Winner: Stupidest Pop-up Ever.
As I'm working on a borrowed laptop at the moment, I don't have all my usual favourite goodies and widgets installed to smooth my browsing experience. In particular, there's nothing blocking pop-ups on this copy of IE.
It's actually quite entertaining for a change to see some of the crud that appears unbidden - I usually have the Google Toolbar blocking all the nasties for me. I had no idea that some of the stuff I'm missing is just so completely, insanely, brilliantly stupid.
This one that popped up last night is an all time classic - kind of a non-pop-up pop-up. Irritating simply for the sake of it:
Clearly what's happened here is that the scummy dirtwads behind this thing have figured out my general location from my IP address (not that difficult) and, not being able to offer their particular brand of pyramid scheme north of the 49th, they've coded this 'helpful' little pop-up to apologize for disappointing me.
"Sorry - we can't scam you, you're a foreigner (we're weasels, yes: but we're parochial weasels). But here's an annoying pop-up anyway."
What kind of diseased, mudbrained excuse for a marketer came up with this? I mean what, for feck's sake, is the actual point of doing something like this? Are they completely gob-frothingly stupid?
Let's assume for a moment they have a couple of synapses still firing - they must surely have figured out that a lot of Net users will most likely have a negative response to whatever 'message' they're trotting out.
At the same time, they must presumably be getting some click-through traffic from their U.S. pop-ups, otherwise they wouldn't bother doing them, would they?
(Or would they? If they're thick enough to have created a 'sorry you're a Canuck' pop-up, they're probably thick enough to be spending their money on advertising without any thought to measurement).
But in either case - why the hell would they put together a special pop-up that deliberately showcases their inability to annoy you further by annoying your frigging balls off?
"New from idirectnetwork.com - 100% content free spam-lite. All the irritation, half the bandwidth."
Want something even more annoying than this? I can't even track down the toerags behind this witless bollocks thanks in part to the byzantine wonders of the new improved Whois system, and a little added BS mixed in by the mongers over at Sympatico (my ISP).
Used to be the case that you could go to one of a number of Whois-type sites, all of which would allow you to uncover public info about the owner of a particular domain.
Now, thanks to the lovely new shared registration system model, it appears that you first have to do a Whois search to find out the specific registrar for the domain in question, after which you can have the pleasure of running the exact same search again, at the site of the individual registrar of record. How is this better than the old model?
It gets worse, I'm afraid. Turns out that the Canuckophobic pop-up provider we're looking for registered their domain at Network Solutions. Alas, trying the Whois search at Network Solutions' site brings up this:
The IP address from which you have visited the Network Solutions Registrar WHOIS database is contained within a list of IP addresses that may have failed to abide by Network Solutions' WHOIS policy. Failure to abide by this policy can adversely impact our systems and servers, preventing the processing of other WHOIS requests.
Er...what?! The IP address I have is one assigned by Sympatico when I fire up the DSL connection. You know: Sympatico. As in Bell Sympatico - part of Bell Canada Enterprises.
These guys have been abusing the Whois policy? I seriously doubt it.
And yet this is another lovely example of how Sympatico sucks. And Network Solutions too, for that matter. Something's always broken. Most of the time you can't figure out exactly what it is (and you sure won't find anyone at Sympatico who knows how to fix it; that is, always assuming you can actually get someone there on the phone. They really should have a word with the phone company, you know - I can never get through to talk to anyone. Shocking.) - but you just know it's bust nonetheless. It's a great business model: "Give us yer money, we'll give you muzak on hold."
Sigh.
So do me a favour: if you're reading this (and you don't happen to benefit from the joys of Sympatico's services), could you just run a quick search here for idirectnetwork.com - see if you can find me a phone number or email address so I can let them know they're a shower of tossers. Click below to leave a comment.
Oh, hang on: I've just Googled and come up with abuse@idirectnetwork.com.
Thoughtful of them to provide a mailbox specifically for abuse. It would be just rude of me not to oblige...
It's actually quite entertaining for a change to see some of the crud that appears unbidden - I usually have the Google Toolbar blocking all the nasties for me. I had no idea that some of the stuff I'm missing is just so completely, insanely, brilliantly stupid.
This one that popped up last night is an all time classic - kind of a non-pop-up pop-up. Irritating simply for the sake of it:
Clearly what's happened here is that the scummy dirtwads behind this thing have figured out my general location from my IP address (not that difficult) and, not being able to offer their particular brand of pyramid scheme north of the 49th, they've coded this 'helpful' little pop-up to apologize for disappointing me.
"Sorry - we can't scam you, you're a foreigner (we're weasels, yes: but we're parochial weasels). But here's an annoying pop-up anyway."
What kind of diseased, mudbrained excuse for a marketer came up with this? I mean what, for feck's sake, is the actual point of doing something like this? Are they completely gob-frothingly stupid?
Let's assume for a moment they have a couple of synapses still firing - they must surely have figured out that a lot of Net users will most likely have a negative response to whatever 'message' they're trotting out.
At the same time, they must presumably be getting some click-through traffic from their U.S. pop-ups, otherwise they wouldn't bother doing them, would they?
(Or would they? If they're thick enough to have created a 'sorry you're a Canuck' pop-up, they're probably thick enough to be spending their money on advertising without any thought to measurement).
But in either case - why the hell would they put together a special pop-up that deliberately showcases their inability to annoy you further by annoying your frigging balls off?
"New from idirectnetwork.com - 100% content free spam-lite. All the irritation, half the bandwidth."
Want something even more annoying than this? I can't even track down the toerags behind this witless bollocks thanks in part to the byzantine wonders of the new improved Whois system, and a little added BS mixed in by the mongers over at Sympatico (my ISP).
Used to be the case that you could go to one of a number of Whois-type sites, all of which would allow you to uncover public info about the owner of a particular domain.
Now, thanks to the lovely new shared registration system model, it appears that you first have to do a Whois search to find out the specific registrar for the domain in question, after which you can have the pleasure of running the exact same search again, at the site of the individual registrar of record. How is this better than the old model?
It gets worse, I'm afraid. Turns out that the Canuckophobic pop-up provider we're looking for registered their domain at Network Solutions. Alas, trying the Whois search at Network Solutions' site brings up this:
The IP address from which you have visited the Network Solutions Registrar WHOIS database is contained within a list of IP addresses that may have failed to abide by Network Solutions' WHOIS policy. Failure to abide by this policy can adversely impact our systems and servers, preventing the processing of other WHOIS requests.
Er...what?! The IP address I have is one assigned by Sympatico when I fire up the DSL connection. You know: Sympatico. As in Bell Sympatico - part of Bell Canada Enterprises.
These guys have been abusing the Whois policy? I seriously doubt it.
And yet this is another lovely example of how Sympatico sucks. And Network Solutions too, for that matter. Something's always broken. Most of the time you can't figure out exactly what it is (and you sure won't find anyone at Sympatico who knows how to fix it; that is, always assuming you can actually get someone there on the phone. They really should have a word with the phone company, you know - I can never get through to talk to anyone. Shocking.) - but you just know it's bust nonetheless. It's a great business model: "Give us yer money, we'll give you muzak on hold."
Sigh.
So do me a favour: if you're reading this (and you don't happen to benefit from the joys of Sympatico's services), could you just run a quick search here for idirectnetwork.com - see if you can find me a phone number or email address so I can let them know they're a shower of tossers. Click below to leave a comment.
Oh, hang on: I've just Googled and come up with abuse@idirectnetwork.com.
Thoughtful of them to provide a mailbox specifically for abuse. It would be just rude of me not to oblige...
