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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

#141

Post by jacquesm »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #135
jacquesm wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hope not to see that day. So, how to avoid it and not be open to security issues like these? It used to be that you could get a lot of use out of a computer all by itself, nowadays that's changed and the trend to 'always on, always online' translates into having your machine potentially under attack 24/7. Being vigilant against enabling the war on general purpose computation is very good, it is the biggest t…

> I really hope not to see that day. So, how to avoid it and not be open to security issues like these? I don't know. Part of the answer likely lies in determining who the "owner" actually is. I want to be the owner of my computer, but business interests go against it. For instance, MAFIAA doesn't want me to be the owner, because they want secure means to enforce DRM on me. Other businesses would also like to be the…

> I hope so, but I fear we won't - that at some point a company will finally figure out how to lease PCs to general population instead of selling them.

They'll give them away just to get you to be part of the ecosystem!

Apple does provide some verification services but the major reason the app store in its current form exists is as a choke point to extract revenues and as a way to remove any credible competition to Apple supplied applications.

Re: Google Says 5% of Visitors to Its Sites Have Ad Injectors Installed

#142

Post by ksk »

jacquesm wrote: post #116
ksk wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can't trust anybody except for open source repositories. That is patently false. Established profitable companies in a market with multiple competitors usually do not fuck with their customers, if they charge up-front for their product/service. On the other hand, companies that give away stuff for "free" have to find unique ways to pay the bills (be it hosting fees, or hardware costs, or developer time, etc). In…

> Established profitable companies in a market with multiple competitors usually do not fuck with their customers, if they charge up-front for their product/service. Lenovo (and lots of other hardware manufacturers) are proof positive that this is absolutely not the case. There isn't a windows machine bought over the years by my extended family that did not have a whole pile of junk on it right from day one including…

My computer didn't come with any junk on it. Even otherwise, pointing out what some companies do in ONE market means nothing. That is why I used the word usually. I guess it is no longer expected to read what someone says before responding. Good job on that.

Re: Google Says 5% of Visitors to Its Sites Have Ad Injectors Installed

#143

Post by code_duck »

MBCook wrote: post #107
code_duck wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens a lot on iOS too - even some respectable sites have ads that open the App Store without any user intervention. I'm not sure why Apple allows this.

They stopped it with iOS 8, but after a few weeks someone had found a way around it and the problem was back. It doesn't effect me much, which must say something about the sites I read. But it is obnoxious as hell.

I've had it happen even on imgur and seemingly respectable news sites. I would expect to get an "Open the App Store?" dialog, but I suppose people find ways to circumvent that.

Re: Google Says 5% of Visitors to Its Sites Have Ad Injectors Installed

#144

Post by sjolsen »

freehunter wrote: post #117
dublinben wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fundamentally Microsoft's fault. The shareware culture of Windows is insanely insecure these days. Any sane operating system should have a packet manager, with all the software you could want included, and nothing you don't.

Yeah it's Microsoft's fault for allowing third-party applications be be installed on their OS. You'd never see OSX or Linux letting people install software without going through a walled garden.

>You'd never see OSX or Linux letting people install software without going through a walled garden.

I can't speak for or against OS X, but with respect to Linux this is plainly false, unless by "Linux" you mean "Android" or by "walled garden" you mean "basic user authentication."

Re: Google Says 5% of Visitors to Its Sites Have Ad Injectors Installed

#145

Post by ChuckMcM »

jacquesm wrote: post #118
ChuckMcM wrote: post #111

These guys are pretty annoying. And it ads an "untrusted" advertising stream to the page, a channel which has been the source of malware infections in the past. I'm really curious how this all turns out. I can't imagine the deteriorating system lasting another 5 or 10 years. So what happens after? Clearly advertising has _some_ value, I loved BYTE magazine as much for the ads as I did for the articles, and there are…

How did you discover websites before advertising took over the web? I don't remember having any trouble discovering new stuff, rather the opposite, word of mouth and following links gave an endless stream of new and interesting stuff. This site alone generates more info in that bracket than I can keep up with (even though I really try to).

GNN ? :-) Generally discovery of web sites wasn't nearly as difficult as discovering new products. Its the flip of that problem that is hard. Which is BYTE would sell advertising to companies that wanted to reach people building/using/programming microcomputers like me. But these days people consume their information from a thousand sources, whether it is a mention here, or an article on reddit, or Ars. So how does the advertiser in the 21st century "reach" the people likely to be interested in new offerings about their particular experitise? And especially how do they do that when the existing mechanism, site advertising networks, has been burned to the ground by abusive ad networks? Do they hire consultants to find and make agreements with the 10 sites they want to "sponsor" for the roll out of Product X ?

I don't worry about finding content, but I do wonder how folks who have something cool will reach me.

Re: Google Says 5% of Visitors to Its Sites Have Ad Injectors Installed

#146

Post by frrad »

sjolsen wrote: post #144
freehunter wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it's Microsoft's fault for allowing third-party applications be be installed on their OS. You'd never see OSX or Linux letting people install software without going through a walled garden.

>You'd never see OSX or Linux letting people install software without going through a walled garden. I can't speak for or against OS X, but with respect to Linux this is plainly false, unless by "Linux" you mean "Android" or by "walled garden" you mean "basic user authentication."

Pretty sure parent was being sarcastic

Re: Google Says 5% of Visitors to Its Sites Have Ad Injectors Installed

#147

Post by sjolsen »

maccard wrote: post #137
code_duck wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Setting up a windows 8 pc is wonderfully simple. Theres an option to reset to defaults, and the default driver discovery is quite good. Windows 8 has picked up display drivers, wifi drivers and pretty much everything else that I care about in every laptop and desktop pc I've tried. I haven't tried Linux recently (about two years ago) but when I did I had major headaches with a Broadcom wireless driver, and a Bluetoot…

>I haven't tried Linux recently (about two years ago) but when I did I had major headaches with a Broadcom wireless driver, and a Bluetooth chip, that both worked flawlessly on windows 8.

As someone who has used Debian almost exclusively for a few years now, I've got to admit that Windows 8 really does handle drivers nicely. Linux systems are generally pretty good about drivers these days, at least if you allow proprietary drivers, but nothing beats total out-of-the-box automation.

Re: Google Says 5% of Visitors to Its Sites Have Ad Injectors Installed

#148

Post by Eridrus »

tinco wrote: post #30

"It’s also worth noting that ad networks often also don’t know that their ads are being used in this way." So, ad networks don't know about a source that hits them with the 5% of the total throughput of Google's sites? Yeah right.

There's some nuance here.

The ad network whose script/iframe is directly injected onto the top frame can know fairly easily, since they know which accounts should be linked to which domains, however when these inevitably get resold, these subsequent ad networks have a much tougher time.

What ends up happening is that the first thing that gets injected is someone totally shady ad network that doesn't care, who will then resell it to someone slightly less shady, who will bundle it with a pile of other traffic, etc, etc, until it's been laundered enough times that it's hard to separate this out.

Re: Google Says 5% of Visitors to Its Sites Have Ad Injectors Installed

#149

Post by timedump »

kkamperschroer wrote: post #130

I'm a Chrome extension author and I've been contacted at least a half-dozen times by shady companies that want me to add some "totally unobtrusive" ad-injection javascript into my extension. I've been told I could make $0.50/user based in the US per month. That would be a nice raise, for sure, but I'm not the type of person willing to sell out my users to make a little extra dough. Plus I am a user of my own extensio…

I know this isn't the place or time, but I got your extension and I would like to request that the archive.org music player be added to it. I do not know how to contact you through your site or send a pm through here or github.

Re: Google Says 5% of Visitors to Its Sites Have Ad Injectors Installed

#150

Post by mreiland »

hellbanner wrote: post #63

I 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,…

same thing with firefox. I made that mistake once because I never expected a malware download link to be higher in google's rankings than mozilla.org.

I was shocked, and to this day I find that utterly ridiculous.

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