Sloppy's Journal: Motherfucker!!

I work at a place that runs a fairly (locally) popular website. We sometimes get orders for ads from a company who just gave us one of these to run. I gather that the behavior in question is intermittent, so it was just dumb luck that it happened to me, so that I realized WTF was going on and killed it.

So they aren't screening this stuff, huh? That means I have to? Shit. I don't know how to screen for this. I hate Flash. I hated it before, but now I really fucking hate Flash.

we got hit too

[ces]

our sites were hit by this too. And apparently most of the agencies just don't have the technical staff to screen these things properly.

From tearing apart the flash the redirect is very hidden so you have to know what you are looking for to even find it in the first place.

We had to turn off all flash ads to stop this and also ended up dropping one of our ad partners over this (they kept saying it "wasn't a big deal").

Biz kids aren't happy though as non-flash doesn't pay as high per impression or click.

Re:

[Sloppy]

I just disassembled the ad in question with Flasm [sourceforge.net] (although I'm looking around at other tools as part of my crash course in Flash) and there's no way I can cost-effectively audit that. I just recommended to my bosses that we no longer run Flash ads unless we compile human-readable ActionScript ourselves.

Flash should never have gotten so much expressive power as to be able to minimize a window, pop up, do network I/O, etc. Adobe just killed it's usefulness for the web. WTF were they thinking?!?