Blocking Pop-ups at the ISP Level?

roXet asks: "I work for a small ISP that offers dial-up and DSL in Louisiana. In the wake of the big boys' new wave of pop-up and spam blocking advertisements, I am looking into providing these services for our customers. I hate the thought of filling my customers machines with proprietary software, if for no other reason than I see it creating a support nightmare for our call center. I have found several options for blocking spam at the network level, but I have yet to find a good solution for getting rid of pop ups. Has anyone found a good method of doing this at the ISP level?"

Comments

possibilities

[dtfinch]

You can set them up with an alternative browser. Mozilla Firebird is fast and does popup blocking, and is by no means proprietary.

Blocking website popups at the ISP level would be hard. Sure, you could set up your own http proxy and replace occurances of "open(" with something else, but it's so easy for a web site to obfuscate their popup code to get past such a filter and you would also be breaking countless sites that don't use popup ads.

You can no doubt block gator and a bunch of other insidious adware though. Just block all their domains and executable filenames. Most low end firewall/routers have a url filtering feature that's adequate for this. The people who are hit by the most popups often have one or more of these installed and don't know about it.

Google Bar 2.0

[crapnutassneck]

If you do want to use IE, the Google toolbar has a good popup blocker.

google

[BigBir3d]

toolbar.google.com (works with IE, and now blocks pop-ups) is another option from mozilla etc (which may not work with certain sites).

Blacklist

[Tyrdium]

A good blacklist should have zero false positives, and still block a good deal of ads. I use Dan Pollock's hosts file, and it works pretty well. It blocks Hotmail's in-page ads, along with a lot of others. It also has some sites that set malicious tracking cookies and popup traps blacklisted. Of course, you should check each url for validity, but it should work pretty well. Also, I suggest you put a page on your site that contains suggestions for Internet security, including links (and preferably easy tutorials) to things like Adaware, Spybot, and the like. Oh, and a link to Firebird (or Mozilla) would be good, too... ;)

Re:how do browsers do it?

[LordNimon]

I don't know how browsers solve the problem, but I'd be interested to know.

The JavaScript interpreter ignores the calls to open the window, depending on how the call was made. This technique would not work on the ISP side, because it would require the ISP's server to parse and edit the JavaScript on every page it sends to the users.

Offer a well-maintained proxy to your users

[Cecil]

A popular solution is Privoxy's popup blocking chained with Squid's caching. In my opinion, that's the way to go. Privoxy by default also blocks ads and webbugs and nasty javascript and other things, but you can disable those features.

These could probably be configured as a transparent proxy if you don't want to set it up manually on users' computers, but speaking as a power user, I would never sign up with an ISP that stuck me with a proxy I couldn't avoid.

Proxomitron

[cybermancer]

http://www.proxomitron.info/

Proxomitron is a proxy that provides that as well as many other features. Since it is a proxy you could put it on your servers and provide access only for your subscribers. Make it optional. Most good browsers offer easy switching between proxy and non-proxy mode.

Proxomitron offers more then just popup blocking, and also by letting them use the ISP as a proxy they have an additional level of anonymity.

You would need to configure Proxomitron to a useful, but not too invasive level, or offer multiple proxies at different levels of restrictiveness. Then the use can pick which one they want depending on their needs. Document it all really well on your support site.

Re:Use a transparent Squid

[foooo]

And you were too busy trying to close pop-ups to provide a working link??

LINK


~foooo

For those insisting on IE

[bryanp]

Mozilla is great but let's face it, for a lot of people The Internet means Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. So, as part of the setup get all of your new users to install either the Google Toolbar or the Avant Browser add-on for IE. They both do an excellent job of blocking popups in IE.