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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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I have not had one popup since I fully switched to FireFox (around 6 months ago).
There is also a FireFox extension that blocks those annoying Flash popunder ads.
If the code is on the page, The Proxomitron can kill it. I haven't seen a pop-up that has been able to get past it yet, and even if one did, I could just make a new filter to kill all pop-ups of that sort.
It also blocks other ads, background midis, flash animations, and all sorts of other annoyances in addition to adding functionality to other sites if you're clever enough to write some nice regular expressions and HTML code.
Wonderful little program.
If a user has specifically installed software in order not to see popups, why do advertisers think they will be inclined to click them if they do somehow get through?
It's aiming at the wrong targets - how many Firefox users will click a X10 camera ad just because it evaded their filter? I'd say alot more will simply take the address and add it to their hosts file pointing at 127.0.0.1 to stop the popup from returning. It's like putting MS ads on Slashdot - how many users will click compared to all those that chuckle at MS's wasted money on putting the ad there.
If there is one thing that will make me leap from my chair and purchase your product it is annoying me with a popup. I'll be doubly interested if you specifically try to circumvent my implicit wish not to be disturbed by your adverts. Oh yes, you'll be sure to make me a customer for life.
This post sponsored by the Sarcasm for Life initiative
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.
Silence! Google can do no evil.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Click here to see some sneakier popup methods. Some even get around firefox popup blocking, although I'm certain that once they become popular, the army of mozilla hackers will find a way to block them.
But I use Links!
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
Why does anyone leave Javascript on? Its main feature is the ability to have pop-ups thrown at you, and its other features are about as useless and annoying.
But people insist on requiring it to use their buttons on their sites sometimes, so instead of putting so much effort into detecting when a pop-up is coming, I'd much prefer it if there was an easy way to turn scripting on or off. Like a tiny toolbar with two little radio buttons.
Anybody know off the top of their heads if that's do-able without waiting for Microsoft to do it?
That knife cuts both ways. You'll keep developing new ways to serve adds, and we'll keep blocking them.
I do think, however, that there are more people who dislike popups than who benefit from their continuing as a viable marketing option.
Advantage: Us.
The best solution is a browser that has built in popup support, not a lame IE hack of some kind. The worst solution is popup signitures which tend to change over time as companies try to break popup blockers which rely on signitures.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I develop a contextual/live feed advertising system (yes flame me if you wish) and we have one guy who attends IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) events here in the UK, so I get to hear about all the "latest and greatest" advertising formats.
/.ers don't have too much to worry about.
In response to the adblocking technology several new ad formats are being approved for general usage and they all suck.Basically the new ad formats are much much bigger than the current sizes. I can't remember what sizes they were but I was crying when I was told. (bad luck 800x600 users)
Other "great" news from the cutting edge of advertising is that more full movie streaming ads will become popular (obviously with advertisers not with users)
And worst of all what are currently blockable popup ads will be replaced with Flash overlays that fly around screen.
Apparently the IAB did an expensive study in the states into what normal users thought of all these new ad formats (pop-ups, pop-unders, flash overlays, dhtml etc,) And the result was that most users call all annoying ads "pop-ups" and they really hate them. Well duh, I'm not sure what the point of *that* study was for.
On the plus side I remember hearing that IAB guidlines will recommend all flash overlays have a close button.
So in general the whole state of affairs depresses me ALOT. I don't think the IAB/advertisers have even got Avalon on their radar yet, but I imagine Avalon ads will enable a whole new generation of annoying ads.
For normal users this will all suck, but most of the ads probably won't work on a standard debian install so
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.
By using overlays & stylesheets you can float an ad on top of a regular web page.
And since mozilla is one of the few standards-complant browsers that allow you to do overlays properly, you can get these ads. If the DHTML serves the ad from the same site as the webhost, it is much, much harder to block.
Popups are irritating because they, well, pop up, when you least expect it, where you least expect it, and have to spend time and nerves closing it. But when you use tabbed browsing and set new windows to open up as new tabs, this problem is gone. It is when I use a browser without tabs for some time and notice those ugly popups that I think - why don't I ever notice any popups? And this is because when an ad appears in some tab, I just click where the X that closes the tab usually is and get it over with.
Marketers are increasingly becoming for the internet what ticks are to a dog.
Around 1996 or so, a friend was lamenting the increasing commercialization of the Internet. I remember thinking that he was maybe overreacting a bit, and that the trend was maybe even a good thing since it didn't take away any of the other uses of the net, but just added to it. And at the time, it was in fact quite benign, and often even positive. But now, spammers and web marketers are abusing and undeniably damaging the medium. When users have to criple features to stem the deluge of marketing, those features are rendered unviable for desireable uses as well. It isn't benign at all anymore. The cancer of Internet commercialization is now malignant.
0.9 is going to stop all of the FF spyware in it's tracks. A new website, update.mozilla.org will sign all new extensions and themes. If you then stumble across a .xpi file on the internet, if it does not verify with update.mozilla.org then it is simply blocked. However, apparently they will let you lower your security rating (high is the default though so newbies will not see this stuff) and then it will install ok.
But, smartupdate which will automatically update your browser, extensions and themes is going to be a great feature in 0.9 and will hopefully pull a few more IE users over.
IntechHosting - Free domain, 2GB, PHP, £4.95/$8.95
I get most angry when i visit a friend's home, and they complain about the incessant pop-ups. Usually, they have gotten adware on their computer.
The sad thing is, they're usually ignorant of how it happened. I remember, two weeks ago, my buddy was using my computer, and i told him "Use Firefox" and he was like "No, I like IE." I went to pick up a friend, and by the time i got back, there was already some Claria powered program installed on my computer. He swore up and down he didn't install anything, but it didnt matter, i had to run Ad-Aware and SpyBot (Search and Destroy) to get rid of all the crap that had got installed in less than an hour.
Now, when i fix my friends's computers, i put Firefox and Privoxy on their computers. They don't bitch to me anymore about pop-ups.
gum2me?
The problem I've had with a few popup blockers is that they are not particularly intelligent. Some of them can't even tell the difference between a popup and when you create a new instance of your browser. Beating advertisers requires intelligent filtering at the HTTP stream level, and I've found that the Proxomitron is an excellent proxy that does this. Unfortunately, the writer burned out and it's no longer supported. As such, I've heard really good things about Provoxy, but I can't make a recommendation since I've never used it.
As far as Proxomitron goes, it makes my surfing much more pleasurable. Annoying Flash ads that pop up and make noise and block what you're reading? Gone. Pop-up mouse traps? I laugh in their face. Sidebar/banner ads? What are those? Sometimes, however, the Proxomitron DOES munge some sites due to its filtering, but all you have to do is double click its taskbar icon, punch the "Bypass" button, and reload your browser. A small price to pay compared to punching your monitor in because an ad just took over your browser.
For fighting spam, popups and malware in general, I find Cexx to be a good site. They have a decent list of anti spyware/adware apps, and lenghthy and informative analyses of the various spyware running around.
-R
I'm surprised that they haven't figured this out.
This sig no verb.
Besides, a lot of floaters only work on IE. I'm mostly safe w/ Sarafi or Mozilla.
AC comments get piped to
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Windows opened from scripting are treated as children of the parent window. When the parent window closes, so must the child window. When the parent window is moved to the back or minimized, the child windows must do the same. (You can still minimize or dismiss the child window, of course.)
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Windows opened by scripting should retain some visual association with the parent window. They
should overlap it at least slightly, unless the
user moves the window.
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Windows opened by scripting have a user-settable maximum size. Anything bigger than this comes up with scroll bars.
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Flash animations must be closeable and blockable.
Flash, and all other "controls", should run in a jail, permitted to talk to the screen and the originating site only. There must be right-click menu options to kill any "control", whether it likes it or not.
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All windows have close buttons.
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No script can open more than one window per user click.
We need to keep control of the browser GUI in the user's hands, no matter what the site tries to do.Since annoyance is clearly a working marketting tool (why else would Gilbert Gotfried still be popular on commercials?) and SPAM shows no signs of being slowed and clearly, as the article shows, pop-ups are getting increasingly more aggressive, I have decided to create my own more effective marketting technique.
I plan to hire thousands of people to pass out hand-bills door-to-door. What? Not new? Oh yes it is... Studies show that prime-time for this activity is when people are home! So part of the plan is to knock on their doors during dinner time. Still not new? I'm not done... After they answer the door, he will push his way into your home and punch you in the face, change the channel on your TV to always come up to our commercials, change the speed dials on your phone while we are putting a bug in it so we know who you are calling, and then tape the handbill to your face with duct tape so you can't miss seeing it.
We think that will be enough to make people want to buy our stuff...
Would the ones that promote disabling features really want to go back to the crappy featureless, tool-less, mostly text internet that we had only 7 or 8 years ago?
Yes please!
2. Global and Other Specialized Address Blocks
0.0.0.0/8 - Addresses in this block refer to source hosts on "this"
network. Address 0.0.0.0/32 may be used as a source address for this
host on this network; other addresses within 0.0.0.0/8 may be used to
refer to specified hosts on this network [RFC1700, page 4].
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3330.html
enjoy
Note the highlighted bit. 0.0.0.0/32 (the address we commonly call 0.0.0.0) can be used as a SOURCE address. That's quite different from being used as a DESTINATION address, which is what the entries in the hosts file will be used for in this case.
You need to look at RFC 1700 page 4, which the bit of RFC 3330 you quoted refers to:0.0.0.0 is specifically invalid as a destination address by RFC 1700.
This probably has something to do with the fact that a large percentage of pop ups use deceptive techniques to get someone to click on them unwittingly.
From 'System Needs to Update, click anywhere in this window to Update your system', to 'Your system is not secure, click anywhere in this window to secure your system', to "Error Xb3t10-2, click anywhere in this window to continue", to ads that simulate windows and have their own 'close' buttons that are just part of the ad graphics, (Even I have accidentally clicked on those a few times,) there are myriad different 'strategies' that advertiseers use to trick people into thinking that the pop up is not an ad, but an essential message from their computer machine that they should obey.
Meanwhile, people have learned that 'click to win' banner ads generally aren't worth their time, and so they have stopped clicking on them as often as they used to.
With the current batch of viruses growing larger and more dangerous, there will be more people that know they should be worried abotu viruses,
As to floaters and various flash ads, browser makers and macromedia need to take some responsibility and provide options to prevent that kind of crap. Going to a website and then having a floating ad with motion and sound that I cannot close, or an ad that floats over what I am trying to read, is quite irritating, and I will never purchase.
For some companies that I normally buy from, I have sent letters explaining that their intrusive ads have caused me to lower my expenditures on their products. Generally I get back a canned response that places the blame on the advertising firm that made the ad. Apparently advertising firms are privateers now, that companies give payment and blessing to, and then take no respoinsibility for.
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 the advertisers assume is that the site that I am visiting has such an appeal to me, that I will put up with the pop-ups etc to be able to view it.
:-))
Bzzzt. Wrong!
If a site goes to that much trouble to circumvent my blockers, well, I just don't visit it anymore.
Problem solved! Well for me anyway
Oh yes, I alwyas use the feedbak/comments page to TELL the site operators that they have lost my eyeballs.
If enough people would just stop visiting these sites.....
There are alternatives on the Internet.
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I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
FYI, there is an extension to Moz that allows you to
have "run in IE" in your context menu, so you'd
right click, select that and be done, no cutting
no pasting, no going to start button.
As a side note, I personally don't like your
approach. The goal isn't to keep Mozilla clean, the
goal is to keep the screen clean. Worse yet, pages
that _really_ want to get to you, so much that they
would use flash may also try other underhanded tricks
like hijacks, so going to IE for the vilest pages
is a questionable tactic, IMHO.