Its probably not a big deal, and if selling bits on the wire makes money
"the more the merrier" might be a catch-cry but I wondered if there was
a NANOG dimension to these bloody irritating X-10 popups that curse me
more and more.
Is there some well understood non-edge solution to this kind of crap
or do we all wind up rolling our own?
-George
Reminds me a lot of the early days of fighting spam...though
a ban on popups has already been mentioned in the US Congress.
> Its probably not a big deal, and if selling bits on the wire makes money
> "the more the merrier" might be a catch-cry but I wondered if there was
> a NANOG dimension to these bloody irritating X-10 popups that curse me
> more and more.
>
> Is there some well understood non-edge solution to this kind of crap
> or do we all wind up rolling our own?Reminds me a lot of the early days of fighting spam...though
a ban on popups has already been mentioned in the US Congress.
Yep, they even have an opt out page. Although I found this from
another source and no obvious way to this from the frontend of their site.
For what its worth the 'popunders' from x10 are cookie based. The url
below will opt you out for 10years (leap years figured also). The week
or so after they started these annoying things I noticed that x10 was one
of the highest traffic sites (I may be wrong) of the week... I will NEVER
buy anything from them...
http://www.x10.com/home/optout.cgi?DAY=3652GE=http://www.x10.com/x10ads1.htm
Thanks
Frank
X10 offers an opt-out cookie, but the usual issues of scaling apply
when everyone and their brother start doing popups (opt-out from
hundreds of web sites? Sure, whatever.)
There are a few windows programs that claim to block popups. X10 even
recommends them for people who don't want to get their ads, which
surprised me since it pretty much admits that they know they're
harassing people to the point of installing special software just to
get some X10 ad relief. Seems like a poor way to get name recognition
to me ("X10? Oh yeah... they do those really annoying ads, and made
me buy special software just to be rid of them. Ooh, I think I'll buy
something from them posthaste!").
I just did:
echo "127.0.0.1 ads.x10.com" >> /etc/hosts
which solves half of the problem (I get an empty popup).
David
[snip]
There are a few windows programs that claim to block popups. X10 even
recommends them for people who don't want to get their ads, which
surprised me since it pretty much admits that they know they're
harassing people to the point of installing special software just to
get some X10 ad relief. Seems like a poor way to get name recognition
to me ("X10? Oh yeah... they do those really annoying ads, and made
me buy special software just to be rid of them. Ooh, I think I'll buy
something from them posthaste!").
[snip]
Just turn off javascript and you will find browsing nirvana.
That was my original solution, but alas, these days enough sites use
javascript for basic functionality that turning it off renders a good
portion of the web unusable.
David
Its probably not a big deal, and if selling bits on the wire makes money
"the more the merrier" might be a catch-cry but I wondered if there was
a NANOG dimension to these bloody irritating X-10 popups that curse me
more and more.
This link .should. disable them. Lasts for a month. Easily found on X10's
site.
http://www.x10.com/home/optout.cgi?DAY=30&PAGE=http://www.x10.com/x10ads1.htm
Jamie
There's an ampersand missing between 3652 and GE in the above. Adding that made it work. For those who prefer less typing, I've added the corrected URL as a link on http://www.noads.org/.
Unlike the link on the X10 page, this will set the cookie for, as Frank noted, 10 years. I expect in time they'll add additional advertisements, and use different cookies. I'll put new ones on the noads.org page as I learn of them.
David Shaw wrote:
> Just turn off javascript and you will find browsing nirvana.
That was my original solution, but alas, these days enough sites use
javascript for basic functionality that turning it off renders a good
portion of the web unusable.
I've never seen the pop-ups. I browse without javascript or images.
I'm only interested in content.
The mistake in your message is "good" portion of the web. For those of
us interested in content, we find nothing missing.
On those rare occasions where javascript provides useful functionality,
and I've personally examined the page source, I turn on javascript and
reload. For the security conscious, javascript is unconscionable.
There are a few windows programs that claim to block popups. X10 even
I have been using the free Adextinguisher on windows at
http://adext.magenet.net/ for quite some time. No X-10 here, or any other
ads for that matter.
Regards,
James
The URL above and on the http://www.noads.org/ web site are incorrect and will not install the needed cookie to prevent the X10 ads. It shouldn't be "&GE=", it should be "&PAGE=" ... as in:
http://www.x10.com/home/optout.cgi?DAY=3652&PAGE=http://www.x10.com/x10ads1.htm
After receiving the page from X10 informed you that ads have been blocks for 30 days (wink, wink), close your brower and look in your cookies.txt file (for Netscape, don't know about IE). You should see a line from X10 that includes "x10removeads.dat".
jas
I think we can safely let each person choose for themselves what part
of the web they find useful, and what security precautions they are
taking. Your needs and precautions are likely not mine.
Turning off javascript, just like carefully written mailbox filters
against spam, does indeed address the symptom but doesn't solve the
problem.
David
Thanks for the fix.
Actually, what I found is that the PAGE= thing seems to be more concerned with where to take you after you click on the link. When I had it as GE=, the cookie still got properly created, but you wound up on a dummy page.
To experiment further with this, I added a new link at the bottom of the noads.org page which just says "test". This runs you through the optout.cgi, then lands you on another page at noads.org which tells you all was completed. I'll probably update the main link to this thing to do that, and users won't ever see an X10 page in the whole proces. Those who write silly CGI...
This isn't quite the universal solution you're looking for, but my
method is to load an x10.com zone on our nameservers, with a wildcard
A record pointing to loopback. Stops all x10 ads dead. IANAI however,
so it's not nearly the headache it would be were a major ISP/NSP to choose
this method 
-Matt