X-10 and like behaviour.

Thu Jul 19 18:18:09 UTC 2001

At 01:51 PM 7/19/01, John Starta wrote:
>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".

Thanks for the fix.

Actually, what I found is that the PAGE= thing seems to be more concerned 
with where to take you after you click on the link. When I had it as GE=, 
the cookie still got properly created, but you wound up on a dummy page.

To experiment further with this, I added a new link at the bottom of the 
noads.org page which just says "test". This runs you through the 
optout.cgi, then lands you on another page at noads.org which tells you all 
was completed. I'll probably update the main link to this thing to do that, 
and users won't ever see an X10 page in the whole proces. Those who write 
silly CGI...
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Daniel Senie                                        dts at senie.com
Amaranth Networks Inc.                    http://www.amaranth.com