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Google Targets Fake "Download" and "Play" Buttons (torrentfreak.com)
AmiMoJo writes: Google says it will go to war against the fake 'download' and 'play' buttons that attempt to deceive users on file-sharing and other popular sites. According to a new announcement from the company titled 'No More Deceptive Download Buttons', Google says it will expand its eight-year-old Safe Browsing initiative to target some of the problems highlighted above. 'You may have encountered social engineering in a deceptive download button, or an image ad that falsely claims your system is out of date. Today, we're expanding Safe Browsing protection to protect you from such deceptive embedded content, like social engineering ads,' the company says.
Some sites get ridiculous with that.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I get it if those ads are part of Google's network, but they rarely are. How would Google target them (in Chrome or whatever) when they're basically just images, unless they do some kind of image parsing for literally every image that loads, in which case, bye CPU cycles.
How would Google target them
You know that 20% of free project time Google employees get? Yeah, now it's looking for download button images.
It's not even like they lose anything as they only tell the Google workers that were surfing porn anyway to save off URL's as they browse.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The biggest thing is to always look at the redirect address and see if it makes any sense. Usually the advertisements give themselves away. Though this doesn't really help the most naive of users. Who wants waste time when they could be downloading sw33t haxz.
Google should probably start warning about their search engine, which presents search result hyperlinks, that by default point to a Google webserver, that redirects you to the target.
Right next to the title https://torrentfreak.com/googl...
Hopefully they will go back to putting links in the summary shortly.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
You're right. We need cross-platform compatibility for malware. Who's with me?
They can start with Cnet's Download.com, nothing but ad banners with identical looking green "download" buttons.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
These things are annoying.
"Google says it will go to war against the fake 'download' and 'play' buttons that attempt to deceive users on file-sharing and other popular sites."
"You have attempted to use Google on a known spyware system. Your machine will now reboot."
put it into ad services, too.
thanks.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
It doesn't catch near the amount of crap it should. I can see this project will be just as worthless.
If you prevent 5% of fraud, it's not worthless, it's just not as good as it could be.
Imagine your attitude were what everyone had used toward spam filtering fifteen years ago. We wouldn't have good spam filtering until some kid without the preconception that it was impossible sat down and hacked it out.
Why don't you start with your own mobile advertising platform?
Nope, never going to see ads from ANY ad network. If a web site wants to show me ads, they can do it from their own domain.
I don't respond to AC's.
This should be quite a bloodbath; but the satisfying kind of bloodbath, where the guilty are cut down in swaths.
blocking the fake "submitted by timothy" links on Slashdot
Oh wait...there'd just be a blank page left. NM.
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
Microsoft could have worked on an alternative executable format that is safe and sandboxed
You mean MSI / Windows Installer Service? That's about as good as you can hope for, but it does nothing for a user who is convinced they are downloading a program - and digital signatures aren't even shown to the user to match against the name of the software being installed. It only shows if there's not one or it's invalid.
If the user thinks they're going to install software, they're going to give it admin permission to install necessary registry and file permissions. How do you sandbox that away without blocking a legitimate installer?
Sites want to get indexed by google. If a site hosts ads that have bullshit Deceptive practices google can downrank them. Google doesn't have to be 100% effective. Even a crude system for spotting these is going to turn up hits if a site isn't blocking these kinds of adertisers. And so on. If a site doesn't do it's own ads but instead hosts ads from and advertising aggregator and they do this bullshit then the site will drop them to stay in google's good graces.
And so all google has to do is scan adds that show up in content providers and then punish them. so it's top down.
They can also try to go bottoms up, and seek out companies that do these kinds of ads but that's going to be impossible to block unless they are actually hosting the page. However that's not completely nuts. companies like Opera and Amazon who offer compression and caching of web pages in their browsers do have the capacity to edit the webpage to remove content from ad agencies they deem to be scum.
Does google do that for android mobile? (I have no idea). But apple is talking about ad blocking. And thrid parties like ad block plus have the capability to erase ads from nasty advertisers.
Once these technologies start denting revenue and page views those ads will dry up by themselves.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
That same green "play button" image is displayed millions of times per day, linking to the same URL. They only need to check it once to discover that it's bogus. Then Chrome can block it for all Chrome users who see that image linked to that URL.
That does involve communicating something about the block list between Chrome and Google's blacklist server. Hopefully they get that part right. The right way will probably involve communicating a strong hash of the two URLs rather than the URLs themselves.
|\
|--\
|----\ Click to start
|----/ DOWNLOAD
|--/
|/
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
yeah the mobile version is pretty much worthless.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
I feel like Google deserves a big ol' Apple-style "Finally" dropped in this headline, tho
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
I run a site that offers downloads of files. I have advertising on that site. A large number of those ads, obviously context-sensitive, display fake "Download" buttons on them.
Guess who is my ad provider? Google AdSense.
Google, heal thyself.
Submitter here. It used to be that if you put the link in the link box on the submission page the editors would insert it into the summary for you. Sometimes I'm too busy/lazy to do it, and what are editors for?
Maybe the new people didn't realise, but it's better to put the link in the summary. Please edit it in next time.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
An office suite often needs to associate file extensions. Lots of apps use shared libraries, which only needs to exist once on a system (VB6 runtime, .NET, etc). Non-registry settings files shouldn't be in program folders (so that they can be discovered for backup and/or separated from executable files - user files should not be under the Program Files folder).
Sandboxing a Photo manager app to only its own directory means you couldn't even use the default Photos folder to manage a photo library. Reading file lists or generating thumbnails requires file access. And an OS-generated file picker just to update metadata on a photo?
There are several reasons to add registry entries, besides file associations. A CD burning program needs to be able to register UpperFilters or LowerFilters on an optical drive or add a non-hardware driver (since while Windows has userspace drivers, they haven't really been adopted widely as far as I can tell).
Even Linux package managers put default configuration files under /home/ instead of with the binaries.
Actually they started this a couple months before it changed hands.
Still yet they should always put a link somewhere in the summary.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Totally...it is a confusing change. For over a decade there has always been a link IN the write-up, but now there is a link next to the headline. Additionally, the link is still green, and the background bar is also green, just darker. And small text too, so it's not very noticeable.
Yep. It's been long overdue too. And they've been able to solve it for mobile phones and touchpads, where you are giving permission in advance. With Windows 10 moving towards one codebase for mobile and PC it should become easier to roll out.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
half the fucking internet delisted from google.... because THEIR OWN FUCKING ADS are a primary source of this fake download bullshit... not only on sites using their ad networks, but also GOOGLES OWN RESULT PAGES have ads with misleading bogus malware infested download pages.
google... clean up your own fucking house before you try to clean up the rest of the internet.
They fixed it. I think that's a good sign.
Barbara Felden claims prior art on the flip phone, sues Motorola, Nokia.
That was pretty quick! Yes, it's good that our new overlords (lol) are taking active participation and fixing stuff!
Every time I try to use YouTube or Google Drive through the latest and greatest Pale Moon, I am greeted with a page (or a ribbon in the case of Drive) telling me my browser is no longer supported and that I need to use the latest version. Umm, this is the latest version. When I choose to go through anyhow, everything works just fine.
They could afford to start a bit closer to home.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
New subject question about how long, the answer is "The google don't care, just like the honey badger." Or you could reword it in terms of the google's new motto: "All your attention are belong to us."
However, the post by OverlordQ that I'm responding to said:
Some sites get ridiculous with that.
No, it is NOT the websites or even the app, though there are things an app developer can do that can make it easier or harder for scammers to use that sort of misleading ad. The REAL problem is that the google don't care about scams or the victims thereof. The only concern of the google is MONEY. These days that is driving them to ever nastier exploitations of our private information, but it does NOT have to be that way.
For example of a possible constructive solution:
Add a "Business model" or "Financials" tab in Google Play. Let the developer explain how the money works, most often by selecting one of the more common options. Then the google would add a secure comment about the evidence.
No, this would not eliminate all scams, but it would let us make better choices AGAINST scammy the business models. Again, details available upon polite request.
Oh yeah and by the way, I've been trying to call the google's attention to these sorts of scams for some years, but it's just one of a LONG list of google-supported scams. With great power the google accepts NO responsibility.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Can they get Microsoft to stop trying to trick me into downloading Windows 10?
So far, I've run the programs to strip those notifications and updates from my system, but Microsoft keeps getting trickier.
banners showing next/previous navigation buttons. Been caught by these too.