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New Online Ad Technology To Bypass Popup Blockers
RetroGeek writes "Falk eSolutions AG is claiming it can detect and defeat pop-up and pop-under ad blockers. The best quote is that when they detect an ad blocker they will 'replace a pop-up or pop-under ad with what are called "floating" ads, or ads that appear as transparent images over Web-site content.' As far as I am concerned they can place as many transparent images as they want. He probably meant translucent. It should be easy to defeat the detection, after all visit a web site, the pop-up blocker detects a Javascript command, then doesn't run it. Replace this with: the pop-up blocker detects the Javascript command, runs it, then places the result into a bit-bucket. Any Mozilla devs here?" WebGangsta adds "While this may ignite another round of online advertising purchasing, this news doesn't affect anybody who uses a customized HOSTS file to stop the majority of ads from appearing anyway."
Maybe what they are talking about is different, but there is already software to block floating ads. Just search google and software such as this and this claim to block in-your-face floating ads. I have never used these and probably wouldn't since they cost money and google is doing a fine job for me.
They're likely talking about layers.. which is something that Adblock already deals with. (along with Flash, images and custom paths - i.e. block anything in the directory */ads/*).
Just another reason to use Firefox/Mozilla.
One successful tactic in sales is to be annoying. Almost everyone hates telemarketing, yet if nobody ever bought anything from a telemarketer, it would not be profitable and nobody would do it. Same with spam.
This is a problem with technologies that allow your ad to be delivered to millions of people cheaply. If even a tiny fraction of people respond, it won't matter that you annoyed the hell out of the other 99%.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Free Popup Blocker:
7 /uninstall_flash_player.exe (Uninstaller)
http://www.mozilla.org/
http://toolbar.google.com (If you use IE)
Replacement HOSTS file:
http://www.everythingisnt.com/hosts.html
Tiny HTTP Server to respond to all those HOSTS entries:
http://www.pyrenean.com/edexter.php
Flash Remover:
http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flash/ts/flash
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ (for Mozilla)
"TK-421, why aren't you at your post?"
Should've said: ...one purchase per <insane number here> hits is enough...
1) Intelligent popup blocking by mozilla (do not open any unrequested popups -- there is also enough customization).
2) "Block images from this server" -- blanket nuking.
These are the "extensions" to mozilla and firefox that are very powerful
3) Adblock -- block images based on a URL pattern. Very powerful and easy to specify what to block.
4) Flash block -- block flash elements (even something like flash click to view)
5) Nuke Anything -- if something comes up on your screen, you can remove it "after the fact". For example, if you want to read an interesting article on some celebrity with a stupid image, you can remove the image very easily using this.
At the end of the day, the end user should be able to see what he/she wants to read and view. If the sites persist in doing annoying things or refuse to serve some pages to people that have an advanced browser, I believe it is better to avoid those pages.
S
look here- http://www.everythingisnt.com/hosts.html
No, transparency includes all ranges from totally transparent to not entirely opaque. Translucency is more properly used when light but not details are carried through. A translucent floating image would scatter or effectively blur the content behind the image making it unreadable.
A tinted window is still transparent, but the windows in public restrooms are generally translucent.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
i dunno, maybe that link on the side of the page that says:
Banner Ad Blocking
I'm not the maintainer, just a satisfied "customer."
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
The truth is, popup ads have about 10-20 times as high a clickthrough rate as regular banners do (even flash banners) - so the companies will keep paying for them. Where there is a will and a lot of money, there is a way.
If popups become ignored (as you propose, as opposed to being simply blocked) on a significantly large scale (doubt it will happen though), ad companies will not even attempt to show popups, but jump straight to DIV layer ads, so you're not really going to ever solve this problem permanently.
However, consider that Mozilla has had blocking for a couple of years now, and the ad industry didn't really do anything about it. It's not until Yahoo and Google (and soon MS) got in on the action that they started to get worried and started coming up with circumvention techniques. The truth is that Mozilla is currently not a big enough market for the companies to worry about. In fact, most current implementations of floating DIV ads leave mozilla users alone.
Don't expect this privilege to continue if our little underdog of a browser earns any significant market share.
Ñ'
td > div#floatpop, td > div#closebox {
display: none !important;
}
Anyway, just add the "td > div#floatpop, td > div#closebox" in with the rest of the rules. I should probably submit it for inclusion in the next update.
As a webmaster, let me assure you that the percentage of the web audience who have disabled javascript (or in fact knows how to do so), is so insignificant that it's not worth talking about.
Again, it's not people who run mozilla or paid $29.99 for an IE blocker that this measure is targeting. These people hadly make up 10% of the web users... The reason ad companies are scrambling now to circumvent blockers is because the two largest toolbars now provide them, and soon so will the most popular web browser.
Ñ'
Just to add to this. AdBlock can block based on a regular expression. So I block
:)
http://*.doubleclick.net/*
Which means any javascript, ads, images, flash from doubleclick is blocked. If the 'floating transparent image' is served from doubleclick, it will not show up either
Or you can do something sophsitcated like blocking
http://www.somesite.com/ads/*
Which blocks everything under the 'ads' directory for that site but loads the rest of the site normally.
WebElements
As said before, there will always be alternatives that don't do such things. Boycott the ones who do.
HOSTS was never meant to have 1000's of listings. I can't think of anything stupider than to sequentially search a huge text file for each outgoing tcp request.
Since you're all linux nerds, and swear up and down you use nothing but linux on the desktop, why would you even fuck with such a thing?
Throw your hosts into an ldap and install (and use) libnss_ldap.so. That'd be slightly more efficient since of course, you do have nscd running, right?
Or use something like privoxy, which works well, though I don't care for proxy servers. Mozilla's pop-up blocking works well too.
Gack, leave HOSTS alone. This is the 21st century for fuck sakes. Run a dns cache/server like pdnsd or BIND and block them out there.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
blocking ads by domains through Hosts file is the dumbest thing one can do, especially when you're on Windows. It's a resource hog
It's only a hog because of the "DNS client" service on win2k and winXP. If you disable the DNS client, everything goes back to normal. The DNS client service caches DNS requests to DNS servers. Win2k and winXP work fine without it.
Well, they're not totally hateful as it seems. Not sure why they couldn't have just said this instead of the "nyah, go away opera user" they seemd to have.
a long time ago i think i was useing mozilla 1.3 alpha and i was going around lots odd forums and one led to another untill i got to a forum that had an ad that was large enoff to cover lots of the page but you could still see something like 10 words of the actual page. in smallsh print the ad said something like 'this page has found you use a pop up blocker or have disabled javascript plese disable your pop up blocker and enable javascript in order to take this ad away and to show the content below.' I think the ad was for some free computer thing that just gets your email and spams you to death
Weather Underground is your friend.
That's why there are diferent types of ads to be bought;
some are priced by impressions, so I might pay for 700K downloads of my ad image.
Some are priced by click-throughs so I might pay for a 100K clicks.
Some are paid by a commission on sales generated durring the visit after a click-through.
There is advantages to each as well as disadvantages no matter which side of the fence your on. Few people realy object to seeing well targeted, tastefull ads, almost everyone objects to tacky, intrusive shot-guns ads.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Opera's user-agent string, when emulating IE, is "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) Opera 7.01 [en]"
The user-agent string seems to be a very bad hack. IE calls itself mozilla because it was forced to do so years ago, largely to keep stupidly-designed websites from automatically rejecting its connection attempts. But it still wanted to make itself known as IE, so it appended things in brackets that most stupidly-designed web sites didn't bother looking at.
Jump ahead a few years, and we have the same thing happening with Opera. It pretends to be IE (pretending to be mozilla), but adds its own signature after the end of the brackets, where modern stupidly-designed websites don't bother to look. My guess is that most scripts just stop parsing the user agent string once they hit the last bracket. The website referred to here looks at the whole thing because it's outright malicious and wants to "punish" opera users.
Nix absolutably seriousness.
Once upon a time, PPI was the only way banners worked.
PPI is somewhat trivial to scam; have the image 50 times as a 1x1px image, tricking users to see it, etc etc etc.
Pay Per Click came next, and is still how "search engines" such as Oveture make money. But not used very much outside PPC search engines. Payments used to be noted with the search results, but I cant find any right now. "Casino" usually paid >$19.00 per click; usually was around 2-3c per click.
Most banner adds, these days, are Pay Per Lead, or Pay Per Sale. Cookies stay around for at least a couple of months, so the "proper" person is credited. half.com (part of eBay) was paying $5/per lead at one point.
Actual product providers (be it membership sites, or physcial goods) are notorious for not paying out for anything but PPL or PPS... The excuse being "bad ratios" Of course, they don't tell you what the required ratio is.
Anyone who has a PPI setup, and is honest about payments, would quickly go out of business.
If its the ad-blocking hosts file you want, its here.
That's why computer keyboards {usually} have several different kinds of brackets: round (these ones), square [like this] and curly {my personal favourite}, plus more-than and less-than signs . (The idea being that you can nest them {like [in case you really need an example] this sort of thing} to reduce the potential for confusion).
Of course, to a programmer, it's common that () delimit function parameters, [] delimit array indexes, {} delimit blocks of statements to be executed together and <> as less-than and more-than, or file indirection operators. This method of thinking can sometimes lead to people becoming afraid to experiment a little.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
While this may ignite another round of online advertising purchasing, this news doesn't affect anybody who uses a customized HOSTS file to stop the majority of ads from appearing anyway.
Since mozilla displays its connection errors in modal windows instead of showing error placeholders like IE, i can't use a modified lmhosts.
Please vote for bug 28586 to get this fixed
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Nice and neat, but it doesn't stop your browser from actually downloading the image as the hosts file would.
Actually, it can. It depends what you put on your customized stylesheet.
Some people want to get a completely ad free web experience. Others, feel guilty about it, and don't want to get rid of the ads to show their support to the site, but want to make them less annoying.
iframe[width="468"][height="60"], a img[width="468"][height="60"]
{ -moz-outline: medium dashed red; -moz-opacity: 10%; }
468x80 images and iframes are downloaded and displayed, but they are 90% translucent and are outlined by a big red dash.
iframe[width="468"][height="60"], a img[width="468"][height="60"]
{ visibility: hidden !important; }
Banners & iframes are downloaded but not displayed.
iframe[width="468"][height="60"], a img[width="468"][height="60"]
{ display: none !important; }
Banners and iframes are neither downloaded nor displayed.
This site provides a sample antibanner stylesheet, as well as instructions on how to use it with opera, mozilla and others.
!
^_^
There's another great custom hosts file at someonewhocares.org/hosts. I use it everywhere, and it's wonderful.
-S
I happen to work in a bio lab and actually like it when the sales reps come by. I need their stuff and they're constantly filling me in on their new products. The new RNAi stuff that these companies are coming up with make my life a hundred times easier. The sales reps are knowledgeable about them and don't feed me bull about what they can do, but give me the facts.
There are also tons of moral ad guys who do pro bono work for good causes. I know a marketing guy who does pro bono work for a local wild-life rehabilitation center. That's a pretty sweet deal for the non-profit conservancy.
So stop being so fucking ignorant and realize that not all marketers are out to dupe and harass people.
"I think the U.N. is going to find that the blame lies with all the Sudanese rap music that glamorizes genocide."
There's a better hosts file (well, more servers) at remember.mine.nu I use it and with Mozilla popup blocking, it's great! It's updated frequently and contains over 1800 servers. I practically never see ads anymore. And of course, like all Hosts based adblocking, it's platform independent and speeds up your connection.
http://www.popupcheck.com/ Check the unblockable pop up.
You might want to check again. At least, in the browser I'm running, setting a custom stylesheet with everything on display: none will still download all of the content - it just won't display it.
Try it out. Change everything in your custom stylesheet to
body {display: none}
You'll get a blank page, but I bet the status bar will reflect that images and the page are being downloaded.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
a customized HOSTS file
Sure. But the origin of this and the easiest way to do it is with this little gem:
ftp://radsoft.net/pub/bloatbusters/silencer.zip
radsoft.net
Bollocks. They are all different kinds of brackets, if you can get your head around such a concept. () are commonly known as round brackets {or even just brackets}, [] are commonly known as square brackets, {} are curly brackets or posh brackets, and <> -- the less-than and more-than signs -- are sometimes called angle brackets or pointy brackets. I've also heard them referred to as 'mustang signs' {no idea why, I thought a mustang was a wild pony and don't see the connection}.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!