(this.weekinsecurity.com)
https://doublepulsar.com/adform-compromised-to-serve-crypto-...
Going online without an adblocker just feels like playing with fire, especially nowadays.
It appears to be normal Adform code plus two appended chunks at the end.
Bitcoin: bc1qmplgt0hcg62jc2guz86wn2sms7tqrsulkkrrls
Ethereum: 0xE7983E69df17079ADb0aD7b3458488Cac0dBc573
TRON: TW4AgGnDc2Pk6YAynCtjCKzoKYWPg7nJe (?)
~$110k bitcoin
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/bc1qmplgt0...
~$55k in ETH
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/eth/0xE7983E69...
Gotta tackle such issues at different places all at once for sure. It's like wearing 5 digital condoms at once. Too bad there's still some leakage somewhere for sure. B)
YouTube does this, so you need to use a browser-based ad blocker.
It's getting harder by the day to tell sentiment apart from narrative.
Makes you wonder, are we living in a democracy or not?
(*) shown at inconvenient moments and tracking the user; yellow pages were fine
That said... The modern internet is built off many free services paid for by people who buy stuff from ads. It is hard to imagine a world without ads - many sites and services would disappear. Hosting costs money.
I could see a dystopia without ads where a government provides free hosting for citizens. That quickly becomes "thought police" when an authoritarian leading head of state comes in. If we pretend like that will not happen, I think we would have a much more wonderful internet.
Don't you see the problem with that statement? Ads are profitable, and we are paying for them, indirectly, through buying products and services. Adtech takes a chunk of that profit. Therefore, we pay more than we should!
You are not 'paying more than you should'. Not least because there is no price you 'should' be paying. Further I'm not sure how you imagine this working? The retailer gets to decide prices or not? They get to decide if they advertise or not? The advertiser's have competition? The retailers? Retailers are presumably choosing to advertise because they think it's worth it, thus it is? You are free to choose to buy those products, that will feed into their decision whether and how to advertise.
In no way is the consumer helped here, in the end.
To make things worse, the consumer is nudged into buying more stuff and thus contributing to global overconsumption.
It is hard to imagine a world without horses & carts; many businesses would disappear.
See e.g. https://ballotpedia.org/Alaska_Measure_5,_Prohibit_Billboard...
Granted, even in the 1990s there were ads; I remember blinking banners and what not. But often the underlying website was still fine as such.
Fast forward some years. Now if you look at e. g. medium.com but many other websites, you are CONSTANTLY bombarded with pointless pop-ups, slide-ins, and pester-naggers. No I do use ublock origin (it works on thorium by default) so I only get very few ads, but many websites just pursue a strategy to piss off visitors. I do not understand this. If you want anyone to read your content, do not pester them at all. Nowadays when a slide-in appears that sneaks through ublock origin, I don't even let ublock origin block it, I just insta-close that tab. Cookie accept banners fall into the similar category, though some add-ons help with that.
the ads in the 90s were served by the same server of the site you were browsing. those ads were images. today's ads are from 3rd party servers running arbitrary JS code that the server of the site you are browsing knows nothing about how it works. ads from the 90s while possibly obnoxious and annoying were not able to be malicious as ads from today.
Does that really happen ? I don't know what this is
Note: I have Ublock set with no JS permissions by default, so maybe that's why i never see a slide-in menace ?
Now, the scientist is probably right, the hippo probably goes its whole life not really knowing that it has all these leeches in its butt. It might feel a little pain in the butt, but the hippo probably isn't concerned with why that pain is there, much less how or even if it can get rid of it, it's just something that the hippo has always lived with. The hippo accepts that one of the facts of daily life is that you just need to live with some pain in your butt.
Now, imagine (and believe me, this is a hypothetical), if the hippo let someone root around inside its butt and remove every one of the leeches, and even stop any others from attaching. It might take a day or two to get used to and get back to normal, but the hippo would wake up one day and realize that it no longer has a pain in its butt. It can still do everything it used to do, it can frolic in the water, it can roam around and find the tender little pieces of grass, it can do that thing where it poops and swishes its tail around to spread it all over its neighbors, and it realizes that it can do all of those things it likes without having that pain in its butt.
Now, maybe the leeches could talk. Maybe the leeches talk to the hippos and they say things like, listen, hippo, my life cycle depends on you letting me get into your butt when you're in the water. I need to drink your blood and drop out some eggs, so that other leeches can be born and start the cycle all over again. It's not really a big price you pay, I mean sure, there's a little pain in your butt, but I need you to do this. If you want to get in the water, it's just something you have to deal with. It's the price of admission. If you get in the water without letting me in your butt, it's like you're stealing the water.
I bet that the hippo would hear that, and would still want to continue going about its day without any pain in its butt. I don't think the hippo would feel very sorry for the butt leech. Sure, maybe the butt leech contributes to the aquatic ecosystem, maybe its eggs or the dead leeches get eaten by other things and fertilize the grass that the hippo likes to eat. But, if the leeches weren't there, the grass would just find other nutrients. Even though the leech is trying to argue that it's a necessary part of this ecosystem, it's actually just a pain in the butt. In reality, despite what it tells everyone else, the major beneficiary of anything that the butt leech does is the actual butt leech.
Anyway, I just had a thought that advertisers kind of sound like hippo butt leeches.
Reading the content is really not necessary, but the business is predicated on selling ads.
Think of a typical news site with millions of ads flying in as you try to read - they are the causers of this shit ad world
Look what happened to YouTube after the news showed up there.
Look at the clusterfuck that is housing and banking.
Compare how any other vertical is ran by the main players vs Finance and Media - the two most shittily ran industries in the West.
This is a silly distinction anyway. Blocking ads is an obvious first step to improving browser security.
Their users do.
Someone shared the code in the comments, it uses 'copy' and 'cut' event listeners, so disabling this setting would have prevented the exploit regardless of an adblock.
It's Google versus Mankind.
Mankind will eventually prevail against Evil. Google pissed off too many people now, you only need to look at reddit's degoogle subreddit.
A drop in the ocean…
Google is constantly rushing from growth record to growth record in the last years.
The tolerance for slavery, brutal warfare, institutionalized racism and much more is way lower now than it has been in the past.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
The world has always be run by oligarchs, and nothing changed since ten thousands of years.
Most people today on this planet are still slaves.
For years one of the perks of being a soldier was raping and pillaging, now that lands you in prison (depending on the country of course).
The world isn’t some utopia where everyone is treated fairly and there are no oligarchs, but I think it’s hard to argue that the amount of justice is unchanged for all of human history.
Do you know that today's soldiers still rape and pillage?
I agree.
It got worse.
The inequality between people was never so high in history! Hard fact.
Now some people "earn" more money while they breeze in and out then large amounts of people earn in their whole life.
Also now the slaves have to pay everything themself (like food, shelter, clothes, in some countries even education). Progress!
Are you saying that a black person born in South Carolina today has a worse life and with less justice than a black person born into slavery a few hundred years ago?
I don’t think slaves got university educations for free.
And why only black people?
If copy and paste is disabled in my default browser that would be something like 80% of my total of my total use cases for the clipboard in the first place.
The former is a system event, not a browser one.
This is similar to how on google docs if you try to copy via the edit menu, it pops up to say use Ctrl-C instead.
Honestly, I too am surprised a JavaScript plugin was able to access and alter the system clipboard in the first place too.
For external situations I agree. No clue why browsers started to sniff after people. I blame Google for that.
You want to talk about killing a system... look at all the perverse incentives that pop up when companies are allowed to sell user attention instead of decent services and products.
If the modern social media internet dies because of ad-blockers... good damn riddance.
Everyone takes for granted, or is unaware, that the structure of the current internet is unbelievably progressive (money doesn't matter, attention does, and everyone has the same 24 hours of attention to sell), and yet here we are desperately trying to get away from it.
P.S. The 90's internet is dead and isn't coming back. I'm uninterested in engaging if you think bringing back geocities and IRC is a legitimate strategy that the whole of society would happily jump right into. I can already see my mom uninstalling instagram to hop on mIRC.
Right, it’s the ad-blocking that’s making the internet suck. You’re going to hurt your lower back carrying that much water.