[HN Gopher] Noiszy: A browser plugin that creates meaningless we...
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       Noiszy: A browser plugin that creates meaningless web data -
       digital "noise."
        
       Author : throwaway154
       Score  : 51 points
       Date   : 2023-08-22 16:16 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (noiszy.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (noiszy.com)
        
       | someguy7250 wrote:
       | 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)
        
         | JohnFen wrote:
         | > Question is: Will I be held liable for randomly clicking on
         | things?
         | 
         | Liable? For what? You're literally doing nothing damaging or
         | illegal.
        
       | xnx wrote:
       | Should probably have (2017) in the title. Previously
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002995
        
         | bigmofo wrote:
         | I agree. Also, the code repository has no changes since 2017
         | (at least on the default branch).
        
       | elitepleb wrote:
       | https://adnauseam.io - clicking ads, so you don't have to.
        
         | anjel wrote:
         | 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?
        
           | hot_gril wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | Unai wrote:
         | 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?
        
         | leach wrote:
         | This looks very interesting
        
         | hot_gril wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | 3abiton wrote:
           | Is it open source?
        
             | hot_gril wrote:
             | Yes https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam and it's a fork of
             | the open-source uBlock Origin.
        
       | recursive wrote:
       | The "get the plugin" link is a 404.
        
         | nxobject wrote:
         | 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.)
        
           | faeranne wrote:
           | https://github.com/noiszy/noiszy There's no direct link to
           | the source, but it's out there.... and very, very broken.
        
             | juujian wrote:
             | Hasn't been updated since 2017? :(
        
       | k310 wrote:
       | I ran one once and it was a bit too noisy and got me banned
       | (temporarily). Are they any better nowadays?
        
         | ivolimmen wrote:
         | Banned from what?
        
           | k310 wrote:
           | 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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       (page generated 2023-08-22 23:02 UTC)