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Trojan Horse targets Google Adsense
dorkygeek writes "The Register reports that nogoodniks have developed a Trojan horse program that produces fake Google ads posing as the real thing. The as-yet unnamed Trojan replaces legitimate ads served via Google AdSense with promos for penis pills, porn sites and the like. Techshout says the Google AdSense team confirms 'that these are fake Google ads, formatted to look like legitimate ads. We agree that this phenomenon is likely the result of malicious software installed on your computer.'"
Perhaps Google just wants more premium subscribers. From the detailed article:
The Adsense Trojan Horse attacks small publishers. The premium publishers and ads displayed by Google's websites are apparently unaffected.
An advert is an advert, I block them all. I doesn't matter whether it's linking to some porn site or to some site selling digital cameras, it's all bollocks as far as I'm concerned.
Why does it matter to the user whether it's a 'legitimate' Google advert or not?
and it was rejected. Is it more relevant today?
This is a fair question, and I'll try and give you a fair answer.
The problem with Windows is that it took over the business world and forced a lot of us to work with it. We quickly found out that its quality was dreadful, and yet we could not make money with Unix because everyone was running pell-mell towards Windows. Thus, a HUGE amount of resentment towards Windows, because it was lousy, and because people were forcing us to use it.
Apple, on the other hand, gave us a deal. "Hey guys," Steve said, "What if you could use a platform that has designer beauty, that will run all those cool commercial applications like Photoshop, but that is Unix underneath so you could run all your great free software?"
Well, at the time he made this offer, computers running Linux either used window managers that took a week to set up, or had fonts that were so ugly they rivaled kindergarden scrawls in legibiilty. And to make matters worse, the developers of KDE and Gnome decided that Windows was the be all and end-all of user interface design and implemented the whole shooting match, from the Start button to the taskbar.
So we started playing with the MacOS and we realized that this wasn't half bad. In fact, it's pretty darn cool. It's beautfully designed, well-engineered, and we can still play with our favorite command line toys. And hey, we're starting to make a few bucks, we don't need to put together a computer out of random dumpster parts for $2.98 anymore. We can afford a little luxury, and Apple's PowerBooks and PowerMacs are the most luxurious personal computers made, from the quality of their keyboards, to their screens, to their elegant metal finishes.
Is it really that bad to run software controlled by a company? The reality is that it depends on the company. True, Apple equipment's expensive, and operating system and bundled software updates cost money. But Apple has never failed us. Each release brings us wonderful surprises and new fun stuff. The basic OS is solid as a rock, as long as you don't cheap out on your memory.
To jog your memory, there are a lot of people who used Windows 2000 who loathed XP because of how oddly they switched things around. Apple has never done that. When they make improvements, they make sure they really are improvements. In short, although Apple is not a perfect company, they have shown themselves on the main to be a good, trustworthy partner, making computers that are genuinely beloved by the people who use them.
In short, the problem of being controlled by a company depends on the company. And so far, Steve Jobs and his team have never failed us in creating cool, fun to use products. I don't think the Linux guys can say the same thing, since what they've done most of the time is to rip off old Windows and X11 interface ideas. Steve's willing to do things that are original, and beautiful, and some of us like both of those things, very much.
It it nice to be able to play around and tinker with the OS? Only if you have time to burn. Many of us don't anymore, and would rather create something cool ourselves rather than messing around with someone people have already done. And I haven't noticed anything about the MacOS that seems like human waste products. it looks like a beautiful, slick, well-designed system that I genuinely enjoy using.
In the end, for me, that's what matters, not whether I can fool around with the scheduler to my heart's content.
Hope that helps.
D