This is a good development. This proves the point that a lot of ads found on these websites are extremely shady and dangerous, and that we - as users - don't desire these crazy amount of ads on every single fucking website. These cases strengthen the need of a good adblocker because this story will hopefully spread around, causing an increase in adblock usage thus causing an overall decrease in ad revenue and hopefully we will see a decline of websites filled with advertisements
>we - as users - don't desire these crazy amount of ads on every single fucking website.
If intentional, the attributes you gave to the website are particularly appropriate, the combination of "single" with the other adjective is absolutely on target.
Or, you know... you could open your wallet/purse. The response to decreasing ad revenue would not be less ads it would be more ads filled with even more psychological engineering.
Advertising on the web was never stable or reliable as a revenue source, it just seemed that way because the infrastructure of ad blocking wasn't available or well known.
The well of consumer trust has been poisoned by companies that saw the web as a Wild West platform where they could make money without bothering with ethics or standards, but now users are aware that all of those malignant and annoying ads can easily be blocked, and companies are getting desperate as they realize all too late that they were participating in an honor system in which they had far less power than they wanted.
Why would we surrender and pay the Danegeld when we're clearly winning the war?
Publishers are not entitled to breaking the law and distribute malware. Going criminal because their business model is having problems is a poor way for sympathy, and a straight way for open hostility between consumer and producer.
History has a tendency to repeat itself. Advertisement in email is today almost dead, where everyone has filters and blocks to prevent the flood of illicit actors. Telling people to "open your wallet/purse" is not the solution to spam, malware, scams, and fraudulent advertisement. Nothing short of a major rework of international law has any chance of putting that genie back in the bottle and turning back time. Its unlikely, so we all have to resort to blocks and filters to do the jobs for which normally governments and police do.
Advertisement is a business cop out for companies that ant come up with a proper business model. Luckily for them, it can be super profitable.
The cost of course is that we are forever bombarded with advertisement that tries to coerce and trick us into buying some shit that we don’t need or want, or we have to see even more misleading or downright fraudulent bullshit and put up with ever-worse clickbait articles and websites. Which causes more and more people to block adverts.
Personally, I’ve never paid for a site or app to remove their adverts, but I often pay for stuff that’s advert-free (but not cost-free) to begin with. I also like to directly back content creators whose content I enjoy through patreon.
When subscribing to many services, like newspapers, there is no reduction in ads seen. Even if everyone subscribed, there would be no incentive to remove ads unless there was some external market pressure.
Because the value of an ad is as much in knowing what you’re looking at as it showing you something - the JS is there to track and identify, not to show you pretty pictures.
Note: This is NOT a drive-by loader. It is no more newsworthy than anybody else getting owned by extremely obvious phishing attacks.
I know it's unpopular to "blame the victim", but in 2017, if you're not even casually glancing at the url, I'm not sure how much sympathy these victims deserve.
The big problem is that nobody wants to admit that they use these sites (even though a large percentage do), so if something gets infected we don't talk about it and as a result it doesn't get resolved.
I'm glad someone wasn't too repressed to call them on this.
The day I got a you-have-a-virus-call-us popup on Chrome on my phone was the day I switched over to Firefox with ublock. I wasn't even visiting a sketchy site.
