There are many anti-pop-up techniques out there. The most popular involve a software program that blocks the ad from coming up on your system. That doesn't help the millions of people who don't bother or know how to install the program. Or people using a borrowed PC. This method would involve a small number of users downloading a program that constantly refreshed the URL of a Pop-Up ad. This would use up all the bandwidth of the the ad's web server - essentially bringing it down. The ad would have to be discontinued. Individuals with cable and DSL connections could have the program run automatically when they are not using their PC. User's could submit the URL's of annoying pop-ups to be targeted. The URL wouldn't be "attacked" until several people submitted or through a manual process.-- Thread7, Jun 10 2002 Killing pop-ups is a great idea, but (and I'm certainly no expert) are you sure they have their own URL's? I know my address bar doesn't change when a pop-up appears, so how do you tell the browser to refresh the ad, as opposed to the page that generates it?-- snarfyguy, Jun 10 2002 <Obligatory "use Opera" annotation />-- -alx, Jun 10 2002 Aren't DDOS attacks unethical?-- Jeremi, Jun 10 2002 Not only are they unethical, but many sites now use measures to try and prevent them, so they might not even be effective.-- pottedstu, Jun 10 2002 What you'd end up with is the marketing company making all kinds of money for the page views (<- not sure what you call the pop-under equivilent).-- phoenix, Jun 10 2002 Croissant for using ‘sure fire’ in your idea title, chewed on croissant because you really don't need this tool.-- reensure, Jun 10 2002 This program would be used to DDOS good sites. So no.-- andrewm, Jun 10 2002 As [alx] says - use Opera. But neither this nor your DDOS idea would stop popups created by Flash or via ActiveX controls.-- mcscotland, Jun 11 2002 Wouldn't it be simpler to travel back in time and terminate the child who will eventually grow up to develop the concept of pop-ups?-- waugsqueke, Jun 11 2002 Or to travel back in time and terminate the child who will eventually grow up to be annoyed by them?-- angel, Jun 11 2002 ...this latter suggestion would amount to genocide. The only people I've ever met who are not antagonistic toward pop up ads are the people who sell them, and the people who believe statistics about effectiveness given to them by the people who sell them.
---v-- agentv, Jun 19 2002 No I don't (but then I would say that, wouldn't I?). Pop-ups are annoying, sure; often they're extremely annoying, but they're adverts - they're a means of paying for something which would otherwise have to be paid for some other way. I don't like the ads on commercial TV, but I appreciate that if they weren't there, I'd have to pay to watch the programmes. The ads on the IBD are a bit annoying as well, but I'd prefer to have them on there than pay for the service.-- angel, Jun 19 2002 No, it would definately cause the advertiser to loose interest in doing pop-ups even if I dont actually beleive you're going to be 'bringing any servers down'-- Real Estate, Jan 05 2003 opera-- Alaina_demon_child, Jan 06 2003 In addition to whate everyone else said, if you DDOS a popup ad, you'll be DDOS-ing all the people who won't be able to load the sites they actually want because the sites are structured in such a way that the popup ad has to load first.
Plus, there are a lot more popup ads than there are people willing to spend time and bandwidth DDOS-ing them, because popups generate revenue for someone, while DDOS-ing is a loss all around.
Much easier to just use Mozilla and configure it to ignore popups.-- f1r3br4nd, Feb 23 2005 random, halfbakery