One of the projects I’m involved in is rating for Google. What I do in a nutshell is rate the validity search strings for sites, images, etc…
Today I had a particular search, actually I don’t remember exactly what the search term was, but it landed me on a page from Yahoo! Video. The page a directory of videos from a user called Mania_t_v. Frankly the videos were pretty useless, as they all seemed to be advertisements for the site called mania.tv, an online TV site. Now before you go checking out the site… don’t! After checking out some of the videos, although I’m not really into the topic (Hollywood gossip), I thought I would check out the site. The first time I tried my browser Firefox crashed. Ok, odd… So, I started Firefox again and chose restore session. It tried to access the site again, and BOOM! Not only did my browser crash, my computer crashed and restarted with a whole bunch of errors! I am currently running AVG Anti-Virus and Ad-Aware (I recommend both) to see what they infected the computer with. So far all I’ve found is some cookies that seem to be a bit dangerous, but I’m sure I’ll find something else considering none of my audio drivers work now…
So in short: Stay away from maniatv.com I don’t know if it is one of their advertisers that is malicious or those running the site. Hopefully Yahoo! Video will investigate this as well, because if someone is using there service to lure people to their site and then dumping Spy/Malware onto their machines. It could tarnish the image of Yahoo! And this only shortly after I was so happy with their service…
