Displaying items by tag: Ads

Yesterday we reported that insider builds of Microsoft’s Windows 11 were displaying ads for other Microsoft services inside File Explorer. Like most people, we felt this was not a good thing and the news went around the internet at a pace typical of things that are bad. In response to this Microsoft release a statement saying, “This was an experimental banner that was not intended to be published externally and was turned off,” Basically the marketing equivalent of a 5-year-old saying they got the cookie for you.

Published in Security Talk

Microsoft, famous for bad marketing moves, is looking to make another one. In this case the mistake has not hit the general public but is in a preview build of Windows 11. The mistake is shoveling ads to people for other Microsoft products as part of the Windows File Explorer. To say that this move caused some concern with testers is a bit of an understatement. Some even called it “one of the worst places to show ads”

Published in Security Talk

Facebook makes their money off their users. That is no shock to anyone considering the number of investigations currently ongoing over Facebook’s data collection practices. Of course, Facebook is not the only group collecting this type of information, they just tend to take it a bit farther than most of the other groups. Because of these invasive data collection practices many countries have tightened their laws around what can and cannot be used to develop and send out targeted ads. This has included a whole new category for “intimate” information. Even Apple has decided that this style of data collection might be out of bounds and have change their own privacy policies in iOS.

Published in Security Talk

The term “free to play” has often been parodied as “free to pay” by gamers that feel this new system of timers and locks is something that is just not a good business model. Fortunately it is not a model that has managed to spread through the entire market, but is one that is certainly entrenched in the mobile one. A recent ruling in the UK over EA’s advertisement of the Dungeon Keeper game for iOS and Android might be the start of a new look at this often misleading label.

Published in News

Our first bit of news this morning is a piece about the SEA (Syrian Electronic Army) hacking into an ad plug-in (widget) on the Reuters new page that allowed them to redirect readers to new landing pages. Now, while the hack is serious, at the time of this writing it does not appear there was any additional payload pushed out to end users. All that happened was readers looking for news stories were redirected to a new page that slammed western media.

Published in News

According to the latest rankings of 100 most valuable global brands compiled by market research firm Millward Brown, Google is the most valuable brand in the world. Google has come to the first spot instead of Apple, which was the first in the rankings for three years, but now fell to second place because the Apple's value on an annual basis fell by 20 % and now amounts to $148 billion.

Published in News
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Wednesday, 13 November 2013 09:31

Apple Fans Try to Use Ad Mistake to Bash the Surface 2

It must be a slow news day over at Apple Insider where they have chosen to present a mistake in an advertisement to try and slam the new Surface 2. You see according to them, the ad shows Excel making a mistake in addition. This somehow translates to Microsoft being bad and Excel being worse than numbers. The author of the piece quickly went about showing how much better Numbers was by using it to calculate the same sum and they came up with the correct number. The logical leap here is something staggering considering it is not a photo of the surface, but a piece of graphic art.

Published in News
Wednesday, 18 September 2013 19:37

Google could be moving away from Cookies

Google

Most people are aware of small bits that are used to identify and track your computer on the internet and no, I am not talking about the NSA. We are talking about cookies and there are no end users that I know of that like them. If you look around you will find that there are tons of utilities, applications and plug-ins that will help you avoid or delete cookies from your system. Yet these annoyances (in addition to being more than a little invasive) are still around after more than 15 years. However, there is some potentially good news about this as we hear that Google is looking to move away from the use of third party cookies for tracking your movement on the internet.

Published in News
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Google is not happy with Microsoft at the moment. It seems that Microsoft has done something rather foolish to the YouTube app for Windows Phone. Instead of following the normal restrictions that most other mobile players follow, they (Microsoft) have decided to let their users download videos from YouTube and to block ads completely during video playback.

Published in News
aol

AOL, once a leading global provider of Internet services reported the first quarterly revenue growth in eight years. In the fourth quarter of last year the company operated with $600 million in revenue, compared with $576 million in the same period a year earlier. This is significantly better than the estimates of analysts who had expected revenue of $573 million. Operating profit also rose by 24%, from 54.8 to 68.2 million.

Published in News
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