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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to prove numbers without Google sharing them. But suffice to say... You may recall this blog about fake download button ads: https://security.googleblog.com/2016/02/no-more-deceptive-do...

...That's the Chrome team. But fake download buttons are alive and well at Google AdWords. (Most of them you'll find on sites like paint.net are from Google.) As far as I understand, they aren't even against Google AdWords' policy. Google allows malicious ads which Google says are bad.

And as a computer technician, most malware I remove, I check web history to figure out where they got it. Almost always it's a malicious Google ad at the top of search, which Google has progressively made look more and more like real search results over the years. Great for Google's bottom line, but terrible for everyone else.

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I just went to your website "paint.net" - it redirects to "Warren Paint & Color Co." - which appears to be a paint company in the US.

Did you perhaps mean getpaint.net? That's the download site for Paint.NET, a Windows-only paint program.

I did see an ad there at the top for "FileSendSuite" which does have a download button:

http://i.imgur.com/ed3CKGb.png

To me, it was reasonably clear the link was for FileSendSuite - but perhaps some other people could get mistaken?

If you hit the "x" in the top-right of any ad, you can report an ad (e.g. for being misleading/spammy), or simply say you never want to see that ad again (it gets filtered).

I was referring to the software, yes. Some examples were documented here, and have been seen this year as well in a recent HN discussion: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/03/google-and-paint-net-need...

I absolutely disagree with your suggestion it's "obvious" FileSendSuite is what that download button is for. Notice how the text for the actual name is drastically smaller than the Download command, which is at the top of the ad, so it appears to directly follow the page content above. Notice how it also lacks a border or background so it is more easily mistaken for page content.

I am not inclined to go into the detail here, but I have spoken with Google employees on this issue before. And reporting an ad Google doesn't think violates it's policies is pointless.

From the recent HN discussion on this topic, site owners have confirmed that even if they ban these malicious providers, they're rapidly replaced by other accounts doing the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14336695

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