Google should stop running its server side Ad-Injectors before they complain about the client side ones.
Google Says 5% of Visitors to Its Sites Have Ad Injectors Installed
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Re: Google Says 5% of Visitors to Its Sites Have Ad Injectors Installed
#72> “Unwanted ad injectors aren’t part of a healthy ads ecosystem,” Google Safe Browsing engineer Nav Jagpal writes in today’s announcement. “They’re part of an environment where bad practices hurt users, advertisers and publishers alike.” Healthy ads ecosystem? WFT? The internet is inundated with garbage because of the perverse incentives wrought by ad-based revenue models, not to mention the other costs of advertisin…
> Google is to me and to a growing number of people an "unwanted ad injector" built into a vast number of web-sites…
The difference is that those websites willing allow ads of a specific type to be injected into themselves. The browser toolbars inject ads into everything, which is annoying (and breaks sites due to poorly coded injection).
I'm with you though—ads of any type are pretty annoying. But that's what adblock is for. :-)
Re: Google Says 5% of Visitors to Its Sites Have Ad Injectors Installed
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
"You can't trust anybody outside of group X" does not imply "You can trust everybody inside of group X".
True, but then that is not what he said, you conveniently reworded it ;)
> True, but then that is not what he said, you conveniently reworded it ;)
I reworded it for generality, but specifically, "You can't trust anybody except open source repositories" does not imply "You can trust all open source repositories" in exactly the same way as, in more general terms, "You can't trust anybody outside of group X" does not imply "You can trust everybody inside of group X".
Re: Google Says 5% of Visitors to Its Sites Have Ad Injectors Installed
#74You can't trust anybody except for open source repositories. The easiest way to get such trash on your computer is installing software from a commercial vendor. Oracle is one major source of headache, if you aren't careful you'll find your 'java' install also gives you a severe case of malware/crapware. There are whole companies dedicated to this concept of piggy-backing junk.
The Linux model: you install software from repositories curated by people you trust - distribution maintainers. No viruses, no bundled adware, just simple no-bullshit software repositories. I have a hard time understanding why techies continue to put up with Windows and OSX.
Agreed, every time I clean or set up a Windows computer for someone I marvel at how poor the entire process is, and how little it has changed in the past 15 years.
OSX still has very little adware attached to downloads, in my experience - plus there's the Mac App Store. It's pretty much just Windows users who endure that.
Re: Google Says 5% of Visitors to Its Sites Have Ad Injectors Installed
#75Well maybe they should stop allowing download sites that offer ad infected downloads to buy the top spots on the google search results page? https://i.imgur.com/Ote9c2k.png Adwords is probably one of the main infection vectors for malware these days. Previous rant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8879229
Adwords has had a policy against ads for malware for many years now. (I helped develop an earlier version of that policy.) But it's not entirely effective. Unreviewed ads, poorly reviewed ads, and ads for sites that just barely skirt the boundaries of being malware are all regular problems. For some historical perspective, here's a 2007 article: http://www.infoworld.com/article/2663560/application-develop...
The reality is that there is virtually 0 market for user-friendly PPC ads on browsing sessions noncommercial intent. Therefore scammers (users have a wider definition than Google) will always win the auctions.
Re: Google Says 5% of Visitors to Its Sites Have Ad Injectors Installed
#76I believe this. We've recently been tracking down bugs coming from users of a web site a friend and I run. We couldn't figure out what was going on until we realized that some injected code was stomping on our site's code and breaking everything. Grrr. So now we have to decide if we want to change all our code to be way more defensive (or offensive) so that we work in the face of hostile injected code. Or perhaps we just live with 5% of our users not working.
Re: Google Says 5% of Visitors to Its Sites Have Ad Injectors Installed
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's definitely the people who are least inclined to install an ad blocker that could use it most. On the other hand, it takes a long time, but they do learn to be more cynical about the Internet if they're exposed to its raw state.
It takes less than sixty seconds and requires nothing more than installing a browser extension.
I think they meant that it takes the users a long time to learn to be cynical.
Re: Google Says 5% of Visitors to Its Sites Have Ad Injectors Installed
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
That HTTPS supposedly keeps out ads like this was one of Google's selling points for suggesting HTTPS to publishers. I was expecting this article to end with "and that is why all sites should be running HTTPS now". 5% is a lot. If HTTPS reduces this number to 1%, it might be worth the change.
HTTPS will keep out injection during transit from the server to your computer. But it will do absolutely nothing against toolbars and other browser extensions and that is what this article is about so at a guess the 5% is on top of injection in transit.
Why does the browser even allow any toolbar/extension to modify the content that was delivered on a HTTPS connection. Isn't the data that is delivered over HTTPS pristine that it should not be modified at the browser endpoint by the browser.
I am a layman in security and do not understand a lot of this. May be I missed something here. Is my question correct?
Re: Google Says 5% of Visitors to Its Sites Have Ad Injectors Installed
#79I googled for "Open Office download" on a family's computer and went with the first download -- download.com or cnet, I think. It downloaded very fast and I thought "well, maybe it's just an initializer that torrents the rest". NOPE. Within 30 seconds of the installer, it prompted to install an ad-bar in the browser. I quickly closed and researched for the official site. It was scary, being a technical professional,…
A nice benefit of using DuckDuckGo is the distinctive way it flags an official site.
Re: Google Says 5% of Visitors to Its Sites Have Ad Injectors Installed
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's probably where we're headed. Hypervisors running single-application kernels talking via message passing over some networking protocol to display servers and other virtualized hardware.
Am I the only one who thinks this reality sucks? Everything locked down, no way to tweak or repurpose any of your software. I know, there are bad actors out there, etc. but shouldn't there be a limit for destroying utility of things in the name of security?
Why would proper sand boxing limit tweaking or repurposing of software? (I must admit I'm not sure exactly what you mean by that). It just limits apps interactions with each other and the OS environment.