Saturday, October 01, 2005

weird firefox ads -- anacapa.biz

Every so often, I go to a web page and I see a Firefox popup warning. It's always for a url like http://ads.anacapa.biz/pop_code;gid=3,pid=9,bid=103,rid=1847376853. The weird thing is, I can't figure out where they're coming from.

  • I'm running Firefox 1.0.7.
  • I don't have any unusual extensions or greasemonkey scripts loaded.
  • There is nothing unusual in my profile chrome directories.
  • I clean any anacapa.biz cookies that I see set in my browser. Even if cookies were somehow triggering the ads, going to Google search result pages shouldn't pop up anacapa ads.
  • Neither Ad-Aware nor my anti-virus app can find anything unusual on my system.
  • Even worse: no one else appears to have this problem (or, at least, I can't find any mention of it online).

Where are the ads coming from?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Try creating a new Firefox profile and see if the problem remains. Other than that, I don't have a clue.

rotatef said...

Perhaps it's an extension I use. I saved my bookmarks and cookies, deleted my profile, created a new one, and the problem's still there.

I have another profile created, and I don't see the popup warning in that. I don't know why it's acting like this.

decaf said...

Was having an identical problem, started using a proxy and it stopped. Seems like an ISP problem to me - I'm in Pakistan, using cybernet. What about you?

rotatef said...

It was, indeed, the isp (Nexlinx). Sometime in the past couple of months they stopped injecting ads, though.

They used a Porchlight ad server. What happens is that their transparent proxies would hijack the web pages I'd request with my browser, send them to the porchlight box, which would wrap some html around the page, and then redirect that to my browser.

If you use a url sniffer, you can find the server that's sending you the ads. I got around it with a proxy -- it was easier than trying to filter out the ads before they reached my browser.