Malvertising on Microsoft Edge's news feed pushes tech support scams
malwarebytes.com
malwarebytes.com
One day I spent hours going through and blocking each individual news provider from the feed, hoping eventually I'd reach the bottom of the pile and there would be nothing left. It's never ending though.
Are there good third party weather widgets that can live on the taskbar?
Even on my Legion 5 laptop, nothing, though my wife's Legion Y540 does have it. I suspect there's something funky that has it blocked on my Microsoft Account, but I can't imagine what.
The WM itself: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/stack-wm/9p4rj8rl7qg...
And Chrome and Edge makes turning it off non-trivial. Its an AWFUL feature that seems to have been destined for misuse from day one.
Love the Windows UI, but their commitment to putting ads in the OS means the OS is no longer the product. Their users are the product. We all know how this ends.
But why did Microsoft allowed Taboola in the first place despite Taboola's reputation? That's a question that I want to know the answer to.
Are Microsoft really so hurt for cash they're willing to sacrifice their userbase for a few bucks? It seems crazy they'd stake their reputation like this, especially considering their corporate focus.
Microsoft isn't, but somewhere within Microsoft there is probably team who's KPI for the year is "increase Edge ad revenue by $N million". This team is completely removed from the "make Edge a great browser" team.
American here. What’s the beef with Klarna?
It's a scam scheme for financially illiterate people IMO. The fact that it's added into a default browser in a most popular OS in the world adds insult to the injury.
I've even been overdue on a bill (I forgot about it) and they just sent me an email asking to pay, still no fees.
Of course if I had continued to neglect the bill, fees might have started kicking in at some point, but that's no different from any other postpaid service.
If I'm reading this right, the late payment fee is maximum of $7 for their 4 payment thing?
https://cdn.klarna.com/1.0/shared/content/legal/terms/0/en_u...
If you bounce a check or an ACH the fee seems to be $27 (but not more than you owe) for their 30 day plan: https://cdn.klarna.com/1.0/shared/content/legal/terms/0/en_u...
Their pay over time thing seems to be 0-29.99% which seems in line with credit cards?
I mean, sure, I guess making it easy for people who make bad financial choices isn't great... but it's also easy for people who are making good financial choices.
Is there even a single corporation on earth that won't eventually do this? All it takes for this to happen is some executive or manager deciding they want a bonus. Shareholders demand perpetual growth and by god they're gonna deliver it.
I'd say it should be illegal to profitably harm people like this but everybody knows these people always get away with everything anyway. They already break existing laws and get a slap on the wrist at best.
About 95% of the ads were Taboola / Outbrain garbage designed to lead senior citizens into scams. Usually the ads are framed like they're stories from a news site. Secrets your doctor doesn't want you to know, (D or R) politicians just signed a bill that will let you save money refinancing your mortgage, your computer might have virus!!!!!1!
All these ads are there to prey on vulnerable people. I don't know how Microsoft, Taboola, Outbrain, etc. get away with it.
The fact that companies the size of Microsoft and Google refuse to properly sanitize their platforms is, just, gross behaviour begging for regulation.
It obviously costs them less in lobbying than it would to properly vet the ads they show.
Here's an example of Google advertising a scam: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-21/scammers-using-text-m...
So, either Taboola's dump truck had more than 10 billion dollars in it, or whomever made this call is an idiot, and the management above them is asleep at the wheel (seems like occam's answer here), or I'm missing something.
The people who made this decision are only answerable to their team and hitting their targets. They don't care about the effects it has on other parts of the company, and don't have incentives to either.
Is that really so obvious? Granted, I just use Windows and no other Microsoft products, but the way they are treating Windows, it does not seem to me that they actually care about their brand, they care about maximizing profits, since they have been introducing more and more ads into their OS.
I think there's a decent number of people working on Edge that want it to be a success, but Microsoft's "put more ads in it department" clearly gets the final say on all decisions.
Thing is, despite some particularly bad UI decisions of late, the base OS seems pretty solid these days. But then they slap this annoying UI on the top of it, and now with malware. It's like the company, as an individual, just can't help itself. Scorpions, frogs, and a river crossing, or summat.
This is about poor design and unethical decisions. MS can keep its values to itself.
> in the positive “I thought Microsoft would be better than this” way seems likely to have the most effect if enough people do it.
But how many is enough? And whom do I approach with this "positive" feedback so that the feedback is not routed to /dev/null? I'm pretty sure that MS receives a ton of feedback on this and similar topics and ignores it.
This is ridiculous. People hate how Edge is bloated nowadays and it’s a fact. You know it, we know it. But MS does nothing to fix that. Instead it pushes forward and adds new shit into the web browser.
* What's "Microsoft Rewards" in MS Edge? An award for those users who share the most amount of telemetry with MS?
* And a "Math solver" in a web browser?
* Games menu?
* FOUR unskippable screens to opt out of some useless features?
All this needs to be in a web browser?
Oh and I almost forgot. Please add support for Flash games into the web browser, add BonziBuddy and bring back my favourite AOL toolbar from IE. I'm missing all this (no).
MS's only job was to create a fast and clean Chromium-based web browser. It failed again.
My suggestion is that when it fails at a job you care about, instead of dismissing the company as a whole you raise the gap between that particular bit of execution and the espoused values of the company.
That’s how I would raise it internally, because it respects the job people are doing while also suggesting a path for improvement.
And yes, in case you're curious, this is a Section 230 problem: As long as we grant platforms default immunity, there is no business risk to Microsoft to offset the profits gained. If the choice to include Taboola included the ability to be sued for damages, Microsoft would be more hesitant to do business with them.
Can we really not draw a distinction between an internet service provider passing messages between users, and a tech company receiving money from a content company to show their ads to users who didn't ask for them? The latter seems much more like an activity that should create a liability than the former.
Any content served to a platform in exchange for any sort of revenue, the platform should be liable for the content of.
Note that there's no meaningful distinction between a "tech company" and an "internet service provider". Google operates Fi and Fiber, Comcast operates email and streaming video services, it's just service providers ultimately, and Section 230 is a giant gaping immunity hole for holding any of them responsible for business decisions they're well aware is malicious.
Tangent to the publisher/platform debate, but can we stop for a moment to appreciate that Windows is a paid-for product?
The fact a paid-for product has ads in it is fucking nonsense.
Mike Judge's Idiocracy satire was ahead of the curve on this one: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
I am always amazed on how passively and non annoyed people click away all these virus scanner and whatever popups popping up whatever you are doing.
Sure I may be biased, I get aggressions when YouTube forces a second ad. And my brain was turned upside down when I realized smart TVs introduced smart ads that may take 20% of the screen, whenever and people still don't seem to care.
I am so glad I live behind a pihole in a Linux only network, without 'normal' TV. I am sure I see at least 95% less ads than my average peers.
Now imagine the horror every time I have to do something on modern Windows. There was a period when I worked on a cross-platform library, which I sometimes had to build and test on Windows. It took me quite much effort to get my Windows 10 VM into an annoyance-free configuration — that included uninstalling stuff like Microsoft Store and Edge, too. And that's me, a guy who knows what he's doing, most of the time.
There are two things that blow my mind: how much user-hostile most of mainstream software products have become, and how much people are willing to tolerate that. "That's just what computers are like."
And yes, I do know some people who still use Windows 7. And I also wonder if it's possible to run Windows 7 userspace on top of the Windows 10 kernel.
I was a Linux user as long as I understand computers, so doing the switch from Windows to MacOS for work gave me no relief either. Still a locked down OS with weird quirks. But something they really did right is building a distraction free working environment. Literally the one thing I want from a working computer.
Yeah. Software isn't about us users anymore. It's about corporations, their needs, their profits, their rights, their platforms, their everything. We're just incidental. It's getting worse every year and it feels like there's no end in sight.
Stallman warned everyone about this and very few people cared. Free software exists to combat this but there's increasingly no point since the hardware itself is becoming hostile. What's the point of free software if we can't run it?
I just feel so hopeless about all this. Computers had such potential. To see them reduced to advertising appliances is just sad.
Other than rose tinted nostalgia I can't imagine going back to a dated, insecure and inferior OS.
Windows 7 was the last properly-desktop version of Windows.
Does Apple also ruin the UI on macOS? Yes, absolutely. But they still don't do it that much, and they actually officially acknowledge that someone might have reasons to stay on an old version — they provide security updates for 2 additional years for all old versions. They also understand that people use computers to get jobs done and thus are not to be interrupted with sudden "let's cross this one out of your list" modals.
In an ideal world though, an OS doesn't need updating at all and has zero vulnerabilities. But I guess just hold the f up and stop with your endless feature creep and focus all your engineering on fixing your shit is too much to ask from the modern IT industry ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Pi-Hole is only good for what it does. You have full control (and overview) what your network is requesting and can block everything you don't need. The way I use it it takes time to operate. Like blocking most of whatever IoT devices are doing works like charm. Or whatever my smartTV was sending every other hour for no reason.
It doesn't block ads that are served on the same domains as the content, obviously. (Youtube, Twitch, ...) Only the client can filter those.
I would, if Firefox would stop deteriorating. They are down to miniscule marketshare and continue redesigning their GUI, disabling features, preventing ad-blocking, launching pointless annoying services. Firefox of 2014 was a far better product than Firefox of 2022.
In other words every distraction that tries to get my attention that I haven't asked for is something I consider very very annoying.
I for one realize. But i am forced to use it by my employer. And the fact that MS seems to be the only platform where CAD/CAE programs run, does not help either. I don't know what corporate IT is doing but they seem not to be bothered.
Personally I'm more amazed that there are people this actually happens to.
I run Windows 11. I've also got an M1 Air and a Linux box so am not blind to the alternatives or particularly biased. And I have to say that's not my experience at all.
I'll admit that upon installation I removed the start menu apps Microsoft seemed to think I'd want, and I run uBlock Origin in the browser. Other than it's an out-of-the-box install of 11 Pro and I see no adverts, no irritating cross-selling, nothing getting in my way. Windows just works and lets me get on with things.
What is it people do that gets their machines into such a state? Or am I just more careful than most without even realising? Either way as long you're sensible Windows is totally fine.
A better world without advertising is perfectly possible. People have simply been conditioned to accept this reality. There needs to be new ways of thinking about advertising. I consider it a form of violence, mind rape.
At work, the Windows computer takes over 5 seconds to launch the calculator app. Once upon a time, the calculator appeared on screen pretty much instantly. On decades older hardware. It's now faster to just type whatever I want to calculate into a search engine.
https://www.thecodeblogs.com/@/JamesonNetworks/removing-the-...