Oh Snap

Ron Wyden is calling for ads to be blocked from all government systems, because of their role in serving up malware:

A US Senator trying to eradicate the Internet scourge known as malvertising is proposing that all federal agencies block ads delivered to worker computers unless advertisers can ensure their networks are free of content that contains malicious code.

In a letter sent today, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden asked White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Rob Joyce to begin discussions with advertising industry officials to ensure ads displayed on websites can't be used to infect US government computers. If, after 180 days, Joyce isn't "completely confident" the industry has curbed the problem, Wyden asked that Joyce direct the US Department of Homeland Security to issue a directive "requiring federal agencies to block the delivery to employees' computers of all Internet ads containing executable code."

"Malware is increasingly delivered through code embedded in seemingly innocuous advertisements online," Wyden wrote. "Individuals do not even need to click on ads to get infected: this malicious software, including ransomware, is delivered without any interaction by the user."

You have to figure that there is a LOT of people who surf the web during their lunch hour, and if ads are blocked, internet firms will take a major hit.

Some Perspective………

Alleged Russian government Facebook ads were marginally more than one-two thousandth of Clinton and Trump ads during the election.

Obviously, we can talk about how a butterfly flapping its wings in Malawi can create a hurricane, but the effects of this "massive" Russian interference

Russian information troll farm the Internet Research Agency spent just 0.05 percent as much on Facebook ads as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s campaigns combined in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, yet still reached a massive audience. While there might have been other Russian disinformation groups, the IRA spent $46,000 on pre-election day Facebook ads compared to $81 million spent by Clinton and Trump together, discluding political action committees who could have spent even more than that on the campaigns’ behalf.

Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch revealed these figures today during the Senate Intelligence Committee’s hearing with Facebook, Twitter and Google about Russian election interference.

Without counting PACs, the top campaigns spent 1,760X more on election ads than one group of Russian meddlers puts the situation into context. The IRA ad buy was small by comparison. This aligns with Stretch’s main talking point that Russian propaganda content was a tiny fraction of the content and ads seen on Facebook. This revelation could put more focus on organically posted propaganda.

The Democratic Party is focusing on this stuff, and avoiding a meaningful examination of how it failed and why.

I can understand why they are doing this:  Any search for incompetence will lead to a lot of folks working for the Democratic establishment getting VERY well deserved pink slips.

Absent a meaningful autopsy of the 2016 debacle though, the party will continue to pull defeat from the jaws of victory.

This is Kind of Tempting

Someone has discovered that the Showtime premium TV network had JavaScript code placed on its page that mined crypto currency for an as yet unknown entity:

The websites of US telly giant CBS's Showtime contained JavaScript that secretly commandeered viewers' web browsers over the weekend to mine cryptocurrency.

The flagship Showtime.com and its instant-access ShowtimeAnytime.com sibling silently pulled in code that caused browsers to blow spare processor time calculating new Monero coins – a privacy-focused alternative to the ever-popular Bitcoin. The hidden software typically consumed as much as 60 per cent of CPU capacity on computers visiting the sites.

The scripts were written by Code [Coin] Hive, a legit outfit that provides JavaScript to website owners: webmasters add the code to their pages so that they can earn slivers of cash from each visitor as an alternative to serving adverts to generate revenue. Over time, money mined by the Code-Hive-hosted scripts adds up and is transferred from Coin Hive to the site's administrators. One Monero coin, 1 XMR, is worth about $92 right now.

Let me start by saying that I won't be putting code like this on my site.

I am considering placing an additional button on my tip jar (aka Matthew's Saroff's Beer Fund), but it would take the form of another donation button, since the revenue from Google™ Adsense™ is so pathetic.

If I do this, it will be voluntary, another button to click on the page, and I might occasionally nag my reader(s) to click the button.

As always, note that this post should in no way be construed as an inducement or a request for my reader(s) to click on any ad that they would not otherwise be inclined to investigate further. This would be a violation of the terms of service for Google™ Adsense™.

More of This

A group of people on Twitter known as "Sleeping Giants" has taken to visiting Breitbart, taking screenshots showing the ads and then naming and shaming the advertisers:

Hardly anyone paid attention last November when a strangely named Twitter account, Sleeping Giants, sent its first tweet into the digisphere. “Are you aware that you’re advertising on Breitbart, the alt-right’s biggest champion, today?” read the tweet, aimed at a consumer lending outfit called Social Finance. “Are you supporting them publicly?”

Within 30 minutes, Social Finance replied, tweeting that it would stop running ads on Breitbart.

It was, it turns out, the start of an odd, and oddly effective, social media campaign against Breitbart, the influential conservative news site headed by Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former campaign chairman and ex-chief White House strategist.

………

Sleeping Giants’ basic approach is to make Breitbart’s advertisers aware that they are, in fact, Breitbart advertisers. Many apparently don’t know this, given that Web ads are often bought through third-party brokers, such as Google and Facebook. The brokers then distribute them to a network of websites according to algorithms that seek a specific target audience (say, young men) or a set number of impressions.

………

So when an ad appears on Breitbart, Sleeping Giants or one of its 109,000 Twitter followers and 35,000 Facebook followers flag the advertiser, often accompanied by an image of the sponsors’ ad next to a Breitbart story.

The other day, for example, a Sleeping Giants follower tweeted at Country Inns, informing the hotel chain that it was advertising on “the racist Breitbart site.” Within a day, the company tweeted back: “Thank you for your concern. . . . We have added Breitbart to our blacklist of ads.”

This apparently happens a lot. Sleeping Giants’ database lists nearly 2,900 companies that have declared Breitbart off limits since November — an astonishing figure, though one hard to confirm because some ad buys recur. Nevertheless, it’s not an implausible number. During one 24-hour period, advertisers such as the air-conditioning manufacturer Rheem, transport operator Caltrain, Sutter Health Plus and Rose Medical Center of Denver all publicly acknowledged that they had blacklisted Breitbart in response to a Sleeping Giants tweet.

………

The group decided to single out Breitbart almost by happenstance. “It really happened as a reaction to Steve Bannon’s rise,” the spokesman says. “We weren’t familiar with Breitbart at the time and were obviously pretty shocked at the articles. . . . To be honest, we weren’t familiar with [other conservative] sites,” so those weren’t even considered, he says.

The group has raised about $1,500 from T-shirt sales and about $7,000 from an online fundraiser, but it otherwise operates with little overhead, he notes. “If I had a nickel for every claim that we’re being funded by [liberal billionaire activist] George Soros, I’d be well off. It’s crazy. There’s not much need for funding. Tweeting is free.”

Two points here:

• People have been writing to advertisers about where their ads appear since Madison Avenue was a cow path.
• The fact that the big players in the online advertising market are this cavalier with how they serve up ads.  If you buy ads, be aware of this, or maybe beware of this; your choice.

I think that I might know someone who knows who these guys are.

The Seinfeld Candidate

The Seinfeld show was famously a show about nothing.

Look at John Ossoff's latest ad.

This is the most vapid and content free ad that I've seen since ……… Well ……… Since Hillary's ads during the Presidential campaign.

It appears that the Democratic Party has not learned its lesson, even a bad something beats nothing:

Spocko Did This a Decade Ago

10 years ago, Spocko, the blogger who runs Spocko's Brain, started to send records to advertisers showing what hate-talk radio jocks were showing immediately before and after these ads.

He asked a simple question: Do you really want your products associated with this?

It now appears that it has dawned on online activists that they can do the same thing with online news.

It's even easier, you just have to email a screen shot with their ad and a headline:

One day in late November, an earth and environmental science professor named Nathan Phillips visited Breitbart News for the first time. Mr. Phillips had heard about the hateful headlines on the site — like “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy” — and wondered what kind of companies would support such messages with their ad dollars. When he clicked on the site, he was shocked to discover ads for universities, including one for the graduate school where he’d received his own degree — Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. “That was a punch in the stomach,” he said.

Why would an environmental science program want to be promoted on a site that denies the existence of climate change? Mr. Phillips figured — correctly — that Duke officials did not know where their ads were appearing, so he sent a tweet to Duke about its association with the “sexist racist” site. Eventually, after a flurry of communication with the environment department, he received a satisfying resolution — an assurance that its ads would no longer show up on Breitbart.

………

In mid-November, a Twitter group called Sleeping Giants became the hub of the new movement. The Giants and their followers have communicated with more than 1,000 companies and nonprofit groups whose ads appeared on Breitbart, and about 400 of those organizations have promised to remove the site from future ad buys.

“We’re focused on Breitbart News right now because they’re the biggest fish,” a founder of Sleeping Giants told me. (He requested anonymity because some members of the group work in the digital-media industry.) Eventually, Sleeping Giants would like to broaden its campaign to take on a menagerie of bad actors, but that would require a much bigger army of Giants, and “it has only been a month since we started doing this,” he told me when I talked to him in December. Then he added, “This has been the longest month of my life."

Advertisers have been fleeing Rush Limbaugh's show for precisely the same reason ever since he tried to slut shame Sandra Fluke, and it appears from the silence over the numbers, last time around they were trumpeting the numbers, that he took a significant pay cut.

Everyone has a right to free speech, but that doesn't mean that they have a right for you to support their sponsors.

My Heart Bleeds Borscht for You C%$# Suckers

It appears that the advertising industry is having a major butthurt over EU requirements that people have a modicum of control over information that is collected about them:

Europe's new privacy regime is likely to disrupt global digital advertising by preventing companies from using an individual's data unless they have direct consent from the consumer.

The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) doesn't come into force until May 2018, but when it does it will have a profound effect on businesses. The regulation will apply to data about every one of the EU's 500 million citizens, wherever in the world it is processed or stored.

Stephan Loerke, CEO of the World Federation of Advertisers, said, "I'm surprised more marketers have not woken up to the implications of GDPR. The new regulations will be a significant challenge for the ecosystem and it's difficult to forecast how technology will adjust."

Put simply, targeting and tracking companies will need to get user consent somehow. Everything that invisibly follows a user across the internet will, from May 2018, have to pop up and make itself known in order to seek express permission from individuals.

………

Companies can be fined as much as 4% of global revenues for breaching the regulations. They must also report hacking incidents within 72 hours and ensure parental consent for under-16s.

This is all common sense stuff, and it's done everywhere else, but the only folks don't want to do it, because ……… Internet.

Would you like some cheese with that whine?

Google Goes to the Dark Side

The firm that used to have the motto, "Don't be evil," has just decided to renege on their promise not to use personally identifiable tracking:

When Google bought the advertising network DoubleClick in 2007, Google founder Sergey Brin said that privacy would be the company’s “number one priority when we contemplate new kinds of advertising products.”

And, for nearly a decade, Google did in fact keep DoubleClick’s massive database of web-browsing records separate by default from the names and other personally identifiable information Google has collected from Gmail and its other login accounts.

But this summer, Google quietly erased that last privacy line in the sand – literally crossing out the lines in its privacy policy that promised to keep the two pots of data separate by default. In its place, Google substituted new language that says browsing habits “may be” combined with what the company learns from the use Gmail and other tools.

The practical result of the change is that the DoubleClick ads that follow people around on the web may now be customized to them based on your name and other information Google knows about you. It also means that Google could now, if it wished to, build a complete portrait of a user by name, based on everything they write in email, every website they visit and the searches they conduct.

The magic of the market will not fix this ……… ever.

This Has to Be the Best Campaign Ad of the Season

Jason Kander, Democrat running for the Senate in Missouri, just made incumbent Republican Roy Blunt his bitch:



That is gonna leave a mark.

The Internal Polls Must be Fascinating

I don't know what the Hillary Clinton campaign is seeing in their polls, but one of her PACs is dumping 10½ million dollars into Pennsylvania.

The Republicans haven't won a Presidential election in Pennsylvania since 1988.

Obviously, it is illegal for an independent PAC to coordinate, this has no relation to what the Clinton campaign is thinking (and according to Gilbert and Sullivan, married men never flirt).

If you believe that, then I have some swamp land in Florida you might be interested in purchasing.

One can look at this as the Clinton campaign taking nothing for granted, (glass half full) but if the past is precis, and panic mode does seem to be how the Clinton campaign operates, so I am inclined to see this glass as half empty.

Be Afraid. Be Very, Very Afraid

Over at the Washington Post, Paul Schwartzman and Jenna Johnson look at the Trump Campaign, and they discover that there is actually a very sophisticated and measured messaging process, not the shoot from the lip perception of "The Donald":

He referred to Mexicans as “rapists,” questioned Sen. John McCain’s status as a war hero, ridiculed the physical appearance of his opponents, falsely claimed that “thousands” in New Jersey cheered as the World Trade Center fell and, this week, called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States.

Despite predictions that such searing, divisive rhetoric and the resulting outcry would cripple his campaign, Donald Trump’s insults and controversial proposals have propelled him to the forefront of the 2016 presidential race — and kept him there.

And while it may seem like a lurching, chaotic campaign, Trump is, for the most part, a disciplined and methodical candidate, according to a Washington Post review of the businessman’s speeches, interviews and thousands of tweets and retweets over the past six months.

Trump delivers scores of promises, diatribes and insults at breakneck speed. He attacks a regular cast of villains including undocumented immigrants, Muslims, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, his GOP rivals and the media. He keeps the narrative arc of each controversy alive with an endless stream of statements, an unwillingness to back down even when he has misstated the facts — and a string of attacks against those who criticize him.

All the while, his supporters see a truth-talking problem solver unlike the traditional politicians who have let them down. Spending remarkably little, he dominates yet another news cycle, and his Republican rivals languish in his shadow.

………

The Post’s analysis found several qualities to Trump’s approach. First is a pattern of experimentation that suggests that he is testing his insults and attacks as he goes along. Like a team of corporate marketers, Trump understands the value of message-testing — but he appears to do it spontaneously, behind the lectern and on live television.

It appears that there is a method to this madness.

To me this is a hell of a lot scarier than him being some loud mouth who accidentally captured the Zeitgeist of the Republican Party, because it means that the next time, it could be worse.

From the Department of, "It's About F%$#ing Time"

The AMA has reversed itself, and called for a ban on prescription drug advertisements:

Drug companies should stop advertising directly to consumers, a major U.S. doctors group said Tuesday, declaring that the ads often push patients to more expensive treatments and inflate demand for therapies.

In a vote Tuesday at the group’s annual meeting in Atlanta, the American Medical Association called for an end to television commercials and magazine spreads that are used to pitch prescription drugs. It’s a change from the AMA’s previous position, which said the ads were fine as long as they were educational and accurate. The U.S. is one of the few countries that allows direct-to-consumer drug ads.

The vote “reflects concerns among physicians about the negative impact of commercially driven promotions, and the role that marketing costs play in fueling escalating drug prices,” AMA Board Chair-elect Patrice A. Harris said in a statement announcing the vote result. “Direct-to-consumer advertising also inflates demand for new and more expensive drugs, even when these drugs may not be appropriate.”

I am not sure why the AMA has reversed itself, but it is long overdue.

However, given the expansive view of business free speech held by the Supreme Court, I am not sure precisely how one would enforce such a ban.

Advertisement Octagon. Only One Shall Emerge Victorious!

Coneheads


Brady Bunch

I really like these two ads that invoke classic TV, the Bradu Bunch and the the Coneheads from Saturday Night Live.

They are both brilliant.

Casting Danny Trejo as Marsha and Steve Buscemi as Jan Brady is genius, and their seamless integration into an existing scene is magnificent.

Conversely, the Coneheads commercial splices seamlessly into the already well known "Jake, from State Farm" ad.

I cannot decide which is the better exemplar of the classic TV based advertisement form.

Why are Songs from "The Who" Suddenly Appearing in Ads?

Over the past month or so, I've seen what seems like dozens of ads featuring songs by "The Who."

I've heard Baba O'Reilly, My Generation, and Eminence Front, among others.

What's up with that?

This is the Best Subway Ad Ever.

This is positively brilliant.

Also, 8 quid for a beer, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

London is a pricy place.

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Buy a Truck, Because Your Penis is Too Small

Advertising, Exploiting People with Insecurity About Their Manhood for more than a Century

In the conflation of automobiles and manhood that is the American car advertisement, the latest GM ad, which doesn't even bother making the juxtaposition between one's choice in transportation and one's manhood, and they pretty explicitly state it.

The video attached shows hoe they bring in a "focus group" of young women who look at pictures, and they universally find the guy in front of a truck sexier than the same guy in front of a hatchback.

First, they obviously had to find a group of women dumb enough not to think, "Hey, these are the same guys?  Are you trying to imply that I am a vacuous shallow bitch?"

Seriously. Just how tiny does a potential car buyer's penis have to be for this ad to work?

My Thoughts on this Year's Super Bowl

Let me ask you, who are you gonna believe, Tom Brady, the greatest man in all of humanity, or a bunch of a**h**** on Twitter?

First, I do not have a dog in this hunt, though Sharon^* does, being a die hard Pats fan since before Tom Brady.

I am watching for the ads.

Remember that article by Warren Sharp in Slate that said that the Patriots fumble numbers were mathematically impossible?

Yeah, not so much:

The data science community responded with a number of rebuttals (I put together a roundup of my favorite ones below). Collectively, these posts did a great job of breaking down the Statistics 101 problems with Sharp’s original analyses. But even if Sharp had been less sloppy, it would have been right to take issue with the larger implication of his work — that any major outlier, if shown to be statistically significant, should be seen as evidence of rule-breaking.

Barry Bonds and Lance Armstrong were outliers. But so is Lionel Messi. And Phil Jackson. And the San Antonio Spurs. It would be irresponsible — and depressing — to assume every incredible performance equals cheating. Celebrating outliers is one of the best parts about being a sports fan.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that, in cases such as these, our traditional methods of determining statistical significance can severely underestimate the odds of something happening due to chance. That’s because of the so-called Wyatt Earp Effect, named after the frontier lawman known for taking part in lots of gunfights without getting hurt. Earp’s feat seems improbable in hindsight, but given the sheer number of shootouts in the Old West, it was actually pretty likely that somebody would make it out alive.

Likewise, it’s difficult to estimate the true odds against a team preventing fumbles to the extent Sharp originally suggested New England did. Knowing particulars about the Patriots after the fact can bias us into computing the odds that a specific team would have a specific fumble record over a specific period of years. But the real question regarding New England’s outlier-ness should surround the odds that any team would post any outlier statistic over any span of seasons. And the probability of that happening, as you may imagine, is a lot higher than the odds of a very specific set of circumstances.

Here were some of the responses to Sharp’s posts:

………

• The harshest counterargument belonged to data scientist Drew Fustin. Fustin challenged Sharp’s choice to exclude dome teams (Sharp’s own post says outdoor teams barely fumble more often than those based in domes), instead looking at fumble rates across all teams in outdoor games only — whereupon the Patriots don’t even rank first in the NFL at fumble avoidance over the 2010-2014 period. He also questions whether Sharp’s decision to use that 2010-14 period was a case of cherry-picking the timeframe that would make the Patriots look most like an extreme outlier.

(emphasis mine)

Seriously, it's a tempest in a teapot, and distracting all of us from the true meaning of the Super Bowl:  To sell us useless sh%$ that we really do not need and to pump up the profile of advertising firms.

^*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

I Think I'm Going to be Sick

I'm watching TV, and an ad for Jackson Hewett comes on, talking about all their offices, including about a thousand in Wal-Marts.

The background music is, I've Been Working on the Railroad, and it's sung by Pete Seeger.

Seriously, Pete Seeger, who would never do this, and must be spinning on his grave over this.

I confirmed this via a Google search, and it appears that his family licensed this use.

It's not some sort of bullsh%$ record label stealing for the artist bullsh%$.

Stop the world.  I want to get off.

I am so angry that I could chew iron and spit nails.

Is it Just Me………

Or is the latest Cadillac Escalade ad, the one that uses David Bowie's song Fame, the stupidest ad of the year so far?

I Am a Whore, Not a Slut, Act Accordingly

After I wrote a post about the abuse of the IP process and price gouging for a potential HIV prophylaxis treatment, I got an email from a PR person with a link to a promotional graphic for the product, and a request that I post it.

No offer of payment.

Not even an offer of swag.

I realize that my readership numbers probably don't rate a T-shirt, but I wasn't even offered a f%$#ing key fob.

Seriously, if you are not going to read my article, and know that I condemned what your employers are doing, at least have the decency of offering some form of remuneration.

It's a matter of pride.

To quote fellow engineer Montgomery Scott, "This was a matter of pride."