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End Run Around Pop-up Blockers
An anonymous reader writes "The pop-up arms race continues, cnet has this article on how advertisers are responding to pop-up blockers." Can't wait for a full page of javascripted user-initiated pop-ups.
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So let's get this straight- one "photographer from the UK" installed Google popup blocker, and then it stopped working(probably, if anything, because her machine got infected with spyware/adware). What about Mozilla's blocking functionality? Opera? Safari? Oops, that'd be asking too much of our dear news.com.com.com.com.com reporter(and folks- remember why they use "news.com.com"; so their tracking cookies work across all their sites).
I use Safari's popup blocking setting and it works fantastically. All of the time. Since the day I started using Safari- ie, the day it was publicly beta'd.
What I really want, however, is a "turn off flash" quick menu item, same for animated gifs; Opera had that, and it was great. Disabling all plugins actually works pretty well too, and kills off many rather annoying ads.
Please help metamoderate.
It is probably time to apply spam-blocking techniques to popup ads.
The article talks about how Javascript mouseover commands are being used to launch popup windows in a "user-prompted" fashion, thereby defeating Google's and other vendors' popup blockers that rely on detecting non-requested popups.
So, what is needed is a browser plugin that communicates with a central server. As a user of this plugin, when I encounter a popup ad or a Flash ad, I simply close it manually with ctrl-click or something similar, and the plugin reports the Javascript command that originally launched the ad to the server. Whenever any Web page tries to spawn a new window, the plugin checks with the server to see if the page and Javascript line in question is trying to spawn an ad. A plurality of "yes" votes -- ctrl-clicks from users like me who visited the page earlier -- would cause the plugin to suppress the unwanted window or Flash feature.
You would need a voting system to prevent abuse of the system by people reporting legitimately-requeted popups. Dynamically-composed pages would be another problem, but perhaps the domain-specific nature of ads would be sufficient to detect unwanted popups. (Even simple rules like "Never close windows spawned by mbnanetaccess.com; always close windows spawned by forbes.com" would be a big step ahead of the current state of the art in popup-blocking).
The ad's cost X per click for the twit paying for them. The rate is based on the amount of legitimate click throughs for the site.
How hard would it be to create a browser plugin that will hide the ads, but still 'click' on them? If the the number of such plugins in use became prevalent enough, then the advertisers would be charged more money, since their accounts show more click throughs. But since these are false positives, the increase in sales associated with those click throughs would not materialize.
Once this hits a critical mass, all such ads will become useless, nothing more then costly traffic that drains dramatically more revenue then it creates.
You wont get rats to stop trying to eat your food by hiding it. They just look harder for it because they know its still there. But if you can poison the food, they will die painfully.
END COMMUNICATION
I use Adblock, which is a firefox extension which also does flash banner blocking. As far as pop-ups go, the only ti'me I've ever had to deal with them on Firefox is with false-positive blocks - ie. Firefox thinks it's a pop-up, so it shows u a little "i" icon at the bottom left. Click it and tell Firefox that it's safe to allow it and you're good to go - usally happens with those annoying sites that use pop-up windows to log you in
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
Are those really a problem for people?
Most definitely. My girlfriend and I recently got back from college, and I'm astounded what's happened to her family's computer. I haven't gotten over there to fix it yet (was planning to today actually), but she ran a virus scan and found 91 viruses, mostly adware (Hasn't actually scanned for adware yet). She can't use internet explorer because just opening it fills the screen with popups.
I guess this is what happens when two parrents and a fifteen year old who aren't at all tech savy are left with a computer for 9 months.
Him: "So does that mean you'll move back to Internet Explorer from Firefox since that was your main reason for switching?"
I switched to Firefox about a month ago, after I picked up a google browser hijack I coulden't get rid of, because it didn't support active X and VBscript the perferred methods of something like 80% of all unauthorized spyware/adware downloads.
The popup blocker was just a really nice extra bonus. When using IE w/ the Google Toolbar there were a few popups that got by now and then, but so far Firefox has been impervious. I am very happy with it.
SMOKE... are ya smokin yet?
if there would be some way for us humans to actually learn regexps...
:-)
:-)
Well, according to Chomsky's hierarchy, regular expressions are equivalent to the simplest possible languages (automatic ones). Human languages are context-dependent, i.e. two levels more complex! I suppose you get my point
BTW, programming languages are (usually) context-independent, i.e. right in the middle of regular expressions and natural languages. Therefore, every kid at the age of 2 should be able to learn programming really easy
That's not a very good way to look at the numbers. A better way is to point out the April 2003 numbers as well, Then you get a much better idea of the trend:
2002: 1.8 percent
2003: 6.0 percent
2004: 6.4 percent
The article says that the ads have tripled since the rise of the pop-up blockers, and while that's true, it is also true that the vast majority of that growth came before mid-2003. In the year since then, ad growth has been almost stangnant -- exactly what you would expect to see as the ad whores gradually realize that people hate their guts enough to take steps to rid them from their lives.
No, to me those numbers tell me the opposite of the conclusion reached by the article author. To me those numbers say that pop-up blockers were not only effective, they were noticed by the ad companies and it caused a slowdown in pop-up ad trends. Of course, being the lowlifes that they are, they are now going to other method to force us to see what we have explicitly shown them we don't want to see. But that's par for the course for these leeches.
What's a ``google browser hijack''?
Yes, thats what I mean. Whenever I would go to google and search for whatever, the resulting page would look almost exactly like Google but was full of crap paid listings instead of the real ones. Oddly enough the address still said www.google.com and if I clicked next at the bottom to go to the next page it would go to the real Google results.
So it was a browser hijack that effected google.
SMOKE... are ya smokin yet?