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

Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Is this wise?

[NanoGator]

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.)

replies so far

[itwerx]

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.

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.