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Next-Gen Pop-up Ads
bje2 writes "CNet has a disconcerting story about a new generation of pop-up ads that use a "kick through" technique such that you don't even need to click on the pop-up ad anymore, you just need to mouse over it...wow, can they make our web surfing experience any worse?"
This has started with things like disabling the blink tag and having pop-up blockers, and now we see that browsers should not allow certain actions to be triggered simply by a mouseover, and so on. Remember things like this the next time you see someone on bugzilla commenting about how the browser has to respect command X because it's in the standard!
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
This all sounds like nice possibilities for Mozilla (andother alternative browsers) to block those annoying ads in their default setup. Maybe M$ Internet Explorer might catch up one day, but I'm not waiting for that! ;-p
Hmm... Moz can't just block these kind of ads or all those javascript menus and other leditimate onMouseOver scripts that's quite common might stop working.
However, Moz could add a feature similar to "block images from this server", but "block scripts from this server". However, the scripts can still be on the actual web server which won't help much since it would again block *all* scripts from the server which we don't want.
A solution might be to tell Mozilla to "block scripts associated with images of this size".
That's the best I can think of now, since ads almost never change size and it's fairly unusual to have legitimate images in the same standardized size as advertisments.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Almost every executible GUI program we use today has many of these kinds of "pop-up" dialog boxes - some more complicated than others (from confirmation dialogs to config screens). And all of them serve a useful purpose.
I'm a firm believer that developing apps using HTTP/(X)HTML as an interface is a smart move, as opposed to writing an executible for a specific platform - since it is a true write-once, run-anywhere tech (well, access-anywhere, at least from as far as client access is concerned.) And there's no reason we, as web developers, shouldn't be able to use pop-up windows for web-enabled apps.
Just because commercial sites the world over have abused pop-(up|under)s, doesn't mean the technology itself is useless.
ps. - I realize Mozilla allows you to disable scripts from opening "unrequested" windows (ie. where any "window.open" call is ignored, unless it applies to link you just clicked), but for a complicated site with various domains (eg. secure/non-secure), or other complications, it still isn't a robust enough solution to those of use developing true web-enabled applications.
You're missing my point - if the ads don't annoy me, then I don't avoid the company that placed the adverts, and they don't learn the lesson that annoying potential cusotmers is bad for business.
Anti-advert technology (such as Mozilla's pop up filtering, which I have turned on, and it's gif loop blocking which I choose not to have turned on btw) is removing the negative feedback element, which I feel is important if the offenders are to learn not to offend. All that happens is that the adverts carry on annoying the technological underclass that dosen't block them.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
You need two programs to do that, bash and wget. You can write one (long) line to do just that:
shell$ for i in `seq 1 1000`; do wget --user-agent='Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0)' --cache=off --referer=http://www.x10.com/products/ http://www.x10.com/images9/abkc_sidecam.jpg; rm -v abkc_sidecam.jpg; done [enter]
or you could even run something million times more effective, like this:
shell$ for i in `seq 1 1000`; do wget --user-agent='Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0)' --cache=off --mirror -e robots=off http://www.x10.com/products/; rm -rfv *x10.com; done [enter]
Technically it's trivial, you can use Bash/wget, you can use Perl/LWP, etc. But the question is: wouldn't it be more evil than the popups themselves?
root@aio:~# nmap -sX -iR -p1- # Ho, ho, ho! Merry Xmas, everyone!
Although Microsoft has most likely done reasearch on pop up ad's and are aware of their customers wanting such a feature, Especially when MSN competitors are touting Pop Up Blockers as a feature of their service, not to mention the deceptive nature of popups these days, Microsoft Will not do it.
Why you Ask? Because They will get Sued for Being a Monopoly or Stifiling Competition, and Lose.
Dont Believe Me? When Outlook Express 4 was in it's beta stages, It had a spam filter similar to the one that Hotmail and Outlook currently have. You dont see it in Outlook Express because a company that was sending newsletters sued them for being a Monopoly because the Spam filter would fiter the companies Legitmate E-mail. Even though Microsoft explained that it was the way they were sending the mail and there was an easy fix to it, they didn't budge, They won the case, and Spam continues to flow to inboxes.
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