The Hole Truth
Charly's Column – Pi-hole
A strange rule seems to dictate that the most useless products and services have the most annoying online advertising. Columnist Charly blocks the garish advertising for all computers on his network centrally with the Pi-hole tool, which is not only for Raspberry Pi devices.
There are two irreconcilable camps in the discussion on the use of banners and skyscrapers on websites: One is populated by people who get annoyed by garish, flashing, fidgety advertising formats that remind them of neon signs from the 50s. An increasing number of these users simply reject advertising on the web as garbage. The opposing camp is occupied by website owners – amateur bloggers, to name just one example – for whom advertising is the only way to recoup their costs for servers and other things.
People who place ads on their websites usually source them from one of several large commercial networks and simply create placeholders on the sites, which are then later replaced with the ads. Most people do not know exactly what advertising their site is showing at any given time.
The ad networks, in turn, allow the ad creators a great amount of freedom. It is no longer only images that are used here, but also JavaScript and the like. Criminals exploit this to display manipulated advertisements that scan the visitor's browser for vulnerabilities and – if they find any – install malicious software or animate the user to download applications of dubious repute. It can thus happen that visiting a highly reputable website actually infects your own PC with malware.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Plasma Bigscreen Returns
A developer discovered that the Plasma Bigscreen feature had been sitting untouched, so he decided to do something about it.
-
CachyOS Now Lets Users Choose Their Shell
Imagine getting the opportunity to select which shell you want during the installation of your favorite Linux distribution. That's now a thing.
-
Wayland 1.24 Released with Fixes and New Features
Wayland continues to move forward, while X11 slowly vanishes into the shadows, and the latest release includes plenty of improvements.
-
Bugs Found in sudo
Two critical flaws allow users to gain access to root privileges.
-
Fedora Continues 32-Bit Support
In a move that should come as a relief to some portions of the Linux community, Fedora will continue supporting 32-bit architecture.
-
Linux Kernel 6.17 Drops bcachefs
After a clash over some late fixes and disagreements between bcachefs's lead developer and Linus Torvalds, bachefs is out.
-
ONLYOFFICE v9 Embraces AI
Like nearly all office suites on the market (except LibreOffice), ONLYOFFICE has decided to go the AI route.
-
Two Local Privilege Escalation Flaws Discovered in Linux
Qualys researchers have discovered two local privilege escalation vulnerabilities that allow hackers to gain root privileges on major Linux distributions.
-
New TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro Powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300
The TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen10 offers serious power that is ready for your business, development, or entertainment needs.
-
LibreOffice Tested as Possible Office 365 Alternative
Another major organization has decided to test the possibility of migrating from Microsoft's Office 365 to LibreOffice.