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Prince of Pop-ups

Posted by michael on from the everyone's-gotta-be-prince-of-something dept.

Ric writes "From the article lead paragraph: 'If you hate pop-up ads, you might blame Brian Shuster. A long-time figure in the Internet pornography world, Shuster recently received a patent for the ad format and is now looking to make some money off the sites that use it. And that's just the beginning - Shuster has a long list of pending patents, including one for pop-up audio ads that cannot be turned off.'"

6 of 539 comments (clear)

  1. Use Mozilla ....... by Jeehoba · · Score: 4, Informative

    God Bless Mozilla .. no more pop-ups. Hopefully it will still block those audio pop-ups "that can't be turned off."

    1. Re:Use Mozilla ....... by Sylver+Dragon · · Score: 5, Informative

      Best solution I have found is to locate the advertising servers of the companies doing this crap, and blackhole them via your hosts file. I used to see this stuff all the time when reading the news on Yahoo!, but I have since managed to find most of their ad servers and redirect them to 127.0.0.1. Personally I keep a pretty long hosts file. If I find an ad/tracking server I simply add it to my hosts file. And ya, I run Mozilla as well.

      --
      Necessity is the mother of invention.
      Laziness is the father.
    2. Re:Use Mozilla ....... by jpkunst · · Score: 3, Informative

      Simple: just click-and-hold or control-click or right-click on the offending image and choose 'Block images from this server'. Most of the time those images are served from a dedicated ad-server.

      JP

  2. Re:I'm conflicted!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Don't be. It's not his fault. He didn't "create" anything. GeoCities deployed the first pop-up ad in mid 1997. I know this because I did, and I'm currently looking at the source code I wrote to do it (scheduling, etc.). Keep in mind this was during a time when internet companies couldn't figure out how to make a profit... oh wait, never mind that last point. I'll still be happy to see 'em go.

  3. Re:Excellent!! by stratjakt · · Score: 5, Informative

    A lot of sites (like the once really cool but now really pathetic Vintage Gaming Network) now block downloads or forum access or other features if you block popups.

    --
    I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
  4. Re:Excellent!! by Binestar · · Score: 4, Informative

    Thats fine, so you allow popups for the 10 seconds it takes to start the download. In opera it's as easy as pressing F12, in other browsers like mozilla you can set it to allow popups for specific sites.

    Although a pain in the ass, you can make it so you don't lose any fuctionality of sites that require popups.

    --
    Do you Gentoo!?