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Comment by bertil | Hacker News Reader

That article describes a though experiment that would A. remove an ad, and B. should (but doesn't) trigger a BitCoin miner. It's clearly marketed as an illustration to an idea. I'm failing to see the consumer fraud. Is this like accusing a car-manufacturer of manslaugher because they latest concept-car didn't have seat-belts?

I would like to know if that's selective reporting from Wired, or spectacular fishing from NJ state atorney.

Also, neither the hackathon, nor MIT appear to be in NJ: what is their jurisdiction? Those two issues should be clarified in any basic coverage of the incident: at this point, it is plain bad reporting.

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It's been in the news before.

It's spectacular fishing from NJ state attorney, it could in theory violate the law as written if deployed on a website and mined bitcoins without implied consent by the client (but then again I could argue the same for flash ads), but the whole thing took place in MA and as far as anyone is aware only in lab environments in MA as part of the competition. The code could be used maliciously, but wasn't and there is no evidence it ever was, its NJ overreaching, pure and simple.

This is where I am as well, why is the NJ AG in such a snit? I get they may have thought there was crime here, but once they got the facts they should have just gone on about their merry way, especially when the university tells them this. Now they look stupid, they have to know they look stupid, and so what or who is pulling so hard that they are willing to look stupid to fulfill that request. Very very strange.

Could just be sunk cost. They think they wont look stupid if they 'win', so are willing to look a lot more stupid yet in the hope they can do someone for something, as otherwise the whole affair is a huge waste of time and money and they can't have that.

Oh man, overall it would suck, but if NJ won this case... Could you actually sue a company for a resource-intensive ad?

Ads are just the visible parts, so many web pages are bloated with so much invisible tracker/analytics javascript code etc. collecting data to be sold.

As a coder, I was actually shocked to realize just how bad it was when I tried Ghostery. Some pages load more than 10 scripts that are just trackers and analytics. Aside from the performance implications, the amount of data collected on your behalf, on each page, without any mention (implied consent, I spose), is pretty crazy.

Ghostery is great and I use it too, but I would also suggest NoScript if you use Firefox, it blocks a lot more.

And an ad blocker.

I do use an Ad Blocker as well, I just installed Ghostery to better understand what it did (had heard the name, wasn't familiar with the product).

Would it be nice if that stuff also became illegal in NJ?

The article is indeed poor. The actual subpoena and subsequent filings indicate that Tidbit distributed embeddable code in return for an email address and bitcoin wallet, and that New Jersey authorities obtained a copy by the same method. They are concerned that there doesn't appear to be any safeguards against the malicious use of this tool and essentially asked Tidbit to cough up a list of who they had distributed it to.

From New Jersey's point of view, it seems rather as if Tidbit is, or was, in the business of distributing something that could very easily be abused, and whose distribution in NJ is regulated by law - in much the same way that some items in catalogs are marked 'Not for sale in [list of states]' because such items are restricted from sale i those places. For example, I don't think you can sell lock-picking tools to the general public in California, and I imagine that it's illegal to sell ATM skimming devices in many states.

You'll rarely be wrong if you assume that prosecutors are fishing.

On the other hand, you'll also rarely be wrong if you assume Wired fucked up the story.

50/50, flip a coin.

Can I vote for both?

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