This became a bit more interesting yesterday. I had the Earthlink webmail
page open and observed that there was a lot of data activity taking place. I
quickly unlugged the telephone cord and a couple of panels appeared at the top
and right of the screen saying that it was unable to connect to
blah.blah.blah.googleads.com.
Aha! I added that root URL to the hosts file this morning and have yet to
see any activity. My guess here is that when the webpage contacts Google,
Googleads.com sends down a URL for my laptop to contact. Putting a block on
that might be the best overall way to handle this.
Now I have a question: Anyone here know of a utility that will record the
URLs that our machines are downloading from, or perhaps a utility that records
the URLs that the hosts file blocks?
>
> It was an interesting investigation. I tried using the same approach
> with the annoying ads on the right side of Facebook pages, but it didn't work.
>
>>
>>Good!
>>
>>> I found the culprit in the Earthlink webmail page, thanks to a
>>>burp in viewing yesterday evening. There are two instances where the
>>>HTML code is calling "Google_ad" for the top banner, left tower, and
>>>right tower:
>>>
>>> /wam/brand/earthlink/google_ad_top_banner.jsp
>>>
>>> and
>>>
>>> /wam/brand/earthlink/google_ad_left_tower.jsp
>>>
>>> and
>>>
>>> /wam/brand/earthlink/google_ad_right_tower.jsp
>>>
>>> This is a somewhat innocuous function, the real culprit being
>>>Google_Ads, which is downloading malware that bypasses ad blocking.
>>>Yet another piece of evidence that justifies the efforts in removing
>>>anything related to Google (deGoogleisation) from my machines, the
>>>only exception being Google Earth on the laptop I'm presently using.
>>>
>>> What worries me about this is that the activity indicator for my
>>>dialup dialer showed that my machine was sending data as well as
>>>receiving during these periods of activity. That could very likely
>>>mean that Google was using the pubads.js script as a means of harvesting
>>>data, for which Google has long been suspected.
>>>
>>
>
>Chris
>
>When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro
> - Hunter S. Thompson
Chris
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro
- Hunter S. Thompson
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