301–310 of 434 posts
I don't disagree that these findings may be useful for other users, who can now look more at suspicious bot behaviour - but all of that money empowers Evil. Let's not let Google off the hook. Remember why they went against ublock origin. They want people to use of ads, so you ultimately contribute to evil harassment via such pester-ads that further sustain Google's de-facto monopoly. This is bad from A to Z.
My favorite story: 1. Dev publishes app with Google Admob integration to the Play Store. 2. Buys Google Ads to drive traffic to the app. 3. Google Admob bans his account for invalid traffic. https://www.reddit.com/r/admob/comments/1vzg3fu/i_paid_googl...
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Exactly my thought. For, say, $50/month I can get a second ISP to my house, host the proxy (and only that) on that link, and enjoy free movies. It is cheaper than having 2-3 streaming service subscriptions.
Or for $5/mo you could have a mullvad subscription and a vpn-aware bittorrent client that knows how to pause if the vpn drops.
Also most of them are for pirating live TV. You can't watch live TV through Bittorrent, you just can't, it doesn't work that way. Sports fans need less than 5 seconds of latency relative to the loudest neighbor they can hear, or they'll hate your service.
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This is one of the primary reasons why fraud actors purchase residential proxies in bulk now. Google "residential proxies for sale" for the tip of a huge grey/black market iceberg. You know all those trojan infected smart TVs and home routers and such? That's one of the things they're doing.
Grey? There's multiple conferences that "ethically sourced" proxy providers feature at now (ex: extractsummit.io) Web scraping (for LLM inference / training) I guess has transformed "residential proxies" into a giant industry.
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You also get to run credit card fraud purchases through your home internet connection, such fun times we live in.
So what's the catch? Has anyone ever been arrested for proxying a fraudulent credit card transaction?
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I was getting an advert that was obviously some scam software on YouTube mobile. The image looked like a system alert that storage was low. It was an obvious attempt to trick users. https://bsky.app/profile/atomic14.bsky.social/post/3mnc7ws2h... Perfectly fine according to google.
Funny, I too reported it a long time ago, with the predictable response that it’s not breaking any of Google’s rules. It also tells me how primitive Google Ads are, when they keep showing me an ad I reported.
Why wouldn't they? They still get paid for it, and if you could block an ad by reporting it, you'd just report every ad until there were no ads.
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It's 'make work' because it's a unnecessarily competitive system wherein prices will by definition be driven up to absorb all of the surpluses of any given business. Google and Facebook are in the business of 'economic rent' of people's attention. 25% of sales price going to Google might leave 5% for manufacturer and possibly even more for the Ad channel. Aka 'Google is where most of your profits are absorbed'. You'r…
Real estate?
I've been in go to market for the better part of 20 years now (anyone remember the DigitalOcean youtube ads of the 2012-2014 era?), paid online advertising has basically gone to shit, it started about 6 years ago, but over the past 3-4 years outside of linkedin it's effectively pointless, over 55% of Americans run ad blockers now and around 40% globally - on top of that, what you do get it mostly just... bots. In Jan…
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I once did this by accident and without a bot farm. It was very lucrative. What I did was create a game with an action button. Then I served ads right next to the action button. I didn’t realize people would miss click on the ads at a high rate, but they did. They fat fingered it, clicked the ad, I got paid. I looked into it after a couple weeks because my click rate was crazy high.
That's definitely a core principle of crapware that's widely done. Put that ad 0px away from the "mash here like crazy" button, PROFIT!