They thrived alongside the yuppies in the booming 80s. Now, in tougher times, they have found a safe space to flaunt their carefree lifestyle

Name: Dinks.

Age: The term was coined in the 1980s. Dinks have been around for longer and are, by definition, of working and child-raising age.

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AA Milne brought to bear to help settle dispute between Waltham Forest council and Greek food firm Odysea

It is not every day that a judge quotes Winnie-the-Pooh. But this week, one made the return to the Hundred Acre Wood when delivering an extraordinary judgment over what constitutes “raw honey”.

Judge Neville was asked to settle a row between a high-end Greek food firm and a London council over whether the company could call their product “raw” or “artisan”.

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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.

Technology made its mark on the Super Bowl ads this year. Microsoft purchased a long inspirational ad for Copilot, ending with the tagline "Your everyday AI companion." (Although another message made the opposite point. "With artificial intelligence, the future is in good hands," an announcer says ironically -- while the ad shows the minions from Despicable Me 4.) Google's ad showed how its Pixel 8 smartphone helps people with vision problems take photos. T-Mobile touted its internet service. And for some reason CrowdStrike's ad about its endpoint security software took place in the Old West... VW ended an ad looking at its history with a shot of its new electric vehicle, the ID.Buzz minivan, while Kia had its own heart-tugging ad touting their electric EV9. And Pfizer ran a minute-long ad showing the history of medical progress, culminating with a pointer to their new domain, LetsOutdoCancer.com. Even NASA got into the action, releasing a video showing an astronaut catching a pass in zero gravity. ("Including its solar panels, the Space Station is the same size as a regulation football field.") And some people even tried watching the Super Bowl on their new Apple Vision Pro...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Tech Company Super Bowl Ads of 2024

As a cash-strapped festive season looms, brands are reining in their spending on traditional broadcast campaigns

The star power of festive favourite Michael Bublé and singer Christina Aguilera will not be enough to arrest a £150m slump in Christmas TV advertising spending, as the cost of living crisis and the pull of alternative media tempers the traditional big-budget marketing showdown in the biggest shopping quarter of the year.

UK companies are set to spend a record £9.5bn on marketing in the run-up to Christmas, known as the “golden quarter”, which many retailers rely on to drive annual profits and sales. That figure is up more than £400m overall on last year.

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Research found speeding or jumping a red light less likely in a Skoda or Hyundai than in brands sold as ‘performance driving’

What came first, the boy racer or the sports car? Academics have called for further research into the marketing of cars after analysis of UK accident data suggested that drivers of certain brands are more likely than others to cause a crash.

A study of more than 400,000 UK road accidents found that when “risky or aggressive manoeuvres” played a part in collisions, there was a significant statistical difference in driver culpability across different brands.

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‘Faster, cheaper, better’ digital model that helped build business into £5.2bn company has been hit hard by advertising recession

When Sir Martin Sorrell set up S4 Capital it was meant to mark a triumphant last act, a return to the top of ad land and a means of rehabilitating his tarnished reputation, but the worst slump since the advertising recession of the late noughties is threatening to derail his comeback.

Sorrell launched the digital marketing group at lightspeed just a matter of months after his scandal-ridden departure from WPP in 2018, which followed allegations that he paid for a sex worker using funds from the FTSE 100 company he founded and spent decades building into the world’s biggest advertising group.

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When Russia invaded and then annexed Crimea in 2014, Ukraine’s vision for the future would be challenged like never before. On its western borders lay peace, opportunity, and the European Union. To the east, war, regression, and Vladimir Putin.

Following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, even closer ties with the EU became a matter of national urgency for Ukraine. Despite widespread destruction and unimaginable loss of life, work to welcome Ukraine into Europe has somehow pressed ahead. Efforts to align Ukrainian law with EU norms face considerable challenges, but progress is being made.

Reforming media legislation is just part of Ukraine’s path to EU membership and during the summer, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed new legislation to update Ukraine’s advertising environment to standards required by the EU. After a three-month introductory period, the new rules will start being enforced early October, including measures that govern advertising on the internet.

Limiting Pirate Sites’ Ability to Generate Revenue

The amendments cover a wide range of issues from discrimination to product placement and beyond. The amendments relating to online advertising are considerable but of particular interest is a section that outlaws placement of advertising on pirate platforms, in clearly defined circumstances.

The reference to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) concerns the WIPO Alert ‘blacklist’ , a centrally-maintained database of piracy platforms nominated by rightsholders in participating countries. In Ukraine’s case, pirate sites and services are identified as part of the ‘ Clear Sky ‘ initiative and then added to a national blacklist.

Ukraine’s blacklist currently contains over 3,600 domains and is available for scrutiny in a public Google spreadsheet ( here ). Once forwarded to the WIPO Alert database, any included domains are subject to the advertising prohibition detailed in the new law.

Transparency on Eligibility

According to WIPO, participants in the WIPO Alert program provide information on the criteria and procedures that result in a domain appearing on their respective national blacklists before being placed on WIPO Alert. Ukraine’s legal amendments explain as follows:

The central executive body, which ensures the formation and implementation of the state policy in the field of intellectual property, determines the procedure for the formation, maintenance of the national list and consideration of applications for the inclusion of a website in the national list, informs the World Intellectual Property Organization of the information from the said national list and also publishes the national list on its official website.

The website is included in the national list based on the results of consideration of the application of the subject of copyright or the subject of related rights…which is submitted on behalf of the applicant by his representative – a lawyer or a representative in intellectual property matters…providing adequate evidence that the website owner has, within the last 365 days, committed:

three or more violations of intellectual property rights that have not been remedied by the website owner as of the date of submission of such appeal; or

two or more violations of intellectual property rights, which were registered by the applicant before the date of such appeal, and at the same time there is a failure to comply with the requirements of the eleventh part of Article 56 of the Law of Ukraine On Copyright and Related Rights.

Video sharing sites, media platforms and other services registered in accordance with the Law of Ukraine “On Media” cannot be included in Ukraine’s national advertising blacklist.

Ukraine Beats Most of the EU

While Ukraine has received widespread criticism for unaddressed and at times rampant online copyright infringement, its participation in WIPO Alert puts it ahead of nearly all EU member states.

Italy participates in the program through telecoms regulator AGCOM, Lithuania through its Radio and Television Commission, and Spain through departments under the Ministry of Culture. No other EU country participates, despite having similar ‘pirate’ blacklists of their own.

Ukraine is not yet listed as a participant in the WIPO Alert program, at least according to current WIPO information . Whether its inclusion will have a significant or indeed any effect on pirate sites’ ability to generate revenue is unknown. At least in part, Ukraine hopes to remove or at least reduce the prevalence of gambling advertising on local pirate sites, but the odds of success probably aren’t great.

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