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

The only answer - Mozilla

[rudy_wayne]

A long time ago, I signed up with a local ISP and they sent me a copy of Netscape Navigator. As a result, it was a few years before I even knew that MSIE existed.

Do your users a favor. A big favor. Strongly insist that they use a modern, good quality web browser, like Mozilla, and make copies easily available.

Doesn't have to be all or nothing...

[WoTG]

a lot of posts (rightly) mention that most known tricks to blocking pop-ups will present problems for the small minority of users who want the pop-up (or websites where legitimate pop-ups happen to fall into the filter). Perhaps the solution would be some sort of "opt-in". Similar to opting into the spam blocking at Yahoo Mail (and I suppose Hotmail). A little setting through a web interface to enable or disable the pop-up blocking.

And you must disable them.

[devphil]

Privoxy by default also blocks ads and webbugs and nasty javascript and other things, but you can disable those features.

The way it gets around, say, certain kinds of Javascript, is by rewriting the function text as it goes by. But it doesn't know what is and isn't actually a script. Any webpage containing the word "open" followed by an open parenthesis -- there's one in the comment currently at the top of this page -- gets rewritten to "PrivoxyWindowOpen(..." to defang the Javascript, even when it, well, wasn't. The comment makes no sense as it actually appears on my screen, because it isn't what the user wrote. Being familiar with Privoxy, I back up, reparse, and keep going.

We've all probably seen similar things in email. Anytime members of a certain mailing list start discussing XHTML examples, their snippets have things like "<link_LINK-DEFANGED foo..." and I have to blink a few times before I figure out what they actually wrote and what they didn't.

Customers of an ISP would be seriously confused and explosively pissed off if this happened to them. Maybe offer levels of filtering; they can choose various ports on your proxies to get them, etc.