9 ms·

Yahoo Homepage – Now Featuring Extra-Scammy Scams

317 points by rosenjon 12y ago

martinko 12y ago
Hm, now the link in the article (www.discoverpresentsonline.com/david-brain/report.html) just redirects to the real discover magazine.
- shawabawa3 12y ago
  In the article it mentions it only lets you see the article if you have the tracking cookie from the ad
  - thaumaturgy 12y ago
    That part made me scratch my head a bit, because they shouldn't have access to Yahoo cookies. I think the article meant the http referrer needed to be yahoo?
    - coldpie 12y ago
      Possibly. Can you set cookies over JavaScript? Ad networks allow ad providers to inject arbitrary JavaScript into their clients' websites.
      - thaumaturgy 12y ago
        You can set and read cookies using Javascript, but due to same-origin policies that are present in all modern browsers, it shouldn't be possible for a non-Yahoo domains to read cookies set by Yahoo. There might be some exception that I'm not aware of, but that would seem like a pretty serious browser security issue.
- slipstream- 12y ago
  I curl -i'd it. It gives a 302 redirect but also serves the content. As in, someone did header("Location: ..."); but forgot to also die();.
  - kogepathic 12y ago
    If anyone wants to read the page, here's a copy of the page content (images are linked with relative path and thus broken): http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=7yEUirQf http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=7yEUirQf
blumkvist 12y ago
>Do companies like Brainstorm Elite ever pay the price for wholesale fraud and the theft of brand identities? Yes, they do. The FTC takes them for every penny they got. At least the big ones. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/the-dark-lord-of-the-internet/355726/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/the-dark...
- tim333 12y ago
  Whereupon their creators it seems walk away and start the next dodgy company. Glancing at the Atlantic article "Jesse Willms is doing just fine financially—and he has a new yellow Lamborghini to prove it" and is advertising "just $1 for a vehicle-history report" and then billing $199 to peoples credit cards. Methinks the laws could be tightened a tad.
  - blumkvist 12y ago
    Internet sarcasm fail. I'm sorry.
- GFischer 12y ago
  That's a great article, thanks for linking to it. I missed the original submission and discussion which was here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6972139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6972139
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  But it won't help much, because they're all shell companies intended to be cheap to dispose of whenever the backlash strikes - and before that happens, they will already have whisked any proceeds away.
  - mirekrusin 12y ago
    payment processing companies should be partially (fully?) responsible for this kind of scams. this seems to be reasonable force to make them find ways of filtering rouge clients. some of payment processing companies will freeze incoming payments up to 6 months for high risk clients for example. that's a good start.
RandomCode 12y ago
I had a 1440 SAT, 740 Math 700 Verbal. I was one of only 7 national merit finalists in the freshman class of ASU in 1988. 42,000 total students. I wrote the entire TempleOS from scratch. 130,000 lines of code. I have a master's in electrical engineering from ASU. http://www.templeos.org/files/ASU_Transcripts.pdf http://www.templeos.org/files/ASU_Transcripts.pdf In 1985, I was tested with a 165 IQ in a sociology class. The mental health meds, as the doctors will brag, make your brain smaller and make you impotent and sterile and shorten your life. Yumm.
jarcane 12y ago
This kind of thing is, frankly, yet another reason why I employ an adblocker.
- RedneckBob 12y ago
  That is why I don't mind almost all current advertising, my ad blocker (disconnect.me) does a fantastic job.
dnlmzw 12y ago
That is quite disturbing.
nugget 12y ago
This is the dark side of the massive shift to programmatic ad buying and selling which nobody wants to talk about. Compliance has largely been tossed aside in search of maximum yield. Sad but definitely the trend for the future.
- vdaniuk 12y ago
  Do you have any citation for this? I am not seeing more bad actors when working with various programmatic ad exchanges.
bad_user 12y ago
I was originally against ad-blockers, because it provides me with an incentive to look for alternatives and I also want to reward websites that don't do this shit. However, it's because of scams and malware pushed by means of ads that I started using ad-blockers myself and I recommend it to all my non-technical friends. It's also the reason for why on my Android I'm now using Firefox. For Google to not provide at least a glimpse of a plan for Chrome's add-ons support on Android is unacceptable, for one because I now expect my browser to have add-ons support and I originally started using Chrome based on this expectation and because on mobile these websites are even more aggressive in pushing their ads. And with Firefox I can use AdBlock Plus on my Android, with uBlock coming soon.
- thaumaturgy 12y ago
  We tell our customers that ad blockers are their first line of defense against malware on the web, and it's true. Web ads have been bad for years and continue to get worse, and content providers aren't doing enough yet to police the advertising on their site. Did you happen to see the recent link about the AdSense redirects? e.g. http://blog.sucuri.net/2015/01/adsense-abused-with-malvertising-campaign.html http://blog.sucuri.net/2015/01/adsense-abused-with-malvertis...
  - eli 12y ago
    If your customers have machines that can be hijacked by drive-by malware, then blocking ads is not going to help them much in the long run.
    - PeterisP 12y ago
      Pretty much everyone has machines that can be hijacked by drive-by malware - there have been cases where 0-day exploits have been used for such attacks through targeted ads on reputable websites. Following other best practices doesn't help you to protect against that, but preventing third parties from injecting arbitrary content on the [reputable/largescale/https] websites you're viewing does close one attack channel. One out of many, but a valuable one.
    - 12y ago
r1ch 12y ago
Adwords is becoming increasingly bad with these kind of ads lately. Yahoo are lucky that they don't have the automatic redirecting version that simply takes visitors away from your site onto these fake landing pages. Most of them seem to be coming from compromised adwords accounts. As a publisher it's very difficult to do anything about this since Google apparently let adwords publishers insert arbitrary javascript into their ad code. This makes it so the ad creative and "destination domain" in the review center mean absolutely nothing, and since the JS won't execute from the review center you have no idea which ads are responsible.
- coldpie 12y ago
  I have no idea why ad networks don't have two fields for advertisers: a plain PNG image and a URL to link to. I guess the answer is somehow "money," but I feel like client websites would have enough incentive to switch to the network that works this way to avoid this BS for their users.
  - phamilton 12y ago
    Most ads use multiple tracking pixels for various 3rd party analytics and measurement. Some of these analytics require runtime inspection of the page to confirm things like domain, viewability, height and width, page language,etc. So your average ad requires loading a dozen empty images ("pixels") and running a bit of JavaScript.
    - coldpie 12y ago
      And people are baffled when they learn I use NoScript.
- wdr1 12y ago
  As others have pointed, it doesn't look like this a Google ad. However, as a publisher, you do have a fair bit of control. You can choose to only allow text ads, and you can also block specific advertisers, categories & the like. https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/180609?hl=en https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/180609?hl=en
mpeg 12y ago
Just want to point out that AdChoices is NOT owned by Google, and they do NOT serve any advertising. It's a program organised by the DAA (Digital Advertising Alliance) which is itself formed of several other advertising associations, the goal of which is to be a self-regulatory program allowing to opt out of online behavioral advertising, so that you do not have to see any behavior targeted ads if you choose not to. Google's display network is a part of the AdChoices program, but not every ad showing that icon is a Google ad. In fact, from the yahoo.com homepage, only the banner ads seem to be served by Google, sponsored articles are being served by Yahoo! directly. If you click the AdChoices button it will actually tell you who is placing the ad. I'm not the biggest paladin of Google, but in this case everything points to the ad being served by Yahoo! EDIT: From what I could find, it's likely the ads are being served by the Yahoo! streamads[0] self-serve platform. Programmatic is always tricky to properly validate, because it's expensive to fact check every single creative that comes through. It's likely that, if reported, Yahoo will ban the advertiser from their platform. Facebook uses a whitelist approach where they'll manually validate your first few creatives and then whitelist you for automatic validation, not sure if Yahoo employs the same method. [0] https://streamads.yahoo.com/ https://streamads.yahoo.com/
- troymc 12y ago
  You wrote "it's expensive to fact check every single creative that comes through" I'm surprised they fact check any ads. Many publications don't have the budget to fact check their news, features, or editorials, never mind the ads.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - mpeg 12y ago
    Definitely, the usual things that are checked would be whether the page loads, whether the creative is offensive, etc. Facebook gets a lot of flak for having poor ads, but they have a pretty comprehensive list of rules [0] and they actually enforce most of them through semi-manual audits of the first few ads each account creates. Most networks will say that content of their ads must not be deceptive, but ultimately they can only audit a small percentage of them. Usually they have heuristics to try to identify the most "high risk" categories such as adult / alcohol and they will make sure those are not being targeted to minors, as they would get in trouble otherwise. But "miracle pill" and "doctors hate him!" ads are harder to automatically filter out. [0] https://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php https://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php
chatman 12y ago
Shame on Yahoo!
dredmorbius 12y ago
99% of online advertisers give the rest a bad name. Not only is this why online advertising is ultimately doomed, but it's why we hugely and desperately and badly need to find another way of paying for content. The alternatives for the moment are gratis, patronage, "native advertising", and subscriptions. Few of these strike me as ultimately scalable. I've been a fan of Phil Hunt, of Pirate Party UK, and his broadband tax proposal after more-or-less independently coming up with the same idea myself. Hunt's proposal was principally aimed at music. I see no reason why it cannot apply to all content published and distributed online. http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-for-the-uk/ http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-fo... My own sketched proposal: http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest_proposal_universal_online_media_payment/ http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest... http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2h0h81/specifying_a_universal_online_media_payment/ http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2h0h81/specifyi...
- bambax 12y ago
  > 99% of online advertisers give the rest a bad name So true; remove "online" from the sentence above and it's even truer. > it's why we hugely and desperately and badly need to find another way of paying for content Not sure about that. Here are the ways I can think of we gain access to content: - by directly paying for it (books, movies, etc.) - by indirectly paying for it (ad supported newspapers articles and such) - by paying for it via taxes (your proposal) - because it's free. The best content is undeniably that which people will specifically, directly buy with their own money[1]. And the second best is free. All the other content distribution schemes produce bad content, either hollow or click-baity or just plain dumb. My point is that AdBlock is saving the world. 1: For the purpose of this discussion, pirated is in the same category as paid-for.
  - antihero 12y ago
    What would be interesting is a sort of all-content-subscription - you pay X per month, and it's divvied up between the providers/owners of whatever you use. Kind of like a tax, but actually related to usage. Would be very difficult to have the trust and integration required for it to work though.
argc 12y ago
This makes me want to puke. Nice one, Yahoo.... makes you look GREAT.
Fede_V 12y ago
This is great detective work, and hopefully Yahoo steps in and fixes this. Online advertising has become and more vicious - on all my computers, I run adblock/no script, etc, but on my phone, browsing sites like retractionwatch or theatlantic, I've been redirected to full page ads for subscription services where the automatic subscription button is about 1mm where the 'close window' button appears.
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  > and hopefully Yahoo steps in and fixes this. and Forbes, CNN, Discover Magazine, etcetera sue both the company for plagiarism, as well as copyright and trademark infringements. They should probably sue the advertising company behind it too, those organizations have the moral obligation IMO to ensure the quality and legitimacy of the companies that buy advertising with them.
  - coldcode 12y ago
    All shell companies I bet.
DanBC 12y ago
> “[...]I ordered one bottle of Brain Storm Elite, entered my payment and shipping info, next thing I know, I have been charged $144 for another product “The Memory Plus”. I NEVER gave “MP” any CC information or anything, when I called BrainStorm about this, they say they are affiliated but do not have access to Memory Plus accounts, I asked how Memory Plus got my credit card information because the only website I was on was for BrainStorm. Big Surprise, someone else would have to get back to me on that. Filed report with BBB.” How do these companies survive having their merchant accounts closed after all the inevitable chargebacks?
- bhartzer 12y ago
  All they do is rebrand and start up another company under another name.
owly 12y ago
Anyone have experience blocking ads at the firewall level? Possibly too many URLs to block? Also, what's Yahoo? ;) DDG FTW
GregoryGrookett 12y ago
Not sure who these ads are from all I know is that they are very annoying and I can't stand them.
adamdeloach45 12y ago
Good use-full posts...
mbesto 12y ago
My favorites are Taboola and Outbrain who basically do this as a turnkey service. They've both received $99m+ in funding... As as a user, I've never seen these as remotely valuable. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/taboola https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/taboola https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/outbrain https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/outbrain
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  "Favorites" in what sense? As in "favorite to hate"? I block both within CSS (I use a stylesheet manager) and may well block the hosts / domains they feed from. They're absolutely worthless.
PaulHoule 12y ago
It has been way for a while, but it has gotten worse. I used to check out Yahoo Finance once a day because it used to have real financial news but now if you look at the front page template about 60% of it is allocated to the same scam ads that run over and over and less than 40% to real content. Needless to say I don't use Yahoo Finance regularly anymore.
hellbanTHIS 12y ago
Seems like branding is the way to go on the internet, rather than throwing crap in peoples faces. Example: Yahoo News, brought to you ad free by Nationwide Insurance Then people think "I like Yahoo News, I like Nationwide Insurance" instead of "I hate that scummy ad, I hate Yahoo News".
- GhotiFish 12y ago
  personally, if I see something branded, then of primary concern to me is if their opinion is compromised. That said, I wouldn't expect much that is trustworthy coming from yahoo anyway.
brokentone 12y ago
I've worked primarily on the publisher side and observed such advertisements, but where to point the finger can be really difficult. There are so many affected parties here. Should Yahoo be held at fault by the consumer? What does that even mean, a boycott? Does Yahoo have a direct relationship with these scammers, or how many connections away are they? Is this a network or programatic placement? Do discovery magazine and CNN go after this company for trademark issues? Does this former homeless man go after them for endorsement issues? Does it even have a US point of presence at all?

317 points by rosenjon 12y ago

Hm, now the link in the article (www.discoverpresentsonline.com/david-brain/report.html) just redirects to the real discover magazine.

shawabawa3 12y ago
In the article it mentions it only lets you see the article if you have the tracking cookie from the ad
- thaumaturgy 12y ago
  That part made me scratch my head a bit, because they shouldn't have access to Yahoo cookies. I think the article meant the http referrer needed to be yahoo?
  - coldpie 12y ago
    Possibly. Can you set cookies over JavaScript? Ad networks allow ad providers to inject arbitrary JavaScript into their clients' websites.
    - thaumaturgy 12y ago
      You can set and read cookies using Javascript, but due to same-origin policies that are present in all modern browsers, it shouldn't be possible for a non-Yahoo domains to read cookies set by Yahoo. There might be some exception that I'm not aware of, but that would seem like a pretty serious browser security issue.
slipstream- 12y ago
I curl -i'd it. It gives a 302 redirect but also serves the content. As in, someone did header("Location: ..."); but forgot to also die();.
- kogepathic 12y ago
  If anyone wants to read the page, here's a copy of the page content (images are linked with relative path and thus broken): http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=7yEUirQf http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=7yEUirQf

blumkvist 12y ago

>Do companies like Brainstorm Elite ever pay the price for wholesale fraud and the theft of brand identities? Yes, they do. The FTC takes them for every penny they got. At least the big ones. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/the-dark-lord-of-the-internet/355726/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/the-dark...

tim333 12y ago
Whereupon their creators it seems walk away and start the next dodgy company. Glancing at the Atlantic article "Jesse Willms is doing just fine financially—and he has a new yellow Lamborghini to prove it" and is advertising "just $1 for a vehicle-history report" and then billing $199 to peoples credit cards. Methinks the laws could be tightened a tad.
- blumkvist 12y ago
  Internet sarcasm fail. I'm sorry.
GFischer 12y ago
That's a great article, thanks for linking to it. I missed the original submission and discussion which was here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6972139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6972139
Cthulhu_ 12y ago
But it won't help much, because they're all shell companies intended to be cheap to dispose of whenever the backlash strikes - and before that happens, they will already have whisked any proceeds away.
- mirekrusin 12y ago
  payment processing companies should be partially (fully?) responsible for this kind of scams. this seems to be reasonable force to make them find ways of filtering rouge clients. some of payment processing companies will freeze incoming payments up to 6 months for high risk clients for example. that's a good start.

RandomCode 12y ago

I had a 1440 SAT, 740 Math 700 Verbal. I was one of only 7 national merit finalists in the freshman class of ASU in 1988. 42,000 total students. I wrote the entire TempleOS from scratch. 130,000 lines of code. I have a master's in electrical engineering from ASU. http://www.templeos.org/files/ASU_Transcripts.pdf http://www.templeos.org/files/ASU_Transcripts.pdf In 1985, I was tested with a 165 IQ in a sociology class. The mental health meds, as the doctors will brag, make your brain smaller and make you impotent and sterile and shorten your life. Yumm.

jarcane 12y ago

This kind of thing is, frankly, yet another reason why I employ an adblocker.

RedneckBob 12y ago
That is why I don't mind almost all current advertising, my ad blocker (disconnect.me) does a fantastic job.

dnlmzw 12y ago

That is quite disturbing.

nugget 12y ago

This is the dark side of the massive shift to programmatic ad buying and selling which nobody wants to talk about. Compliance has largely been tossed aside in search of maximum yield. Sad but definitely the trend for the future.

vdaniuk 12y ago
Do you have any citation for this? I am not seeing more bad actors when working with various programmatic ad exchanges.

bad_user 12y ago

I was originally against ad-blockers, because it provides me with an incentive to look for alternatives and I also want to reward websites that don't do this shit. However, it's because of scams and malware pushed by means of ads that I started using ad-blockers myself and I recommend it to all my non-technical friends. It's also the reason for why on my Android I'm now using Firefox. For Google to not provide at least a glimpse of a plan for Chrome's add-ons support on Android is unacceptable, for one because I now expect my browser to have add-ons support and I originally started using Chrome based on this expectation and because on mobile these websites are even more aggressive in pushing their ads. And with Firefox I can use AdBlock Plus on my Android, with uBlock coming soon.

thaumaturgy 12y ago
We tell our customers that ad blockers are their first line of defense against malware on the web, and it's true. Web ads have been bad for years and continue to get worse, and content providers aren't doing enough yet to police the advertising on their site. Did you happen to see the recent link about the AdSense redirects? e.g. http://blog.sucuri.net/2015/01/adsense-abused-with-malvertising-campaign.html http://blog.sucuri.net/2015/01/adsense-abused-with-malvertis...
- eli 12y ago
  If your customers have machines that can be hijacked by drive-by malware, then blocking ads is not going to help them much in the long run.
  - PeterisP 12y ago
    Pretty much everyone has machines that can be hijacked by drive-by malware - there have been cases where 0-day exploits have been used for such attacks through targeted ads on reputable websites. Following other best practices doesn't help you to protect against that, but preventing third parties from injecting arbitrary content on the [reputable/largescale/https] websites you're viewing does close one attack channel. One out of many, but a valuable one.
  - 12y ago

r1ch 12y ago

Adwords is becoming increasingly bad with these kind of ads lately. Yahoo are lucky that they don't have the automatic redirecting version that simply takes visitors away from your site onto these fake landing pages. Most of them seem to be coming from compromised adwords accounts. As a publisher it's very difficult to do anything about this since Google apparently let adwords publishers insert arbitrary javascript into their ad code. This makes it so the ad creative and "destination domain" in the review center mean absolutely nothing, and since the JS won't execute from the review center you have no idea which ads are responsible.

coldpie 12y ago
I have no idea why ad networks don't have two fields for advertisers: a plain PNG image and a URL to link to. I guess the answer is somehow "money," but I feel like client websites would have enough incentive to switch to the network that works this way to avoid this BS for their users.
- phamilton 12y ago
  Most ads use multiple tracking pixels for various 3rd party analytics and measurement. Some of these analytics require runtime inspection of the page to confirm things like domain, viewability, height and width, page language,etc. So your average ad requires loading a dozen empty images ("pixels") and running a bit of JavaScript.
  - coldpie 12y ago
    And people are baffled when they learn I use NoScript.
wdr1 12y ago
As others have pointed, it doesn't look like this a Google ad. However, as a publisher, you do have a fair bit of control. You can choose to only allow text ads, and you can also block specific advertisers, categories & the like. https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/180609?hl=en https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/180609?hl=en

mpeg 12y ago

Just want to point out that AdChoices is NOT owned by Google, and they do NOT serve any advertising. It's a program organised by the DAA (Digital Advertising Alliance) which is itself formed of several other advertising associations, the goal of which is to be a self-regulatory program allowing to opt out of online behavioral advertising, so that you do not have to see any behavior targeted ads if you choose not to. Google's display network is a part of the AdChoices program, but not every ad showing that icon is a Google ad. In fact, from the yahoo.com homepage, only the banner ads seem to be served by Google, sponsored articles are being served by Yahoo! directly. If you click the AdChoices button it will actually tell you who is placing the ad. I'm not the biggest paladin of Google, but in this case everything points to the ad being served by Yahoo! EDIT: From what I could find, it's likely the ads are being served by the Yahoo! streamads[0] self-serve platform. Programmatic is always tricky to properly validate, because it's expensive to fact check every single creative that comes through. It's likely that, if reported, Yahoo will ban the advertiser from their platform. Facebook uses a whitelist approach where they'll manually validate your first few creatives and then whitelist you for automatic validation, not sure if Yahoo employs the same method. [0] https://streamads.yahoo.com/ https://streamads.yahoo.com/

troymc 12y ago
You wrote "it's expensive to fact check every single creative that comes through" I'm surprised they fact check any ads. Many publications don't have the budget to fact check their news, features, or editorials, never mind the ads.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- mpeg 12y ago
  Definitely, the usual things that are checked would be whether the page loads, whether the creative is offensive, etc. Facebook gets a lot of flak for having poor ads, but they have a pretty comprehensive list of rules [0] and they actually enforce most of them through semi-manual audits of the first few ads each account creates. Most networks will say that content of their ads must not be deceptive, but ultimately they can only audit a small percentage of them. Usually they have heuristics to try to identify the most "high risk" categories such as adult / alcohol and they will make sure those are not being targeted to minors, as they would get in trouble otherwise. But "miracle pill" and "doctors hate him!" ads are harder to automatically filter out. [0] https://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php https://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php

chatman 12y ago

Shame on Yahoo!

dredmorbius 12y ago

99% of online advertisers give the rest a bad name. Not only is this why online advertising is ultimately doomed, but it's why we hugely and desperately and badly need to find another way of paying for content. The alternatives for the moment are gratis, patronage, "native advertising", and subscriptions. Few of these strike me as ultimately scalable. I've been a fan of Phil Hunt, of Pirate Party UK, and his broadband tax proposal after more-or-less independently coming up with the same idea myself. Hunt's proposal was principally aimed at music. I see no reason why it cannot apply to all content published and distributed online. http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-for-the-uk/ http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-fo... My own sketched proposal: http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest_proposal_universal_online_media_payment/ http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest... http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2h0h81/specifying_a_universal_online_media_payment/ http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2h0h81/specifyi...

bambax 12y ago
> 99% of online advertisers give the rest a bad name So true; remove "online" from the sentence above and it's even truer. > it's why we hugely and desperately and badly need to find another way of paying for content Not sure about that. Here are the ways I can think of we gain access to content: - by directly paying for it (books, movies, etc.) - by indirectly paying for it (ad supported newspapers articles and such) - by paying for it via taxes (your proposal) - because it's free. The best content is undeniably that which people will specifically, directly buy with their own money[1]. And the second best is free. All the other content distribution schemes produce bad content, either hollow or click-baity or just plain dumb. My point is that AdBlock is saving the world. 1: For the purpose of this discussion, pirated is in the same category as paid-for.
- antihero 12y ago
  What would be interesting is a sort of all-content-subscription - you pay X per month, and it's divvied up between the providers/owners of whatever you use. Kind of like a tax, but actually related to usage. Would be very difficult to have the trust and integration required for it to work though.

argc 12y ago

This makes me want to puke. Nice one, Yahoo.... makes you look GREAT.

Fede_V 12y ago

This is great detective work, and hopefully Yahoo steps in and fixes this. Online advertising has become and more vicious - on all my computers, I run adblock/no script, etc, but on my phone, browsing sites like retractionwatch or theatlantic, I've been redirected to full page ads for subscription services where the automatic subscription button is about 1mm where the 'close window' button appears.

Cthulhu_ 12y ago
> and hopefully Yahoo steps in and fixes this. and Forbes, CNN, Discover Magazine, etcetera sue both the company for plagiarism, as well as copyright and trademark infringements. They should probably sue the advertising company behind it too, those organizations have the moral obligation IMO to ensure the quality and legitimacy of the companies that buy advertising with them.
- coldcode 12y ago
  All shell companies I bet.

DanBC 12y ago

> “[...]I ordered one bottle of Brain Storm Elite, entered my payment and shipping info, next thing I know, I have been charged $144 for another product “The Memory Plus”. I NEVER gave “MP” any CC information or anything, when I called BrainStorm about this, they say they are affiliated but do not have access to Memory Plus accounts, I asked how Memory Plus got my credit card information because the only website I was on was for BrainStorm. Big Surprise, someone else would have to get back to me on that. Filed report with BBB.” How do these companies survive having their merchant accounts closed after all the inevitable chargebacks?

bhartzer 12y ago
All they do is rebrand and start up another company under another name.

owly 12y ago

Anyone have experience blocking ads at the firewall level? Possibly too many URLs to block? Also, what's Yahoo? ;) DDG FTW

GregoryGrookett 12y ago

Not sure who these ads are from all I know is that they are very annoying and I can't stand them.

adamdeloach45 12y ago

Good use-full posts...

mbesto 12y ago

My favorites are Taboola and Outbrain who basically do this as a turnkey service. They've both received $99m+ in funding... As as a user, I've never seen these as remotely valuable. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/taboola https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/taboola https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/outbrain https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/outbrain

dredmorbius 12y ago
"Favorites" in what sense? As in "favorite to hate"? I block both within CSS (I use a stylesheet manager) and may well block the hosts / domains they feed from. They're absolutely worthless.

PaulHoule 12y ago

It has been way for a while, but it has gotten worse. I used to check out Yahoo Finance once a day because it used to have real financial news but now if you look at the front page template about 60% of it is allocated to the same scam ads that run over and over and less than 40% to real content. Needless to say I don't use Yahoo Finance regularly anymore.

hellbanTHIS 12y ago

Seems like branding is the way to go on the internet, rather than throwing crap in peoples faces. Example: Yahoo News, brought to you ad free by Nationwide Insurance Then people think "I like Yahoo News, I like Nationwide Insurance" instead of "I hate that scummy ad, I hate Yahoo News".

GhotiFish 12y ago
personally, if I see something branded, then of primary concern to me is if their opinion is compromised. That said, I wouldn't expect much that is trustworthy coming from yahoo anyway.

brokentone 12y ago

I've worked primarily on the publisher side and observed such advertisements, but where to point the finger can be really difficult. There are so many affected parties here. Should Yahoo be held at fault by the consumer? What does that even mean, a boycott? Does Yahoo have a direct relationship with these scammers, or how many connections away are they? Is this a network or programatic placement? Do discovery magazine and CNN go after this company for trademark issues? Does this former homeless man go after them for endorsement issues? Does it even have a US point of presence at all?