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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

We're talking about people who install a program to defraud advertisers. The complaint was, "we're sticking it to people who censor and use social control."

"The rules" in this case are that censorship and social control (presumably) exist on the platform. If you don't like that, don't participate.

But don't say, "OMG censorship" and use that to justify defrauding advertisers while continuing to use the free site that you deride.

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Whoa! It's not defrauding advertisers, unless you want to claim that clicking a link on the internet without intending to purchase something is considered fraudulent.

Actually, a court of law take into account intent. Misclicking on a link is not fraud, but intentionally misclicking is indeed fraud, if you know if had an intended effect on the budget of the advertiser.

Is it? The user would have to be making a misrepresentation by doing so. Is clicking an ad link really a statement that meaningfully communicates anything? Or is the advertiser merely inferring a meaning and getting it wrong for that user?

That has no bearing here because it's not the user mis-clicking on the link, but the app in question deliberately following a link on behalf of the user with the stated goal of causing harm.

I would think there's a much stronger case for fraud against people who put misleading advertisements on their websites. Visiting a link automatically demonstrates an intent to protest advertisers, not defraud them.

False advertising is already against the law.

You can protest legally by blocking ads, but there's such a thing as too much civil disobedience. Its a slippery slope, because this argument can be used to justify DDoS.

You didn't answer the question: 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.

I don't work for reddit anymore, so I don't offer anything. But no, I don't think reddit offers that, as no site does. That's a perfectly fine excuse to run adblock, but my original thesis was that people say, "If you let me remove ads I'll pay" and those people are being disingenuous when they don't pay.

It still doesn't justify the topic at hand, which is a program that attacks the ad networks and defrauds the advertisers.

No. The topic at hand is whether or not I'm allowed to run the program on my computer. And regardless of what argument you or any other business man 2.0 can proffer, I am. Because it's my computer.

As I understand it, the issue is whether you can run AdNauseam on Pale Moon on your computer. Are there other browsers that allow you to use AdNauseam?

Yes. Thanks to this HN post, I just started using it on Chrome.

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/adnauseam/

To paraphrase a wise person, I can install what I want on my browser, and if you don't like it, feel free to shut your website down and do something else.

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