After an embarrassing malware outbreak Sunday and Monday, Startribune.com digital boss Jason Erdahl says users can safely surf back to the site now. As noted yesterday, the Strib disabled third-party ad networks around lunchtime, which disabled the malware’s ability to be transmitted.
The malware never affected Apple machines; Erdahl says most PC-network admins restored access to the site late Monday. He hopes to restore the ad networks today — which may send a few shivers among outraged users infected over the past two days. Hopefully, the site will have better ad screening in place going forward.
Comments (4)
Thanks Jason. I’m in the second day of trying to undo your damage on one of my PCs at home.
Actually, this crap does affect Macs. My Mac Mini finds the Strib site to be the slowest loading and balkiest of the eight newspapers I visit daily.
Allowing third-party servers to load ads is a disaster. I have no clue how many times I’ve stalled out with “waiting on doubleclick” or some such frozen at the bottom of my screen.
The Strib should host all the ads they run. The only reason advertisers use third party servers is because they don’t trust newspapers to give them honest page counts.
I thought no one reads the newspaper. How could this have happened? Huh…..
I look at the Strib every day to see if there’s any content I’m interested in. That usually kills about two minutes. When there is content I like, I promote it on my blog. (Yes, I’m lucky they don’t sue me for linking to them but so far the Strib’s not quite as crazy as Rupert Murdoch or AP).
One of my blog readers in Chicago who got burned by the malware said this is it for him. He barely gets any reading out of the Strib, and now that they’ve served him some malware he won’t be back.
Journalism will survive the digital age, but much to my surprise I no longer think newspapers will. They had every possible advantage but kept blowing it by laying off content creators when instead they should have just done bankruptcy, stiffed the idiots who bought in way too high, and focused on creating a superior product, not a rag for leveraging advertising.