Josh Wieder

Three years ago I wrote a blog post demonstrating how the International Business Times appeared to be associated with some extremely shady online advertising networks , resulting in International Business Times article links being advertised on places like malware-filled mirrors of The Pirate Bay. The presence of IB Times on a Pirate Bay clone site was particularly ironic as the online news outlet had recently published several articles detailing exactly how terrible the ads on Pirate Bay were. To be clear: I never found any indication of any malfeasance on IB Times' part. In fact, I think it is much more likely to be the fault of some affiliate marketing firm that did a poor job of tracking its purchases. As such, I contacted IB Times via Twitter to inform them of my findings. I was contacted by a representative of IBT Media, during which I offered (for free) to walk their marketing staff on how to identify the affiliate responsible for the ad placement. IBT declined - instead...

Recently I was reviewing several of The Pirate Bay's (TPB) new mirror sites that have popped up over the last year since the most recent rounds of raids against the famous website's administrators. These mirrors have been the source of no small controversy - there have been rumors of law enforcement entrapment, that a project once founded in the spirit of breaking down walls to the free transfer of information has been hijacked for nefarious ends. Among these rumors, complaints centered on the advertising schemes used by many of the new Pirate Bay mirrors stand out as being substantial. Even Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde pointed to advertising as one of the critical signs that the site was taking a turn for the worst in a blog post late last year  : "TPB has become an institution that people just expected to be there. Noone willing to take the technology further. The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design. It never changed except for one thing – the ads....