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Snopes Pushing Zango Adware
DaMan writes "Here's something that isn't an urban legend — Snopes, the popular urban legends reference site, has been pushing adware, for at least 6 months, to users via ads displayed on its Web site. No one seems to have called them on it until recently."
They also run spam servers... http://xkcd.com/250/
This sig is false.
Maybe I should go check an urban myth site to see if it's real...
Stay good Snopes! Stay good!
"Pushing Zango" is Dominican slang for having sex with an elderly woman. It's true.
Which is probably responsible for no one knowing about the adware for so long.
Snopes isn't something built for the common good of people, it's their to generate money, and they just happen to choose one of the darker ways to do it. "Do you want to block junk sites?"
Snopes has long had obnoxious levels of advertising. The site really isn't usable without AdBlock.
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
This summary is somewhat misleading, since the user actually has to click the banner to install the software. Contrary to what the summary implies, Snopes does not perform drive-by downloads on its users. By the logic of this summary, tons of online publishers "push adware," since those "Free Virus Scan" ads are pretty ubiquitous...
This message printed on 100% post-consumer recycled electrons.
A little on topic/a little bit just an excuse to blather about something in my mind since the Cloverfield story:
Folks in the ad game are in trouble. And I mean the folks using ads to sell another product and the folks selling the ads.
Apparently there was some sort of 'buzz' about Cloverfield for the past few months. I missed it. That may not be interesting, except I watch 2 to 3 hours of TV a day, spend more time than that on the web, subscribe to several popular (non-technical) magazines, and read a daily newspaper. I don't claim to have my finger on the pulse of pop culture, but I'm not quite ammish.
I vaguely remember a teaser-trailer (perhaps before Transformers?), but other than usual pre-release media push in the last few weeks, I know nothing of this buzz. If that's the state of advertising, then those folks are in trouble.
How does this tie in to the current topic? Well...Snopes has ads? I would guess it would since there's no subscription fee and would make a very strange charitable effort otherwise. But if Snopes has ads, I can't say I recall ever actually seeing one.
Seriously, for TV I have TiVo. For the web, there's ad buster and other tricks. For magazines, those ads are usually full page and very easy to recognize and skip without reading. For radio, there's NPR. Pretty much the only traditional advertising that gets my attention are bra ads in the daily paper. And those aren't even selling anything I might buy! (Unless the models are for sale.)
"These two popups are there practically every time you visit Snopes (see for yourself)."
Well, I did. And I didn't get any popups. I'm on refresh #30 or so.
No, I don't run adblock.
No, firefox isn't telling me it blocked a popup either.
I also tried with IE6. Still nothing.
Is the author quite sure they're not just targeting -him-? Be it my some manner of IP -> location lookup, or via an old cookie he's got laying around, or whatever?
Either that, or Snopes already changed things. Woo conspiracy theorists rejoice.
But he does say that since people trust Snopes that the software appears to be enorsed by Snopes. Which would lead people to go ahead and install it.
I've been running adblockplus for quite a while now and have effectively forgotten about issues like this. So have most others who would get upset by it. Of course then I'll unknowingly send friends/family to sites such as snopes without a second thought about malware concerns. To me it looked like a nice wholesome/clean site.
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
Snopes isn't obscure--they're probably the most authoritative debunker of urban legends on the web. On the linked blog post, you can see several comments saying "I used to refer people to Snopes all the time when I got some glurge email."
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
As you are probably already aware, Slashdot is running a story (http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/29/0047236) about malware being served up from advertisements hosted on your site. This malware appears to be in the form of misleading popup ads for Zango (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zango | http://www.zango.com), which is a company with a long-standing track record of deceptive business practices (reference FTC settlement here: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2006/11/zango.shtm [which they have mostly failed to learn from]). These ads are being served by the Fastclick ad network, which is operated by ValueClick Media (http://www.valueclickmedia.com/). I strongly object to any site profiting from these sort of irresponsible ads, and would like to see prompt action on the part of Snopes to remedy this situation. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Talk about a user-unfriendly feature! They use some very annoying javascript to disable the ability to select a portion of text. No idea why...
"Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine No Posessions?'" -- Elvis Costello
I'm sure I'm not the only one that would like to block Zango at the network level. Does anyone have the repository of information needed to create an effective block? I'm talking about RIR assignments, ASNs, SWIPed allocations, domain names, etc. Does anyone know of such a source? With this information I can ensure that none of my users ever have to put up with this Zango horse shit again.
Snopes claims it's an urban legend.
I get the same result. I thought I had sent my complaint (reference this post via their web form, but upon clicking back over to that tab I noticed the same error you got. So, to contact them about Zango's abusive business practices, I have to install Zango's abusive software to interact with their server, or it generates an error? Wow. Somebody's smoking some good stuff at Snopes. WHIOS has the following registry data for snopes.com:
:
Administrative Contact , Technical Contact
Mikkelson, David
snopes@best.com
P.O. Box 684
Agoura Hills, CA 91376
US
Phone: (702) 988-4047
Fax: (818) 261-3054
The phone number appears to ring to offices at "best.com", who says their offices are presently closed and offer to take a message. Keying "best.com" into your browser will redirect to Verio. And round and round we go. I think I'll send a fax to the number listed in WHOIS.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
A quick primer in online advertising, for those of you who block it:
At one end of the chain, we have Content Provider A. At the other end of the chain, we have Service Provider Z. Z wants to place advertising on A's site but, importantly, doesn't know how to do it, doesn't generally know specifically who A is, and needs this to scale to potentially thousands of As. This is where participants B, C, D, E, F, Google, H... etc come in. There are advertising aggregators, affiliate networks, affiliates, affiliates of affiliates, affiliates of affilates of networks of affiliates who subdivide the advertising market into smaller and smaller slices before it finally gets on A's site.
Now, somewhere in the chain, let us inject one person who is less than scrupulous. He doesn't work at Snopes -- this would tarnish a brand for a week's worth of income, not a smart play. He probably has a steady stream of relationships with each of the numerous advertising concerns on the Internet, picking up and moving from one after he has collected a check or three and then had the banstick for TOS violations catch up with him. He is the one working for, most probably, affiliate of an affiliate of an affiliate of Zango.
This is the way most malware makes its way onto ad networks and, from there, onto high-trust sites. Volokh Conspiracy, one of my favorite blogs, had a nasty browser hijacker which affected non-US users for months before their advertising network caught wind of it. A few popular MMORPG sites have ended up hosting keyloggers in the same fashion. It is an unintended consequence of a system without central control -- much like the Internet itself, actually. (The system being split up this way does have its advantages, for both endpoints of the chain and for everybody between. Google's business model is based on snapping the chain and replacing it with a big cloud labeled Gooooooogle, but they're not yet the only game in town.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
1: Unless you went through the code yourself, don't trust it. Maybe you can trust the maintainer of that code, but either way you end up trusting a third party.
2: Spelling it "Windoze" and "M$" just makes me think you're a moron. You're not a moron, are you? Why would you want me to think that?
3: Microsoft takes my money and gives me software that is as good or better than what I can get elsewhere. (Otherwise, I don't go to MS.) Zango would take my privacy, and give me... what, exactly? Third-rate software I can find better from a freshman off his first coding binge?
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
NoScript requires you to explicitly enable sites to run scripts, either per session or permanently. This turns people off, but security is never easy and it's just two clicks.
(%i1) factor(777353);
(%o1) 777353
Microsoft better watch out when he rolls deep with his leet skillz, he'll bust a cap in that closed source shiznit. Word.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Well that explains the dupes...
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
Surely you mean "OpenOffice Writer", my home-dawg?
This sig is certified free of self-referential humour!
Nah, but consider it this way: Microsoft wants us to waste our time on slashdot. Imagine if only half of the people here started to help with open source ;-)
I'll field that one. My experience of people who seriously use terms like M$ or Windoze (or open sores for that matter) are generally either trolling, morons or fanatics (or some combination). In any of those cases, there seems to be little point to trying to have a constructive, reasoned argument with the person.
It's official. Most of you are morons.