Coming Soon to a Wireless Hotspot Near You: Ads

mindless4210 writes "A new generation of spam is born with the launch of FreeFi's new Wi-Fi advertising network. It is the first service of its kind, with intentions of delivering ad content to hotspots around the world starting in mid-Summer. FreeFi's President, Lawrence Laffer, says that the service displays a 'persistent set of ads adjacent to the user's browser without use of invasive advertising software or pop-up ads.' He also claims '[their] market research indicates that, except for pop-ups, people really don't mind ads.'" This seems like the kind of thing that would keep me from using "free" wireless access, but I've a feeling I'm in the minority.

Comments

Re:Must be closed

[KingOfBLASH]

That's not necessarily true. They could set up the access point to run all connections through a proxy, or even run the wireless access point as a proxy, which basically would allow the computer to change web pages on the fly. So they could force all content to resize into a frame (or iframe, or table, or do any of a number of HTML tricks) on whatever portion of the screen they allocate for content, and then put the ad bar in. Or they could create a flash "float over" ad bar. Or they could do any of a number of things to modify the web page, without requiring the user to install any special software at all. Note this would even allow you to play games / whatever online, because it would only modify traffic going over port 80, and then only modify HTML.

No problem at all

[DaHat]

Long ago I took up updating my hosts file with data from http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/ which provides a list of known ad servers that you then point back to your local machine.

I decided to take this one step further and change the mapped to IP to be that of SCO, so that each time I come to Slashdot and don't see their ads, I instead see a small bit of the SCO homepage, what you might call a mini DoS