AOL Class-Action Suit Over Pop-Up Ads

unigeek writes: "CNN -- Florida judge approves class-action lawsuit against America Online At issue: 'Pop-up' advertisements. A Florida judge has approved a class-action, multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the world's largest Internet service provider, America Online, on behalf of hourly subscribers who viewed so-called "pop-up" advertisements." I for one of dreamt of this day. It'll never win 'cuz you can turn them off of course, but it's pretty dang funny.

Comments

Porn sites in search engines

[Dungeon Dweller]

What I would like to see, is a lawsuit against porn sites who grab the 100 most searched words and put them in their meta tags for search engines to find. I hate when I search for something that I need, and the first 20 pages are porn sites. If I was looking for "cum guzzling sluts," I think that I would have put that in as my search, now wouldn't I?

Re:Porn sites in search engines

[ethereal]

I think about 90% of the problems like this could be prevented if browser writers would include two configuration options: allow the user to choose whether the browser can open up new windows and whether the browser will follow redirects. Or at least pop up a yes/no box every time the browser wants to do so.

Is this supported or hackable into mozilla?

Re:Porn sites in search engines

[Cato]

What would be useful is if someone did a Junkbuster clone or enhancement (see http://www.junkbuster.com, it's a proxy server that just filters ads currently) that could also edit out selected Javascript (e.g. the on-close event).

Ideally this could be done based on whether a site was trusted - e.g. nicesite.com could be allowed to do cleanup stuff in its on-close event, but an unknown & untrusted site would simply not get that event in the Javascript it actually ran.

Does anyone know of an open source tool that does this?

Behold the perfect weekend for geeks.

[crovax]

Not only did one of us get hitched,
But now AOl is getting sued!
I'm getting a little fuzzy headed.
-----
If my facts are wrong then tell me. I don't mind.

Another article....

[Draoi]

Florida judge approves class-action lawsuit against America Online [snip] It'll never win 'cuz you can turn them off of course, but it's pretty dang funny.

Ahh, but the attorney taking the case has also stated the following:

"That's a new thing," he said. "Our lawsuit period goes back to 1994. That wasn't the case for the five-year period we're covering."

So there's hope yet ......

Here's a link to a detailed Irish Times article

Pete C

Interesting precedent- poor default configurations

[ltcordelia]

I hope that AOL's defense of "it is user-configurable" gets tossed - it would set a nice precedent of companies being responsible for the default configuration of their software (can we sue MS for all the virii propagated by poor Outlook configurations?).
Information wants to be free

HA HA HA

[pb]

Yes!

Now all we need is a rewritten and updated version of Dante's Inferno, and have it approved and endorsed by the pope!

Cower in FEAR, AOL, TELEMARKETERS, MICROSOFT!!!

The telemarketers will be FORCED to sit in a room answering phones all day and POLITELY LISTEN to mind-numbingly BORING advertisements!!!

Top AOL employees will have to DOWNLOAD programs to UPDATE their pitiful computers... only to have AOL CRASH on them, and give them BUSY signals!!

---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Rediculous

[LaNMaN2000]

Allowing pop-up ads is part of the AOL ToS. If people do not want pop-up ads, they should find a real ISP. I think I'm going to sue FreeWWWeb because of that annoying sound that the modem makes every time it connects :-)

Re:No Pop-up = No Javascript

[lari]

I believe that this isn't in reference to pop-up ads that one sees while "web-surfing", but to ads that come up when an AOL user logs on, after "6. Connecting to America OnLine. 7. Verifying Password" and before the AOL windows that let users check mail, go to different "channels", access AOL's browser, et cetera appear. Basically, while these ads are on the screen, you can't do anything except either follow them or click "No, thanks." It's not quite as simple as disabling Javascript in Netscape or MSIE. (Although I doubt a lot of AOL users could handle that easily... ah, well.)

There is *no* obvious, or even semi-obvious, way to turn off the pop-up ads -- most people I know who use AOL just endure and ignore. Granted, each release of AOL gets less and less intuitive to use (2.5 was fairly straight-forward, 3.0 slightly less so, 4.0 I never did figure out how to find the things I used (basics like FTP), and now that 5.0's appeared I've lost any semblance of hope at getting anything done *that* way on my mother's computer.)

However, I have around 200 AOL cds in the back of my car, in display boxes. This makes me happy.

AOL is doing nothing new

[nosilA]

Tramont said the practice amounts to charging twice for the same product. "AOL gets money from advertisers, then money from subscribers, so they're making double on the same time," he said.

I hate to bust this wonderful anti-AOL bubble, but newspapers have been doing this for years. Same with Cable TV, if I have to watch commercials while watching that CNN i pay $50/month to watch, they are wasting my time. If you say pop-ups are worse because you have to actually do something proactive to make them go away, well it's the same as a whole page ad, where you have to turn the page.

I'm not saying this class action lawsuit will not result in victory for the class, but if it does, someone in Florida really ought to try suing a newspaper on this same precedent.

-Alison

Re:AOL is doing nothing new

[_vapor]

The difference, though, is the hourly rate. By viewing an ad in the newspaper, the newspaper does not begin to cost you more because it takes longer to read. With AOL, every time you view an ad, you pay more since you pay by the hour (usually). I'm not sure that AOL should be sued over this, though -- when you pay AOL for their service you should be aware of the possibility of ads, just like when you pay for a newspaper. It's just part of the cost. If there were no ads in newspapers, it might be less annoying, but then again, you'd be paying a couple dollars for every paper.

Re:AOL is doing nothing new

[Deega]

IIRC, when AOL was charging by the hour there were two states your session could be in: free and non-free. Stuff like reading pop-ups were in the free section. I also believe things like reading your mail were free, while sending mail was a premium service. To recieve an instant message was free, to send one was not.

Hell, there was even software designed to specifically keep you in the "free" section of AOL for as long as possible during your session

Banner vs popup

[Builder]

I have nothing against banner ads. They used to pay my salary. As long as they're non-intrusive and relevant to the audience of the site, I think they're great.

But then you look at things like a recent levis campaign. Every time you went to the home page of a site you got to be the proud downloader of between 80 and 100k of flash video for a popup levis ad. And you'd be sitting reading something, and it pops up right over what you're reading. Now this is intrusive and is starting to interfere with my browsing experience.

What's even worse is the Compaq non-stop campaign. My natural reaction to a popup ad is to click the x in the corner and kill it. The idea behind the compaq ad, was Compaq are non-stoppable. So they made their ad KEEP coming back up about 4 or 5 times. This is just plain annoying and adds stress and extra mouse movement to my already ruined wrists and my already stressed life. I don't need this.

So I guess, yeah, lawsuits are dumb, but as what happened with the Prof vs Demon where they settled, maybe this will scare the hell out of advertisers and sites that use this kind of advertising, and we'll all have a more pleasant browse experience.
/* Wayne Pascoe

Turning Off is irrelevant

[Effugas]

First off, this lawsuit goes back to 1994, long before popup ads could be turned off.

Secondly, the ability to turn the ads off isn't particularly simple to find(remember, this is a service that built its success on knowing exactly how to make things simple to find; anything that wasn't simple within AOL was made intentionally not simple.

Finally, and this is important, the ads would come back on their own. In security, we make things a pain in the ass when we want to convince the users to use a more secure alternative(i.e. ssh-agent and RSA keys vs. passwords at every prompt). For AOL, it's "Watch the ads, and you won't have to keep turning them off."

They'll settle out of court; they really don't want their advertising dirty laundry getting aired. Remember, this is the company that got UCITA in their state before anyone else.

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com

Haven't cable companies been doing this for years?

[DestructioN]

It's the same idea -- I pay for programming, but I can't see the content I'm paying for until the ads are over or until a push a button (to close the ad, or in the case of TV, change the channel). Would you get away with suing a cable company on these grounds? I doubt it. AOL has smart enough lawyers to bring up this fact, and then make themselves look like good guys by showing how you can turn off the ads altogether, something you can't do with cable. Just my 2 cents.
--

If I Were AOL....

[oh shoot]

how would I get even with these idiots, to punish them for this stupid groundless lawsuit?

Give them lifetime subscriptions to my own service.

--Jeff

Ads pay for things..

[acomj]

I HATE pop up ads. I realy do. But one thing that is getting lost in all this is that these ads pay for "service" or information that we want.

I'm sure almost everyone is used to banner ads, and ignores them most of the time. but relize that someone or something has to pay to get a web site up, and these ads help to pay for it.. As internet companies struggle to make profits these ads are going to become more important (also as click through rates continue to drop...)

But I'lm willing to accept the ad to get at information on the net I want for free (as in beer). It would really suck if you had to pay for content each time you accessed it.

ads are a better way.

Banner ads must work for newbies...

[RPoet]

Have you ever watched an absolute newbie trying to read some web pages? The first thing they try to click is the banner ads. I often find myself explaining, "no, don't click there, that's just an ad". Of course, gaining experience, they learn to seperate ads from real content, but it does take time.

Pop-up banner ads are probably even more efficient in this respect :)

--

Re:Pop Up Ads

[MartinG]

All that you say just suggests that AOL don't provide a very good value service. That's not a reason to sue them.
The best thing you can do if you don't like it is to change ISP and tell AOL why you changed. If enough people care about this issue, they will do the same and AOL will be forced to act.
In the end, all they are doing is offering a service (which includes pop up ads) and they are offering it at a price. You get to choose whether the service as a whole is better or worse value than competing services.
This really is a minor issue which can and will be easily solved by the free market as long as people do something constructive about it (such as changing ISP if they are not happy) rather than trying to restrict the freedoms ISPs Just because YOU don't like what they offer doesn't mean they shouldn't be allowed to offer it.

Re:Porn sites in warez sites

[kwsNI]

What's really funny about it is that the pr0n ads on warez sites are for pay sites. Yeah! Like I'm not going to pay for software but I will pay for porn.

kwsNI

Try a Filtering Proxy

[Tom7]

Pop-ups do suck, but why complain when you can just get rid of them? I've had web pop-ups disabled for a long time; I do it with a cute piece of freeware called "Proxomitron":

http://members.tripod.com/Proxomitron/

It has a lot of other (configurable) usability/privacy enhancements like disabling animated gifs and blink, not letting javascript use the status bar, etc. Plus, you can write your own regular-expression based filters!

Too bad it's only for windows; but I don't think it would be too hard for a Posix version to exist. Perhaps something like it already does.

Search Engines are just inaccurate

[Tom7]

I used to think it was keyword spamming too (and maybe it is to some extent). Then I started using the new version of analog which gives me a report of the search terms which users use to arrive at my site. Here's one day's results:

reqs: search term
----: -----------
14: quake 3 stuff
5: scanterm
3: human copulation pictures
2: wordlist.txt
2: cannibalism snuff
2: genital jewelry
1: akasha
1: aluminize
1: quake 3 levels
1: emazing
1: antigravity backpack borscht
1: barmy badger backpackers
1: ssachs
1: axolotl adaptions
1: directory listing mp3
1: aerometer
1: wordlist barons
1: argumentive analysis of advertisements
1: isthmus algorithm
1: spacebar.org
51: [not listed: 51 search terms]

"barmy badger backpackers"?? Fully 75% of these searches have NOTHING to do with my site, and I do not keyword spam in any way.

Maybe, when search engines get bored or tired, they just return more or less random results? ;)

It's Possible...

[linuxci]

If you want to filter banner ads out a simple way to do it with most browsers is to use the Internet Junkbuster filtering proxy, or if you're using a fairly recent release of Mozilla you can use their image manager (Edit | Advanced | Cookies and Images or Tasks | Privacy | Image Manager) which lets you specify hosts that you'd rather not display images (such as ads.doubleclick.net), or you can only allow images that appear from the site you're viewing or you can selectively allow images by means of an interactive dialog (a similar management system applies for cookies). Hopefully the image manager will be included with the next release of Netscape 6 as it's a useful ad blocking feature.
--

Mmm... Time/Warner pop-up tarts...

[Pope]

new pop-up ad for AOL, Fall 2000:

We notice you're downloading an illegal copy of the new Britney Spears album. Wouldn't you rather buy the CD at the AOL/Warner Online Music store?
[] YES []NO


Pope

Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!

An actual e-mail of mine from 1982 (and on topic!)

[weave]

Get a load of this. The oldest e-mail message I still have around, from 1982, talking about my first experience on Compuserve at $5.00+$2.00/hour and how it took me an hour just to do one thing cause of all of the "waiting..."

Yes, this is on topic. AOL users have nothing to bitch about. I should sue for all of the wasted time spent on CIS, 300 baud, at $7.00/hour! :)

(B6900 refers to a Burroughs 6900...)

Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1982 22:04
From: Ken Weaverling >>>---> Ken <47869 @ UCSC-Site>
To: Bob Rahe <BOB @ UCSC-Site&gt
Subject: Re: Monitor
In-Reply-To: Your message of 24 Jun 1982 09:19
Message-ID: <0322.06.24.1982.22.04.44 @ UCSC-Site>

This terminal is quite nice for $399. It's an RCA. It has a modem built in, color graphics, and sound from 14 Hz to 230 KHz. (Why the heck do you need 230 KHz. I probably can't hear past 15KHz.) It even has a white noise generator. (Don't ask why).

The graphics are pretty HI-RES, 240x192, but it takes forever to draw at 300 baud. One could make impressive graphs but one won't ever see Pac-Man here! You can also hook up a cassette recorder to store a heck of a lot of data for off-line viewing.

I got a free hour on CompuServe with it. Ever been on that? They say it's simple, but it took me the whole hour just to look for one thing. The say it's menu driven. GEEEEEEZZ, they must have their menu's nested 50 levels deep!

I was looking for the multi-user Star-Trek game that I read about. Also the CB simulation (Randall probably wrote it).

The story of my quest:

After drifting thru 10 pages of menus, I found the newspapers that were on-line, so I choose New York Times. They wouldn't print the %&$#& thing out unless I subscribed! The subscription was free but they wanted name, add.... I said "SCREW IT". I could imagine how many menu's were on the other side of that subscription.

Now I had to "back up" thru the menus before I could move on. After another 10 mins. I found the home entertainment menu! I was getting closer. I didn't see Star-Trek but I did see "ELIZA - Artificial Intelligence". I decided to try it out, real quick.

This program CompuServe has (called DISPLA) is polite. Instead of saying #SCHED 1234 it says "Please wait. I am processing your request." Sure, I think that the computer down there realizes that it's getting paid by the hour. After 2-3 mins., it starts "Tell me what's on your mind." After 5 mins I was ready to leave, "QUIT, BYE, STOP, " nothing worked. She just kept saying, "Your "Tell me what's on your mind." After 5 mins I was ready to leave, "QUIT, BYE, STOP, " nothing worked. She just kept saying, "Your being short with me.". I was getting desperate, I started punching all the control codes I could. I stoped the program but I hung the terminal. Oh, well. Call back. Back to the first menu page. But I was getting better, I typed "GO HOM" and I went straight to the home entertainment section. After about 200 more menus (estimate) I found "CB simulation"! Quick, read doc. Got it, run CB. "Please wait......". After 5 mins it comes back "Your free hour is up. Would you like to subsribe?".

All that and I never saw the program. For $5.00/hr plus $2 for Telenet, they can forget it.

THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME ON THE B6900 !!!!!!!!!

>>>----> Ken