mrseb

Hi. Do you have any more info on that? A screenshot maybe? And ideally the URL that's being called. Will help us find the bad ad (if there is indeed one).

We've updated the story - did some more investigation. Definitely looks like it was Telecity.

Yeah, I don't think we have such a public statement at the moment - and maybe that's something we should rectify. All I can tell you is that native content/advertorial would be very, very clearly labelled. We would never try to sneak anything through.

In general, Ars is _very_ above board. Our reputation and authority are everything. That's why we're one of the very few publications that doesn't do native advertising - we're just not sure how you can do that, and still somehow expect the reader to trust what you write.

But yeah, I appreciate that just saying "trust us!" is a bit difficult on the Internet today :)

Heya. I'm the editor of Ars Technica UK, where this story was originally published.

It's not native advertising. The author just really likes the 911. Ars doesn't do native advertising/advertorial. We do some sponsored stuff, but those posts are clearly marked.

Author here. I was being ironic :)

I'm an equal-opportunities OS user. I have two Linux boxes (Slackware!), two Windows boxes, and an OS X laptop within arm's reach of my desk. I was just poking fun at the Year of Desktop Linux thing -- it's a bit of a meme/running joke in tech blogger circles.

Ditto. The OP probably just visits Wikipedia a lot, so Google is bumping it up to the top.

It's a bit of a leap to go from 'Zynga must tell Facebook about any games it's about to launch' to 'FACEBOOK CAN VETO ZYNGA GAMES OMG!'

Facebook probably just wants a little warning so that it can get its software and hardware resources into position.

Yea, I actually played with that sentence a few times. I thought about making it clear that Firefox and Thunderbird weren't called Firefox and Thunderbird when they were part of Mozilla Suite... but the codebases are the same, I think. Sometimes you have to know where to draw the line, to keep things clear :)

Yep, very good point. Inserted a paragraph about it on page five ("Firefox 1.0") - thanks :)

I'm blushing :)

Yes, I actually got to the last paragraph and realized that I could then dive into Google Fiber and Chrome OS... but I had to wrap it up!

There's definitely more to say about Google and/or Facebook taking of the web, though, that's for sure.