A heartfelt plea

I find your line of questioning odd and mildly pointless considering it would've taken you less effort to view any page's source than to ask.

Anyone actually interested in those things should be competent enough to do their own research and make their own judgments.

In your case, uh, you're using their browser, so if you have trust issues they're oddly placed.

Funny you mention effort when it would have taken less effort on your part to just say "Google" (or more accurately, Doubleclick, as when you hinted at "Google" at first, I thought it was simply AdSense). ;D

I don't have trust issues per se - but if you Google the subject there's oodles of complaints of rich media advertising being exploited to inject malware (with the ad networks doing the heavy lifting of targeting users of specific games to boot), and I believe there were rumours of another fanforum that's named after a Victoria island town having it happen to them too. I don't think it's an unfair question, nor do I think it's lazy to ask. I definitely think that the first post of this thread (considering it's an appeal) could definitely benefit from having the information present for lazy, yet paranoid freaks like me.

P.S. In case you somehow think Google's immune to serving malware, though I apologize for the crappy source: http://blog.armorize.com/2010/12/hdd-plu...rough.html