Most of you will recognize the term malvertising. It’s a technique for infecting computers with malware by using the advertising feeds found on most websites. Similar with the way TV in the US is funded by advertising, this blog is also supported by advertising because I can’t afford to pay for it. That is, the agreement I make with WordPress is that they get to run advertising on my blog posts because I’m not paying them anything.
The problem is how those ads are delivered. You would routinely find an ad on a page had passed through three or more servers before it displays in your browser. The rights to post those ads are traded in many different ways. Too often, when someone pays the fees, nobody wants to ask any questions. By the time it gets to your computer, it could be the software equivalent to a nuclear device. The issue here is that advertisers never did have morals in the first place. They aren’t willing to rob people directly because it’s no fun and it’s risky. However, it makes them feel like a big stud if their skills and artistry brings in the customers. There is no trick they won’t use, and the laws are simply advisory in their minds.
There is nothing immoral about blocking advertising on the Internet. You aren’t stealing content; the advertisers are stealing your computer resources and flagrantly refusing to deal with the risk factors. Pitchmen are slimy as a whole, and the good guys are so rare we can’t find them. All of them claim they are the finest specimens of humanity, which is part of their lying sales pitch. A rare counter example is the Google text ads; simple information about the existence of a product is not a sin. How Google tries so damned hard to manipulate you by snooping on the content of your searches and your communications is a sin.
Few Internet users will go the lengths I do for computer security. I keep track of how this stuff works as part of my computer tech support ministry. I read about it every day. What follows are some suggestions based on what I’ve tried for myself.
Learn about browser extensions: Ghostery, Adblock, Click & Clean, and tools like Bleachbit or CCleaner. Learn where they are and bookmark them.
Select your browser carefully. Use more than one for different purposes. I use Seamonkey to protect my important logins. You’d need to explore the features and settings possible to understand why. It comes with a host of extensions the same as Firefox, but offers far more fine-grained user control.
I use one browser only for Facebook (Opera’s newest line of WebKit browsers) with the appropriate extensions. I chase links from FB using the “private browser window” (right-click on the link) option to prevent FB from planting tracking in that window, and to ensure that window dumps all cache when I close it.
I use the older Opera browser (12.x) for general surfing because it doesn’t need any extensions; there is a healthy content blocking tool built into it. I can also place a JavaScript blocking button on the interface itself. It takes time to identify the URL sources for unwanted content, but once it’s in place, surfing is much safer. Start learning how to use it by right-clicking on the background of any webpage and select “Block content.” When the toolbar drops down at the top, select something you would prefer not to see and click on it. A block ribbon will appear and the toolbar will offer some fine tuning with a “Details” button. Click that and observe how the URL is formatted. For some advertising URLs, I block the entire domain.
I use the latest Opera Mail client for email on my desktop because it imported everything from my long-term email usage of the older Opera browser’s built-in email client over the years. It also has a collection of safety options, such as blocking graphics and fancy formatting by default. It also imports settings and mail across different operating systems with ease.
If you really like Google’s Chrome browser, learn how to add the adblocking extensions and learn about the advanced settings that allow you some measure of control. They are not turned on by default. Also learn how to use additional profiles to isolate one kind of surfing activity from another. You should at a minimum set up a separate profile for Facebook, which remains today the single biggest threat to privacy and personal security because almost everybody uses it. This makes it a juicy fat target rich with victims for whatever evil schemes any corporation or government agency can dream up. And the folks who run FB are all too eager to help them.
Use DuckDuckGo and StartPage search engines. The former is Yandex Search with anonymity; the latter is Google with the same anonymity. StartPage also offers you a chance to chase resulting search links through a proxy viewer. That means they do all the work and take all the risks and display the content for you. It does block JavaScript so some sites look rather funny that way, but it also protects you from bad JScript.
Learn to use Lynx browser. There are instructions on older posts here how to install a version for Windows and some of the settings you’ll need to make. For my own use, I prefer to pull it up in Cygwin, a set of tools that give you Linux/Unix on your Windows computer. While some sites will block the Lynx browser based on obsolete assumptions that it’s a hacking tool, it’s still the best way to get textual content with far less hassle and risk. Once you get used to how it renders pages, you can quickly find information you seek.
Install CryptoPrevent on your Windows computer; it will save you a great deal of heartache in the long run. It blocks malware trying to launch and install from your browser cache.
The single biggest change is inside your own head. If the Internet for you is all about entertainment and multimedia content, and more particularly gaming, you will always be at high risk. Porn-surfing is easily the highest risk behavior on the Net. I’m not telling you those pursuits are evil at this point, only that they are inextricably linked with exposure to malware. The predators who make that evil software are counting on your desire for zeal for such pursuits to hinder your risk awareness. Those pursuits are the essence of advertising, trying to sucker you into something you really want in exchange for a measure of slavery.
My blog is littered with more details on how to do some of this stuff. Use the search box built into the blog interface. The main point to remember is that, with advertisers being so rapaciously irresponsible about filtering out malvertising, you have every right to block their crap until they clean up their act. You shouldn’t expect that too soon.
