C'mon Afterdawn!

Google is so full of crap...a quote from the article:

"When our automated system is able to identify a problem, we immediately stop serving the affected ads, and then work to refine our security measures to help capture and disable similar ads for all DoubleClick publishers and advertisers"

They know that they can never prevent all of these java-based malware ads. The only way they will ever make their ads safe is to go back to a GIF/JPG-only ad requirement. Just an image and a hyperlink that only activates when it is clicked. Can't make your ad using GIF? Tough luck!

They should post something like this on their site: "We are not going to risk our reputation for your company, especialy if the first thing you do is to spend money writing a java-based ad that could have been made more affordably, efficiently, and safely as an image file; the only reason to do that is to infect, confuse, trick, or at least annoy the users"

This is the only "Security Measure" that can stop all of this, and it needs to be implemented quickly. As it is, many people have become frustrated enough with all of this that they block just about everything but images, css, and html. It is already so bad that it is now safer to download pirated software than to browse the web without blocking everything (even the various Flash and Java things that are wanted).

In conclusion, these companies know that they are enabling these problems, and they refuse to do anything about them because they know that these malware artists represent a good amount of revenue to them. Yeah, they might remove something that is a blatent virus from time to time, but they will not even consider removing something that is non-viral, but that spawns a non-closable "pop-in" that blocks the site it is on.

I wouldn't even mind all this crap if there were not so many laws against freedom on the net...but there are laws to protect these virus pedlers! If I were to DOS attack a company that is attacking millions of ordinary users, I would be the criminal!

 

I finally found a good fix to both prevent the evil ads, and to prevent all the ads from starting to download in the first place. All I had to do was to add a few hundred domains to my hosts file.

Here is the list I used: http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/

 

I tried that...but ABP still downloads the ads even when they are not displayed, sometimes freezing the page load in the process. This prevents the ad servers from being contacted in the first place.

 

That was probably my problem...I wanted to block all the ads that cause problems...and from what you say, ABP gets overloaded with all the problematic ads on this site. My method works on all the ads, without the need for ABP. Plus, it makes the page load a lot faster, as about 95% of all the download speed used for afterdawn goes to advertising (again, ABP does not stop the ads from downloading; only from displaying). Oh, and I don't even have to select the ads I want blocked...because they are never even loaded the first time.