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IronSource is known for leveraging their ad network and installers to distribute spam, malware, and adware bundlers. What the fuck Unity. [1] https://www.bened

IronSource is known for leveraging their ad network and installers to distribute spam, malware, and adware bundlers. What the fuck Unity. [1] https://www.benedelman.org/news-021815/ https://www.benedelman.org/news-021815/ [2] https://blog.infostruction.com/2018/10/26/adware-empire-ironsource-and-installcore/ https://blog.infostruction.com/2018/10/26/adware-empire-iron...

shmatt 4y ago
I've interviewed IronSource employees who showed me their work. I was pretty shocked at how purely evil the products intent was (malware wrapped installers for popular Windows applications). And this is in Israel, so you regularly interview people from NSO and similar companies, but at least they can claim to be part of "The War On Terror". IronSource doesn't even have that as an excuse
- andrepd 4y ago
  > but at least they can claim to be part of "The War On Terror". Can't decide if that makes it better or worse x)
  - atwood22 4y ago
    "Not only is this work evil, it also involves wasting 8 trillion dollars and killing civilians"
  - golemiprague 4y ago
    Terror might not be the main issue in Israel these days as it was for example around 2000 but it still happens and the reason it doesn't happen as much is partly due to those efforts. The main issue is that there are still entities in the region openly claiming that they want to destroy the country and turn it into another Arab country, most of the military efforts are against this threat. There is no need to judge it cynically as if we are talking now about the US or some European country going half way across the world to destroy some countries as part of the "war on terror".
    - stelonix 4y ago
      There are still entities in the region oppressed by the Israel regime too, human beings whose land has been taken, journalists, children, civilians in general murdered by their army, a belligerent stance on their neighbors, known nuclear weapons... The list could go on and on, but there's no way to put Israel on some noble pedestal, it's a powerful first world nuclear power oppressing people on their doorsteps.
      - throwaway894345 4y ago
        Who are the angels in the region? Which other countries in the region tolerate women, LGBT, and Jews?
        Dylan16807 4y ago
        I'm not sure what you're trying to imply with your question. It's not like Israel's oppressiveness there is an attempt to improve those types of tolerance.
        throwaway894345 4y ago
        I'm implying that it's hard to take criticism of Israel seriously when it gets far more criticism than its much worse neighbors (indeed, the UN has passed more resolutions against Israel than ~all other countries combined, and whatever Israel has done it's not worse than Iran, North Korea, Syria, etc much less all of them put together).
        Dylan16807 4y ago
        Okay but Israel came up because that's where the company is, in a comparison of different kinds of bad actor. Your complaint, in this specific context, is not helping.
        beepbeepcabbage 4y ago
        That would be the YPJ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Protection_Units https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Protection_Units
  - mort96 4y ago
    Well, at least it opens the possibility that the employee _thinks_ they're fighting the good fight, even if they're misguided. You can imagine the kind of person who thinks they're making the world a better place by working on technology to "fight terrorism". I don't think there exists a single person who genuinely thinks they're making the world a better place by installing malware onto innocent users' computers to earn money; you know for a fact that the employees who work on that stuff are morally bankrupt.
    - tshaddox 4y ago
      > I don't think there exists a single person who genuinely thinks they're making the world a better place by installing malware onto innocent users' computers to earn money Suppose someone thinks that if they hold a job there and perform their duties less effectively than their replacement would, they are reducing the company's effectiveness at accomplishing their harmful goal. If I can come up with that on the spot without even having any cognitive dissonance to self-justify, I imagine that at least some employees can come up with something at good or better.
      - mort96 4y ago
        You're downvoted, but I don't think you're wrong. I'm probably underestimating people's capacity for deluding themselves into thinking what they're doing isn't harmful.
    - throawayAlcohol 4y ago
      It's easy to label alternative morals as bankrupt. If my kids were starving and I could feed them by scamming some American with more money than I'll ever see if I added up every dime I make for my entire life, I'd feel pretty morally bankrupt if I let them starve instead. The people who write the code aren't the problem, they're a symptom
- weatherlite 4y ago
- jacooper 4y ago
  - js212 4y ago
    I hear they do a great job of respecting LGBTQ rights in the West Bank and Gaza!
    - krainboltgreene 4y ago
      Wait till you hear what happened to them when they fled to Tel Aviv. Nevermind, I know you don't actually care.
- m3kw9 4y ago
  Any relation to IronDome?
- rmbyrro 4y ago
  Depending on who you ask, it's actually "war for terror"
  - Fordec 4y ago
    Turns out its more analogous to think of terror as the toast and war as the jam
progbits 4y ago
Slightly off topic: in [2] the first screenshot showing "download chrome" query in Bing - do I understand right that the green "google.com" text is not the actual domain of the ad link? I couldn't reproduce this, Bing no longer shows me ads annotated that way. But that seems like a strange feature to let the ad owner present custom domain name...
- ev1 4y ago
  You can usually pick what domain you want to show up there when you buy an ad. It's common so you can use obnoxious chains of tracking links redirecting into each other and not show up as emjcd.com
  - progbits 4y ago
    Sure (I mean that is shady but whatever) but at least it would seem logical to verify the redirect chain ends up on that domain or better yet (since the redirects could change later) only allow the domain if ownership has been verified though DNS or similar. I simply don't see why I should be able to buy ad that shows "google.com".
    - ziml77 4y ago
      That's fucking insane that it's allowed. But if the ability to override the domain is truly that important, then there needs to be manual vetting of the ad buyer and the target domain. I'm sure you could automate it with signed TXT records, but I think there should still be a human in the chain to at least double-check everything.
    - ouid 4y ago
      >That is shady but whatever This century's motto
returnInfinity 4y ago
So its flash player all over again?
kinnth 4y ago
I'd say that's almost all mobile ad networks, as it's not the network themselves but the ads. This is good for both companies as Irnsrc gets deeper down the stack in terms of data and targeting and unity gets more spend flowing into their systems increasing their efficiency. Too bad the IDFA issue is slowly killing all forms of performance advertising. Unity should be looking to buy studios akin to Unreal IMO.
bdefore 4y ago
Unity has learned all the wrong lessons. Their success was largely from the verdant asset store and the asset developers who augmented a creaky platform with wonderful and useful tools to shorten development time. They never figured out how to maintain sane compatibility for these tools version to version, nor a way to sustain and compensate these authors. Which brings us to today: a shady acquisition to sneak malware tech into games while they continue to neglect the community that made them who they are.
- mordae 4y ago
  Good times for Godot, nice!
  - adamrezich 4y ago
    but also, maybe it's a good time to try dropping the scene graph/ECS way of doing things—there are other ways to make video games!
    - nomel 4y ago
      > there are other ways to make video games! Any interesting, practical, examples?
      - adamrezich 4y ago
        I'm having trouble understanding the question—there's plenty of open-source games that do not use ECS or a Unity-style scene graph. this mode of thinking being the default is relatively recent in the history of video game development. if you've never tried something like that before, PICO-8 might be a good starting point. this blog post might also prove useful: https://www.gamedev.net/blogs/entry/2265481-oop-is-dead-long-live-oop/ https://www.gamedev.net/blogs/entry/2265481-oop-is-dead-long...
        nomel 4y ago
        > I'm having trouble understanding the question I've only slightly dabbled in game engines, and have only been exposed to ECS and scene graphs, so I was asking for other methods, since they don't seem to be nearly as popular. Searching gives me results, but I can't qualify them, so maybe aren't "interesting" to actual game devs. I added "practical" because this is HN, where sometimes theoretical tangents take hold. :) But thanks!
moralestapia 4y ago
>IronSource is known for leveraging their ad network and installers to distribute spam, malware, and adware bundlers. What the fuck Unity. Big company that makes money, wants to make even more money. Is this a new thing for you?
JyB 4y ago
> What the fuck Unity. Quite right
sorry_outta_gas 4y ago
thank the gods for godot and other projects
- acomjean 4y ago
  I wouldn’t bring gods into it and consider thanking all the Godot contributors. Actually a lot of open source project and contributors need our support.
bdefore 4y ago
In the second link above, a Bing ad is presented to download Chrome while describing a domain of "www.google.com" but when clicked takes the user to googleonline2018.com ... maybe my expectations are out of date, but how is that possible? The otherwise excellent article doesn't explain. edit: was the second, not first link. this one: https://blog.infostruction.com/2018/10/26/adware-empire-ironsource-and-installcore/ https://blog.infostruction.com/2018/10/26/adware-empire-iron...
- franga2000 4y ago
  What do you mean by "describing"? If you mean the thingy in the bottom of your screen when you hover over a link, this is trivial to fake and Google itself is the largest user of this "feature". In a Google search, right click a link and copy it, then paste it somewhere. It will be a long ugly google.com tracking URL, even though what your browser showed you in the hover display was the link to the actual website.
  - bdefore 4y ago
    Sorry i misstated, it was the article at the second link from post i responded to. first image of that post, under where it says 'Get Chrome - Download Chrome Today' there is a green text that shows www.google.com. I thought that was enforced by the search engine and not able to be manipulated. At the risk of insinuating too much, there is a concerning incentive for Bing to provide corrupt links to Chrome.
    - kyle-rb 4y ago
      That definitely seems like a major flaw with Bing's search ads. They should be either deriving that green domain name, or verifying it matches the link, or at least verifying that you own that domain. I can't find a current Bing search ad whose green domain name doesn't match the domain of the destination of the link. Hopefully they've fixed this by now.
  - AinderS 4y ago
    > the thingy in the bottom of your screen when you hover over a link, this is trivial to fake Sounds like a security flaw. Why don't browsers patch it?
eli_gottlieb 4y ago
Oh well, there's always Godot.
failrate 4y ago
Oh, yeah, Unity is in the "PE folks are wearing your organization as a skin suit" phase.
- drawkbox 4y ago
  I have used Unity since 2007, Unity 2. This is by far the biggest blunder in their history. Did John Riccitiello get a visit late at night and capitulate? What happened? As a long time user, pusher and investor now, this concerns me deeply. Microsoft why couldn't you have bought Unity...
- munificent 4y ago
  What an absolutely perfect turn of phrase.
- PoignardAzur 4y ago
  "PE folks"?
  - umeshunni 4y ago
    Private Equity
  - potatochup 4y ago
    Private Equity
- edmcnulty101 4y ago
  Thats funny
- darkteflon 4y ago
  Great turn of phrase, perfectly captures both the state of Unity-the-company and the broader zeitgeist.
linspace 4y ago
What a pity Epic is not publicly traded, I just checked if it was possible to buy stock
m463 4y ago
Unity is pretty screwed up too. GOG.com sells games that do not have DRM and are generally not evil. But the unity games on the platform - they all phone home and send back detailed telemetry on what you do in-game. (I also know paradox games are a mess too) Thankfully the GOG terms allow you to install and run the games offline without requiring these shenanigans to play your game. I'm not versed on all the multiplayer subtleties.

shmatt 4y ago

I've interviewed IronSource employees who showed me their work. I was pretty shocked at how purely evil the products intent was (malware wrapped installers for popular Windows applications). And this is in Israel, so you regularly interview people from NSO and similar companies, but at least they can claim to be part of "The War On Terror". IronSource doesn't even have that as an excuse

andrepd 4y ago
> but at least they can claim to be part of "The War On Terror". Can't decide if that makes it better or worse x)
- atwood22 4y ago
  "Not only is this work evil, it also involves wasting 8 trillion dollars and killing civilians"
- golemiprague 4y ago
  Terror might not be the main issue in Israel these days as it was for example around 2000 but it still happens and the reason it doesn't happen as much is partly due to those efforts. The main issue is that there are still entities in the region openly claiming that they want to destroy the country and turn it into another Arab country, most of the military efforts are against this threat. There is no need to judge it cynically as if we are talking now about the US or some European country going half way across the world to destroy some countries as part of the "war on terror".
  - stelonix 4y ago
    There are still entities in the region oppressed by the Israel regime too, human beings whose land has been taken, journalists, children, civilians in general murdered by their army, a belligerent stance on their neighbors, known nuclear weapons... The list could go on and on, but there's no way to put Israel on some noble pedestal, it's a powerful first world nuclear power oppressing people on their doorsteps.
    - throwaway894345 4y ago
      Who are the angels in the region? Which other countries in the region tolerate women, LGBT, and Jews?
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        I'm not sure what you're trying to imply with your question. It's not like Israel's oppressiveness there is an attempt to improve those types of tolerance.
        throwaway894345 4y ago
        I'm implying that it's hard to take criticism of Israel seriously when it gets far more criticism than its much worse neighbors (indeed, the UN has passed more resolutions against Israel than ~all other countries combined, and whatever Israel has done it's not worse than Iran, North Korea, Syria, etc much less all of them put together).
        Dylan16807 4y ago
        Okay but Israel came up because that's where the company is, in a comparison of different kinds of bad actor. Your complaint, in this specific context, is not helping.
      - beepbeepcabbage 4y ago
        That would be the YPJ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Protection_Units https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Protection_Units
- mort96 4y ago
  Well, at least it opens the possibility that the employee _thinks_ they're fighting the good fight, even if they're misguided. You can imagine the kind of person who thinks they're making the world a better place by working on technology to "fight terrorism". I don't think there exists a single person who genuinely thinks they're making the world a better place by installing malware onto innocent users' computers to earn money; you know for a fact that the employees who work on that stuff are morally bankrupt.
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    > I don't think there exists a single person who genuinely thinks they're making the world a better place by installing malware onto innocent users' computers to earn money Suppose someone thinks that if they hold a job there and perform their duties less effectively than their replacement would, they are reducing the company's effectiveness at accomplishing their harmful goal. If I can come up with that on the spot without even having any cognitive dissonance to self-justify, I imagine that at least some employees can come up with something at good or better.
    - mort96 4y ago
      You're downvoted, but I don't think you're wrong. I'm probably underestimating people's capacity for deluding themselves into thinking what they're doing isn't harmful.
  - throawayAlcohol 4y ago
    It's easy to label alternative morals as bankrupt. If my kids were starving and I could feed them by scamming some American with more money than I'll ever see if I added up every dime I make for my entire life, I'd feel pretty morally bankrupt if I let them starve instead. The people who write the code aren't the problem, they're a symptom
weatherlite 4y ago
jacooper 4y ago
- js212 4y ago
  I hear they do a great job of respecting LGBTQ rights in the West Bank and Gaza!
  - krainboltgreene 4y ago
    Wait till you hear what happened to them when they fled to Tel Aviv. Nevermind, I know you don't actually care.
m3kw9 4y ago
Any relation to IronDome?
rmbyrro 4y ago
Depending on who you ask, it's actually "war for terror"
- Fordec 4y ago
  Turns out its more analogous to think of terror as the toast and war as the jam

progbits 4y ago

Slightly off topic: in [2] the first screenshot showing "download chrome" query in Bing - do I understand right that the green "google.com" text is not the actual domain of the ad link? I couldn't reproduce this, Bing no longer shows me ads annotated that way. But that seems like a strange feature to let the ad owner present custom domain name...

ev1 4y ago
You can usually pick what domain you want to show up there when you buy an ad. It's common so you can use obnoxious chains of tracking links redirecting into each other and not show up as emjcd.com
- progbits 4y ago
  Sure (I mean that is shady but whatever) but at least it would seem logical to verify the redirect chain ends up on that domain or better yet (since the redirects could change later) only allow the domain if ownership has been verified though DNS or similar. I simply don't see why I should be able to buy ad that shows "google.com".
  - ziml77 4y ago
    That's fucking insane that it's allowed. But if the ability to override the domain is truly that important, then there needs to be manual vetting of the ad buyer and the target domain. I'm sure you could automate it with signed TXT records, but I think there should still be a human in the chain to at least double-check everything.
  - ouid 4y ago
    >That is shady but whatever This century's motto

returnInfinity 4y ago

So its flash player all over again?

kinnth 4y ago

I'd say that's almost all mobile ad networks, as it's not the network themselves but the ads. This is good for both companies as Irnsrc gets deeper down the stack in terms of data and targeting and unity gets more spend flowing into their systems increasing their efficiency. Too bad the IDFA issue is slowly killing all forms of performance advertising. Unity should be looking to buy studios akin to Unreal IMO.

bdefore 4y ago

Unity has learned all the wrong lessons. Their success was largely from the verdant asset store and the asset developers who augmented a creaky platform with wonderful and useful tools to shorten development time. They never figured out how to maintain sane compatibility for these tools version to version, nor a way to sustain and compensate these authors. Which brings us to today: a shady acquisition to sneak malware tech into games while they continue to neglect the community that made them who they are.

mordae 4y ago
Good times for Godot, nice!
- adamrezich 4y ago
  but also, maybe it's a good time to try dropping the scene graph/ECS way of doing things—there are other ways to make video games!
  - nomel 4y ago
    > there are other ways to make video games! Any interesting, practical, examples?
    - adamrezich 4y ago
      I'm having trouble understanding the question—there's plenty of open-source games that do not use ECS or a Unity-style scene graph. this mode of thinking being the default is relatively recent in the history of video game development. if you've never tried something like that before, PICO-8 might be a good starting point. this blog post might also prove useful: https://www.gamedev.net/blogs/entry/2265481-oop-is-dead-long-live-oop/ https://www.gamedev.net/blogs/entry/2265481-oop-is-dead-long...
      - nomel 4y ago
        > I'm having trouble understanding the question I've only slightly dabbled in game engines, and have only been exposed to ECS and scene graphs, so I was asking for other methods, since they don't seem to be nearly as popular. Searching gives me results, but I can't qualify them, so maybe aren't "interesting" to actual game devs. I added "practical" because this is HN, where sometimes theoretical tangents take hold. :) But thanks!

moralestapia 4y ago

>IronSource is known for leveraging their ad network and installers to distribute spam, malware, and adware bundlers. What the fuck Unity. Big company that makes money, wants to make even more money. Is this a new thing for you?

JyB 4y ago

> What the fuck Unity. Quite right

sorry_outta_gas 4y ago

thank the gods for godot and other projects

acomjean 4y ago
I wouldn’t bring gods into it and consider thanking all the Godot contributors. Actually a lot of open source project and contributors need our support.

bdefore 4y ago

In the second link above, a Bing ad is presented to download Chrome while describing a domain of "www.google.com" but when clicked takes the user to googleonline2018.com ... maybe my expectations are out of date, but how is that possible? The otherwise excellent article doesn't explain. edit: was the second, not first link. this one: https://blog.infostruction.com/2018/10/26/adware-empire-ironsource-and-installcore/ https://blog.infostruction.com/2018/10/26/adware-empire-iron...

franga2000 4y ago
What do you mean by "describing"? If you mean the thingy in the bottom of your screen when you hover over a link, this is trivial to fake and Google itself is the largest user of this "feature". In a Google search, right click a link and copy it, then paste it somewhere. It will be a long ugly google.com tracking URL, even though what your browser showed you in the hover display was the link to the actual website.
- bdefore 4y ago
  Sorry i misstated, it was the article at the second link from post i responded to. first image of that post, under where it says 'Get Chrome - Download Chrome Today' there is a green text that shows www.google.com. I thought that was enforced by the search engine and not able to be manipulated. At the risk of insinuating too much, there is a concerning incentive for Bing to provide corrupt links to Chrome.
  - kyle-rb 4y ago
    That definitely seems like a major flaw with Bing's search ads. They should be either deriving that green domain name, or verifying it matches the link, or at least verifying that you own that domain. I can't find a current Bing search ad whose green domain name doesn't match the domain of the destination of the link. Hopefully they've fixed this by now.
- AinderS 4y ago
  > the thingy in the bottom of your screen when you hover over a link, this is trivial to fake Sounds like a security flaw. Why don't browsers patch it?

eli_gottlieb 4y ago

Oh well, there's always Godot.

failrate 4y ago

Oh, yeah, Unity is in the "PE folks are wearing your organization as a skin suit" phase.

drawkbox 4y ago
I have used Unity since 2007, Unity 2. This is by far the biggest blunder in their history. Did John Riccitiello get a visit late at night and capitulate? What happened? As a long time user, pusher and investor now, this concerns me deeply. Microsoft why couldn't you have bought Unity...
munificent 4y ago
What an absolutely perfect turn of phrase.
PoignardAzur 4y ago
"PE folks"?
- umeshunni 4y ago
  Private Equity
- potatochup 4y ago
  Private Equity
edmcnulty101 4y ago
Thats funny
darkteflon 4y ago
Great turn of phrase, perfectly captures both the state of Unity-the-company and the broader zeitgeist.

linspace 4y ago

What a pity Epic is not publicly traded, I just checked if it was possible to buy stock

m463 4y ago

Unity is pretty screwed up too. GOG.com sells games that do not have DRM and are generally not evil. But the unity games on the platform - they all phone home and send back detailed telemetry on what you do in-game. (I also know paradox games are a mess too) Thankfully the GOG terms allow you to install and run the games offline without requiring these shenanigans to play your game. I'm not versed on all the multiplayer subtleties.