WHEN GOOGLE IS POSSESSED BY PROFIT

donho

It’s ironic that while you advocate free speech that you try to get speech that you don’t agree with shut down.

The mimic website, using a copycat domain name, fails to explicitly disclose its non-affiliation with the official Notepad++. Instead, it strategically diverts traffic from the legitimate Notepad++ site, misleading unsuspecting users into clicking on it and generating profits for the site owners.

Their ploy is remarkably effective - I’ve received numerous inquiries via email and Twitter, questioning whether the suspicious site is indeed the official Notepad++ website.

So let’s be clear: the situation described above has no connection to the concept of free speech.

That site, while peculiar, seems harmless. They are not even running ads.

I guess that you don’t call these “ADs”:

@SinghRajenM

Thank you for your report. I finally find the time to do the news:
https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/help-to-take-down-parasite-site/

I’ll ask users’ help on different social media tomorrow. Time to sleep for me.

Lycan Thrope

@donho ,
Reported both, https://notepad.plus and also https://notepad-plus.en.softonic.com via the Google search, and the link you just had us follow. Just a note, this is only showing up, so far, on Google, not DuckDuckGo, which is one of the reasons I use that instead of Google the monopoly. :-)

donho

It seems that malicious ads (promoting a fake Notepad++ website) have returned on the Google search page.
Below is the email I received this morning:

Hi Don
I am a long-time user and admirer of Notepad++. I am based in Australia.

Today, I went to download a copy of Notepad++ to a new machine. When I searched for “Notepad++” in Google, the first link which came up appears to be a FAKE website located in China:

    https://www[.]notepadplus[.]com[.]cn/en/

I thought I should let you know, in case this is some kind of hacking attempt.

Any follow up questions, just let me know.

Kind regards

If anyone here has encountered these malicious ads, please use the following link to report them to Google:
https://support.google.com/ads/troubleshooter/4578507?visit_id=639056285883908601-3926234762&rd=1