These guys are delivering ads for Lexus to moviepiracy.com by using an intermediate server that obscures the actual target site. Lexus doesn't want its brand associated with these types of sites and would normally prevent this from happening. Intermediary collects the money.
I know some people that made tons of money simply for setting up the arbitrage, shell companies that would sell ad space to big brands promising top tier media orgs and then turn around and buy it directly from porn, gaming and piracy sites.
Same thing as this article, but without actually building the technology themselves, simply being the middleman.
If an advertiser says "place this ad, but not on TPB", and a network says "sure, we'll run your ad, and not on TPB", and then through trickery runs the ad on TPB, but in a way that fools the advertisers auditor, that is clear fraud.
Isn't this more like a network says "if you run this ad on your nice-and-fluffy-site, we'll pay you $x" and the nice-and-fluffy-site says "yep, we'll run this ad on our site" but runs this ad on TPB instead ?
I.e. as far as I understood the particular situation described by OP, the breach of contract happens between the site and network, not between the network and advertiser.
The parties to the frauds may be different than I understood. That’s part of good crimeing ;-) I’m not in the trade, and don’t know how people distinguish networks, from resellers, from publishers. The whole world of advertising tends to blur together in a giant ball of mutual fraud from my vantage.
Fascinating article to a layman who has no idea what goes on in the bowels AdTech. The scamming and detection cat-and-mouse game seems like such a zero-sum waste of energy/talent/servers/everything, but I suppose while there's opportunity to play these games and shovel money towards oneself, it will keep attracting people. And nobody seems to be losing except ad buyers (monetarily) and end users (via a shittier web experience). I guess my question to the author would be: Once you found out what it really was that you were working on, what did your internal ethical dialog sound like, and how did you justify to yourself continuing to work on it?
AdTech gets a lot of flak, but I did spend quite a lot of time in my career building tools on the opposite side of this. We also did reverse engineer what the big networks like Google were doing but with the objective of learning the best techniques to use – which is actually quite disappointing in practice, these days the most important measure of being a real user is whether Google can doxx you or not.
It was quite fun for a while, and some of the tools and techniques ended up having applications beyond ads, for example developing 0-day techniques to unmask Tor and VPN users (webRTC leaks, etc.) that could then be reused on seized/honeypot onion sites to catch predators.
Side note: I've seen these articles which blame Capitalism ("ad tech: capitalism refined to its purest?"), and while that may be true, they never address what solution they want. Communism? As if communist China isn't launching malware attacks. Socialism?
For that reason it feels like blaming something unrelated.
I highly recommend staying away from hemlock tea, despite the fact that I am unable to provide you with an antidote.
Just because a solution isn't provided does not necessarily invalidate one's criticism. And China as your poster child for communism? Man, I don't want to get all "no true Scotsman" on you, but...
I understand - I'm not saying it's not capitalism, but that I don't see from this article why using a different system would prevent this from happening. It's just something to blame.
The alternative to drinking hemlock tea is not drinking hemlock tea.
You can't not pick an economic system of organization. Even if you don't pick one, you will have one. So the question becomes "what's the best choice available?"
To choose "not capitalism" is still choosing something -- something which may work much worse.
Thanks, Neil Peart?[0] I'm not saying "don't choose", or "choose differently". I'm saying one doesn't need to offer alternatives in order to state that $THING might have downsides. Just because I have a lot of money tied up in the U. S. stock market doesn't mean that it's hypocritical to point out the jackassery that can come with capitalism...like ad tech.
In agreement. Far too many "debaters" do not acknowledge this truth. Identifying a problem and proposing a solution are two different things. I get that actionable statements are appreciated, but they aren't a requirement. Conflating the two rhetorically sophomoric.
Another way of putting this is the burden of proof to also provide on a solution is not on the problem identifier. Asking as much is implicitly making the argument that the problem doesn't exist because the solution doesn't yet exist. We can all agree how absurd that is.
> I'm saying one doesn't need to offer alternatives in order to state that $THING might have downsides
Which is a completely reasonable and true point! And it's a rhetorical pattern that, if we could assume noble intent more often, would be way more popular.
However, unfortunately, when people act in bad faith, the reasonable expression "x has problems" can have the subtext "we should use [popular alternative y] instead". This is the case with supporters of socialism and communism - "capitalism is bad" is not used in order to try to improve the regulatory mechanisms around capitalism (which, as other people have pointed out, are absolutely necessary), but in order to try to drum up support for their favored economic system instead.
The pattern that consistently appears is that people who are trying to improve or draw attention to the regulatory landscape around capitalism consistently talk about regulations (e.g. focusing on the FAA's lack of oversight over Boeing, or old environmental regulations that were revoked under a recent administration), and the people who are trying to advance another agenda instead throw out lines to the effect of "capitalism bad" or "this is the result of capitalism".
Your assumption that selection of a system is binary, as in you either have an absolute unrestricted free market or you have uncompromising centralized state control of the entire economy is missing the question.
We don't have either of those things now (neither does China). Control of the economy exists on a multidimensional spectrum, of which there are many possible options; blaming "capitalism" for a problem is shorthand for noting that, in some situation, the unrestricted free market is leading to negative externalities or a poor use of the commons.
That paragraph stuck out to me too.. it makes no sense. They say it is refined capitalism but also nothing of value is being traded. Isn't capital supposed to have value? That's refined snake oil.
When someone blames "capitalism" for something, what they usually mean is that they'd like if this thing didn't happen, but don't have any concrete proposal for preventing it. It's equivalent to blaming "society"
You could also substitute "unregulated capitalism" for "capitalism". Often when someone criticizes capitalism for allowing some social ill, the underlying message is: This wouldn't happen if there were some regulatory guard rails and a legal system that punished this particular ill.
A lot of us actually mean capitalism because we believe that the incentives it creates are inherently baked into its structure. For example, the construction of capital markets inevitably lead to labor exploitation through a natural series of actions and reactions. That's anti-capitalism 101.
Anyone who has worked at a heavily funded startup knows this. They may not have the words for it, or they may even like it, but they cannot deny that the situation creates the incentives.
I really wish I could, but this is essentially asking for a distillation of Capital Vol 1 in a Hacker News comment. If this is something you're interested in, I encourage you to read it from the source. It spells out exactly this.
If that doesn't quite suit you, feel free to reach out (email in profile) and I'm sure we could find a way to convey this conversationally.
I have this idea that maybe ads should be entirely disallowed from everywhere, except for catalogues, printed and online. Crazy, right?
It would work like this: you feel like spending money or you want to buy a specific type of product? You pick-up/load the catalogue and browse until you can't take it anymore, or at least until you find something. And then follow a link to the seller's website, or get the address of the local store. No more ads everywhere, not in the physical world and neither in the online world.
Admittedly, I have not spent much time thinking about it and the possible side effects.
That's fascinating. Looks like this is due to the clean city law put in place in 2006 that removed upwards of 15000 billboards and other outdoor ads.
The wikipedia entry [1] contains an account from a local reporter there. Here's the first bit:
> São Paulo is a very vertical city. That makes it very frenetic. You could not even realize the architecture of the old buildings, because all the buildings, all the houses were just covered with billboards and logos and propaganda. And there was no criteria. And now it is amazing. They uncovered a lot of problems the city had that we never realized.
> ads should be entirely disallowed from everywhere, except for catalogues, printed and online.
I've been saying this for a few years now, but that's only part of a Terminal Solution[tm].
I wouldn't disallow online ads, because done sensibly (https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html) they could happily coexist with everything else. Here's the more heretic take: make the core EU take the universal one - any and all data on an individual is ALWAYS the property of the person in question. No exceptions. Any third part storing a copy of it is merely a guardian of the data, not its owner. Then require for every single use of that data to compensate the individual.[ß] That flips the incentives, because all of a sudden every data processing round costs you real money that you have to pay out. Not in amortised compute costs, but in actual payouts.
In a strange twist, the sums themselves don't need to be particularly large. The sheer overhead of requiring accurate accounting, auditable records, and all the extra back-office operations to make it possible to repay people at a global scale is expensive enough to transform the practice of hoarding personal information from an asset into a liability with capital L.
In other words: if you want to advertise to me, you need to pay me for the privilege of wasting my time, my bandwidth, my electricity and my screen real estate. Through the nose, if needed.
ß: I'm willing to make an exception to legal hard requirements. But unless you're a government conducting their necessary activities, you pay.
Hmm, I don't read it that way. It's just as easy to interpret that subhead as "the dose makes the poison" in which case the author isn't arguing for Communism as the solution but less-pure Capitalism (i.e., not the Wild West). The advertising industry does strike me as a particularly unpleasant outgrowth of Capitalism, and I liked the characterization of it as buying and selling of things without value, not in the trivial sense of monetary value - it has that, clearly - but social value.
Capitalism is a system where, so it is claimed, atomized individuals pursuing their "rational self-interest" produce an inherent moral and societal good. This is to be aided by a lack of regulation and interference by non-market forces. The freer the markets the freer the people.
This case is a pretty clear example of how this is not in fact the case. By the metrics of a captialist system this should be a huge success. You have investment, voluntary contracts, free markets and fierce competition that results in huge amounts of innovation. Yet the result is horribly useless waste that hurts society. I think it's pretty fair to call it out.
I can't personally speak to the effectiveness of all of the systems humans have lived under or seriously proposed, but I'm fairly certain that among them capitalism is pretty unique in being a system where a paperclip maximizer can be considered a good product. (incidentally also fairly unique in being the only system so far under which hunans have created a global extinction level event)
Here's an idea: like, capitalism, but with some restraints on it to protect the world. You know, like how we have regulators that (nominally) ensure food safety and clean air and whatnot.
"they never address what solution they want. Communism?"
As much as I enjoy hackernews, is it economically illiterate. There are 50 different economic schools of thought, and 'Capitalism/Communism' are not among them, they are vulgarities.
'Capitalism' of 1800 was mercantelism - it was protectionist, featured slave trade, etc.
'Capitalism' of 1980's was Keynesianism, when income tax was 70% in the top bracket, high inflation, cheap housing, we could build infrastruture effectively, etc.
'Capitalism' of today is 'Neoliberalism', and it's the pinnacle of laissez-faire approach to economy.
There is also Shumpeterianism which proritises technological development, Austrian school, and countless others
X at "its purest" is pretty awful, for all values of X.
Shocking news flash: pretty much any system has unintended consequences, distortions, etc. You invariably need checks and balances (which rob it of its "purity") in place to mitigate. When you get into the extra-legal space, where those checks and balances are most mitigated, you see some pretty terrible stuff.
> It's not blaming capitalism. It's blaming purism.
I've never seen an article that blames "purist capitalism" on HN (maybe two that reference "lassie-faire capitalism"), and dozens that just blame "capitalism", no further elaboration given. The most straightforward explanation is that capitalism itself is being blamed, and I think that this explanation is supported by the recent (past 20 years?) increase in support for socialism/communism (both in the US and globally).
I guess it depends on how you read it. This article is pretty clearly critical of "capitalism in its purist form", and [checks notes] it was posted on HN.
So your perception may be more of projection of your own POV than that of others.
It sounds like a lot of this could be prevented if Javascript had a way to disallow monkeypatching. Maybe there could be something like `const` that would prevent external code from modifying an attribute of an object. At least for objects provided by the engine itself. Is there any non malicious reason to allow everyone to replace `window.encodeURIComponent`?
Well, window is the default global scope, so it can't be sealed or any top-level declarations wouldn't work. You'd have to create a new global scope to be able to seal window, and that would break large swaths of the web.
I'm thinking that might not be as bad of a thing as you might be making it out as. Sometimes, you just need to light a match and watch certain things burn. Allow their ashes to be fertilizer for the regrowth period.
Unfortunately, in the world of today, I think the underworld of slimey devs would fill the void faster, and implement "new" that appeals to their needs.
And what of all those government websites that don't get updated very often, with forms that people rely on to get access to benefits? Something as simple as client-side pre-form-validation would break access and it could be months before anyone does anything about it. Sure, you could argue that the various government bureaus should be better about updating stuff, but that's really just not going to happen.
It's absolutely possible to have JavaScript coexist in a potentially hostile environment. We utilize a secure reference cache for Transcend Consent so that potentially malicious scripts cannot interfere with the operation of our consent manager.
Like many takedowns of the digital ad industry, this paints an incomplete picture.
We use 3rd party impression and click tracking, along with pairing purchases to user/session ids to make sure our ads our working. If a user tries to mask their data from us, they simply come in as direct traffic, and we don't attribute that to our ad campaign.
If this fraud stuff trips you up you aren't doing it right.
>If this fraud stuff trips you up you aren't doing it right.
That mentality, across the entire ad industry, is how I retired before 40. Assumptions of security, understanding, and operating knowledge create huge blindspots, and those were my flow state.
Most of the ad industry believes that because they use a 3rd party impression or click tracking they are safe from these attacks. This article outlines how ad fraud operations find vulnerabilities in those technologies that the ad industry trusts. 3rd party verification does not mean you have avoided fraud.
To track from impression to purchase you would probably be using one 3rd party service. Google has the best capabilities but you are still relying on them to not have any vulnerabilities and their incentives of selling adds and verifying them for you aligned.
You should add your retention rates into the picture though. The ad network can bring you really shitty users who had incentives to click (usually from within games) but are absolutely not interested in your product. These can be real users, not bots, but they will ruin your retention stats later.
Another industry which often flies under the radar of many people is the marketplace for products which eBay, Facebook Marketplace, Amazon, PayPal, Stripe, etc. will not touch.
The market for [non-FDA] diet pills, MLM eBooks, "mind, body & soul" empowerment videos, etc. is massive - even more so during the pandemic when employees are getting bored at home.
A business I knew with saw revenue rocket during the last 2 years, and they owned the whole stack - affiliate marketing schemes, an ecommerce platform (which still supports IE7!), virtual call-centres, right down to a payment processor (that also accepted adult content, CBD products, etc.).
The experience really opened my eyes into how much money there is to be made by... how can I put this politely.... exploiting overweight gulliable people with low self-esteem.
That is a very accurate description of the 'ad tech' business we got to interact with at Blekko. Greed caught many of the folks, they would be making $2K - $4K a week and suddenly jump to $15-$20K ? And all the anti-fraud algorithms would light up. I don't doubt for a moment that the small numbers were also fraud but until they crossed the threshold they got away with it.
The CFO and I were convinced that everyone would switch to "CPA" or per-action models (you only pay on the ad if the click resulted in a sale/conversion etc) that seemed like a much harder thing to defraud. But for brand impressions? That isn't something you can do easily.
Our crawler uncovered a registrar that had sold thousands of domains on one of the odd top levels to a scammer who had populated them with duplicate data driven "forum", "blog" and "review" sites. At the time the crawler would flag sites with identical copy and this person had been fairly clever in that they clearly had a crawler of their own and they crawled through forums and just duplicated all of the messages and then populated their "fake" forum with them (as an example). If you looked at one "page" it kind of made sense (it clearly was written by a human) but different responses were talking about randomly different things (likes one post on cats and then a post on rebuilding an engine).
We speculated it had started as a black hat SEO operation and then expanded into an ad fraud farm. But still it was amazing to see what was perhaps hundreds of thousands of "web pages" that existed simply to exploit a way to extract money out the web ecosystem.
While I don't buy that this is the only view at the time, and that there was no dirt to find, I believe that there was a time were ads were imagined as a way to inform the consumers, or at least convey some kind of information to them.
Unfortunately, the market doesn't optimize for what's right, only for what's profitable. The too may or may not aligned at first, but give it enough time, and it will deviate.
Just personally, I’m not super opposed to ads sold on television networks that come over my antenna that basically just market to specific demographics.
Billboards a bit problematic if they distract drivers but otherwise don’t bother me much either.
It's only when you look into the Black Hat world that you realize how deceptive the Ad world is... Major Record labels botting their music videos to make them look extremely popular, social media profiles with millions of followers for sale providing instant impressions of fake fame, and the majority of ad-based revenue being eaten up by scammers.
Even Google analytics are so convoluted now that they really make a simple process of tracking real engagement into a maddeningly confusing bowl of spaghetti.
The people that seek to overcomplicate the web also create wild pyramid schemes for profit that really corrupt purpose and utility of the Internet. It won't be long before we begin to see completely fabricated statistics everywhere, and it will feed into misled investors and more deception.
I'm glad we still have the ability to create our own web sites and resources, many companies have been lobbying to take that ability away from us, to drive costs of doing so up wildly, and to cripple our ability to have an even playing field.
I don't run ads on my personal web sites though, it's better I don't contribute further to the problem.
My friends and family don't realize why I'm such a pessimist when I speak about the Internet and Social Media now, I worry about them being scammed and influenced by the fake aspects of certain business and celebrity online.
If there's one thing that the Pandemic has shown, it's who had money and who was faking. There were many people using black hat techniques to fake popularity, success, and fame and that began to dry up quick every time Google pushed an algorithm update.
The sad reality is that normal creators, and business owners that don't participate in the ad/manipulation madness can't ever make it to a point where they'll be visible, and the Internet can't ever return to the point where equal opportunity existed because of all of the now embedded ad-based revenue culture that we all let take hold of it.
The only way to thrive moving forward will be to create small (focused) communities that avoid the current pitfalls of ad based communities, and to be able to sell valuable and highly useful products and services within them that fund reasonable expansion and operation of those communities.
> ad tech is about trying to scam the rest of ad tech as hard as possible, while trying to not get scammed too hard yourself
That’s a joke of a quote. You could say that about literally any industry and it would never be true. If a company solely exists to scam others, over the long term it will not last. Adtech provides digital marketing which drives actual revenue and profits for businesses. There certainly are scammers, but this quote just ignores an entire legitimate industry.
only if you can trust the source and destination, which, from the point of view of the ad server, is not the case hence the uphill battle of ad fraud.
this is the value add of closed platforms. though not perfect, they have the most reliable ads. amazon, google, facebook, netflix, pinterest, tv. any fraud just makes these platforms more money so what's the incentive? maybe there are some edge cases with revenue sharing models. the fraud that i can think of on these platfroms is the extent that the quality of platform is misrepresented [1].
The only way to really solve this is to follow the money. There will always be vulnerabilities but whether it's profitable to exploit them is another story. Ads move fast but money moves slow.
The victims are good publishers ( miss out on ad dollars that would have gone their way) and advertisers (who have generally moved their money to walled gardens where there isn't an agency incentive problem).
90 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadSame thing as this article, but without actually building the technology themselves, simply being the middleman.
They’ll be upset if this “gray” traffic doesn’t convert well, but Lexus buyers just might be the type with the disposable income for gambling.
I.e. as far as I understood the particular situation described by OP, the breach of contract happens between the site and network, not between the network and advertiser.
Everything 'security' in the world is the same way.
It was quite fun for a while, and some of the tools and techniques ended up having applications beyond ads, for example developing 0-day techniques to unmask Tor and VPN users (webRTC leaks, etc.) that could then be reused on seized/honeypot onion sites to catch predators.
Aa well as end users via subsidizing the ad spending for the ad buyers. Who you think pays for the ads in the end? It's us, the consumers.
For that reason it feels like blaming something unrelated.
Just because a solution isn't provided does not necessarily invalidate one's criticism. And China as your poster child for communism? Man, I don't want to get all "no true Scotsman" on you, but...
The alternative to drinking hemlock tea is not drinking hemlock tea.
You can't not pick an economic system of organization. Even if you don't pick one, you will have one. So the question becomes "what's the best choice available?"
To choose "not capitalism" is still choosing something -- something which may work much worse.
[0] https://www.rush.com/songs/freewill
Another way of putting this is the burden of proof to also provide on a solution is not on the problem identifier. Asking as much is implicitly making the argument that the problem doesn't exist because the solution doesn't yet exist. We can all agree how absurd that is.
Which is a completely reasonable and true point! And it's a rhetorical pattern that, if we could assume noble intent more often, would be way more popular.
However, unfortunately, when people act in bad faith, the reasonable expression "x has problems" can have the subtext "we should use [popular alternative y] instead". This is the case with supporters of socialism and communism - "capitalism is bad" is not used in order to try to improve the regulatory mechanisms around capitalism (which, as other people have pointed out, are absolutely necessary), but in order to try to drum up support for their favored economic system instead.
The pattern that consistently appears is that people who are trying to improve or draw attention to the regulatory landscape around capitalism consistently talk about regulations (e.g. focusing on the FAA's lack of oversight over Boeing, or old environmental regulations that were revoked under a recent administration), and the people who are trying to advance another agenda instead throw out lines to the effect of "capitalism bad" or "this is the result of capitalism".
We don't have either of those things now (neither does China). Control of the economy exists on a multidimensional spectrum, of which there are many possible options; blaming "capitalism" for a problem is shorthand for noting that, in some situation, the unrestricted free market is leading to negative externalities or a poor use of the commons.
Anyone who has worked at a heavily funded startup knows this. They may not have the words for it, or they may even like it, but they cannot deny that the situation creates the incentives.
Can you explain what this means, with some key examples?
If that doesn't quite suit you, feel free to reach out (email in profile) and I'm sure we could find a way to convey this conversationally.
It would work like this: you feel like spending money or you want to buy a specific type of product? You pick-up/load the catalogue and browse until you can't take it anymore, or at least until you find something. And then follow a link to the seller's website, or get the address of the local store. No more ads everywhere, not in the physical world and neither in the online world.
Admittedly, I have not spent much time thinking about it and the possible side effects.
The wikipedia entry [1] contains an account from a local reporter there. Here's the first bit:
> São Paulo is a very vertical city. That makes it very frenetic. You could not even realize the architecture of the old buildings, because all the buildings, all the houses were just covered with billboards and logos and propaganda. And there was no criteria. And now it is amazing. They uncovered a lot of problems the city had that we never realized.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
I've been saying this for a few years now, but that's only part of a Terminal Solution[tm].
I wouldn't disallow online ads, because done sensibly (https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html) they could happily coexist with everything else. Here's the more heretic take: make the core EU take the universal one - any and all data on an individual is ALWAYS the property of the person in question. No exceptions. Any third part storing a copy of it is merely a guardian of the data, not its owner. Then require for every single use of that data to compensate the individual.[ß] That flips the incentives, because all of a sudden every data processing round costs you real money that you have to pay out. Not in amortised compute costs, but in actual payouts.
In a strange twist, the sums themselves don't need to be particularly large. The sheer overhead of requiring accurate accounting, auditable records, and all the extra back-office operations to make it possible to repay people at a global scale is expensive enough to transform the practice of hoarding personal information from an asset into a liability with capital L.
In other words: if you want to advertise to me, you need to pay me for the privilege of wasting my time, my bandwidth, my electricity and my screen real estate. Through the nose, if needed.
ß: I'm willing to make an exception to legal hard requirements. But unless you're a government conducting their necessary activities, you pay.
This case is a pretty clear example of how this is not in fact the case. By the metrics of a captialist system this should be a huge success. You have investment, voluntary contracts, free markets and fierce competition that results in huge amounts of innovation. Yet the result is horribly useless waste that hurts society. I think it's pretty fair to call it out.
Regulations are added to restrict some of the harmful effects of uncontrolled greed.
As much as I enjoy hackernews, is it economically illiterate. There are 50 different economic schools of thought, and 'Capitalism/Communism' are not among them, they are vulgarities.
'Capitalism' of 1800 was mercantelism - it was protectionist, featured slave trade, etc.
'Capitalism' of 1980's was Keynesianism, when income tax was 70% in the top bracket, high inflation, cheap housing, we could build infrastruture effectively, etc.
'Capitalism' of today is 'Neoliberalism', and it's the pinnacle of laissez-faire approach to economy.
There is also Shumpeterianism which proritises technological development, Austrian school, and countless others
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schools_of_economic_thought
X at "its purest" is pretty awful, for all values of X.
Shocking news flash: pretty much any system has unintended consequences, distortions, etc. You invariably need checks and balances (which rob it of its "purity") in place to mitigate. When you get into the extra-legal space, where those checks and balances are most mitigated, you see some pretty terrible stuff.
I've never seen an article that blames "purist capitalism" on HN (maybe two that reference "lassie-faire capitalism"), and dozens that just blame "capitalism", no further elaboration given. The most straightforward explanation is that capitalism itself is being blamed, and I think that this explanation is supported by the recent (past 20 years?) increase in support for socialism/communism (both in the US and globally).
So your perception may be more of projection of your own POV than that of others.
I'm thinking that might not be as bad of a thing as you might be making it out as. Sometimes, you just need to light a match and watch certain things burn. Allow their ashes to be fertilizer for the regrowth period.
Unfortunately, in the world of today, I think the underworld of slimey devs would fill the void faster, and implement "new" that appeals to their needs.
Specify a subset of the language and guarantee that if on sticks to this subset it will run in a simplified and heavily optimized branch of the code.
[1] And that there are no relevant extensions, and no one has modified the browser itself.
We use 3rd party impression and click tracking, along with pairing purchases to user/session ids to make sure our ads our working. If a user tries to mask their data from us, they simply come in as direct traffic, and we don't attribute that to our ad campaign.
If this fraud stuff trips you up you aren't doing it right.
That mentality, across the entire ad industry, is how I retired before 40. Assumptions of security, understanding, and operating knowledge create huge blindspots, and those were my flow state.
Evil person creates a (simple, weak) good site, and sells ads on it.
Advertiser pays Evil person to show ads on simple, weak, good site.
Evil person then displays those ads (via iframe) on Pirate Bay.
Advertiser thinks the end-user visited Good site.
The ads are not fraudulent per se -- real humans are seeing the ads and interacting with them.
The market for [non-FDA] diet pills, MLM eBooks, "mind, body & soul" empowerment videos, etc. is massive - even more so during the pandemic when employees are getting bored at home.
A business I knew with saw revenue rocket during the last 2 years, and they owned the whole stack - affiliate marketing schemes, an ecommerce platform (which still supports IE7!), virtual call-centres, right down to a payment processor (that also accepted adult content, CBD products, etc.).
The experience really opened my eyes into how much money there is to be made by... how can I put this politely.... exploiting overweight gulliable people with low self-esteem.
The CFO and I were convinced that everyone would switch to "CPA" or per-action models (you only pay on the ad if the click resulted in a sale/conversion etc) that seemed like a much harder thing to defraud. But for brand impressions? That isn't something you can do easily.
Our crawler uncovered a registrar that had sold thousands of domains on one of the odd top levels to a scammer who had populated them with duplicate data driven "forum", "blog" and "review" sites. At the time the crawler would flag sites with identical copy and this person had been fairly clever in that they clearly had a crawler of their own and they crawled through forums and just duplicated all of the messages and then populated their "fake" forum with them (as an example). If you looked at one "page" it kind of made sense (it clearly was written by a human) but different responses were talking about randomly different things (likes one post on cats and then a post on rebuilding an engine).
We speculated it had started as a black hat SEO operation and then expanded into an ad fraud farm. But still it was amazing to see what was perhaps hundreds of thousands of "web pages" that existed simply to exploit a way to extract money out the web ecosystem.
Ads are just a dirty business at this point.
While I don't buy that this is the only view at the time, and that there was no dirt to find, I believe that there was a time were ads were imagined as a way to inform the consumers, or at least convey some kind of information to them.
Unfortunately, the market doesn't optimize for what's right, only for what's profitable. The too may or may not aligned at first, but give it enough time, and it will deviate.
Billboards a bit problematic if they distract drivers but otherwise don’t bother me much either.
Even Google analytics are so convoluted now that they really make a simple process of tracking real engagement into a maddeningly confusing bowl of spaghetti.
The people that seek to overcomplicate the web also create wild pyramid schemes for profit that really corrupt purpose and utility of the Internet. It won't be long before we begin to see completely fabricated statistics everywhere, and it will feed into misled investors and more deception.
I'm glad we still have the ability to create our own web sites and resources, many companies have been lobbying to take that ability away from us, to drive costs of doing so up wildly, and to cripple our ability to have an even playing field.
I don't run ads on my personal web sites though, it's better I don't contribute further to the problem.
My friends and family don't realize why I'm such a pessimist when I speak about the Internet and Social Media now, I worry about them being scammed and influenced by the fake aspects of certain business and celebrity online.
If there's one thing that the Pandemic has shown, it's who had money and who was faking. There were many people using black hat techniques to fake popularity, success, and fame and that began to dry up quick every time Google pushed an algorithm update.
The sad reality is that normal creators, and business owners that don't participate in the ad/manipulation madness can't ever make it to a point where they'll be visible, and the Internet can't ever return to the point where equal opportunity existed because of all of the now embedded ad-based revenue culture that we all let take hold of it.
The only way to thrive moving forward will be to create small (focused) communities that avoid the current pitfalls of ad based communities, and to be able to sell valuable and highly useful products and services within them that fund reasonable expansion and operation of those communities.
It's a marijuana/hemp forum that is one of the biggest resources in the space.
That’s a joke of a quote. You could say that about literally any industry and it would never be true. If a company solely exists to scam others, over the long term it will not last. Adtech provides digital marketing which drives actual revenue and profits for businesses. There certainly are scammers, but this quote just ignores an entire legitimate industry.
For example if I have an image and need to be 100% certain where it was loaded, is that possible to do with some very high level of certainty?
this is the value add of closed platforms. though not perfect, they have the most reliable ads. amazon, google, facebook, netflix, pinterest, tv. any fraud just makes these platforms more money so what's the incentive? maybe there are some edge cases with revenue sharing models. the fraud that i can think of on these platfroms is the extent that the quality of platform is misrepresented [1].
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/18/facebook-knew-for-years-ad...
The victims are good publishers ( miss out on ad dollars that would have gone their way) and advertisers (who have generally moved their money to walled gardens where there isn't an agency incentive problem).
Comments in here and the post itself are such a niche that only people browsing hacker news get to see.