121–130 of 282 posts
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"without fault"? Is it reasonable to assume that a cheap internet connected toy with a video camera and microphone is secure enough to use without any precautions?
" secret embedded camera " I bought "child's toy" and sold you "child's today", you expect seller to check every toy if there is "secret camera" ?
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> if you weren't allowed to advertise, say, smartphones there would be a lot less smartphone owners. That would certainly be a net benefit to societies mental health.
Not necessarily. Mobile phones are hugely important economic enablers and poverty is bad for every kind of health, not just mental.
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> What a weird way to start off. You should probably elaborate on that The point I'm trying to get across is that something can be critical to a functioning system even if on its own it doesn't look very impressive. Voters are the scourge of every democracy, they push for all sorts of stupid policies and usually get them. > Regarding number 1: like what? Literally everything? You've identified 3 product categories fo…
> Honestly I think your 99% figure just suggests you are browsing the wrong websites. Maybe visit parts of the internet that are less sketchy. This is not true and I'm gonna provide some evidence: I am a conservative christian[0]. I get those ads as well. My browsing habits: - stuff linked from hn - local news - one mainstream newspaper - fringe political papers from the left and right (mostly don't agree with any of…
Yeah, everyone does. Are you suggesting you see almost literally 100 such ads for every ad advertising something legit? Because for me they are the 20% dross for 80% potentially useful ads I see.
Honestly, the businesses in your region of the woods are truly woeful at advertising, and should probably spend more money on it. Realistically, if what you suggest is true, something has probably gone wrong and your demographic has been caught in a bubble where no-one serious is advertising to you. Because those ads should be in the minority.
It is interesting how this article starts. A guy has an app which drains users batteries. But it's not his fault of course, because it's the ad company. Except the ad company says it's not their fault, because the ad came from some other company. This fingerpointing points to one of the core problems of the ad industry: They created a system where nobody knows who's responsible for anything, so malware and fraud has…
Just as if you were to buy a child’s toy that has a secret embedded camera that streams to some foreign server. It may be the manufacturers fault, but the person who sold it to you (the provider) is liable. Should be the same here
In situations like this perhaps it would be more productive if we had a system that focused more getting everyone to clean up and prevent this from happening again first, and then look at the liability part.
I do believe that this is the innate human response, the desire to "do the right thing". Most of us have the right mixture of nature/nurture to want to do that. But if the system doesn't enable that behavior or punishes that, that behavior will get suppressed and we end up in a miserable situation for everybody.
I dunno, it's not exactly an easy question or it would be solved already, and bad faith actors will exploit the goodwill of others too.
Why is that even possible to hijack an active ad feed? It implicates that in-app ads are high risk security-wise. I just can't believe how broken the infrastructure for web services actually is, and why the companies doing and serving ads space only act when revenue is at stake. This and many other things are getting out of hand.
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Or phrased another way, why does a banner need to be anything more than an image, possibly an animated image? Everything else screams of abuse and unnecessary tracking.
Simple: Because video ads are more effective, thus providing more sales for whatever's being advertised and more advertising income. Ad companies are trying to find the limit of annoyance vs effectiveness, and despite most people finding video ads and the like annoying, they're proven to be more effective than static ones.
The ad companies aren't trying to find the limit of annoyance vsc effectiveness, they're trying to maximise their profit. They don't care about annoyance, in fact annoyance can actually be positive for brand advertising.
It is interesting how this article starts. A guy has an app which drains users batteries. But it's not his fault of course, because it's the ad company. Except the ad company says it's not their fault, because the ad came from some other company. This fingerpointing points to one of the core problems of the ad industry: They created a system where nobody knows who's responsible for anything, so malware and fraud has…
But if you ask them, it's not their fault, but the ad company (Google), which in turn will point to a different company, etc
And in the end, people are scammed and Google gets a bit richer, but it's nobody's fault or responsibility
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Not necessarily. Mobile phones are hugely important economic enablers and poverty is bad for every kind of health, not just mental.
Mobile phones, sure. Smartphones? That's a bit more debatable. At the very least, a cheap smartphone is probably fine for most "economic" needs. What we need less of is idle high-noise-low-quality content consumption, which is also the thing that's most supported by advertisement.
I guess the advertisers whose video ads run in the background don't care about ad viewability. Most of our advertisers require at least %90 of viewability, big brands. But a still significant amount of them use VAST and don't care about any other measurement. When we ask them to if they have VPAID tags many times they just say no, we only have VAST.
Seems like an impossible arms race though (to fake viewable) plus it looks like this fraud was a VPAID container. VPAID adds a overhead compared to the possibility of a native implemented VAST player. If there was a way to verify & build trust with pubs/networks to run vast tags natively, no JS, I would buy that inventory. Newer vast also has a viewable event, but again is on the pub to specify legitimately hence the…