Ad's that try to "download"
Sep 17, 2002 at 6:58 AM Thread Starter Post #1 of 15

TimSchirmer

Repelling digital infidels. (Would that be called the Digifadah?)
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I've recently become extremely annoyed with junkware... my computer asks "do you wish to download blah blah blah"

I always click no...


But seriously... arent there laws against this type of thing? What's next... walking down the street and have people try to force advertisments into my pockets?

I really think it is getting out of hand.
 
Sep 17, 2002 at 11:13 AM Post #2 of 15
Have you ever been to New York City?
wink.gif
 
Sep 17, 2002 at 2:20 PM Post #4 of 15
No, it is common, the lying whores are everywhere.

I've just enjoyed flaming the people at Ascentive, makers of those fake "speed up your internet connection" things that try to look like a Windows alert (except that it appears in a web banner... funny place for a windows alert). They didn't send me spam, they just have an affiliate program that pays anyone who send me spam 50% of the price if I go to Ascentive and buy something.

On the other hand, this kind of behavior gave rise to one of my favorite internet phrases, a quote from Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka:

"passed around like Sam Jain in a turkish bathhouse"

Someday someone will kill a spammer. I really think it will happen.

(got to link to this: Somethingawful.com on the Bonzi Buddy)
http://www.somethingawful.com/article.php?id=403
 
Sep 17, 2002 at 3:32 PM Post #5 of 15
i recommend this:
http://www.schooner.com/~loverso/no-ads/

takes a slight bit of knowledge to get to work if you're behind a proxy/firewall with ie6, but i install this on all of my friend's computers without problem. it is totally awesome. i use it at work with mozilla and i haven't seen a banner (or popup) in months.

i recommend opening it with wordpad instead of notepad so that it is formatted correctly. make sure you read it the instructions.
 
Sep 17, 2002 at 4:22 PM Post #6 of 15
what amazes me is how much spam is out there desite how obviously futile the whole thing is! I'm never going to click on a pop-up window, I'm not going to be fooled into thinking that I'll receive a prize for being the 1,512,814th person to go to a website, I don't want to know where my old classmates are, so why the ***** do they keep asking me? the sheer pointlessness of it is mind-boggling!
 
Sep 17, 2002 at 4:50 PM Post #7 of 15
^ Internet and email spam is so cheap that they only need a ridiculously low click through rate for the ad to be worthwhile. I'm talking a tiny fraction of a percent. So, if one person in 999,999 clicks, the ad paid for itself.

They study this crap and already have ROIs worked out for each ad. There are formulas to work that stuff out in Marketing textbooks and ****.

Same garbage drives direct mail advertising, they only need a fraction of the recipients to be interested and a fraction of those interested to follow through.

[edit]

Throw enough poop at a wall and some of it will...
 
Sep 17, 2002 at 7:29 PM Post #8 of 15
Spam email's click rate is something like .0025%. That's like 1 in 10,000,000. But that's not the good news, the good news is that a few years ago that rate was more like 1 in 1,000,000. With a sharp decline like that, it won't be long before it is simply compleatly pointless to send out spam because you will never pay for even the time it took to write the email message.

What really needs to happen is that a big ISP like AOL or MSN needs to ship its software with ad-blocking built-in (and more importantly enabled by default). People would flock to that service because there would be fewer to no ads, and all of a sudden a good portion of the internet advertising buisness is gone. This would solve the major problem with most of these ad-blocking freeware things because you would then have a well funded team to make sure that the filter is up-to-date.
 
Sep 17, 2002 at 7:32 PM Post #9 of 15
At least Spam doesn't cost you money.

I think the worst of the intrusive advertising business is unsolicited faxes. Despite responding to every one with a "remove" request ( it really pisses me off that I'm paying an employee to do this) our company fax machine still receives 3 to 8 junk faxes a day. Not only does it waste paper ( which I have to pay for) but it's wearing out and clogging my fax machine. Sometimes I'll get 5 or 6 identical junk faxes in a month. If I didn't want my heating ducts cleaned last Thursday, it's doubtful I'll want them cleaned today.

It would be nice for a group of companies to band together, get legal representation, and force junk faxers out of business.
 
Sep 17, 2002 at 7:39 PM Post #10 of 15
Just get a real browser--

www.opera.com

it works on Windows based platforms and Linux (got it running on my W98/Mandrake 8.2 dual boot as we speak.)

Opera has a pop-up killer built in, as well as a download manager/resumer, and it runs circles around Netscape and Internet Explorer.

Give it a try, you just might like it.
 
Sep 17, 2002 at 7:51 PM Post #11 of 15
*cough* mozilla *cough*
smily_headphones1.gif
 
Sep 17, 2002 at 10:00 PM Post #12 of 15
aeberbach wrote:
Quote:

Someday someone will kill a spammer. I really think it will happen.


To avoid building up too much frustration and being the first spamkiller I rely of SpamCop, www.spamcop.net. It is a tracking and reporting faciltity, you paste the message source of the spam into a window and SpamCop locates the origin of the spam (where the address nearly always is faked). Then it sends a report to the ISP. I don't know how effective, or totally ineffictive this is. Hope that serious ISP's cut off the spammers, but there are a number that doesn't seem to care.

I use an ad and cookie filter called WebWasher. It removes most ads on internet sites, can stop banners and cookies. The problem with such programs is that they occasionaly interfere with operations you want to do. May need some tweaking to get maximum protections without problems, but it easy to exit it if you suspect it causes problems with a site. It is free for personal use.
If you have a slow connection, you save some bandwidth and time because ad downloads are refused.
 
Sep 17, 2002 at 10:58 PM Post #13 of 15
Quote:

Originally posted by mbriant
At least Spam doesn't cost you money.

I think the worst of the intrusive advertising business is unsolicited faxes. Despite responding to every one with a "remove" request ( it really pisses me off that I'm paying an employee to do this) our company fax machine still receives 3 to 8 junk faxes a day. Not only does it waste paper ( which I have to pay for) but it's wearing out and clogging my fax machine. Sometimes I'll get 5 or 6 identical junk faxes in a month. If I didn't want my heating ducts cleaned last Thursday, it's doubtful I'll want them cleaned today.

It would be nice for a group of companies to band together, get legal representation, and force junk faxers out of business.


Spam most definitely does cost you money. With email, all that extra traffic adds up to higher rates.
 
Sep 17, 2002 at 11:17 PM Post #15 of 15
Quote:

Originally posted by mbriant
At least Spam doesn't cost you money.

I think the worst of the intrusive advertising business is unsolicited faxes. Despite responding to every one with a "remove" request ( it really pisses me off that I'm paying an employee to do this) our company fax machine still receives 3 to 8 junk faxes a day. Not only does it waste paper ( which I have to pay for) but it's wearing out and clogging my fax machine. Sometimes I'll get 5 or 6 identical junk faxes in a month. If I didn't want my heating ducts cleaned last Thursday, it's doubtful I'll want them cleaned today.

It would be nice for a group of companies to band together, get legal representation, and force junk faxers out of business.


Here's the way to get rid of them. On a Friday after closing hours, take a legal sized piece of paper, write a remove request on it using as many explitives as you feel are really nessisary. Start the fax to their number, and as soon as the paper starts coming out of the fax quickly tape it into a loop. This will keep the same fax going over and over and over. Eventually it it will shut down, but I've had them go for as many as 100 pages!

If it is a long distance call, get one of those cheap 300min phone cards and use it. After doing this a few times my father was junk-fax-free for over three months.

Now what he does is use a computer to recieve incoming faxes. This way he can print out what he wants and delete the rest. It takes only a min or so to sort through them.

Oh, and when you respond to any spammer's "remove" thing, you are just setting yourself up for pain. Even if they do remove you from that list, they will just add you to another one and sell your fax number for a high price because you obviously read the faxes that come in.
 

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