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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.
And I thought X-10 was bad!
This type of advertising only frustrates users and creates animosity between advertiser and potential customer. This is an obvious and sometimes extreme nuisance, having to shut down your broweser at times!
Alienating your audience is not a good business practice.
I like fire ants. They are very spicy!
One thing that surprised me is that this slime ball has been sued for this before and lost 57 cases tied to 200 domain names and been fined $800,000 to $1,000,000. And he's still doing it. The only reason he would still be doing this is if it is profitable, above and beyond court costs and fines.
Who is falling for all this and patronizing the sites that trap you like this?
My aunt is furious about when her 6 year old child accidently does a typo and porn sites pop up everywhere. Perhaps if this stops, it will lessen the demand for filtering software. Filtering software, IMHO, is very bad; definately the worse of two evils. At least shutting down a web site could possibly have a court process attached to it...
Fortunately, what's happened isn't that the government has decided to regulate javascript, the FTC is just making a reasonable application of existing laws against deceptive business practices. What we're seeing here is legal action against deceptive practices. We are not seeing action to outlaw the use of a particular technology, or any restriction on your right to write and distribute any sort of javascript tool that you like. What we are seeing is a crackdown on a business practice that was already unethical and illegal.
Be very wary of falling into the trap of thinking that adding 'and do it with a computer' to the end of some already common thing makes it new and different. That's what Amazon did (We're going to keep our customers address and credit card number in a rolodex 'and we do it with a computer') and we all hate them for it.
Also be wary of falling into the trap of thinking that because the Internet is international no one can exert any authority over it. While it is certianly true that the US FTC has little to no authority over what foriegn companies do with offshore servers, there is still a responsiblity to put a stop to illegal actions when you are able to do so.
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
POPUP KILLER, sadly afaik win32 only but it works wonders on those annoying pop ups and pop unders
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Now I wish the feds would do something to stop the pop up adds that interupt my TV shows every 10 minutes. I hate those.
Because a bunch of morons thought that the web had to look like television, they put ActiveX, VBScript, Javascript, Flash and other crap into browsers and plug-ins. This, not surprisingly, lead to many vulnerabilities like the one exploited here. (Who is the genius that decided that the "Back" button should be able to be redefined by any website that the user viewed?) If the web simply displayed pictures and text, we would not have this idiotic problem. Lest you laugh, that's what books and newspapers have done for centuries and they still seem mighty useful and popular.
We have seen this overcomplexity lead to many problems. Look at Microsoft Outlook: some group of idiots decided that displaying text, or even pictures, was not enough. So they added Visual BASIC scripting to it. And HTML that you can't turn off. Suddenly any nitwit could create an e-mail Trojan horse that emailed itself to every person in the address book. Or Outlook could display some web site in the preview window, play annoying music, or provide confirmation to a spammer that you received and saw his message.
It's time that we started demanding robust, secure applications even if it means that web sites won't be able to display animated, dancing piglets.
An important technical point: it sounds like the Back button was not actually reprogrammed to perform a different action. Rather, an onUnLoad event handler was specified in the BODY tag to execute a bit of JavaScript code when the window was closed. There are legitimate uses for this that are not annoying, although offhand I can't think of any (probably cleaning up things that were previously set, perhaps on a site that is designed to use multiple small windows for some special purpose).
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;