That one weird trick fails: Google binned 780 million ads last year Google blocked 780 million malicious and annoying advertisements last year, up from 256 million in 2014. The company says it has destroyed more than 10,000 sites foisting software like download wrappers, which install adware and the like. This, it says, reduced the total unwanted downloads through Google ads by 99 percent. …
You've obviously not visited Buzzfeed/Answers.com/$timewastingsites.
Last week, I clicked on a link that took me there. I'm pretty sure I did half that number just on that one visit...
(Note: I just went to my Facebook feed to find some other such sites to pad out the list, but thankfully couldn't find any despite scrolling back a whole day. However, I now worry that some kind of disaster may have killed all of my less intelligent friends and relatives...)
... but actively supporting others.
Apparently Google have given Scientology the equivalent of $5.7 million in free advertising grants:
http://tonyortega.org/2016/01/07/audio-hear-scientology-boast-about-the-5-million-it-got-from-google-in-free-ads/
What's the big deal about that? Well, take a look at HBO's documentary "Going Clear" from last year for starters.
Whilst Scientology are classed as a religion, rather than correctly classified as "a cult designed to extract money from people", they probably qualify for some kind of discount from many businesses.
I'd like to see Google refuse to do business with them. But Scientology would probably just start a shell game with many new companies in order to get what they want. Let's face the simple fact that Scientology is the evil here, and Google is - at worst - the lesser evil.
Also, I'd question the source. Scientology makes lots of claims, many of them somewhat distanced from reality. But even if they provided evidence, would you really take it at face value? This is an organisation that has planned to forge government documents in the past, after all...
The way to fix Scientology and others like them is to give at least equal prominence to the anti brigade. Google have enough clout to perform a public service and deal with takedown demands. They've even found a way to deal with the ones they have to obey, by publishing the fact that someone asked.
I'd like to see Google refuse to do business with them. But Scientology would probably just start a shell game with many new companies in order to get what they want.
Probably not go that far... just lawsuits. They have a history of suing companies and people for trying to ban/stop them.
The source says ads, not impressions. They use the word disabled ads, which would not really make sense if this was only impressions.
…Considering the billions of ads impressions they must serve every single day, it would be fairly weird if they could find only 750 millions bad impressions.
A lot of, how shall we say, low-grade emails are passed through gmail on an ongoing basis.
What is an irritation is the hoops legitimate businesses with well-established trading reputations (can't they google that?) have to go through to de-list from gmail's block list when blatant spammers can sail through that process.
People used to moan about the likes of SORBS, but getting delisted from there is a walk in the park compared to gmail's process (no I don't know my maternal great grandfather's shoe size). In more than one instance I've slewed a company's public IP address to another to work-around the problem.
Ok company's should not spew spam, however momentarily, but where there's been such an event, which has been cleaned up, gmail should allow a "probationary" unblock, as practised by most other blacklists out there.
"Ok companies should not spew spam" [egregious use of possessive instead of plural corrected]
The shouldn't but they do although they'll describe it as valuable marketing information or customer engagement or some such tripe. My household insurance will change at the next renewal because my current insurers clearly forgot they'd been warned a couple of years ago. And no, opt-out is not an acceptable substitute for opt-in.
The worst part about all these diet scams is invariably they're a byproduct of shady MLMs. The MLM cons a bunch of people into becoming sellers for some dubious diet products and then this zombie horde begins setting up websites, buying ad impressions and spamming every site in existence to promote this shit.
I'm glad if Google is removing their garbage from ad impressions and hopefully scuppering their websites in search results.
I've also been to some sites on a phone where before I know it I've been directed to download an APK, or Google Play has launched up on some app (usually some shitty "free" game) . It'd be nice if Google also apps and games that people had involuntarily arrived at on their store from rogue sites to deter the practice.
Not that although that's annoying too - LinkedIn, Pinterest etc nagging to use the app instead of the browser.
What I mean is I've visited sites containing mobile ads and a malicious ad has automatically initiated downloads of APKs. I've also see ads which automatically open Google Play store which is trigged by some kind of url.
The workaround to the latter is to install another appstore on the device, e.g. F-droid. If a malicious ad triggers the appstore url, Android pops up asking which appstore to launch and I can hit back at that point.
I've said it before and I'll say it again.
They could easily guarantee that. All they have to do is take the ad content, vet it and host it themselves to serve, rather than selling the slot and fetching the content from ${shithole}.
I know that this would cause howls of outrage in the advertising agency world about being less "agile" and "responsive to the market". However, in the same way that we do not allow small children to have submachineguns and live grenades, we should not allow advertisers direct access to computers.
I know that analogy isn't perfect, small children don't know any better whereas advertising execs are just bastards.
FAIL: 'Cos the current system is a massive, steaming heap of it.
Well Google, in this instance, is only talking about its own ad service, and serving. And Adwords is relatively well-behaved when it comes to serving stuff.
Which leaves a couple of 100 other cowboys/clowns who range from "mildly annoying" to "specialised in pushing dangerous crap" who most definitely are not well-behaved. And happily serve the stuff Google refuses.
-- we do not allow small children to have submachineguns and live grenades --
"What you mean 'we', Masked man?"
You must not live in the USA, or maybe you live in one of those states that President Trump will be building a wall around, and making them pay for!
Hi, we are in the business of selling advertisement space on webpages and sending ads to you. We are pretty proud of how we spend a small fraction of the money we take in doing that to filter out some of the least desirable ads.
While we are here, lets take a moment to tell you about how malicious advertisements are increasing and that ads even we are too embarrassed to serve up are becoming pretty common. This gives us even more ads to filter out! You know, from the good ones. The ones you eagerly wait for.
You're welcome!
A Google search [site:nhs.uk paypal viagra] brings up several pages with many obviously dodgy links. Also there are usually a large number of similar offers for counterfeit goods of various sorts apparently on the NHS site. I don't know how the hacks are achieved or exactly how they benefit the miscreants, but it's been a couple of years since this misuse of nhs.uk was first mentioned on El Reg. And Google itself has supposedly been tackling the issue for about a year now.
It's not just that the ads are dodgy, the perpetrators are using the NHS internet presence fraudulently too. Must try harder.
One would hope that not only is Google cracking down on fraudulent advertisements, they have created a relevant to each countries communications authority liaison office, to pass on the collated evidence so that the relevant authorities can pursue prosecution.
Google might still think that the cost world wide would be far to high, millions of dollars (proper collation and legal presentation of evidence maintaining a quality chain for evidence for further investigation) but that investment will result in significant reductions of cost associated with finding and removing those bad players, a huge problem would rapidly shrink to a minor problem because repeat offenders don't get no network access in prison.
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