If you have adblock enabled and you try to visit any url of www.archivum.info you will get a really nasty alert saying:
You Are Using Adblock Plus or some other advert blocking software! Archivum.info relies on advertising for revenue. Please add www.archivum.info to your ad blocking whitelist or disable ad blocking when you visit www.archivum.info.
When I first saw this I laughed…and then I tried to find a way to bypass it.
I used curl to see the sites html code:
$ curl -v www.archivum.info
curl -v www.archivum.info
* About to connect() to www.archivum.info port 80 (#0)
* Trying 69.147.224.162... connected
* Connected to www.archivum.info (69.147.224.162) port 80 (#0)
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.19.5 (i486-pc-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.19.5 OpenSSL/0.9.8k zlib/1.2.3.3 libidn/1.15 libssh2/1.2
> Host: www.archivum.info
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:24:22 GMT
< Server: Apache
< Last-Modified: Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:41:17 GMT
< Accept-Ranges: bytes
< Content-Length: 9392
< Vary: Accept-Encoding
< Content-Type: text/html
<
<html>
<head>
<title>archivum.info - The Internet archive.</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<script type="text/javascript">var disabled = false;</script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.archivum.info/js/adblocker_probe.js?
site=http://googlead.foobar.tld/"></script><script type="text/javascript">if (disabled == false) { location.replace("http://www.archivum.info/denied");
alert("You Are Using Adblock Plus or some other advert blocking software! Archivum.info relies on advertising
for revenue. Please add www.archivum.info to your ad blocking whitelist or disable ad blocking when you visit
www.archivum.info.");}</script></head>
[snip]
Here’s how this site blocks Adblockplus: there’s a variable called disabled set to “false” then if a js (http://www.archivum.info/js/adblocker_probe.js) runs it sets disabled to “true” . The hint is that adblockplus blocks urls starting with “googlead.” so it won’t visit “http://www.archivum.info/js/adblocker_probe.js?site=http://googlead.foobar.tld/” and the variable will remain “false“. Then the alert pops up.
The solution is very simple, just add an exception to your local AdblockPlus rules, AdblockPlus Preferences -> Add Filter:
@@|http://www.archivum.info/js/adblocker_probe.js?site=http://googlead.foobar.tld/
So firefox, visits the js url, disabled becomes “true” you are allowed to continue browsing the site and AdblockPlus continues blocking all blockable items.
Filed by kargig at 16:19 under Internet,Networking,Privacy
6 Comments | 11,193 views
