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Ad Fraud Scheme Drained Users’ Batteries By Running Hidden Video Ads In Android

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Re: Ad Fraud Scheme Drained Users’ Batteries By Running Hidden Video Ads In Android

#111

Post by TeMPOraL »

roenxi wrote: post #94
TeMPOraL wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point I'm trying to get across is that something can be critical to a functioning system even if on its own it doesn't look very impressive. Voters are the scourge of every democracy, they push for all sorts of stupid policies and usually get them. I'd love if you could expand how this applies to advertising. Voters are critical to democracy. Advertising isn't critical to society, it's mostly a way for a lot of…

> Voters are critical to democracy. Advertising isn't critical to society Advertising is absolutely critical to society. Without advertising we can't figure out what companies are selling, because they can't tell us. That puts a real crimp of having a functioning economy. I don't have statistics handy, but I assure you that if advertising were generally banned there would be a lot less, say, smartphone owners. If you…

That's motte-and-bailey defense. Technically advertising is about informing consumers what's on the market. In reality, it's everything but. Real-world advertising is near-universally dishonest and manipulative. Getting rid of that would not preclude companies from making available (note the pull, not push, approach) information on what they're selling.

> It isn't a zero sum game. It is value add. People can't exchange money for goods and services they want if they can't find a vendor selling said goods and services.

It is. People can trivially find any goods and services they find through catalogs, phone books, trade shows, and Internet search engines. Advertising spending is mostly about shouting loud enough to get heard over shouting of your competitors - which is a zero-sum game of ever amplifying noise.

Re: Ad Fraud Scheme Drained Users’ Batteries By Running Hidden Video Ads In Android

#112

Post by darkpuma »

simonh wrote: post #99
darkpuma wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried not seeking out movie trailers and seeing how your life changes as a result? Between my television avoidance, adblocking, and theater avoidance, I've not seen a movie trailer in many years. Instead of deliberately blasting your brain with fast paced A/V propaganda for a minute or two, try learning about movies through word of mouth with people who share your general interests.

Yes, but then I miss stuff I would have wanted to watch, or more accurately miss it longer than I would have wanted to. If a show or movie is genuinely engaging or thought provoking then I want to know, because material like that has value to me.

There are ways of becoming aware of what's available other than watching trailers. For instance, reviewing lists of recent releases then reading the wikipedia pages for them. The A/V format of trailers is fundamentally more coercive than text.

Re: Ad Fraud Scheme Drained Users’ Batteries By Running Hidden Video Ads In Android

#113

Post by foobar_ »

You know many programmers are the 1% of the internet, in a way. I think almost every programmer has an adblocker.

I've been browsing without an adblocker for a while. I really recommend it. You will see scam after scam after scam ...

And most people, the 99% who don't use adblockers are falling for all these things.

Re: Ad Fraud Scheme Drained Users’ Batteries By Running Hidden Video Ads In Android

#114

Post by Cthulhu_ »

perlgeek wrote: post #79
Reason077 wrote: post #66

Isn’t the real issue here a technical one with MoPub’s ad platform? How is it possible that a banner ad can open hidden off-screen views, and play video ads using a different (fraudulent) publisher ID? Can’t banners be sandboxed in order to prevent such activity, or at least detect it?

Or phrased another way, why does a banner need to be anything more than an image, possibly an animated image? Everything else screams of abuse and unnecessary tracking.

Simple: Because video ads are more effective, thus providing more sales for whatever's being advertised and more advertising income. Ad companies are trying to find the limit of annoyance vs effectiveness, and despite most people finding video ads and the like annoying, they're proven to be more effective than static ones.

Re: Ad Fraud Scheme Drained Users’ Batteries By Running Hidden Video Ads In Android

#115

Post by Cthulhu_ »

baybal2 wrote: post #27
kbenson wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Advertising is a scourge upon society. I understand where you're coming from, but that's painting with a pretty broad brush. Advertising covers everything from the signage stating the name of the mom-and-pop shop on the corner (which is why cities often limit the size of logos/names on building) to billboards on the side of the freeway. It covers movie trailers I seek out ant watch to see what's coming soon to comm…

I am more on the position that advertising as a function of product promotion is dying, in all, but the most extreme overkill forms.

It is in a way, but that's because advertising has become underhanded and is inadvertently being done by the people at large. This is particularly prevalent in the media industry (TV and movies), where things like posters or TV commercials are not nearly as effective as the buzz a movie creates online.

When I checked my Facebook the other day, at least half of the posts made by my friends were in some way expressing how much they like a movie, TV show or game. I mean on the one side that's fine, it's sharing and talking about what they enjoy, but on the other it's a form of marketing / advertising, and I'd rather they talk about themselves or politics or something that matters more.

Re: Ad Fraud Scheme Drained Users’ Batteries By Running Hidden Video Ads In Android

#116

Post by chronogram »

roenxi wrote: post #74
chronogram wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Voters are also usually not responsible enough to handle democracy either, and yet here we are. What a weird way to start off. You should probably elaborate on that for it to make any sense outside of a high school economics class. Regarding number 1: like what? I’ve never met anyone who looked really happy about seeing an ad for hot singles in their area, that they should feel insecure about how they look in linge…

> What a weird way to start off. You should probably elaborate on that The point I'm trying to get across is that something can be critical to a functioning system even if on its own it doesn't look very impressive. Voters are the scourge of every democracy, they push for all sorts of stupid policies and usually get them. > Regarding number 1: like what? Literally everything? You've identified 3 product categories fo…

> Honestly I think your 99% figure just suggests you are browsing the wrong websites. Maybe visit parts of the internet that are less sketchy.

Those are the kinds of things I see mentioned on Twitter. I use iPhone, so I don't see why I would see internet ads myself. Obviously as I am someone who doesn't like ads, I'm one to block them.

There's adblocking in mobile Safari since 2015? So there's very few ads that I see since then (the digital ads in the last month I've come across: "powered by x", "powered by y", and "you can subscribe to z at url" - I'm happy with those). Comparing life before mobile adblocking and after, I don't see that since then I've missed out on anything. People, without an interest in the success of ads, who come across an ad on their devices seem to find it irritating; haven't found anyone who didn't seem happy and kept using uBlock after showing how.

> The point I'm trying to get across is that something can be critical to a functioning system even if on its own it doesn't look very impressive. Voters are the scourge of every democracy, they push for all sorts of stupid policies and usually get them.

Eh.. am I living in some kind of singular utopia then?

Re: Ad Fraud Scheme Drained Users’ Batteries By Running Hidden Video Ads In Android

#117

Post by cinquemb »

shtam wrote: post #50
mirimir wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, there are no ad blockers for apps, right? Messing with other apps is a ToS violation for both Google and Apple, as I recall. Edit: OK, you can. But not with other apps from the official stores.

You can with Adguard

Thanks for this, installing this on both me and my wife's phones.

Re: Ad Fraud Scheme Drained Users’ Batteries By Running Hidden Video Ads In Android

#118

Post by reitanqild »

roenxi wrote: post #74
chronogram wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Voters are also usually not responsible enough to handle democracy either, and yet here we are. What a weird way to start off. You should probably elaborate on that for it to make any sense outside of a high school economics class. Regarding number 1: like what? I’ve never met anyone who looked really happy about seeing an ad for hot singles in their area, that they should feel insecure about how they look in linge…

> What a weird way to start off. You should probably elaborate on that The point I'm trying to get across is that something can be critical to a functioning system even if on its own it doesn't look very impressive. Voters are the scourge of every democracy, they push for all sorts of stupid policies and usually get them. > Regarding number 1: like what? Literally everything? You've identified 3 product categories fo…

> Honestly I think your 99% figure just suggests you are browsing the wrong websites. Maybe visit parts of the internet that are less sketchy.

This is not true and I'm gonna provide some evidence:

I am a conservative christian[0].

I get those ads as well.

My browsing habits:

- stuff linked from hn

- local news

- one mainstream newspaper

- fringe political papers from the left and right (mostly don't agree with any of them but it makes for interesting reading, a better understanding of why people are mad etc)

- christian podcast

- technical stuff (both related to work and to my technical hobbies)

- repair videos, childrens videos (when they get to borrow one of my devices)

And still I get ads for singles in my area. Extremely stupid ads. E.g.:

- when I'm at work in the middle of nowhere and I get ads with a picture of someone who is supposedly desperately looking for someone like me, supposedly living in the valley next to nowhere where there are nobody except old farmers. That kind of stupid.

For a while I tried to hit that micro x in the corner of those ads and mark them as irrelevant. Only got equally stupid ads for other equally irrelevant sites.

I don't want to remove ad income for honest writers but I've given up now and I'm ad blocking like many others here.

I've also come to the conclusion that tracking doesn't work, it is just a thing they do to scam marketers.

And I've concluded that if I were to place ads for a product I would place them based on the content of the website, -like Google used to do. If anyone wants a proven business opportunity here it is :-]

[0]: No, not embarrased by it, but I do not want to discuss that here, this is a technical forum. Just pointing out I don't visit what I consider sketchy web sites at all.

Re: Ad Fraud Scheme Drained Users’ Batteries By Running Hidden Video Ads In Android

#119

Post by dkersten »

simonh wrote: post #107
dkersten wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you weren't allowed to advertise, say, smartphones there would be a lot less smartphone owners. That would certainly be a net benefit to societies mental health.

Not necessarily. Mobile phones are hugely important economic enablers and poverty is bad for every kind of health, not just mental.

Mobile phones, sure. Smartphones? That's a bit more debatable. At the very least, a cheap smartphone is probably fine for most "economic" needs. What we need less of is idle high-noise-low-quality content consumption, which is also the thing that's most supported by advertisement.

Re: Ad Fraud Scheme Drained Users’ Batteries By Running Hidden Video Ads In Android

#120

Post by dkersten »

simonh wrote: post #104
dkersten wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google, in particular, collapses. ... Facebook probably goes as well. You say this as if it’s a bad thing. In my personal opinion, both of these companies have ultimately done more harm than good. Maybe Facebook more so than Google, and some Google products have pushed various tech forward, but at the expense of being tracked and watched and having garbage we don’t want or need constantly punch us in the face for o…

>More people seem to be suffering from anxiety and depression and I personally think these companies are a major part of the cause. That trend pre-dates Google or Facebook. Before them and Snapchat and instagram, it was text messaging. The basic ability to send messages to your friends in real-time is the problem. Individual services can make it incrementally better or worse, but it's the behaviour that's the actual…

Communication isn't the problem, in my opinion. Its the empty-calorie idle content consumption. All the people (myself included) in the train or bus or streets who are idly scrolling through facebook or twitter feeds, reading some low-content articles on some clickbait subject -- the kind of stuff that I can spend hours reading, but then not be able to act on or remember any of it. What's the point of consuming content if you don't remember it a day or two later? I estimate that about 90% of what I encounter online makes no difference to my life (both in terms of usefulness and entertainment) other than to consume my time, my energy, my focus and my phones battery ;) All the while, the advertisement is telling me I'm not good enough and don't have the right things.

Back in the early 2000's, I did spend a lot of time with text messaging and I did spend a lot of time on messenger applications/irc etc. The way I communicate with others hasn't changed that much: I use different apps or websites, sure, but ultimately its very similar. What has changed, though, is how much content I consume idly, just to pass the time, because my internet-addicted brain tells me I should, not because I get anything out of it. I'm slowly working on reducing it, at least.

> but it's the behaviour that's the actual problem

Sure, but what we put out there encourages certain types of behaviour and the current norms of internet use encourage an, in my opinion, unhealthy addiction to low quality content consumption.

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