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Comment by stingraycharles | Hacker News Reader

This sounds very conspiracy-theory-ish to me. The more likely explanation is that some ad network allowed malware ads to go through which triggered the block.

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Especially when you consider that the ad networks those sites are using are rather sketchy. Many of the ads there try to trick you into believing they're the actual download link

Yup. Though if you keep the tinfoil hat on, nothing stop a malicious entity to use those network to funnel malware to those websites through targeting, the security of these ad networks is usually subpar, not too hard to imagine an entity determined enough to figure out an sure way to slip in malware.

>the ad networks those sites are using are rather sketchy. Many of the ads there try to trick you into believing they're the actual download link

If that's your definition of a sketchy ad network then there aren't many that aren't sketchy. Google serves ads that do that all the time. It only took me a few seconds to find this misleading fake download link ad being served by Google on one of the download pages of download.com: http://i.imgur.com/wYAfr7z.png

Would Google blacklist download.com for serving malicious google ads? Somehow I doubt it.

still, considering the mess of code they release every year with new Android versions, empty promises ('smooth as iPhone') where the solutions implemented are things like 'project butter' that cranks the CPU frequency to maximum when you touch the screen to overcome 1. ineffective governor design 2. bloated software; and generally poor design, it still doesn't seem outside the realm of reality that

eh, maybe it does.

Yup. On top of that it could be a false positive in the malware detection algorithm.

Not defeding anyone, ad business is highly volatile, especially in grey areas of the web.

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