News Banner ads spread viruses

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/11/16/banner_ads_spread_viruses/1

Browsers of legitimate sites such as Canada.com and MLB.com may find an unpleasant surprise on the sites - a virus contained in the banner ads.

 

A modified hosts file combined with NoScript pretty much keeps me safe IMO.

 

What about the ad's around bit-tech, can we ba assured they don't contain any nastys?

Sam

 

I LOVE my ad and banner blocker even more now. Even Bit-Tech is annoying with all those animations going off everywhere. But I am careful about where I go and don't run a virus program. It seems most malware just disables them anyway.

 

I know disabling ads and not clicking on them hurts sites like Bit-Tech*, but web advertising is becoming so much more invasive these days. Video ads which slow page loading. Flashing, blinking and audio ads making it difficult to concentrate on page contents. I used to disable web ads in the days of 56k, but these days I do it for a quiet life.

I always felt that there was a threat of malware or something nasty coming from advertising. It wants you to buy something, but I just won't part with my cash if I have a bad feeling about the link.


*Which is disabled if I like the look of the full page art on the font page. Clicked on the Crysis link a couple of days ago.

 

Yes you can, we test internally before putting stuff live on the site.

 

We also don't use DoubleClick

 

ugh, yet another reason to addblock the living crap out of the internet

(and off course, run linux bwahahahahahahahahaha)

 

Giving it some thought, ads wouldn't be so bad if they were actually useful.

Say, for example, hardware ads on bit which gave you multiple click through options. Personally I have a number of trusted places I'd rather buy hardware from on the internet, but if banner ads gave you more information; multiple resellers, listed prices, p+p, availability etc, it would make them more of a service than a hindrance.

 

^^ Silver51^^ makes a good point.

I'm running AVG even tho its not the best... it eats ALOT of cpu horse power.
*Thats why I want a tri core! :b I dont care if its a failed quad core*

 

I can't see this news title nor the comment count on the front page.... Is there anything wrong?
I've tried on IE and FireFox...

 

I got this the other day - I was on PC Mag or Download.com or something and a new window opened from nowhere, pretended to do a spyware scan, found OMG BAD SPYWARE and then downloaded an exe to my desktop.

I laughed though, since i was on OS X at the time

Don't worry - the site is cached. It will catch up (it has now)

 

Ditto, Couldn't agree more.

 

So do many of my ex's.

Seriously, that sucks though. But not uncommon, I suppose.

 

woot

omg, thank you! there's enough of their crap on the internet as it is!

 

I was about to say the same thing

 

I don't like ads, 1 in 100 are actually useful

 

Well thats good to know then, cheers for answering.

Sam

 

I don't mind the ads on Bit-tech as its not intrusive and doesn't freeze-up waiting for a response from an ad-server, ie Hexus.

 

it could be worse. they could do those underlined keyword things that pop up when you scroll over them. most annoying thing EVER.