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."

Comments

Wake me up

[Anonymous Coward]

when you can block first posts

why

[mpost4]

do adervisters really think this will increase their sales. The user
using these popup blockers have said they don't want them, to try to
defeat them is only going to make many users hate you, and your product
I would see that if it is a legit company they just might see their sales
drop from the angry net users. For those who have not disabled javascript
this just might be the nail that gets them to disable it.

Re:why

[MoonBuggy]

It works for the same reason spam works. Ads are more expensive than spam, obviously, but still not too pricey alot of the time. They're almost certainly cheap enough that one purchase per hits is enough. All it takes to get rich without making anything good is to track down those stupid enough to buy your crap - the easiest way to hit alot of morons is to saturate the web, you'll piss off millions, but still hit thousands willing to give you money.

Re:why

[MojoRilla]

Unfortunately, they might start trying to use other technologies such as flash or java for their pop-up spam.

If the people who are working on this actually cared about offending people, they wouldn't be working in marketing.

Re:why

[slash-tard]

It must help or they wouldnt keep paying for them. Kinda like spam.

Yeah we would all prefer TV without commercials but we have them and they influence some people enough to make them worth buying. Its the same with web ads.

I personally dont block any ads except pop-ups, they dont bother me that much and I understand that sites need ads the generate revenue. If I was on dial-up though I would be blocking left and right.

Re:why

[MoonBuggy]

Should've said: ...one purchase per <insane number here> hits is enough...

re: why

[ed.han]

unfortunately, people apparently are buying stuff from spam, so it stands to reason people actually do buy stuff off pop ups/pop unders. so yes, they do think it's gonna increase their sales.

however, using this targets precisely the wrong segment of online users: the people who know enough to block them in the first place. anybody wanna give odds on how long before some overzealous kid DDOSes their site?

ed

Re:why

[abb3w]

do adervisters really think this will increase their sales.

For the large, reponsible companies-- brands 80% of the population of your home state would recognize-- of course not. But for Fly-By-Night-Porn.com and other tiny web companies which would otherwise get zero business, even a minimal response rate from those getting the ad can be well worthwhile, even if the other 99.999% of the people seeing the ad swear up and down they "will NEVER do business with those #$%^ing @#$%^&*s so long as they exist". And they can always change names if the original company name gets tarnished.

Re:why

[levik]

I think that this crop of blocker circumventors is not targeted at the users who said they don't want popups, but rather at people who installed a google/yahoo toolbar in their browser, and for whom popup disappearance is a side-effect.

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.

Re:why

[Anonymous Coward]

It works for the same reason spam works.

Waitaminit.. spam works?

yeah, right (cue the 'if it didn't work people wouldn't do it' stupidity.)

OBSimpsonson quote:
"I have a rock that keeps tigers away"
"Really? How does it work?"
"It DOESN'T - it's just a rock! But, you don't see any tigers around, do you?
"I would like to buy your rock!"
"*sigh*"

Re:why

[levik]

... For those who have not disabled javascript this just might be the nail that gets them to disable it.

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.

Re:why

[alphaseven]

All it takes to get rich without making anything good is to track down those stupid enough to buy your crap - the easiest way to hit alot of morons is to saturate the web, you'll piss off millions, but still hit thousands willing to give you money.

Actually a lot of spammers are middlemen, they make money wether a product sells or not, they work as advertisers and get paid by the people selling the product. What they rely on is the percecption that "spam works", so people will hire them to do spam campaigns.

Spammers make profits without making a sale

Re:why

[Excen]

Which is precisely why we need to chlorinate the gene pool as quickly as possible.

Re:why

[Bodhidharma]

That explains it. The spams I've been getting lately are less and less legible. They can't possibly think they are doing marketing anymore. As far as I'm concerned, it's no better than harassment or vandalism.

Re:why

[s20451]

it kind of just happens to some of the weaker willed and morally challenged

marketing is a career that one chooses once one has graduated college and realizes one has no other skills companies want

I dislike these arguments of moral superiority, which lend greater importance to these issues than they truly warrant. You are being annoyed by pop-up ads, not seriously harmed. You are free to avoid any site that uses them.

I don't think it follows that needing a salary so that one can feed one's family is equivalent to being morally challenged. I'm not sure if you have children or not. But if you did, would it be moral of you to turn down a marketing job in a tough economy?

Re:why

[Le Marteau]

Marketing is an industry where the idea is to insinuate onesself where one is not wanted. An honest and upright man will not go where he is not wanted - marketers make a living at it.

There ARE immoral jobs. Marketing is one of them, albeit this side of manufacturing nerve gasses, but it is still not an occupation a good man should aspire to. Of course, if one has to feed his kids, etc, etc, but that is just goes to the old adage 'it is permissable to commite a lesser crime to prevent a greater crime'.

Re:why

[Anonym1ty]

I don't think it follows that needing a salary so that one can feed one's family is equivalent to being morally challenged. I'm not sure if you have children or not. But if you did, would it be moral of you to turn down a marketing job in a tough economy?

If you had morals, you would realize that the ends do not justify the means. Just because your children are hungry does not automatically give you carte blanch to set your moral aside. In fact doing so only proves you never had any morals to put aside.

Character means you find a way to feed your children without being immoral or unethical. Saying there is a tough economy and you had no choice just shows the quality of your character.

What a man does with his life is not nearly as important as how he does it.

Re:why

[LiquidCoooled]

Because they saw an advert in a popup window....

Re:why

[wobblie]

Probably because many admins are installing ad busting proxies in workplaces (it can conserve quite a lot of bandwidth and is a nice courtesy to the users).

So one ad busting proxy can protect thousands of people from ads all day ... who may otherwise click on them.

Re:why

[T-Ranger]

While true, the days of Pay Per Impression are long gone.

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.

Re:why

[tomstdenis]

W.h.y. d.0.!!!y.0.u....T.H.1.n.k..t.h.3.y. @.r.e. t.r.y.i.n.g. t0 g3t t.h.r.o.u.g.h. y.0.u.r. s.p.4.m. f.1.1.t.3.r.z.???? ;-)

Re:why

[ajs318]

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.

Re:why

[mausmalone]

I still have a hard time believing that this kind of extreme ad saturation actually boosts sales in any way at all. (Except for maybe the x cam, which was wholly unknown until the popunder scheme) I come to loathe advertisements that are intrusive, and to loathe the products they represent. I also don't understand why 5 ads every 2 minutes on TV is a lot... but 1 ad every page load is considered tiny on the web. I'll make this clear so that everybody understands:

There is no reason to have an ad on a page meant solely for navigation. It's like pasting ads on somebody's remote control as they watch TV.

Re:why

[DunbarTheInept]

You don't know which sites have popups until you visit them. So it is false to say that you are free to avoid any site that uses them (unless you meant avoiding all web sites altogether).

I'm a fan of directed advertising. I don't mind sites knowing my purchasing tastes if that means I don't get ads for pointless stuff I'd never buy. Ads for things I actually might like are much less annoying than wasting my time with ads that flood the market looking for those few people here and there that might be interested, of which I'm not one of them.

I think directed advertising would make consumers less annoyed (assuming it's based on accurate information and assuming you have the ability to ban categories you are not interested in), and make advertisers happier too because they know people might actually LOOK at their ad instead of immedieatly going, "oh, and ad - i'll click the 'X' button in the corner before I even look at it.

Re:why

[s20451]

You missed the point. I was using an extreme example to convey the idea that marketing is not necessarily immoral. I agree that certain kinds of marketing are immoral, such as high-pressure sales tactics with questionable returns. However, there are immoral possibilities associated with any job.

I simply don't believe that causing minor annoyances should be declared immoral. Immorality is a weighty word that should not be overused.

Re:why

[edrain]

To be fair (and this is the definition of devil's advocacy) not all marketing is intrusive. The posters you see when you walk into a movie theater are marketing devices placed there by the marketing departments of the relevant studios, and (MPAA gripes aside) I can't imagine a moral objection to that type of marketing. Again, I think intrusive vs. non-intrusive is the key.

Re:why

[s20451]

Actually, I agree. It is arguably immoral to continue to pester someone once you have been implicitly asked to stop (by disabling popups). The point of the thread was that the entire profession of marketing is immoral, which is an overly broad position that I can't accept.

Re:why

[Ironica]

There is no reason to have an ad on a page meant solely for navigation. It's like pasting ads on somebody's remote control as they watch TV.

Oh, dude, that is an AWESOME idea! There's this whole space at the bottom of most remotes, where the heel of your hand usually goes, that is just blank except for the company logo. Put a little LCD screen down there, beam ads straight to it, and we'll make a fortune!

Seriously, there is nowhere they won't put ads these days. The bathroom, your credit card statement, the bucket your popcorn comes in at the movie... any space that people see has a price. Now DON'T GIVE THEM ANY NEW IDEAS.

Re:why

[Ironica]

Marketing is an industry where the idea is to insinuate onesself where one is not wanted. An honest and upright man will not go where he is not wanted - marketers make a living at it.

Marketing is an industry built to make you want things you didn't previously want. There are two types of things you don't want: things you know about and don't want, and things you don't know about yet but might or might not want. Marketing both brings products you did not know about to your attention and tries to convince you that you want them.

It can be done well or poorly. Probably 30-40% of the calls we get on our home phone are telemarketing of one kind or another (though we get substantially fewer since we opted out of long-distance service all together, so we don't have AT&T calling to try to sell us their local service and SBC calling to try to sell us their long-distance service in alternate weeks). There are telemarketers who call knowing that they're trying to sell you something and that you might already know you don't want it, and there are those who just don't know the difference. Lately, I've had pretty good success at ending calls quickly and painlessly by making it clear that I know about the product and don't want it. i.e. "Hi, my name is [name] and I'm calling from the Los Angeles Times--" "Hi. We don't want the paper. Not even just on Sundays. We get all our news from the internet. Save a tree." "Ok, thank you, have a good day."

If there were no marketing, you probably wouldn't own half the stuff you do. Marketing departments send demos of new products to places that publish the reviews you may read when deciding what to buy. They place ads in the Yellow Pages. There are a lot of methods of marketing that don't fall into the narrow definition you gave above... in fact, *most* marketing is non-intrusive; you just haven't noticed it. (By design.)

Now, I have wondered what the effect on our economy would be if there were no more advertising. Television would all be public or by subscription. All entertainment would be more expensive. On the other hand, many products would cost a lot less, because they currently have such huge advertising budgets. I truly wonder if a significant proportion of the wealth in our economy is *created* by the existence of advertising, and I speculate that some of our economic growth is dependent on innovations in advertising (hey, we can sell ads in public restrooms!)

But marketing is not inherently an unethical business. It's easy to do it that way, of course. But the same is true of freelance computer support, health care, legal assistance... almost any service.

Re:why

[marauder404]

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.

eBay is still paying $5/lead ... and that's the bottom of the scale. According to affiliates.ebay.com, they pay up to $16 per active registration. Obviously, there are a lot of people that do this professionally if one affiliate earned $1.3M in one month. You didn't think that all those eBay's ads were all over the Internet because they bought them all, did you?

Re:why

[Ironica]

...you say that like it's a bad thing.

Point well taken. I tend to think that American society (and most of Western society, but we're the worst) is way too caught up in consumerism. It's damaging on many levels.

But anyone who does own plenty of stuff and claims to disdain all marketing is blind to the effects marketing has on them... which is, IMO, even worse.

I can watch a commercial, and at the end, know whether the commercial had a positive, negative, or neutral effect on me. I'm aware of whether or not I am the target market, whether I consume products like the one being advertised, and whether I am more likely to buy them afterward. I'm also aware of *why* a particular commercial worked or didn't work... I can identify whether it taught me something I didn't know about the product, or if I identified with/despised the characters used in the commercial, or if it just made me feel good/bad about the company. (The worst commercials are the ones where, a few seconds later, I can't remember what they were advertising at all.)

I also know that pretty much all of the information I get about products comes in one way or another from either personal experience or a marketing department. Sometimes both, when someone gives out free samples.

People who aren't aware of the marketing they're not supposed to notice are, I think, far more susceptible to it.

Re:why

[NetGyver]

Ah, but see, you "know" about the X-10 Cams. The more annoying the ad the better it is for the person selling the advertised goods. X-10 did a hell of a job getting their name out. Bad publicity is still publicity, and for small outfits selling on the net, vendors would pay a primium to get that kind of brand recognition.

if 1,000 people didn't know about your company and the product your selling, then those 1000 people WILL NOT EVER buy anything from you. Now if 1000 people see your annoying ads, you got 1000 people who know who you are and what you're selling. The chances of getting a sales boost vastly increases once people know that you exist and have something to offer.

Not everyone is as loathing of advertisements. They CAN be a good thing when done right. If we didn't have advertisements how would we hear about new products coming out? How would we know if a product existed if there was no press releases (a form of advertising) or TV/radio/net commercials?

Now don't get me wrong, I hate ads just as badly as most /.'s. All the tools that are available to remove ads and popups *IS* a good thing. There's way too much "noise" on the net as it is. There are a lot of advertisers who are abusing the medium to the point where getting online means gawking at irrelevant ads instead of actually doing something useful.

Right now advertisers have a hell of a stronghold on bogging people's systems down with spyware and ads. However, people *are* getting wise to this and are taking measures to keep things down to a dull roar. Once one side has the power, the other side steals it back for a while...human nature i guess.

It's all about balance. I know it's there, I see it when i swing past.

Re:why

[ajs318]

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}.

These guys missed the boat.

[Liselle]

One of the many things we learned about the advertising idiocy during the dotcom boom was that you can't just spew your message everywhere. Random, untargetted advertising is what gave us Spank the Monkey and Win $20 (someone feel free to bring up the Microsoft ad I'm looking at now, not touching that one with a 10-foot stick).

These people are trying to serve ads to people actively trying to block them. Oh yeah, that's brilliant.

Re:These guys missed the boat.

[ffsnjb]

I clicked a TreeLoot banner ad once ( I was bored with nothing to do). Because of that one click, I've had a free subscription to Playboy since 1999, I think it expires in 2006. Now that was some good advertising money well spent by someone... They gave away a product, and had to pay to give it away! hehe.

Will I pay to renew in a couple years? Hell no. Will I click another banner ad to do so for free? Oh yeah.

Re:These guys missed the boat.

[ajs318]

It's fastclick which from what I've heard is one of the hardest to get into, and in my experience they do pay very well for the industry and are great to work with.

And they are also on my Squid Proxy Server's banned list -- along with doubleclick, tribalfusion and falkag. I'm not going to buy the product, so I'm f**ked if I'm going to waste bandwidth letting the advert get onto my screen.

Re:These guys missed the boat.

[wkitchen]

Ah the dot com boom days. Seems like every business plan involved giving stuff away. In 1999 my wife visited a web site that was giving away address labels in the hopes that people would like them enough to buy more in the future. She filled out the online form, and in a few days a shiny new roll of address labels appeared in the mail box exactly as promised.

And fine address labels they are. Their mistake was sending such a large roll. It's now 2004 and we're still using those same labels.

Re:These guys missed the boat.

[lewko]

It's now 2004 and we're still using those same labels.

And they're still selling your same address...

Is this really a problem?

[thebra]

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.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[r00t_ur_b0x]

Not to mention this one. Pretty cheap, too.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[Carnildo]

I've been using the Proxomitron to block popup and javascript ads for 3+ years now, without updating the filters, and the only effect I've seen from the anti-ad-blocker techniques is fewer ads are showing up -- the javascript techniques now used to display regular banner ads are running right into the Proxomitron's anti-javascript filters. I wonder how many fewer ads I'll see as a result of this latest round of techniques.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[DrEldarion]

Yes! The Proxomitron is a wonderful piece of software, is free, and the most configurable (and therefore most flexible) pop-up blocker that exists.

The best part is that it's not only useful for pop-up blocking. It can kill any annoyance on webpages from background MIDIs to animated GIFs. It can ADD things to pages as well - I have it configured to add a sliding sidebar to any page on the forums I visit with links to each individual subforum.

It truly is a wonderful piece of software.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[Sylver Dragon]

Try installing AdBlock for Mozilla. Its a great way to get rid of the rest of the advertising crap on the web. Granted, there are those that question the morallity of doing so, but then we each have to make those decisions on our own.

This is too easy

[davmoo]

I have an easy way to defeat their technology.

Every time I see a pop-up that defeats my pop-up blocking, first I'll for damned sure never buy that product. In addition, I will never go to the hosting website again. And I'll make damned sure they know why.

There is no topic on the internet that can be served by only one site.

Re:This is too easy

[1000101]

This is certainly what one would hope people would do. Unfortunately, you are in the very small minority. The vast majority of internet users will simply close the ad or just click on the next link. Your idea has merit, but most people won't take the time to email the host and complain.

Re:This is too easy

[DustMagnet]

Every time I see a pop-up that defeats my pop-up blocking, first I'll for damned sure never buy that product. In addition, I will never go to the hosting website again. And I'll make damned sure they know why.

I've done that, but more often I reconfigure my blocker. I use Proxomitron to block both ads and pop-ups. It uses regular expressions, so it only takes me a few minutes to come up with a new rule for the website. I don't mind simple ads, but animations drive me nuts.

Some websites don't work with Proxomitron, if they are ad free, I use the bypass feature. If they have ads, I follow your system.

The next wave...

[Anonymous Coward]

The next wave will be full fledged interrupt ads on most major sites. Already a couple high-profile companies are using them and more are sure to follow.

Advertising is and will kill the Internet. Out of the ashes will be born something new and better.

I just wish they'd hurry up and get done fucking everyone in the ass so we can start over fresh.

Fresh as a summers day.

Re:The next wave...

[Alyred]

Yeah, I'm waiting for one that reprograms the BIOS EEPROM with a flashing program to display thier adds when you boot up, in the logo space that most BIOS chips have now.

My only question is, will they bother to tell you before they reboot your machine so you see it? They already act as if they have a RIGHT to do whatever they want to your machine anyway...

ho-hum

[illusion_2K]

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.

Re:ho-hum

[Anonymous Coward]

They're likely talking about layers.. which is something that Adblock already deals with.

For a moment I thought you were linking to some great new software that stopped lawyers ... now THAT'd be a great new product!

Re:ho-hum

[c_ollier]

Try this working link.

Re:ho-hum

[Walkiry]

You mean like this?

Just like the old saying

[Anonymous Coward]

When you outlaw popup blocking blockers only outlaw popup blocking blockers will block popup blocking blockers.

Here's an example...

[slifox]

http://environmentalchemistry.com/yogi/periodic/

Here's an example of this style of anti-popup-blocker advertisement. This site, which is very useful by the way, will not "work" if javascript is not enable or ads are not shown.

I haven't tested this in other browsers, but this system is pretty neat (awful?)... it changes itself so its hard to detect the functions and block them.

Re:Here's an example...

[gmuslera]

Nice opening message...

Opera 7.5 Detected

You have been brought to this page because you are using Opera 7.5. Unregistered Opera 7.5 typically makes use of Google AdSense ads that are targeted based on the content of the webpage, this is an unauthorized use of our copyrighted material.

Im not sure about how useful is their content, but very sure about how hateful are their policy.

Re:Here's an example...

[TheRealFixer]

I use The Proxomitron, and I get no popups on that site, and it doesn't redirect me to some anti-ad-blocker-complaining page, either. Strangely, though, it doesn't block the banner ads on the site, which Proxomitron is usually great about.

I absolutely love The Proxomitron. I have an Excite portal page, that started redirecting me towards a whine/moan screen because I was blocking certain JavaScripts. Easily solved: found the redirect tag in the source of the portal page, and added a rule in Proxomitron to replace it with HTML comments. Poof! No more annoying anti-popup-blocker redirect! Any time I come across a new ad method, I just have to track it down and add a new rule to remove it.

Re:Here's an example...

[Sgt York]

I thought so, too, but I just gave it a shot, spoofing as MSIE 6.0, and I got the same message.

Re:Here's an example...

[Thng]

From the page source:

// // To get past the following Opera blocking script, simply go to full screen mode [F11].
// Our goal is to stop Opera's Google rads, not Opera users.
// See: http://klbproductions.com/issues/opera.html
//

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.

Re:Here's an example...

[Insanity]

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.

Re:Here's an example...

[Dachannien]

I got the "banners blocked" message too. So I shift-clicked Reload about thirty times and then left the site.

because

[s20451]

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%.

Re:because

[gl4ss]

I don't know about your local situation, but around here telemarketing almost solely lives from the fact that they don't really end up paying hourly rate to the callers, instead they pay a provision from the sales they make. this provision system is usually built so that you need to make a certain minumum amount of sales before you start any money from the company to yourself.

the thing is designed to get people started, work for few weeks, a month at the most and some very rare sellers staying for longer than that(some people just have a good voice), and then to quit. so the usual caller is _supposed_(in their business plan) to make few sales and then to quit.

so in reality basically telemarketing isn't really profitable(for most of the persons involved in it), it's just driven through something that is in effect a scam to lure young, inexperienced, desperate stupid people to make phonecalls to people for few weeks without pay. Mainly because of this in my opinion telemarketing as such should be totally banned or at the minimum have a law that would state that you can't hire people to do it on provisional pay.

Re:because

[badasscat]

If even a tiny fraction of people respond, it won't matter that you annoyed the hell out of the other 99%.

But it should matter to the owner of the medium, because after all, ads can't exist without a medium to run on. Pissing off 99% of their users is not generally desirable for most web site owners, so I am not sure if this is going to fly. At the same time as pop-up blockers have become popular, site owners have realized they're actually hurting their own business by hosting them. No, not every site, and pop-ups do still exist (though as a Firefox user you can forgive me if I don't know this from experience), but there have been plenty of high-profile companies that have sworn them off recently. Even AOL's cutting back.

I think that's what's getting lost in all this. Advertisers are still at the mercy of the site owners, not the other way around (despite the bad economy... it only makes things worse to piss off your users). I doubt you'll ever see this technology used on a major commercial site; it'll probably be relegated to the internet red light district where most pop-ups seem to be served up these days to begin with.

Re:because

[Anonymous Coward]

I usually don't stop to ponder the morality of telemarketing. I start out talking nicely and work myself into a truly obscene screaming rage. I find this very effective in getting the telemarketers to stay with me through the first few mild-mannered bursts of profanity so I can get in a few good ones before they quite realize I've turned on them. Then they disconnect with the truly awful abuse ringing in their ears.

That's their job, right? To allow me to really vent some steam at an actual person?

I wish I could figure out how to do this to the popup and popunder scum.

Re:because

[Reziac]

This is very true. I once went to a "job offer presentation" that proved to be a telemarketer. And I happened to sit where I could see the head honcho's desk, which happened to have the previous week's phone-monkey pay records lying open ... and I read quite well upsidedown, thank you..

ONE person made the promised "$700 a week".
ONE person made about $100 for the week.
All the rest (about 30) made $40 for the week.

Mind you, that was a 40 hour week.

I vaguely recall that some states require that commission work also pay a certain minimum hourly wage (at least until your commission hits a certain point), but it may not apply to telemarketing. Anyone know?

Re:because

[cornjones]

not the original poster but i did this once. I was paid pretty well for a college job. i think it was around 10 bux an hour. I don't recall any success minumums but we had to basically stay on teh phone all day.

On a side note, that is the only job i have ever left hanging. One saturday I woke up and realized I just couldn't be that guy any longer. So I just turned over and went to sleep. They treated us like children so I had no feeling of responisiblity to them as I did to other jobs i have had.

we were calling for donations to a hospital. our script had us start out asking for 2 grand and work our way down. my two favorite calls:
1. one lady told me that if I paid for her divorce, she would donate the 2k
2. One guy said he wasn't interested. I asked why? Poor service (this was a hospital remember). Not for him but for his wife. Oh really, I say, what happened? Well, she died. I could understand him not really being interested in giving the hospital that killed his wife a donation so I quickly got off the phone. Apparently the bosses were listening in on that one and told me not to let them off so easily but to continue to press harder. In fact, I think that was the last shift I completed.

DMCA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sue them under the DMCA claiming that they are bypassing a security feature that you installed to block ads?

When will they figure it out?

[RobertB-DC]

I've seen this already. Sliding windows across the text, with a "close" button that's the only thing I will ever click. When will these advertising bozos figure out that if I'm going to all that trouble to block their ads, then I'm not in their target market anyway?

Even the spammers are smart enough to figure that one out. I've received about a spam a month since I changed my domain registration email address from "domains@" to "domspam@". Before I changed over, I was receiving one or two dozen a day, even though most bounced when the account's purposely low quota filled up.

I guess popup blockers have become too easy to use. Now that my mother-in-law, queen of "click anything", can install it, the spamvertizers have to find another way to infiltrate her system.

I'm looking forward to a future release of Opera with "pop-in blocking" built in.

Handy ad fighting URLs

[xTK-421x]

Free Popup Blocker:
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/flash7 /uninstall_flash_player.exe (Uninstaller)
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ (for Mozilla)

Re:Handy ad fighting URLs

[gusnz]

Here's another great but little known technique: the PAC file ad-blocker. Cross-browser, easy to install, and much more lightweight than a HOSTS file, plus it can match paths on servers like "/ads*/" rather than just server domains themselves.

Enjoy :).

My suggestion:

[Anonymous Coward]

If you encounter one of these ads, send feedback to the people who run the site. Play dumb and pretend your web browser choked on them. Say that you tried to look at their site, but this huge ad appeared covering the text and you couldn't read anything or make the ad go away, and tell them that you gave up and left and won't be coming back in future if they can't make their web site work.

There are several ways to avoid ads

[sisukapalli1]

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

Re:HOSTS link?

[Anonymous Coward]

look here- http://www.everythingisnt.com/hosts.html

notepad

[Professor Cool Linux]

Of course you could do the less rich, IE only (what isn't?) Notepad Pop-Up

The amorality of direct marketing

[FunWithHeadlines]

Is there any other industry that tries to force itself upon a public that is explicity making it clear it wants no part of it? This is not a case of putting an ad in front of an audience composed of people who may or may not look favorably upon that ad, and who may or may not want the product. Instead they are trying to put an ad in front of the eyes of someone who has said, "I don't want to see this ad, I hate this form of advertising, and I look down on any company that employs this form of advertising, and I refuse to use their products."

Yet they do it anyway! Remarkably obtuse people. Of course, I know the reason for it. It's all about eyeballs and the more they can prove they are shoving their stuff in front of more eyeballs, the more money they get. That's why this is so amoral: They don't care how anyone reacts, or that that are despised, or that it causes business problems for the advertisers. They just want mo' money, and that's the end of their thought process.

Buh bye, new technology. It won't work. I will defeat it. I will refuse to view ads on the Web. Don't yammer at me with the tired old whine, "But how else are I gonna pay for my web siiiiiiite?" I dunno, Sparky, figure something else out. I will never allow advertising on my web site. It doesn't belong on the Web.

The Web is about people to people communiciation. Just because a bunch of greedheads decided to use it to make money doesn't subvert the purpose of the Web. As for the endless war against pop-ups: They lose. Every time.

transparent vs. translucent

[HTH NE1]

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.

I buy stuff from spam all the time...

[mrscott]

And, let me tell YOU... I'm hung like a horse and always ready to go.

Re:HOSTS link?

[maj1k]

i dunno, maybe that link on the side of the page that says:

Banner Ad Blocking

Dilbert website

[Neil Blender]

To all who visit the dilbert website regularly, has anyone seen that floating ad that blocks the last panel of the strip? I have seen it about 5 times and I read the site daily. I use NS7.2 and have not seen a popup ad anywhere since I started using it. I assume this ad is some sort of CSS. This type of advertising is not pop up, but it is certainly annoying. What's to stop other websites from doing something similar? It might require more than pasting some banner code in your page, but still...

Re:Dilbert website

[ChristTrekker]

I read Dilbert online about once a week (catch up a week at a time) and have never had a problem like that. Using Opera 7.23.

Re:HOSTS link?

[crimethinker]

The site has a very large hosts file that resolves many ad-serving hosts to 127.0.0.1, i.e. your local host. My browser displays a nice red X instead of a banner ad, and it just makes surfing the web so much easier. The list is updated regularly.

I'm not the maintainer, just a satisfied "customer."

-paul

Not awful...They have the right idea.

[JeanPaulBob]

This site, which is very useful by the way, will not "work" if javascript is not enable or ads are not shown.

Sounds to me like they're taking a good approach. They're not attempting to circumvent anyone's ad-blocking software--anyone who doesn't want to see their ads, doesn't have to.

But they're providing a valuable service, and they deserve to be compensated. If you don't want to pay for it by letting them display their banner ads, then you don't get to use their site.

Re:HOSTS link?

[cioxx]

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 and doesn't accomplish half of what can be done with Privoxy or Proxomitron.

Don't touch the Hosts file.

Do you watch television?

[3770]

Are you influenced by commercials on the TV? Of course you are.

If you could choose, would you choose to have the commercials disabled? Of course you would.

With this reasoning advertisers can safely assume that even annoying ads pay off.

Re:Do you watch television?

[Romeozulu]

disgusting than any pornography

I feel sorry for you...

Re:Do you watch television?

[ckaminski]

Once upon a time, I was stuck on a plane ride from Georgia, I think. Atlanta. Anywho, I sat next to this marketing guy for a good three hours, and in between the mindnumbing explanation how our seat cushions would double as a floatie in the event of a water crash^Wlanding and our arrival over stinky Boston Harbor, he made the insightful comment that if an ad is bad enough that you remember it, then the ad has paid itself off, because mindshare, good or bad, is good. At least now, the product is known to you, whereas before, it might not have been.

Ergo, the 7up commercials.

Re:Do you watch television?

[Snaller]

Are you influenced by commercials on the TV? Of course you are.

Of course i am - i make sure never to buy anything for which i can remember a commercial.

Proud of being a plague to humanity?

[Kiyooka]

"Over the years, various companies have claimed to have a way to sidestep their online ads from being blocked," InterMute CEO Ed English said in a statement. "History has shown [that our] AdSubtract has no problem keeping up with ever-changing online ad technologies."

He sounds quite pleased with what his company's doing, but in reality they're not "keeping up with technology" -- they're finding ever-sneakier ways to push ads into people's faces despite their explicit objection, and despite the fact that they take extra steps to be rid of them.

It's like he eats shit for a living and sports a shit-eating grin.

You bunch of whiners

[Nuclear Elephant]

Sit there and complain about it, but the reason you're able to do things like read news for free online, perform fast google searches, and even use some software without paying for it is because companies pay for these services with advertisements. Remove the advertisements and you can kiss all of this goodbye. I'm not saying we should support the more obnoxious approaches to advertising, but our demand for "free software" and "free services" requires that the people running them find a way to make a living. Obviously I'm not a supporter of spam, I'm talking about something entirely different here. We live in a material world and I am a material girl...or boy.

Re:You bunch of whiners

[akiaki007]

I agree with you, but there is a difference between the ads that are out there. I use the AdBlock extension with FireFox. It works great, and I have completely forgotten about ads on the internet. I can still perform fast Google searches and I have no interest in blocking their ads. Why? Because all of the ads that I have blocked are images; colourful, moving, flashy images. I have no problem with simple soft-colour text ads, a la Google, but I hate ads that are like the X11 camera ads.

When Advertisments start to deter a user from surfing the web, you know it's gone too far. yes, sometimes the ads are nice and you're actually looking for them, but generally, they're obnoxiours and rude. Salon, I think, has a good idea on how to handle things. I don't have time to really read much news online, so I don't subscrube to them. I do however go through their 1-ad view for a free-day-pass when there is 1 article that someone has sent me.

I will bitch and bitch and then bitch some more when I am bombarded with ads. I hate them when I pay 11$ to see a movie and I'm forced to see commercials, and I hate them when I pay money to go to a website (hey, access to the internet does cost money and image ads are a b/w hog).

Re:You bunch of whiners

[nathanh]

Sit there and complain about it, but the reason you're able to do things like read news for free online, perform fast google searches, and even use some software without paying for it is because companies pay for these services with advertisements. Remove the advertisements and you can kiss all of this goodbye. I'm not saying we should support the more obnoxious approaches to advertising, but our demand for "free software" and "free services" requires that the people running them find a way to make a living. Obviously I'm not a supporter of spam, I'm talking about something entirely different here. We live in a material world and I am a material girl...or boy.

I pay for my Internet connection. It's not free. The idea of paying for a service is not a problem here. And the "free" in "free software" refers to various freedoms, not the price. I've paid several $1000s over the years for "free" software.

But the popup advertising model is based on a "here, the content is free, now how do I make money?" mentality. It's stupid because they're starting on the backfoot. I've already got the content. They're crossing their fingers that I also click on the ad and generate some revenue. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.

There are plenty of other solutions. Sites could work out a partnership with ISPs; if you provide content, you get paid by the ISP, funded by content "consumers" like myself. Or you could go like Salon; subscription model, or watch an ad in advance. I don't find either of Salon's solutions offensive (strangely enough).

You believe that the reason we're able to do things like "read news for free online" is because of advertising, and if we block all the advertising then the news goes away. Fine. I don't care. The web was much better back when it wasn't infested with spam, porn ads, and popup crap. I personally believe that companies will find other revenue, most likely pay-for-view or subscription models, and the content will not go away. But hey, we'll never know until we block all the ads and effect a change.

Company's web site

[Kelz]

They are always talking about solutions, but aren't they the problem?

You're missing the point

[Kjella]

These people are trying to serve ads to people actively trying to block them. Oh yeah, that's brilliant.

...there's a whole lot of people setting up blockers (or have blockers put up for them, which won't be able to dodge these new ones) because they are the kind that get easily tempted. When they're calm and collected, they want to block ads. But if they see an ad, they simply MUST have it. It's amazing how many people you can catch that way.

Kjella

Re:HOSTS link?

[MobyTurbo]

Color me ignorant, but what exactly does everythingisnt.com have to do with customized HOSTS files?

The (small lettered) link is on the left part of the page.

What surprised me is that Slashdot, on it's front page, advertized a host file that specifically blocks the ads on slashdot. (ads.osdn.com, etc.)

Hah, I use Links

[HermanZA]

It must be pretty damn hard to get pop adverts into a text browser...

AdBlock

[johncheng]

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.

Re:Here's an example...(Alternatives)

[ItMustBeEsoteric]

WebElements

As said before, there will always be alternatives that don't do such things. Boycott the ones who do.

Real solution

[Ra5pu7in]

The real solution goes beyond ad blocking software. It lies in a willingness to completely boycott any site willing to allow advertising of this style. When enough of your readership complains and walks away, and your hits drop astronomically, you definitely re-evaluate your policy (especially since your advertisers do too).

I say let those sites that want to cater to sheep serve up as much as they want and get paid by advertisers to ignore the desires of their readers. I will get my data from sites that listen to their readers over their advertisers. (Reminds me of www.techreport.com which once had an advertiser whose animated image seriously sucked system resources. Readers posted complaints and the advertiser was asked to revise the image. Win/Win because the readers got a simple unobtrusive ad, the site got the advertising cash flow, and the advertiser adjusted to something that actually appealed to those readers who might be interested).

Customized HOSTS file? C'mon

[stratjakt]

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.

Re:HOSTS link?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:HOSTS link?

[Greedo]

Rather than messing with hosts, use a custom style sheet. I know Safari on OS X supports this. I'm guess most modern browsers do as well (maybe not MSIE).

Here's mine.

/*
* hides many ads by preventing display of images that are inside
* links when the link HREF contans certain substrings.
*/

A:link[HREF*="//ad."] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="//ads."] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="/ad"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="/A="] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="/click"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="?click"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="?banner"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="=click"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="/ar.atwo"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="spinbox."] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="transfer.go"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="adfarm"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="bluestreak"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="doubleclick"] IMG { display: none ! important }

/*
* disable ad iframes
*/

IFRAME[SRC*="ad."] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="ads."] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="/ad"] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="/A="] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="/click"] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="?click"] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="?banner"] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="=click"] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="/ar.atwo"] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="spinbox."] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="transfer.go"] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="adfarm"] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="bluestreak"] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="doubleclick"] { display: none ! important }

xIMG[usemap] { display: none ! important }

IMG[SRC*="bluestreak"] { display: none ! important }

/* turning some false positives back off */

A:link[HREF*="download."] IMG { display: inline ! important }
A:link[HREF*="click.mp3"] IMG { display: inline ! important }

/*
* For more examples see http://www.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html
*/

DMCA violation?

[dustwun]

I wonder when one of the pop-up blocker companies are going to start filing suit under the DMCA for circumvention of their blocker. It would be nice to see a REAL use of the DMCA for once instead of a big business scare tactic.

ive seen this before

[soimless]

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

Re:posted this on fark already but...

[Fo0eY]

they're actually exit popups that are launched by that blank popup, so if you close that one before you close the main window they don't launch

mozilla won't let you open windows off screen so you can't hide that one like you can in IE

...oh well, our "target market" are IE users anyways ;)

Re:HOSTS link?

[metlin]

The thing is that a lot of people on Slashdot *like* the ads that come on, or are willing to be subscribers.

I contemplated blocking the ads initially, but after a while I noticed that the ads were of interest to me and I actually went and got stuff through the click-throughs.

And now, am a subscriber - but even so, I have a minimal amount of ads disabled simply because I like the ads, and they are useful to me.

The folks at Slashdot know this too, and the way they see it is that if they provided good, relevant and useful ads, customers will not mind. And besides, hell I like this place ;-)

Do not worry

[Orion Blastar]

if you block their pop-up ads, their spyware/adware will surely get you later. No need to install their malware, it gets installed automatically.

JS IRNOR.M anyone? Really nasty malware I found on my system that NAV and others could not detect. It uses HTML and Javascript to install itself from a web page. Lookt2me was another one, the latest version could not be removed, it did pop-ups and destroyed my TCP/IP stack after I removed it. Forcing a reinstall of the OS.

You really want to get rid of pop-ups forever? Reformat the hard drive, install Linux and Mozilla/Firefox and avoid sites that require IE or Windows in order to work.

Interesting, technique, but not foolproof.

[Ayanami Rei]

It uses javascript to check the ads to make sure the size of the image is not too small (as replacement images often are) and the display properties are maintained (not set hidden with CSS).

It can't actually detect if an ad was replaced by a blank image by a proxy server, but it'll know if the ad is the wrong size.

Solution? More sophisticated ad blockers should attempt to match image size to a URL pattern by fetching it a few times and seeing what it gets back. Then it should autogenerate the replacement content with that size.

click throughs

[budgenator]

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.

Banner Blocking Manifesto

[Lord_Dweomer]

This is the banner blocking message I get when I use Opera. Interesting to note is the link to an Ask Slashdot article at the very bottom.

"Banner Blocking Detected You have been brought to this page because it was detected that your web browser, software on your computer or some other event is preventing some or all of our banner ads from being displayed on our pages correctly. If you are not using a utility to block banners, you may have been inadvertently brought here because a banner image did not load correctly. Please make sure you have enabled images and disable any ad blocking software then try again.

If you sincerely want a banner free experience on our site and are willing to help support our efforts directly, we do offer a paid subscription option. This option is especially useful for educators who would like to use our site in their classroom without the distractions banner ads create.

Banner Blocking Manifesto
We understand that you may find banner advertising annoying. This website, however, is not sponsored or produced by some faceless rich corporation or public entity. This site is the product of the hard labor of one individual and his family. Producing and delivering the content on this site is expensive. If we are to continue to make the resources on this website available to individuals like yourself free of charge, we must be allowed to use banner advertising as a means of paying the costs of maintaining this website.

The relationship between the web content provider (in this case us) and the content consumer (you) must be a symbiotic relationship. If small web publishers like us are to continue to be able to provide access to useful information free of charge, we must get something in return. In this case it is the ability to display and earn revenue off of banner advertising.

Kenneth Barbalace
Creator of EnvironmentalChemistry.com

How to Disable Ad Blocking Software

There are scores programs and services on the market that offer banner ad blocking abilities. As such we will only focus on a few of the most common programs.

Symantec Norton Internet Security: If you are using Symantec's "Norton Internet Security" software, banner blocking may have been turned on without your knowledge. You can turn off ad blocking in Symantec NIS by opening Norton Internet Security. In the main window, double-click Ad Blocking and then uncheck "Ad Blocking".

ZoneAlarm Pro firewall: If you are using the firewall ZoneAlarm pro, you can turn off ad blocking under the tab "Privacy" and then slide the "Ad Blocking" control to the off position.

AdSubtract: If you ar using AdSubtract, right mouse click on the AdSubtract icon in your task tray (looks like an orange circle with a plus and minus sign) and select "Disable AdSubtract".

WebWasher: If you are using WebWasher, right mouse click on the WebWasher icon in your task tray (looks like a blue circle with a white "W" and then select "Deactivate standard filter".

Related Resources TechTV - Rage Against the Ad-Blocking Machines
"Ask SlashDot" article
Steal this Site"

Salon

[tgibbs]

I like Salon's approach. If you are not a member, you can get a day's membership by choosing to watch a brief commercial. A site could easily deal with pop-up blockers by presenting a screen inviting the user to request to see the ads. That would make it a requested screen, and the blocker would not trigger. If you don't want to do that, they are free to withhold their content.

On the other hand, I'm not going to futz with my pop-up blocker settings trying to get a site to work. If a site refuses to load, I just figure that it's a buggy site and I never go back.

Customized HOSTS vs. "Blocked sites"

[mnemotronic]

this news doesn't affect anybody who uses a customized HOSTS file to stop the majority of ads from appearing anyway.

1. MSIE (heaven forbid!) can block a list of sites. I think the effect is the same (but I may be worng)
2. Tools
3. Internet Options...
4. Security tab
5. Restricted Sites
6. Sites...

I wish there was something similiar in Firefox! My employeer's virus scanner (McAfee) can restrict sites by IP address or URL.

A problem is that these days, some web sites (SlickDeals.net) are doing some things that causes valid pages to fail to load because of my "blocked sites". I usually get a "Cannot find server or DNS Error" because I've blocked various ad sites.

Timothy, thanks for linking to my blog, but...

[gad_zuki!]

If its the ad-blocking hosts file you want, its here.

Except

[Snaller]

People (sellers) have gone on record as saying they never saw any business because of these methods, yet when they employed Googles addwords the could register a big change almost at once. Because Googles adds are mostly relevant and never annoying.

Collateral damage from all these "blockers"

[stevek]

The big problem with this war is that there is so much collateral damage.

With each measure people take to block the popups and other types of advertisement, they also end up blocking content and applications that they need.

Once, people thought the browser will become the "application environment". The latest W3C inventions makes that more viable every day. But, now look what we've _removed_ from the environment:

1) Dialog Boxes: Gone. You can usually still use a javascript alert, but you can't prompt the user with a dialog box anymore, a primitive UI component.

2) Random things broken: "Adblock" css and stuff like that, which blocks images and iframes when the relative path to those things starts with "ad"? So, if slashdot's preferences were called "adjustments", that would get killed.

Sure, people can sometimes turn these things off, but more and more often, people are having these things installed without even knowing they're there (like millions will when XP SP 2 comes out).

This whole situation is rapidly making the web a much less hospitable environment for applications.

Re:Collateral damage from all these "blockers"

[stevek]

Oops. I forgot to mention why I wrote this in the first place.

The original article suggested that the current behavior where browsers return an error from window.open should be changed so that the calling script can no longer determine that the new window was not created.

Not only would this theoretically stop the "popup" advertisers from knowing that you had blocked their advertisement, but it would also make it much more difficult for application developers to know.

So now, where the user experience for an application user might be getting a JavaScript alert asking them to enable popups for the application server, they'd just get silent failure.

Re:Collateral damage from all these "blockers"

[Moraelin]

Sorry, I don't see that as collateral damage caused by the blockers, but as collateral damage caused by the greedy fucks that threw pop-ups and pop-unders at us in the first place.

The problem is the mentality that "by Jove, I have a sacred _right_ to make a profit. No matter who or what gets killed in the process."

In the early days of the web you'd have one banner per site. A simple .gif image, no flash, no popups, no whatever. And guess what? Noone even thought of blocking those.

It went downhill from there because of greedy fucks on _both_ sites. Greedy fucks as site owners trying to shaft the ad providers, and greedy fucks as ad providers trying to shaft everyone else. People who thought they have a sacred right to make money, no matter what collateral damage they cause. People who treated the web like the 16'th century buccaneers treated the shipping lanes: not as a useful infrastructure for everyone, but as something to plunder and rape for your own benefit.

And again, I'm not blaming just the ad providers. The site owners are as guilty, if not more. The whole dot-com crap was _based_ on the idea that "ooh, look how much they pay per ad. Let's make a site with 20+ ads per page, and rake in the big dough." Guess what, Einstein? Those rates were not calculated for that.

The plan ammounted to no less than "let's cheat the ad provider out of some money we don't deserve, and then cheat the VCs out of even more money we don't deserve." But that's ok. Only a moron would think of morals, when lining one's pcokets is at stake, right?

And from there it's been a downwards spiral of death and destruction. A race to shaft each other. A race where the site owners became more and more desperate to get money for nothing, no matter how imoral the means, and where the ad providers became more and more obnoxious to actually sell something for those money.

They thought they had a _right_ to make a sale, even if they have to kill you for it. Pop-ups, pop-unders, 500k flash animations, etc. Nothing was too much, if it could make a buck.

And noone thought of the collateral damage they're causing to the internet or to the people using it. Well, now those people are just trying to defend themselves from this crap barrage. And it seems supremely hypocritical to now blame the collateral damage on them, instead of on the greedy fucks who made popup blockers needed in the first place.

LMHOSTS

[Espectr0]

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

Re:HOSTS link?

[sootman]

I have to disagree about it being the dumbest thing I can do. I've got a 4,000-line hosts file on all my OS X Macs and I never noticed the slightest blip in CPU usage or slowness in my browsing. And, my custom "Another blocked ad!" 404 page brings a smile to my face every time I see it in a page that uses inline frames to store ads.

I have no problem with this.

[Doppler00]

I've already seen these kind of advertisements used on websites. They are not like pop-up ads at all. Here is the difference:

A popup ad requires you to first, close the window to see the web page, or for that matter ANYTHING that may have been underneath it on your desktop. These can also appear in such rapid succession that you have no access to your computer for several seconds as you frustratingly try to close them all.

However, a transparent pop-up embedded in the webpage itself is not as much of a problem. It is contained within the browser window, so there is a clear seperation between the website, and anything else on your computer's desktop.

If you don't like website's that use advertising that's fine. Avoid them, or find some Mozilla tool to block them. For most people however, this is much less obtrusive than standard IE popups.

Re:HOSTS link?

[Rushuru]

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.

another great hosts file

[sklib]

There's another great custom hosts file at someonewhocares.org/hosts. I use it everywhere, and it's wonderful.

Get over yourself

[CalCudahy]

Wow, what a troll! And moderated at a 4 no less. Hey I ain't no huge fan of marketing but to make such a blanket statement is moronic.

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.

We don't want your damned ads!

[squall14716]

In Soviet Russia, pop-up ads block you!

Ok, ok, I'm sorry for that. Why can't advertisers find a way to give ads to people who want them and leave the rest of us the fuck alone. If I make a concious effort to BLOCK your pop-ups, BLOCK your spam, then why would I ever want to buy your product?

I do not try to block small banner ads like the one at the top of this page. I have no problem with those. It's pop-up/under ads, spam, and banner ads that make you scroll down to see jack shit that really piss me off. I mean, make your ads non-intrusive and I'm sure more people who actually need/want what you are offering will click that ad.

What are more annoying are pop-up ads advertising pop-up lockers that cost "only $500!". Wow, what a bargain, Firefox cam at this outrageous price of free. Meh, end rant.

So, did they miss the big hint?

[BillX]

Do you think the marketers will ever realize why there are 300 different types of popup-blocking software, but no AdWord-blocking software?

Superior Hosts File!

[EdgeOfEpsilon]

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.

DMCA Invocation

[limekiller4]

Why not just invoke the DMCA? All the popup blocker would need to do is require some sort of challenge-response to allow a popup to occur. Circumvention of that blocker would then be a violation of the DMCA.

...profit?

i went there and...

[Sfing_ter]

i went there and found a javascript that launched a flash ad that would not go away. So if i uninstalled flash would it not be there? Maybe I will just not go to those sites that use this crap. Fuggem.

Re:HOSTS link?

[aftk2]

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.

Customised?

[radsoft]

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