Live data from Hacker News

Google Ad Disguising Itself as www.gimp.org

old.reddit.com

181–190 of 230 posts

Re: Google Ad Disguising Itself as www.gimp.org

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It empirically is allowed, though. Google is welcome to claim that it's against their rules, but they still let it through.

Do you know how many they ban on a day to day basis? You don't see those, you only the few that get through.

Ban? They shouldn't need to look for bad actors or ban anyone†, they just shouldn't let people spoof the domain on an advert. At all.

What's happening is Google would rather accept the cash up front and keep it if and when someone reports an ad. No forethought is given to people tricked by this.

† Obvious exception for unicode squatters but even they should be filtered out entirely automatically. Invisible or misleading characters in your domain should be automatically blocked.

Re: Google Ad Disguising Itself as www.gimp.org

#182

Why is this allowed? I know Google will do anything for money, but why is Google allowed to signpost a link to gimp.org which actually takes you to g--imp.org (sanitised)? I mean, if nothing else, how do they not share the liability for damages done by the spyware they're literally promoting? For the businesses squatting on the names of more notable ones? AdWords goes too far.

It's not allowed. It'a a violation of Google advertiser policies.

They turn a blind eye when it suits them such as the "misleading thumbnail" policy on YouTube that's never enforced.

Re: Google Ad Disguising Itself as www.gimp.org

#184

Remind me why Google even allows ads in rank 1 on brand terms? I remember when "don't be evil" Google would talk about how ads are in a different color on the right sidebar.

Not only do they allow it, they actively encourage it. They tell businesses that it's really important to buy ad space on searches for your own brand name so that a competitor doesn't. The way they say it really comes off like a protection racket. "Nice number one spot for searches for your brand name you have there, would be a shame if anything were to happen to it." They make people feel better about it by giving a…

> They tell businesses that it's really important to buy ad space on searches for your own brand name so that a competitor doesn't.

The term for this is "racketeering."

Re: Google Ad Disguising Itself as www.gimp.org

#185

Does anyone have a copy of the exe? Would love to poke it for research. Edit: Here be dragons. Found a source: https://old.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/ygbr4o/dangerous_goog...

If anyone is mildly curious but doesn't want the actual EXE, here's the VirusTotal analysis:

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/acea176b67cb7c77dfd0780f...

Re: Google Ad Disguising Itself as www.gimp.org

#186
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am confident even Google fails to understand how much of their own business is scams and malware.

This is not merely rhetorical. Nvidia, for example, was caught hard during the first cryptocurrency bust... and the second.

What's nvidia and crypto mining hardware got to do with Advertising scams? Mining isn't a scam in itself.

Re: Google Ad Disguising Itself as www.gimp.org

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turns out uBlock Origin is the best anti-malware software there is. For some reason friends and family just don't seem to get malware anymore after I installed it on their browsers.

I put PiHole on a Raspberry Pi as the home's DNS and every time it blocks these links. I still click on them thinking they're taking me to the correct site, but then I realized PiHole "saved me". I configured my wife's computers to use the Pi too and she loves it.

Ublock make it that the links are not even displayed. You may be interested in https://github.com/Barre/privaxy

Re: Google Ad Disguising Itself as www.gimp.org

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It empirically is allowed, though. Google is welcome to claim that it's against their rules, but they still let it through.

Do you know how many they ban on a day to day basis? You don't see those, you only the few that get through.

I don't care how many they rejected, I care that they published more than zero.

Re: Google Ad Disguising Itself as www.gimp.org

#189
post #34

EDIT: There is definitely a mismatch between the display URL and the landing page URL. It's not clear to me how that can happen; for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx-gl6K2zQw shows that only the display path can be edited (not the domain), consistently with the wording on https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2616010 and https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2375287 . On the other hand, https:…

You can just set any URL you want

You can’t set the domain. Just the path.

Re: Google Ad Disguising Itself as www.gimp.org

#190
post #104

I think people are missing the actual issue here. Google used to have a clear distinction between what's an ad and what is organic. In these screenshots you have to pay good attention to see the top result is an ad. To keep their conversion numbers up they had to constantly reduce the difference between the ads and everything else. The fact that they can do this and we are so used to it that we don't first identify t…

It's not enough. I used to always skip the ad of the canonical site I was looking for to avoid incurring them a cost when I knew what I was searching for. But it's often no longer possible. The actual search reasult you want is the ad and the link is no longer duplicated in the organic search results. So you have to click the ad.

Do you have an example of this? I haven't seen it.

Disclosure: I work at Google but not on Search.

Post reply on HN