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Comment by surge | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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