Megabox will replace 15% of ads on websites with Mega's own ads | Hacker News Reader

Megabox will replace 15% of ads on websites with Mega's own ads

bbgamer.co.uk

46 pointsjarnix61 comments

This sort of ad replacement has actually been done plenty of times before, by malware and by shady toolbars. Pretty much no one is going to be okay with this: the music industry and the US government hate the guy's guts; it's directly stealing money from Google; it wants to directly compete with iTunes; it's directly stealing money from every random blogger and press outlet that might cover it; and other companies doing exactly this was responsible for destroying Microsoft Windows' reputation in the eyes of consumers. Oh, and it's a backdoor held by someone considered wildly untrustworthy. So on the list of parties that have a vested interest in seeing it fail, we have:

    - The music industry  
    - The US government  
    - All ad-supported press outlets and blogs  
    - Microsoft, Apple, and Google  
    - The computer security industry

Oh, and it's also probably illegal (under copyright and tortious interference grounds). I think this is really just a signaling ploy; Dotcom wants to be able to say that he tried to come up with a monetization model for the music industry. But to say that this is doomed a fairly significant understatement.

You're generalizing too much. To say that noone is going to go for this is absurd.

People who pirate songs in large part are clueless. If they download a torrent with an exe in it, they're still going to click on it because they don't know better.

If you willingly give the public a chance to replace a small amount of ads for free stuff, they're going to go for it, because they dont care about replacing ads that were already there, and they benefit.

It's like if someone plastered over your billboard every other night. Sure there are people that care, but it's not the people driving on the freeway.

As far as the legal aspects, no doubt that will be a large discussion. But, is adblock illegal? If this is illegal, should adblock also be illegal? Will this be enforced the same in all countries?

It's not going to take much for this service yo take off, and while many projects may come to an unceremonious end, I predict this will be a massive success before it becomes a failure, but we shall see.

You're talking about the product, jimrandomh is talking about the business/legal environment. He doesn't mention the fact that it wont be appealing to consumers, just that it'll have a handful of very large entities gunning for it's demise.

It's not unreasonable to think that MegaBox was one of the reasons behind the raid.

After all, MegaBox was almost complete when it happened, and we now know that the FBI had been monitoring Megaupload for 4-5 years.

If they had that much time to gather evidence of wrongdoing, yet fuck up their execution so badly, it leads one to believe that the operation was rushed, perhaps by some influential people "gunning for its demise"

Now, if that were really the case, it would be because they actually fear the product's release, and they would have to feel that the existing legal framework wouldn't be enough to stop it.

I highly doubt much of anything is going to come of this. The US Gov't was that afraid of MegaBox to rush a raid on Dotcom? Not likely IMO. Grooveshark hasn't been paying artists for a long time and isn't enough of a threat to raid as of today.

Most likely more BS self promotion from the Head BS'er.

The US Gov't as an entity isn't afraid. But lobbyists and other politicians might be afraid of not being able to buy that second house if they don't act in the interests of the RIAA/etc.

edit On the surface this sounds like the stuff of tinfoil hats, but lobbyists do influence politics. A well-placed word with someone on high could have tipped the action.

This has been done wholesale by ISPs for several years.

The article is just wrong ! It's not unwanted software or a malware it's something users decides to install or not knowning what that entails: ad replacement in exchange of music. Now you may like or dislike this approach but it's not a malware !

It's malware, pure and simple. Website operators can be victims of malware just like end users can be victims.

Then according to you if you install a software that is ads supported it's a malware too... You may want to rethink your definition or we'll need to pull out all the free section of the android/ios store.

Huh? Your doesn't make any sense. The fact that something is ad supported is not what makes something malware, it's the hijacking of the content provider's revenue stream and replacing it with your own that makes something malware.

That is a poor definition of malware.

Just because something bad doesn't happen to the end user does not make something not malware.

Would you say that bot-net software for launching DDOS attacks, installed willingly as part of X music service's software, is not malware? After all the user that installed it willingly is only making a few extra HTTP calls every once in a while, so they aren't suffering any negative affects. The author may have even obfuscated the secondary (primary?) use in some 2000 word term of service document that the user agreed to.

Let's consider both the DDOS botnet (most would consider "bad") and a program that contributes CPU cycles to Folding@Home (most would consider "good"). If it was buried in the TOU and we don't have a reasonable expectation that the user was aware of it, then it's malware, in both cases, plain and simple.

What's absent from this is the intended target because it doesn't matter - a program was duplicitous and installed programs that the user wasn't aware of.

I'm trying to take duplicity out of it. I'm more interested in the "willingly" part, which I probably articulated a little more clearly when I edited my initial response to kevinpet with a similar question. Your example about unwittingly installing Folding@Home is an interesting counter point and figures into where I was going.

By willingly I was implying an unscrupulous person installed a program which they knew to be detrimental to a 3rd party in order to utilize some functionality would still be considered "malware"; despite others having the view that if a user, with complete knowledge of all aspects of the software, installs it it cannot be "malware".

You state that the intended target doesn't matter, which I disagree with. Which seems to leave us at agreeing to disagree. Everybody has their opinion on advertising and its boundaries (or lack thereof) and value (or lack thereof), like I said in one of my first replies, I've never seen anybody change sides on this ;)

If an unscrupulous person were to install and knowing use a malicious program for personal gain, that might make the program malicious or unethical, but it doesn't make it malware by (what I believe to be) the common definition of malware.

Take the example of a script kiddie who wants to hack his neighbour's wifi and downloads a program that does that but also prominently notes that your computer will become part of a spam botnet to support development of the utility. Is it malicious and unethical? You bet. But not everything malicious is malware.

I think most people are arguing with you about your terminology. You decry Mega's plan as immoral, and you can say that it uses similar techniques as other malware programs, but that doesn't mean that it is malware.

On the deeper ethical issues, we'll leave that at agree to disagree.

It's only malware if it doesn't tell the user what it's doing. There's no reason for Megabox to do that, so I don't see why would you assume so. Or do you really think these users will care if the ads come from Doubleclick or MegaAds?

"Or do you really think these users will care if the ads come from Doubleclick or MegaAds?"

Most won't, which is why my point was never about the end user anyway. I think the website owner whose ads are being replaced should be part of the equation, others don't. It's a matter of ethics, perspective and where they intersect for you.

Ethics are irrelevant as to whether it's malware or not, and I don't see it fitting the widespread definitions of malware.

"Ethics are irrelevant as to whether it's malware or not"

I don't agree. I could understand how a website operator would consider megabox's software "malicious", and I could understand how a user that sees no value in advertising would not since the net effect is the same in the end.

And Jack Thompson and his supports consider violent video games malicious because they say they are the trigger of school shootings and other killings. Should we start calling GTA "malware"?

I'm sorry, but there's more to the definition of malware than "someone considers it malicious".

Is Adblock Plus also malware, then? What about Greasemonkey?

The uncomfortable truth is that website operators do not have the right to control what sort of software users use to view their websites.

I'm not interested in arguing about what the end user does concerning ad blocking. Everybody falls into one camp or another and I've never seen anybody change sides.

I'm talking about malware and it's effects from the perspective of the website owner. Let's take some hypothetical numbers to make it easy. Operator X has a website that displays 1000 ad impressions in a month, for those 1000 impressions he receives 100 dollars. Now megawhatever diverts 15% of those impressions, net result is the Operator X still serves 1000 ad impressions but only earns 85 dollars for the month. 15 dollars has been stolen from him.

The aggregate value of the delivery of those ads is what matters, not who saw the ads. So it doesn't matter if it's 100 people, none of whom have Adblock or 200 people, 50% of whom have AdBlock. This is strictly from the perspective of the website owner. If you lose 15% revenue from one month to the next while your audience stays constant then you are definitely going to view megawhatever as malware.

Edit: for further clarification, I wouldn't view somebody who did not use adblock in month 1 and switching it on in month 2 as stealing from the website owner because the revenue is not being diverted. The audience, in the context of the ads, has simply decreased from one month to the next.

Well, yes, but the terms "malware" and "stolen" imply that something was done improperly (or illegally), that the website owner is being deprived something of something he has the right to. A user has the right to only run the programs of his choice on his computer (and have them do what he expects), so if a program installs itself and steals his credit card data, his right is being violated. Do website owners have a similar right to control how their website is formatted? I think that they don't, so while the owners in question can consider it whatever they want, it is objectively not malware.

Your definition of the word "malware" goes against the common definition. IMO, most people would consider malware something that is installed without the user's intent. Just because a piece of software negatively impacts website owners doesn't make it malware.

Website owners would probably consider AdBlock malware, but almost 25 million users across Firefox and Chrome would disagree with that.

So would you suggest that blocking ads completely is less objectionable than blocking 15% of ads for the sake of the argument?

Downvoted for most blatant use of "malware" to mean "stuff someone doesn't like" as opposed to software that runs without the computer owner's permission or does things other than it claims.

Would that mean that a user that installs software that you would normally consider malware would not be able to claim it as such if they blew past the TOS or didn't uderstand the legalese wall of text they had click OK at the bottom of to make it go away?

Or would you consider the user lazy and/or dumb and got what they deserved, but you still find the software to conform to your perception as malware? If they agreed to it, then either it's not malware or malware is a subjective term.

This debate seems to rest on the perception of the "perfectly informed user" but that is a very small percentage of internet users and most assuredly not who Dotcom would see as his most profitable users.

EDIT: kevinpet, below I asked lowboy and I'd be interested in your take as well. Would a user that willingly and knowingly installed software that participated as part of a DDOS bot net in exchange for some functionality have software on their computer that you would consider malware? Is it malware only if something bad happens to the end user?

What about ad-supported installs that have a screen in the installation process with "Would you like to install ______" with a checkbox?

Although I disagree with that practice, I wouldn't consider that malware because it does inform the user of the installation and gives them a way to opt out.

Security scanners like nmap or Nessus were never considered malware, even if they can be used to exploit other servers. I don't see why would a DOSer, much less something like Megabox (which doesn't attack anything in any way) be considered malware.

I was trying to take "advertising" out of the equation because we were no longer talking about the ethics of the megabox business model but rather what constituted "malware".

I know. As I said, Nessus can and is used to attack third-party servers, but it's not considered malware, and it's in fact a commercial product openly used by companies and governments (like the US gov).

I've never seen a definition of malware that includes hack or DOS tools.

"I've never seen a definition of malware that includes hack or DOS tools."

I did a quick search on "stuxnet malware" and the articles linked to in the third and fourth results (by Computer World, and Christian Science Monitor respectively) both call stuxnet malware. It's not a very old word, I don't see why its definition can't evolve or change over time.

AFAIK, stux did replicate on the computers of users without their knowledge, which is a key component of malware from my understanding of the term. So stux is malware.

Stuxnet is a worm, which have always been considered malware.

And while the definition can change, of course, I don't see why it would.

The distinction of malware is about who is being deceived. If a user willing installs on their own computer A some software to attack someone else's computer B, that's not malware.

If a user installs something on their computer that allows someone else, without their knowledge, to gain control of their computer, then that's malware.

If someone breaks into a computer which they are not supposed to access and installs a rootkit that is designed to hide itself, that is malware.

Obviously, this leaves some gray areas if a user is to go out and intentionally copy some botnet worm on their own computer -- since that software is primarily propagates surreptitiously, we'd still call it malware, regardless of whether someone once happened to install it intentionally.

To your specific question, it depends entirely on whether the user is informed of what the software will do. If the user is aware that it's going to participate in a DDOS, or show pop-ups when browsing the web, or send their browsing history to Alexa, that's not malware. If, on the other hand, the user is told that they are installing a "nature photos screensaver" and its doing any of the above, then that's malware. And here we get into the debates about things like browser toolbars that were not very good at communicating what sort of spying they do when the user installed them. And it's clear to me that people rarely agree on where exactly to draw the line (and worse, usually argue adamantly that some borderline case either definitely is or definitely isn't malware).

But nowhere in any evaluation of whether something is malware do I consider the effect on other people relevant, which was the original claim -- that this software was malware because it was abusive towards the web site owners who were having their ads blocked. Malware is entirely about software that intentionally causes the computer to do something other than what the owner or user intended it to do.

The only way website operators can be victims of malware is if their site gets a script injected into it. Otherwise they're not a "victim" as much as someone who is negatively affected by a piece of software that a user runs on their computer, whether or not that piece of software is malware or not.

In any case this is moot, because if this is a voluntarily installed piece of software with the user's full intention and knowledge, it's not malware no matter how negatively it affects website owners.

You're probably right, but I'm not sure a debate over semantics is helpful. It certainly uses the same techniques as some genuine malware and (IMHO) most people would not consider it a fair and legitimate way to make money.

Shouldn't it be up to the user to decide what she wants to run on her own browser?

If I want to block all ads, I should be able to do that. If I want to replace those ads with kittens, I should be able to do that. If I want to replace those ads with other ads, I should be able to do that because it's my browser.

edit Also, it's useful to talk about semantics here because people are conflating malware with "software that web owners might disagree with".

If, against all odds, this scheme works and becomes acceptable, it can't last too long before competitors offering different kinds of service/values copy the same scheme. At which point, it becomes a real estate grab, and before you know it, this new meta layer of ad-serving apps become the ad network itself. I'm not sure that's good thing.

Gator/Claria did this 10 years ago. Replacing existing ads is a big no, and is quite different than popping up ads over someone's existing site.

Based on what happened with them, pretty much any one who owns a website that shows display revenue can be a plaintiff again Megabox.

"I’m very kinda unsure", "I guess", "will maybe have", "Maybe not, maybe so", "Hopefully there’ll probably be".

Is this what passes for an article? Or even hacker news?

Granted the quality of the article isn't amazing, but the points it brings up are certainly interesting/warranted.

Also it's two months old

If my AdBlock software blocks the MegaAds as well then what? Will I still have access to free music? Certainly an interesting business model!

Either AdBlock or the ad-blocking-hosts-file block all Comedy Central ads (including Daily Show, Colbert, and South Park), so their shows play without commercials. Sometimes weird things happen, ie. after a commercial break, the show will play for 30 seconds then jump to after the next commercial break.

One can wish that Google would block them from the SERPs. Let's see if they can succeed while being invisible.

The real question for me is how MegaKey will interact with other 3rd party software, such as ad-blockers - and how much / what / information they'll be collecting about my surfing habits (I'm assuming they'll be collecting all of it so they can better target their ad-serving)

It's fine, I'll use MegaAdblock. Is this even legal? Replacing content providers' ads seems wrong.

If adblock is legal, this is legal. Instead of ignoring ads, its simply replacing a websites ads' with their own.

Is it ethical? That is an entirely different question.

So he is making you a proposal along these lines:

-hey man, come over here, I'll let you listen to music for free if you let me steal money from the websites you visit...do we have a deal?

totally legit.

Pardon me, but where has the 15% came from? I don't see that number anywhere in the article.

Haha, wow. That's an incredibly novel approach. I won't be surprised if many here oppose it as it strips revenue from deserving websites and redirects it to Dotcom.

Is it any worse than AdBlock, though?

And what if I make something that does this too? If you have 10 applications all trying to replace 15% of ads on the web what will happen?

A situation similar to the Birthday Problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

Your computer becomes so slow that you have to reinstall Windows.

The thing is he'll probably have at least a moderate amount of success with it.

It's not novel at all, really -- this technique has been used many times before.

The only gotcha is: all the software that's used this technique before has been malware.

I can't wait until Project Glass takes this approach with our vision :-)

I can't wait until I can install AdBlock-AR and replace real ads with pictures of adorable kittens.

How long until someone cracks it to prevent the url rewriting?

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