Isn't that all ads, then? I mean, as an end user, which is more harmful to you - downloading a bunch of ads and filling your screen with them, or downloading a bunch of ads and not displaying them?
You are going to use more battery and resources actually displaying the ads, not to mention the worse user experience. If I had to pick between the two, I would prefer 'download and don't display' over 'download and display'
Ads don't have malicious intent (usually). You may not like them, but displaying ads doesn't cause you harm. You could argue "having to see ads is inconvenient, which is a kind of harm" but just because software is inconvenient or doesn't do exactly what you want doesn't mean it's malicious. In this case, what makes Judy malicious is that it is using your machine to defraud advertisers.
It often takes my personal information, unique device identifiers etc and sends them over the internet without my consent. That causes harm. IMO, much more so than defrauding some advertisers.
As I said in another comment, the term "malicious" is obviously open to interpretation, so yes, you could make the argument that that is malware. You just have to convince others of your argument.
I'm not really interested in having that argument here, since it's really off topic for this article.
For sure, but any extra battery and resource consumption here would be extremely minor compared to a bitcoin miner. Many apps do various forms of push advertising and background reporting which does quite similar things, do you consider that to be malware too? Ultimately the only difference here is that this one abuses Google and their advertisers instead of the user, which seems to be an accepted and common advertising practice. In my opinion at least, it's not significantly different from those behaviors.
What if this is a self-modifying code? Now instead of clicking ad now DoDDS? Malicious is basically bad intent. This is an unauthorized activity so it is malicious.
It's not self-modifying code, it's looking specifically for google.com frames, see the source in the link. This is hardly worse intent than any other mobile ad these days.
You are going to use more battery and resources actually displaying the ads, not to mention the worse user experience. If I had to pick between the two, I would prefer 'download and don't display' over 'download and display'