131–140 of 197 posts
What can I as a user even do to protect myself from this? Like what is the best practice for finding the official website of some organization in a high stakes situation?
1) Use an ad blocker, always. 2) In advertisements, Google shouldn't allow the advertiser to modify the domain that is displayed. Really, why do they even do this? 3) IDN shouldn't be enabled by default.
While Google is waging war against adblockers on YouTube they are once again showing they absolutely cannot be trusted with the responsibility of showing safe ads. That, and them showing war videos in ads to little kids.
Im constantly reporting ads that are inappropriate, scams, or flat out illegal, usually they are back within a week or two, if they even get removed at all. My favorites are the dumb-brick phone charger that "magic defrags your phone", and the micro-ghost pistol.
It seems Google doesn’t want to receive feedback if it affects their bottom line.
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Im constantly reporting ads that are inappropriate, scams, or flat out illegal, usually they are back within a week or two, if they even get removed at all. My favorites are the dumb-brick phone charger that "magic defrags your phone", and the micro-ghost pistol.
I see so many binary options scam ads on YouTube, often with a very poorly deepfaked Elon Musk as a spokesman. Google never takes them down. Maybe I should start reporting them to the securities regulator in my province instead - binary options were banned in Canada a few years ago as they are a haven for scammers and con artists. That might get better results.
"The ads were paid for by an outfit called Digital Eagle, which the transparency page says is an advertiser whose identity has been verified by Google." OF COURSE they were verified by Google. Google verifies identity by accepting money. Give them money, and you're verified. "Google representatives didn’t immediately respond to an email" Are there real humans at Google who actually answer email? I haven't seen a resp…
Windows has a similar problem: marketing / ads is ruining an otherwise decent product.
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"Advertising malware is not legit business." Sure. I"m pointing out this simple sort of "they can easily afford to do x" is usually nonsense. I haven't commented at all on what the result should be (not allowed to do it or whatever), simply that the math that it would be simple to fix is wrong. If we are going to argue about things in a useful way, we should avoid random assertions without data that don't really adva…
Sorry, but that is most fanboyish thing ever. If Google cannot handle their ad business, when there are too many customers, then stop taking new customers. Very simple. But taking money from criminals is very profitable and that is the reason. Edit: Checked DannyBee profile: "I manage developer workflow tools and services at Google" That explains why he is defending Google's scammy behaviours.
This sort of dismissal based on who you work for is both childish, and unproductive to a real discussion. Similar to the "most fanboyish thing ever" comment, which, honestly, if telling someone their totally unsourced math and claim is wrong, by providing data and real math, is the most fanboyish thing you've ever seen, then i think you are very lucky in what you see ;)
Beyond that, i'll repeat what I said - i simply pointed out the assertion and math is wrong. That is all. You are the one claiming i am defending anything, beyond that, at all. I was very careful about not defending anything, and in fact said i'm open to all sorts of views about what to do about it.
Maybe you should re-read what i wrote, and point out any point where i did anything but show that the claim made was wrong, and the math was wrong?
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The first "punycode attacks" were using letters that were completely indistinguishable from the "real" ones (e.g. by using Cyrillic letters). I guess the assumption is that the user would be able to identify any letters with diacritics (even if they're indistinguishable from specks of dust on your screen) and avoid them - after all, you wouldn't go to "göogle.com" either?
As a german I wouldn't go to göogle.com. If my native language didn't include ö? Then that might be a speck of dust to me as well. A safer approach would be to only ever show a user the characters they expect to see (and are familiar with), e.g. based on their language setting. Assuming that every language has a finite list of characters used in its written form such a whitelist approach should be possible and much b…
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Im constantly reporting ads that are inappropriate, scams, or flat out illegal, usually they are back within a week or two, if they even get removed at all. My favorites are the dumb-brick phone charger that "magic defrags your phone", and the micro-ghost pistol.
I did so too. Only that often, that I'm no longer able to report any ads at all.
I pay, and if they cut me off for helping do their job, I'd be livid. Maybe being a paying customer is the reason they haven't blocked me yet
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Sorry, but that is most fanboyish thing ever. If Google cannot handle their ad business, when there are too many customers, then stop taking new customers. Very simple. But taking money from criminals is very profitable and that is the reason. Edit: Checked DannyBee profile: "I manage developer workflow tools and services at Google" That explains why he is defending Google's scammy behaviours.
Ah, i see we've moved onto ad-hominen attacks and dismissal rather than engaging for real. That certainly may feel good, but it changes nothing about the argument? This sort of dismissal based on who you work for is both childish, and unproductive to a real discussion. Similar to the "most fanboyish thing ever" comment, which, honestly, if telling someone their totally unsourced math and claim is wrong, by providing…
If it is true, then Google execs should be in jail right now.
And proves point again that Google does not care about filtering content and it is profitable to accept money from criminals.
Ofcourse if your paycheck depends of criminals money then it is very dumb to share that profit to hire more people to fight malware content.
In my country there are many Google scam ads which feature local celebrities/doctors, but it is impossible to remove those ads, because Google never removes them. Zero response from Google. Even Police cannot help because nobody from Google responses.
So I guess it is intentional to spread those spam ads.
Even if users report those ads, Google 99% of time never takes an action to remove spam ads.
With few thousand people you can remove those reported ads...