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I agree with a lot of what you say, however the idea of sin-binning badly-behaving advertisers is very tricky. The problem is that both the website owners and t

I agree with a lot of what you say, however the idea of sin-binning badly-behaving advertisers is very tricky. The problem is that both the website owners and the viewers seem to have little say in what gets stuck on their pages. Take the recent cases of malware-spreading adverts on legitimate sites. These sites get their ad spaces filled through agencies that then broker further deals, often selling ad space on-demand through live auctions to others, and so on. So, the issue of who is at fault becomes very murky. Who is to blame? Naturally, the malware originators are guilty, but at each level removed, someone has failed to do proper due diligence. And at each level out, that due diligence becomes even more difficult. When you get to the site owner, it's difficult to see what they could do to stop the attacks (other than not having ads at all). Even Google, who should be well equipped to filter out the bad guys, can't seem to prevent scum from getting on to their ad networks. Or is it that they don't really care? It's hard to tell. But going back to the sin-binning, there's just no way to tell who to sin-bin. The 'block everything' approach is effective and just about everything else fails.

SCdF 11y ago
> Take the recent cases of malware-spreading adverts on legitimate sites. These sites get their ad spaces filled through agencies that then broker further deals, often selling ad space on-demand through live auctions to others, and so on Yeah, and I think this is the crux of the problem. Like The Cube, we (as a collective, not you and I) have built his massive incomprehensible machine with an infinite number of moving parts that no one person actually groks the function of. The pictures about a third of the way down this talk[1] are instructive. So not unlike the banks with the GFC, there isn't really some moustache-twirling evil-doer pushing one weird trick ads and malware your way who you can regex out of your life, so you just have to nuke the whole thing from orbit. Which is essentially what we're doing with ad blockers. [1] http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
mavhc 11y ago
Well, there's 2 kinds of filtering, malware from viewing an ad, and malware from clicking an ad. At least we should be permanently blocking ad networks that fall for the first kind of hack. A whitelist of the top 100 ad networks that haven't let through malware in the past year, if you want to be on the list, submit your code for auditing. Easy way to get on the list: Only let people create pure text or graphic ads, no code.
- fsaintjacques 11y ago
  First kind of hack: You've effectively blacklisted every ad network.

SCdF 11y ago

> Take the recent cases of malware-spreading adverts on legitimate sites. These sites get their ad spaces filled through agencies that then broker further deals, often selling ad space on-demand through live auctions to others, and so on Yeah, and I think this is the crux of the problem. Like The Cube, we (as a collective, not you and I) have built his massive incomprehensible machine with an infinite number of moving parts that no one person actually groks the function of. The pictures about a third of the way down this talk[1] are instructive. So not unlike the banks with the GFC, there isn't really some moustache-twirling evil-doer pushing one weird trick ads and malware your way who you can regex out of your life, so you just have to nuke the whole thing from orbit. Which is essentially what we're doing with ad blockers. [1] http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

mavhc 11y ago

Well, there's 2 kinds of filtering, malware from viewing an ad, and malware from clicking an ad. At least we should be permanently blocking ad networks that fall for the first kind of hack. A whitelist of the top 100 ad networks that haven't let through malware in the past year, if you want to be on the list, submit your code for auditing. Easy way to get on the list: Only let people create pure text or graphic ads, no code.

fsaintjacques 11y ago
First kind of hack: You've effectively blacklisted every ad network.