CDR: Re: Ho to KICK OUT Junkbusters users

[Eric Murray]

On Sun, Oct 29, 2000 at 10:42:46AM -0800, Alan Olsen wrote:
> 
> At 09:31 AM 10/28/00 -0700, Tim May wrote:
> >At 11:19 AM -0500 10/28/00, Igor Chudov wrote:
> >>I have a website (www.algebra.com) that makes money from banners. I have
> >>a suspicion that a small percentage of my users uses Junkbusters proxy
> >>in order to avoid seeing my banners.
> >>
> >>I do not want to serve such users at all and I do not want them to use
> >>my bandwidth.
> >>
> >>Is there any way to detect a user of Junkbusters in a CGI/mod_perl script?
> >
> >Your presumably-misspelled subject line, "Ho to KICK OUT Junkbusters 
> >users," seems ironically appropriate.
> >
> >Though some prefer the spelling "Hoe."
> 
> >As for finding ways to see who is avoiding looking at yoiur 
> >advertisements, most of the ad filtering is done at the recipient's 
> >machine, right? Gonna be hard for you to reach into their machines to see 
> >if they're running ad busters in a local script.
> 
> Actually you can. Junkbusters mucks with the http headers for client type.


Other filtering proxies don't mess with the Agent line, or let
you send whatever you want there ("Hi!  I'm running X10 on MVS!").  

I don't think that a high percentage of people use filtering proxies.
You could make a rough guess by analyzing your log files to see which
users are reading the content pages and not requesting the ads...
but that's only possible if you're serving the ads yourself.
You'd have to account for people who end the session early, therefore
don't request the ads.

If many sites implement anti-filtering methods, the ad filter writers
will figure out a way to get around it.  I'd do it.  It'd be
pretty easy- simply request the ads but don't send them to the browser.
I suppose that you could then add 1x1 stealth gifs to the ads to see
if the ads are getting to the browser, but then I'd just code the filter
to parse the HTML stream and request those .gifs.... you can't win.

Besides, if the market for web ads is a free market, the number of
people who filter out ads is already factored into the price
that you're getting.  It's probably about $1.25 a month. :-)

-- 
  Eric Murray           Consulting Security Architect         SecureDesign LLC
  http://www.securedesignllc.com                            PGP keyid:E03F65E5