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Posts by The Blind Trust

Screen shot of a scam Guardian page for a crypto scam. Devtools is open showing that this is not performing complex redirections as most of these scams do. In the bottom left corner is a floating inset showing the ad from MSN that was the source of the scam.

Screen shot of a scam Guardian page for a crypto scam. Devtools is open showing that this is not performing complex redirections as most of these scams do. In the bottom left corner is a floating inset showing the ad from MSN that was the source of the scam.

@theguardian.com have Confiant look at this and pester Netcraft to improve their detection of these scams. This is a rookie version of this type of crypto scam.
report<.>netcraft<.>com/submission/JkEfAmHT4cNE9IPKhOVDV98bFO75QgBq

4 months ago 2 0 0 0

The info MS need to id the impression:
rid 691c6359a1db46fdbac0ae7b0ec73b62
r riverdb
i 1
p webcompar
l en-gb
d appnexus
b Edg
a c8fb52d8-42fe-4ab3-9b30-595837a8f3d0
ii1
c 17571865744381596538
bid 09c1c6d9-30a7-4514-bd9f-00e8b56d2ce8
tid webcompar-riverdb-1
ptid webcompar-riverdb-1
f MisleadingAd

4 months ago 0 0 0 0
A screen grab of a scam website using the image of Martin Lewis on a fake BBC News page. Dev tools is open showing the hops from AppNexus (xandr), Taboola, Rocktoon to the site wealthwisecenter
The image of the orginal ad is shown over the dev tools, and is a pair of hands holding a bunch of Β£50 notes in front of a Barclays Bank.

A screen grab of a scam website using the image of Martin Lewis on a fake BBC News page. Dev tools is open showing the hops from AppNexus (xandr), Taboola, Rocktoon to the site wealthwisecenter The image of the orginal ad is shown over the dev tools, and is a pair of hands holding a bunch of Β£50 notes in front of a Barclays Bank.

@martinlewis.moneysavingexpert.com Here is a live scam using your image being trafficked on MSN, by Xandr for Taboola. The ad is probably running from MediaGo a DSP wich joined the IAB a month ago.
I reported the source site of the scam, which has been flagged:
report.netcraft.com/submission/F...

4 months ago 2 0 1 0
A photo of the front cover of a book by Jimmy Wales "The Seven Rules of Trust" signed "To Colin, Good luck fixing the internet - smiley face - Jimmy Wales"

A photo of the front cover of a book by Jimmy Wales "The Seven Rules of Trust" signed "To Colin, Good luck fixing the internet - smiley face - Jimmy Wales"

I'm quite happy to get to chat to Jimmy Wales at the Reuters Trust Conference 2025. Expressing how the trust model of the internet is inherently breaking equality legislation. "Good luck fixing the internet" signed in his book is nice to get! #TrustConference

5 months ago 1 0 0 0

Indeed, it is impossible with 30k new domains registered each day - most of those are for fraud! There is a better way - one that works for the blind, visually impaired & users of assistive tech while also providing employment oppertunites for them too. We should chat. #SocialModelofDisability

11 months ago 0 0 0 0

rid: ab299f1d05204fab863f90f6ccaa7005
r: infopane
i: 2
p: webcompar
l: en-gb
d: appnexus
b: Edg
a: 06761c2a-e6dc-4bdd-8205-93926787a94b
ii: 1
c: 18298244562584589309
bid: b6ce8d81-0af9-4cfb-a62c-58cc9990db66
tid: webcompar-infopane-2
ptid: webcompar-infopane-2
f: MisleadingAd

11 months ago 0 0 0 0

It seems that you can't view the alt txt of images that are flagged as adult content - which is a curious UX design choice! The info needed to have MSN look into this issue with be in the next messsage.

11 months ago 0 0 0 0
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An appeal "sexually suggestive" label dialog placed on a report of a scam advert. The text of the appeal reads: I am reporting a series of scam adverts featuring fake celebrity endorsement by Deborah Meaden which drive traffic to a fake MailOnline page with a scam diet pill pitch. I guess that the faked 'before and after' image triggered this label!

An appeal "sexually suggestive" label dialog placed on a report of a scam advert. The text of the appeal reads: I am reporting a series of scam adverts featuring fake celebrity endorsement by Deborah Meaden which drive traffic to a fake MailOnline page with a scam diet pill pitch. I guess that the faked 'before and after' image triggered this label!

Kinda cool, that @moderation.bsky.app flags content immediately upon posting, but the faked 'before and after' image might not be worthy of an suggestive flag! πŸ€·β€β™€οΈπŸ˜Ž

11 months ago 0 0 0 0
Six different variants on a scam advert featuring the image of Deborah Meaden. In the bottom corner of the image is a screenshot of a report of one of the instances to srtb.msn.com containing the following data which will allow Microsoft Advertising to identify the serve information and ban the advertiser: rid: ab299f1d05204fab863f90f6ccaa7005
r: infopane
i: 2
p: webcompar
l: en-gb
d: appnexus
b: Edg
a: 06761c2a-e6dc-4bdd-8205-93926787a94b
ii: 1
c: 18298244562584589309
bid: b6ce8d81-0af9-4cfb-a62c-58cc9990db66
tid: webcompar-infopane-2
ptid: webcompar-infopane-2
f: MisleadingAd

Six different variants on a scam advert featuring the image of Deborah Meaden. In the bottom corner of the image is a screenshot of a report of one of the instances to srtb.msn.com containing the following data which will allow Microsoft Advertising to identify the serve information and ban the advertiser: rid: ab299f1d05204fab863f90f6ccaa7005 r: infopane i: 2 p: webcompar l: en-gb d: appnexus b: Edg a: 06761c2a-e6dc-4bdd-8205-93926787a94b ii: 1 c: 18298244562584589309 bid: b6ce8d81-0af9-4cfb-a62c-58cc9990db66 tid: webcompar-infopane-2 ptid: webcompar-infopane-2 f: MisleadingAd

A screen shot of a fake Mail Online promoting a scam diet pill. The URL hosting this fake page was registered 26 days ago on NameCheap

A screen shot of a fake Mail Online promoting a scam diet pill. The URL hosting this fake page was registered 26 days ago on NameCheap

@deborahmeaden.bsky.social do you have a team to report fake endorsements to? Seen quite a few variants of these diet pill scams featuring your image today! The info needed by @microsoft.com (advertising) is in alt txt. The intermediary domain is 26 days old & from @namecheap.com.

11 months ago 4 1 4 0
James O'Brien - Mystery Hour - Frequency Illusion Advertising 2025-04-03
James O'Brien - Mystery Hour - Frequency Illusion Advertising 2025-04-03 YouTube video by TheBlindTrust

Frequency illusion & abuse of consent in OBA on @mrjamesob.bsky.social 'Mystery Hour' in 30 seconds!
He was right about 'recency' but less jibber jabber & I'd have twice as long & got three times the info in! 😜. How legitimate interest is abused for this. Paranoia exists around OBA - some is true.

1 year ago 1 0 0 0

They know the number is legit if it connected & wasn't answered. It won't greatly impact the volume of calls you get by answering - it'll stay in their data set. Slow progress is being made against spoofing landlines, but spoofing mobile numbers is trickier to prevent for the teleco's, sadly.

1 year ago 0 0 0 0
Preview
Have I Been Pwned: Check if your email has been compromised in a data breach Have I Been Pwned allows you to search across multiple data breaches to see if your email address or phone number has been compromised.

Troy is also interested if any a11y people can review his site for a11y glitches and recommendations. haveibeenpwned.com

1 year ago 0 0 0 0

I was able to ask the amazing @troyhunt.com a question about trust signals for the blind & users of assistive tech. Also security.txt should be in DNS as TXT records so they can be pulled with privacy even if a site is down also making it harder to compromise sites as the DNS 'flags' are in DNS obvs

1 year ago 2 0 1 0
Nameless windows error messages
Nameless windows error messages YouTube video by TheBlindTrust

When you start paying attention to a11y you notice glaring omissions. Whilst it might be easier for the sighted to spot which app is infocus, or trawl some event logs... It would be great if all dialogs just had the application source? youtu.be/x1ynrotwBas #A11y

1 year ago 0 0 0 0

A standard is needed for few accessible GPL policy building templates, on trusted hosts, versioned and diff'able, with reliable multilingual translations. Pick the ones you need on your site, hold a local template with your normal prefs to apply your normal consent consistently or permit variance.

1 year ago 0 0 0 0
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Infographic by visualcapitalist from April 16, 2020:  How long it would take to read the terms of service agreements of popular online services. Even the shortest terms and conditions are a few thousand words long. 97% of people aged 18-34 consent without reading. Read @240wpm by readinglength.com - From Insta at 9:43 & 2451 words, to MS at 1:03:30 & 15260 words. Left to right, is FB, Insta, Spotify, Twitter, LI, Tinder, YT, Apple, Amazon, Zoom, TikTok, Netflix and chill for 11 mins while reading their ToS which was then the second shortest. The mega MS! and finally Uber which in 2020 was 23 mins 35 seconds and 5,658 words. 

Not shown: On Uber today Dec 6th, 2024 I've spent 26 mins skimming around multiple "Privacy check-up, interactive tour of privacy settings"  centres, full of clever drop down, external links in an in-app webview requiring cookie consent, with other external content each requiring consent, the consent process spawned another ToS to consent to to read a ToS many of which were 37 min reads each, and each different with more links, many also loading US terms with dropdowns for country pickers that took you back out of one WebView to another in my geo to start the journey again, finding a "Privacy Centre" & a "Legal hub", and quite a few 404s, A "Data tracking" page with a consent tick box which "For more information please see our United States privacy page" which claimed a 2 min read  which had a "Proceed to opt-out" button and then I gave up.

So I can't give a total, but my skimming around without reading took more that 30 mins and without learning much. There was also a legal section at the bottom of the page that I didn't explore! 

Maybe time to do a SAR for my analytics data they've collected (with my consent?) to see what % of policy docs I've actually read! Then a SAR on Telium...

MS recently asked me to skim a 3 hour 56 min "Privacy" document and consent.

Infographic by visualcapitalist from April 16, 2020: How long it would take to read the terms of service agreements of popular online services. Even the shortest terms and conditions are a few thousand words long. 97% of people aged 18-34 consent without reading. Read @240wpm by readinglength.com - From Insta at 9:43 & 2451 words, to MS at 1:03:30 & 15260 words. Left to right, is FB, Insta, Spotify, Twitter, LI, Tinder, YT, Apple, Amazon, Zoom, TikTok, Netflix and chill for 11 mins while reading their ToS which was then the second shortest. The mega MS! and finally Uber which in 2020 was 23 mins 35 seconds and 5,658 words. Not shown: On Uber today Dec 6th, 2024 I've spent 26 mins skimming around multiple "Privacy check-up, interactive tour of privacy settings" centres, full of clever drop down, external links in an in-app webview requiring cookie consent, with other external content each requiring consent, the consent process spawned another ToS to consent to to read a ToS many of which were 37 min reads each, and each different with more links, many also loading US terms with dropdowns for country pickers that took you back out of one WebView to another in my geo to start the journey again, finding a "Privacy Centre" & a "Legal hub", and quite a few 404s, A "Data tracking" page with a consent tick box which "For more information please see our United States privacy page" which claimed a 2 min read which had a "Proceed to opt-out" button and then I gave up. So I can't give a total, but my skimming around without reading took more that 30 mins and without learning much. There was also a legal section at the bottom of the page that I didn't explore! Maybe time to do a SAR for my analytics data they've collected (with my consent?) to see what % of policy docs I've actually read! Then a SAR on Telium... MS recently asked me to skim a 3 hour 56 min "Privacy" document and consent.

CMPs oft full of 'dark patterns' who's got actual legal capacity to informed consent? Lawyers only? Joan is Awful was fiction, Disney+ not. Assistive tech can't safely read this mix of ToS, EULAs, Privacy & Cookie docs, in HTML or PDFs; clever CSS & dropdowns, buttons & links, on & offsite. 2020β¬‡οΈπŸ€·πŸ‘Š

1 year ago 1 0 1 0
An image of the header of the Google blog post from 2020 entitled "Find wheelchair accessible places with Google Maps" with a graphic showing three people, a man with a pram, a woman with a 'stroller' walking aid, and a man in a manual wheelchair with his hands on the push rings. The article is dated May 21, 2020 by Sasha Blair-Goldensohn a Software Engineer on Google Maps the article is a 3 min read. An audio version of the blog post is available at the top of the article but is not shown in the image.

An image of the header of the Google blog post from 2020 entitled "Find wheelchair accessible places with Google Maps" with a graphic showing three people, a man with a pram, a woman with a 'stroller' walking aid, and a man in a manual wheelchair with his hands on the push rings. The article is dated May 21, 2020 by Sasha Blair-Goldensohn a Software Engineer on Google Maps the article is a 3 min read. An audio version of the blog post is available at the top of the article but is not shown in the image.

From the chat on SightTechGlobal it seems few people know that Google added a 'Google Maps for Wheelchairs' accessibility layer into the app in 2020-ish!
blog.google/products/map...

1 year ago 0 0 0 0
Screen shot of my Bluesky post of a long URL to the Cisco Webex company Slido.com, which is using a URL shortener with the domain name of app.sli.do for the Sight Tech Global event. The original URL is 54 characters long, but Blue Sky has truncated the URL shown to 23 characters and an ellipsis.

Screen shot of my Bluesky post of a long URL to the Cisco Webex company Slido.com, which is using a URL shortener with the domain name of app.sli.do for the Sight Tech Global event. The original URL is 54 characters long, but Blue Sky has truncated the URL shown to 23 characters and an ellipsis.

Nor do I love how Bluesky has hidden most of the URL in my post. Ok, most people don't look at URLs, most people don't understand the structure of URLs, some browsers hide the URLs - Sigh! 🀷

1 year ago 0 0 0 0

It appears the slido[.]com is a Cisco / WebEx company, but they don't make that obvious unless you go read the AUP, Privacy or Cookie settings, or navigate to the .com homepage. They might think it's clever to use a domain from the Dominican Republic for their short URL - is clever trustworthy?

1 year ago 0 0 0 0
Preview
Join Slido: Enter #code to vote and ask questions Participate in a live poll, quiz or Q&A. No login required.

app.sli.do/event/4U1rUL... Their rather funky companion Q&A and chat app for SightTechGlobal.
I don't love the URL, not especially trustworthy as a string of alphanumeric characters on a strange domain, with no mention of the conference name. But it works! #trustme!

1 year ago 0 0 0 0
The image is a screengrab from the sighttechglobal.com website about their online free conference. The text from the image is: December 4-5, 2024
Shaping New Technologies to Create a More Accessible World for People with Blindness and Visual Impairments
Sight Tech Global is the first global, virtual conference dedicated to fostering discussion among technology pioneers on how rapid advances in AI and related technologies will fundamentally alter the landscape of assistive technology and accessibility.

The image is a screengrab from the sighttechglobal.com website about their online free conference. The text from the image is: December 4-5, 2024 Shaping New Technologies to Create a More Accessible World for People with Blindness and Visual Impairments Sight Tech Global is the first global, virtual conference dedicated to fostering discussion among technology pioneers on how rapid advances in AI and related technologies will fundamentally alter the landscape of assistive technology and accessibility.

Just started at 4pm UK time: A free online conference "Sight Tech Global"

sighttechglobal.com/event/

Shaping New Technologies to Create a More Accessible World for People with Blindness and Visual Impairments.
Rapid advances in AI & tech will transforms assistive technology and accessibility.

1 year ago 0 0 3 0
House of Lords - The future of news - Communications and Digital Committee

publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld5901/ld...

1 year ago 0 0 0 0
Advertisement
BBC Radio 4 - Today 25/11/2024 - The Future of News
BBC Radio 4 - Today 25/11/2024 - The Future of News YouTube video by TheBlindTrust

R4 Today at 8:45 covers a report from HoL on the Future of News, Fracturing news environment risks a β€œgrim” future for UK. On the falling trust in legacy media. Amol Rajan with Baroness Tina Stowell and @arusbridger.bsky.social
#r4today

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMHz...

1 year ago 0 0 1 0
AI generated image of Martin Lewis on a MSN news article. Dev Tools is open showing the creative ID of a scam ad.

AI generated image of Martin Lewis on a MSN news article. Dev Tools is open showing the creative ID of a scam ad.

AI generated image of Martin Lewis on a MSN news article. Dev Tools is open showing the creative ID of a scam ad.

AI generated image of Martin Lewis on a MSN news article. Dev Tools is open showing the creative ID of a scam ad.

The image shows three windows. One shows a fake BirminghamLive page with dev tools open showing the page connections. One the right of the screen is a window showing the source of the BirminghamLive logo https://staypositivetoday[.]info/assets/const/logo.png Below that is an image showing a fake Daily Mirror page on the same URL, displaying the logo as an SVG encoded into the HTML of the page.

The image shows three windows. One shows a fake BirminghamLive page with dev tools open showing the page connections. One the right of the screen is a window showing the source of the BirminghamLive logo https://staypositivetoday[.]info/assets/const/logo.png Below that is an image showing a fake Daily Mirror page on the same URL, displaying the logo as an SVG encoded into the HTML of the page.

An image of the same URL however this shows different content  "Guaranteed Life Insurance for UK Residents" which is a typical lead generation type of site. This page will be shown to visitors that the scammer has coded to avoid detection of the cloaked scam pages.

An image of the same URL however this shows different content "Guaranteed Life Insurance for UK Residents" which is a typical lead generation type of site. This page will be shown to visitors that the scammer has coded to avoid detection of the cloaked scam pages.

@martinlewismse.bsky.social You might want to have your team talk with MSN and AppNexus for allowing mediag[.]io to run AI scams <!-- Creative 571902736 served by Member 13368 via AppNexus --> The scam site is cloaked behind an insurance lead generation site. Reported to @netcraft.bsky.social

1 year ago 1 0 0 0