I know what it was based off of, and I’m saying the numbers are crap. Claiming that eliminating one of their two ad providers will result in a 50% revenue drop is like the RIAA claiming that every downloaded album is a loss of the sale price of that album to the industry. In both cases, things just aren’t that simple, and there are many other factors at play.
50 ads that a bunch of people see are better than 100 ads that no one sees because they’ve blocked them all to protect themselves, is my point.
The SDMB cannot *guarantee *a malware-free experience. But this is *by no means *a universal problem, and in the opinion of me and a lot of other posters here, it behooves the SDMB to do what they can to avoid distributing malware. If that means dropping an ad server that has a *demonstrated inability *to properly screen its advertisements, then that should be the sacrifice they have to make. One or two cases of infectious ads are understandable. *Continuing *to use the same ad server after the third, fourth, fifth, etc.: that, IMO, is unacceptable.
A more equivalent analogy would be avoiding an accident under less than ideal conditions because you have a well maintained car. It does not mean the situation never happens, just that the little extra bit of reaction time or reduced stopping distance can make the difference between a change of underwear and a funeral. It does not make the accident your fault, it just shifts the odds of a bad thing happening a bit in your favor.
I’m not trying to blame the victim here, just trying to point out that this is not an sdmb problem, it is a web problem. Criminals are exploiting the flaws in how the web works to victimize users. The Internet is a wonderful world full of fascinating things, but the same flexibility that allows us these wonderful things can be exploited to harm us as well.
I have always viewed the Internet like a big city, it has good neighborhoods and bad, but bad things still sometimes happen in the good neighborhoods because bad people have the same freedoms to move around the net as we do.
If you’ll note, though, there *are *people here who are reporting being infected *even though *they have the computer equivalent of a “well maintained car.”
Your personal experience does not reflect the growing problem of malicious advertising over the past six months to a year. If you think it does, you need to get out more:
Isn’t that kind of like going to a restaurant that advertises the “Best Hamburgers in the World” and trying to explain to them that it isn’t possible to accurately make that claim?
I wasn’t asking for a snippy retort, I was asking for a cite. Which you provided, so thank you, I guess.
But your own cite shows that the New York Times’ solution to this problem was to pull their ads until they got it figured out. If the NYT can do it, why can’t the SDMB?
Possibly. If you think of a restaurant as akin to a package delivery company that cannot guarantee overnight service but still claims the “best price in town”.
Can we see a breakdown of how much it actually costs to keep this site running? There are plenty of other free boards and sites that are getting by just fine without having to resort to malicious advertising companies.
Between the paid memberships, purchased custom titles and people paying to have their charter membership status restored, I would imagine that it would be enough to keep the site going.
And I would imagine that the company that owns this website would be disinclined to listen to the demands of someone who has no financial interest in their company and who has written things like post #54.
I entirely recognize that these ads are becoming more of a threat. My incredulity is that most other websites are responding in the same way as the SDMB. From your own cite:
Not “a security breach prompted *The NYT *to send a few emails to their adservers to ask them to maybe please stop infecting their visitors with malware, if they would be so kind, and meanwhile they just kept displaying the ads, because, hey, money is money.”
I suspect he meant to say that computers are more complex than refrigerators.
I’m not demanding anything, I’m asking a reasonable question since it’s been said over and over again that they need the ad revenue to keep the site going. All I’m asking for is proof of this statement, not details of their financial records.
And yes, I did blow my lid in that post, but this is frustrating beyond belief that there has not been any action to rectify an on going problem that if continued will eventually be worse for business than pulling an ad provider for a limited time in an attempt to rectify the situation.
That’s not directly related to ads, mind you, but if even large, technical domain registrar can be compromised and serve malware for months, it’s hard to have reasonable expectations that any ad provider or message board can guarantee a malware-free experience.
Unfortunately, I am of the opinion that, at the present time, occasional malware infections are just part of the cost of being on the internet. For my last infection, I had adblock and flashblock running, up to date (as far as I knew, at least) on all programs, and when I got infected, in the course of trying to clean, I think I had three different virus scans (including online scanners), Malwarebytes and Ad-aware all declare me clean even though I wasn’t, and just had to reformat and start over. If all of the professional virus companies don’t have the virus signature updated to be able to see it when I know it’s there, how can I expect ad companies (or Ed) to be able to stop it from being served?
Simple: don’t serve infectable ads. Nothing fancy; just text and images.
Well, yes, there’s *some *plague. But the rats add to the ambiance so! No, I’m sorry, you’ll just have to deal with them scampering about. Wear thicker boots next time, and *do *tell your wife I’m sorry about the buboes.
Well maintained cars, and computers, can still have problems.
Far more people are like ClarkK than you realize. They don’t know whats going on inside, its just a magic black box and the internet flows in from the wall. I see people every day who have immaculate homes and offices but if you open up their PC you have the General Woundwort of dust bunnies living in there.
Remember, if you get infected while browsing the dope, your antivirus software failed you, are you complaining to them too? Nothing in life is 100% Just I can provide a warranty to a customer on a computer but I cannot guarentee that nothing will ever go wrong, just that I will fix it if does.