X-10 and like behaviour.

Thu Jul 19 17:51:13 UTC 2001

At 11:19 AM 7/19/01 -0400, Daniel Senie wrote:

>At 08:26 AM 7/19/01, Frank Thomas wrote:
>
>>Yep, they even have an opt out page.  Although I found this from
>>another source and no obvious way to this from the frontend of their site.
>>For what its worth the 'popunders' from x10 are cookie based.  The url
>>below will opt you out for 10years (leap years figured also).  The week
>>or so after they started these annoying things I noticed that x10 was one
>>of the highest traffic sites (I may be wrong) of the week...  I will NEVER
>>buy anything from them...
>>
>>http://www.x10.com/home/optout.cgi?DAY=3652GE=http://www.x10.com/x10ads1.htm
>
>There's an ampersand missing between 3652 and GE in the above. Adding that 
>made it work. For those who prefer less typing, I've added the corrected 
>URL as a link on http://www.noads.org/.
>
>Unlike the link on the X10 page, this will set the cookie for, as Frank 
>noted, 10 years. I expect in time they'll add additional advertisements, 
>and use different cookies. I'll put new ones on the noads.org page as I 
>learn of them.
>-----------------------------------------------------------------
>Daniel Senie                                        dts at senie.com
>Amaranth Networks Inc.                    http://www.amaranth.com

The URL above and on the http://www.noads.org/ web site are incorrect and 
will not install the needed cookie to prevent the X10 ads. It shouldn't be 
"&GE=", it should be "&PAGE=" ... as in:

http://www.x10.com/home/optout.cgi?DAY=3652&PAGE=http://www.x10.com/x10ads1.htm

After receiving the page from X10 informed you that ads have been blocks 
for 30 days (wink, wink), close your brower and look in your cookies.txt 
file (for Netscape, don't know about IE). You should see a line from X10 
that includes "x10removeads.dat".

jas