I've heard secondhand (but from a source I trust) quite a bit about malware getting transmitted via stuff like banner ads, even without people clicking on them which is my main thought against them.
This is not just mere rumor, this DOES happen when ad companies don't closely monitor what their customers are putting in banner ads.
I should know, because i've dealt with the fucking things at least twice from the Something Awful forums (while reading the Dwarf Fortress LP/Mega threads, too) which put an .exe that hijacks all program executions (direct .exe use or their shortcuts) to pop up with a copy cat window that's some half-assed attempt at replicating the apperance of a genuine security warning from a certain popular antivirus program. Usually asking you to download some bullshit file that's obviously a keylogger or trojan or worse. (fortunetly i'm smarter then that) What i had to do in order to bypass the script the banner ad gave me when it loaded, i used a .bat file to open the command prompt and then execute the antivirus program using the MSfuckinDOS interface.
... One malwarebytes anti-malware scan and 4 hours of my time later the computer is clean and usable again; and the SA forums don't get visited again for a week after that bullshit, either.
Fuck banner ads for making web pages more difficult to navigate, fuck banner ad companies for wasting everyones' bandwidth, and fuck banner ad company customers that put script kiddie viruses in their fucking ads.
edit-
Central banks create money by loaning it at interest. They also print a small fraction of this money (most money is virtual). Because this is the only source of money, debt is necessarily always greater than available money; so it can't be paid off. This requires defaults to occur, and the seizure of property. It's a method of transfer of wealth (capital) to large financial institutions. The end result is that all capital will in actuality be owned by a handful of private individuals; the obvious endgame of capitalism.
Just like it's simulated in dwarf fortress!
... Fuck this gay earth capitalism.
Dammit, I was hoping I was just being paranoid by never accepting my software's requests to update and always going to the web site to download the updates manually. Also was hoping I was being paranoid in my reluctance to go to places like SA or Cracked.com.
And SA has those "please disable your ad blocker" placeholders too, as if we're the assholes. Hell, they charge for membership and have ads up, if they need more than that I'd say they're doing something wrong.
I miss 2006. Built myself a gaming rig, with my sole security precaution being a router firewall, and took it all over the internet, to forums, to mod sites, downloading things left and right, and when I thought a driver error was a virus a year later, I bought Norton (yes, I know, I uninstalled it after less than a year) and it showed a perfectly clean system. Still doesn't mean it was really clean but if I did that today for a year, half the processes running on my machine would be malware. Fuck the rise of online crime.