GoKawiilHow I advertise malicious software on Google Ads
A caller phones Radio Erywan. “Is it true that in Moscow, on Red Square, they give out cars?” “True. Not in Moscow, however, but in St. Petersburg. Not on Red Square, but on Revolution Square. Not cars, but bikes. And they don’t give them out, but steal them”.
RACE is a native macOS terminal multiplexer written in Rust. You can position and resize terminals freely instead of squeezing everything into a uniform grid: Keep a large editor beside a small shell, spread out build logs, arrange the workspace around the work, mark with colors etc. I built it, I use it, and I maintain it. Since it’s multiplexer it manages terminals and lets shell sessions survive application restarts (good for development and hooking off the work).
In action it looks like this:
I also built the website for it - https://race-term.com. Static page built with Bridgetown. JavaScript changes the DOM to provide interactive visual features and that’s it. No custom server-side application behind it. At the submission time (that changed recently) the only third-party JavaScript ws Cloudflare Analytics. No Google Analytics or advertising tracking - to keep it light. Served from Cloudflare, Cloudflare R2 keeps the downloads.
Then I tried advertising for the first time.
I set up a Google Ads campaign. Spent 500$ and… Google suspended the account for “Malicious software”.
Unexpected addition to the feature list.
To be precise - Google said “Malicious software” and “Compromised Site”. Sounded like bullshit. Application was signed and notarized. Website was clear and had no attack surface, but sure I’ll check. Zero. Nothing. Nada. Clean like a whistle. So I appealed.
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