Thread · 10 tweets · 22 Jul 2020

An investigation that ties together dark adtech and alt-right financing. It's worth your time. The tech standards community has largely ignored advertising. If you're in standards and want a better world, you should pay attention. 🧶

Publishers use a "standard" called ads.txt to identify themselves on ad exchanges. Thanks to a spectacular supply of incompetence from @iab and @IABTechLab, instead of being an actual identity scheme you just post whatever ID you want.

Apparently, public key cryptography didn't exist (checks notes) three years ago when this was invented. Neither did .well-known apparently.

There are certification authorities that check that you're doing the right thing. Thanks to the @iab's world famous governance, the way in which they work is that they take money to certify you and that's it.

The @IABTechLab also has a registry for this, but all they do with it is charge $10k to access it. And that's it.

So, apparently, and if you've done any work with technology and people at scale this might not surprise you, the IDs are getting reused. And that's used to cheat!

If you're wondering why companies in the @iab as well as Google and Facebook who support this system don't try to fix it, well, intermediaries get paid no matter what.

Anyway, fellow technologists: advertising matters. It drives huge amounts of revenue that keep the lights on across the Web. But it is operated by kakistocracy. It's a worthy use of your time to join WebAdv and help fix this mess.

For deeper details, please check out the more detailed description from @thezedwards too: medium.com/@thezedwards/b…

And when I say "worthy of your time" I mean at the "defund fucking fascism" level of worthy.