That doesn't match my experience. For example, I recently had Meta scrape robots.txt disallowed paths. On some page they claimed they respect it but they don't. And yes, all the IPs they used to connect to me (they used a different /64 network for each connection) were owned by Meta, it was not someone pretending to be them.
Do you not see you're projecting? If I say two different types of bird are "the same to me" because they both shit on my head, that doesn't make them the same birds, that just means I only care about what they are to me, i.e. the self-centeredness you accuse me of.
You said "for me they are the same". Not in reply to someone saying "to me they're different", but to someone saying they're very different in nature, which they are. That's not a perspective, that's changing the subject and making it about you.
>You said "for me they are the same". Not in reply to someone saying "to me they're different"
You are arguing with another user; it was I who said it.
They have some differences, yet they are the same in a lot of ways. Some people cannot see it because they have been educated a certain way. Lots of people in China really believe they are right and the US is wrong. Same in Korea, Same in Rusia. Similary, a lot of people in the US are educated to believe the US is "the best country in the world", "the good guys", "always right"; they are not.
I can agree to to it with the qualifier "in a lot of ways", just not without. We learn about a lot of US crimes by the reporting of US citizens and journalists, a lot of which is available to buy and re-print within the US. Meanwhile, people in China still cannot simply remember Tiananmen, much less publish books about it.
Do you even understand what you wrote? Because it's practically incoherent.
> They are not what they are to you, they are not just whatever you care about, they are what they actually are.
You wrote that. It's a useless comment, adds nothing to the discussion and reads like you are trying to be clever and failing at it. Learn to articulate.
I think we're fighting against the modern world here. My 4S did and still does take the last great iPhone photos, before the processing pipeline ruined it for me, with over-sharpening, smeared noise-reduction and color flattening.
Thankfully we have access to raw DNGs in phones after the 4S, so we can create our own image processing pipeline.
But for "out of the camera" JPGs, the 4S is still supreme.
They have been putting thousands of scam adverts on our website for some time. Think "you have been looking at xxx and must pay a $100 fine" type popup nonsense. Hosted on the following websites:
azurestaticapps.net
azurewebsites.net
herokuapp.com
ondigitalocean.app
digitaloceanspaces.com
netlify.app
Google doesn't allow you to block these domains, because they consider them "TLDs" (the scammers use a new subdomain every day eg abcdefg.herokuapp.com). The scammers get banned and return the next day with a new account and subdomain (repeat every day). Therefore we cannot stop them. It's bizarre and baffling. But Google Adsense had to go.
I created a tool that automatically follows ads to try to find scams.
But that was usually reserved to typosquat domain ads or ads on porn websites.
I didn't know scammers used normal page ads too.
I know tech support scams used to use google search ads, but I don't think they do that as much anymore, so maybe they have moved onto things like adsense.
These scammers usually do IP address checks to check for residential IP before showing the scam, and some also do some basic fingerprinting checks, so that is how they get past detection. That said, it shouldn't be too difficult for google to do some better checks if they actually cared.
Yep. I Agree. I believe it's a question of economics, not technical challenges.
Google is absolutely smart enough to make these attacks un-economical. IMO they are unwilling to incur the loss in revenue this would involve (false positives, banned resellers etc).
Another major issue is google safe browsing whitelists many of these subdomains that the attackers like to host their scam pages on.
As a result, even though "Enhanced" safe browsing can use Gemini Nano to do client side detection of scams and then flag it in google safe browsing for everyone, the entire domain and all subdomains are whitelisted, so that detection never seems to actually fire.
https://blog.google/security/using-ai-to-stop-tech-support-s...
I'm not sure which domains this applies to, but it seems to apply to most of the domains that these scammers actually like to use.
> These scammers usually do IP address checks to check for residential IP before showing the scam, and some also do some basic fingerprinting checks, so that is how they get past detection.
Same issue with spam sms in my country: I think they geo-locate it so submitting the link to safe browsing project takes way too long
I have the same experience in one of our properties.
We have someone who's checking daily what's there, and they need to vet ads constantly.
It's a lot of anti-fungus advertisement (which made us block health products in general), but also a lot of fake software. Unfortunately we can't afford to block the entire software category.
The problem is that Google has enshittified their service, destroyed their reputation for quality control, and that information is very slow to disseminate.
Brands work as a trust heuristic, so a fallen brand continues to trade on its old reputation for a while.
Personally, I'd put twenty quid a month in a microtransaction wallet to cover hosting costs instead of ads, but that's not an option. I already pay for search.
I hate ad technology but it does, to a small extent, empower creators. Is there a better way? I don't think geocities is coming back.
Google is part of a cartel of ad companies.
Most websites do not have any option left.
To blame small companies for choosing big tech monopolies is unfair and solves nothing.
Strong regulations and splitting monopolies are the real solutions here.
And if Google breaks the law someone from the company needs to go to prison, too. Knowingly helping criminals is a crime itself.
Huh? You have options? Tiny radio stations of 30 years ago all had their own ad department with a salesman who's job was to find advertisers. Most website shave enough reach to fund the own ads.
Also, if you along are not big enough, it was common to join with others (beware of anti-trust laws). You only need a few websites on your new less dodgy ad platforms and those who want to advertise will run to you because you control impressions. You probably won't get as rich as Google running a new ad company, but there is plenty of money to make a nice living selling non-dodgy ads.
I'm curious why Google wouldn't want to block those domains. I find it hard to imagine any site that would be using only one of those domains and would be legitimate to purchase from. I understand people having blogs etc on a domain like that, and obviously development stuff, but nothing with purchase intent.
As a publisher it really sucks. The DSPs must know these ads are shit. It would be trivial to filter them with a bit of AI.
I've asked my Google partnered SSP to disallow ethically bankrupt ads like gambling, alcohol etc. They say "we've asked the partners to block those categories"... and then it just keeps happening. They're either unable or unwilling to help.
I had to take ads down for several days at my own expense due to rogue ads. The ads are now in safe frames which doesn't pay quite as well but I'm okay with it.
A friend of mine runs a web agency company (you know, the oldskool wordpress dev shop). Clients from almost all industries, some very high traffic & publicly visible (think magazines). About two years ago they recommended all their clients remove random ads (primarily via Adsense) as they were injecting crypto-scams and porny/gaming ads for trashy site/apps on sites where they really shouldn't be. Some clients completely dropped it just fine (meaning, no replacement ad engine), while the bigger clients are using purely targeted/specified ads where they know the brand being advertised, typically from within in their own industries, and no more random ads being shown. People are fed up with ads/Adsense. Just the the stuff kids see while playing mobile games are atrocious.
It doesn't practically matter whether the ads are from google. They're shown on a third party site, not using google won't get rid of them, only not using that site will (or installing an adblocker...). Users very reasonably blame the site, who have direct agency to remove the ads.
That seems fixable. When people include this JS garbage, have a header/title/etc stating that this is Google's professional opinion. Bake it into a library offering enough other features that a large number of people are inclined to use it.
- The big problem is that malicious ads are being displayed without appropriate attribution
- Add that attribution -- blame Google (or, supposing the ads are good, credit Google; a good header goes a long way toward swaying people's opinions)
- But it doesn't matter if a single website appropriately attributes Google's highest/lowest-quality ads. The last step (speculative and hand-wavy) is to incorporate that behaviour in some sort of software more people want to use. If you're fighting alone then you'll lose. If you can convince more people that appropriately crediting Google's advertising successes and blaming their malicious failures is advantageous, you'll (by definition) have more traction in the anti-megacorp-endorsed scams and other life-altering consequences.
Ad viewers are about as empowered as the cow the goes into your cheeseburger. No agency, and no communication mechanism to the rancher’s actual customer.
These companies that abstain from adsense and it’s revenue are WWW vegans.
The second you load JS onto your page, you lose that ability, you know that, right? the scammy ads aren't limited to that tiny little box you designate for ads. Advertisers work around that limitation pretty easily, and you should also probably read AdSense terms of service before doing too much to blame google. Some of the language will surprise you.
hmm thought this was about adwords JS 'intelligently' reading page contents, and when it finds such attribution with some special tags, filters out certain ads...
Calls from law enforcement is laud and clear: BigTech is not doing enough to fight fraud, war and other crimes, they make money from criminals.
Nobody’s yet cared enough to sue them, or their managers at ICC yet. However, eventually an ambitious lawyer will try to make the case, especially if fraud and human trafficking continues to grow like it is.
It does in the sense that they're losing business, as people describe in this thread. But I get your point, Google seems to be enjoying the profits more than the harm to their reputation. If it gets bad enough, maybe they'll rethink.
They're losing business that they don't want. Silicon Valley culture has embraced saying no, firing clients and customers, choosing the right audience, etc. This even fits into finding product-market fit. You don't try to please everyone, and find a well-defined segment. So to Google it might not seem like it's getting bad at all. To them, maybe the trash took itself out, they got rid of that annoying customer who complains about their marketplace, whereas they appreciate the quiet reporting of an ad that's against the ToS...
Oh wow, I am just setting up a new site with the plan on recouping part of the modest running costs with Adsense ads but this is making me reconsider.
Are there any solid, preferably European, alternatives for a site that doesn't really have any traffic yet but a fairly decent growth potential in 3-6 months timeframe?
I suppose the obvious question is: Are you actively profiting from Adsense?
If yes, then ... you are profiting from ... that shite. You must be OK with that and it does sound like you are actively complicit with it, despite your protestations.
If you really think that Adsense is awful and might damage your brand then dump it and don't whine on HN!
OK, that's probably a bit unfair because you are dealing with a monopoly with no recourse to arbitration. That's your real problem.
Ah shit, that one word does change the whole meaning of the sentence. Well, at least we brought attention to it over the course of four comments instead of this just being the first response lol
Classic example of victim blaming. Not the company generating the ad, not the company approving it, but the person who is trying to block it, and then ACTUALLY did stop using Adsense.
Impossible. The majority of websites firewall automated crawler traffic (because of the rise of the bots), only making exceptions for the largest search engines. There is no possibility of starting a new crawler.
It would be interesting to see a decentralised, residential collective that builds and publishes an index. There are surely enough interested people on HN alone that would be willing to run software at home to scrape a small slice of the internet.
The majority of websites try to do that but they do not catch as much traffic as they think they do. A starting point for a scraper is to run it on your home connection in an undetectable web driver framework such as zendriver.
This was a knee jerk response to the first paragraph. They weren't talking about a general crawler, but a subset of Wikipedia, stack overflow, programming docs and github. You can download archives of all of those except github, and github could be queried using the api or GH cli
There's probably nothing he can do about it, the same way Microsoft Teams doesn't have an explicit "Make Teams Crap" policy, it presumably happens in spite of the wishes of Microsoft for it not to be crap.
Whatever. The first time someone's complaint makes its way to Nadella's desk, he has the power to stop it. Since that hasn't happened, he's clearly not that concerned OR he's so not in charge that little fiefdoms exist that choose to ignore senior management. Neither is a good look for Nadella.
We have the absurd situation where human-made websites are by default blocking AI training bots (see Cloudflare etc), but AI is creating websites solely to be fed to AI training bots.
So within a few years, most of the ingested website content will be AI.
Is it inevitable that AI companies are going to have start paying to access human content?
Oh ho ho, no. Not to the human content creators. They'll lobby, they'll huff and puff and spend billions until the laws get changed in their favor. One day blocking claude scraper might just "suddenly" become illegal. Oh it won't be phrased as such. There will be excuses and misdirections, but the end result will be what the AI overlords desire.
That's the way to go. Anyone who publishes any of their work in the open web and who values what they are doing should do whatever possible to block the AI scrapers (which is often difficult or impossible, I know) until all that's left for them to feed on is their own garbage.
Let the garbage-spewing machines choke on their own garbage
But that's meaningless because 99% of AI crawlers are "bad bots" which ignore robots.txt and use domestic IPs to circumvent blocks.
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