[forgueam]

I did something similar in college. A company paid cash for installing software that displayed ads on the bottom of your monitor. It qualified your ad viewing activity based on mouse movement.

At night I would open the software, wrap my mouse cord around an oscillating desk fan, then go to bed. Earned myself $50/month

[xythian]

That was my first ever exposure to programming. I installed as many of those crap ad bars as I could on a backup computer and wrote a macro that would open Internet Explorer, browse thru the same 10 sites in a loop, close IE, repeat.

This setup provided enough income to cover the costs of my dedicated phone line and ISP access.

[verelo]

Not that i have not done many questionable things like this when i was a kid, but at what point is it an admission of fraud that can get one in trouble?

[GSimon]

When the incentive to prosecute (i.e opportunity for resources gained vs opportunity for resources lost) reaches a certain thresh-hold there's action. Generally, that thresh-hold is high because the value gained from prosecution is low, even in cases were one party is quite apparently guilty.

The only real exception would be the "let's make an example of out this person" case. When crime is rampant, prosecutions might happen with greater likelyhood in order to deter more crime for occuring. An example would be pirating music. It is not feasible to prosecute people for pirating music, but suing 1 party publicly will get 1000s of people to stop instantly.

[mirimir]

In this case, the add-click businesses engaged in fraud. So was it fraud to trick them?

[dllthomas]

... yes? "My target is also guilty" is not a defense against fraud...

[mirimir]

I get that. At least, if you're both contributing to fraud against advertisers.

But what about if tricking ad fraudsters avoided defrauding advertisers?

[beedogs]

The point is somewhere well beyond a fifteen-year-old anecdote told anonymously in a public forum.

[jasonmp85]

Certain companies deserve it?

[vanadium]

I remember the AllAdvantage.com cheat as well. It became so popular to game that one that not only were novel tactics like yours employed, but automatic mouse hijacking apps for Windows made some headway for those that didn't want to sit and click ads ad nauseum.

I may have made a quick buck on this back in the early 2000s.

[userbinator]

click ads ad nauseum

There is a browser extension that does this for you:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10611594

It was removed from Chrome's appstore, so it must be very effective... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13327228 ...and shows very clearly whose side they're on.

[duncan_bayne]

"So, an advertising company that used to have a motto about not being evil, but abandoned it, built a web browser."

Realistically that wasn't going to end any other way :)

[aiCeivi9]

On site owners site? That extensions likely punishes owners of sites visited by you by suspending their ad network account for click fraud. I can see how that might be considered harmful.

[Dave_TRS]

AllAdvantage was great while it lasted. My method as a highschooler was a free mouse trembler app, coupled with 4 rotating Geocities sites I made to auto-forwarded to each other in a loop every 45 seconds.

[jtreminio]

There were programs that would run up the 40 hour weekly limit in seconds. I'm assuming AllAdvantage had no real sanity checking when receiving data, which to my eyes means they deserved to go out the way they did.

[Trav5]

It was a game. The sanity checks were added and workarounds were formed...

[pmorici]

lol I remember AllAdvantage; I had a set of programmable Legos and I made a little jig that would sit there and spin a wheel under the mouse ball back and forth.

[ransom1538]

Remember, you aren't ripping off the shady ad companies. Actually, you are doing what they want you to do. You are ripping off the merchants (people buying ads) who just don't know better.

[bittercynic]

It may end up being both, though, since you're also making the shady ad company's impressions less effective.

[stale2002]

Good. Those merchants are supporting these shady companies with their money.

If they get screwed, all the better.

[warent]

But this is a positive-sum world where it's actually better for us all the fewer people that get screwed. So although it may be better if they used alternative methods, it's actually a step backwards to turn this into a zero-sum game

[stale2002]

Ads are a negative sum game, IMO. The less money that ad companies make the better.

Or in other words, the ad companies deserve it.

[wpietri]

I'm not sure about the latter part, but I think the first part is pretty clearly true.

The theoretical economic value of advertising is new product discovery. If you needed a thing but didn't know there was a solution and you saw an ad, then some of the value you gain would be attributable to the ad.

Imagine a world entirely without ads. Would you really be lacking a lot? I doubt it. Especially with the internet, it's easy enough search, to receive word of mouth, to read reviews, or to ask friends for help with a problem. But let's assume it happens some. Ads might at least get you to a solution sooner, so count the value gain there as well.

Now subtract all the money spent on things where ads encouraged a purchase that was not valuable or even wasteful (e.g., didn't live up to expectations, was fine but the need wasn't urgent so it sits in a closet, was bad enough that it actively cost you extra money). Subtract further the amount of money spent on ads, hundreds of billions of dollars per year. Subtract also all the time spent watching, listening to, and reading ads. Further subtract the amount of value that would have been gained had that time been used as a person wanted. And further subtract all the value that could have been gained had those creative people creating ads been doing something beneficial.

I can't come up with any reasonable numbers that suggest advertising is a net societal positive. It exists not because its targets want it, but because businesses are in an arms race to manipulate consumers in ways favorable to the advertisers. It's like military spending: most of it happens not because anybody really wants it, but because nobody wants to lose to the other guy.

[tempestn]

Advertising can be very helpful to get a new product or service in front of people, which then allows you to start building word of mouth referrals etc. Without it, there are many things that would never see the light of day. And because it costs money, it provides somewhat of a filter; while we all feel inundated with a lot of garbage advertising, you'd have to wade through far more to find interesting new products otherwise.

This isn't to say that you can't currently find useful things in ways other than ads; obviously that happens all the time. But without ads (or other similar forms of marketing) it might not be viable for many of these things to be launched in the first place, allowing you to then discover them.

[mannykannot]

There is not much to complain about, from the consumers' view, in an explicitly opt-in system like this.

The whole thing seems quaintly naive from today's perspective.

[stale2002]

I don't think consumers should complain.

What, what I believe consumers should do is install ad-blockers en mass.

Actually, no. What they should do is install ad blockers that specifically send in fake ad clicks and fake ad views and data to the advertisement companies so that they lose money.

There isn't much point to complaining when there are so many more disruptive and effective things that a bunch of consumers could do.

[wpietri]

To my combined horror and joy, you can now just buy a commercial mouse jiggler: https://www.amazon.com/WiebeTech-Programmable-Mouse-Jiggler-...

[tlrobinson]

WiebeTech sells a bunch of interesting computer forensics hardware. I’m guessing these are typically used by law enforcement when seizing unlocked computers to keep them unlocked.

[greglindahl]

There's a legit use for those, to avoid screen blanking. Also used to keep computers from locking themselves after N minutes of inactivity.

[lostlogin]

If only there was another way.

[hayleox]

If the computer you're on is completely locked down, there really isn't.

[wpietri]

And that's the horrific part to me. Instead of making sane software or sane policies, it ends up making perfect sense, at least at an individual's level, to manufacture a piece of specialist hardware that does nothing but jiggle a mouse.

[greglindahl]

One of the use-cases of the jiggler is during police raids, where they're used to keep a computer from locking itself. Obviously that's not the use-case you're imagining!

[CosmicShadow]

I bought one for my wife so she doesn't appear "away" on Skype while working from home which is very helpful.

[bennettfeely]

Do these companies still exist?

[cdr]

There's no shortage of adwall sites, which is pretty much the evolution. Outsourcing of ad fraud is their bread and butter.

[johns]

I used this exact same method.