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... prohibit "the use of network access, network devices, applications, and the disruption of normal advertising data, tampering with or blocking others doing advertising business (or) unauthorized loading the ad."

I have read through this string of words several times and still find it hard to read that interpretation into it. The way I read it, it says that it is illegal to hinder your competitors' online advertising in any way - and even I, who fundamentally dislike adverts in any form, find it hard to see that as anything but quite reasonable. Banning users from using adblockers etc would be absurd - like demanding that people must stop to look at advertising posters or have to watch tv adverts. Another thing I notice is that this comes from a website with the address http://adexchanger.com/ - I couldn't be bothered to go and read it, but the name suggests they are in the advertising business - wouldn't a ban on adblockers be a wet dream of theirs?

You can dig deep into your about:config settings and fix it there ((sorry - setting so obscure can't remember it! You might find it to turn it off but Grandmama won't)) and you are right!!! Firefox only pays lip service to privacy. And like their tieup with Adobe DRM https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-c..., their advertising page for "partners" http://adexchanger.com/ad-exch..., targeting you for advertising based on your browsing http://www.pcworld.com/article..., and now Disconnect.me, they're doing favors for businesses. Google was paying Firefox $300M a year http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/... before they pulled the plug and Firefox reached a deal with Yahoo, and they switched searches to Yahoo -- not because it was the better search engine, but because Yahoo was giving them cash http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

Firefox has become a megacorporation. They are not for profit http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb... so that money doesn't to shareholders but it goes SOMEWHERE like executive salaries and just like a megacorporation they care more about cutting deals with other businesses than they do the public because we are not their customers. They are!

Imagine you had to pay every time you wanted to watch a YouTube video? Like when you goto a movie, or order cable TV, I'll gladly wait 10sec & click skip, vs shelling out money every time.

I dunno, average payment for video is 2.4 cents. Regular web pages it is 0.19 cents (thats nearly one-fifth of one cent). With an automated micropayment system I think a lot of people would be OK with direct payments rather than wasting their time. The people who would rather watch advertisements are probably low-value anyway since they most likely don't have much money to spend on the products being advertised.

We might even see a general increase in the quality of content since the consumers would be directly paying for it. It would probably mean the end of clickbait since that would pretty quickly piss people off for wasting their money.

captcha: sedition

This has VERY interesting possibilities for digital forensics as well. I get the feeling that the bluecava guys aren't even aware of that possibility yet. This would allow web interactions to be more thoroughly traced to a particular machine. Given the ability of most companies to put a particular person behind that machine (whether surveillance or electronic controls), suddenly your machine AND your interactions are subject to investigation at any time.

I would be very surprised if it hasn't dawned on them yet. From an interview:

Businesses can also determine if devices have a history of committing fraud, so they can protect themselves.

Note in that interview, BlueCava CEO David Norris is very careful to portray the technology as linked solely to the device and not the user. And there is a lot of effort to portray BlueCava as providing control of information to the end user. But the reality is that linking user to device is trivial (as you noted) and end users tend to not grasp implications of data security. However, the initial money is unlikely to be in forensics and for the system to work, you have to convince people to not fight it.