[nerdponx]

Wish I could upvote this 1,000 times.

It's ridiculous. It's a text-based ad. At worst, it's a clickable image. At what point did it become okay in your minds to let advertisers run arbitrary code?

I've left ads turned on specifically on StackOverflow because 1) I want to support StackOverflow, and 2) I trust them not to run malicious ads.

I don't even care that they're running ads network-wide. But if they're going to be running these kinds of ads anywhere on the site, they're going right on the ad block list along with everyone else.

[mikeash]

It’s completely insane. Can you imagine a TV station receiving ads on tapes and playing them to their audience without looking at them first? Can you imagine TV stations occasionally showing ads containing porn, urging people to kill, showing extreme violence during cartoons, or containing specially crafted audio that blows out your speakers, and the TV station just shrugs and says they try their best to stop these things but they can’t stop everything?

Imagine a TV ad that tries to make your phone call a 1-900 number so they can rip you off, and the station says they don’t know where it came from but they’re trying real hard to put a stop to it. And somehow watching the ads themselves before broadcasting them never crosses their mind.

[josephg]

It’s worse than that. Imagine a TV ad which sends malicious code that gets executed to your television, which profiles the hardware in your TV and sends information about your viewing habits (tied to a unique ID) back to the advertiser.

In any other context we would call this a security vulnerability. I think that label also applies here.

[Spooky23]

You don’t need to, it happens already. Many TVs do screen grabs and send everything you do to the manufacturer or partners.

[zeta0134]

My Vizio's built-in software tries to do that. There's a reason it's not allowed to connect to wifi.

[DCoder]

When you say "it's not allowed", do you trust its own settings? Are you sure it's not doing something like [0]? How do you even protect against that?

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bpr6xs/if_you_choo...

[zeta0134]

I bought a new wifi router and never told the Vizio the new credentials. If it manages to somehow figure out how to log onto the new router, and transmit the data about how I don't own cable service and mostly use it to play retro games? I'm going to be kindof impressed really; at that point, Vizio can have the data.

[islon]

My wifi router has an interface that shows every connected device and I can blacklist them based on their physical address.

[DCoder]

In the post I linked to, the TV in a similar situation was happily connecting to someone else's (open) WiFi network nearby. You can't really block those…

[SmellyGeekBoy]

Don't buy a "smart" TV?

[cerebellum42]

Isn't every decent TV these days a smart TV? Not exactly practical advice

[anoncake]

WPA?

[jacobush]

I guess with GDPR.

[koolba]

I bet you could do that with an ad that plays “Alexa- call 1-900-555-1234”.

[baroffoos]

The state of web ads is closer to the public pinboard only instead of having ads for grandmas couch its Mr CEO trying every trick to drain your money and track you.

[manigandham]

Tv spots are very limited. Digital ad impressions number in the billions with 10s of millions of ad creatives. It’s not the same situation.

[mikeash]

The only reason it’s not the same situation is because they’re willing to throw their users under the bus for a little extra cash. If they wanted to exert more control, they absolutely could. Ads would cost more and we’d see fewer distinct ads as a result.

[manigandham]

That is absolutely not the only reason. Digital ads work entirely different from the TV medium and its more than "a little extra cash".

No single publisher today really has the power to change much, no matter how big they are. The issue likes with adtech (like Google) and advertisers.

[mikeash]

Digital ads could work where every single one is vetted by people before it’s served to any users. There is no reason it can’t work this way, other than it being a lot cheaper to skip that step.

[manigandham]

All creatives (and the root templates of dynamically construted ones) are actually audited on the advertiser-facing platforms before they ever get to the publisher.

Unfortunately running javascript means these ads can do anything at any time and change into malware. Other than adding some technical guardrails, the best practice would be to ban bad actors (of which many are known and usually the same shady people) but many large adtech companies look the other way because it makes money and they have no consequences.

Malware and adfraud is primarily a business problem, not a technical one.

[pushpop]

Yet adverts on porn sites do operate as per our wish list:

* adverts are vetted by a human

* adverts are not allowed to inject JavaScript.

There have been a few interesting blog posts from businesses outside of the adult entertainment industry where they discuss just how work is involved in getting an advert approved on adult sites.

It’s a sad state of affairs when an adblocker is less required on porn sites than it is on Stack Overflow.

[manigandham]

All major ad networks audit every single creative. The problem is javascript can change at anytime, and the publisher is the most exposed and also the most removed to be able to discover and mitigate. There have been some movements to whitelist the JS providers but volume is incentivized so most networks look the other way for now.

Adult ads are definitely not better and are served by even looser networks that allow anything. That industry has pioneered things like popunders, clickjacking, and monetizing every possible action on a window while serving as the primary vector for malware and browser bitcoin mining. I'm not sure what blog posts you've read but the only strict standards they would have is on getting paid.

[wdr1]

Or -- the more expensive ads don't justify the ROI, meaning advertisers don't buy them, meaning fewer ads, but less content.

[simongr3dal]

If you can't manage to oversee it because of the scale you don't deserve to take advantage of the scale.

[manigandham]

That sounds nice but is neither realistic or even sensible. There are other solutions like sandboxing to prevent access to features, it's not an unsolvable problem.

[bamboozled]

Well I would argue if billions will see the content, that gives more reason to have it checked over before serving no?

[manigandham]

Billions? No single creative is seen by that many. In fact, with dynamic creative optimization (DCO) and all the optimization that happens, you can easily get creatives that are custom generated and only see by a few individuals or even a single person.

[luckylion]

The comment was referencing the parent: Digital ad impressions number in the billions with 10s of millions of ad creatives

[manigandham]

I wrote both comments. There are billions of impressions but a single creative is not seen by that many. The point is that the scale is too large to validate on the publisher side.