Malware Installed by LiveJournal Ad 199
Jamesday writes "LiveJournal recently introduced an ad-supported level. Over the last few days an advertiser used an ad to install the ErrorSafe malware that tried to trick people into believing they had a fault on the computer that needs them to purchase a fix. The ad used a server-side setting and targetted only those outside the US, to prevent LiveJournal's own checks from noticing it. LiveJournal has apologized for the ad and slow response." Even our readers have had to endure more than one browser-crashing ad campaign from time to time. Thanks for sticking around.
Breaking News (Score:3, Insightful)
This just in: Capitalism and Morals do not necessarily go hand in hand.
Re:Breaking News (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Breaking News (Score:3, Funny)
Communism. You know, communes, community, kum-bay-yah, matriarchy and all that crap.
Re:Breaking News (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Breaking News (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Breaking News (Score:3, Insightful)
In other words, it runs counter to human nature. People are instinctually selfish, and it will never change.
Re:Breaking News (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. It is precisely because of self interest that others are willing to offer us their goods and services. One of my favorite quotes puts it much better than I can:
Re: Breaking News (Score:2)
Re:Breaking News (Score:2)
These groups don't tend to last very long, but they have existed. They generally require a small isolated community and a charismatic and idealistic leader. And carefully selected followers.
I don't think that such goups could be stable for multiple generations even without exterior pressures, but they ca
Re:Breaking News (Score:3, Interesting)
--Noam Chomsky
Re:Breaking News (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Breaking News (Score:2)
People are inherently selfish...but the degree to which they express it varies significantly, and the strength with which they feel it also appears to vary significantly. Before Regan starting his propaganda that "Greed is good" selfishness was generally much less expressed, and when people were caught being selfish they were condemned socially. After the PR campaigns, however, there were large enclaves of society that would no longer demean a person for having been wantonly and flagrantly selfish, s
Re:Obligatory serious responce to smartaleckiness (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I think what you meant to say is (Score:2)
Don't make it sound like he's damning humanity. Humanity does pretty well on its own.
Unfortunately for the rose-colored glasses crowd (Score:2)
It doesn't matter how much you improve yourself; unless an overwhelming majority follow suit,
Re:Unfortunately for the rose-colored glasses crow (Score:2)
You underestimate the power of groupthink. A lot of our apparent viciousness now stems from the fact that our society runs off it. If we didn't run on a system like capitalism, selfishness would not only be considered far less socially acceptable, it would also actually appear less desirable as a result.
It's all completely moot though. It's like some (hypothetical) study revealing that driving on
Re:Breaking News (Score:2, Insightful)
No self-interest? How is that achieved? The only way you could do this was to provide everyone with everything they wanted - but no economic system can do that. As you say, we need Star Trek replicators. It's not communism which gets rid of the self-interest - it's the replicators. In a society with unlimited resources, economics doesn'
Re:Breaking News (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't confuse communism the theory with the dictatorships the claim to be communist. Communism as a theory disclaims most if not all personal property rights, but it has nothing to do with Murder and Censorship, any more than Capitalism has to do with monitoring bank records and tapping phone calls.
Which doesn't mean I'm pro-communism. The problem with communism is motivation, without the acquisition of something as a goal, what motivation do people have? Who assigns people tasks? Who says the community is best served by Jon running the cash register and Joe cleaning septic tanks? Its a system that sounds great in theory but works like crap in practice
At the same time, there's nothing terribly moral about capitalism either. In an ideal capialist society, The sick, old and infirm are left to die. The people in a capitalistic society may be moral and charitable, setting up orphanages to help stranded children, feeding and housing grandma even when she ran out of savings, but thats not Capitalism.
There are very few examples. (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.hutterites.org/ [hutterites.org]
As for being "moral", as long as they do follow their religious code, they are "moral" by definition.
Now, whether the code they follow would be considered "moral" by someone following a different code, well, that's because "morality" is subjective, not objective.
Re:There are very few examples. (Score:2)
How do you do this? I've been coming to this site for almost two years now, which isn't much compared to you, but every time there's an opening to talk about your religion, you're there to tell us what a bunch of dicks we are. I'm not going to take the all-too-easy way and just disregard you as a troll, because perhaps half of your posts seem to be genuine attempts to discuss other matters, and also because your low karma seems to be a result of a campaign of downmods against you at about the 500 mark.
What
Re:Breaking News (Score:2)
Many of the modern, ever-so-nice university based communists who live in my city will tell you that their ideal society can not be achieved through democracy. People have to "take their word" that their way is b
Re:Breaking News (Score:2)
No it doesn't. All his post says is that capitalists are not necessarily moral. He says nothing about the existence of capitalists that *are* moral, or of other systems that are moral (or for that matter, other systems that are less moral).
Re:Breaking News (Score:2)
I would debate that Capitalism will be replaced by Technocratism [wikipedia.org] in about 100-500 or so years.
Not becaues Capitalism is bad or anything, but because a Technological Singularity will make it a moot point.
When you have the technology to produce or simulate anything that you could buy through virtual reality then what is the point of payin
Re:Breaking News (Score:2)
Re:Breaking News - spin (Score:5, Insightful)
Caveat Emptor
Doesn't matter if its politics, economics, religion, software, hardware, or even information.
The fact that there are people running businesses with questionable ethics in no way reflects on the morality of the underlying economic philosophy. History easily shows that people who have questionable morals have no difficulty working within the structure of any social philosophy which gains any significant following whether it be economic, religious, or governmental in nature.
So when someone comes around selling their alternative economic philosophy based on the idea that the current system inherently lacks morality, caveat emptor.
burnin
Re:Breaking News - spin (Score:2)
I don't think the poster's point was that Capitalism is immoral, but that it is amoral, and therefore, if it is to be a beneficial force in the world, morality must be injected into it - or imposed upon it. The same goes for Communism or any other economic system. Whatever the system is, it requires limitations and regulations to keep it in line.
As Keynes said... (Score:3, Interesting)
Are there any humans around? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Are there any humans around? (Score:5, Informative)
Baking deniability into the system fools the naive (Score:2)
Re:Are there any humans around? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Are there any humans around? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm just a bystander too, but I beleive you're missing the GP's point.
Do newspapers clear an ad, then send their paper off to the advertiser with blank sections in pages for the advertiser to fill in with whatever they want?
The internet advertising industry is broken, because the advertisers have too much control, and when they abuse that like this, it is time to take that control back. Send me your flash animation, animated GIF or whatever, and I will add it to my page. You'll have to trust me on pa
Re:Are there any humans around? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Are there any humans around? (Score:5, Interesting)
One advertising company I used to work for once had a request to configure an ad campaign to run each advert for 30seconds then switch the advert the user was viewing to a different one.
Only later did we discover it was to bypass a websites manual safety check, where they check each advert complies with their rules by watching it for 20 seconds.
Re:Are there any humans around? (Score:5, Insightful)
A better question is why displaying an ad can install software on your computer. The LiveJournal posts say it was a Flash ad, so until we get real information it's logical to guess that it exploits one of the vulnerabilities in the Shockwave player.
Re:Are there any humans around? (Score:2, Informative)
besides slowing down the page download (mostly DNS related issues), disturbing my attention and wasting my time my machine (and IP address) is getting exposed to numerous unknown or little known servers.
chain of ads suppliers can be very long. ad can go from the initial seller via multiple broker companys to reach my Linux/Win32. in any point on th
Re:Are there any humans around? (Score:2)
Re:Are there any humans around? (Score:2)
1) If any of the media you listed ran an offensive ad, they'd be fined or similarly chastised by the appropriate regulatory body. No such body exists for the web, that I'm aware of.
2) In each of those media, the ads are submitted for approval to a human, and a human manually puts them in place (by running the tape/CD, dropping the ad in place in Quark, etc). On the web, it's entirely possible for a person to approve a third party ad serving service, then for that service to pull a
Re:Are there any humans around? (Score:4, Informative)
Xserv
This isn't too surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This isn't too surprising (Score:2, Insightful)
You're using Windows from an account that has Administrator privs, aren't you?
Re:This isn't too surprising (Score:2)
Re:This isn't too surprising (Score:5, Informative)
Sucks to use Windows, doesn't it, not being able to use "su -" and control everything from a command window while logged in as a limited-permissions user?
Also, Livejournal, before these ads, was a pretty safe and secure site. Now they put in advertising, some of it flash based, and suddenly I'm nailed by one of their ads and malware hits my system.
Sucks to use IE, doesn't it? Firefox and Flashblocker would have protected you.
Re:This isn't too surprising (Score:2)
Re:This isn't too surprising (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This isn't too surprising (Score:2)
Re:This isn't too surprising (Score:2)
Re:This isn't too surprising (Score:2)
Hint: I wouldn't be any so
Re:This isn't too surprising (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:This isn't too surprising (Score:2)
Re:This isn't too surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This isn't too surprising (Score:2)
Re:This isn't too surprising (Score:4, Informative)
ads (Score:3, Funny)
Obligatory (Score:4, Funny)
I, for one, do not welcome our new malware-installing overlords!
Re:Obligatory (Score:2)
Google (Score:2)
It seems to be commonplace these days...
Re:Google (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, people should be making use of the adblocking functionality in their browsers, or better yet, installing filtering proxies like proxo [proxomitron.info] to halt this crap before it gets to the browser.
Re:Google (Score:2)
I know publishers hate ad-blockers... (Score:5, Insightful)
... but they and the advertisers are the ones driving people to them.
No seriously, is it any wonder people turn to ad-blockers? Try reading an informative bit of text when there's a Flash advertisement of box jumping around and flashing like a student at Mardi Gras. I don't care if you are trying to tell me I'm your millionth visitor. You misspelled congratulations! The box makes me wish I had no peripheral vision! FOAD.
Now I know publishers want to make a buck (I have a few websites [sans-advertising] myself), but if the advertisers are going to use annoying/underhand methods, people will take steps to protect themselves. A lot of these companies would do well to look at the sort of program Google offers: inoffensive, targeted, text ads.
In short: make your advertising better -- advertisers AND publishers -- or lose that which you supposedly value. Eyeballs.
Re:I know publishers hate ad-blockers... (Score:2)
Google AdWords = good (Score:4, Insightful)
You know, Google ads are the only ads I look at any more. (Hell, I run them on my own site!) They are short, not ugly (because Google cares [google.com] about the viewer's experience), and quite often very pertinent to the content. I have to try really hard not to puke when I log in to something like Yahoo! Mail! and I see flashing banner ads for "Get your Credit Rating" or "Cheap Mortgages" or "Warning: Your system is broadcasting an IP address! Ph33rz0r teh RFC!". They are the most useless ads ever. The only reason I think they might survive is if the ad networks charge per impression, not per click--because almost nobody would click on them!
Re:I know publishers hate ad-blockers... (Score:3, Funny)
Just one ad? (Score:5, Interesting)
How can you NOT take responsibility for malware spread through your own site? I understand that people contract out ads, but geez, come on. No need to draw from the bottom of the barrel.
-matthew
Re:Just one ad? (Score:2)
I quit playing it a few years ago when their ads started playing sound. I'm sure they've gone downhill from there.
Re:Just one ad? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just one ad? (Score:3)
Re:Just one ad? (Score:2, Interesting)
simple fix (Score:2, Insightful)
It's for this reason that any webmaster who insists on using 100% flash to view their site deserves a swift kick to the nutsack.
Re:simple fix (Score:4, Informative)
It's for this reason that any webmaster who insists on using 100% flash to view their site deserves a swift kick to the nutsack.
Google Videos, for one, are all Flash.
Use Firefox and install Flashblock, then you'll have the benefits of both worlds.
Try this easier fix that works in Camino, FF, etc. (Score:2)
object[classid$=":D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-4445535
object[codebase*="swflash.cab"],
object[type="application/x-shockwave-flash"],
embed[type="application/x-shockwave-flash"],
embed[src$=".swf"]
{ -moz-binding: url("http://www.floppymoose.com/clickToView.xml#c
Simply stick it in your userContent.css and restart your browser.
Re:Try this easier fix that works in Camino, FF, e (Score:2)
Easier???!!!
Have you recommended Gentoo to your grandmother lately?
Re:simple fix (Score:5, Funny)
Even better, just disconnect your computer from the internet. Who needs internet? Let's face it, 99.9% of internet is just obnoxious anyway.
Re:simple fix (Score:2)
Mod +2 (Unintentionally Insightful)
Re:simple fix (Score:2, Funny)
Re:simple fix (Score:2, Interesting)
All flash-based ads get replaced with a placeholder and a little play button, then you get to selectively enable the ones which you require - http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ [mozdev.org]
Haw! (Score:2, Troll)
Re:Haw! (Score:2, Funny)
Adverts? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Adverts? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Haw! (Score:1)
by heinousjay (683506) Alter Relationship on 18:36 24th June, 2006 (#15596823)
I'm only here for the blowjobs. I bet our experiences are similarly disatisfying.
Adverts? (Score:3, Insightful)
by Karellen (104380) Alter Relationship on 17:17 24th June, 2006 (#15596520)
Do people still get them? I thought everyone had adblock [mozdev.org] installed.
Which became even funnier when I saw who the post was from.
Re:Adverts? (Score:2)
Identify the Advertiser (Score:4, Insightful)
The way to discourage this kind of nonsense is to make sure that the advertisers are identified and given a large public black eye. Probably that's not appropriate if the ad just uncovered a bug in the Flash player, but I think it certainly is in the case where an ad installs spyware.
Did the advertiser know this was going to be done? Quite possibly not, but they are still the ones responsible for the ad: they want the good consequences (more sales), so they have to take the bad ones as well. If their bottom line is hurt, they'll start paying more attention to what their ad agencies and other agents are doing. (This is just an application of Murphy's Golden Rule: the guy who has the gold makes the rules.)
weak effort (Score:5, Insightful)
(1) they failed to post a notice or provide links for the removal of the malware. At best in the blog there are references that such removal instructions exist, peppered with a warning that some of them are actually malware themselves. They should have made the fix EASY and FOOLPROOF to obtain after getting their readers infected. It's been how long since they got their subscribers infected and they have done nothing more than to stop more of them from getting infected. They helped to break the computers, they should play an active roll in fixing them.
(2) the impression I got from their posts in their blog was that "oops sorry not our fault, not our advertiser's fault, it's one of the ad companies that subscribed to our advertiser". This is a cop-out. When you provide a service like they do, your advertisement is a bundle that comes with your service, and as such you are responsible for its content. I don't care if it's a 3rd party. You take on the responsibility for the content you deliver, regardless of how you get it. You can have legal arrangements with your content providers that provide YOU with a legal remedy, but the grief passes through you. You get sued, and then you sue the ones upsteam that caused you to get sued. You do not "pass the buck" and point a finger up the chain three levels and say not my problem good luck getting anything out of them, because the consumer has no legal recourse against those people. You as the content provider do have a legal recourse against your advertiser, and they have recourse against their affiliate who caused the problem in the first place. This pass the buck mentality is cheap and lazy, and they should be ashamed for trying to pull it.
Re:weak effort (Score:3, Informative)
VI. INDEMNITY
You agree to indemnify and hold LiveJournal, and its subsidiaries, affiliates, officers, agents, co-branders or other partners, and employees, harmless from any alleged claim or demand, including reasonable attorney fees, made by any third party due to or arising out of your Content, your use of the Service, your connection to the Service, your violation of the TOS, or your violation of any rights of another, whether you are a registered user or not. The user is s
Won't hold water in the end... (Score:3, Insightful)
Moreover, if the malware violates unauthorized-access statutes, the TOS would be well and truly trumped by such legislation.
Overall, they're in a very weak legal position; a reasonable person would conclude that the best course of action is to mitigate
Re:weak effort (Score:2)
Agreed. Correct me if I'm wrong, but for the LJ user to see a particular ad, the user has to be a) logged in with a username and password, b) with a "Sponsored+" account (or whatever it's called). Unless the ad system was implemented in a braindead way, there should be a record that Ad X was served to user Y. Having a logged-in user gives you a guaranteed way to track a specific user across sessions (the old standby of using co
Re:weak effort (Score:2, Interesting)
I know you're probably not referring to me, but for reference, I'm not LiveJournal staff and nor do I play one on TV. I hate LiveJournal ads and I wish they would get rid of them already.
Just to clear things up for anybody who was wondering.
I tried to read the apology (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently, I needed to download some software because my computer was out of date. Thank goodness I visited LiveJournal today, which told me to update with their new UrP0wnd.exe update.
On Slashdot? (Score:2)
Oh? What happened?
Re:On Slashdot? (Score:3, Funny)
Somebody set up us the bomb.
Web advertising considered harmful (Score:2)
Cyberterrorists (Score:3, Interesting)
Why don't we sue them into the ground as pursuing cyberterrorism as a business model?
Yawn . . . (Score:2)
Still think Windows is [cheaper|easier|better|stronger|faster]?
Re:Yawn . . . (Score:2, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:FlashBlock (Score:2)
Also, what is the YouTube thing people keep linking to? I guess the grey boxes are nice, but they don't really add much to webpages. Besides that, what's up with Google Video? It's not even video really, just images. You have to download the goddamn avi's to watch anything. I don't see what makes it so useful.
Oh well.
Re:Duh (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Ho ho! (Score:2)
Tempted to smile along with you, but... those are likely your family and friends that you're smiling at.
Analogy time: It kind of seems like laughing when a bunch of people who don't know how to cook get food poisoning.
Re:Ho ho! (Score:2)