this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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Recently found this gem: https://adnauseam.io/
It's an ad blocker that only hides ads and clicks them for you in the background, which means you waste advertiser's money, support creators, can't get flagged for ad blocking as easily, and they can't build a proper profile against your ad activity since it's all noise. Haven't installed it yet, but this might be the push I needed.
This might be an acceptable sollution, but what happens on the other side of the ad? If something maliciously is being spreaded, the click might have to happen in an isolated form from the rest of the system or the browser.
I cannot vouch for it, but this is their explanation: https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/FAQ#does-adnauseams-clicking-put-me-at-risk-for-malicious-ads-or-ransomware
Does AdNauseam's clicking put me at risk for malicious Ads or ransomware?
Absolutely not. AdNauseam simulates clicks on Ads by issuing an AJAX request to the adserver in a background process. This request is made without opening any additional windows or pages on your computer. The text-only request is safely discarded by AdNauseam before it has a chance to execute in the browser (no DOM is constructed and no code is ever allowed to run). Further, all cookies from AdNauseam's visits are automatically blocked before they reach the browser's local storage.
As a software engineer, I can't speak about their actual implementation, but I can vouch that it's a technically sound response, as far as blocking malicious ads from executing code from your browser.
However, I don't know what headers or parameters are being sent with the request. It's possible that a malicious ad could still track you using that metadata, so heads up on that
From the AdNauseum FAQ, they issue the ad "click" request in such a way that they are able to immediately discard the response data without feeding it to the browser in any meaningful way, so nothing gets loaded, rendered, etc
Interesting, thanks for the info, couldn't find it when i flew over the site
The question is: How much data about me and my browser does clicking on the ads leak? I'm using libre wolf with additional hardening, including noscript, and I suspect that clicking on ads will not even register with the ad company?
I like it. It's basically a spruced-up fork of uBlock Origin.
this sounds neat. I'll check it out
Looks promising!
No data collection and no telemetry, plus it's based on ublock origin
If this one works properly there is no way for a site to detect the ad blocking at all, I mean no "legal" way
Aren't they going to realize that something strange is happening? No real person clicks on every single ad.
Part of why complex algorithms fail is their assumptions are baked in. Until we get literal AI deciding what ads to serve, someone would have to notice the unusual behavior in aggregate and explicitly program some heuristic to deal with it.