Pop-up Windows

[toods]

I am a long-time user of Proxomitron and have just discovered Bfilter. I have been using it for a few days now and I am very imopressed - very few ads. are getting through on the pages that I visit.

My question here relates to popups. I use the site www.zephyr.com to see if popups are blocked. With my current Proomitron filter set all but one of the popup typs are filtered, but with Bfilter quite a few still get through. Can the Bfilter filtering sytem be modified to stop more of these popups?.

Kind regards,

Bill

[jart]

My personal opinion is that it's better to let the browser block popups. You are not going to block them better than a browser can do it.
However, we have an external filter that blocks popups among other things. Go to Tray Icon -> Configuration -> Filters and enable it there.

[toods]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

I had in fact got the 4 HTML filters enabled when I went to the TEST site.

I am using Firefox 1.0.7 as browser.

I agree with your approach of not writiing lots of specific filters, but i just wondered if any of the present filters could be modified to 'catch' the remaining popups. I am not skilled enough in this to be able to work on the filters myself.

Many thanks,

Bill.

[jart]

If even a browser can't handle a particular type of a popup, it means there is no way to block it without risking blocking legitimate ones. Take for example popups coming from flash files. It happens like this: the flash plugin tells the browser to open a new window. The browser has no idea if the request is legitimate (user has clicked something in the flash file) or not.

[toods]

Thank you, I understand.

It's not a big problem because I have only encoutered one ad. appearing on a page since I started using Bfilter. That was on one of the Yahoo Formula One sports pages.

Thanks again.

Bill

[tBB]

toods Wrote:I am a long-time user of Proxomitron and have just discovered Bfilter. I have been using it for a few days now and I am very imopressed - very few ads. are getting through on the pages that I visit.

My question here relates to popups. I use the site www.zephyr.com to see if popups are blocked. With my current Proomitron filter set all but one of the popup typs are filtered, but with Bfilter quite a few still get through. Can the Bfilter filtering sytem be modified to stop more of these popups?.

Kind regards,

Bill

You don't mean by any chance http://www.kephyr.com/popupkillertest/ because there is no popup test at the address you mentioned.

Let me say a few words to the popups which come thru:

Test 12 opens a layered popup. As of today, no filter external or internal is able to filter these popups (which aren't actually popup's) successfully without usage of a URL based blocklist.

Test 13 is a Flash popup. As the external filters can't know what is inside Flash, this test fails naturally but as BFilter probably filters the Flash ad out anyway, it is not of much relevance. Firefox/IE should however block it.

Test 21 and 22 (and as for IE, tests 26 and 27 as well) aren't popup's at all. I wonder what such test has to do on a popup testpage. Probably they sell some application.

Test 25 is generated by Java. For this the same as for Flash ads applies.

The only test which really fails is Test 23 what wonders me because I can surely remember it passed this test some time ago. I'll look into it.

Regards, tBB

[Oddysey]

Boys and Girls;

jart Wrote:Take for example popups coming from flash files. It happens like this: the flash plugin tells the browser to open a new window. The browser has no idea if the request is legitimate (user has clicked something in the flash file) or not.

Well, that's not quite true, I mean the part where a browser has no idea how legitimate a source of command is. The browser can indeed, at its core, determine exactly how a command was initiated, should the browser's author choose to go that far. The mechanism for this is called 'tracing the chain', and in each method of opening a window, the chain will show a call do a different routine in one or more dll files. That's why it does take a browser to actually decide what's legitimate, and what to toss out.

However, that doesn't address the issue of the user. That person should have the final say-so as to what's legitimate, not the browser's author. (Nor a filter writer, for that matter.) Just because a pop-up is called from a Flash file doesn't automatically make it undesirable (unless it's on my machine, then the file doesn't even get to play!). So even if the browser does know that a Flash file called for the pop-up (a different dll services the Flash file function calls), there's still a wide latitude in deciding what to allow, and what to kill.

tBB Wrote:Test 25 is generated by Java. For this the same as for Flash ads applies.

Note that tBB didn't say Javascript. If it truly is Java, then that's even easier to track down - any such request is handled by the JRM, the Java Runtime Module (or Machine), and is identifiable as such in the chain. But the same decision-making issues are brought forth here, and they've been discussed.

As for a filter in either Prox(o|i) or Bfilter, we're doing nothing more than reading the incoming stream, usually on Port 80, comparing strings of text against locally stored strings, and taking appriate action where needed. Until such time as a "pre-processor" is written (essentially another browser, but without the rendering component), then we're stuck with the non-text portions of our incoming data being unfilterable.

Classify all this as a work-in-progress.


Oddysey