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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

My standard reply to this: https://github.com/pjc50/misc-personal.github.io/blob/master...

> If I could rig my browser to pay 1 cent for every newspaper article I read

Define "read". And "article". Should you get charged for every link preview you scroll past on Twitter? (see lawsuits! the publishers think you should, or at least that this is copyright infringement)

Can I build a page with one "article" plus one thousand hidden iframes each of which also contains a one-cent "article"?

Who polices fraud in this system? How much does it cost?

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> Can I build a page with one "article" plus one thousand hidden iframes each of which also contains a one-cent "article"?

It should be up to your user-agent (aka the browser) to implement your decision and protect you from scammers, just like it happens in the rest of scenarios.

That link doesn't work.

It's pretty apt since the argument doesn't either[1].

[1]Taler requires explicit user action for payment, it's not like publishers can charge you for scrolling.

Not quite. GNU Taler's reference implementation requires explicit user consent for payment. But as GNU Taler is Free Software, you are free to modify the code on your system (and share your with others) to not require an explicit confirmation if you prefer that. Or even better, to add an option to do that on some "trusted" sites which you make configurable for each user via settings. I don't know if the risk is worth the UX improvement, but a key contribution of GNU Taler is that it is a Free Software payment system where you actually have the full four freedoms. Use them!

While what you say is completely valid, that doesn't save the original argument by pcj50 which was made up claims about the ability for scammer to drain your wallet. Of course you could build your own implementation that allows for such an attack, it is not a valid criticism of the project.

Indeed, I just wanted to point out that the "game changing" desire of entropyie to fully automate payments can still be done with GNU Taler. So you are right that the scammer in the default deployment won't succeed, but additionally entropyie could still totally get what entropyie wants as a feature on their own system (and conceivably make this reasonably secure, too).

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