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FTC Shuts Down 'Pop-Up Trapping' Sites
Masem writes: "The FTC today ordered the shutdown of 5,500 sites owned by John Zuccarini, all of them the so-called 'typo' sites that common mis-entered URLs for popular sites (such as Annakurnikova.com); when the user visits these sites, their back button behavior in most popular browsers is modified as to open multiple pop-ups featuring ads for adult entertainment and gambling sites when pressed, and uses other technology to basically 'trap' the browser until the entire application has to be closed. While some sites are still operating, the FTC is going to take this matter to court, which may decide exactly how much control a web site can take over the end browser using JavaScript and ActiveX. CNet has the full story." Le Marteau contributes a link to the same story at the Washington Post.
This is a great thing. The FTC protects people from fraud and other illegal business practices. That is what they are doing in this instance. The FCC regulates the airwaves, television, and so forth.
The government isn't "getting involved in the internet" in any new creative way. They are just protecting consumers (us) from fraudulent illegal business practices
Next time get the FCC FTC thing correct before you post, it completely changes the context of the article.
looking for a bug in some Javascript (we maintain
our own web browser), and after delving down
through the deliberately obfuscated javascript
code, it became obvious what it was trying to do:
it went through all links in the document, attaching
a javascript "front-end" to each link that did an http GET request
informing the remote site what had been clicked on,
before actually following the link. the technique
used seemed fairly dodgy (the request was purporting
to be for a non-displayed image), but it's interesting
to see what a fairly reputable site is prepared
to do in order to get as much information off you as possible (without your knowledge).
how reasonable is that? i don't like it, but is that sort
of subterfuge the kind of thing we'd like to stop too?
[PS. apologies if this appears twice - it looked like
had rejected the previous ones; and then the whole
server seemed to crash: what was going on there then?]
The site www.annakurnikova.com is running Apache/1.3.6 - 448 user - IKM 11211999 (Unix) on FreeBSD.
They go on to say the netblock he is using belongs to CWIE LLC.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
But noone's blaming Microsoft, Netscape, Mozilla, or Konq
Really?
(and you really can't blame the last 2, they're implementing things to take care of this junk).
I don't know about Konq, because its authors chose not to release a version that runs on my platform of choice, but Mozilla doesn't yet ship to block pop-up advertisements (or even "hydras", the most annoying type) by default. It has a hidden pref to disable the window.open() function while a page is loading or unloading, which should become a visible pref once bugs are worked out. I hope the pref is eventually turned on by default, at least for the case of hydras.
The shareholder is always right.
To everyone who thinks this is a good thing for the government to be envolved in: "Get a real browser!". For a couple versions now Mozilla has had the ability to disable the JavaScript functions that can open windows. It's currently not available from the GUI, but they have complete instructions for how to edit the config file to disable pop-ups. I use it and love it. Take responsibility for your own browsing.
I doubt you will ever see this sort of feature in a non-Free browser, because corporate interests would not permit them to add it. Microsoft probably owns some of the sites that annoy us with pop-ups. Think about it.
There are no user-visible options for what web sites are allowed to do in Mozilla, so I don't find it surprising that users complain that they're given an all-or-none choice.
You can get some documentation on Mozilla's configurable security policies here, and you can also test the new hidden pref to prevent web pages from opening new windows while they are loading or while the user is leaving the page. Note that the new hidden pref is still buggy: it catches some things it shouldn't, such as clicking a javascript: link in a page while the page is still loading, and fails to catch cases like onmouseover and onfocus.
The shareholder is always right.
He's made $800,000 - $1,000,000 from these sites, which the FTC would like to take away. It does not say he's been fined for that much. Also, he lost 53 of the cases not 57, it doesn't say if he was fined beyond losing the domain names. Check your facts!
When you backclick or close, the next site(s) will attempt to pop up, but no further code will be loaded and hence the hell will eventually end.
I always click "work offline" before trying to exit or back out of any of these questionable sites now BEFORE the cascading crap starts...
Okay - I'll probally get flammed for this. But if you are using Internet Explorer you can start up IE with the -new command and have each browser open in a seperate process. That way, your main browser won't lock up or be forced to 'end task' if your popup windows get out of control.
Bleagh. timothy has silently edited/corrected both the story title and masem's submitted text, without even providing a sentence notifying readers that he's done so?
Welcome to the ephemeral web, I guess. I wish the editor would at least *tell* us that he is changing history, otherwise taniwha's post makes little sense.
OmniWeb for OSX solves this with a checkbox labeled:
"Allow Pop-Up Windows Only When Link is Clicked On" (or something similar)
Which means, it'll only pop up a window if and only if you click on something deliberately.
Nice. Very, very nice.
iCab has given users amazing control over JS for ages (and of course from the GUI. If you don't want a web site to:
access the referer
open new windows
move windows
touch the toolbar
write in the status line
create cookies
ask for cookies
access history
etc
You can prevent them from doing it with the click of a button. You can apply the settings to all web pages and choose sites where the filters won't be applied.
You can even decide what type of Javascript will be executed by turning on/off:
JavaScript 1.0
JavaScript 1.1
JavaScript 1.2
JavaScript 1.3
JavaScript 1.4
JavaScript 1.5
JScript
among many, many other things
It must be one of the most configurable browsers out there.
For general browsing it's extremely fast, small and flexible and cannot be beat at saving web archives. One word of warning though. It feels like a finished browser but is still in Preview. Make sure you don't have any duplicated Text encoders on your system.
For OS X iCab is still being primed. OmniWeb however, will give you enough control over popups.
People should be annoyed by popup trojan links and traps until they download AdShield for IE or use a browser like Konqueror that stops this crap out of the box. Microsoft should have added this to IE 6 but they are a bunch of lazy monopolistic twits. Netscape should have too but they are circling the bowl so I'll cut them some slack. I E is better because it lets you make the menus toolbar, and address bar go on one line at the top and lets you use more screen for viewing the page.
For those who still endure the drudgery of Winblows at work or home, go to www.panicware.com and get the Pop-Up Stopper. Works great, non-intrusive, can be disabled with a quick double-click on the tray icon.