An End to Pop-ups? Advertisers Wince, Then Shrug

InternetNews.Com ^ | November 14, 2003 | Zachary Rodgers

[FreedomPoster]

Here: http://toolbar.google.com/

[JoJo Gunn]

I'd considered it, but I just don't like online installs. If they have a standalone installer, I didn't see the link.

[boycott]

I don't know for certain but I believe that a lot of these slimey Internet marketers have found a way to work around the google toolbar. I've got it and I am starting to get lots of popups again.

Ad-aware6 is garbage. I pick up a lot of unwanted trash every time I do an Ad-aware scan. I have to do a virus scan after every time I use it.

I wish Microsoft would put blockers in their browser. Otherwise, I'll be looking for an alternative browser.

[JoJo Gunn]

Looks like I'll have to eat my words. The link you posted is different than what I saw a while back. Sure enough I clicked on the link to download the toolbar, and I got the box giving me a choice to save it. Haven't installed it yet....

[Psycho_Bunny]

Lol....My IE configuration blocked it.

[carlson]

'Cookies' are for monsters!

[Crispy]

Been using Firebird since it was Phoenix 0.3. Greatest browser ever!

[Crispy]

The difference between regular mozilla and firebird, is firebird is has a faster UI and less bloat. It does not include an email client, chat client or anything else. It is just a straight browser. It had tabbed browsing before Mozilla and has all the great features like popup blocking. You can also put the whole toolbars and menus on one line. Not sure if you can do that with Mozilla these days or not.
check it out.

[freebilly]

Firebird..., built for Speed!

[stuck_in_new_orleans]

I tried to download Firebird, and it wont load onto my computer for some reason. I downloaded 1.5 and it works fine (but it does slow down my computer)

Ever heard of probs with firebird and windows XP?

[Timesink]

Does that mean we can go back to checking drudge?

There are plenty of programs out there that block ALL ads, not merely popups. (Well, they're 90-95% effective.) I have it set to block all Drudge ads until he stops the popunders. He can put fifteen ads on his actual page for all I care, but until he stops running ads that take longer to load and render than the entire content of his actual page, I'm blocking them all.

[claudiustg]

Safari on the Mac, no popups, and its very fast and clean. Life's too short to spend it doing Windows.

[Timesink]

I would never but any product, no matter how useful, from an uninvited popup ad. Period. End of discussion.

Unfortunately, your outlook on these sorts of ads (which I agree with) only hurts the advertisers if every single other living human hates them as much as you do. The problem is they don't. These sorts of ads cost next to nothing to serve up, so even the tiniest response makes it worthwhile for the company.

This is why the amount of spam just keeps on growing even though 99.99% of the people getting it are enraged by it. The cost is almost literally ZERO to send; anyone with a broadband connection can become a spammer. (And if you want to be ultra sleazy, you can just use one of those five zillion AOL disks you get every month, sign up for the "45 day free trial" using a fake name and address, send your spam and then never access the account again. Then your cost is truly literally zero.)

Generally, a *cough* "legit" spammer will only charge you about $100 or so to shoot out your ad to several million different email addresses. At that price, you make a profit if only four or five people actually respond and buy your junk. (And out of several million people, you will always be able to find four or five who dumb enough to fall for your pitch.) If your spam goes to 3,000,000 people, five hits is a 0.000166% response rate. There's no other form of advertising on earth that can reach so many people for so little cost and guarantee you a profit on so few responses.

This is why spam is destined to get worse than it already is, much MUCH worse, to the point where it will start having a serious effect on the ability of legitimate internet traffic of all sorts - email, web pages, audio streams, everything - to get through ... because you'll never be able to eliminate from the gene pool that 0.000166% of the population that makes spam worth it for sleazy companies. Spam already makes up anywhere from 60-70% of all email; the estimates I've seen say it'll probably grow big enough to start causing serious slowdowns all over the net by next summer.

[TheMole]

The Google Toolbar indeed rules. If you need to let a pop-up through for some reason, you can just hold down the Ctrl key while accessing that particular site.

[PokeyJoe]

yeah, I just sign up using an email from my "favorite democrat of the month" club. =) It never hurts to embelish their accomplishments. =)

[Brett66]

Well I did some digging and discovered this forum:

Spywareinfo

They suggested getting Hijackthis

Downloaded and ran it, it gives a list,after scanning your system, of suspicious executables and registry hacks which affect IE's toolbar,homepage, etc. and you can check off the suspicious entries to delete them. The trick is knowing which entry to delete. After trying a few entries I found these three files in my Windows folder:

1. DNSErr.dll

2. iedll.exe

3. loader.exe

After getting rid of these, I set my start up page back to Yahoo, got rid of the unwanted favorites it kept placing in my bookmarks, and ran spybot. I rebooted my system and restarted IE and lo-and behold, it worked!

IE is now clean. I just wanted to thank MS and the spammer/hijackers for making such a wonderful experience possible. It's the last time they'll get away with screwing up my browser since Mozilla Firebird will be my browser of choice from now on.

I'm still not exactly sure why these hijack writers aren't treated as hackers and hauled off to jail. This insidious scumware behaved just like a virus on my system. The only difference is these hackers have found a vaguely legal way to make money.

[ezo4]

you might want to look at what google is doing with there toolbar. You might also want to get a firewall and research spyware killer apps

[Brett66]

I need to add that the program CWS shredder will give you a report on the suspicious executables, dll's etc. Then you can run hijackthis to scan and delete by check-off box option the suspicious files.

[ryanjb2]

Internet Explorer gets even better. Congrats Microsoft.

[steve-b]

This is why the amount of spam just keeps on growing even though 99.99% of the people getting it are enraged by it

I'm frankly surprised that somebody hasn't snapped and tracked down and murdered a spammer. When you offend millions of people day after day, a few of them are going to be six sigmas below the mean in self-control....