In a World of Fake News - You Are The Target!
I love watching Dragon's Den, and when I saw this I was shocked that the programme had been cancelled:
But even when I went to the page, I thought it was real [Link][Link]
But the more you read, the more find out that you have been conned and it is fake news - Clickbait! I should have spotted that the tweet had come from a food site. How can it be possible that someone has created a page such as this, with real photos and quotes from the stars?
Fake news
There are some tricks going on, on the Internet, where users are tricked into reading things, and where eventually the made-up stories become trusted. So, I live in Juniper Green, Edinburgh, and this review popped up on Twitter, so I dived in and had a quick look [here]:
While I was happy at the free wi-fi, I was a bit shocked at ￡130 for a bottle of Dom Perigon 2000:
But there's a sneaky thing going on at the news items at the bottom of the page and where we see articles with local connections. So, you'll see "Edinburgh Mum's Trick Removes Eye-Bags" and "Edinburgh Mum Sheds 1.4 stones":
When you go to the site, you find that it is a pretty generic page, which has tricked you into thinking that there is some local interest:
The strategy is thus to seed the Internet with stories, over many different media channels, and this increases their impact by customising them for whichever region you are in. The V for veracity has thus been because people are reading the article.
If you search over the Internet, you find lots of similar stories:
But the strangest of all the links is the YouTube video for the story, which is basically just a cityscape (or maybe there's a hidden skinny pill in there):
At the root of this "spoofing" advertisements is a company named Revcontent:
And if you click on their link you get:
And if you follow-up on their so-called "privacy" policy, you can see they basically use everything they can to track you ... cookies, web beacons, web storage, unique device identifiers ...
and then they say that they can pass this onto they want now and in the future:
For them the "magic" happens with a smart piece of JavaScript code:
and where the https://trends.revcontent.com/serve.js.php feeds you customised advertisements based on your location. It does this by dropping a cookie onto your machine, and then traces you across all the sites that you visit, and also across your devices. It thus passes a w variable (giving the ID of the site), along with the date and the width of your browser.
Revcontent, too, seem to think they are changing the world and have pictures of Steve Jobs and Martin Luther King on their main Web page:
and:
Conclusions
The Internet model of running code only from the site that you are accessing is now gone, and the cross-fertilisation of activity is .
Basically ... you are being tricked into clicking on a link, which often has very little real substance. You are being spied upon, and it's not by the CIA or FBI, it is by Google and invisible advertising spies, who customise your pages for you ... because they think you want them.