[gabbo]

I'm sorry to go on like this but I wonder if you've 'groked' what I'm thinking.

Originally Posted by Disk_Contented

There's nothing simplistic about it.
Your programs actions will be on a servers logs somewhere. Along with the users IP and anything else that can be grabbed. Invisible it is not.
"Oh, bandwidth *is* a consideration".
Nope. mail bots cost nothing. I can spam all day long and It costs me no more than my usual subscription to my ISP. I can use other servers as spam relays. It would add nothing to my costs. Bear in mind that it is third parties that do the spamming.
"It won't be hackable, you can't hack something that does no more than fetch files from port 80 without executing them. Watch out for the length of any given link (buffer overflow) and you're fine."

Really? Don't be so sure of yourself.

The whole idea is that the advertiser's logs show an apparently normal browser, apparently browsing the site, but with no purchase or signup for the reason that there's no user viewing the site.

It's not the mail bots I'm after, I've perhaps been too blurry in what I've said. I'm after the pop-up web hosts that irritate the hell out of me when I'm browsing. Those horrible undelined green things that bring up adverts whenever your cursor goes near them for a start.


As for being invulnerable to hacking, I'm not that sure of myself, if I was writing something that provided any sort of complex response to input then I wouldn't trust my coding any further than I could spit into a force 10. However, for something that just fishes out any URL's from a file, and fetches the referenced files via http, there isn't room for vulnerabilities.

Keep an eye on the length of the links and the length of the files and you're safe.


Standard browser based malware is a threat regardless of what's already installed. My app being present or not wouldn't increase or decrease the vulnerability to 'drive by' installs.

Originally Posted by Disk_Contented

"most users aren't bright enough for sufficient would-be victims to adopt it"
You alienate every average joe on the net with that comment.

I was in a rather bad mood at that point, for personal reasons. I shouldn't have been making posts of any sort if truth be known.

Originally Posted by Disk_Contented

Given the choice, most people would rather not go near the stuff in the first place.
Why download the stuff yourself and use your own bandwidth that you pay for and may be metered, when you can block it full stop. The net result is the same? Nobody gets a paid click through.

I meant it when I said that *I* personally don't need to worry about a few KB here or there. Admittedly I'm not considering the minority who run so close to their limits that it does matter. My thinking is just that with standard popup blockers the advertisers can see what's going on, and they don't pay for any bandwidth. With a >> dev/nul diversion however, the hosts won't be able to see the difference and they will be forking out on the bandwidth. Their statistics will also show a much lower 'success' rate which would reduce their motivation to continue.

Sadly, it's not really something I could persuade enough people to use. It's true that most just want the popups blocked from their machine, they don't care about general social benefit, so I wouldn't really stand much chance of persuading a significant proportion to use my toy.

Pure daydream. Writing purely for own satisfaction really. :-(

I've now tried it out, it does sort of work, it spiders hell out of any site that appears as a popup without me seeing *any* cost beyond slight wasted bandwidth.