Cardhouse Weblog apr 2001.

2001apr25. Don’t know if you’ve been smacked in the face with this pop-up lately. Apparently it’s fooling the entire world. ... .

Sure, pop-ups, we’ve seen ’em before. But this one, to a lot of people, probably looks like a real gosh-darn message from their very own pc, especially in this surreptitious format. Fine, I figured, just find out where it’s coming from, and put the server in my ban list (explained below). Unfortunately it was on a site with five thousand different advertisements, so it took me awhile to pluck the bad boy from the bunch. It looks like this:

blah blah href='http://ad-adex3.flycast.com/server/
rmclick/qpV9AAAAAAC0dQEDAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
BAAAABAAAAFdRUGQAAAAA/$HCLICKURL$http://www.colonize.
com/flycast5.php3?aid=f1' target='_top' blah blah
blah src='http://a1.g.akamai.net/7/1/2924/0/jeeves.
flycast.com/rich/27/04/50427316/onemessageblink.gif'
border='0' height='60' width='468' blah blah

It kind of makes me dizzy. Akamai, Flycast, Colonize, all friendly friends. I haven’t really been keeping up with all the mergers in the execrable online advertising world. Anyway, if you get snookered and click on that link, it throws you over to colonize.com, where they've got an infinite amount of questions for you. It starts out with this nice little certificate. ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN DOLLAR SPREE?!??! NOW HOW MUCH WOULD YOU PAY? Anyway, I punched their own email address into the email field and was whisked away to a telemarketer’s wet dream. Pages upon pages of check boxes and radio ads – do you want to consolidate your debts? How much did you make last year? How about a free Dr. Seuss rectal thermometer? Maxim magazine – always a crowd pleaser. I couldn’t keep up with all of the questions so I signed up for everything.

Colonize.com claims they “deliver over 250 million opt-in emails every month!” Yep, that’s right, every month the entire population of the United States wants more spam sent to them. I suppose if you try every trick in the book (“sign up a friend!”), you get big numbers.

Enough of this nonsense. For a large number of you, here is a quick-and-painless way to get rid of this asinine pop-up ad.

If you’re on a PC, edit a file in your windows/desktop called “hosts.”If there’s already text there, add this line. If not, just go ahead and type it anyway.

254.0.0.0 ad-adex3.flycast.com
[if this doesn’t work try 127.0.0.0]

save the file.

That’s it. For more information, and for a list of more ad servers to ban, go here.

Oh, sometimes, instead of the “message waiting” pop-up, you get this pop-up. “The service that prevents junk mail” – just give us your email address and we'll send you tons of crap and enter you in a contest. Delightful.