Malicious data harvesting code in the forums

[Guest]

2 hours ago, CPotter said:

This is definitely not intentional, we've had Amazon banner ads running on here for years and I never realized it has this tracker until reading this post. Like others have pointed out, we don't strive to "make money" from the forum, so its not worth it to us to have these ads on the site. I'm removing them now.

 

I'm sorry I'm just seeing this thread now.

Can I be an advertisement? I won't track anyone.

In fact, I don't even know what footprints are.

[spartaman64]

22 hours ago, NastyFlytrap said:

 

the internet is free because of advertisement. if you want privacy then find subscription based alternatives 

Edited August 24, 2022 by LogicalDrm

[Guest]

1 minute ago, spartaman64 said:

the internet is free because of advertisement. if you want privacy then find subscription based alternatives 

I would pay for websites, but I don't have any money.

[kumicota]

2 hours ago, spartaman64 said:

the internet is free because of advertisement. if you want privacy then find subscription based alternatives 

That's BS from someone who maybe didn't grew up in old internet or don't understand networks.

 

This happens because internet nowadays is a big centralized service but internet by design is made to support a lot of decentralized services/platforms like e-mail for example.

 

Unlike what people seems to think, you don't need expensive servers, computers, network bandwidth to talk to people online, services like Usenet, bittorrend,IRC, XMPP, e-mail and more can be run on a 45$ raspberry pi on your 10mbps home internet and talk to a network with millions of online users daily but you need expensive servers and networks if you will host a centralized service to millions of people.

 

The problem with decentralized services is that is not a dumb by design software. I use a few decentralized services myself(mainly xmpp and fediverse) and I tried to bring some friends who aren't into the computer world, they couldn't figure it out why me at user1@server1.com can talk with him at user2@server2.com and other hundreds of thousands of users in different servers so he ended up giving it up.

 

Internet isn't free because advertisement but advertisement exists because people don't know that better alternatives exists

[dalekphalm]

14 hours ago, kumicota said:

That's BS from someone who maybe didn't grew up in old internet or don't understand networks.

 

This happens because internet nowadays is a big centralized service but internet by design is made to support a lot of decentralized services/platforms like e-mail for example.

 

Unlike what people seems to think, you don't need expensive servers, computers, network bandwidth to talk to people online, services like Usenet, bittorrend,IRC, XMPP, e-mail and more can be run on a 45$ raspberry pi on your 10mbps home internet and talk to a network with millions of online users daily but you need expensive servers and networks if you will host a centralized service to millions of people.

 

The problem with decentralized services is that is not a dumb by design software. I use a few decentralized services myself(mainly xmpp and fediverse) and I tried to bring some friends who aren't into the computer world, they couldn't figure it out why me at user1@server1.com can talk with him at user2@server2.com and other hundreds of thousands of users in different servers so he ended up giving it up.

 

Internet isn't free because advertisement but advertisement exists because people don't know that better alternatives exists

A web server exists to fill a different niche than something like Usenet, bittorrent, email, etc.

 

And sure, if you host your own email server that handles you (and maybe, what, a few dozen other emails tops), doing it off a Pi is no problem. But if you're running a large email service, a Pi just isn't going to cut it.

 

Same goes for a web server. Yeah you can run a simple web server off of a Pi. Good luck running the LTT forums off of a Pi though.

 

I guess you could argue that the forums don't need to exist, as there are other ways that are decentralized that could take the place of the forum, such as an IRC channel or something, but - I don't think that's a good faith argument.

 

Regardless of what it is - everything on the Internet costs some amount of money to operate. Whether that's the hardware costs ($45 for a Pi isn't free), the bandwidth costs (sure a simple web server can run off of a 10 Mbps line, but you still need to pay for that line to begin with), etc.

 

That's not even counting the human component - which, even if given away for free via volunteer work (eg: the Mod team), it's still a cost. While some volunteer work can be completed, it's ridiculous to assume or even want the entire internet to be run via volunteer work.

 

Centralized vs decentralized services have many pros and cons on both sides. One is not inherently superior to the other - it's a case by case situation where one may provide better benefits than the other - but in a different situation, that could be the reverse.

 

The cold hard truth is that the internet costs money to operate. If you decentralize it, you're effectively just pushing those costs down onto the end user. Maybe that's fine for you, but that's a choice each end user needs to make, not have it made for them.

[Vishera]

19 hours ago, spartaman64 said:

the internet is free because of advertisement. if you want privacy then find subscription based alternatives 

@kumicota @dalekphalm Or you could have advertisements without tracking just like how it was in the early 2000s.

The advertisement script would crawl the page you visit and display ads that are relevant to the topic of the web page you visit.

 

Just like how Google's business model used to be with AdSense and it's crawler.

[mariushm]

11 minutes ago, Vishera said:

@kumicota @dalekphalm Or you could have advertisements without tracking just like how it was in the early 2000s.

The advertisement script would crawl the page you visit and display ads that are relevant to the topic of the web page you visit.

 

Just like how Google's business model used to be.

AdSense and it's crawler.

Ha ha ... yeah right, wishful thinking.

Back then, it was enough to search for some specific keywords on Google and then whenever there was no relevant content on a third party page you visit, you'd get ads for those specific keywords Google remembered you were interested in.

Also, you would visit a website - let's say something random, how to change napkins on a baby - and the next day you'd get baby toys and wipes instead of default ads. 

 

Amazon also made profiles on you.. kept track of what sections of Amazon you visited more often and pushed those ads to you on consecutive visits.

I've even had a website with game trainers and cheats and configured it to give each visitor a unique id through a cookie and kept track of what games they were looking and if they were mostly looking at gameboy cheats, I'd serve amazon ads on the site for gameboy accessories and other such nintendo related products.

 

You can't have advertisments like back in the day because nowadays you have lots of bots and automation, which was much more expensive and difficult back then.  Ad networks have to monitor and invalidate fraudulent clicks, have to make sure the ad system is implemented according to terms of service (ex you're not encouraging members to click on ads for some prizes or bonuses, that you're not begging people to buy stuff through ads etc), they have to know where the ads are placed because they may not want to associate the brand name with controversial subjects (ex ab.ortion, or g.un control etc etc)

 

Static banners without tracking work mostly where a company pays a flat fee per month based on impressions not clicks ..... the owner of the website can publish the analytics for the website, company sees there's 2m visits to page a month, so they pay $2k a month to reserve the banner spot across the page, regardless of how many clicks that banner gets. 

 

 

[kumicota]

6 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

The cold hard truth is that the internet costs money to operate.

After reading what I typed and what you typed I agree with you and I expressed myself poorly. The point I was trying to make was that the internet is a big centralized service and it it would be "cheaper" if that didn't happened as the internet itself was made to be decentralized.

6 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

costs (sure a simple web server can run off of a 10 Mbps line, but you still need to pay for that line to begin with)

About this I was considering that you already pay for it, so it's kinda a net loss. What I was trying to convey is that big services like facebook, twitter, amazon(I don't know how a decentralized shopping would work but I'm trowing it anyway), web aggregators and etc pays more per user than a lot of decentralized service that is run to support 10-100 users each node.

 

6 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

Centralized vs decentralized services have many pros and cons on both sides. One is not inherently superior to the other - it's a case by case situation where one may provide better benefits than the other - but in a different situation, that could be the reverse.

Agree, one good example is payment and online shopping, I trust amazon more than a random .xyz website and there's also opsec, security, redundancy and more.

 

I think what I was trying to say that a lot of malicious pratices nowadays is because internet became centralized and expensive where pratices like that wouldn't happen that much if was decentralized.

[tkitch]

On 8/23/2022 at 6:34 AM, Vishera said:

 

How can i seriously respond to you guys when you don't even bother to do basic research about what trackers are and how they work?!

We're in ur base, stealin ur dataz!!!!

[Tristerin]

Thank you for bringing this to light Vishera.  I saw the post and read the solution and was like - nice, right thing for them to do.

[YellowJersey]

9 hours ago, tkitch said:

We're in ur base, stealin ur dataz!!!!

Now that one takes me back.