Comment by classified
4 days ago
If only! I think we can no longer afford to ignore all these security threats and should make online advertising wholesale illegal. But I won't hold my breath.
4 days ago
If only! I think we can no longer afford to ignore all these security threats and should make online advertising wholesale illegal. But I won't hold my breath.
The ads are getting insane, they're trying to fill every bit of space you can look with ads. You go to a restaurant there's ads on your placemat. You go to the grocery store there's ads in your cart. They put chargers in the parking lot so now there's ads out there.
Streaming services used to be bad enough with ads in the shows, now they put an ad on the screen when you pause it. Peacock just started putting ads in the login screen.
If we don't stop this, pretty soon they're going to have ads in the stars as satellite constellations arrange themselves to sell you Twitter subscriptions. They're not going to stop even when there's an ad no matter where you look.
> ads in the stars
I'm reminded of the ending of the 2008 film Hancock in which Hancock defaced the moon with a corporate logo. But it was okay because it was "for a good cause".
Showing an advert is fine. A poster on a billboard is not deploying mass surveillance.
It's both, there is no mass advertising without mass surveillance.
2 replies →
The moon as a giant Pepsi logo.
this is why adblock is completely necessary, not just for your eyes, but for security.
I don't see how anything in this exploit requires ads. It could just as well be done by enticing the target to view a malicious web page, such as a post in a subreddit or facebook group the target is known to read, or even by just sending him a link in an email or chat which will often trigger an automatic "preview" of the link in the email or chat client. Or by other social engineering techniques.
The ad-tech network probably does make it easier, because any page that includes their ad network could deliver the malicious ad.
The main thing ads allows is "zero-click" - so they don't need to click a link or anything to get exploited.