forbes

question April 1, 2016

The sad status of online advertising

I will give in this post an example having FORBES.COM as target. I want to emphasize that this is not the only site that behaves like this! If you have an ad blocking plugin active and you visit www.forbes.com you will be promted to disable the ad blocker and you see the picture above. After you turn it on, you can see that you are allowed to view the website for 30 days with “ad-light experience”: This is what you get with an ad-light experience: 1 ad on top of the page 2+ ads on the right of the page 2+ ads on the bottom of the page If you re-enable the ad-blocker, you actually can see how many ads and trackers are on that page: 10 Ads, 99+ connections to websites that track you! Here is what Disconnect shows on that page: And this is just for an article. If you go back to the root page, you see actually a lot more ads and a lot more trackers: Conclusion: The Internet would be much faster and much reacher if there would be less ads. I am not saying that there shouldn’t be any ads at…

quoted May 23, 2014

Quoted in Forbes.com: New Computer Virus? Inform The Crowd

New Computer Virus? Inform The Crowd Author: EMC Contributor Michael O’Dwyer Sorin Mustaca, an IT security expert at Avira, a global provider of anti-virus solutions headquartered in Tettnang, Germany, says, “the biggest threat when dealing with vulnerabilities or patches is that attackers are faster to use the intelligence than the vendors can create the patch or customers are able to apply it.” As hackers enjoy the benefits of new technology, the source of threats can become more difficult to isolate. Mustaca says that attacks from distributed networks, known as botnets, make it particularly difficult to track down the source of an attack. In such cases, the network owners themselves are often unaware their systems have been hijacked and are being used remotely by hackers as part of a botnet.