{"id":7407,"date":"2013-02-11T14:40:50","date_gmt":"2013-02-11T03:40:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelwyres.com\/?p=7407"},"modified":"2013-02-11T14:40:50","modified_gmt":"2013-02-11T03:40:50","slug":"shabby-inline-adverstising-in-fairfax-rss-feeds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/2013\/02\/shabby-inline-adverstising-in-fairfax-rss-feeds\/","title":{"rendered":"Shabby Inline Adverstising In Fairfax RSS Feeds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the last couple of weeks I came to conclusion that both my work computer and home desktop computer had somehow managed to become infected with a virus.<\/p>\n

This was something of a surprise, given the security techniques in place in both my home network, and the corporate network – but as always, I keep an open mind as hackers develop new attack vectors all the time.<\/p>\n

It seemed to be happening whenever I was clicking news items in my personal news aggregator, where the links were to Fairfax<\/a> newspaper sites. I was being presented with the following interstitial advertisement<\/a>:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Given the various languages presented on the right hand said, the fact that Google Chrome<\/a> was offering to translate the page from French, and the really<\/i> poor appearance of the page, it seemed like my clicks were being intercepted and redirected.<\/p>\n

It looked very malware<\/a>-like. If nothing else, it looked really unprofessional.<\/p>\n

As it turned out, my clicks were<\/i> being intercepted and redirected – by the Fairfax RSS<\/a> feeds themselves. Their RSS feeds have recently been changed to serve the interstitial in between the click, and the user being delivered to the actual page they are interested in.<\/p>\n

Now, I have no problem with Fairfax seeking to improve their advertising revenue – business is tough – but there is no acknowledgement that the interstitial is supposed to be there, no suggestion that it is from the destination site, and it looks really<\/i> “hacky”.<\/p>\n

I went into full virus check mode, before I took a moment to examine the original RSS feeds, and find that it was deliberate.<\/p>\n

I’m sure I won’t be the only person to view this as a potential virus\/malware attack – so poorly and shabbily this has been implemented. Fortunately, since I wrote my own news aggregator, I coded around it anyway – and I don’t get the interstitial now.<\/p>\n

But for everyone else, if you’re going to use interstitials, give the visitor confidence they aren’t being attacked.<\/p>\n

Ugly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the last couple of weeks I came to conclusion that both my work computer and home desktop computer had somehow managed to become infected with a virus. This was something of a surprise, given the security techniques in place in both my home network, and the corporate network – but as always, I keep […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[29,220,460,530],"class_list":["post-7407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","tag-advertising","tag-fairfax","tag-rss","tag-theage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7407"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7407\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}