Pfft comments on Open Thread, November 15-22, 2013 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: drethelin 16 November 2013 01:36AM

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Comment author: Pfft 20 November 2013 03:48:41PM 7 points [-]

Did they add auto-playing video ads to the LessWrong frontpage, or do I have malware?

Comment author: wmoore 26 November 2013 12:25:25AM 11 points [-]

SiteMeter in the sidebar was the cause of this. It has been removed.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 26 November 2013 06:53:19PM 1 point [-]

Thank you!

Comment author: satt 11 December 2013 09:20:21PM 2 points [-]

Who downvotes a thank you to one of the site maintainers? Sheesh.

Comment author: arundelo 12 December 2013 01:39:37AM 4 points [-]

A downvote stalker. Many comments in fubarobfusco's recent posting history have multiple upvotes, some have one or none, but almost all of them have at least one downvote, and usually no more than one. (Hover over the karma score; unfortunately it's a percentage rather than a raw vote count.)

Comment author: MugaSofer 02 January 2014 08:52:07PM -1 points [-]

Huh. I wonder how common that is?

Comment author: jaime2000 20 November 2013 03:52:44PM 4 points [-]

Yeah, same here. Little video on the bottom-right corner starts playing randomly. Not related to any LW topic I can think of.

Comment author: gattsuru 20 November 2013 06:17:34PM 2 points [-]

I'm not seeing anything like that. (Windows 7 running Chrome)

Comment author: jaime2000 20 November 2013 10:18:29PM 7 points [-]

Likewise. This is what I see.

Comment author: Pfft 21 November 2013 01:15:19AM 0 points [-]

I'm using Firefox on MacOS. I see the same thing, but not repeatably (it's appeared a couple of times so far).

Comment author: Pfft 20 November 2013 08:06:41PM 0 points [-]

Phew, I guess I'm safe then. Thanks.

Comment author: fezziwig 22 November 2013 03:56:41PM *  0 points [-]

Or you both have malware. LW has no other ads at all, so how likely is it that their first ad is an auto-playing video?

EDIT: And I personally see no video ads ever, FWIW.

Comment author: drethelin 22 November 2013 04:54:29PM 1 point [-]

I have this too and it started recently. It doesn't happen anywhere apart from LW. If there's malware it's something to do with LW

Comment author: Lumifer 22 November 2013 05:13:49PM *  2 points [-]

My usual browsers are pretty much locked down all the time, but I dug out IE and looked at some LW pages. Didn't see any ads, video or not.

I would suspect malware, but it's also possible that other browser tabs (e.g. Facebook) are playing games...

P.S. Oh, a plug-in I have says there are three "requests" on this page from SpecificMedia (http://specificmedia.com/) and it does seem to specialize in video advertising.

Comment author: Pfft 22 November 2013 09:18:02PM 2 points [-]

I'm leaning towards it being part of the website. The video doesn't seem to play very often, but every time the page loads, there is a script tag from "vindicosuite.com" at the bottom, which contains links to specificmedia.com. Both of these domains are related to video advertisement.

To see the tag, I load the page in Chrome, rightclick->Inspect Element, and scroll to the bottom of the HTML view.

I see this both under Firefox on my laptop and Chrome on my office computer, it seems unlikely that they would both have the same malware at the same time.

Comment author: Lumifer 22 November 2013 09:52:06PM *  7 points [-]

there is a script tag from "vindicosuite.com" at the bottom, which contains links to specificmedia.com.

Um. That doesn't look nice.

I am also suspicious because the vindicosuite code is very clearly appended to the end of the page, just stuck onto the end. It's not integrated with the page in any way.

YO, ADMINS!! Are you quite sure lesswrong.com hasn't been pwned?

Comment author: gwern 23 November 2013 12:13:34AM *  1 point [-]

I just loaded http://lesswrong.com/ in both my Iceweasel and Chromium (Debian testing), and C-u, C-f 'suite', 'specific' - I see nothing? Nothing in curl either.

Comment author: Pfft 23 November 2013 06:50:58AM 3 points [-]

You will not see it with View Source (C-u). Try right-clicking on the page and selecting Inspect Element (in either Firefox or Chrome). (The tag is added by some Javascript, so it's only present in the DOM, not in the original source).

Comment author: Pfft 23 November 2013 07:07:33AM *  4 points [-]

Ok, it seems the culprit is this fragment

 <!-- Site Meter -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="<http://s18.sitemeter.com/js/counter.js?site=s18lesswrong>"> </script>
<noscript>
<a href="<http://s18.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s18lesswrong>" target="_top">
<img src="<http://s18.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s18lesswrong>" alt="Site Meter" border="0"/></a>
</noscript>
<!-- Copyright (c)2009 Site Meter -->

Commenting it out will get rid of the vindicosuite stuff. So I guess this is sitemeter.com gone rogue.

Some Googling found at least one other person who noticed the same problem.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 23 November 2013 07:44:02AM 1 point [-]

There are a few other blogs complaining about this.

AdBlock can handle it with this pattern:

||s18.sitemeter.com$domain=lesswrong.com
Comment author: Lumifer 23 November 2013 12:43:27AM *  2 points [-]

Interesting. I just looked on an entirely different computer and there's nothing.

Since the connection is http (and not https) I wonder whether there's some code injection going on...

But on the computer I used during the day there was a call to x.vindicosuite.com with a bunch of parameters. It was at the very end of the page, right before the closing </html> tag.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 21 November 2013 01:59:48AM 2 points [-]

I'm not seeing anything like that on Windows 8/Firefox, Ubuntu/Firefox, or iOS/Safari. What OS and browser are you using?

Comment author: Pfft 21 November 2013 03:26:45AM 1 point [-]

MacOS/Firefox. I have only seen it a few times, not every time I load the page. But I never saw this style of ad on any other website.

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