this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
842 points (97.3% liked)

Technology

68244 readers
4205 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

It garbles advertisers' data as a result, but you must disable uBlock Origin to run it; they can't work simultaneously. I recently moved to it and, so far, am never looking back!

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] pyre@lemmy.world 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I don't know, just sounds like I'd be contributing to the marketers metrics so they can show "it works". it'll only make them invest in ads more. if anyone thinks capitalists are these genius level manipulators who know how everything works I only refer to the richest person alive being the least charismatic, least knowledgable, unfuckable troglodyte who keeps making an ass of himself.

if any of these companies suffer any losses or reduced profits they'll just fire hardworking people, not one of them will turn around and say maybe the ads aren't working when you actively work to show them that it is working.

[–] joshchandra@midwest.social 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

... until they keep having to dismiss people and go, "... huh." This is a marathon we're playing. You certainly don't have to use it, but I think the philosophy makes sense, especially given how AdNauseam doesn't click on acceptable ads that don't track you.

[–] pyre@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

they will never go "huh". you give way too much credit to corporate management.

[–] dantheclamman@lemmy.world 6 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Just curious- if ads are for something illegal, couldn't this expose me to liability for theoretically "clicking" it from my IP/device? And if ads are for something unsavory ( like a "chat with local cougars" site or something similar), wouldn't they start to deliver me more such ads, thinking, wow this IP is the only one clicking every sex chat ad, send them more!

[–] RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works 3 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

How many websites do you browse with links to truly illegal content?

If you live in a country with truly abysmal human rights, definitely don't bother with this plugin, but in most cases you should be fine on the illegal side.

Even if somehow the website you're browsing has some super sketchy ad to buyillegaldrugshere.com or whatever, to get in trouble with the law in most civilized places you'd have to actually buy the illegal drugs, not just ping the illegal drugs IP. Especially since you can pretty easily prove to a judge that your system fetches ad links automatically and without further engagement.

Not saying it can't happen, just that it's really unlikely you would be served an ad for something so illegal just clicking on it is a liability. The literally only case I can think of coming close is CSAM, but even then, if you're regularly browsing websites that advertise CSAM, maybe find other websites to occupy your time? And I can just about guarantee any website serving CSAM ads is already doing illegal shit, so you should probably be more worried about that than an ad-click...

[–] dantheclamman@lemmy.world 3 points 16 hours ago

I'm not sure how many ads on different sites are sketchy. I don't feel like finding out, that's why I block it. There have been plenty of reasons that all sorts of illegal stuff gets inserted on well-meaning sites, so it seems like it's inviting all sorts of trouble to automatically click stuff without consideration.

[–] fossilesque@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

I've used this for a while. Also, I love filling out corpo surveys because I feed them bad data. It's the little acts of chaos.

Another great extension:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fake-data-haterapps/

If they want real information, they can pay me, and even then, well... :) Don't work for free.

[–] joshchandra@midwest.social 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Ha, this is as hilarious as it is creative. Interesting find; got any more?

[–] fossilesque@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

Depends on the situation really, it makes me feel the joy of a naughty child. Roll with it. Where you can feed people bad data, do it. Where you cannot, strip it and block it. Obtusify and randomise how your computer connects to the internet (browser spoofs, VPNs, SPN, etc.), use containers (Firefox), support others breaking rules (https://snowflake.torproject.org/), contain your applications (https://safing.io/), spoof things like location etc. This is my little everyday act of anarchism. If people want to fight back against this bullshit, they should learn to stop complying with the folks putting everyone and everything in boxes. People are so used to mindlessly complying. It's my nerdy kind of fun. Make your phone & computer a poisoned apple when you have time.

[–] joshchandra@midwest.social 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Dang, I had no idea of Portmaster! I wish I talked to you years ago and will check these out, thanks, and I fully agree with your stance as well.

[–] lumony@lemmings.world 67 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I've been recommending this for awhile, it's nice to see someone else take up the mantle.

Yes, it clicks ads in addition to blocking them. Google removed it from its addon repository even though it wasn't breaking any rules. They just removed it and kept it removed because there wasn't sufficient backlash, the scumbags.

It's the main reason why I use Firefox these days. it's clear that the cabal will not allow anything that legitimately threatens their power structure, and make advertising less-effective for the same price is a gut punch they need.

[–] milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee 24 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Automated ad clicks probably are breaking the rules, TBF.

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 8 points 18 hours ago

Don't care. At this point I will take being actively malicious toward them.

[–] wonderfulvoltaire@lemmy.zip 23 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] CPMSP@midwest.social 5 points 20 hours ago

That comment is correct on so many levels...

[–] renzev@lemmy.world 130 points 2 days ago (11 children)

You know this is the good shit because when it first came out a few years back google was running a huge disinformation campaign against it. You'd search for "adnauseum" in google and the first result would be an article from some weird advertising company calling is "insecure" and "malware" without any actual argumentation behind those claims, while no other search engine returned that article (I lost the screenshots, so yall are just gonna have to take my word for it). They also delisted it from the chrome store for not discernible reason. They were afraid.

But nowadays I'm willing to bet that they figured out how to detect adnauseum's fake clicks and filtering it out. Stuff like that needs a talented development team to keep it up to date.

load more comments (11 replies)
[–] morphballganon@mtgzone.com 34 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Good start. Now make a version that clicks each ad a random number of times from randomly generated IP addresses.

[–] Tja@programming.dev 63 points 1 day ago (27 children)

That's not how IP addresses work.

[–] FiskFisk33@startrek.website 1 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

Totally doable if this was a distributed service.

ok not randomly generated, but you know

[–] Landless2029@lemmy.world 2 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

It does if it reports the URL to click home somewhere and users can opt in to pull the list to auto click.

It would DDoS the ad servers. Muwhahahaa

[–] theherk@lemmy.world 6 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Yes. That’s just what I want. An extension sending all ads served to me to a central location, so my fingerprint can be very easily indexed and stored on a definitely never hacked, leaked, or sold database.

[–] Landless2029@lemmy.world 2 points 13 hours ago

And it would totally never get abused or hit a false positive.

[–] yarr@feddit.nl 23 points 1 day ago (2 children)

What if we use a Visual Basic UI to hack the IP address by netmask?

[–] GenosseFlosse@feddit.org 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yes, but this only works if you connect your VPN via 3 block chain proxies.

[–] madcaesar@lemmy.world 4 points 18 hours ago

Make sure you're behind a 54mghz ram modem firewall

load more comments (24 replies)
[–] GenosseFlosse@feddit.org 18 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Ad Networks use browser fingerprinting to detect duplicate clicks, which is tied to your hardware, system locale, installed fonts etc.

[–] morphballganon@mtgzone.com 18 points 1 day ago (8 children)

Sounds like a solvable problem

[–] viking@infosec.pub 25 points 1 day ago

Chameleon add-on for Firefox, randomly rotates your browser, OS, screen size, timezone, device type, language, and other customizable parameters every x minutes.

I've set it to do so every 5 minutes, and to omit desktop & tablet as device types (else some websites display the respective page) and timezones (messed up 2FA).

I also disabled blackberry and windows phone from the manufacturer ID, that would have the opposite effect from obscuring me.

For the rest of it, it's working great.

load more comments (7 replies)
[–] x00z@lemmy.world 48 points 2 days ago (1 children)

This would still make a connection to the ad servers that can then track me though.

I guess with a hardened browser and a VPN it would be alright.

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 4 points 18 hours ago

At this point I think it's better to poison the well.

[–] NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml 96 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I always liked using this on the premise of privacy-through-obfuscation. If the powers that be must get information from me, then i'd prefer to give them garbage information.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] rimu@piefed.social 89 points 2 days ago (18 children)

Google has put a lot of effort into detecting and blocking stuff like this. They call it "click fraud", if you want to look it up.

It'll just mean they start ignoring clicks from you.

[–] diffusive@lemmy.world 74 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That, I guess, it’s the whole point. Stopping being tracked 🙂

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] _cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 day ago

Then that achieves the same goal. If they're ignoring clicks from you, and you're blocking their trackers, then they probably don't have a good profile on you, because whatever they do have is either old, poisoned, or both.

load more comments (16 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›