Posted by surprisetalk 8 hours ago
They paid you to put a little ad banner at the bottom of your screen, and paid you like 5 cents an hour that you had the banner up and you were browsing the web.
It tried to watch your browsing to make sure you were actually there, but of course we wrote some script to programmatically visit random web sites. Then they added mouse tracking, so we added mouse movement to our scripts.
The most insidious part was that it was also an MLM… you would also get paid for usage by people you referred, too, and then even by people those people referred, with diminishing returns from each level. So like 1 cent an hour for my referrals and .5 cents an hour for their referral referrals.
We were broke high school kids, so we put so much time and effort into recruiting people and getting them set up with the auto scripts. By the end we were making in the low 3 figure a month. We knew people who were making even more.
Of course, it soon went out of business because of the dotcom bust as well as the ridiculous business model and rampant user fraud, but it was fun while it lasted.
but it does sound fun. let's see if all these large coding models and agents are a similar scheme.
The big networks filter such traffic, the small networks benefit from it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/legal/comments/1pq6kgp/is_it_legal_...
You may also get accidentally get your own website blacklisted or moved to a lower RPM tier, or provoke shadow-ban websites that you like to visit, or... generate more ad revenue for them.
Any jurisdiction where this is supposedly illegal, it hasn't been court tested seriously.*
Per your link: "What you're describing is essentially the extension AdNauseam. So far they have not had any legal troubles, but they technically could." That stance or an assertion it's not illegal is consistent throughout the thread, provided you aren't clicking your own ads.
"The industry" thinks you shouldn't be allowed to fast forward your own VCR through an ad either. They can take a flying .. lesson.
* Disclaimer: I don't know if that's true, but it sounds true.
No, the illegal-ness doesn't come from the clicking, it comes from the fact you're clicking with the intention of defrauding someone. That's also why filling out a credit card application isn't illegal, but filling out the same credit card application with phony details is.
You’re not defrauding anyone if you have your extension click all ads in the background and make a personalized list for you that you can choose to review.
The intent is convenience and privacy, not fraud.
How's this any different than going around and filling out fake credit applications to stop "uninvited data collection" by banks/credit bureaus or whatever?
>The intent is convenience and privacy, not fraud.
You're still harming the business, so my guess would be something like tortious interference.
It's so different that it can't even be compared. There's nothing similar there.
>>The intent is convenience and privacy, not fraud.
> You're still harming the business, so my guess would be something like tortious interference.
No, you're not harming the business. You're simply not following the business idea of the "business". Anyone can have a business idea of some type. Not a single person on earth has any obligation to fulfill that business idea. But somehow some people believe the opposite.
If you send me an unsolicited mailer with a microchip that tracks my eyes and face as I read it, you’ve already pushed too far. To then claim my using a robot to read it for me is fraud ignores the invasion of privacy you’ve already instituted without my express consent (digital ads are this).
It’s not fraud if it’s self-defense from corporate overreach.
At best that gets you off the hook of fraud charges, but not tort claims, which are civil, and don't require intent.
>It’s not fraud if it’s self-defense from corporate overreach.
There's no concept of "self-defense" when it comes to fraud, or torts.
You're defrauding nobody. People purchase visibility and clicks when they purchase advertising. not conversions or sales.
Again, you're ignoring intent in all of this. It's not illegal to default on a loan, or even to refuse to pay it back (eg. bankruptcy), but it is illegal to take out a loan with the specific intent to not pay it back (eg. if you know you're planning on declare bankruptcy right afterwards).
> I hate advertisers so I'm gonna get back at them by making them pay more.
Clicking with the intention of helping doesn't help. Only clicking with genuine interest helps.
To be fair, you put it in your own face, by visiting the site...
The goal of Adnauseam was to hurt Google, and other big adnetworks, from what I understand.
By blocking:
-> Advertiser is not harmed
-> For the adnetwork: No ad revenue
-> Publisher is not harmed
-> Pages load faster
==
With fake clicks:
-> Advertiser is harmed
-> Publisher is harmed
-> Adnetwork is okayish with the situation (to a certain point)
--> Google is accidentally earning more revenue (at least temporarily, until you get shadow-banned), your computer / page loads slows down and you enter a legally gray area.
(+ the side-note below: clicking on every ads leak your browsing history because in the URL there is a unique tracking ID that connects to the page you are viewing)
How? Publishers do need revenue and this can deprive them of this income.
If it's something that's been held up in court already then of course I have to accept it, but I can't say the reason seems immediately intuitive.
Charges of fraud doesn't require a contract to be in place. That's the whole point of criminal law, it's so that you don't need to add a "don't screw me over" clause to every interaction you make.
Now if you had an AdWords account and ran a botnet that visited your property and clicked ads, that’s fraud.
I mean if you had an extension that did it I don't see why it would be impossible. And with an extension for that purpose it shows intent.
Now like I already said, if you are running a botnet clicking on your ads that is entirely a different story.
So tell us what does having the extension installed prove?
If you intentionally loop-download large files or fake requests on websites that you don't like, in order to create big CDN charges for them, then what ?
Without reaching the threshold of Denial of Service, just sneakily growing it.
Nobody benefits, except for the weird idea of the pleasure of harming people, still illegal.
Not doubtful at all. He literally laid out the definition of click fraud for you.
As someone who ran ads on web sites as far back as 1995, that has been the term the industry has used forever.
Replying with a dismissive "doubtful" demonstrates that you don't know what you're talking about.
Never in the history of HN has a [citation] been so [needed].
And from an actual lawyer, not just some rando cosplaying M&A in his mom's basement.
Usually when it's brought up people say it doesn't work or try to spread fear that it is illegal. Google banning them but taking no action otherwise indicates to me and the thousands who use it that it is in fact effective and Google has no other recourse other than their control over the most popular browser.
Advertisers are stealing my time and attention. Why is this not illegal also then?
Big ones detect it, so they don't care to sue. Small ones benefit, so they don't sue.
This is your main protection, there is nothing to squeeze from a single guy. Even if you get him to pay you back the fraud, then what ? It costs more in legal fees.
Still, it's such an odd concept to self-inflict yourself such; it's way better to just block the ads than to be tagged as a bot and get Recaptcha-ed or Turnstiled more frequently.
> One public Firebase file. One day. $98,000. How it happened and how it could happen to you.
https://www.reddit.com/r/googlecloud/comments/1kg9icb/one_pu...
"It's just a script that makes a loop, I didn't charge anybody anything, I didn't pay anybody anything. I agreed to no terms and conditions".
It's a very harmful practice to intentionally try to hurt companies, when you can just block what you don't like.
I say tit for tat. They're intentionally trying to harm me, spying on me, maybe infecting my computer, mining crypto with my CPU, or wasting my network bandwidth. They could just not do that and there wouldn't be any concern about reciprocity
Companies aren’t people. Fuck companies.
There is a side-effect in terms of privacy: you send a fake click request every single time, you also actually disclose to adnetworks which page you are visiting and incidentally your whole browsing history (not through referrers, but because click URLs have a unique click IDs to match).
It lowers the effectiveness of internet advertising. When advertisers feel they're paying too much for the business the ads generate, they'll stop advertising in that way. That's probably the thinking anyway. A less generous stance would be: I hate advertisers so I'm gonna get back at them by making them pay more.
Which it probably doesn't, given that it uses XHRs to "click" on ads, which is super detectable, and given the proliferation of ad fraud I'd assume all networks already filter out.
I don't think that's a very lucid assessment of how advertisers operate on the Internet. We all agree that they could take these steps. If AdNauseam doesn't look like outright fraud in the logs (which they don't if it's all distinct IPs and browsers), I don't think they want to cut it out from their revenue and viewer analytics.
You think ad networks don't have logs more sophisticated than default nginx/apache logs? XHRs are trivially detectable by headers alone.
[0] https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-intern...
i used adnauseam a while ago. it clicked on about 1.5 million ads in half a year of usage.
Not sure i can give good reasoning for this, but it felt like doing the right thing. :)
{
headline: "We Value Your Privacy",
body: "That's why we collect it so carefully. Accept the cookies.",
style: "darkpattern",
},