24 Nov 2024
Use an ad blocking extension when performing Internet searches
(update 26 Apr 2025: A new public service announcement from the FBI is up: Winners don’t click search ads)
The FBI seems to have taken down the public service announcement covered in Even the FBI says you should use an ad blocker on TechCrunch.
Use an ad blocking extension when performing internet searches. Most internet browsers allow a user to add extensions, including extensions that block advertisements. These ad blockers can be turned on and off within a browser to permit advertisements on certain websites while blocking advertisements on others.
This is still good advice. Search ads are full of scams, and you can block ads on search without blocking the ads on legit sites. I made a local copy of the FBI alert.
Why did they take the web version down? Maybe we’ll find out. I sent the FBI a FOIA request for any correspondence about this alert and the decision to remove it.
The Malwarebytes site has more good info on ongoing problems with search ads. Google Search user interface: A/B testing shows security concerns remain
More: Winners don’t click search ads
Bonus links
“Interpreting the Ambiguities of Section 230” by Alan Rozenshtein (Section 230 covers publisher liability, but not distributor liability.)
Confidential OCR (How to install and use Tesseract locally on Linux)
The
Great Bluesky Migration: I Answer (Some) Of Your Questions
Bluesky also offers a remedy for quote-dunking. If someone quotes
your post to make a nasty comment on it, you can detach the quoted post
entirely. (And then you should block the jerk).
Related: Bluesky’s
success is a rejection of big tech’s operating system
Designing
a push life in a pull world Everything in our online world is
designed to push through our boundaries, usually because it’s in someone
else’s financial best interest. And we’ve all just accepted that this is
the way the world works now.
Killer
Robots About to Fill Skies… (this kind of thing is why the EU
doesn’t care about AI innovation
in creepy tracking and copyright
infringement—they need those developers to get jobs in the defense
industry, which isn’t held back by the AI Act.)
Inside the Bitter Battle Between Starbucks and Its Workers (More news from management putting dogmatic union-busting ahead of customers and shareholders, should be a familiar story to anyone dealing with inadequate ad review or search quality ratings.)
National
Public Data saga illustrates little-regulated US data broker
industry National Public Data appears to have been a home-based
operation run by Verini himself.
The enterprise maintains no
dedicated physical offices. The owner/operator maintains the operations
of company from his home office, and all infrastructure is housed in
independent data centers,
Verini said in his bankruptcy
filing.