I hope SL is making lots of money off the ads!

[Phil Deakins]

LL does have some choice in that they can choose not to take ads from specific companies but, unless things have changed since I last looked some years ago, they can't choose not to take ads on certain topics, such as ads for other £D environments. If they spot an ad from a competing company, they can choose not to take ads from that company any more.

They can't peruse ads in advance, and choose or reject some. They get what they are given and only then can they reject ads from specific companies.

LL could and should reject ads from whoever is advertising as a download button and the one at the bottom. They may have done it already but what are the chances of LL being on top of things like that?

[Freya Mokusei]

Thanks!

And yeah, there's some pretty terrible examples around. My current location of choice for web access has a fun set-up - while I'm not at the PC it will 'surf' the web on its own and collate information by hunting Google search results. This collation is done in tandem with half a dozen or so additional PCs, all running the same routine (through the same IP address/connection) Since it's automated and is allowed to follow some pretty fun leaps, I get advertised some of the best (worst) stuff as I wander around.

Right now it's showing me ads for PPI claims (I'm sure you're familiar) and Christian exploration workshops. Ooh, and mature dating!

[Phil Deakins]

That sound like fun, Freya

If it does searches on Google too quickly, Google will automatically prevent it from getting results. They have systems in place to prevent auto-searching when they can. I've even been stopped when searching by hand - when looking for something specific, I'd go through all the results pages quickly until I found it. My button presses must have been too quick and too regular and the auto-system kicked in. If I remember right, I had to do something that needed human eyes in order to continue. That happened a few times.

I've written programmes that do auto-searches but I knew enough to write them so that they didn't do quick and regular searches, and they were never stopped by the system. One programme I wrote searched over 70 of the Google search IPs so I could see the results on the different datacentres - they do vary. They didn't have that many datacentres at that time but it was only by doing searches on them all that I came to realise that each datacentre could be accessed on several IPs.

[Awe Thor]

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Freya Mokusei wrote:

Ooh, and mature dating!

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As opposed to immature dating?

[Freya Mokusei]

@Phil

Ah yeah, I've bumped into that one myself. I should've been clearer though maybe, its exposure to Google is minimal and the process is intentionally slow - it's part of an experiment in security via obfuscation, minimal-trust paradigms and other long words

@Awe

Yes! That is my preferred variety. Nothing is more fatal to dating than trying to take it seriously

[Awe Thor]

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Freya Mokusei wrote: it's part of an experiment in security via obfuscation,

minimal-trust paradigms

and other long words

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I thought that approach had been abandoned because use of symmetric cryptography allows any node to corrupt the routing protocol operation within a level of trust, by mounting virtually any attack that would be possible without the presence of the scheme.

Or is that where the obfuscation comes in; you hide the data in pizza boxes?