Popups/unders Getting Through Blockers 


New "technology" from the advertising depths of hell was released in the wild over the past couple of weeks. You know that nice shiny pop-up blocker installed in your browser? Doesn't work anymore. Some troll selling ad space has come up with some Javascript that bypasses most of these filters resulting in - once again - a painful browsing experience.

Basic pop-up blockers work on the principal that pop-up windows aren't allowed, unless they are the result of your clicking. That is, unless you initiate an action (by clicking on a link/button) pop-up windows aren't allowed to be displayed. Well, through some ingenious trickery that will surely land the mystery-author in hell to be ripped apart by HTML <blink> tags for all eternity, it appears that they are now adding onclick handlers to some (or all) links so that when you click on something, ads appear. Quite simple in theory - but annoying in practice. What's more, they are doing this dynamically - a banner ad is navigating the DOM tree and adding these handlers - so that even if the original page doesn't have these "features", they get added by an advertiser.

I want to know who these assholes are. Why do they think that we somehow want to view their crappy little ads for casinos, herbal Viagra, and whatever product-of-moment they're hawking? I purposefully block these ads because they are annoying, as do many people. Why would I suddenly want to purchase their junk? Especially when they are annoying the piss out of me with their chosen advertising method.

These jerks should rot in hell. In my opinion, they are no better than spammers - they screw around finding loopholes to annoy people, in the hopes that enough gullible morons buy their junk to make it worthwhile. The difference is that seemingly reputable companies are being advertised here. For one, NetFlix seems to pop-up (literally!) a lot. I'm never going back to their service because of this. They have control over how they are advertising, and they don't seem to mind that the services they are using are only one-step above the spam I get in by inbox every day. So bye bye NetFlix.

There are some workarounds for certain browsers. For Firefox/Mozilla, there are plugins that work on whitelisting and regex blocking of suspicious code and known offenders. Unfortunately, this means going back to the bad old days of maintaining these things, but that may be where we're headed.

Link to MacFixit.com article about this. Good place for links to more information.
Link to Slashdot article. 

 

Posted: Tue - February 22, 2005 at 10:01 AM          

©