Today, we came across a website called “Best Arts Wallpaper Online 2015” which offers colouring pages intended to be printed / drawn on by the smaller members of your family.
The site features Minions (From Despicable Me), My Little Pony, Batman, Mario, Looney Tunes and more – clearly, there’s a wide range of interests on offer.
Shall we take a look?
wallarts(dot)tk/justin-bieber-coloring-pages/
The page is overlaid with a transparent full-window ad (the page doesn’t look as grey once the advert is gone) – you can see the “x” in the top right hand corner. Clicking the visible banner in the middle will take you to the ad (reasonably enough).
However, clicking anywhere else on the page with the exception of the “x” will still cause it to act as though the ad in the middle of the page had been clicked – and you’ll also have the possibility of another window opening containing entirely unrelated content.
Some examples of the adverts / landing pages we were taken to include:
1) An iLivid Chrome extension
2) A Search By Zooms Chrome extension
3) A survey “win”
4) A Russian dating website
5) A PC repair tool
6) A pornographic website with links to multiple domains
Clearly, this isn’t somewhere you want the intended audience hanging out as they grab pages for you to print. There’s no real way to know what they may end up installing, and as for the last example – who knows where some of those URLs might lead.
Here’s some safer examples of colouring in for you and your family to make use of:
Disney – Colouring in BBC – Crafts and colouring in Crayola – Colouring in LEGO – Colouring in Nick Jr – Colouring in
Basic searches for “Colouring pages / colouring books” in search engines typically return a lot of “non-official” sites back along with the above, so it definitely pays to keep an eye what you’re trading in return for some print out pictures – whether it be installs, surveys or linkdumps of content you’d rather not have on your computer.
Christopher Boyd (Thanks to Jovi for additional research)
