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Snopes Pushing Zango Adware

Posted by kdawson on from the say-it-ain't-so dept.

DaMan writes "Here's something that isn't an urban legend — Snopes, the popular urban legends reference site, has been pushing adware, for at least 6 months, to users via ads displayed on its Web site. No one seems to have called them on it until recently."

4 of 256 comments (clear)

  1. They also disable text selection by ThatsNotFunny · · Score: 5, Informative

    Talk about a user-unfriendly feature! They use some very annoying javascript to disable the ability to select a portion of text. No idea why...

    --
    "Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine No Posessions?'" -- Elvis Costello
  2. No urban legend, that's confirmed. by palegray.net · · Score: 5, Informative

    I get the same result. I thought I had sent my complaint (reference this post via their web form, but upon clicking back over to that tab I noticed the same error you got. So, to contact them about Zango's abusive business practices, I have to install Zango's abusive software to interact with their server, or it generates an error? Wow. Somebody's smoking some good stuff at Snopes. WHIOS has the following registry data for snopes.com:

    Administrative Contact , Technical Contact :
    Mikkelson, David
    snopes@best.com
    P.O. Box 684
    Agoura Hills, CA 91376
    US
    Phone: (702) 988-4047
    Fax: (818) 261-3054

    The phone number appears to ring to offices at "best.com", who says their offices are presently closed and offer to take a message. Keying "best.com" into your browser will redirect to Verio. And round and round we go. I think I'll send a fax to the number listed in WHOIS.

    --
    512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
  3. Re:The downside of adblockplus. by rjstanford · · Score: 5, Informative

    I once emailed a funny video clip on a website to my wife - it had a mildly risque title, but wasn't NSFW at all, so I even mentioned that in the email. Little did I know that the clip was literally bracketed with loud, auto-playing flash-based porn ads (seriously). She was, to put it mildly, unthrilled.

    And no, I don't know the URL any more.

    --
    You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
  4. Re:"there practically every time" - not for me by Spy+Hunter · · Score: 5, Informative

    Snopes, like most other sites using popups, sets a cookie the first time you visit, so you only get the popup once per some amount of time (however long until the cookie expires). Also, these days sites get around popup blockers these days by raising the popups on a mouse click event, instead of when you first visit the page. Try clicking on an empty area of the page to generate the popup (after you have cleared your cookies).

    I can confirm that they do use popups as I got one from them just yesterday. Actually what I got was a pop-under, masquerading as a Windows dialog box, which is even worse. Snopes' advertising has become quite obnoxious, but their content is still good so I grudgingly put up with it. Incidentally, if you hate popunders as much as I do, please vote for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=369306 to kill them forever. (Don't add comments to the bug though, that's bad bugzilla etiquette)

    --
    main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}