Slashdot Mirror
Forbes Asks Readers To Disable Adblock, Serves Up Malvertising (engadget.com)
Deathlizard writes with a report at Engadget that when this year's "Forbes 30 Under 30" list came out , "it featured a prominent security researcher. Other researchers were pleased to see one of their own getting positive attention, and visited the site in droves to view the list. On arrival, like a growing number of websites, Forbes asked readers to turn off ad blockers in order to view the article. After doing so, visitors were immediately served with pop-under malware, primed to infect their computers, and likely silently steal passwords, personal data and banking information."
And with laws like the DMCA you can be sued for telling other how to bypass the ad block block.
Man this place going to the dumps...
Jack of all trades,master of none
Matter of fact they do it in the story just below this one
http://politics.slashdot.org/s...
Seriously I know for some reason they have relentless need to plug Ask Ethan but seriously could they at least do it by posting a link to an archive site. Archive.is comes to mind as a good alternative to links to Forbes
There was a time before advertising infested the internet. Then the first ads started to appear, and many of us warned, "If you support those sites, soon the whole place is going to go to shit. The internet will turn into a clusterfuck of excessive commercialization, fake reviews, astroturfing, and meaningless click-bait content designed to sell eyeballs to advertisers". But did people listen? No, because there were dancing monkeys.
When javascript-infested sites first started appearing, many of us warned, "Are you people fucking insane? Giving random sites the ability to run imperfectly sandboxed code on your computer is going to be a disaster. It'll result in horrifically annoying behavior like pop-unders, unclosable windows, auto-playing audio, and most likely malware. It'll result in behavioral tracking on a scale you can't imagine. It'll result in wholesale transfer of control away from the owner of each computer, to ad companies. Is that what you fools WANT?"
But did people listen? No. Like mice hooked on opiates they pushed the lever and and again for the next hit, without considering the long term ramifications, until it's become hard for most people to use the web without javascript, because we let it become so ubiquitous that nothing fucking works without it. We were too stupid to say "no" when the camel's nose first entered the tent. Now, here's the camel!
The same WILL happen with sites that refuse to serve content if you block ads. A few of us see where that road goes and will say "no thanks", but most of us are far too stupid. The end result will be a web completely unusable if you don't want to let the ad-men control your computer. The end result is TV 2.0, rather than what the internet used to be: a democratic medium where everyone had a voice. It's a wholesale transfer of control from everyone, to a few.
We all get what most of us deserve. Unfortunately, most of us are drooling mouth-breathers.
because it's a big and trusted name
And trying hard to rectify that...
Adblock plus is telling me it's blocked 13 ads on this page and that's with the excellent karma opt-out.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Whenever I encounter a page that requires me to turn off adblock: I close the site.
If web sites allow advertisers to run scripts from the main domain, then these ad scripts will get access to everything, login cookies and all.
Web sites allow advertisers to run scripts from the main domain. Advertisers doesn't want to.
The reason is that advertisers doesn't trust the content providers. They need the end user to connect to the advertiser directly to verify that there is a legit access and not just the content provider trying to fake accesses.
When a content provider asks you to trust them and disable ad-block, remember that there is no trust between the advertiser and the content provider.
> People who scream that they should be able to use ad blockers because they don't want to see ads sound like self-entitled jerks.
I don't give a fuck what name you call me, I'm not watching your fucking ads. Go to hell.
No one is obligated to prop up your artificial scarcity dependent business model. Your rights end where others' systems begin. If you don't like it, put your site behind a paywall and find out what it's really worth to most people.
The problem is that Forbes doesn't know who the advertisers are. They sell ad space to a company which in turn sells some number of hits to many different advertisers, mostly through automated means. Some malware distributor buys some hits with a stolen credit card number, uploads the malware and neither Forbes nor their ad service has any way to track down the source. IP will turn out to be a Starbucks or Internet cafe.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
yeah, they don't really care about whether you watch the ad. they care about convincing the person hiring them that they're making a "good effort" to show the ad and that their viewership statistics are at least approximately correct.
so why disable rewind? because there are people (and semi-organized companies) who will intentionally re-watch ads, both manually and automatically, to inflate the view counts. disabling rewind doesn't do a whole lot about this, but some clueless manager will check it off on their list. the online ad industry is a total fucking joke, and a great example of how capitalism can also build Potemkin villages when the margins of return are slim and market information is sparse.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
The problem is that Forbes doesn't know who the advertisers are.
Yes, but technically it's their problem. They should take responsibility and push for advertisers to behave morally.
The whole system is rotten to the core.
People can't trust sites because sites can't trust their ad distributors because the ad distributors can't trust the advertisers. And noone in the chain after the user takes any responsibility for making a safe advertising system. And then they whine when people use ad blockers as their last line of defence.
I mean, it's beyond ridiculous.