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How I advertise malicious software on Google Ads
- soltanov 24d agoGoogle treats its customers so blindly. in short, Google is not user centric company at all.
- astrashe2 24d agoGoogle treats its customers like a monopolist.
- Henchman21 24d agoGoogle treats its customers the way a cattle rancher treats his cattle.
- thisisauserid 24d agoYou should take your ad viewing elsewhere in protest.
- someguyiguess 24d agoYep. Straight to the pie hole.
- freediver 24d agowave
- deleted 24d ago[deleted]
- thesuitonym 24d agoUsed to be you'd say Google was bad because the users weren't the customers, the advertisers were. Nowadays even the advertisers aren't the customers. They only customers Google has anymore are the shareholders.
- faeyanpiraat 24d agoNeat terminal, I've been building the same thing in my free time but haven't reached a point where it is complete / stable enough for being my daily driver. Have you (anyone) actually sticked to the way of working this enables, or is this just a gimmick?
- xlii 24d agoThis is my driver since it become usable. I have 140 terminals on 2 workspaces. Grouped by project/task. I know, I'm the author, so I'm biased, but I love working using it.
- GrinningFool 24d agoAny chance we'll see this for linux?
- xlii 24d agoYes, and since multiple people expressed interest in Linux it might come much sooner than later. I kept macOS surface isolated and constrained on purpose (and also have my own rendering engine) so it should be rather easy to make it run on Linux. The biggest obstacle is that it's hard for me to test (I have a gaming rig on Linux, but I don't use it often lately..).
- deleted 24d ago[deleted]
- rvz 24d agoMaybe Google have detectors of some sites that are mostly vibe-coded also being associated with AI slop. Also why use Google Ads in the first place? Given that HNers and technical users are extremely allergic to that?
- gen2brain 24d agoDetectors can clearly identify the exact issues. So, what are those issues here? We know, but we don't want to tell our cash-paying customers.
- bookofjoe 24d agoBecause the proportion of "HNers and technical users" in the general population is vanishingly small.
- dangerlibrary 24d ago> RACE is a native macOS terminal multiplexer written in Rust. Pretty sure they are not targeting the general population with this product.
- rvz 24d agoExcept that his product is for technical users as well as HNers here? I won't expect the "general population" that use Google to care about this software.
- xlii 24d agoMy Show HN failed. Might resubmit some time later, but HN (in general) is a lucky draw. And also I figured that trying to sell a indie software might be a good idea for own business and HN can't help with getting enough potential customers :)
- throwawayffffas 24d ago> Maybe Google have detectors of some sites that are mostly vibe-coded also being associated with AI slop. That is definitely not the case. At least 90% of google results are AI slop now.
- OptionX 24d agoGoogle is the worst offender, but a lot of companies are increasingly hiding themselves behind a wall of automated systems to completely neuter users ability to challenge any decision unilaterally taken by the them. The LLM-age has worsen the situation but it started well before it. At some point it may be necessary to add the requirement for large companies to have a both human contact point and perhaps a requirement for specifics on account terminations and the like, or at least a way to request them, to the letter of the law.
- usernametaken29 24d agoIt’s a strategy. Ask RyanAir. They systematically shut down any way to communicate with them, except lawsuits. Tried their chatbot, hotline, email, letter, fax, small claims court (I’m not joking they don’t even care about that). Unless you turn up with a court order and confiscate a plane, they simply won’t give a fuck, and I’m sure it’s a tactic to deter 99% of their problems before they start
- sscaryterry 24d agoThe fact that this has become acceptable is the real problem.
- tcfhgj 24d agoYou don't want to harm the economy, do you?
- sscaryterry 24d agoI'm sure the people who will get hurt have plenty of money.
- ShinyLeftPad 24d agoSame with Amazon Japan. It blocked my account with no way to contact them, never used again.
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- 1970-01-01 24d agoGoogle has forgotten the plot. A quick tangent story follows: I attempted to add a Tesla Supercharger as it went live to Google Maps. I was the very first to pay to recharge at the new location. The process went something like this: 1st time: Uploaded 4 photos, local business info, current charger prices, and GPS coordinates. Google replied this would be sent to human review. It was rejected within 6 minutes. 2nd attempt: Uploaded 6 more photos, including shots of local business hours and info, and current prices. Rejected in 6 minutes. 3rd time: One photo of a new charger, no description. Rejected in 6 minutes. 4th time: Appended all above details to local business info. It went live within a minute. 5 days later: Supercharger location was added by ??? and included no info at all and the pinpoint was off by 100m.
- chrisandchris 24d agoI tried to remove a not-anoymore-existing company I had a business profile before from Google Maps. I was close to giving up, it's such a complicated process that is fully intransparent. Kudos for you for trying 4 times.
- nkrisc 24d agoThe lesson here is: don’t do free work for corporations.
- wat10000 24d agoI don't even fill out surveys anymore for the most part, unless it gets me a discount or something.
- nkrisc 24d agoCold hard cash. If they want my input, they can pay me for my time. If it’s a small or local business that I like patronizing then I might do something small for them out of generosity and a desire to see them succeed in place of some large chain or corpo.
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- huhtenberg 24d agoWe had that, almost a decade ago. The cause was that the site was in fact compromised and at a certain very discreet URL it hosted a bunch of pages for legit products that linked to external shady sites. They got in through some PHP hole. Got lucky they didn't do more damage. However as per various Google pages and dashboards no issues were present except being tagged as a malware distribution site. The remedy was to audit the site, clean it up and then re-submit the appeal. Got the tag cleared in a couple hours.
- urbandw311er 24d agoI mean sure that makes sense - but the OP isn’t even getting any information to confirm or deny this. If that’s the case Google should explain the issue.
- kg 24d agoBehavior like Google's monopolistic behavior here in turn enables other monopolies - if distributing your own software puts you at risk of being arbitrarily banned by advertisers, deranked in search, blocked by virus scanners, etc without recourse, you're going to end up leaning on app stores like Steam, Google Play, etc because they have a shortcut through all the red tape.
- andriamanitra 24d agoI'm guessing "race term" got automatically flagged because it can be understood as "word or expression that refers to a racial group or to race/ethnicity" i.e. an euphemism for a slur.
- customguy 24d agoI really wonder about these youtube ads for these (non-existing, AI slop) incel games... it's always the same pattern, a man is exploited and/or rejected by a woman who gets everything for free he has taken from him, is spat on and whatnot, then starts his quest to fight the demoness or whatever. Are there any articles about those and the companies behind them?
- fyltr 24d agonon-existing? if we mean the same ads (mainly the cartoonish knight with bluish-black hair, though I've seen a caveman variant from another game) the game does exist. I played it about ten years ago, back when their ads were still the puzzles you supposedly need an IQ of 300 to solve. (kudos for keeping up with the times, I suppose.) /s it's a gacha money-pump, but I don't think the developers are strictly guilty of false advertising: from memory, the game does include one minigame or another reproducing the ad's loop.
- customguy 24d agoIt's also space "survival" games I really doubt exist. And my main charge would be the incel stuff, I could not care less if these games exist or don't. The ads themselves are toxic as fuck.
- lorey 24d agoHad the same issue. In the end, getting pulled into some Google Ads sales funnel and them solving the issue through internal tickets helped. Spent $1000 on useless ads in the process, but have an "unlocked" account now. Really disappointing customer experience.
- bede 24d agoFYI https://race-term.com https://race-term.com is blocked by NCSC's Protective DNS service using my UK University's connection. Are you sure your domain is not blacklisted somewhere?
- rozab 24d agoLooking forward to the update where his vibe-coded site has been compromised and is being used as a C&C server
- Snoddas 24d agoI hope so. It's hard finding a good Command & Conquer server nowdays
- poody 24d agoNatch!
- rkachowski 24d agoAccording to the article it's a static site served from cloudflare. That would be quite the compromise.
- titularcomment 24d agoI recommend you read the authors' other two latest articles.
- taco_emoji 24d agoMy work web filter is blocking it as well due to "newly registered and observed domains", but I don't think Google should be using that as a heuristic.
- charcircuit 24d agoIt is very common for malware to use recently registered addresses. They absolutely should be using it as a heuristic.
- Toutouxc 24d agoThat’s surprising, because in my opinion Google doesn’t care about malicious anything. The other day I had to look for something on YouTube on my dad’s computer with a disabled ad-blocker. I saw like 30 ads in 15 minutes, every single one of them was a scam, literally not a single non-fraudulent ad. Google is full cartoon villain evil at this point.
- hnlmorg 24d agoI went through a phase of reporting scams and every single time my report was rejected. I guess I shouldn’t have expected any differently when their income is dependent on displaying those scam ads.
- 72deluxe 24d agoSame here. Seems they love AI-generated nonsense ads!
- wat10000 24d agoAs long as it makes them money, they're incapable of caring. Make them liable for what they show, and watch them suddenly discover they are able to care a lot.
- WarmWash 24d agoThe more you ad-block and tracker block, the more scammy the ads when you take down the guards. People who never do any sort of blocking are the most valuable ad-targets, and hence get the highest bids when their views are auctioned. They get Toyota, Coke, and Downy ads. Scam advertisers are bottom feeders and the "advertiser of last resort". Google doesn't really care that much about people with blank profiles, and why would they, these people use their services and contribute nothing back. I don't think Google is vindictive, but it just doesn't make business sense to put a lot of resources into cleaning up ads that pay google nothing and mostly go to people who temporarily disabled their ad-block.
- skyberrys 24d ago
- throwawayffffas 24d agoCheck if chrome flags your site as malware. If it does, hire a lawyer and sue them for defamation.
- monegator 24d agoAh yes, i got an account suspended on play console due to inactivity. The new help system has been "improved" in the sense that it is directly inside play console, so of course i can't appeal or request to reinstate or transfer the app ids to a new account, because THE CURRENT ACCOUNT IS CLOSED AND I AM ALWAYS REDIRECTED TO A PAGE THAT TELLS THAT THE ACCOUNT IS CLOSED. So i tried appealing using another console account. After about a week i got the usual automated response stating that my previous report was auto-translated into english (i wrote it in fucking english of course) and some generic babble about what happened. To which i replied that i have no problem opening a new account using the old email, but i'd want to know beforehand if i'd keep, or how to retain, the package IDs so it's not going to be a fucking painful mess to tell customers to reinstall. And of course i got the same autogenerated email, with a couple new lines summarizing the first part. I feel for the author, it is literally impossible to talk to a human there.
- jens_tlb 24d ago[dead]
- skylurk 24d ago> You can position and resize terminals freely instead of squeezing everything into a uniform grid yes please!
- xlii 24d agoIf you decided you like it enough to get a license code HNMAGIC will get you 50% off (valid for 24 hours for anyone to pick :))
- de6u99er 24d agoGoogle doesn't care. They advertise online betting to kids, because those platforms now have some "free" online games.
- dakolli 24d agoUhhh.. They actively particpated in the sluaghter of over 10k children in the last two years and fired all their employeess who spoke up regarding it.
- stronglikedan 24d agooh boy, that's quite the stretch...
- dakolli 24d agowhat part?
- sspiff 24d agoThey are begging you to spend your ad budget elsewhere.
- qingcharles 24d agoI would too. Google Ads are the absolute quickest way to lose your shirt. You need masses of experience (or a straight scam) to run a profitable ad campaign. Their agents will hound you to the ends of the Earth the moment you start reducing your spend.
- delegate 24d agoInterestingly how everyone is talking about 'Google', this faceless entity.. but in essence there are humans who work there, employees not doing their job properly. Lazy, detached, disinterested .. with no consequences for coasting.. Or are badly organized/managed, have the wrong incentives, are burned out, going through a divorce, performance review, whatever.. People are people, life happens, job happens, but unfortunately some of these roles have real external impacts on other people. One demotivated employee at a Google* can radiate their unhappiness onto great number of others because of the circumstantial power they have at their disposal. At the very least they could copy & paste the exact reason for the ban, but no, they'll drag people through mud and automated replies, etc.
- wat10000 24d agoThey made over one hundred billion dollars last year. Seems like by and large they're doing their jobs pretty well. Oh, you expected them to care about users? Lol, lmao even.
- fwip 24d agoMore likely, overworked and underpaid. Some employee in $farOffLand working 10 hour shifts for $4/hr with a quota^W target of appeals-per-hour to meet.
- LtWorf 24d agoNo, the business controlling side has decided that it's ok to have scams as ads as long as that makes money.
- anon84873628 24d agoA true full-time Google employee is like three layers of outsourcing removed from touching these operations. The people doing the work have been given zero latitude to actually help someone. And then the design and implementation of the process itself is split across access silos mediated by lawyers and program managers. It's deliberately physically impossible for a motivated employee to improve the system for users.
- deleted 24d ago[deleted]
- chrisgd 24d agoAnthropic is terrible too. I couldn’t rectify my spending versus my usage. Automated assistant shows me where things are that I am already asking about. Gets escalated and person doesn’t respond to my question. Back to automated with multiple requests to escalate before they will do it
- xlii 24d agoI made an update, but I'll post also here in comments. It seems that either a human read it or it triggered some trigger, but my account has been reinstated. Thank you, also those who made this issue visible. On one side I'm happy it happened, on the other, it's a shame that it took complaining on the internet amplified by HackerNews to get this problem fixed...
- skyberrys 24d agoCongratulations. They must have been worried about your circular graphic at the bottom of your post!
- goldmine0147 24d agoDid they address what the fix was?
- xlii 24d agoNo. Only got "account reactivated" e-mail.
- Trung0246 24d agoPretty cool but I wish linux/windows version is available
- talhaanwar 24d agoSo you are guy whose weired and malicious ad destroyed my system
- WarmWash 24d agoThe real question is why you would spend money to advertise to probably the most advertising adverse, and ad-bloc literate, demographic?
- mcast 24d agoWhen you search "us passport" or "tsa precheck" on Google, you constantly see promoted ad results impersonating government sites (ie passportvisarush.com or easegov.com) extracting and selling your PII (social security number, etc) from your application. I've reported the ads multiple times, but new ones still end up being promoted. I'm sure these companies have mined and sold thousands of SSN/address/DOB info from unsuspecting users.
- nekusar 24d agoDoesnt help, when official government websites ( usps.com ) are on the commercial suffix, and not .gov
- qingcharles 24d agoYeah, USPS is a weird one. We need a .QUANGO domain for stuff like that :p
- ButlerianJihad 24d agoI hope you realize that there are legitimate third-party services which assist with passport applications and filing paperwork, generally in the capacity as a courier. Similarly, in my state and others, there are third-party services which operate as storefronts in under-served communities, that provide services as the DMV office would. So it is unclear how you determine that they are definitely scams, unless you have attempted to trace each one through referrals or official links from the government office they are representing. Some don't have any link, though: the passport assistance services may be operating independently as middlemen. Is it worth paying someone to assist you with paperwork? Do you only speak Laotian? In general, for any government service, there are usually middlemen who'll assist you in filling out paperwork and getting approved. That includes Medicaid and the IRS and Social Security. Of course, some of those assistors have licenses, or represent a facility. The passport agencies may not need any bona fides like that. On the other hand, if a service is advertising "TSA PreCheck" services (and not simply intercepting your keywords to advertise unrelated stuff) then there are only three authorized partners: IDEMIA, CLEAR, or Telos. But I bet you that your keywords are simply triggering some adspam.
- deaton 24d agoI've used adblockers, revanced, and whatever else for years, so I don't see many ads, but every time I'm on a computer without this stuff installed I am appalled by how many scams get through. At some point, Google must have realized that nobody is going to come after them for selling ad space to scammers (possibly because of section 230 of the CDA?) and hey, scammers are willing to pay enough for it to be worth it.
- maerF0x0 24d agoI noticed this around homebrew install style key words. People blindly copy and paste a shel script that is given sudo on a fresh install. Seems pretty ideal setup for bad guys.
- cbeach 24d agoYup, I was had by a malicious fake Homebrew site that had the #1 spot in Google thanks to it being an ad (a key fact that was very unclear at the time of browsing Google)
- cbeach 24d agoMy Adsense account got automatically disabled years ago, allegedly for click fraud (no such behaviour on my part) and there was no effective way for me to appeal. I'm now a huge supporter of any initiative or law that attempts to break Google's stranglehold on online advertising. They have placed too much responsibility in their broken automation, and they are a bad faith actor in the space.
- ozim 24d agoEveryone who is angry at „not giving feedback what is malicious” should remember that bad guys will also do so and with feedback they just get more information on how to make malicious sites to hide better. Google is not great but we all can’t have nice things because of thieves and criminals.
- hermitcrab 24d agoI sympathize. My Google Adwords account (that had been running continuously for 10 years at that point) got suspended for (I shit you not) hyperlinking to another domain. I believe it was due to a very poorly trained contractor. The whole sorry saga is here: https://successfulsoftware.net/2015/03/04/google-bans-hyperlinks/ https://successfulsoftware.net/2015/03/04/google-bans-hyperl...
- xlii 24d agoMind-boggling. A joke comes to my mind: A man tells his friend "You know, I don't think we can be friends anymore. Some money went missing from our house.." - "What?! Me? I'd never seal money from your house!" - "Yeah, we found that money, so that's not a problem. But you know... the whole thing left a sour taste."
- hermitcrab 24d agoWe are entering a Kafkaesque world where all powerful companies are the gatekeepers, but there is no chance to talk to a human to appeal their decisions. Your only hope is if a) you have an inside contact or b) you can create enough stink on social media.
- skeptic_ai 24d agoWe will soon use ChatGPT Astra to talk though shit to get out problem solved.
- hermitcrab 24d agoYour faith is touching.
- pessimizer 24d agoWe reached that years ago. We're entering a world in which there is no chance to talk to a human to appeal their decisions, and if you complain about it your social media account will be suspended, you will be questioned by police, and your child will be expelled from their private school.
- Henchman21 24d agoIf we’re already in that world, datacenters are a valid target for destruction.
- cindyllm 24d ago[dead]
- GoToRO 24d agoAdd facebook too. No problem for them to accept money from websites that were reported as fraud. They pause it a little then they are right back at it.
- notatoad 24d agothis is what regulatory failure looks like. There's no downside for google to do this, because nobody is going to hold them accountable. Nobody is telling them they have to explain their actions, and it's easier for them not to, so why would they?
- classified 24d agoIn the good old days, twitter was the replacement helpdesk for the monster corporations. If your issue went viral there, it would suddenly be magically fixed, when the day before it was completely impossible and out of the question. YC should send Google an invoice for services rendered.
- shevy-java 24d agoThe thing is: I don't see any ads. So I won't see his advertised malicious ad either, nor the software. All gets blocked. All must be blocked. That's why everyone needs hero blockers such as Ublock origin and other solutions here. By the way - which company removed ublock origin from Chrome? Could it have been a certain adCompany that does daily deeds of Evil?
- micromacrofoot 24d agopretty much every ad network is full of scam content now, some of the AI generated ads I see on youtube are just jaw-droppingly bad... the whole industry needs to be reset it used to be common but more of an exception, but now it feels like everything is a scam
- burnte 24d agoSounds like AI saw terminals and the word "race" and assumed it was for exploiting race conditions.
- tolusky 24d agoGoogle needs to do more of safety verification before making any ad go live on its platform. It owes us that duty.
- commandersaki 24d agoWhat's crazy is there's so much malvertising on Google. I used to see heaps of Homebrew advertisements leading to malicious curl | sh installs.
- trhway 24d agoYet the scam ads like the 33tb ssd are running wild unrestrained on YT.
- redbluething 24d agoMeanwhile on the publisher side, Adsense is unusable with the constant scareware content on the network: https://www.cannonade.net/blog/why-i-turned-off-google-adsense https://www.cannonade.net/blog/why-i-turned-off-google-adsen...
- motoroco 24d agoI got blocked by Microsoft for trying to advertise on DDG. I signed up for a new account (no prior M$ affiliation to start from), imported my Google Ads campaign, paid them a hundred bucks and was almost ready to spend. Then I uploaded my WA state business license and immediately got force logged out without any reason. An email came by to say I had been blocked. Support was utterly useless, there was no way to appeal that I could find, and I had to file a chargeback with my bank to get the $100 out. Don't waste your time & money, folks
- pampas 24d agoThe lack of support is why all the publishers I know give some third party SSP a hefty cut of their revenue just for support. Trying to get any non-wordy website like a tool or game approved is infuriating because they want blog spam.
- Jean-Papoulos 24d agoGoogle is guilty of this across their whole range of product. We hear a lot about Youtube, but it's the same for Ads and Android. I had my developer account banned for a copyright issue, and to this day I don't know what the issue actually was.
- maybewhenthesun 24d agoGoogle has always been like this. I used to have a Youtube account with timelapse movies from my holidays. Nothing special, just stuff to show the family, but it was a lot of work to edit and upload them all. One day I got a message that my account was closed because of a violation of the TOS. No explanation what it was that I violated. No chance for appeal. No chance to communicate with a human about it. It was explicitly stated that it was impossible to reinstate the account. To this day I have no clue what it was in the 20 or so timelapse movies taken from a small sailing boat that offended Google. It was a good lesson to never trust Google.
- ShinyLeftPad 23d agoAnother post where the "how" prefix adds no semantic value.
- xg15 23d agoAt this point the "you need to contact support to get unblocked but also must already be unblocked to contact them" catch-22 has occurred often enough and is in place long enough that I can't imagine it's an oversight anymore. This looks more like a deliberate policy.
- aimarkdeck 22d ago[dead]