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."

Comments

I hear...

[Landshark17]

They also run spam servers... http://xkcd.com/250/

This sounds fake...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe I should go check an urban myth site to see if it's real...

Coincidentally...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Pushing Zango" is Dominican slang for having sex with an elderly woman. It's true.

Re:Coincidentally...

[Nimey]

Is that Dominican-the-country or Dominican-the-Catholic-religious-order?

Obnoxious Advertising

[driftingwalrus]

Snopes has long had obnoxious levels of advertising. The site really isn't usable without AdBlock.

Misleading Summary

[setirw]

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...

Who does what how?

[mcmonkey]

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.)

"there practically every time" - not for me

[Animaether]

"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.

Re:"there practically every time" - not for me

[Spy Hunter]

Snopes, like most other sites using popups, sets a cookie the first time you visit, so you only get the popup once per some amount of time (however long until the cookie expires). Also, these days sites get around popup blockers these days by raising the popups on a mouse click event, instead of when you first visit the page. Try clicking on an empty area of the page to generate the popup (after you have cleared your cookies).

I can confirm that they do use popups as I got one from them just yesterday. Actually what I got was a pop-under, masquerading as a Windows dialog box, which is even worse. Snopes' advertising has become quite obnoxious, but their content is still good so I grudgingly put up with it. Incidentally, if you hate popunders as much as I do, please vote for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=369306 to kill them forever. (Don't add comments to the bug though, that's bad bugzilla etiquette)

The downside of adblockplus.

[ChangeOnInstall]

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.

Re:The downside of adblockplus.

[rjstanford]

I once emailed a funny video clip on a website to my wife - it had a mildly risque title, but wasn't NSFW at all, so I even mentioned that in the email. Little did I know that the clip was literally bracketed with loud, auto-playing flash-based porn ads (seriously). She was, to put it mildly, unthrilled.

And no, I don't know the URL any more.

Re:Holy ...

[jjohnson]

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."

Re:all about the money

[Anonymous Coward]

I just tried to fill out their Contact Us page to ask them about their use of the Zango malware. My form submission threw an error on their server side ASP code. The really scary thing, look at the error message:

Error Type:
Microsoft VBScript runtime (0x800A01A
Object required: 'zango' /cgi-bin/comments/webmail.asp, line 132

We'll see if any spam starts coming in to the (unique) address that I submitted to that form.

What this says to me though is that not only are they including JavaScript for an ad banner network, but their server side code is making references to 'zango' by name, implying a deeper relationship.

I think it's safe to assume for the time being that Snopes probably doesn't have your best interests at heart, and to not use an e-mail address that you care about if you choose to communicate with them.

They also disable text selection

[ThatsNotFunny]

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...

Blocking Zango at the network level?

[macdaddy]

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.

No urban legend, that's confirmed.

[palegray.net]

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.

It likely wasn't Snopes' decision

[patio11]

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.)

Re:I don't see any claim for driveby install

[yotto]

[i]Snopes readers... Who are generally somewhat cautious, skeptical or suspicious sorts, if only because they're most likely there to debunk some urban legend that's been going around... Are going to blindly install a shady virus scanner from a pop-up window ad.[/i]

Um, I don't send people to Snopes because they were cautious, skeptical, or suspicious. I send them to Snopes because they forwarded me an email about how a little girl in Indiana went missing and if you just forward it to your friends some company will donate $1 to the save the little girl fund or some garbage like that.

These are EXACTLY the type of people who will click on the flashy icon that says "Click here"

Re:It's not a Snopes Problem.

[palegray.net]

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? Hey, man, ease up. My bro there sounds like a mature man of 14 wise years. He's just tryin' to lay the truth on you, for real. He ain't gotta do no code review, he got that shizzle memorized, yo. He's pimpin that junk in binary, it ain't even on our level. True talk, he's down with the open source life-style like a mutha. He's the kind of real playa who's got spreadsheets printed out all over his bedsheets, in ODF format for sure.

Microsoft better watch out when he rolls deep with his leet skillz, he'll bust a cap in that closed source shiznit. Word.

Re:It's not a Snopes Problem.

[thetorpedodog]

Word.

Surely you mean "OpenOffice Writer", my home-dawg?