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      Pirate Sites With Malicious Ads Face Restrictions Under New Initiative

      news.movim.eu / TorrentFreak · Thursday, 29 February - 19:10 · 4 minutes

    malware-s1 There was a time when visiting a pirate site was much like visiting any other. Keen to attract eyeballs wherever they might be, many of the world’s biggest brands exchanged cold hard cash for an appearance on prominent pirate portals.

    Over time and as the thorny issue of funding illicit platforms gained traction, companies including Ford, Toyota, Nissan, Mazda and Volvo came under increasing pressure. The same held true for other household names, such as tech giant Samsung , along with Nokia, Canon, Carlsberg, even Coca Cola.

    These companies weren’t deliberately placing ads on pirate sites, but their ads kept turning up on them nonetheless.

    Goodbye Quality Brands

    As brand protection became increasingly important during the previous decade, companies such as White Bullet provided intelligence on which sites to avoid, with similar lists deployed to facilitate the work of the UK’s Infringing Website List , among others. In the United States, the formation of the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) in 2015 saw advertisers and advertising agencies come together to clean up the system and prevent ad revenue from reaching pirate sites.

    TAG enjoys considerable support; Amazon, Disney, Google, Meta, NBC, Sky, and Spotify, among others, sit on TAG’s Leadership Council. Most were around in 2019 when TAG launched Project Brand Integrity , an initiative to prevent valuable brands’ advertising ending up next to potato-quality copies of Hollywood movies and other unauthorized content.

    Half a Decade Later, TAG Upgrades

    While TAG says that v1.0 has performed well, on Wednesday it announced Project Brand Integrity 2.0. More easily scalable than its predecessor, PBI 2.0 still aims to defund pirate sites and protect advertisers from undesirable associations. If all goes to plan, it will be quicker to react and more responsive to domain hopping too.

    “Project Brand Integrity 1.0 was incredibly effective but hard to scale, as it involved a time-consuming manual process of notifying advertisers when their ads were found on pirate sites,” says Mike Zaneis, CEO of TAG.

    “Although most advertisers took action when alerted to such misplacements, the money often had already changed hands, and the criminals quickly moved their efforts to new domains.”

    Excluded From Ads, Pirates Welcomed to Exclusion List

    Also receiving an upgrade is TAG’s database of pirate sites, which is shared within the industry to help advertisers avoid undesirable platforms. This ‘exclusion list’ is maintained and developed through intelligence sharing at TAG’s AdSec Threat Exchange , where members collaborate with participating companies, utilize open source resources, and share information on pirate domains.

    The resulting list aims to limit pirate sites’ access to advertisers, thereby reducing their ability to generate revenue from advertising.

    “Through PBI 2.0, TAG will leverage new partnerships with the industry’s major ad tech intermediaries to cut off funding from pirate websites through a comprehensive pre-bid exclusion list, thus preventing pirate sites from monetizing stolen intellectual property (IP),” TAG says.

    “By incorporating real-time intelligence on new pirate domains from TAG’s Ad Sec Threat Exchange and TAG member companies, PBI 2.0 will protect brands while preventing ad dollars from reaching those illegitimate sites.”

    Malvertising Everywhere

    In an interview with EMA last December, Michael Lyden, TAG’s Vice President of Threat Intelligence, spoke of the constant battle against malvertising, a portmanteau of ‘malware’ and ‘advertising.’ Scam ads, auto-redirections, cloaking, and drive-by downloads all received a mention. Not exclusively in connection with pirate sites, though, the problem is much broader than that.

    Given the nature of this pervasive adversary, TAG’s v2.0 exclusion list will also combine data originally collected by anti-malware vendors, with the intelligence providing an enhanced view of pirate sites that combine free downloads with malicious or deceptive ads. Once that information is placed in the hands of advertisers, it’s hoped that having two reasons not to fund pirate sites will be better than having just one.

    Proactively Eliminating Malvertising

    What kind of effect the project will have at the consumer end is unclear. One of the great ironies of the pirate site/malware debate is that by driving trusted advertisers away, anti-piracy groups not only removed revenue but also opened up the market for less inhibited advertising agencies to do more business with pirate sites.

    Lower ad rates made available to pirate sites with fewer opportunities elsewhere, can lead to an elevated chance of risky ads, on web-based portals in particular. Since TAG’s system will only make things worse and the rest of the internet isn’t getting any better, some sites may need to be tackled more directly.

    The good news is that plenty of solutions for disappearing bad ads, malvertising, endless trackers, and other stuff some sites just can’t get enough of, are readily available for free. Since they don’t discriminate, they’re just as happy removing all hot girls in your area to the 80 advertising partners imposed on visitors by too many mainstream sites.

    For those really averse to abusive advertising, moving away from ISP-provided DNS to Quad9’s threat-blocking alternative is a good start.

    For the more adventurous, a self-hosted DNS server like Pi-Hole, loaded with various hand-picked blocking lists, is something that few people think they need. At least until they see how even seemingly regular ads, not to mention things like smart TVs, can really abuse their trust.

    Finally, uBlock Origin on top is an essential for every browser, and if all goes to plan, malvertising will be a thing of the past. Then, working from a nice clean sheet, unblocking the sites worthy of support seems the way to go, while enjoying the internet all over again.

    From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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      Hey tumblr users. Here is why Movim could be the best platform to migrate to!

      Timothée Jaussoin · pubsub.movim.eu / Movim · Monday, 3 December, 2018 - 22:45 edit · 3 minutes

    Tumblr has decided to ban all NSFW content from its network. Although we understand the reasons why this decision has been made, it's a strong reminder that handling your content - NSFW or not - from a centralized and private platform can always lead to such censorship.

    The Tumblr Logo

    Movim has been built to prevent this kind of restriction. Here's a few reasons why.

    Movim is a Free Software

    Movim has been and will always be a Free Software. This provides you with the freedom to adapt it, redistribute it and use it in any way you would like to. You are then free to add new features, change some behaviors or customize as you wish, for yourself or your community.

    Movim is based on an Open Standard : XMPP

    All the content that you are publishing on Movim: articles, private messages or chatroom messages, pictures… are published using your #XMPP account that is separate from Movim itself (like your emails are separated from your email client).

    The XMPP Logo

    The XMPP standard is the official IETF Instant Messaging solution and is used accross the world by millions of people daily. Since 2008 Movim is pushing social features on top of it to provide to everyone a simple and modern way of publishing content, subscribing and reacting to it.

    Movim is then just a way to access your content on the XMPP network (like your browser is accessing content on the Web). If you don't like Movim, you are also free to use one of the many other solutions to access your content and communicate with others… while keeping the same account!

    Movim is easy to deploy

    Movim is lightweight (only a few megabytes) and can be deployed on any server. We are providing a Docker image, a Debian package or a simple installation tutorial if you want to deploy it yourself.

    The project only relies on widely used technologies like PHP, HTML5 and is fully compatible with MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite.

    One instance can handle several hundreds of simultaneous sessions in real time.

    We are also providing apps for Windows, macOS, Linux and Android that can easily be used for your own personnalized instance.

    You can then build your own instance in a few clicks and host your own content while still being connected and explore the rest of the network.


    Movim provides similar features to Tumblr's

    Like Tumblr, it is possible to publish content in a few clicks, write articles (like this one), attach pictures or files. You can publish content on your own profile but also in Communities where you can collaborate with others and create a stream of articles around a topic and bring followers in.

    It is possible to apply CSS stylesheets to fully customize your public blog.

    It is also possible to share a content that you found on your own account, but also like and comment other people's content!

    You can easily #tag content by putting #hashtags in your article or title. The other users will then be able to discover it while browsing tags on their own instance.

    Movim has NSFW features built in. If you publish NSFW content, just add the nsfw tag and Movim will filter the content for the users who chose not to view it from their account. A spoiler overlay is also added in your news feed to prevent explicit content to be displayed on your screen while scrolling.

    … but also provides more than Tumblr!

    All the content published on Movim is broadcasted to your subscribers in real time! You will also be notified instantly for the likes and comments on your publications. A simple toggle will also allow you to publish your articles privately (restrict the publication to your subscribers) or publicly (share with the whole network).

    Movim also provides a full, and modern Instant Messaging system, with chatrooms, message edition, stickers, video-conferencing and many more features… In a few clicks you'll be able to invite contacts and chat with them!

    Movim is available on all the devices. Its fully responsive and the real-time UI allows you to access your content from your phone, tablet or computer and keep everything in sync.


    So what are you waiting for? Come and try it!

    If you have any concerns, questions, remarks or critics on the project, feel free to come to our official chatroom: movim@conference.movim.eu and drop us a message.

    That's all folks!