(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Greetings NGU, last night I had a startling revelation - I get angry just thinking about various things. I decided as a way to control my anger and possibly entertain/sympathize with other users of the forum, I could try to start a weekly rant.

I know most of you don't know me, and most of you don't care about my opinions, but I figured I *might* be able to change that. This will go down one of 3 roads: A. It becomes popular and I do it every week for a while. B. A few people like the first rant and I continue ranting 2-3 weeks but it's not enough to keep people entertained so I just sort of...stop. C. No one likes it and this will be the only one I post.

But I figured it would be worth a shot and who knows, maybe it will become popular

Week #1
Topic - Advertising
Tirade 1 - Ads from YouTube

Last night I was browsing the web (watching various videos on YouTube and taking a look at some of the most popular YT personalities for the first time) I was filled with anger when, all of the sudden, the next video I loaded up displayed a 30 second ad. Making me wait for my video to play with no way to skip this infernal ad about HP. I already own a COMPAQ computer and an HP keyboard. Let me watch the ****ing video already.

It loads, then another ad (Hotwire) comes up at the bottom of the video about 10 seconds in. I'm watching these videos for recreational purposes. I'm not trying to book a hotel for vacation.

After the video was over, I found the ad that spawned this rant, the true purpose for my anger and pent up fury.

It was one of those stupid "See what you'll look like old!"

Obviously, I knew it was a fake, all of these stupid ads are, but on the ad, it claimed "utilizes custom FBI face recognition software." So I was curious to see if they would elaborate. As I expected, they did not. In fact it was just like any other of those cell # traps, same page layout and everything. There was even a typo in some of the larger text. "See what age will do tp you!" No joke, they misspelled "to." Granted that wasn't the EXACT phrase, as what it actually said was some stupid general statement that continues to elude me, but they did misspell "to." If you are going to scam people, at least run a spell-checker.

Then I got to the fine print at the bottom of the page. And this is when I snapped. It pretty much said: Complete steps 1-3 and we will get to work on making your *baby* picture (yeah, they copied the fine print from another site they used that supposedly made baby versions of your face). You need to be 16 or older and have a cell phone number. You will receive your photo after you verify your number. When you verify your number you are signing up for our service which, based on your service provider gives you smilies, photos or fun texts regularly. The service ranges from $14.99 a month to $19.99 a month and will be charged directly to your phone.

So, in giving this page your phone number, you (may or may not) get a photo of you old, and then you get signed up for an adware service which (without notifying you outside of the fine print) will charge you an extra $15-20 a month. (for the math deficient that would be about $180-240 dollars a year). Yeah.

But that's not the worst part. The worst part is that there are hundreds of scams EXACTLY like this all over the web. And they are being advertised on REPUTABLE sites! Now, I understand that it takes a certain level of computer deficiency to actually fall for one of these scams, but it's not all that uncommon. I mean how evil do you have to be to say you are going to give someone a free picture of them when they are old (or them as a cartoon, or the name of their soulmate, or when they are going to die, or when their first kid will be born, or what their favorite color is, etc) and then charge them $200 a year without notifying them?

NO ONE deserves that. (well, maybe Bieber, but other than him...)

Tirade 2 - Survey Locks.

I saw an interesting video in the related videos for one of iJustine's videos (give me a break, I just got into watching all these videos last night) , that claimed the uploader had a working Facebook hack. I've been around long enough to know it was clearly a fake, but I wanted to see how the guy was benefiting from it.

At first it seemed he wasn't getting anything out of it. He said to download the file from the link below (and he really emphasized to only use THAT link, which was suspicious) and install it and type in the account you want to steal. He then ran it through an online virus scanner, virustotal I think, and it came back clean. So out of curiosity, I clicked the link, and found out how he was benefiting. It was survey locked.

For those of you that don't know, when ever you complete a survey online when you give out your details or anything, they get sold to other companies as leads (unless the site specifically states that your information is not sold). They get a handsome amount of cash, and to keep the easy referrals coming in, they pay a small portion of that to people who bring in the referrals (the people who run the surveys or upload the files, etc). And as if it wasn't bad enough that the program was fake, now you're getting calls from telemarketers, spam emails, junk mail, etc.

If you really don't want to complete one, you can sometimes circumnavigate them by finding your goal in the source code, but it doesn't work for all content. This works best with video sharing sites (like free episodes of a certain show) but many of those sites are there only to collect leads and contain no actual videos at all.

/rant

That's all I have time for today, if you enjoyed this, please say so below and give me some ideas for my rant next week. If you disliked it, possibly state why you didn't like it, and I'll try to improve if I actually can improve on the problem.

Thanks for reading and have a great day.

I could out rant you, and many people could probably do the same. I don't think one person should have a rant series so they can be special. Use the stress relief thread in the sticky to rant instead of making a whole series that no one will read.

I read as far as 30 second ad so I had to wait for my video.

You're a very wise man.

only me said yes

tl,dr.

Ads are anoying though

Just hit F5 when an ad comes up.

Or how about you faggots start using firefox and download the ABP add-on for it...instead of being lazy bums and writing long ****ing rants.