Cypherpunks, I just had an amusing online experience. I checked in on Declan's "Wartime Liberty" news site, which I hadn't visited in for a month or so. It is: http://www.wartimeliberty.com Well, a banner ad began blinking in bright red at about 30 Hz, saying "If this banner ad is blinking, you have won a free prize!" Normally I can ignore these pieces of shit, but this same ad blinked in all of the subsections (encryption, policy, opinion, etc.) I checked. Very annoying. I never click on banner ads, but I decided to do an experiment, just to see what sort of company Declan has established this business relationship (of whatever kind) with. I'll spare you the details. Basically, I kept answering questions about my address and age and suchlike (I fibbed slightly, enough to look plausible but not enough to provide tips for the spam and passphrase harvesting I expect Declan's ad banner company is actually doing). After about four or five such screens, it finally told me to select the kinds of free prizes I wanted. All were of the usual bogus kind, including packets of advertising, discounts on subscriptions to magazines, etc. I clicked on none of them. Then came "da bomb": it asked me for the e-mail names of several other "friends." I left this blank and moved on. It wouldn't accept this, and kept returning to the nag screen demanding e-mail addresses. I left at this point. I guess I won't get my "free prize"! Sob. But the obnoxious blinking red banner ad is still telling me I've won a free prize. So I couldn't even stay on Declan's site, so obnoxious was the blinking banner. Declan, you really should be ashamed of yourself for this. Even if you don't personally choose all of the damned banner ads cluttering up your site, at least have the decency to not let spam harvesters run on your system! (I suspect they already harvested my "interest" as soon as I progressed to the "click to claim your prize" screen near the end. I'll be looking for spam arriving with the fibbed details I provided. My thought is maybe to bounce every one of these messages to Declan. Naw...) --Tim May, Occupied America "They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759.
On Thu, Nov 08, 2001 at 10:28:57PM -0800, Tim May wrote:
I never click on banner ads, but I decided to do an experiment, just to see what sort of company Declan has established this business relationship (of whatever kind) with.
To defray in part the costs of running the site, I use Burst Media (burstmedia.com), an ad agency similar in principle to Doubleclick. I include a small chunk of HTML code at the top of the webpage -- Burst salespeople sell the ads and they run on my and other sites (Burst's commission varies from 30 to 50 percent). I do not review the ads that appear on my site, and Burst adds and deletes advertisers (generally about 50 are cycling through at any one time) from the list without consulting me. News organizations would call this an editorial firewall. Burst does give me the ability to make broad choices, like reject gambling or alcohol ads (I allow them) or pop-up ads (I reject them). I'd do the same with the evil blinking ads that Tim hates, if there was a category I could reject. Fortunately, it's trivial to use ad-blocking software if this bothers you. The online ad business is in the toilet, true, but if I can pay part of the server hosting fee through the ads, I'm inclined to keep doing it. In any case, it's a stretch to say I have "established a business relationship" with an advertiser when I have no idea what ads are appearing -- it's only correct to say I've established a business relationship with Burst. -Declan
participants (2)
-
Declan McCullagh -
Tim May