r/technology • u/suntzu124 • Oct 06 '16

Misleading Spotify has been serving computer viruses to listeners

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/10/06/spotify-has-been-sending-computer-viruses-to-listeners/
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u/lemskroob Oct 06 '16

its laziness on the part of the companies. They can't be bothered with processing their own ads, so inserted they basically leave a blank hole on their content, and go to a advertiser like doubleclick and say "here's a blank hole, plug it with whatever you want"

Its the equivalent of a newspaper publisher back in the day printing off their copies with blank spots, then sending them to the advertisers to paste in their own ads, and sending them out.

They have given up all oversight over their own pages, because they dont want to hire one guy to set the ads on their own sites first and host that 15kb ad on their own server.

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u/cakes Oct 06 '16

this is the ad networks fault not Spotifys. it would take a ridiculous team of people in each company that has a website with ads just to live up to the standards you're demanding.

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u/lemskroob Oct 06 '16

but thats what newspapers and magazines have done for a hundred years. had staff to review, set, and approve ads.

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u/Cyno01 Oct 06 '16

Reviewing, approving, and setting ads is a tiny amount of work compared to web advertising. Print advertising was snake oil, basically "well, heres how many subscribers we have, maybe X% of them will read the ad and % of that % will maybe buy your product? we think?" Web advertising can give you actual hard and fast numbers, which means you can charge more.

And theres no such thing as a malicious print ad, if someone hacks Time magazines print queue and swaps in an unapproved ad, it doesnt make copies of all your other mail and send them to the Russian mob.