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Gator-style Overlay Ads Are Legal, Says Court
donutz writes "C|Net has the scoop: "A federal court has ruled that pop-up ads for rivals of U-Haul International, placed atop the moving company's own site by a third-party software application, are legal." In this case, it was ad serving company WhenU.com placing the ads, but this decision could have a big impact on the court cases that involve competitor Gator."
Yes, but both Fox News and CNN consent to allowing that to happen because they each have a 2 minute "local window" within every hour of programming, a commercial block that is specifically marked with metadata as belonging to the cable or DBS provider's ads. The cable/DBS company can then sell those ads to whomever they want, and that just happens to be a rival cable channel so be it. The stations view that as part of the deal they have to make to get onto the cable TV dial.
The difference here is that U-Haul has no relationship with WhenU at all... they'd rather WhenU simply go away.
If you want news, go to the source.
Actually, this one has been solved already. Bonzi was cornered into a settlement that made them promise never to use such an ad again.
All of us (I think that Linux users have this too) open their hosts file and add this to it:
127.0.0.1 www.gator.co.uk
127.0.0.1 www.gator.com
127.0.0.1 www.gator.net
127.0.0.1 webdp.gator.com
127.0.0.1 whenu.com
127.0.01 gator.com
This will fix their wagon quite thoroughly, until they switch their domain addresses, then reopen your hosts file and repeat..
I've got a little hosts file (only 22K) that pretty much takes care of all of the jokers that push ads upon you by replacing their ads with a quaint DNS error.
Let me know if you want a copy of the file.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
You should check out Spybot Search and Destroy. I prefer it to Ad-Aware.
Disable automatic activeX control download. Problem solved. Also gets rid of annoying flash garbage.
funny munging