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Comment by skilled | Hacker News Reader

At least in its current state, notepad.plus does redirect to the official website when clicking the download button. The site itself is mostly an AI generated mess, on top of that - its rankings are manipulated by articles like this,

https://mycours.es/gamedesign2016/2023/03/21/quick-and-easy-...

https://www.bacsitannhang.com/how-to-install-notepad-on-ubun...

There are a few hundred of them but nothing overly crazy. Most of these articles look like a traditional "link pyramid" network.

But I am surprised that the site hasn't been penalized by Google yet. All the signs are there that it is a bullshit site. Looking at the current rankings[0], it appears that the site is surging also. That's around 120,000~ Google clicks monthly based on my own estimates. Don probably has the numbers himself also as far as referrals go.

[0]: https://i.imgur.com/SvOjalu.jpeg

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So the site is clearly parasitic, doesn't add anything and detracts from security. The term "malicious" does imply a little more to me though, like it's actually serving me altered software.

I guess the question is whether doing this (injecting yourself into the download flow for an open source piece of software and profiting via ads while doing so) is "malicious". I can see an argument that it is, as at the very least the site very much looks like it's the official site unless you read the small print.

I don't get the ads on that site at the moment. I assume they are the fake download button type of ad?

In any case, we can fight this particular site, but as you point out if this is generated content then I don't see how we're going to manually fight the coming onslaught of similar endeavours, so if the search engines can't keep generated content off their results (and so far they haven't been able to), it's going to be an interesting few years.

> I guess the question is whether doing this (injecting yourself into the download flow for an open source piece of software and profiting via ads while doing so) is "malicious".

Yes. It's malicious. You're trying to earn money - in this case, ad revenue - on a piece of software with which you have nothing to do whatsoever. It's not only malicious, it's disgusting. I would state how I really feel, but dang would ban me.

> Yes. It's malicious. You're trying to earn money ...

No, please stop trying to redefine words. That's not what "malicious" means.

I agree with you that this website is disgusting and needs to be taken down (as in "down from google") because there's a very real risk that the unscrupulous owners of the website _will eventually serve malicious software_ to juice their profits. But simply serving ads is not what the word "malicious" means.

Given the number of full screen ad's claiming my computer is infected I have ran across just serving ad's is often enough to count as malicious. (Not saying all sites do that but I have seen it often enough.)

Ok, so Google (the website) is malicious, Youtube (the website) is malicious, Facebook (the website) is malicious. Every single ad infested website in the world is malicious, according to you.

Stop trying to change language. That's not what "malicious" means.

It may redirect for 99.99% of users for example. Or only for ip ranges that are not relevant targets.

Yeah my thought was similar: One day in the future its current behavior changes once it has built up enough traffic...

Your definition of maliciousness is basically user-centric, rather than provider-centric. It is malicious from the perspective of the maintainers of N++ because it robs them of the ability to control their image for the users who find the product through the parasitic page (which is obviously a worse UX).

In light of the long-term effort to subvert xz and get a backdoor into sshd it's feasible that these kinds of malicious sites have a second agenda; become popular enough as search results for a Free product to serve backdoored download links selectively or wholesale once they get enough traffic.

Regardless of intent, the low-quality ad networks sites like that serve routinely serve fractional malware ads anyway (focus-stealing alert()-style "you are the 100,000th visitor" or "malware detected on your device" garbage).

Yes, though I was trying to expand the definition of malicious to include GPs own terms. Even if that never happened, the current situation is already malicious because the site erodes at the trust factor of the victim site in exchange for ad revenue.

You are bob. notepad-plus-plus.com is alice. Are you saying alice doesn't want eve to impersonate her because she is jealous?

> The term "malicious" does imply a little more to me though, like it's actually serving me altered software.

Just because it doesn’t today doesn’t mean it won’t tomorrow. Be “legit”, get links to your site, rise in the SEO ranks. Then maliciously alter the software.

> (injecting yourself into the download flow for an open source piece of software and profiting

In high frequency trading, the equivalent's called providing liquidity.

> At least in its current state, notepad.plus does redirect to the official website when clicking the download button.

I’m sure you know this, so i will just state the obvious: the concern is that it might change in the future, or alternatively it might serve a different link if and when some finger printing indicates it.

I love that you can find other adjacent s[cp]ams by looking at the other articles on mycours.es by the same author. Learn "Why you should play at a mobile casino", read reviews on cialis, viagra, ivermectin, in italian, also there's some code that looks like actual Brainfuck (but that might be obfuscated js) at the end of one of these articles, because why not.

https://mycours.es/gamedesign2016/2023/04/20/miglior-prezzo-...

This ivermectin article from april 2023 looks legit, it seems to be part of a section labeled "gamedesign2016". Might be a small mistake.

They say the internet's dead, I say it's flourishing, look at how easy it is, you can upload anything, make mistakes, it still "works". Some LEDs are blinking, everything looks alright to me.

> But I am surprised that the site hasn't been penalized by Google yet.

I'm not really surprised at all.

A site like that surely can’t be doing more than $50/day in Adsense revenue - methinks - probably less given how the same audience will be using adblock

The earliest Web Archive snapshot of this website is from 2020, and back then it looked almost the same, so it is not a "new era" AI generated garbo.

However in 2020 it the same `/download` link returned some executable. Probably it still does the same (because there is no point to make such links, when you can make a direct link), but it returns different content based on geography/cookies/etc.

It is in fact "new era" of AI generated garbage,

https://notepad.plus/best-alternatives-to-notepad-for-mac-os...

this article recommends Atom, which means the person who maintains this site doesn't have a clue.

    <meta property="article:published_time" content="2023-05-30T01:12:52+00:00" />

The site is down now so I can’t confirm, but I assume the site serves ads, which means Google is happy to have people visit it and profit.

You don't know that they do. They did redirect when you tested, but they may not for everyone. They could easily selectively download-snipe anyone they have identified by IP address or even regional. Big security threat.

Does Google actually punish sites that are generating clicks? From a layman's point of view, Google only punishes sites that do not play the SEO game and tries to live organically.

How did you find the backlinks?

Using this,

https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker/

I use it a lot. It's great to find dev resources, hidden gems, sites that talk about a specific topic, etc. It does have a limit (100 links), but for purposes such as this one - it is an absolute must-have bookmark for me.

There used to be a link:url thing in google itself but it doesn't seem to be working that well anymore, like many thing on google search beside classic casual user search.

Casual user search works well on Google these days? That's news to me.

Very neat tool, and I'd love to pay for the actual product but $100/month is too much unfortunately.

Which tool is in the picture?

>But I am surprised that the site hasn't been penalized by Google yet.

I am not. Google searches nowadays suck.

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