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Malware Installed by LiveJournal Ad
Jamesday writes "LiveJournal recently introduced an ad-supported level. Over the last few days an advertiser used an ad to install the ErrorSafe malware that tried to trick people into believing they had a fault on the computer that needs them to purchase a fix. The ad used a server-side setting and targetted only those outside the US, to prevent LiveJournal's own checks from noticing it. LiveJournal has apologized for the ad and slow response." Even our readers have had to endure more than one browser-crashing ad campaign from time to time. Thanks for sticking around.
I use an ad-supported LJ account, and the mentioned advertisement was made in flash. I had to deal with it a couple of days ago. Hoo-ray for security holes. Can't we just sue the ad company for unauthorized usage of our computer's resources?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I once played this web based role playing game a while ago. It was just a so-so game, but one exceptional thing I did notice was that while playing from a Mac I would get randomly named .exe files downloaded to my desktop. Turns out that ads on this game site were just full of malware. Visiting from a Windows computer, I was getting prompted to install crap. So I went to report it on their forums and find out what was being done about it. They didn't care! The site maintainers claimed there was nothing they could do about it. It was their ad provider's fault. All they could say was "you should be running malware protections.." Needless to say, I was outraged by this irresponsibility. I told them off and never visited their god forsaken site again.
How can you NOT take responsibility for malware spread through your own site? I understand that people contract out ads, but geez, come on. No need to draw from the bottom of the barrel.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Heh, sometimes they do - but you'd be amazed at what goes on in the online advertising world.
One advertising company I used to work for once had a request to configure an ad campaign to run each advert for 30seconds then switch the advert the user was viewing to a different one.
Only later did we discover it was to bypass a websites manual safety check, where they check each advert complies with their rules by watching it for 20 seconds.
Tell us why Communism is more moral than Capitalism.
Don't confuse communism the theory with the dictatorships the claim to be communist. Communism as a theory disclaims most if not all personal property rights, but it has nothing to do with Murder and Censorship, any more than Capitalism has to do with monitoring bank records and tapping phone calls.
Which doesn't mean I'm pro-communism. The problem with communism is motivation, without the acquisition of something as a goal, what motivation do people have? Who assigns people tasks? Who says the community is best served by Jon running the cash register and Joe cleaning septic tanks? Its a system that sounds great in theory but works like crap in practice
At the same time, there's nothing terribly moral about capitalism either. In an ideal capialist society, The sick, old and infirm are left to die. The people in a capitalistic society may be moral and charitable, setting up orphanages to help stranded children, feeding and housing grandma even when she ran out of savings, but thats not Capitalism.
These jokers tried for hours to convince me to install a fairly innocent looking HTML file on my server.
What it does is circumvent the Javascript protection between an iframe and the page it lives on. It gives full access to your site DOM from inside the iframe. The reason is so that their content can "expand out" of the iframe and cover part of the page content.
They claim they don't read your cookies, but that's as far as their "guarantee" goes. Someone malicious on their side could easily read those cookies or access form data, etc.
So my point is - this problem is only going to get worse as advertisers look for more and more obnoxious ways to stick ads in your face.
Finally, the sales lady realized that the site I work for doesn't run ads that expand out of an iframe and admitted that they have an alternative which doesn't require the awful Javascript hack. So it worked out for me in the end. The scary thing was she listed some huge high-profile sites that *did* install their file.
You can read their justification here.
I think a better way to deal with flash is to use the FlashBlocker plugin for Firefox
All flash-based ads get replaced with a placeholder and a little play button, then you get to selectively enable the ones which you require - http://flashblock.mozdev.org/
Companies like this make the Internet a frightening, dangerous place. They literally attempted to crack into people's computers without their consent.
Why don't we sue them into the ground as pursuing cyberterrorism as a business model?
|/usr/games/fortune
"Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work to the benefit of us all."
While humans are the cause of failures of idealist systems like capitalism and communism, it cannot be said that these systems run counter to human nature. Humans have the capicity for change. "Human nature" is neither a constant value from human to human nor immutable within a given human. If it were, humans would be nearly identical. Clearly someone like Hitler or Stalin does not have the same underlying "nature" as someone like Siddhartha Gautama or Ghandi.
Indeed so. Are humans inherently selfish, or does prolonged exposure to 'dog-eat-dog' systems such as Capitalism breed selfishness amongst humans.
A block of code, sufficiently well-written, is indistinguishable from magick.
I was the user who posted the entry in no_lj_ads, and commented on the post in lj_ads.
I know you're probably not referring to me, but for reference, I'm not LiveJournal staff and nor do I play one on TV. I hate LiveJournal ads and I wish they would get rid of them already.
Just to clear things up for anybody who was wondering.
The social and behavioral sciences should be seriously studied, not only for their intrinsic interest, but so that the student can be made quite aware of exactly how little they have to say about the problems of man and society that really matter.
--Noam Chomsky
http://use.perl.org
The Christians aren't the only ones to provide an absolute set of morals. Why are yours the right ones?