Friday, November 10, 2006

It's an arms race out there

Dang.

Web ads annoy me: my brain can't handle the flickering crap when I'm trying to read something. So for years now I have been very happily using proxys and (more recently) Firefox's Adblock Plus extension to eliminate them. (adblockplus.org/)

But I was wondering how long this would actually be viable, as it 's simple for the admeisters to just encrypt or obfuscate URLs so pattern-matching blockers won't find them. Well, I just stumbled across a few in the wild. (They really stand out because I see basically zero ads)

tkqlhce.com/click-1587303-10361858
lduhtrp.net/image-1587303-10366510
dpbolvw.net/click-1587303-8259915
awltovhc.com/image-1587303-8259915

I'm guessing 1587303 codes the source webpage, so no point matching that.
Spammers seem to be using the random-domain trick as well. Someone's making it way too easy to register domains!

Next countermeasure in the spam/ad wars: calculate bigram likelihood of a given domain and filter out the low-ranking ones?
Or this kind of idea: www.halfbakery.com/idea/Web...20Cropper



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