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from the the-perfect-advert-for-AdBlock dept.
An interesting conspiracy theory on Business Insider:
A Business Insider reader claiming to be a former ad tech executive at a really huge, well-known news publisher then sent me a fascinating email, in which he claimed that ad tech companies deliberately serve ads slowly because everyone makes more money that way.
Basically, his theory is, when a reader clicks to read a story, the page calls for bids from advertisers on the ad space available. This bidding is supposed to take place in a few milliseconds. But, my correspondent says, ad tech companies hold open the bids much, much longer, so more bids come in, driving up the price. Publishers hate this because it makes pages load really slowly, giving readers a terrible experience. But it's hard to stop because everyone — publisher included — is taking a cut of the winning bid. So publishers and ad tech companies actually have an incentive to make pages load slowly.
[...] Generally, other sources in the ad tech business tell us that this is rubbish. But a couple also admitted that there are some shady practices out there, and it is possible for this happen. "In theory he is basically correct. Publishers and the ad networks they work with have pretty effectively gamed each other. Lots of crazy s--- happens," one source told us. "It's a wild world out there and publishers are not generally very technically competent so ad networks get away with a lot."
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday July 30 2015, @02:56AM
When I go to a webpage and it is slow, I can't help but wonder if they are downloading another "Cryptolocker" to my machine.
I got nailed once with that once. No, I did not pay the ransom. I just lost everything, but thank goodness I was only using the box ( cheap WalMart laptop ) to browse the web, as my serious stuff was on an old DOS machine.
I got the laptop because businesses wanted me to have a "modern" machine in order to communicate to them. Being a business, they are too important to be bothered to drop back to deprecated protocols the simpler machines used.
It taught me to keep backups with CloneZilla.
So, I keep a little "gadget" on my desktop which tracks memory and CPU usage. If I see it rail on a website, it only behooves me to shut the connection down as soon as possible to find out why.
Nailing another Cryptolocker before it does its thing would save hours of restoring disk images and incremental changes.
I believe NoScript has played a major factor, as I have not seen any reinfections of Cryptolocker after installing it.
But I cannot help but be afraid every time some webmaster tells me I need to bypass NoScript that he may have another infection of Cryptolocker for me.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1) by Qlaras on Friday July 31 2015, @04:30PM
Could do your web surfing in a virtual machine; with a clone or snapshot (or just have it throw away changes on shutdown if just surfing and not saving anything).
Faster than a backup of the bare iron for restoring to 'working, known-clean'.
(Score: 2) by joshuajon on Friday July 31 2015, @07:18PM
Qubes OS [qubes-os.org] is built around this premise but takes it a step further. Every application is running inside it's own VM and only has access to certain resources based on preconfigured "zones". Kind of a neat idea, not sure how practical it is though.
(Score: 1) by Qlaras on Wednesday August 05 2015, @03:16PM
I've seen that - uses Xen presently, KVM is in the works. (I've never managed either)
They've done the automation to make it all work, that's the hard part, I think.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday August 01 2015, @01:12AM
I have got to learn how to do this.
It sure seems to me that browser and OS coders have dropped the ball as far as security goes. It seems all the browser coders have to kowtow to business types who want to collect data on everyone, regardless of the security holes said snooping opens up.
If a conscientious coder shows up, he is replaced with another coder that follows orders.
I have already seen that happen. Way too many times.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]