Obligatory caution that's shared whenever AdNauseam is promoted on HN:
Indiscriminately clicking links to ads on web pages will get you flagged as a bot or for "unusual behavior" and you may start seeing more captchas and things like that as your IP / browsing behavior are flagged.
I've had this plugin for like 2 years I think (possibly more), and never had any issue with this. Neither Cloudflare's nor Google's non-interactive captchas have ever labeled me as a bot, and I've never been blocked from any site.
That could be because I've been so thoroughly tracked throughout my life already that they can detect me from mouse movements/keystrokes alone, or that adnauseam's behavior isn't obviously bot-like, or that the trackers already account for it's behavior patterns and filter it out as noise.
In any case, if it has the potential to cause advertisers grief, then I'm going to continue to use it.
yeah, what the parent commenter said makes little sense. Google search certainly won't do this and not a lot of people use google as a cdn (and even if they did I doubt there is an adword/adsense integration like that). Maybe if you click like every result from a google search. Most annoying ads aren't served by the top ad providers anyways, there are a lot of ad networks and ad delivery services out there.
The #1 cause of that bot experience is vpns and proxies. I get that 3rd rate experience myself, but even then it is bad but not unusable bad.
I remember making an ad clicker. I got the idea after my Banjo-Kazooie website earned $12 in banner ad clicks organically. That check in the mail inspired 11-year-old me to create InfiniteMoneyGlitch.js. It chugged away all night. And when I woke up, I saw that I was promptly banned for life.
I've been using it for atleast five years on every single device. This does not happen.
What did happen was that Google banned it from the Chrome store and this sounds like the exact kind of rumor they would spread if it actually does work to help poison your ad profile.
Using an ad blocker already does that. I can’t even use reddit outside a private browsing session because the main session is somehow identified to be a bot already and I get the “whoa there partner…” page. Same thing with other sites amazon serves a ton of captchas, so does google.
This is kinda good if you think about it since it'd create more friction in using ad-laden websites. Those that aren't blnuts with ads will be more likely rewarded with your attention. Seems fair.
I use tor and see captchas everywhere, some sites give me 403 and Youtube reguraly blocks the video and tells me to prove that I am not a bot by signing in (which I assume will block the Google Account as well). And in some cases any page on Youtube gives me 403 (and I don't even use an adblocker).
> We've adopted a model where we expect most content we consume to be free, paid for by ads.
I didn't adopt this. I wasn't consulted about it, and whenever possible I (and many others) voice very strongly our hatred of this model. We want it gone and will do everything in our meager power to avoid/disrupt/disengage from it.
The power being as meager as it is, sometimes its just posting comments in HN hoping that the tech elite see them and have it trigger some sort of deep introspection along the lines of "are we the baddies?" leading to a complete rethink and undoing of the ad/surveillance construct.
ads targeted to me are more likely to convince me to spend money - so it's in my interest to make sure ads know less about me so I make less impulse purchases?
Buying something because you saw it in ads is a wrong choice. If you need something, it is better to make an objective comparison and choose the product with the best properties. I think that for a rational buyer ad should be worthless.
Product makers don't want you to make a rational choice though. For example, take speakers: cheap ones do not have a response curve published at all (so assume worst), and more expensive ones often have a small blurred graph that is averaged to an octave, doesn't show the deviation between different samples of a product and is only for on-axis sound.
And guitars have no spec regarding sound at all except for trivial things like scale length, weight etc.
Literally every source of information that lets you know about the existence of a product is, by definition, an ad. How do you make a rational decision about something you don’t know exists?
Hobby forums? I've been blocking ads for 20 years so it's difficult for me to imagine someone using an ad to learn about anything they want to be even slightly informed about. The main thing "sponsored" links or information tells you is that the thing you're looking at is trying to scam or manipulate you. If you want to actually learn about something and find good products, you look for people who are interested and knowledgeable in that area.
That's so obviously false. There are wikipedia pages about products, and they are not ads, either by definition or extension or induction or by anything. You don't know what "ad" means.
Maybe look up the actual definition of a word before talking about what it means by definition.
Was Wikipedia your first exposure to some product you previously didn’t know existed? Your “counterexample” makes no sense. Also, I’m pretty sure I make more money from advertising than you do, so I’ll stick with my understanding of what it is, thank you very much.
You go to an imaginary price comparison website, choose "speakers" for example, and see all the kinds of products that exist. What do you need an ad for?
The best concert I ever saw was one I wouldn't have known about if I hadn't caught a TV commercial for it the week before.
A moderately intelligent adult can understand that ads are biased and can separate the fact from the opinion. I want to know if there's a new pizza place that opened near me, that's a fact. I can resist taking their claim that it's the best pizza ever at face value. I don't need to fear it.
Advertising contains information. We can own the responsibility for deciding which information is valuable and which isn't.
I don't have control over what certain qualities ad companies deduce and store about me. I can't even ask them to pretty please show me fewer ads if I give them all my data.
Do you think someone with a Google account, using every one of their products and being tracked every which way sees less advertising across the web, as opposed to someone without an account?
I do, however, have direct control over whether ads are shown to me or not, through blockers.
This is the only leverage I have in this unfair deal, so I'm damn well going to exercise it.
I don't think the advertisement companies (or rather, their lawyers) like to see it as consumer that pay for content by watching adds. Any transaction between a company and a consumer of monetary value need to be accounted and taxed, and advertisement based industries has an EU exception that explicitly states that content/products that has advertisement attached is not a transaction, since the viewer may watch 0 seconds, watch the whole add, or anything between, and thus there is no expectations of payment between a producer and consumer. There is also none of the usually consumer protection when dealing with such products.
The model that those companies deploy is that they give away, for free, the product, in the statistically prediction that enough people will happen to watch the ads in order to make it profitable. That is the deal.
Frankly, because the “high value” ads are intrusive and gross.
Getting retargeted for something I bought two months ago on Amazon is annoying. Having Facebook notice I’m no longer in proximity to my wife’s phone and target forensic accountant and dating ads to me is creepy. It’s gross and offensive when it turns out we’re not together because she’s just succumbed to cancer.
Best is no ads. Second best is ads for things that I have no interest in, that I'm never going to buy anyway. Anything else has the potential to influence my buying decisions, which I don't want.
Interesting, depending on how someone interprets 1c2c, it looks like the U.K. made it illegal to lie on the internet. I don't know about the U.K., but in the U.S., I would think that would run afoul of the 1st Amendment.
Ad blocking happens on your own computer, which you are authorised to make changes to. But simulating a click, therefore making an entry in another person's computer is what makes it unlawful.
I sent a get request. If you put something in your database that's on you.
Could we all be less eager to be the devil's advocate?
"Chug your mandatory mountain dew in order to continue"
Yes but technically you are not making an entry in someone's database; you merely send a request and it is not your problem that the remote computer misinterpreted this as displaying an interest in an ad. Remote server doesn't use any password, SMS confirmation or similar measure to restrict the users that are authorized to send requests so sending it sould be 100% legal.
But as a proverb says, "the law is like a drawbar, you can bend it as you like".
I had the same question. I don't wanna your tracking cokies and I don't wanna you draw strange pictures on my computer to fingerprint me. But when I click your link in backround thats not ok.
> But when I click your link in backround thats not ok.
Why not?
If you don't want bots clicking on your link you should put a captcha on it. If your link is publicly accessible, my background click is authorized by consequence.
Obligatory caution that's shared whenever AdNauseam is promoted on HN:
Indiscriminately clicking links to ads on web pages will get you flagged as a bot or for "unusual behavior" and you may start seeing more captchas and things like that as your IP / browsing behavior are flagged.
I've had this plugin for like 2 years I think (possibly more), and never had any issue with this. Neither Cloudflare's nor Google's non-interactive captchas have ever labeled me as a bot, and I've never been blocked from any site.
That could be because I've been so thoroughly tracked throughout my life already that they can detect me from mouse movements/keystrokes alone, or that adnauseam's behavior isn't obviously bot-like, or that the trackers already account for it's behavior patterns and filter it out as noise.
In any case, if it has the potential to cause advertisers grief, then I'm going to continue to use it.
I've been using it for so many years that I'm not sure when I started, but I've never had issues being labeled as a bot.
What should actually be noted is that Google has rejected the plugin from their store for ages so it does seem to do some damage to adtech.
And this is probably the best argument in favor of AdNauseam.
You can still install it on Chrome, but it is a manual process instead of just downloading from the Google Store.
yeah, what the parent commenter said makes little sense. Google search certainly won't do this and not a lot of people use google as a cdn (and even if they did I doubt there is an adword/adsense integration like that). Maybe if you click like every result from a google search. Most annoying ads aren't served by the top ad providers anyways, there are a lot of ad networks and ad delivery services out there.
The #1 cause of that bot experience is vpns and proxies. I get that 3rd rate experience myself, but even then it is bad but not unusable bad.
I remember making an ad clicker. I got the idea after my Banjo-Kazooie website earned $12 in banner ad clicks organically. That check in the mail inspired 11-year-old me to create InfiniteMoneyGlitch.js. It chugged away all night. And when I woke up, I saw that I was promptly banned for life.
This made me laugh. Thanks for the story.
I've been using it for atleast five years on every single device. This does not happen.
What did happen was that Google banned it from the Chrome store and this sounds like the exact kind of rumor they would spread if it actually does work to help poison your ad profile.
Maybe I am lucky, but I have been using AdNauseam for many years, and never had this sort of issue.
Using an ad blocker already does that. I can’t even use reddit outside a private browsing session because the main session is somehow identified to be a bot already and I get the “whoa there partner…” page. Same thing with other sites amazon serves a ton of captchas, so does google.
This is kinda good if you think about it since it'd create more friction in using ad-laden websites. Those that aren't blnuts with ads will be more likely rewarded with your attention. Seems fair.
Except then it happens on every cloudflare-protected website and you're banned from 60% of the web
I use tor and see captchas everywhere, some sites give me 403 and Youtube reguraly blocks the video and tells me to prove that I am not a bot by signing in (which I assume will block the Google Account as well). And in some cases any page on Youtube gives me 403 (and I don't even use an adblocker).
"banned from 60% of the web" suggests a terrible choke-point that everyone should avoid, regardless of convenience.
Agreed, still sounds like a win for me.
You should do this on CGNAT IP for maximum effect. I want to watch cloud flare ban an entire userbase.
[flagged]
> We've adopted a model where we expect most content we consume to be free, paid for by ads.
I didn't adopt this. I wasn't consulted about it, and whenever possible I (and many others) voice very strongly our hatred of this model. We want it gone and will do everything in our meager power to avoid/disrupt/disengage from it.
> We want it gone and will do everything in our meager power to avoid/disrupt/disengage from it.
What do you do to avoid it? I assume some combo of ad-blockers, etc. What else is covered in "everything"
The power being as meager as it is, sometimes its just posting comments in HN hoping that the tech elite see them and have it trigger some sort of deep introspection along the lines of "are we the baddies?" leading to a complete rethink and undoing of the ad/surveillance construct.
ads targeted to me are more likely to convince me to spend money - so it's in my interest to make sure ads know less about me so I make less impulse purchases?
Also, well targeted ads catch your attention more, so they have an higher chance to distract you from whatever you are doing.
Buying something because you saw it in ads is a wrong choice. If you need something, it is better to make an objective comparison and choose the product with the best properties. I think that for a rational buyer ad should be worthless.
Product makers don't want you to make a rational choice though. For example, take speakers: cheap ones do not have a response curve published at all (so assume worst), and more expensive ones often have a small blurred graph that is averaged to an octave, doesn't show the deviation between different samples of a product and is only for on-axis sound.
And guitars have no spec regarding sound at all except for trivial things like scale length, weight etc.
Literally every source of information that lets you know about the existence of a product is, by definition, an ad. How do you make a rational decision about something you don’t know exists?
Hobby forums? I've been blocking ads for 20 years so it's difficult for me to imagine someone using an ad to learn about anything they want to be even slightly informed about. The main thing "sponsored" links or information tells you is that the thing you're looking at is trying to scam or manipulate you. If you want to actually learn about something and find good products, you look for people who are interested and knowledgeable in that area.
That's so obviously false. There are wikipedia pages about products, and they are not ads, either by definition or extension or induction or by anything. You don't know what "ad" means.
Maybe look up the actual definition of a word before talking about what it means by definition.
Was Wikipedia your first exposure to some product you previously didn’t know existed? Your “counterexample” makes no sense. Also, I’m pretty sure I make more money from advertising than you do, so I’ll stick with my understanding of what it is, thank you very much.
Before you look up something on wikipedia, you need to know that it exists in the first place.
You go to an imaginary price comparison website, choose "speakers" for example, and see all the kinds of products that exist. What do you need an ad for?
Don't you see "sponsored" products at the top? But I agree not everything is an ad, just most of stuff.
Is the wikipedia page a about eg. Coca Cola an ad?
Did you not know what Coca-Cola is before you read its Wikipedia article?
You could find the link to the Coca-Cola page at some other page, for example, "Dangerous chemicals".
I learned about products from different non-ad sources (HN, personal blogs, maybe even wiki). What's your point?
If you saw a product in an ad, but aren't aware of any alternatives because you didn't see ads for them, that kind of limits your choices.
The best concert I ever saw was one I wouldn't have known about if I hadn't caught a TV commercial for it the week before.
A moderately intelligent adult can understand that ads are biased and can separate the fact from the opinion. I want to know if there's a new pizza place that opened near me, that's a fact. I can resist taking their claim that it's the best pizza ever at face value. I don't need to fear it.
Advertising contains information. We can own the responsibility for deciding which information is valuable and which isn't.
Where is this choice?
I don't have control over what certain qualities ad companies deduce and store about me. I can't even ask them to pretty please show me fewer ads if I give them all my data.
Do you think someone with a Google account, using every one of their products and being tracked every which way sees less advertising across the web, as opposed to someone without an account?
I do, however, have direct control over whether ads are shown to me or not, through blockers.
This is the only leverage I have in this unfair deal, so I'm damn well going to exercise it.
I don't think the advertisement companies (or rather, their lawyers) like to see it as consumer that pay for content by watching adds. Any transaction between a company and a consumer of monetary value need to be accounted and taxed, and advertisement based industries has an EU exception that explicitly states that content/products that has advertisement attached is not a transaction, since the viewer may watch 0 seconds, watch the whole add, or anything between, and thus there is no expectations of payment between a producer and consumer. There is also none of the usually consumer protection when dealing with such products.
The model that those companies deploy is that they give away, for free, the product, in the statistically prediction that enough people will happen to watch the ads in order to make it profitable. That is the deal.
Frankly, because the “high value” ads are intrusive and gross.
Getting retargeted for something I bought two months ago on Amazon is annoying. Having Facebook notice I’m no longer in proximity to my wife’s phone and target forensic accountant and dating ads to me is creepy. It’s gross and offensive when it turns out we’re not together because she’s just succumbed to cancer.
[dead]
Best is no ads. Second best is ads for things that I have no interest in, that I'm never going to buy anyway. Anything else has the potential to influence my buying decisions, which I don't want.
You don’t need to track individuals to provide contextually useful adverts based on the website and webpage someone is on.
I don't care what ads they want me to see. Only that they are blocked.
I get straight up porn (for porn games and explicit AI gf chat apps) sent to me. I report it each time. What else can I do about it?
Ads per se are not the problem. The problem is, they tracking and loading Gigabytes of data and make every website slow.
Do you understand why the Cambridge Analytica scandal was a scandal? Advertisers target you in their interest, not yours.
Using this would be unlawful in the UK.
Could you share which specific UK law using something like this would violate?
Computer Misuse Act 1990. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1990/18/section/3
(1)A person is guilty of an offence if—
(a)he does any unauthorised act in relation to a computer;
(b)at the time when he does the act he knows that it is unauthorised; and
(c)either subsection (2) or subsection (3) below applies.
(2)This subsection applies if the person intends by doing the act—
(c)to impair the operation of any such program or the reliability of any such data;
Clicking ads is exactly what they exist for. Not convinced this breaks the law any more than just clicking an ad would.
Interesting, depending on how someone interprets 1c2c, it looks like the U.K. made it illegal to lie on the internet. I don't know about the U.K., but in the U.S., I would think that would run afoul of the 1st Amendment.
In the US even the president lies every day, so I guess the US can't forbid to lie.
Would running an ad blocker not fall under 2.c?
Doesn't running ads on my computer without consent fall under 1a?
Ad blocking happens on your own computer, which you are authorised to make changes to. But simulating a click, therefore making an entry in another person's computer is what makes it unlawful.
I sent a get request. If you put something in your database that's on you. Could we all be less eager to be the devil's advocate? "Chug your mandatory mountain dew in order to continue"
Yes but technically you are not making an entry in someone's database; you merely send a request and it is not your problem that the remote computer misinterpreted this as displaying an interest in an ad. Remote server doesn't use any password, SMS confirmation or similar measure to restrict the users that are authorized to send requests so sending it sould be 100% legal.
But as a proverb says, "the law is like a drawbar, you can bend it as you like".
Following that logic I should never click any links on the internet, since I would be potentially logging as activity on someone else's computer
who allowed them to make entries in MY computer in the first place?
If I purposefully click an ad even though I know I have no intention to purchase anything also unlawful?
I had the same question. I don't wanna your tracking cokies and I don't wanna you draw strange pictures on my computer to fingerprint me. But when I click your link in backround thats not ok.
> But when I click your link in backround thats not ok.
Why not?
If you don't want bots clicking on your link you should put a captcha on it. If your link is publicly accessible, my background click is authorized by consequence.
How is that? Sounds unbelievable.
What can i use to get rid of the admiral pop ups?
u block origin and the annoyance filters should work. make a custom one for the pop up element if you have to?
Thanks