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Noiszy: A browser plugin that creates meaningless web data – digital “noise.” (noiszy.com)
79 points by throwaway154 on Aug 22, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 29 comments



If everyone can band together and generate N fake clicks for every 1 real click, And provide N wrong Captcha answers for every correct answer,

Then we might just be able to send a message to advertisers and those "data anal-lysts"

Question is: Will I be held liable for randomly clicking on things? What if I use a bot instead? (Maybe that's why the author eventually abandoned this project)


> Question is: Will I be held liable for randomly clicking on things?

Liable? For what? You're literally doing nothing damaging or illegal.


If it's a buy now button or something it could be an issue.

Also advertisers hate fake clicks on ads (they call it ad fraud) but they will blame the site owner so that's not really a problem.


> advertisers hate fake clicks on ads

The question was if it's illegal, not if it drives advertisers mad. The whole point is to drive them mad. :)


> Will I be held liable for randomly clicking on things?

If you count this, some sites might think you're a bot or otherwise hint that they don't want to serve you. I've had Google make me solve captchas occasionally because I was using Ad Nauseam.


https://adnauseam.io - clicking ads, so you don't have to.


The Ad Nauseum plugin is probably more than 10 years old. In the age of advanced and largely inescapapble browser fingerprinting, is it still useful like it once was?


Hard to tell even 10 years ago how effective this strategy was. Google banned it from the Chrome extensions store, which at least means they felt threatened by the clicks, but that doesn't mean you're defeating the tracking.


and a great way to give your browser a unique fingerprint so it can be tracked even further.

Plugins like this are a very bad idea.


In most cases, using this tool will:

1) Increase revenue for the advertising companies you don't like

2) Cost advertisers a lot of money (some of who are probably companies you like)

3) Increases revenue for publishers with a ton of ads on their page

It's not obvious to me how contributing to click fraud benefits you as the user. If anything, it benefits the ad companies by driving more revenue to them.


4) Eventually the advertisers realize their ads are having less and less of an impact, and pull back on their spending.


I used this for a while. Funny how it even has a "damage meter" estimating how many $ of ads I've clicked on the page. At some point Google started occasionally giving me captchas just when I searched stuff, saying they detected unusual behavior.


Is it open source?


Yes https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam and it's a fork of the open-source uBlock Origin.


How effective could this be? Maybe if it was super popular, maybe integrated on some browsers like brave or opera, it might send a message, but otherwise, isn't it just a way to give money to ad companies?


I'm not the one giving money to ad companies. I'm causing ad companies to exchange money with ad providers for no reason at all.


This looks very interesting


Should probably have (2017) in the title. Previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002995


I agree. Also, the code repository has no changes since 2017 (at least on the default branch).


in a world where big data threatens to commodify our lives,. telling online surveys that i "Dont know" what pringles are constitutes Heroism

https://twitter.com/dril/status/1061091401251745792


The "get the plugin" link is a 404.


This reflects my assumptions more than anything else... my first impulse was to go look for the source, but it doesn't seem to be open-sourced either. (Of course, I shouldn't expect that.)


https://github.com/noiszy/noiszy There's no direct link to the source, but it's out there.... and very, very broken.


Hasn't been updated since 2017? :(


Seems like it got posted here in 2017 and no updates since then


Similar (and of similar vintage) but in python: https://github.com/essandess/isp-data-pollution/


I ran one once and it was a bit too noisy and got me banned (temporarily). Are they any better nowadays?


Banned from what?


It was a long time ago. An extension injected a lot of clicks on random stuff to spoil any profile. I do seem to recall that my IP was locked out for a while, probably for machine-gunning.

Just my best recollection.




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