71–80 of 109 posts
This article is from 2013. Google has banned these types of ads from its network (and started blocking sites that serve them) since then, as was discussed on HN at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11032270
This article is from 2013. Google has banned these types of ads from its network (and started blocking sites that serve them) since then, as was discussed on HN at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11032270
And I just checked myself and confirmed the continuing existence of very similar ads.
Sounds like a personal problem to me... This is a little shady, but all the units are clearly labeled as ads. I have a hard time getting as worked up over this as the author does. Paint.NET is a free product, what do you expect?
You could've at least visited the website. They are NOT clearly labeled as ads. https://www.getpaint.net/index.html
When I go to the site the ads aren't even "download" style ones like those in the screenshots, just normal banner ads.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could've at least visited the website. They are NOT clearly labeled as ads. https://www.getpaint.net/index.html
wcummings might mean the tiny grey-and-blue icons in the top right of each unit. If so, I disagree. Those icons are not visible enough, and are hard for many users to click without accidentally clicking the ad instead.
My question is why is it so easy to have advertisements that directly link to downloadable software? If I'm clicking on an advertisement I want to know more about a product, not be forced to run a binary of which I have no certainty of it's true purpose. Or am I thinking wrong? If you disallow download based advertising including linking to pages that only offer you a download, this could be a little more useful agai…
I can't believe Google couldn't categoricatically add context to these type of ads if they really cared. Google knows the ad link. Google can crawl the target page / file. If it's an installer, Google can run it in a VM and note what ends up being installed. If you can't pull a clear "this is crapware" signal out of that, then their ML is a lot less advanced than it seems. And if they can, then just automatically put…
The terrible experience of pulling down an installer for Paint.net was one of the final straws that pushed me to move over to using chocolatey for windows workstation setup. > choco install paint.net Unfortunately, while that allows me to never see fake download-button ads when pulling down software for my machine, one place it's still a nightmare in is the world of getting minecraft mods installed on a kid's compute…
I was going to say - obviously the author of this post hasn't looked for Minecraft mods, because there the problem is far worse.
Worse, they've got fairly effective adblock detection.
This article is from 2013. Google has banned these types of ads from its network (and started blocking sites that serve them) since then, as was discussed on HN at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11032270
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll take a crack at an explanation: Google has machine learning technology that automatically reads street address numbers on houses, regardless of angle, color, size, focus, or typeface. Using the same type of algorithm to answer "does this ad have anything that looks like a button in it?" is relatively simple by at least two orders of magnitude. So rather than it being "easy" in some absolute sense, what's meant h…
Lots of things have button and aren't maliciously masquerading as download links. Furthermore, if they start doing that then ad producers will start changing their ad images to evade the algorithm. It's much harder to use ML for a problem when you have a malicious opponent actively working against it.