evolve advertising--which is never going away--to a better place, but reactionary destruction does not seem like fertile ground for "y'know, ads kind of suck, how do we make this work better for everyone?".

How come?

The originator of AdNauseum is https://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/

I didn't say that the writer of AdNauseam was of that crowd, but the folks pushing it sure are.

Only some of them are. There is a very broadly diverse resistance to Google's influence on terran politics.

Those people are free not to visit our website. Or even to block all ads if the site gracefully allows it (most do, mine do).

> Those people are free not to visit our website.

If you meant that, you'd have a paywall up.

Do you offer legally enforceable indemnity against people getting malware from ads you serve? If not, then you can't really tell them not to block the ads.

Even though i hate advertising, I'm against weaponizing clicks on ads to punish sites. Boycott, or block ads.

"publishers SHOULD be compensated for their work"

with respect...

_employees_ should be paid for their work

_businesses_ OTOH are not entitled to ANY income regardless of the cost to create their products or anyones opinion on how valuable those products are.

Good, if you don't like fake clicks you should fight for it. Me on the otherhand don't like ads so I will too fight/support ways to avoid it.

But thats just it. The extension, by trying to provide a "unbiased browsing experience" to the user but sending false clicks to the networks, is punishing the author/publisher in the middle.

This is a bad analogy but the closest I can find: Its like saying I don't like big book publishers so I'm not going to pay for the book at the independent book store.

Again, that analogy quickly falls apart but the initial point is similar.

The the larger thread on the page they talk about Google etc issues refunds for false clicks etc. Thats not quite true, that was more for brands that had their ads run on fake news sites.

The analogy falls very quickly apart since if a website uses a ad network that don't track users, then AdNauseam extension does nothing.

Its like saying I don't like big book publishers so I'm not going to pay for the book at their stores, but i will pay for the book at the independent book store.

It goes without saying that big book publishers are book publishers because they can out compete the independent book store, like using vendor lock-in.

So, 99.9% of small websites with ads. Meaning, yes, this is harmful to small websites.

This is harmful to small websites with ads, not to small websites. Big difference.

It's more like when the book store asks you for your phone number, home address, and driver's license before they will accept your credit card, and so you simply pay them with cash.

After giving them a fake phone number that costs $5.99 per minute, a home address on the top of Mt. Everest where shipping ads to costs them hundreds of dollars, and a fake credit card numbers.

And yes, this cost is one that they should simply accept, if they want to ship malware. You try to destroy my system, I’ll try to destroy yours.

What's your phone number?

analogy: intentionally spending counterfeit money at a favorite bar

How is "modify about:config" not having it "your way"?

Might as well use Firefox then, you can always modify the source.

I think PaleMoon is largely silly, but we aren't talking about having to modify the source to use the silly clickjacker. We're talking about typing a URL and changing a number. Which is why the angst being demonstrated is bonkers (and largely ideologically motivated, not to put too fine a point on it).

Of course it's ideologically motivated. The whole point of using Pale Moon is its ideology - represented by the motto "Your browser, you way". Ideologies are at the core of humanness. Using it as an insult is just sad.

And it's exactly because the ideology that the browser represented, and for which many people switched to it, is seen as having been betrayed that people are criticizing it. Whether the roadblock is easy to surmount is irrelevant.

I think angst is primarily for classifying AdNauseam as malware, which it clearly isn't. At least, that's the primary reason of angst for me.

It's a matter of degree, not kind. It's much more of a hassle to compile a custom version of the program than to modify the default configuration, but the point is that in both cases there's a default that does something that the user doesn't want.

You already got to decide which extensions you install. Making them disappear by default is a clear attempt to prevent people from installing an extension they may want.

OK, and? "Your way." Modify about:config. (Or, yanno, keep shitposting on /g/, as the complainers are wont to do.)

> OK, and?

Most people view attempts to manipulate others as bad. Especially in the context of free software that has "Your Browser Your Way" as a tag line.

> Modify about:config

I don't use Pale Moon, so I don't have too :)

Personally I can't tolerate for too long a software that I have to fight with everyday to make it work the way I want.

With Firefox it started with a few small changes but in the end I have found myself working on an userPrefs.js with hunders of lines, compiling the source with custom build flags and patches just to have a browser that doesn't spy actively on me.

I really hope it won't happen with PaleMoon too but this isn't a good sign.

I can't believe you went through all of that when you could have just used Wireshark to find out where the browser was phoning home to and blacklisting the IPs in your router or HOSTS file.

> 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).

They block it by default but you can still disable the block manually. Its hardly an unreasonable form of protest.

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