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Until further notice, think twice before using Google to download software

arstechnica.com

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Re: Until further notice, think twice before using Google to download software

#211

Post by johnklos »

This article is too kind. We're supposed to believe that all the brilliant minds at Google can't keep ahead of scammers? Sorry, but I don't believe that.

On the other hand, I do give Google credit for knowing when they can make more money by allowing a problem to exist than by fixing it.

Google got everyone hooked by being decent, by giving good search results, by giving people decent and free-ish email accounts, et cetera. Now it's all going to shit, because they've got everyone hooked so their free(ish) offerings don't need to be good any more.

My guess is that search sucks because they can extract more money from advertisers who want to buy their way out from under scammers.

Email sucks because they want people to have to pay to get any answers when things are problematic, and we no that no normal human being can correspond with any human that works for Google without giving them money. A majority of the phishing spam I receive now come directly from Google's shitty mail services.

Perhaps Google wants software providers to "buy" their way in to a higher position than scammers. Or perhaps Google wants software environments to seem to suck to make the Android marketplace better by comparison. I can't imagine any other reasons why Google would play dumb and allow this kind of gaming of their search results.

Re: Until further notice, think twice before using Google to download software

#212

Post by Alupis »

thfuran wrote: post #196
Alupis wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're humans, not computers. We don't have the same problem of discerning intent like AI would. It's pretty obvious when someone is communicating nothing but positive things about a product, or nothing but negative things about another competing product. Sometimes it's more subtle... but seriously, if you read enough comments you will locate the ones that are obviously shilling or astroturfing. They won't talk about…

>We don't have the same problem of discerning intent like AI would. The same problems? No. But humans pretty notoriously don't always communicate effectively. >It's pretty obvious when someone is communicating nothing but positive things about a product, or nothing but negative things about another competing product. Sometimes it's more subtle... but seriously, if you read enough comments you will locate the ones tha…

I don't know what you're driving at. Is it perfect? Of course not... what alternative do you suggest?

Re: Until further notice, think twice before using Google to download software

#213

Post by BLKNSLVR »

Google's advertising has actually helped other search engines be safer and more useful. Google search acts as a magnet for all the crap you don't want when searching.

Brave search, DDG, Searx, etc are all cleaner and therefore more useful.

Re: Until further notice, think twice before using Google to download software

#214

Post by fsociety »

johnklos wrote: post #211

This article is too kind. We're supposed to believe that all the brilliant minds at Google can't keep ahead of scammers? Sorry, but I don't believe that. On the other hand, I do give Google credit for knowing when they can make more money by allowing a problem to exist than by fixing it. Google got everyone hooked by being decent, by giving good search results, by giving people decent and free-ish email accounts, et…

In reality this is probably due to orgs not working with each other or inefficiencies (aka negligence).. but yes their threat intel systems can most definitely detect these kind of ads.

Re: Until further notice, think twice before using Google to download software

#215

Post by klyrs »

GavinAnderegg wrote: post #2

Google's search product has become a shadow of its former self. Every year it seems harder to find what I'm looking for. The top half of the first search result page is now (potentially malicious) ads, and what follows is likely SEO spam. I need to add "reddit" or "stackoverflow" to half my searches these days so I'm not served nearly useless results. It's a sad decline from 10+ years ago when I'd type a half-formed…

> I need to add "reddit" or "stackoverflow" to half my searches...

The perversity is that site-local searching used to be better when it existed, but people (users and web devs both) came to rely on google. It's a sorry state that google remains the primary interface to sites that should know their data better them google...

Re: Until further notice, think twice before using Google to download software

#216

Post by ManuelKiessling »

GeekyBear wrote: post #44
capableweb wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it was a lot more ethical back when their major demographic was geeks who could tell the difference between an ad link and a genuine result I think the ads used to be more distinct as well, with a different background color even, if I remember correctly. I guess it's a fine line to walk between "It should be obvious what is advertisement" vs "Users should be confused enough to sometimes click the advertisement", an…

Ads were not only a different color, they were also limited to the margins of the page and did not appear in the list of search results. As a matter of fact, when Google was the scrappy new underdog, they used to make fun of the legacy search engines for the practice of mixing ads into the list of search results.

You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain…

Re: Until further notice, think twice before using Google to download software

#217

Post by NelsonMinar »

asddubs wrote: post #162
NelsonMinar wrote: post #86

Back in the early 2000s I helped create policy and procedures at Google to stop this kind of thing. Google's early anti-malware policies, extended to ads, and internal procedures to make sure we effectively stopped malware ads. That was a long time ago though and it's sad and frustrating to read it's not working so well now. In particular the article points out several big red flags about how malware scanners are aut…

those results and the wikipedia page seem to be for an unrelated tool also called downloadstudio

You're right, the ones I was seeing are for a product by Conceiva that may be legitimate. downloadstudio.net is something else, so maybe we have trademark infringement on top of all the other Google Ads abuses.

Re: Until further notice, think twice before using Google to download software

#218

Post by sneak »

tedivm wrote: post #150
sneak wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you log into the bank with valid credentials if it's on the wrong domain? My password manager won't fill it in on the wrong domain and I literally don't know my banking password.

My bank's website (their real one) was having an issue with Firefox so I installed Chrome just to log into the bank. Since I normally don't use chrome I hadn't installed a password manager yet. I copy/pasted my password out of my password manager.

Any time you copy/paste from a password manager, alarm bells should be ringing.

Re: Until further notice, think twice before using Google to download software

#219

Post by WorldMaker »

bcrl wrote: post #190
Tepix wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could it be that the device is already infected with malware-injecting things?

No, I checked for that multiple times as I was around when that happened. It was an ad served up directly by Google that lead to a phishing website and phone numbers on it. His filter bubble is very different from mine, and it's clear that the peddlers of malware and scams use ad targeting to hit the elderly with ads that try to take advantage of them. This is a major downside of ad targeting: they're more effective…

I increasingly believe that there are no legitimate uses of micro-targeted ads and only harmful ones. The only real distinction is whether or not it is harmful to the target (user), the advertiser (failed impressions), and/or the advertisement network (Google allowing malware companies to spend pennies on the dollar to sell bad software malware launchers in turn makes Google look bad).

Micro-targeting may go down as a multi-billion dollar industry-wide mistake by the time this plays out past logical extremes like this "most software download ads are now malware launchers and Google can't seem to or doesn't want to fix it".

Re: Until further notice, think twice before using Google to download software

#220

Post by stasge »

GavinAnderegg wrote: post #2

Google's search product has become a shadow of its former self. Every year it seems harder to find what I'm looking for. The top half of the first search result page is now (potentially malicious) ads, and what follows is likely SEO spam. I need to add "reddit" or "stackoverflow" to half my searches these days so I'm not served nearly useless results. It's a sad decline from 10+ years ago when I'd type a half-formed…

Personalization could be a reason of getting bad results. I'm always using https://google.com/ncr in private mode and I don't think I've noticed any degradation in search quality so far.
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