Slashback: Walmart and Wiki, Alan Ralsky 119
USB sticks as a security threat. martijnd writes "The BBC follows up on the risks of USB sticks as a threat to business by looking at data theft and virus-spreading-as-from-a-floppy infiltration."
More On Wal-Mart's Wikipedia War. An anonymous reader writes "Past the media coverage of their article 'Wal-marts Wikipedia War', Whitedust has apparently received an interesting email from Mike Krempasky (representing Edelman Public Affairs in Washington, DC). While maintaining that Whitedust has no actual specific issue with Wal-Mart - the article was published on the simple premise that Wikepedia's important neutrality was apparently being compromised - and in the interests of a more balanced argument, Whitedust have published the email in full to their readership along with some other interesting notes."
Mindstorms NXT: Mindstorms Resurrected?. Since the announcement of Mindstorms NXT; many people believe that my earlier article was completely off target. My latest article, Mindstorms NXT: Mindstorms Resurrected?, attempts to complete the analysis. It concludes that Mindstorms NXT does not represent any change of direction for Lego; and unless forced by competition to act otherwise, Lego will continue to market Mindstorms as a niche product line."
Spam King Alan Ralsky NOT Jailed. narzy writes "DailyTech.com is reporting that contrary to reports last week, spam king Alan Ralsky was in fact not picked up by the Feds. Inquires put in to the DoJ and Detroit FBI field office resulted in puzzling dead ends as both agencies had no information as to having Mr. Ralsky in custody. Early Monday morning the original source recanted the story of Mr. Ralsky's arrest."
LiveJournal Explains Ban on Ad-Blocking Software. An anonymous user writes "LJ Founder, Brad Fitzpatrick, blames the change to the Terms of Service on boilerplate language put into the document by 'some lawyers'." From the article: "This is a pre-announcement that a more user-friendly TOS change is on its way. (After all, we can't even detect that you're even using ad blockers to begin with, so there's no point in us saying you can't. Plus you might not even have control over what's installed on your computer, etc.) So, yeah, sorry: we messed up."
Full Disclosure (Score:5, Informative)
Can't detect ad blockers? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Livejournal Incompetent? (Score:4, Informative)
user didn't download ads, user is using an ad blocker.
AdBlock has a feature to download the ad but not display it.
-:sigma.SB
Flaw in detecting ad blocker (Score:2, Informative)
prisoner locator (Score:3, Informative)
I checked before, and found out that a spammer that I sued Gary Hunziker was recently released. http://www.bop.gov/iloc2/InmateFinderServlet?Tran
It sometimes is a handy web site.
Re:Can't detect ad blockers? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Can't detect ad blockers? (Score:2, Informative)
Well, in my experience, it's the PHBs who do the "how dare they not download our ads. They must be stopped..." and issue the directive of "find me all/how many/etc of the users who block our ads" to the administrators. Having been given somewhat similar tasks, if you don't find that fun, maybe you shouldn't be an adminstrator of a high traffic web site. Analyzing that sort of stuff is par for the course.
Re:Poor Mindstorms (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Poor Mindstorms (Score:3, Informative)
Regards,
Ross
Try it. Just check the html and it should be obvio (Score:3, Informative)
Thats right. The ads are served from a different server.
What is therefore missing is the link between requests.
IF you served your own ads you could indeed build in some system that checks wether the ad you inserted into the page is being downloaded. You would have to start a session for each user, you would have to write a script around your image server that notes in the session wether the image was retrieved but it is doable.
But how do you do this with ads from a third party?
I serve a page to you with a link to get an image from another server. UNLESS I can communicate with that server I have no way of telling wether you did that.
How it could work.
There are other ways as well, the server could send a list of ads included to the adserver and get a single message back if they all been requested or not. But the idea remains the same, you need communication between the adserver and the page server.
That, to my knowledge isn't in use yet.
Oh and the above "solution" ain't perfect either. Ad blockers that retrieve the ad but don't show it would be unaffected. How do you deal with a slow client who browses to fast for the ads to download? You also end up sending your content and are only able to block the user from getting stuff again within the same session.
More problems then, for now, it seems worth to taggle.
There is one form of ad that bypasses all this. The blocking flash ad. You know those screens you get before you go to the content page with a huge flash ad? Some require you to wait some time but what if the content link is only IN the flash ad.
Just make the link to the content only display after the ad has played. Forced ads. Lovely eh?
I have had to think about this problem before. The writeup above is very simple because I can't be arsed to write it all down again because at the time I came to the realisation that it is hard to sell anti-ad-blocker solutions to people who use IE and don't even know how to block virusses.