5 ms·

Why are they accepting ads for a product from anyone but the verified maker of the product in the first place? Surely there's budget in that river of ad money t

Why are they accepting ads for a product from anyone but the verified maker of the product in the first place? Surely there's budget in that river of ad money to do the most basic due diligence?

basch 4y ago
Is that extortion? Pay us or malware displaces you as the first thing people see? That said, it’s pretty common to get a competitor ad above the top search result.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  It's not "extortion" so much as "stupid." "Pay us or we'll convince people our search results are crap" is a really bad business model.
  - basch 4y ago
    You know how many people will think “teamviewer or Firefox must have gotten hacked” before “google sent me to a bad site” OR not notice for days and have no idea where it came from?
shadowgovt 4y ago
Being allowed to advertise on someone else's brand, trademark, etc. has been pretty much a cornerstone of online advertising since the birth of online advertising. It's justified as the way mom-and-pops have any hope at all of competing with big-box names; otherwise, Dan's Local Electronics couldn't show up on searches for Best Buy as a potential micro-targeted local alternative.
- deminature 4y ago
  I'm not talking about advertising on someone else's brand, I'm talking about advertising AS someone else's brand, or malicious impersonation. The most basic vetting of advertising would catch this, but apparently this is not occurring.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    Our observation of what is occurring doesn't match what is occurring. Here's how the vetting you're imagining works: 1. The automated system goes to the advertised site. But Google's IPs are public knowledge, so the site vends a "safe" version to Google's checkers. 2. If Google sends a human being? Same story. That human's coming from a Google IP. 3. Google has a small set of non-Google IPs that they privately use for checking. This process seems to have broken down. My guess is malvertisers have caught wise and have managed to build a good list of those IPs to cloak against Google's back- and side-channel verifies too. In terms of the actual ad copy: I suspect a lot of that is checked automatically, and the rest is often checked by contractors. So you're trying to solve the "Build an AI to understand when something is confusing" problem. There's probably room for improvement here, but it's not as surprising as I wish it were that stuff slips through the cracks at that layer.
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      > But Google's IPs are public knowledge You're telling me that even though attackers of various sophistication are able to get clean, residential IPs all the time for nefarious purposes, Google can't do the same? Come on. It's not that they can't, it's that they don't care.
      - shadowgovt 4y ago
        They definitely can. You underestimate how quickly they are identified as Google ad-check bots by the actors who don't want to be seen.
pixl97 4y ago
Because in the vast majority if markets the manufacturer is not the reseller. This is even true in many places in the software market.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  True, but it seems like in the case of Blender, there is no reseller, so an easy solution is to literally blacklist the word "Blender" (when it comes to software - I'm sure they have semantic analysis behind the scenes to differentiate Blender the 3D software vs a smoothie blender). The ban can be reversed if an official from the Blender project reaches out (if they ever need to advertise for example).
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    So nobody's allowed to advertise a better 3d modeling option on searches for "blender?"
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      You can allow it as targeting, but disallow the word "Blender" in the ad copy, which is what these scams would use to misrepresent themselves and trick the user into downloading malware.
      - pixl97 4y ago
        Using your competitors name is legal in US advertising

Why are they accepting ads for a product from anyone but the verified maker of the product in the first place? Surely there's budget in that river of ad money to do the most basic due diligence?

basch 4y ago

Is that extortion? Pay us or malware displaces you as the first thing people see? That said, it’s pretty common to get a competitor ad above the top search result.

shadowgovt 4y ago
It's not "extortion" so much as "stupid." "Pay us or we'll convince people our search results are crap" is a really bad business model.
- basch 4y ago
  You know how many people will think “teamviewer or Firefox must have gotten hacked” before “google sent me to a bad site” OR not notice for days and have no idea where it came from?

shadowgovt 4y ago

Being allowed to advertise on someone else's brand, trademark, etc. has been pretty much a cornerstone of online advertising since the birth of online advertising. It's justified as the way mom-and-pops have any hope at all of competing with big-box names; otherwise, Dan's Local Electronics couldn't show up on searches for Best Buy as a potential micro-targeted local alternative.

deminature 4y ago
I'm not talking about advertising on someone else's brand, I'm talking about advertising AS someone else's brand, or malicious impersonation. The most basic vetting of advertising would catch this, but apparently this is not occurring.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Our observation of what is occurring doesn't match what is occurring. Here's how the vetting you're imagining works: 1. The automated system goes to the advertised site. But Google's IPs are public knowledge, so the site vends a "safe" version to Google's checkers. 2. If Google sends a human being? Same story. That human's coming from a Google IP. 3. Google has a small set of non-Google IPs that they privately use for checking. This process seems to have broken down. My guess is malvertisers have caught wise and have managed to build a good list of those IPs to cloak against Google's back- and side-channel verifies too. In terms of the actual ad copy: I suspect a lot of that is checked automatically, and the rest is often checked by contractors. So you're trying to solve the "Build an AI to understand when something is confusing" problem. There's probably room for improvement here, but it's not as surprising as I wish it were that stuff slips through the cracks at that layer.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    > But Google's IPs are public knowledge You're telling me that even though attackers of various sophistication are able to get clean, residential IPs all the time for nefarious purposes, Google can't do the same? Come on. It's not that they can't, it's that they don't care.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      They definitely can. You underestimate how quickly they are identified as Google ad-check bots by the actors who don't want to be seen.

pixl97 4y ago

Because in the vast majority if markets the manufacturer is not the reseller. This is even true in many places in the software market.

Nextgrid 4y ago
True, but it seems like in the case of Blender, there is no reseller, so an easy solution is to literally blacklist the word "Blender" (when it comes to software - I'm sure they have semantic analysis behind the scenes to differentiate Blender the 3D software vs a smoothie blender). The ban can be reversed if an official from the Blender project reaches out (if they ever need to advertise for example).
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  So nobody's allowed to advertise a better 3d modeling option on searches for "blender?"
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    You can allow it as targeting, but disallow the word "Blender" in the ad copy, which is what these scams would use to misrepresent themselves and trick the user into downloading malware.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      Using your competitors name is legal in US advertising