ErrorSafe/Winfixer on Microsoft.
This isn't directly related to LJ, but I thought people here would find it interesting anyway.
You may remember that some time ago LiveJournal had problems with ads that installed ErrorSafe/Winfixer. The problem was that due to some sneaky coding in one particular banner ad, it managed to sneak past LJ's ad guidelines and make it live to the site, and after that happened, it started to spawn popups on LiveJournal which downloaded the ErrorSafe/Winfixer malware. Very unethical on the part of the ad creators.
Well, although I don't have any empirical proof, I suspect that exactly the same thing happened to Microsoft a few days ago when ErrorSafe/Winfixer adverts started popping up for users of MSN Messenger. Certainly the ads would never have got through their ad guidelines if it did that during testing, so I suspect that the reason is probably exactly the same as the reason it got past LJ's own. Of course, that's weird because it means that MSN Messenger can display Flash ads, if that's true.
Any more discussion about this should probably be taken to a more appropriate venue than no_lj_ads, but I figured this was related and interesting enough to post here.
You may remember that some time ago LiveJournal had problems with ads that installed ErrorSafe/Winfixer. The problem was that due to some sneaky coding in one particular banner ad, it managed to sneak past LJ's ad guidelines and make it live to the site, and after that happened, it started to spawn popups on LiveJournal which downloaded the ErrorSafe/Winfixer malware. Very unethical on the part of the ad creators.
Well, although I don't have any empirical proof, I suspect that exactly the same thing happened to Microsoft a few days ago when ErrorSafe/Winfixer adverts started popping up for users of MSN Messenger. Certainly the ads would never have got through their ad guidelines if it did that during testing, so I suspect that the reason is probably exactly the same as the reason it got past LJ's own. Of course, that's weird because it means that MSN Messenger can display Flash ads, if that's true.
Any more discussion about this should probably be taken to a more appropriate venue than no_lj_ads, but I figured this was related and interesting enough to post here.