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Comment by whstl | Hacker News Reader

For me, searching "Watch Oppenheimer Free" on Google returns mostly malware and fake media-purchase websites (that will probably try to steal my credit card), mixed with SEO spam about "how and why it's not available on Netflix or Hulu... yet".

To me that's significantly worse than showing no results.

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> "Watch Oppenheimer Free" on Google returns mostly malware and fake media-purchase websites

In the EU much of our malware and blogspam is hosted by the EU government itself. We are way ahead here lolol

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=watch%20oppenheimer%20...

https://road-safety-charter.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files...

Edit: this is the same domain that hosts documents on the latest laws for cybersecurity (Radio Equipment Directive, Cyber Resilience Act, ...). And the same body that airs strong opinions on client side scanning. The same org that wants to be in charge of a EU wide database of vulnerabilities so it can tell you if your patch management process is too slow. ENISA were informed about these problems over 8 months ago. Meanwhile they are publicly ridiculed on social media for not fixing it.

If they were using it to educate people about the consequences of piracy, I could understand why they would host that, but that's not the case here. What is the purpose of this?

Not sure if unpatched arbitrary file-upload vulnerabilities that rexult in blogspam and hosted malware, or doctored documents do serve any purpose? But maybe I'm just not thinking adversarial enough :-/

Lol sorry, I missed your sarcasm before. I thought the EU would actually upload this themselves for some bigger purpose. I interpreted too much.

My bad and apologies for not /s tagging it

I've never seen this domain pop up in my searches. Most of the links on Google end up at a 404, though.

Who's benefiting from these weird PDF uploads? Is it the copyright industry trying to make it impossible to pirate their movies? The PDFs don't even contain a link to the ad fraud site that's supposedly generating these.

They have a link, the whole image of the video player is the link

For people who didn't get the joke: these are indeed "hosted" by things like Google Docs, Scribd... but also by EU government websites.

But not willingly!

And yep, the bulk of Google results for me are those. Half those, half stupid blogspam, half fake-legitimate websites claiming to be legit sellers of media.

Imagine actually stating this as a business strategy: "and when customers use our product this way, we send scammers to them to shake them down"

It's like something out of Monty Python

How else will digital sinners learn only to trust corporate streaming services if they are not shown that the alternatives are OBVIOUS ROADS TO DAMNATION?

And we all mocked Chick Tracts: https://www.chick.com/products/tract?stk=1054&ue=d

For all the stupid things Google provides a ready answer for, their inability to answer “when does this come available and how” is annoying.

It's funny that there isn't someone just maintaining a community google sheets doc that handles, that then the search can index.

There are various sites that do it (with more or less SEO garbage and fake answers, mind you) - but it’s surprisingly hard to find something definite.

You’d think some group of obsessives on some forum somewhere would be compiling a database.

Wikipedia often has this info, with AI Google can read it.

AI generated websites have ruined "when does X come out". It wouldn't be as big a problem if studios could just announce these things on their website, but instead you need to get this information from interviews and news articles which get overwhelmed by AI trash in most search engines.

Part of the problem is that it isn't as fixed as you think it is, and varies internationally quite rapidly too.

And the companies almost don’t want you to know - they’d rather you rent/buy the video online for $20 instead of waiting a period of time to rent it cheaper.

That's what I just searched and was able to watch Oppenheimer. The point isn't that it's crummy, the point is that Google or Bing are not answering your query or are answering with junk.

This is a known problem since some years. The main problem is that there are no free alternatives. And paying for 2 searches a week makes no sense.

It's cool, while you waste time wading through a sea of SEO spam, you'll look at plenty of ads.

Look that up on yandex and the first thing is literally a working fast stream with decent quality. wtf

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