If there are any googlers here, I'd like to report an even more dangerous website. As much as 30-50% of the traffic to it relates to malware or scams, and it has gone unpunished for a very long time.
The address appears to be adsense.google.com.
If there are any googlers here, I'd like to report an even more dangerous website. As much as 30-50% of the traffic to it relates to malware or scams, and it has gone unpunished for a very long time.
The address appears to be adsense.google.com.
Also YouTube.com serves a lot of scam advertisements. They should block that too.
I think google is crumbling under the weight of their size. They are no longer able to process the requested commercials with due diligence.
Nah, they just don't give a fuck. Never have
I see the same scam/deepfake ad(s) pretty much persistently. Maybe they actually differ slightly (they are AI gen mostly), but it's pretty obvious what they are, and I'm sure they get flagged a lot.
They just need to introduce a basic deposit to post ads, and you lose it if you put up a scam ad. Would soon pay for the staff needed to police it, and prevent scammers from bypassing admin by trivially creating new accounts.
That's probably a good idea. They can also earn interest on the deposit. (Not that they need the money).
I used to flag obvious scam adverts. A bunch of times I'd even get an email response a few weeks later saying it was taken down. But then I'd see it again (maybe slightly different or by a "different" advertiser, who knows). Its whack-a-mole.
The reality is that google profits from scam adverts, so they don't proactively do anything about it and hide behind the "at our scale, we can't effectively do anything about it" argument. Which is complete horseshit because if you can't prevent obvious scams on your platform, you don't deserve to have a platform. Google doesn't have to be running at their scale. "We would make less money" is not a valid excuse. We'd all make more money if we could ignore laws and let people be scammed or taken advantage of.
There's plenty of ways they could solve it, but they choose not to. IMHO this should be a criminal offence and google executives should be harshly punished. Its also why I have a rather negative view of googlers, since they wilfully perpetuate this stuff by working on adtech while nothing is being done about the normal everyday people getting scammed each day. Its only getting worse with AI, but I've been seeing it for years.
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Did they ever? They used to only allow text ads, which reduced malware compared to serving random JavaScript. But did they ever vet the ad's content?
> They are no longer able to process the requested commercials with due diligence
no longer able? or no longer willing to, because it impacts their bottom line?
They can afford to hire thousands of people to swiftly identify scams and take punitive action. And pay them well.
They can, but as long as regulators let them get away with it, they will just pocket the money instead. Google are, imho, an evil company.
Use their Recaptcha to let users identify scam ads instead of cars and traffic lights.
What i really don't understand at least here in Europe the advertising partner (adsense) must investigate at least minimally whether the advertising is illegal or fraudulent, i understand that sites.google etc are under "safe harbor" but that's not the point with adsense since people from google "click" the publish button and also get money to publish that ad.
I have reported over a dozen ads to AdSense (Europe) because of them being outright scams (e.g. on weather apps, an AdSense banner claiming "There is a new upgrade to this program, click here to download it") . Google has invariably closed my reports claiming that they do not find any violation of the adsense policies.
Same thing with Instagram, they accept all scam ads.
Google and Meta are trillion dollar criminal enterprises. The lion's share of their income comes from fraud and scams, with real victims having their lives destroyed. That is the sad truth, no matter how good and important some of their services are. They will never stop their principal source of income.
They’re far too embedded politically to ever face consequence too. I hope someday we can get a serious anti-corruption candidate.
Do you report those only to Google, or also to your local watchdog/police/commerce regulator?
The law is only for plebs like you and me. Companies get a pass.
I'm still amazed how deploying spyware would've rightfully landed you in jail a couple decades back, but do the same thing on the web under the justification of advertising/marketing and suddenly it's ok.
>Companies get a pass.
I'm pretty sure that if Springer were to make a fraudulent ad, they would instantly be slapped with a lawsuit and face public outcry.
Springer itself is nothing but scam.
True, but at least the ad's are not ;)
Which one of the two Springer-s? ;-)
sites.google.com
The same outfit is runimg a domain called blogger.
Reminds me of MS blocking a website of mine for dangerous script. The offending thing i did was use document.write to put copyright 2025 (with the current year) at the end of static pages.
My work's email filter regularly flags links to JIRA and github as dangerous. It stopped being even ironically amusing after a while.
Microsoft's own Outlook.com flags Windows Insider emails coming from a .microsoft.com domain as junk even after marking the domain as "no junk". They know themselves well.
Frequent frustration past week for me:
The integrated button to join a Microsoft Teams meeting directly from my Microsoft Outlook Calendar doesn't work because Microsoft needs to scan the link from Microsoft to Microsoft for malware before proceeding, and the malware scanning service has temporary downtime and serves me static page saying "The content you are accessing cannot currently be verified".
I feel like the GitHub one might be okay since a lot of malware binaries are hosted there still.
To be fair, that's a legally invalid copyright notice.
sites.google.com is widely abused but so practically any site which allows users to host content of their choice and make it publicly available. Where google can be different is that they famously refuse yo do work which they cannot automate and probably they cannot (or don’t want) to automate detection/blocking of spam/phishing hosted on sites.google.com and processing of abuse reports.
The nerve of letting everyone run a phishing campaign on sites.google.com but marking a perfectly safe website as malicious.
Enshitification ensues.
Yeah - that website keeps on spamming me down with useless stuff.
I was able to block most of this via ublock origin but Google disabled this - can not download it from here anymore:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin/cjpal...
Funniest nonsense "explanation":
"This extension is no longer available because it doesn't follow best practices for Chrome extensions."
In reality Google killed it because it threatens their greed income. Ads, ads and more ads.
Use Firefox.
Use one of the forks. librewolf, waterfox, zen. Firefox itself lost trust when Mozilla tried to push the new Terms of Use earlier this year. That was so aggressively user-hostile that nobody should trust Mozilla ever again. Using a fork puts an insulation layer between you and Mozilla.
Librewolf is just a directly de-mozillaed and privacy-enhanced Firefox, similar to Ungoogled Chromium. I've been trying to get in the habit of using Zen Browser, which has a bunch of UI changes.
> Firefox itself lost trust when Mozilla tried to push the new Terms of Use earlier this year.
Those terms of use aren't in place any longer. I'm surprised that listening to the users is viewed as something bad.
This. Their devs and reactivity to their user base kept my trust.
Their marketing and legal departments lost it long before the terms of service debacle.
Rolling back a change that causes loss of user trust does not automatically restore that trust. It takes time and ongoing public commitment to regain that trust.
Allowing that ToS change is what put them on the spyware list, not rolling it back.
The problem is that all those forks are beholden to Mozilla's corporate interests the same way the chromium derivatives are beholden to Google's corporate interests. What we need is one of the newer independent engines to mature - libweb, servo or blitz.
How are they beholden? In the sense that it's hard to provide engine updates without the funding of goog?
edit: also, by "libweb", did you mean "ladybird"?
You can read this as, "I want Mozilla to spend millions developing a competitive Chrome alternative, but I want it for free and aligned with all my personal nitpicks".
Typical freeloader behaviour, moans about free software politics but won't contribute anything themselves.
No they're not. They can pull what they like and not pull what they don't.
Librewolf is trying to be de-Mozillaed, privacy-enhanced Firefox, so it'll probably take whatever not-overtly-spyware patches Mozilla adds. Some others, like Waterfox and Pale Moon, are more selective.
Apparently the "best practise" is using Manifest V3 versus V2.
Reading a bit online (not having any personal/deep knowledge) it seems the original extension also downloaded updates from a private (the developers) server, while that is no longer allowed - they now need to update via the chrome extension, which also means waiting for code review/approval from google.
I can see the security angle there, it is just awkward how much of an vested interest google has in the whole topic. ad-blocking is already a grey area (legally), and there is a cat-and-mouse between blockers and advertisers; it's hard to believe there is only security best-practise going on here.
You know what? I don't even mind them killing it, because of course there are a whole pile of items under the anti-trust label that google is doing so why not one more. But what I do take issue with is the gaslighting, their attempt to make the users believe that this is in the users interests, rather than in google's interests.
If we had functional anti-trust laws then this company would have been broken up long ago, Alphabet or not. But they keep doing these things because we - collectively - let them.
Why would a monopoly care about users interests?
I know they won't. But we have all the tools to force them to care. We just don't use the tools effectively, and between that and lobbying they get a free pass to pretty much do as they please.
DNS level blockers like NextDNS are much easier to use and works for the entire device.
Yes, the irony of Google warning for other sites as malware, is not lost on me.