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Prince of Pop-ups
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.'"
Here's hoping lots of sites don't want to pay the license fee and stop using popups.
If this guy can start charging people for using popups then these webpages won't pay and popups will start dying off. While a patent like this is mostly a bad thing, the side effects are good!
Of course I use mozilla with popup filtering enabled, so it's not really that much of an issue to me. =)
Do you Gentoo!?
God Bless Mozilla .. no more pop-ups. Hopefully it will still block those audio pop-ups "that can't be turned off."
Why doesn't he just cut through all the crap and patent the very idea of being a complete and utter asshole? Then he could demand royalties from all other assholes when they display their assholitudinism. Then, if they get pissed off and come after him, he can claim that in itself was assholish and sue for *that*.
It's the perfect plan. What could go wrong?
To inundate him with junk mail, of course, and also to hit him up for money. Or just hit him. No, wait, I'm a Quaker. I keep forgetting that...
That's gotta fit into your schema somewhere
Maybe this means that websites will stop using pop-ups.
Oh, and I think I devised a way to turn off the pop-up audio:
1. Press the power button on your computer's speakers.
2. When you're done with the site, press the power button again.
Gee, maybe I should patent this.
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
he's in internet porn eh? Maybe someone can fix it so he can't "pop-up" anymore
Hopefully he charges astronomical licence fees for both "innovations" retroactive to the day he filed. Hopefully that will be the nail in the coffin that drives these scourges off the desktop.
Heck, I wish somebody had patented spam as well!
My rights don't need management.
Wonderful! An anti-popup web article that uses popup advertising!
For him, he's living out the american dream. The freedom to create and sell an idea.
Unfortunately, the mass population HATES this idea and in fact people have gone so far to block this technology with software.
This should get intresting...
Popups are similar to telemarketers. Often, the consumer is not intrested in the product. People who disliked this technology came up with devices to block telemarketers and now there is a legislative "do not call" list. It would be pretty hard to have a "do not popup" list. Unless the ISPs stepped in and placed ALL their users and perhaps had to pay a fee to keep the pop ups away.
just my 2 cents worth...
including one for pop-up audio ads that cannot be turned off
I think he'll find that everything can be turned off.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Their entire profession infringes and could be liable for centuries of back damages!
Do I like this man or hate him?
Pro: He promotes porn on the Internet.
Pro: He will sue a few people into not using pop-ups, at least for a little while.
Con: He "created" annoying pop-up ads.
The situation would be similar if Hillary Rosen, remaining the bitch that she is, was really hot and liked to give me blowjobs...
Okay, well, the blowjobs would easily win out. But you get the idea.
Down with Saudi Arabia!!!
I think I'll patent annoying stupid people and make a million bucks. I don't know which is more intrusive. Pop-ups, or annoying stupid people.
This is a rhetorical question : how can one possibly patent a 'feature' built into web-browsers? Popups are only possible because some idiot decided that opening another window without the users consent (and even doing this recursively!) was "friendly" behavoir and belonged in the javascript spec. The same applies to sound. This is another consequence of our failing legal system (lets be honest : its on life support at best. Its BROKEN. While the basic tenants of judges, juries, and appeals might be good, the implementation is falling apart). If the legal system worked without application of large sums of money (and I would not call giving the victory to the one with the money 'justice') this patent would have no meaning.
So in other words...
Patents pending for porno pop-up prince?
Best Windows Freeware
He must be murdered immediately. The consequences of any other course of action are too dire to even be conceptualized.
Murder.
It's not just the money, it's who's collecting. Anyone who wants to use a pop up having to bow down before the porn master who dreamed up the sleazy idea? Classic. I hope someone makes a big fuss and that it becomes common knowledge that advertisers are paying porn masters to be able to irritate you. Guilt by association and tribute! Suffer, you dick heads!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Easy: institute pop-up ads on your site and see if you can Manage to keep any Traffic.
1) don't use a sound card. In the case of intregrated audio chips, buy a dremel tool
2) Turn off your speakers
3) Cut off your ears. See note regarding dremel tool in 1)
-Pete
Hmm, pardon me but I believe the proper form of that would be:
while(Sound == Obnoxious){
Axe->swing(Speaker);
}
return(Sound->Calm);
;- )
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
(The popups appear when you click a "next page" or "previous page" link in the article, so Mozilla must be treating it as a requested popup. In addition to a whitelist of sites that are allowed to throw popups, Mozilla needs a blacklist of sites that are never allowed to throw popups.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
I was asked a question by a co-worker yesterday, and did not have a solid answer. Since it somewhat relates to this story and google did nothing but bring back ads for popup blockers, I thought I would loose it to the /. people. Simple question -- Anybody who has used Firebird, Mozilla, Opera, etc -- has seen how much better the browsing experience is without countless popups. What is stopping Microsoft from putting out a version or patch of/to IE that has this feature? I know that the conspirecy theorists could speculate to no end on this one, but is there a simple answer?
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I don't understand why you guys don't like Pop-Ups. The strawberry ones are delicious.
Grandma Simpson & Lisa "How many roads must a man walk down?" Homer : "Eight!". Lisa: "That was a rhetorical question!" Homer: "Oh. Then, Seven!" Lisa: "Do you even know what 'rhetorical' means?" Homer: "Do I know what 'rhetorical' means?"
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Can you give an example? I'd like to try it with mozilla to see how it behaves there. Since I did
user_pref("capability.policy.default.windowinterna l.open", "noAccess");
user_pref("capability.policy.popupsites.windowinte rnal.open", "noAccess");
I have not seen a single popup.
PS: of course, there are no spaces in the quoted strings above, /. put the spaces there.
"I have a dream that a guy who designs popup ads is having a major colonoscopy, and the proctologist is saying, 'It's the darnedest thing! Every time I snip a polyp, two more spring up in its place!'"
*reaches over and turns down the volume on the speakers*
-- taking over the world, we are.
I thought theft of computing services was illegal.
the dictionary says:
shyster
n. Slang
An unethical, unscrupulous practitioner, especially of law.
Seems to fit Shuster quite well.
-- This sig for rent.
At the very least, we need to find a way to circle his house 24/7 with ice-cream trucks that play "Turkey In The Straw" and other similar abominations off-key until he can't stand it anymore and starts beating his head against a brick wall until his face looks like 5 lbs of raw hamburger. Or we could simply find his e-mail address and/or home contact information and send him a deluge of "gift subscriptions," "free trials," Franklin Mint tawdriness, and other junk, not to mention sending him Slashdot's current existing corpus of spam, and some invasive code that will let us know exactly what he's doing every hour of the day (or something equally horrible like that)...or...or...or...
I'm ethically opposed to cruel and unusual punishment, though, so I say we just off the jerk before he can do any more damage. (At the very least, can we exile him to a nice deserted island somewhere with no Internet connection? Please?!)
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
"interact with the browser to modify or control one or more of the browser functions, such that the user is directed to a predesignated site or page, instead of accessing the site or page typically associated with the selected browser function."
So he patented misleading people via a web browser...
Intersting.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Audio pop-ups. Gives a whole new humor to that .wav file that circulated via the forward-everything crowd a couple of years back.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
no need, mozilla has builtin support for disabling popups (as does opera)
I realize the above is an Orwellian outlook on the stangle-hold Microsoft is hoping to foist on us, but DRM is a slippery slope indeed. Who knows how far down one will go once one gets started.
--If you code for the exceptions, the rules fall into place
With a HREF you can set a taget window. If that window does not exist it's greated. Popped-up, as it were. You can place any kind of content in that window. Java script allows you to pop this extra target up with a specific size. This is all a given.
At the time this functionality was created there were ads on the web. They were a known type of content. The idea was that they would bring in money. We all know this.
This guys "innovation" is placing an add in new target window? The US Patent Office is grteat pleace. I'm sure it was totally non-obvious.
Patents in the US should be halted, until something can be done. This is causing harm to us all. Not this Patent issued. Issued falsely I'd say. It's the fact that a patent limits the rest of us. It allows an inventor(not in this case) to own an idea for a while.
Owned ideas are bad when they are ebvous, such as this one. To know when is and is not ebvous is way beyond the scope of our government. These are not the simplier times when Patents were penned into being in this country.
Patents should be rolled back, and used only in areas where innovation needs to be stoked. Computer and tech innovation is on a roll, and patens will only halt that trend.
It harms all of us to retard our progress and innovation by allowing a patnet office which cannot see the obvious from the innovaiton.
-- James Dornan
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
Seems like every time an article about spam/popups/whatever comes around, someone tries to find and post the address.
While it's a clever sort of revenge, it's not very practical. You don't send mail to a person, you send it to a building. If the person gets 'snail mail spammed,' all they have to do is move. The building remains 'spammed' for the next tenant, and the next...
Nope, don't like it, don't like it one bit...
This is all total crap. All his patents are laughable and rely on system specifics - ie, windows and IE. HTML (lets forget about flash shall we) is a completely open system. Your computer requests it, it is sent to your computer, your computer deals with it as you wish. This effectively means that if you dont want your own computer to do something, then it wont.
All you need is the correct algorithm to process the HTML/Java whatever in the right way so that it doesn't bother you with pop-ups, audio or whatever. Has anyone invented or patented a method of blocking malicious code? yes its called a virus scanner (or virus scanner packaged as an ad-filter) and it just so happens that HTML and Java are a hell of allot easier to deal with than _real_ malicious code.
You could say this man is patenting virus methods or something like that, if it was a outlook-express visual basic script i dont think the patent office would see it in quite the same way? If not then let me be the first to invent a method of advertising that involves emailing itself to everyone on your address book.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
And the best thing about the Google ads is that unlike 99+% of advertising they are actually usefull and something that I can use to find a product I want.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Shuster has a long list of pending patents, including one for pop-up audio ads that cannot be turned off.'
I think I'll file for a patent on "Honking a truck's horn in a residential area from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m., advertising a sale of one or more goods". I think I could get some license fees for that. To up my income, I will also file for "Yelling at a carefully chosen target group of people at prominent city places until they agree to buy one or more goods".
Jeez. Indeed, leaving the oceans was a bad idea, after all.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
I OWN MY COMPUTER - its fully 100% a resource of MINE and nobody else. I also PAY for my internet access, by the month.
If he wants to force feed me ads - then he better damn well PAY me. And protect himself while walking around in public.
Given that it is your computer, why are you letting him execute hostile code on your computer? I mean, if you're using Explorer (for example) and your security level is set such that pop-up ads are able to execute, aren't you basically allowing pop-up ads?
Now, rational folks will avoid using Explorer because of that annoying dialog box that informs you that "an active-x control on this page could not be loaded" when you turn scripting off, but the same case holds for Netscape. Pop-ups exploit features that you have turned on. Turn them off, and pop-ups cease to work.
I've browsed for years with javascript turned off, and the only time I'm bombarded with crap (the LA Times is a good example of intrusive advertising) is when I temporarily enable JS to do some banking, and forget to turn it off. In IE, I just set the default to have active scripting off for all sites, and add a few "trusted" sites so scripting is enabled selectively for just those sites.
Think about it. Why do certain sites insist on forcing you to use javascript to browse their sites (ie, latimes.com). To make sure you can experience the full "benefit" of their pop-up/pop-under ads. Solution? Boycott these sites.
Can I?
Finding out where this guy lives and break a kneecap or two? ;)