Hacker News Reader

Comment by CommieBobDole | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

"But experts say the problem isn’t with lack of discernment on the part of site publishers but with an extremely complex online advertising system that makes it hard for publishers involved to detect, let alone weed out, misleading and malware-laden ads."

Which is crap. It's your site, you're responsible for what you run on it. If I ran a store, and the guy from the company that cleans the floors occasionally stabs customers in the face, nobody would accept me shrugging and saying "well, it's really hard to tell which companies employ face-stabbers so I guess you're just going to get some face-stabbing every once in a while. Sorry".

If you go to a site and you get malware from an ad network, it's because the site owner doesn't care if you get malware from an ad network. Full stop.

View on HN

Well said.

If you don't want to be criticized for sending your customers malware... get better control over the the third party scripts on your site. Trusting a negligent third-party actor is negligent in itself.

If NYT is willing to sell out it's readers to sketchy internet ad providers, what assurances do we have that they won't also sell-out readers to intentional paid propaganda? Slippery slope for an organization rooted in journalistic integrity. Does management have controls in place for this?

We've had spam originate from google in the past, honestly they're by far the best source of good quality demand and even they occasionally have spam get through.

Better control of third party scripts is a good point, minimize the number of networks and focusing on quality is important but it's not a guarantee spammers won't get through.

Google is negligent in failing to block malware ads. They chose how to build their system, and they could have build a system without this vulnerability (but it would be less profitable). Just because they are the biggest certainly doesn't mean they are ethically innocent here.

They choose to maintain a business model that requires third party scripts - which is a conscious decision to harm the audience at the expense of their patrons. Their greed needs to be called out, or else people will continue using them as a shield against any critical call for improvement in the fraud-rampant online ad economy.

Google may be the best there is, but that says more about the lack of morals in the ad industry than Google's high-ground.

Let's introduce responsibility for hosted content: Every ad has to come with an audit (report linked visibly in a bottom corner of the ad), either by the publishing platform or by a trusted and certified auditor on behalf of the network. (There is no such thing as a free lunch.)

man, this is really untrue. I As someone who has owned and been part of sites that get hit with bad ads / malware, trust me we do care and we do what we can but the end publishers get all the blame and have the least resources available to prevent it. People should really be upset with the networks that allow those ads to go through and don't try and stop them until we complain, they take that spam money and are the ones who are most likely to be able to detect it.

The problem is that we actually don't have much control from networks and they usually at first will deny it's happening. The only thing we can do is pull the networks until they pull the bad ads. But also know it's how we pay most of the bills so we do what we can.

Thank goodness for new companies like Confiant that are building wrappers that look at each ad call first and reject suspicious demand. It's been a life saver. It costs money but it was worth it, I sleep better at night.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com