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German freemail sites trick Firefox and Chrome users into removing AdBlock

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Re: German freemail sites trick Firefox and Chrome users into removing AdBlock

#21

Post by Trufa »

rjzzleep wrote: post #4

oh web.de easily the most dangerous free mail sites there is. it belongs to 1&1[1] one of the bigger internet companies in germany. it's really odd that no one ever shot them down. they are famous for tricking users into shady 2 year contracts, if they wanted to upgrade their 12 mb mailbox. they also upgraded the freemail to 500mb if and only if you would install their browser toolbar, which would change the mail ser…

I live in Austria now and it is amazing the amount of people who use GMX.

I've been on a crusade to try to make people switch to, well, whatever but not that.

I think it was one of the first ones around here and people got used to it and the status quo, most don't even know or care about how bad they've got it.

Re: German freemail sites trick Firefox and Chrome users into removing AdBlock

#22

Post by belorn »

microtonal wrote: post #7
mironathetin wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Confirmed. I use web.de since 1998 as a spam-box, to keep my real account clean. During the last years they indeed try all tricks (we have a present for you, 3 weeks of free membership blah, blah..). If you leave this page now, the present will expire. There is a way to simply ignore this sh..t. All of it. But I agree that it takes discipline (germans are good at that :o). Gmail, on the other hand, cannot be trusted…

Or googles snooping in your data and selling your profile to everyone who pays. You should really read Google's privacy policy: http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/ So, no, they don't sell your profile. I do agree with your point: if you don't want advertisements. Pay for the service. E.g. Google Apps for domains allows you to disable adds in Google apps. And since you can bring your own domain, you can move to so…

An non-binding policy, how quaint!

http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/contractsprof_blog/2010/08/...

Even if you trusted such things, google will still do targeted ads. If DEA want to find drug users, all they have to do is ask google and they will use users emails to locate them.

Re: German freemail sites trick Firefox and Chrome users into removing AdBlock

#23

Post by leonhandreke »

_quasimodo wrote: post #8
mironathetin wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Confirmed. I use web.de since 1998 as a spam-box, to keep my real account clean. During the last years they indeed try all tricks (we have a present for you, 3 weeks of free membership blah, blah..). If you leave this page now, the present will expire. There is a way to simply ignore this sh..t. All of it. But I agree that it takes discipline (germans are good at that :o). Gmail, on the other hand, cannot be trusted…

Can you recommend a paid european mail service?

As was already said, any webhosting package with email will do. Here is a selection of hosters in Germany that I find have a clean website an pricing structure and therefore feel less cheap and more trustworthy to me.

Hetzner: One of the bigger provider for hosting in Germany. They have their own datacenters in Bavaria. Manitu: Smaller, they also have their own datacenter. schokokeks.org: Small service run by a few techies. I'm sure there are a few of this type, I just happen to know somebody who is very happy with them.

Re: German freemail sites trick Firefox and Chrome users into removing AdBlock

#24

Post by sauerbraten »

Just to clear one thing up: the fake warning message doesn't say the security is "compromised", but rather "limited" or "constrained": http://pda.leo.org/ende/index_de.html#/search=eingeschr%C3%A...

What they pull is still shady, but the text seemed a bit sensationalist at that point.

Re: German freemail sites trick Firefox and Chrome users into removing AdBlock

#25

Post by userbinator »

What I don't get is why something like AdBlock should even be detectable...

Incidentally, I remember reading before that Germany had the largest percentage of users using AdBlock, so it makes sense that the pushback is starting here.

Re: German freemail sites trick Firefox and Chrome users into removing AdBlock

#26

Post by DanBC »

userbinator wrote: post #25

What I don't get is why something like AdBlock should even be detectable... Incidentally, I remember reading before that Germany had the largest percentage of users using AdBlock, so it makes sense that the pushback is starting here.

I don't understand it.

Someone has said that they do not view advertising. They have modified their browser to avoid ads.

A marketer choses to ignore that person's choice and choses to use tricky technical means to ignore that person's wishes in order to show an ad.

How is that in any way beneficial to the product being advertised?

I am ad tolerant (don't run ad blockers etc) but behaviour like that fills me with rage. It is exactly the same kind of attitude that said it is fine to spew email to anyone whether they want it or not.

Marketers need a code of conduct to say that this behaviour is unacceptable.

Re: German freemail sites trick Firefox and Chrome users into removing AdBlock

#28

Post by shimfish »

userbinator wrote: post #25

What I don't get is why something like AdBlock should even be detectable... Incidentally, I remember reading before that Germany had the largest percentage of users using AdBlock, so it makes sense that the pushback is starting here.

I drove myself insane for a morning recently when I couldn't work out why a site of mine that had happily been working for years suddenly stopped displaying some images in the carousel. They were there in the HTML but Chrome reckoned they were zero size. Eventually, it hit me that I should try turning off adblock. Turns out, I had called the imgs containg divs "#ad1", "#ad2". "#ad3", etc were all fine for some reason.

Anyway, the point is that you could probably easily check for adblock by checking the image size of something within a div named "advert".

Re: German freemail sites trick Firefox and Chrome users into removing AdBlock

#30

Post by mediumdeviation »

userbinator wrote: post #25

What I don't get is why something like AdBlock should even be detectable... Incidentally, I remember reading before that Germany had the largest percentage of users using AdBlock, so it makes sense that the pushback is starting here.

Why wouldn't it be detectable? Ad blockers do their job by removing elements from the page, blocking requests to URLs that match those used to serve advertisements, or a combination both, and either one of those are easily detectable by client-side JavaScript.
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