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Comment by a2128 | Hacker News Reader

What's with the recommendation for a YouTube MP3 converter near the bottom? There seems to be no technological relation so I can only guess the author got paid to include it, but you're legally supposed to disclose if something is a paid ad

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Is it a legal requirement? I thought it (disclaiming ads) was something one did to avoid the proverbial pitchforks and nothing more.

The FTC has guidance on when it considers a compensated endorsement to be "deceptive advertising", which is something they can legally enforce. [0]

[0] https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/ftcs-endorse...

This seems like a farce. Most advertising in america is deceptive.

Edit: they seem to only enforce disclosure and they don't actually evaluate whether the ad is deceptive or not. Still this does seem to foreclose on the domain user in question's use of ads, if anyone cares

> If the advertiser doesn’t have proof that the endorser’s experience represents what people will generally achieve using the product as described in the ad (for example, by just taking a pill daily for two months), an ad featuring that endorser must make clear to the audience what the generally expected results of following that same regimen are.

Pathetic and spineless. If this were actually enforced 99.99% of ad claims would be illegal.

> This seems like a farce. Most advertising in america is deceptive.

Yes, that's because many of the regulatory and consumer protection agencies are neutered by illegal businesses.

16 CFR Part 255 Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/press-re...

There is no such legal requirement whatsoever.

It's part of the terms of service of a number of social networks, I can almost see how someone might confuse that for the law. If I squint.

Is that a legal requirement where the owner of that website is?

I agree with you, that ad is placed in a odd place. It looks so out of place, I would believe it was copy-pasted there by mistake, if it weren't for the HTML link.

The members seem to mostly be from Norway and Norway has a law against "hidden" advertising, which I believe applies here.

We are indeed Norwegian! The domain is owned by a squatter now. He wants EUR 3000 to release it back to us. It's simply too much right now. So, I wish that this HN post could change from the squatter URL to GitHub instead.

@dang can change the URL to https://github.com/includeos/IncludeOS

according to wayback machine the domain expired at the end of 2021. Months later it came back with the sneaky ad. Their page at github https://includeos.github.io/ does not have it. It is safe to assume whoever grabbed the domain has no association to the authors.

Project has been dead for many years now btw.

You're completely right. It's a squatter and he wants money. The project is not dead, however. It's currently used for research at University of Oslo, and I think we can expect much more activity in the coming years, such as ARM support.

I might add RISC-V support myself, as I am the author of libriscv. We'll see.

> You're completely right. It's a squatter and he wants money. The project is not dead, however. It's currently used for research at University of Oslo

If someone bought the domain and is re-using the same assets to put advertisements up then the author of includeos would have some real teeth in courts...

Yes, we have spoken to a lawyer and it is indeed the case. It still costs money, and we are not sure how to proceed yet, outside of removing links to the domain.

> Project has been dead for many years now btw.

Code doesn't die. Especially code targetting the c abi.

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