Comments on: Comments on 8024

Post number 8024

o2b — Sat, 02 Jun 2001 20:33:05 -0800

Woohoo! Follow the link to a post at the beloved-by-all-metafilterians Jason Levine.

read the fourth paragraph: it seems that i'm not the only one highly ticked off by the recent slew of x10 pop-under ads.

Jason has kindly provided links that will set cookies to prevent them from appearing for 30 days, 1 year or 10 years.

I modified the url yet again to keep it from popping up ever again within my lifetime.

By: benjh

benjh — Sat, 02 Jun 2001 20:42:23 -0800

these are really big with everyone.net, so if you have webmail powered by them (and probably not that many people here, but I had everyone.net powered webmail for my site for a while), then you will notice them pushing it.

By: GaelFC

GaelFC — Sat, 02 Jun 2001 21:12:15 -0800

Jason very graciously credits my site, Pop Culture Junk Mail, with the X10 link (which was one of many sent to me by readers, so I can't take full credit for it either). I've been kind of obsessed with X10 links lately, and you'll find more on my May 31 entry--info on fighting the ads, a bit about their history, and more. Hate the damn things. Hate 'em.

By: register

o2b, 30 days is the max.

By: register

X10 will haunt the web forever.

By: Perigee

Perigee — Sat, 02 Jun 2001 21:23:36 -0800

Thanks, in any case, to both of you; I'll be popping through that link of yours on at least three systems.

By: kristin

kristin — Sat, 02 Jun 2001 21:43:08 -0800

Gael is my hero. :)

By: pnevares

pnevares — Sat, 02 Jun 2001 22:08:52 -0800

By: waxpancake

waxpancake — Sat, 02 Jun 2001 23:16:43 -0800

It's too bad that X10 has such a dastardly marketing department, since their products are actually pretty cool. I use their Entertainment Anywhere package to wireless broadcast MP3s to my stereo and DVDs to my TV.

By: kathryn

kathryn — Sun, 03 Jun 2001 01:56:33 -0800

i've got it set on 30 days, too. unfortunately, the ads are still annoying me, since the pop-under window will show up underneath the current browser window and then kill itself. how inefficient.

By: dong_resin

dong_resin — Sun, 03 Jun 2001 05:08:03 -0800

I never even made it to the X10 stuff, as I couldn't wipe away the image of Poo's heroin nod. I'm in the fetal position now. Happy?

By: register

pnevares, modifying the URL so that the pop-under ads disappear for more or less than 30 days still results in their disappearance for exactly 30 days; I don't know why DAY=30 is in the URL (maybe the script prevents the ads for X days but prints the same confirmation page). this message appears regardless of DAY's value: "For the next 30 days, the X10 "pop-under" ads will NOT appear on your computer!"

By: chrisege

chrisege — Sun, 03 Jun 2001 11:38:23 -0800

register - I doubt that means 30 days is the maximum. It's probably just a hard-coded html page. Since they didn't expect to be using the cookie for anything other than 30 days, there wasn't really any reason to make that value dynamic. So i think it's pretty safe to assume you're getting a cookie for x amount of days, even though the page only says 30.

By: kindall

kindall — Sun, 03 Jun 2001 12:38:52 -0800

Guess we'll know in 30 days, eh?

By: ook

ook — Sun, 03 Jun 2001 14:40:16 -0800

I dunno, folks -- if you have to have advertising on the web, these 'pop-under' ads seem like a pretty darn civilized way to do it: seems like the idea is that they'll stay out of your way until you're finished surfing. That's pretty polite; I almost prefer it to the huge in-page ads that some sites have been experimenting with. And then they go ahead and put in the effort to let the customer turn the things off if they want... I feel like I'm siding with the bad guys here, but that seems like pretty darn good net citizenship to me... ...of course I'm saying that without actually having seen one of these things; I wandered around on everyone.net for a while trying to get one to appear. (Maybe they don't work on a mac?)

By: rodii

rodii — Sun, 03 Jun 2001 15:22:12 -0800

They work *just* fine, alas.

By: fooljay

fooljay — Sun, 03 Jun 2001 15:40:54 -0800

I just responded on Jason's Discuss page. If you want to disable the popup forever and ever, put this into your hosts file (on Windows or Unix. Perhas Mac as well) 127.0.0.1 www.x10.com A list of other known advertisers and cookie tacer/placers can be found here . Enjoy!

By: register

ha, how could we forget? thanks fooljay.

By: skallas

skallas — Sun, 03 Jun 2001 16:33:31 -0800

Actually my hosts file has x10.com blocked, but it doesn't stop the popup just the loading of the ad. So I get a full size pop-up window (IE5.5 W2K) with the typical cannot find host error. Go for the opt-out. Considering the ads come from ads.x10.com not www.x10.com you're just blocking access to the opt-out link. Click below to get to my page.

By: Mars Saxman

Mars Saxman — Sun, 03 Jun 2001 16:43:11 -0800

the idea is that they'll stay out of your way until you're finished surfing. Nice idea, maybe, but there are two problems: It doesn't work unless you use that single-window browsing style, where you leave the same window open all the time and do all your browsing within it. (Needless to say, I don't.) Second, it's much harder to tell where the little beast came from. I eventually figured out that latimes.com was at fault, and now I don't go there anymore, but it was frustrating while I tried to find its origin. -Mars

By: fooljay

fooljay — Sun, 03 Jun 2001 17:48:07 -0800

Considering the ads come from ads.x10.com not www.x10.com you're just blocking access to the opt-out link. Good points, scallas. I didn't check to see where the ads were coming from. I suppose I could put "127.0.0.1 x10.com" in there, eh? Actually my hosts file has x10.com blocked, but it doesn't stop the popup just the loading of the ad. So I get a full size pop-up window (IE5.5 W2K) with the typical cannot find host error. Go for the opt-out. Nah, I don't like the idea that X10.com gets to see the fact that I'm visiting sites where they have a popup placed. I personally would rather just halt any communication between them and my computer. I bet I could forge a cookie on my computer (because x10.com would be mapped to 127.0.0.1) which would disable the popup forever as well....

By: rebeccablood

rebeccablood — Sun, 03 Jun 2001 17:48:29 -0800

am I wrong that I'm getting it at the NY Times? that's where it always appears.

By: rebeccablood

rebeccablood — Sun, 03 Jun 2001 17:56:02 -0800

By: rebeccablood

rebeccablood — Sun, 03 Jun 2001 17:56:17 -0800

did that work?

By: rebeccablood

rebeccablood — Sun, 03 Jun 2001 18:01:26 -0800

[OT: sorry, all. in opera, fooljay's <br /> has rendered everything following in boldface. (although in preview mode it read the right way... go figure.) apologies for not checking source before trying to fix it, and for not checking it in another browser before doing so. so, does opera not support <br />???]

By: register

</A>

By: ktheory

ktheory — Sun, 03 Jun 2001 19:14:39 -0800

I clicked queso's link, but I'm still getting the X10 pop-unders from nytimes.com and chicagotribune.com.

By: rebeccablood

rebeccablood — Sun, 03 Jun 2001 19:55:41 -0800

you know what? me, too. rcb

By: dhartung

dhartung — Sun, 03 Jun 2001 23:03:09 -0800

The first big site (that I visit) to use the X10 ads was Space.com. Then the Chicago Tribune added them; then shortly after that, the LA Times (remember, Tribune Media bought them). Only last week did the pop-unders spread to the NY Times. Man, there can't be that many people buying wireless spycams in Voyeurweb Igor's wildest wet dreams. (Or perhaps we've entered Asimov's short story, "Welcome to the Fishbowl", depicting a future where every television could tune to a camera secretly installed in any other television.) For instance, I have installed a spycam in the period at the end of this sentence. Smile, and move a little to the left. It's pretty strange that they programmed that cookie with the DAYS value in the URL. It would have been insanely easy to hard-code (maybe the X10 web coding staff is being unexpectedly kind). Note also that it would be insanely easy to simply ignore the DAYS value and set it to 30 days regardless. It would be a little harder to program the cookie so you could tell exactly when it was set, but that's also not out of the question. My experimental results? I clicked the actual link on the X10 site, went to ChicagoTribune.com, and saw no ad. I then used the one at the top of this post, and returned to the Trib site, and saw no ad. Remember that you have to have cookies and javascript enabled for it (this fix) to work. (One of my defenses had been to set Chicagotribune.com as a Restricted Site via my security tab, but that also meant every search submission was intercepted and other annoyances.)

By: rodii

rodii — Mon, 04 Jun 2001 09:40:44 -0800

I get queried as to whether I want to accept cookies, and usually try hard to discriminate between sites with legitimate uses for them and ad server/tracking sites. With x10 I originally declined, so I always saw the ad but didn't set a cookie. In order to turn off the ads, I had to accept x10's cookies. So now I don't see the ads, but I do allow them to have a cookie. In other words, I've traded the nuisance of the popup ads for the surveillance issue of giving x10 a cookie. Plus, every 30 days, x10 gets to refresh to whole issue with me. If I were doubleclick, I would be working on a similar scheme right now. Pop up annoying ads but offer to make them go away if they can just set a cookie on my machine. Then they can do all the tracking and profiling I painstakingly opted out of before. Am I being paranoid here?

By: rodii

rodii — Mon, 04 Jun 2001 09:41:50 -0800

ktheory and rebecca, I bet you initially declined x10's cookie, just like I did.

By: rcade

rcade — Mon, 04 Jun 2001 09:47:31 -0800

Looking at the cookie that X10 creates when you try to block the ads for longer than 30 days, it appears that you can successfully create a cookie that doesn't expire for five years (even though the text is hard-coded to say "30 days" on the page). If you try a value too high (such as 999999), the cookie expires within 24 hours, which prevents it from blocking the ads.

By: fooljay

fooljay — Mon, 04 Jun 2001 10:13:42 -0800

Sorry about the BR business. That's weird... Rodii, I had the same experience as you. MyFamily.com uses them, and I kept rejecting X10's cookie, but that meant that upon every single page load I got the *(@^#$ popup ad. I still say you should be able to use the hosts file in conjunction with a forged cookie and make the popup and the ad never show up again. Hmmm, I wonder though if you have to be running a webserver for that...

By: Pinwiz

Pinwiz — Mon, 04 Jun 2001 10:30:01 -0800

Interesting. I'm glad that they gave us the option to shut off the ads, and it made me want to visit their site. Alas, I don't have an RCA output for my computer player (software DVD decoder) so I can't use it. I wish I could, since I'd love to broadcast my DivX movies to the TV.

By: Skot

Skot — Mon, 04 Jun 2001 13:06:29 -0800

This thread gets a mention in today's Moneybox column at Slate.

By: crunchland

crunchland — Mon, 04 Jun 2001 13:38:02 -0800

From I've read, while the X10 camera is apparently a great little device, purchasing one means you will get spammed with emails, several times a day. Companies with marketing tactics like this don't deserve to be in business.

By: harmful

harmful — Mon, 04 Jun 2001 14:46:14 -0800

...you will get spammed with emails, several times a day. I suppose that their marketing tactics could have gotten worse since I ordered one of their kits a couple of years ago. At the time, though, I was able to dump their mail — one a day at most — into its own folder with a simple filter rule; when I got tired of that, a simple unsubscribe request stopped all their mail.

By: fooljay

fooljay — Mon, 04 Jun 2001 14:55:18 -0800

Re: the Slate post mention: Would the real Fray, please stand up? Embrace and extend, I guess...

By: rodii

rodii — Mon, 04 Jun 2001 15:29:31 -0800

Both Frays have been around for about the same length of time, I seem to recall from an earlier MeFi thread.

By: matt324

matt324 — Wed, 06 Jun 2001 06:57:05 -0800

<plug>Well I've solved my pop-up/under window problems. I downloaded the fabulous freeware NoPops. It comes preloaded with the most common popup window names, and you can add your own. It also works for non-web windows like IM's new popup. </plug>. BTW is anyone offended by the way x10 always shows a pretty woman along with the xcam. It seems they're blatantly marketing the device to voyeurs.

By: rcade

rcade — Wed, 06 Jun 2001 07:04:05 -0800

I was thinking the same thing. Those X10 ads are the stuff hidden-camera arrest news stories are made of.