Slashdot Mirror
Browser Becomes Billboard
MikeKD writes "Citing a desire to 'enhance the user experience', United Virtualities is 'preparing to introduce a product [called Ooqa Ooqa] that will allow advertisers to automatically change the appearance of Web browsers, usurping some of the functions built into popular browsers...', according to an MSNBC article--and all this supposedly without downloading any additional software. UV says a lot of sweet things about being able to turn it off and allowing the web sites to customize the degree of intrusion (from reverting to normal form when leaving to retaining the rebrand even after leaving), but does anyone think advertisers will restrain themselves? Not I." Friends don't let friends use browsers susceptible to this.
What it does is bad enough, but what it's called is even worse. I think some of these dot com companies might do a little better if they didn't spend all the VC money on crack for the marketing department.. :)
-s
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
As I am sure the Mozilla team will write a specific patch to disable this slimeware the second it is reported happening on a mozilla install.
Konq would do the same I'm sure...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
wouldn't this be similar to say you're watching friends and while you're watching someone enters your house and paints your television pink, puts a sign on top of your tv that says buy tampax, and replaces your remote with a tampax branded remote?
-
Is this going to affect my Bonzi Buddy??!!
... if it is made optional.
...
Some people enjoy the experience of the internet and this may be one of the things for them. How else can you explain Flash's popularity
Seriously, the key here is the ability to turn it off if you don't want it. They've already built-in the functionality for limiting it to certain websites. As mentioned, weather.com is thinking about it. Personally, it'd be cool if they threw is some weather tools on the toolbar like standard conversions, rain=snow measurements, etc.
You have to admit it beats the heck out of a car driving across your screen
I just __CAN'T__ wait to see the latest pr0n ads..
Wonder what we'll be clicking on to close the windows?
Gives a whole new meaning to 'pop-ups'.
Weather.com, right? Epilepsy-inducing annoying ads Weather.com? Cars driving across the webpage honking at me Weather.com?
Yeah, they have really good judgment as far as intrusive advertising goes.
Was anybody else totally not surprised to hear that Weather.com is looking to be an early adopter for this "technology"?
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
My first thought is "why would anyone use this browser and subject themselves to this"?
But then, I remember the comet cursor scandal*. I'm sure they will package this into a really neat sounding program that will do everything you need, plus other things that you don't know about.
* For those that don't remember, Comet Cursor was this cursor customization that you could download and make your cursor look like anything you want, even an animated something. Pretty neat, except that the software transmitted all your mouse movements and click to their company, so they know where you clicked (becasue it was a browser plug-in) and where you went. The product was wildly popular for a while. I guess some will do anything for a little bit of snazzy-ness.
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
Popups that abused javascript to run "full-screen", changing the size of my browser window without my permission caused me to disable javascript altogether.
Then, I stopped visiting certain websites when the "browser takeover" intensified with the use of "shoshkles"(sp?) - which obscured the very content I visited the web page to read, in order to hock their annoying, unwanted product. The analogy here is opening a newspaper, and starting to read an article on a local election, when suddenly an ad from the other page crawls and sets itself over that article.
Now, the same company that brought *that* annoyance now decides that the very interface of my browser isn't mine to control. Who needs that "Home" button? Not you! No - you go ahead and have this "BUY!" button instead. "Back" button? Nonono...you need another "BUY!" button!. What? You're not pressing them? Well, maybe you need some more incentive...let's replace the Reload button with a button that looks *just like* your old one, but actually goes to the same place our "BUY!" button takes you!
Hopefully Opera will stay clear of this, otherwise I may have to stop browsing altogether when I'm forced to use the Windows partition of my comp.
How long until a new worm uses this to quietly replace all the buttons and fields in a users browser with identical-looking ones that don't work as advertized?
The open source browsers have thus far been pretty immune to the obnoxiousness suffered by windows users. I was helping my room mate with a computer problem the other day and was subjected to the hideous "Real Download Manager." Someone needs to suffer for that atrocity, let me tell you...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Actually what they are working towards is to turn the desktop computer into a Desktop Advertising Device, all protected by Digital Rights Management so you can never avoid the Ads.
To get any work done, you have to sit through long blocks of ads.
And viewing the ads will be mandatory.
Ultimately this will be a form of economic slavery neatly package as something neat and fashionable. Imagine being a borg as a fashion statement, or something to do to tick out the 'rentals
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
...as maybe many others are.
One part of the article mentions "a demo version of a Weather.com-themed browser prepared by United Virtualities", which seems to imply that it is a modified version of a current web browser. This is really nothing new (aside from being able to service ads), when I ran my small ISP in town we modified Netscape Comm. 4 to have our logo in place of the 'N'. This would require the user to download and install a new web browser.
However, there seem to be underpinnings in the article that make it seem like this could affect your current browser you are using. One bad scenario would be that it installs with another (freeware) program...much like the spyware in Kazaa, et al. The worse scenario would be that it could tap into the gui of your current browser just by visiting a web page. Then you would have no real control. This sounds like taking advantage of one of the many bugs^H^H^H^H features that IE has.
And then this statement: "Web surfers will always have a clear option to turn off Ooqa Ooqa and go back to their regular browsers, said Ivan Entel, the firm's chief of staff. In fact, they'll have the option never to be exposed to the technology again on certain Web sites." Go back to my regular browser?? What is meant by that? Does this mean uninstalling/re-installing? Very vague terminology sends scary signals up my spine.
Does anyone know more about this definitively so as to clear up the vagueness?
- A non-productive mind is with absolutely zero balance.
- AC
The same company that brought you the aweful and awefully-named Shoshkele (those were the Flash ads that obscured the content of the page that they were on) has rolled out another aweful and awefully-named advertising technology. And weather.com has spearheaded the deployment of both godaweful technologies...
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
Thank god for lynx!
As reported previously here [slashdot.org], United Virtualities is the same company that came up with those horrible "Shoshkeles" ads!! If you've never seen them, they are ads that run, animated, all over the page, with full sound. Ack!
This sounds like more marketing hype from United Virtualities. If you look at "shoshkeles" and what they actually do, you will see that they like the older "eyeblasters" contain a lot of code that obscures what they really are doing. They simply put a flash animation in a layer, make it transparent and position it with CSS. Flash does the hard work! It's 3 lines of code on IE instead of the steaming heap their scripts turn out.
And ad executives like this? They think people want flying soft drink cans to cover their morning newspaper? Of course they're not human so what did you expect???
Thanks. As of today, and for the first time in my life, I can find some sympathy for the Palestinians.
This is "Overstepping the bounds" in more than one sense.
.sigs don't count.)
When I open a web page, I am generally agreeing to let a web designer do whatever he or she wants with the space between the <HTML> and </HTML> tags. Not my destop, not the frame, just the page.
If I don't have the option of turning this off, I will change browsers and not patronize sites that use this technique.
Why is it that every blank space has to become an advertising marquee?
Cheers
Jim in Tokyo
(Of course,
-- My Weblog.
Weather.com has a link to Tell them what you think. So go there, and tell them that if they use this new ooki yucki whatever they wanna call it crap, that you'll never visit their website again.
Chief Revenue Officer? I guess with as many crappy, gaudy ads as that website runs, they need a chief officer in charge of it....
Someone once said, "Programmers are often so fascinated by the fact that they can that they often don't think about whether they should.
If I find a site that does this, I will not use their product. I will email the web admin and inform them why, and I will feel a little better hoping that my little bit may cause them to stop using this technology because it costs them more money than it makes.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
I first saw this story posted over at SiliconValley.com on April 1.
Are we sure it's not an April Fool's joke that caught out the guys at MSNBC???
The biggest mistake we as a species have made in the past 100 years was to allow advertising to become an industry in and of itself. There was a time when businesses did their own advertising, designed to inform the consumer of their new products and the superiority of those products over the competitor. Now, that function has been farmed off to other companies, who, due to the nature of capitalism, have to compete to get the most advertising business. That competition has fostered ever more intrusive advertising, from 30 second spots on tv to giant billboards to the various annoyances we're seeing now on the internet. I forsee that in ten years or less, an ad agency will replace mega-retailer Walmart as the largest company in the world.
This trend will continue, with ads becoming more and more ubiquitious. A few sci-fi writers have drawn this same conclusion, such as Neal Stephenson, who envisioned 3-D billboards that "attack" pedestrians, or another writer, whose name escapes me at the moment (it might have been Greg Egan), who posited that nano-robots could be used to "hack" the brain and perpetually display ads in a person's visual field. I can envision some enterprising young advertiser inventing eyeglasses that display ads. Poor, nearsighted people would put up with the ads in exchange for clear vision (if slightly obscured).
Sadly, there's not much we can do. Look at how well we've curtailed Microsoft. They had it wrong in Fight Club. The insurance companies and financial institutions aren't the enemies. It's the ad agencies. Maybe the same solution might work.
If you check your Milton, you'll find that Satan had a daughter named Sin, and he banged her, and they had a son called Death. Taking this metaphor a little further, Business had a daughter named Greed, and together, they begat a brood called "Pervasive Idiocy", "Pointy-Haired Boss", "Dot-Com", and "RIAA". Nothing to see here, move along.
Give a monkey a brain and he'll swear he's the center of the universe.
This product is targeted towards marketing people.
It is also named by marketing people.
That should explain a lot.
by the way the least they could do is follow basic rules of english language and put a u after the q.
Guess they are too cutting edge for that.
New York's Computer Crime statute says:
It does require the computer owner to somehow notify the intruder that unauthorized access is prohibited. But one type of notification allowed is:
So print out a big sign and tape it to the side of your monitor. Meanwhile, Wyoming has this to say:
Sounds like this technique, if it really exists, violates both laws.
The problem is when they step out of the box you gave them. If you want to load their page in a frame, it should show up and not throw a tempertantrum.
Look, I hate the intrusive, large ads, but fine. I choose to view a site our not, they are welcome to do whatever they want within the window.
However, do NOT try to disable my backbutton with screwy redirects that mess up my history (do a server-side 301 or 302 if you need to bounce me around, it's not my problem that you suck).
Do not do pop-ups, I gave you a window, use it. If you want more space, ask me to click on something. Pop unders, that's abusive. You don't get to hide ads for me, that's outrageous. Exit-pops are worse. If I hit back, go to another url, or close my browser, you're done. You have no right to harass me.
It's really a shame that MS and Netscape never really worked to make Javascript respect the user, but then, Microsoft has never shown any respect for their customers. Look at the recent Looksmart thing, the thread on webmasterworld shows what their puppet Looksmart is doing to screw over webmasters that paid $300 in good faith for a service that the two of them are rendering worthless.
Alex
Thanks to the Configurable Security Policies in Mozilla:
t s/ConfigPolicy.html
The gist of configuring security policies is described here:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/componen
The bottom of the page has examples that you can use for your 'default' security policy. You can customize them to any security policy you configure in just a few minutes.
Polymorphism -- It's what you make of it.