Foster Grant
May 4th, 2009, 04:24 AM
I was going to say it has been misbehaving, but this goes beyond that.
The Firefox extension NoScript has been very quietly adding its own whitelist exceptions to AdBlock Plus. Obviously, nothing runs on charity but it seems kind of evil to go behind the user's back to ensure a revenue stream ... in fact, it seems kind of like malware to me.
Here's a blog post from AB+ developer Wladimir Palant: http://adblockplus.org/blog/attention-noscript-users
For years, NoScript has been using a trick to prevent Adblock Plus from working on its domains. Fixing this issue was never particularly high on my list of priorities (though I finally came around and fixed it after the recent events) so at some point I suggested that EasyList should be extended by a filter to block ads specifically on NoScript’s domains. This finally happened two weeks ago.
What followed was a small war — the website would add various tricks to prevent Adblock Plus with EasyList from blocking ads, EasyList kept adjusting filters. Then, a week ago a new NoScript version was released. A few days later I noticed first bug reports — apparently, Adblock Plus “glitches” were observed with this NoScript version, especially around NoScript’s domains (but not only those). When I investigated this issue I couldn’t believe my eyes. NoScript was extended by a piece of obfuscated (!) code to specifically target Adblock Plus and disable parts of its functionality. The issues caused by this manipulation were declared as “compatibility issues” in the NoScript forum, even now I still didn’t see any official admission of crippling Adblock Plus. Clearly, NoScript is moving from the gray area of adware into dark black area of scareware, making money at user’s expense at any cost.
It's also in violation of Mozilla's add-ons policy (https://addons.mozilla.org/pages/policy).
All in all, very not cool — to the point that I've uninstalled it on the principle that if it seems like malware, it might be malware at some point. Doesn't hurt me a bit (I only rarely used it and found it slowed me down more than helped me) but like I said/typed ... it's the principle of the thing, and apparently the NoScript developers don't have any.
The Firefox extension NoScript has been very quietly adding its own whitelist exceptions to AdBlock Plus. Obviously, nothing runs on charity but it seems kind of evil to go behind the user's back to ensure a revenue stream ... in fact, it seems kind of like malware to me.
Here's a blog post from AB+ developer Wladimir Palant: http://adblockplus.org/blog/attention-noscript-users
For years, NoScript has been using a trick to prevent Adblock Plus from working on its domains. Fixing this issue was never particularly high on my list of priorities (though I finally came around and fixed it after the recent events) so at some point I suggested that EasyList should be extended by a filter to block ads specifically on NoScript’s domains. This finally happened two weeks ago.
What followed was a small war — the website would add various tricks to prevent Adblock Plus with EasyList from blocking ads, EasyList kept adjusting filters. Then, a week ago a new NoScript version was released. A few days later I noticed first bug reports — apparently, Adblock Plus “glitches” were observed with this NoScript version, especially around NoScript’s domains (but not only those). When I investigated this issue I couldn’t believe my eyes. NoScript was extended by a piece of obfuscated (!) code to specifically target Adblock Plus and disable parts of its functionality. The issues caused by this manipulation were declared as “compatibility issues” in the NoScript forum, even now I still didn’t see any official admission of crippling Adblock Plus. Clearly, NoScript is moving from the gray area of adware into dark black area of scareware, making money at user’s expense at any cost.
It's also in violation of Mozilla's add-ons policy (https://addons.mozilla.org/pages/policy).
All in all, very not cool — to the point that I've uninstalled it on the principle that if it seems like malware, it might be malware at some point. Doesn't hurt me a bit (I only rarely used it and found it slowed me down more than helped me) but like I said/typed ... it's the principle of the thing, and apparently the NoScript developers don't have any.