Tag Archives: forced-redirect ads

Weekly output: forced-redirect ads, broadband infrastructure, Russian indictments

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After a workweek that I interrupted for an overdue reunion with my skis, I have another abbreviated week coming up. On top of Monday being a holiday, early Friday evening I depart for Barcelona to cover my sixth Mobile World Congress show. If you have any questions about the state of the smartphone–especially outside the U.S. market–the next five days would be a great time to get them to me.

2/12/2018: Surfing the web can leave you open to ad hijackings. A browser fix has been slow, USA Today

I revised earlier coverage of “forced-redirect” ads that hijack your Web reading to note that Google had wound up not activating an advertised defense against this scam in January’s update to Chrome.

2/16/2018: Trump needs to do more to get more Americans online, Yahoo Finance

A year ago, even some skeptics of President Trump voiced cautious optimism that his vaunted infrastructure plan would include a broadband component. This week’s release of that plan–yes, over a year after he took office pledging to rebuild America’s roads, rails, airports and waterways–pretty much crushed those hopes. This post outlines some ways that this plan could have done better.

2/17/2018: Russian social-media indictments, Al Jazeera

For once, I was able to chase down a link to one of my appearances on the news network’s Arabic-language channel. If you can speak Arabic, skip to the 11:15 mark in this evening-news roundup and please let me know how intelligent (or not) the live translation made me sound about the Justice Department’s indictment of 13 Russians and the St. Petersburg troll factory that calls itself the “Internet Research Agency.”

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Weekly output: Section 702 surveillance, ad fraud, App Store review

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Monday will be my first workday spent entirely in D.C. since mid December. I’m both attending and speaking (as in, quizzing futurist Amy Webb) at the State of the Net conference at the Newseum. “SOTN” is always a good tech-policy talkfest, and you can watch the proceedings live at its site.

1/22/2018: What you need to know about the government’s renewed surveillance law, Yahoo Finance

This explanation of the National Security Agency’s “Section 702” authorization to spy on foreign-intelligence suspects from within U.S. territory should have run in December. But once again, CES Advent left me with too little bandwidth to write the post then.

1/23/2018: How a gang of crooks hijacked your web browser, Yahoo Finance

One of the companies that I talked to for a December post on the plague of “forced-redirect” ads offered me an advance look at a study they’d done of a racket that not only inflicted these ads on readers at scale but set up its own network of fake ad agencies to get their fake ads on real networks. We updated the post a couple of days later to note that the report no longer mentioned two ad networks as being especially willing to do business with con-ad artists.

1/24/2018: Net neutrality app is a lesson in Apple’s App Store power, USA Today

I’ve been writing about Apple’s use and misuse of its App Store review authority for almost as long as I’ve been writing about net neutrality, so an episode involving Apple rejecting an app designed to help users spot net-neutality violations was an obvious topic.

Weekly output: Apple Park, forced-redirect ads, net neutrality, tech trends, Tech Night Owl, media-player tips

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I would add up how many weeks this year have involved me writing about net-neutrality issues, but that would be too depressing.

12/11/2017: Why doesn’t Apple make its devices as carefully as it’s making Apple Park?, The Washington Post

After seeing Jony Ive’s talk at the Hirshhorn Museum last month, I tweeted out a line from him about how people should shut up about Apple Park’s perfectionist design–which then irked a great many people. I decided there was a story in this and, after striking out at two other places, found a home for it at the Post. Once again, I enjoyed confusing people who hadn’t seen my byline there in years.

12/11/2017: How to stop rogue ads that can set you up for malware, Yahoo Finance

When my mom asked how to dispel an obnoxious “forced-redirect” ads–the kind that take you off whatever you’re reading and then break your browser’s back button–I figured the problem was widespread enough to be story fodder.

12/14/2017: Here’s what you can expect now that the FCC has killed net neutrality, Yahoo Finance

The anger I’m seeing about this–not to mention the 3,767 comments this has drawn so far–suggest that FCC chair Ajit Pai’s PR strategy of laughing off fears is not calming anybody down.

12/16/2016: What’s Up With Tech?, PATACS

In my first talk to this user group since 2010, I talked about why I’m not sold on a handful of much-hyped technologies–4K TV, smart speakers, drones, virtual reality and Bitcoin. I brought a bag full of random trade-show swag to give away, and now I have that much more room in my home office’s closet.

12/16/2017: December 16, 2017 — Rob Pegoraro and Jeff Gamet, Tech Night Owl Live

I talked to host Gene Steinberg about the demise of the service once known as AOL Instant Messenger, net-neutrality politics, and my decision to replace my MacBook Air with a Windows laptop.

12/17/2017: Cord-cutting tips for setting up your new Roku, Amazon Fire TV and Apple TV, USA Today

The advice about using an Ethernet connection instead of WiFi should be obvious, but I’ll bet a lot of people don’t think about using Plex’s apps to play music and videos stored on their PCs or using a media player’s remote-control app to avoid having to type passwords by clicking at letters on the TV’s screen with the player’s regular remote.