111–120 of 259 posts
Tangentially, I would like Google to put a warning on navigating to a site that has served malware any time in the past month. This will increase the penalty of serving malware so much that sites will suddenly push back on the ad networks and improve quality dramatically.
http://www.ghettoforensics.com/2016/03/of-malware-and-adware...
"Here is what is clear:
The advertisement was not malware.
Forbes is still whitelisted from my ad-blocker.
We have no evidence of what exactly created this pop-up."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds great, here's my deposit paid via bitcoin. My business is at 123 fakenschaft, Zurch. My email is a newly created Gmail account.
* Require businesses to provide a tax id or registration number appropriate to their country. * Require security deposits to be paid with a bank transfer, cashier's check, or money order from a country with strong anti-money-laundering laws. * For countries like the US where business information is public, verify the provided business address against public records. * Allow larger sites like the NYT to require higher…
The real problem is very simple. The advertising companies need to stop publishing non-vetted media files (which means they can also no longer do a http referral to a site they don't control to save "bandwidth costs"). Many of them are not doing that because they're foolishly assuming a "deposit" or any other such arbitrary monetary penalty is going to be cost-prohibitive to a criminal organization. To the criminal organization, it's no different than any other bribe.
Anything that expedites the process of moving from ads to paying "somehow else" for good content is good. But it falls on the technologists side to come up with something that replaces ads. Redditors are only curing a symptom.
Ads have been fine for years until they started tracking you around, flashing annoying animations, auto playing sound or video or taking up the whole page. I'm perfectly content with banner and text ads, as long as they're not animated.
One easy way I have found to get around some of these site's blocks is disabling javascript in the chrome console and then reloading the page. it works a good amount of the time. you can also wget the page and pass in headers that your a google bot to bypass paywalls on sites like economist and wsj. (this was documented in a previous hn post exactly how to do this)
All of this was started by a false accusation. The same guy that posted the tweet that went vial later said he was mistaken: http://www.ghettoforensics.com/2016/03/of-malware-and-adware... "Here is what is clear: The advertisement was not malware. Forbes is still whitelisted from my ad-blocker. We have no evidence of what exactly created this pop-up."
At the very least the "ad" was being run by someone trying to create an air of legitimacy around events like... a random popup IN YOUR BROWSER telling you about host system software you might actually need and should therefore go right ahead and install.
Oh HELL no. If it's part of someone's malware campaign, it should be categorized malware. That some dinky piece of their campaign doesn't involve machine-executable code does not matter in the slightest.
The weasely logic needing to justify allowing deliberate attempts at mis-education is how one gets sites for which navigation is rather like attempting to defuse a bomb, blindfolded, while riding a stampeding buffalo.
You would think, if they have the ability to detect that a user has an ad blocker in place, they could just as easily redirect them to a subscription form for an ad-free experience, rather than block people and lose revenue completely.
That works only in theory, subscription has a cost which is above and beyond whatever price listed: it's the mental cost tied to renewing, cancelling and tracking it. Single subscription multiple website model may work, but as soon as buy-in ramps up for that model expect everyone jumping in with me-too services, killing it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with Google is that they are labeling as malware a lot of software that is not malware just because they have an .exe. Source: it is happening at my company. It seems like just signing the software is enough to remove this labelling but their policies are not transparent. At the end Google is behaving like a vigilante.
When the IP for a shared hosting server is flagged, the result in search for all sites residing under that IP are saddled with an alt URL titled "This site may be hacked". Their solution to fix it for the dozens/hundreds of benign sites co-hosted on said server? Sign up for more Google services(Google Search Console). In that way, they are behving like a typical corporation.