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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?"
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.
Wouldn't that involve the ISP looking at what you're doing, and be a horrid invasion of privacy?
I definitely do not want my ISP monitoring my packets. And yes, I expect many replies to this to say "Oh they watch everything you do". I don't subscribe to that level of conspiracy theory.
propz to GNAA.
The problem with popups isn't the window it opens, but rather it opening without expressed permission. Use Opera or Mozilla and popups are no longer a complaint. Why filter at the ISP level? There are some sites that use them legitimately. (Not auto popups, but opening of popup windows via click.)
"Derp de derp."
If you do want to use IE, the Google toolbar has a good popup blocker.
.-=Wit is educated insolence=-. -Aristotle
toolbar.google.com (works with IE, and now blocks pop-ups) is another option from mozilla etc (which may not work with certain sites).
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.
There have been several replies already saying "give them a different browser". However, reading the request, it is quite clearly stated that changes to the client machine are not desireable due to the support time involved. :)
So shaddap about the browsers already!!
But, back to the question at hand, I'm afraid that blocking at the ISP level will be:
A - fairly difficult due to obfuscations. The ISP really isn't going to be doing anything different than a normal pop-up blocking mechanism at the client would in terms of figuring out what is or is not pop-up code and the pop-up people (insert scary mental image here) are already doing their level best to defeat that.
B - potentially a legal problem as any blocking mechanism that the ISP implements at the network level will, in effect, be interfering with the clients' "communication" with the website in question. The FCC might have something to say about that.
However, I'm sure there could be a way to set up a database and have people opt-in for pop-up blocking service. IANAL but I would think that them actually requesting such service would clear most legal hurdles.
As for solutions, I wonder how hard it would be to extract the relevant code from Open Source browsers and make a little routine to rewrite/replace scripts on the fly...? It would almost have to be a proxy though so you could track (and allow) pop-ups which were actually requested.
So the answer is: Don't set up a transparent proxy. Instead, set one up that customers can "opt-in" to use.
Your savvy customers will thank you, and people won't be offended by having the choice taken away from them.
This page appears to cover everything you need to know. But I suspect you've been too busy closing random pop ups to be able to use google
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Argh. No. Not transparent proxies, unless you're providing an opt-in mechanism (say, a value-added service) to do so. It's *so* frusterating when ISPs start mucking with my network connection (firewall incoming and outgoing SMTP or transparently proxy it, block outgoing DNS, etc).
ISPs bitch about how they can't provide tiered service. Spam blocking, popup blocking, firewalling, are *all* great things to toss in value-added packages to provide tiered service. They, however, drive many people (who don't *want* said "service") to tears.
Another option would be a opaque proxy and to provide a mini application that sets it up.
May we never see th
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... ;)
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.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
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.
Random and weird software I've written.
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.
"Anything is possible with enough programmers, time and pizza." (Substitute caffeine for time as needed.)
And you were too busy trying to close pop-ups to provide a working link??
LINK
~foooo
To be honest, I couldn't give a toss whether the ask slashdotter found that page or not. My main point is that he should make this service opt in, as no one likes to be forced to use a transparent proxy.
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
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.
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
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.
I'd like like to plea with you (and all ISPs) not to do anything like this.
As far as I know, your only options are:
* Making the user use some sort of filtering software, e.g. Proximotron or Google Toolbar.
* Making the user use a browser with built-in popup blocking.
* Filtering HTTP requests.
I recently had a big problem getting an XML-RPC based app to work. Turns out that Proximotron had been installed (without my knowledge) on the client system, and was adding it's popup blocking stuff to the XML-RPC response. While this is fine for HTML, it is definitely not ok for XML.
You can argue that XML-RPC/SOAP is a perversion of the HTTP standard, but apps using it are already deployed, and as a network admin I have to deal with it. Please don't make my job harder.
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.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)