Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

PrivDog's functionality is to replace advertising in web pages with it's own advertising "from trusted sources".

So it's an ad-replacer, not an ad-blocker, but works in a similar way to other ad-blocking proxies like Proxomitron. The main problem here is in bad certificate verification, which seems to be a common trend with these bugs (Apple's "goto fail" was another much-publicised one.)

As I mentioned before about Superfish, I really hope these discoveries aren't used as an excuse to take away the right of the user to choose what he/she trusts, in a similar way to how "terrorism" is being used as an excuse to further surveillance. In contrast, it used to be really easy to enable/disable certificate verification completely - browsers had configuration options to do that. (Why? So I can use a proxy that doesn't resign certificates. It means that instead of trusting the browser, I can trust the proxy to do the certificate verification instead; and I should absolutely have the right to do that and inspect what data my traffic contains via that proxy.)

Replacing ads with other ads "from trusted sources" seems incredibly underhanded anyways. Who gets the money from clicks on the new ads? Probably not the web site owner...

I agree. This is theft. It's technical and complicated so it likely won't be ever be enforced or prosecuted, but I think this is outright stealing.

Would you say that using an ad-blocker is also "stealing"? How about changing the channel when ads come on TV - which could make you see a different ad instead (since a lot of them tend to synchronise the times when they play ads...), similar to what Privdog does, or just doing something else completely (analogous to a pure ad-blocker)?

I think this goes back to the philosophical debate about adblocking that won't be over anytime soon... and I'm firmly on the side of the user retaining full control over the content he/she consumes, which in some ways is equivalent to the freedom one has to close his/her eyes or look away at something else, and believe that technological measures like ad-blockers are a way of protecting this freedom.

The alternative, which advertisers would very much like to happen, is for even those basic freedoms to be taken away; for users to essentially be forced into consuming whatever content they desire.

Would you say that using an ad-blocker is also "stealing"?

I think it's pretty easy to draw a distinction between blocking ads for personal convenience and replacing ads with other ads for profit.

You are vehemently and loquaciously defending malware. You are also callously disregarding sites operating on razor-thin profit margins from their ads which, if lost to a firestorm of theft of revenue by criminals distributing malware such as Superfish and Privdog, will cause them to have to shut down their sites altogether.

The only site owners who aren't hurt by this type of malware are the terrible ones with no regard for their users, who are willing to double up on now many popups they slam the visitor with, or ironically even willing to join shady pay-per-install malware networks just to get their revenue back up to normal levels.

I'd like to believe you've never run a site before, because otherwise you'd have an idea of just how expensive it can be.

How exactly is advocating users' freedoms "defending malware"? By the same reasoning that advocating privacy is "defending terrorists"? I wouldn't want to use Privdog or Superfish, but if someone voluntarily wants to change how he/she views the Internet on their own machine, they should be well within their rights to do so.

The only site owners who aren't hurt by this type of malware are the terrible ones with no regard for their users

...or the ones who don't put any ads on their site? I do happen to have such a site, and the reason it doesn't have any ads is because it doesn't need them.

In my experience, the most ad-filled sites also tend to be of the content-farm type, providing little in the way of quality content.

I'm not arguing that users blocking ads is an issue. To me that is the same as someone deciding to not look at an ad in a magazine or tear them out/cover them up before reading the article. What they decide to do it up to them.

See my billboard example reply to the comment above to see why I believe that Privdog and Superfish are run by thieves.

I'm also on the side of user retaining full control over the content he/she consumes, but there's an important difference here - in case of ad blockers, it's your choice as a user to not have ads displayed (or have them changed to something else). However, in case of Privdog, it's a third party changing ads without your or ad-displaying site's knowledge or consent. So maybe I, as a user, did choose to display ads on some site because I want to support them (I do that every now and then if the site asks nicely) - but then the site still doesn't get any of my money because some scumbags injected their own ads.

It's a clear theft - a malicious third party that intercepts money exchange between two other parties without knowledge or consent of either.

It may be easier to think about this in meatspace.

Is it a crime for someone walking around to not look at a billboard? Of course not.

Is it a crime for someone to plaster over an ad on a billboard with their own ad? It isn't explicitly theft, but it is certainly a crime, and the end result is nearly the same (in the meatspace example it is the advertiser that gets the shaft, and in the digital example it is the billboard maker that gets the shaft).

I agree with these statements, but the analogy is flawed because in your second example you are making it impossible for everyone to see the original ad. The software equivalent to your analogy would be hacking into others' servers to replace ads, making that replacement visible to everyone, and that is certainly not what Privdog is doing. This also happens to be the crucial difference between theft and piracy.

Privdog only replaces ads on the machine on which it is installed, and those who don't have it installed will see the original ad. The meatspace equivalent would be something like an augmented reality device that replaces ads for the one wearing it; and this is not a new idea, although no one has wanted to replace ads with other ads:

http://theartvertiser.com/

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