July 11, 2001

6:57 AM

I am really, really, really tired of the popups for the Tiny Wireless Video Camera - the ad that always has a picture of a hot chick and trumpets "FITS ANYWHERE" (in the girls' bathroom, wink nudge.)

If there are any browser coders listening, here's a feature I long for: an anti-bookmark list. Stumble on a page that pops up garbage like the above, add it to your anti-bookmarks list and it's locked out instantly and forever, no forgiveness, no rehabilitation, capital punishment for bad web pages. Yes, yes, I know about junkbuster and webwasherand hosts files. But at this late date crap lockout should be part of the browser the way kill files were (and are) part of newsreaders. Sic 'em, Fang.
posted by jfuller (30 comments total)

But you know James, dog bites aren't always a laughing matter. In fact, tetanus and diphtheria can be transmitted via cannilingus. But dogs can also share warmth, compassion, and giggly moments of tenderness. For more than 12,000 years, Canis familiaris has lived with humans as a hunting companion, protector, object of scorn or adoration, and friend.

Remember that Friends when Chandler grew a moustache? That, was, awesome.
posted by mecawilson at 7:06 AM on July 11, 2001

Tiny! Amazing! Wireless!
posted by waxpancake at 7:06 AM on July 11, 2001

if you want it part of your browser, and you run windows, get netcaptor. it runs rather like opera (although the actual browser component is embedded ie), in that it opens multiple tabs within the one application, and you just write click on one of the tabs, choose 'add to popup captor', and you'll never see that site again.

only downside is that you'll be fed a small strip of their own text advertising at the bottom of the browser. a fair trade off though for those that want control.
posted by titboy at 7:18 AM on July 11, 2001

ActivatorDesk sounds interesting from reading the features list here. It blocks ads, cookies, is a windows skin, etc. There was also an article about it today on Wired.
posted by monkeyboy at 7:32 AM on July 11, 2001

> But you know James, dog bites aren't always a laughing
> matter.

Eh, who's laughing? And who says Fang is a dog? Before I cut off his tail and painted him brown he was an alligator.
posted by jfuller at 7:33 AM on July 11, 2001

>But at this late date crap lockout should be part of the browser the way kill files were (and are) part of newsreaders

It's part of iCab
posted by andrewraff at 7:41 AM on July 11, 2001

I got webwasher set up to filter all of the ads. Weird thing is, and I've been trying to find a solution, if you read yahoo, you still get ads every 5-6th refresh. Anyone know of a solution? I've added the image size filtering and all.

Another annoying problem is bookmarking, some sites automatically setup a bookmark when you enter, how do you prevent that?
posted by tiaka at 7:58 AM on July 11, 2001

You've been going to the bukkake sites, haven't you, tiaka.
posted by dong_resin at 8:10 AM on July 11, 2001

dong_resin, why do you even know what bukkake is?
posted by lia at 8:20 AM on July 11, 2001

Kill X 10 Pop Ups for next 30 days

The company does allow you to set a don't pop up those ads cookie that lasts for 30 days. It would be better if they let you kill them permanently, but it could be worse.
posted by willnot at 8:23 AM on July 11, 2001

How about preventing sites from changing your startup page?
posted by skwm at 8:25 AM on July 11, 2001

Hypothetical: say Microsoft introduces an anti-bookmark feature. Say they make it a right-clickable option: you right-click on a page and, bam!, it's locked out.

Do you think there'd be a controversy about it? I'm curious.
posted by hijinx at 8:25 AM on July 11, 2001

Actually, Netscape 6 was going to have this feature native but somewhere along the lines they dropped it. There was a press release that said the feature was on hiatus. I think AOL realized how easy it would be to just block ad-servers.
posted by skallas at 8:30 AM on July 11, 2001

I use webwasher with Netscape and Linux.

I noticed that occasionally in Yahoo, I saw a banner ad. Then I saw an animated ad in ZOOfootball. This confused me, as they should have been filtered. I right-clicked on one of the ads, and I discovered that they were actually Flash, masquerading as banner ads. Cunning! It looks as if there's an arms race going on between the online ad industry and ad-blocking software. I can't think of an easy way to block Flash ads. I don't want to block all Flash - just the ads.
posted by salmacis at 8:32 AM on July 11, 2001

willnot, that cookie merely shuts the pop-under when you visit sites that show x10 ads. I wish it didn't spawn the pop-under at all.
posted by machaus at 8:35 AM on July 11, 2001

Mozilla can selectively disable popups on a per-site basis. Unfortunately, there's no prefs dialog for it yet, but it is being worked on.
posted by icathing at 8:38 AM on July 11, 2001

Give me iCab, which lets you tell scripts what they can and can't do, on a per-site basis, and has prefs for it now.
posted by darukaru at 8:47 AM on July 11, 2001

"dong_resin, why do you even know what bukkake is?"

Proof of God's love, I thought.
posted by dong_resin at 8:52 AM on July 11, 2001

That text on the X10 site is pretty funny:

Q: Is this form of advertising illegal?
A: Absolutely NOT!!

Hee. Two, count them, two exclamation marks and I think I can hear a foot-stomp in the background.
posted by amanda at 9:08 AM on July 11, 2001

The format for that X10 Cookie is:

http://www.x10.com/home/optout.cgi?DAY=30&PAGE=http://www.x10.com/x10ads1.htm

I think by changing the number of days to an absurdly high number you might be able to block those ads permanently. For instance, http://www.x10.com/home/optout.cgi?DAY=999&PAGE=http://www.x10.com/x10ads1.htm Click Here to test

Is there anyone who can verify if this will work?

However, I too wish the ad didn't ever pop up at all.
posted by Maxor at 9:14 AM on July 11, 2001

Update:
(Sorry I should have put this in the above post)

Clicking the original cookie properties in Internet Explorer gives an expiration of 8/10/2001 for me. After I modified the cookie as above, Internet Explorer reports an expiration date of 4/5/2004.
posted by Maxor at 9:18 AM on July 11, 2001

Do you think there'd be a controversy about it? I'm curious.

Possibly, though not from users. Remember when the first betas of Outlook Express 5 had an exceptionally intuitive spam blocking engine, and Blue Mountain sued because their e-cards ended up in the spam pile?

That's probably why MS won't touch browser content control, beyond the frankly ineffective parental filtering stuff on IE, with the proverbial shitty stick.
posted by holgate at 9:23 AM on July 11, 2001

Opera has a checkbox to eliminate _all_ pop-ups. This of course also eliminates navigational pop-ups that some sites provide, but I've always hated that type of UI so good riddance.

Admuncher does a bang-up job of eliminating pop-ups and ads via a centrally-controlled list, and you can also keep your own homebrew list. Unfortunately it's not working with the new version of Opera on my machine. Definitely install Opera first, then Admuncher.
posted by user92371 at 9:27 AM on July 11, 2001

There's a little utility from Analog X that kills any browser windows you didn't request open. You can configure it for greater sensitivity, as well.
posted by Kikkoman at 9:42 AM on July 11, 2001

The cookie doesn't stop the popups--all it does it let X10 know you've opted out, and they choose to not show you ads for 30 days. They don't care about the expiration date at all, they just look you up in their database. I'm surprised that, since the window opens anyway, they don't just serve some other ad in place of theirs—and for all I know, they do, since I've been getting other "popunders" in exactly the same format lately.

This was all covered rather thoroughly on the earlier thread, including my paranoid theory that this is really a ploy to let X10 set a cookie so they can track you—X10.com, as opposed to X10 technology per se, is more than anything a direct marketing company.
posted by rodii at 9:50 AM on July 11, 2001

How to block pop-ups using the 0.9.2 release of Mozilla (from the Mozilla release notes):
Add this line to the prefs.js file in your Mozilla profile directory while Mozilla is not running:

user_pref("capability.policy.default.Window.open", "noAccess");

If you want to allow specific sites to open new windows, add the line above and also these lines:

user_pref("capability.policy.allowpopups.sites",
"http://www.mozilla.org http://bugzilla.mozilla.org");
user_pref("capability.policy.allowpopups.Window.open", "sameOrigin");
posted by bradlauster at 10:26 AM on July 11, 2001

The pop-under technology is spreading. A lot of "respectable" advertisers are watching what's happening with X10, though.

I've tried the X10 blocker-cookie several times, several different ways, and it never seems to work more than a few days.

Mozilla 0.91 is pretty damn stable, I've been using it a lot more lately. I would rather block popups on specific sites, instead of the other way round, though.
posted by dhartung at 11:12 AM on July 11, 2001

Kill the popup...

Ditto what others said about Opera. Also the hosts file thing. See other thread. All of this information has been clearly laid out here before..
posted by fooljay at 11:23 AM on July 11, 2001

I use the Proxomitron which is very flexible - but a bit techy - I found it better than the rest http://spywaresucks.org/prox/
posted by bregdan at 2:56 PM on July 11, 2001

Quit your bitching and go here.
posted by Spanktacular at 6:55 PM on July 12, 2001