deep thoughts; rants @ 05 May 2008 03:49 pm by bigfish

The book Google Adwords doesn’t want you to see

UPDATED: Read the latest here.

We’ve recently released the second edition of our best-selling Hacking: The Art of Exploitation. This is a major revision and it’s off to a great start.

Hacking: The Art of Exploitation

Well, this weekend I was playing with Adwords a bit. I’ve got a couple of campaigns running. Or at least I thought I had a couple running.

Our campaign for Forbidden L3GO seems to be working just fine. There was an issue with using the L*GO trademark but it looks like that’s sorted out.

But Adwords blocked two ads for Hacking for unacceptable content because
Don’t promote hacking and cracking sites.
Advertising is not permitted for the promotion of hacking or cracking and tools that aid in copyright infringement.
The ads are as follows:
All new second edition.
What are you waiting for?
nostarch.com
and
All new second edition.
Don’t be a script kiddie.
nostarch.com
As you can see, the ads link to our evil hacker site, nostarch.com. According to the Google-disapproval-bot, “Google believes strongly in freedom of expression and therefore offers broad access to content across the web without censoring search results.”

There’s a bit of a disconnect here. Now, I understand that Google can’t review each ad individually and that the word “hacking” is probably stuck in a database somewhere with the flag “evil.” But Google should know better and this certainly smacks of some sort of censorship.

The thing is, there is absolutely nothing in Hacking that violates any law, be it the DMCA or other. In fact, this isn’t a book of exploits; it’s a book about how exploits work. Hence the “don’t be a script kiddie” notion. And there’s nothing at Evil-Hacker-Site-Nostarch.com that violates any law.
I’ve appealed this disapproval. Let’s see what happens.
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2 Comments »

2 Responses to “The book Google Adwords doesn’t want you to see”

  1. on 08 May 2008 at 12:57 pm   My response to Google Adwords’ ban of our ads | The No Starch Press Blog

    [...] neglected to include my note to Google in response to their banning our ads for Hacking: The Art of Exploitation. Here it is: Hello Sandeep, and thanks for your [...]

  2. on 09 May 2008 at 10:09 pm   The AdWords Saga: Yes, our ads are banned | The No Starch Press Blog

    [...] you’ve been following earlier posts, you know that I’ve been having a bit of a dialog with Google AdWords about their having [...]

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