The Adblock Project

flea13 · Guest

Dear Adblock crew,

I've been using your extension for a long time now, and I'm very happy with it in general.
However it seems that there is a bug, or rather an unfortunate coding error, in Adblock somewhere: if a swf file loads another swf file, this second one fails to be blocked.

See http://www.cib.hu/ for an example. A large area on the top of the page is a single swf, which in turn loads several other swf files, including a banner ad. Though the ad has a URL that is nicely blockable, it still loads (confirmed by cache clearing + live HTTP headers extension).

Blocking the loader swf is not an option - I don't want to get rid of the whole menu and all.

Could you confirm this? Can you fix it or provide a workaround?

Thanks
--flea

rue · Developer Joined: 22 Oct 2003 Posts: 752

flea13:
Could you provide the url which fails to be blocked?
.
The short, vertical ad, beneath the word 'Ajánlatunk'?

flea13 · Joined: 25 Oct 2004 Posts: 3 Location: Hungary

It is a normal size banner ad just below the logo on the top left, extending horizontally all the way to the "CIB Internet Bank - Belépés" zone.

The actual URL varies (seems to change periodically on a round-robin or random basis), but today I had the following two:

http://www.cib.hu/%5Ebanner/megtak_szept_fejlec_2.swf
or
http://www.cib.hu/%5Ebanner/25eve_fejlec.swf

It is always under "http://www.cib.hu/%5Ebanner/", and the extension is always "swf". Still, even a filter like "*banner*swf" doesn't appear to kill it.

My guess was that this behavior has to do with the fact that the ad is loaded by another swf (specifically: http://www.cib.hu/%5Eflash/loader.swf - the banner's name is given as a parameter called b_id). Maybe this way the HTTP request doesn't get intercepted and parsed by Adblock.

flea13 · Joined: 25 Oct 2004 Posts: 3 Location: Hungary

and another one:

http://www.cib.hu/%5Ebanner/vankiut_okt_fejlec.swf

rue · Developer Joined: 22 Oct 2003 Posts: 752

flea13:
Embedded media are presently allowed to do as they please -- whether it's circumventing the popup-blocker to open windows.. or circumventing the content-policy system, to load banners. They operate in a context independant of the browser proper, and I'm not yet sure what would need patching to change that.
.
On Adblock's side, there's not much that can be done.

flea13 · Joined: 25 Oct 2004 Posts: 3 Location: Hungary

Thanks rue.
That's bad news.
If you decide to go into this a bit deeper, you could maybe check out what the LiveHTTPheaders extension does to intercept & dump HTTP requests - that might give a clue where to catch requests coming from embedded media. However I haven't had time to look at that, so it's just one of those guesses.