Norton Internet Security
 

My wife got a new computer that has Norton Internet Security pre-installed. She has her own mainstream websites and Norton as blocking images with all of them, even the ones that it shouldnt be blocking.

Know that I can see what is going, I went to some of my porn sites, it completely deletes all the image calls and the links that go with them. Links with no images remain in place.

Renaming image, banner and thumb directories didnt work. Now that I think about it, the only thing I didnt try was putting all the images in the same directoy with the html files.

Has anyone found a successful work around for this?


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What version of Norton?
What color is the globe icon on the task bar (yellow or blue/green)?
Is it just blocking linked banners?
Does she have .htaccess protecting images from hotlink?

Norton 2004
The globe is blue.
On mainstream sites, its blocking linked images. On the porn sites, its blocking all images, linked or not.
Yes, there is an htaccess for hotlinking. I did try checking the box "Use HTTP 1.1 through proxy" but it didnt help.

On the mainstream sites, the linked img calls where deleted from the top a half of the page but not on the bottom half. On her personal website where the linked images go to galleries, all the linked images to the large pics where deleted.

I dont want to fix her settings, I want to find a work around so I know the surfers are seeing the images.

I'm now starting to wonder if AOL, Comcast, or any of them biggys are doing some blocking with their stuff.


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dont know if this will help but theres allot of shit out there about this. webmasters are freaking and rightfully so
http://www.designerwiz.com/mf.htm?ht...se-manager.htm

http://linkcloak.smartpagecash.com/
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum89/895.htm
http://www.searchengineforums.com/ap...s/app::iforum/

not promoting anyone just trying to give you some reading.. jugg..

I wonder how long the average surfer leaves things at the defaults before they start changing things because surfing is so messed up?

They don't change things, they turn it off and leave themselves wide open for spyware infestation. :)

Yeah that is what I see with my few friends that still use Windows.

Hey Barron,

The problem with the porn images is probably that Norton is not allowing your server to see $http_refer= as being from your site and your .htaccess is blocking the images from loading.

There should be a setting under "Privacy Control" (or something like that) in the advanced settings that is set to block information about visited sites. Either turn it off or set it to allow visited page info to be tracked within a web site.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
SF

Sometimes I wonder if any of the clowns at Symantec that develop this stuff actually have Internet connections at home. |banghead|

I do a little IT consulting on the side, for small businesses and home users. Most of the time when I make a first visit at a new site, and they have Norton AV and/or firewall installed, they aren't functional. They've either been intentionally disabled, or a virus that has gotten past it has shut it down.

I wonder if this new version of Nortons crap is why our sales have gone down...

Symantec sells anti-virus software for the Mac too which is kind of odd since there aren't any Mac viruses. It also causes all kinds of problems when used on a Mac and in a sort time is usually removed by the user. Back when I still did Mac consulting I would remove it and the user would be so amazed that I was able to fix their computer and make it run so good when all I did was remove this crap and hand them a bill.

Hey there Barron :)

Think you'll find that SF is on the right track |thumb

I run NIS 2005 on this machine and noticed it was blocking all ads on my domains. Checked that the ad blocking feature was not enabled...then dug a bit deeper.

Most of us have htaccess on our domains. If your htaccess isn't allowing blank referers...that's probably the problem. Either allowing blank referers or disabling that aspect of NIS should fix ya up |headbang|

I am downloading a trial to test my sites on it now

Trial lol I can give you the government full verions 10.0 lol they give it out to us for free along with mcv. lol.

no thanx, it will only be on here as long it takes to do some testing, i hate the crap

Ok I got it installed finally..
It wasnt set to block ads by default, is it normally?
When I turned it adblocking on none of my phpadsnew ads (called via js) would show but many others do. I think those ones are more about size.
How many people do you think surf using this adblocker?

This is really worrying me.. I have my phpadsnew using folders like ads and phpads... i shouldve known better. As a test is there someone that uses phpadsnew here that doesnt have the folders called dumb names like that and calls ads via JS?? If so can you please post me a link so I can check them using Nortons.

I removed Norton Sec and installed grisoft - think it works better

Thanks for help. I followed links and spent the last two hours surfing various link lists and submitters websites using NIS 2004 and my box that doesnt have it.

Its amazing to see the results.

As near as I can tell when NIS deletes the code on image calls it does delete the link as well. It does block entry and exit pops. The amazing thing is it is completely transparent to the surfer. He/she has no clue they are missing anything.

Except for sites that have htaccess. Then the red X appears. But it completely looks like broken images. The surfer has no indication that anything was blocked.

White lists must have been updated, no adwords where deleted on mainstream sites.

But anything in a /ads/ directory was stripped out.

On my wifes personal site I renamed the images directory to "ren" and the thumbs directory to "renth". That had no effect. The image calls on the top half of the page have been deleted and the bottom half have not. No clue why NIS would do that.

Advertising is what makes the world go round, I'm surprised we havent seen any lawsuits over this.

I'm now starting to think that this has been the cause of some of my problems with my out click script. I got some interesting results with NIS because of the no referrer being sent. Thats easy enough to fix, but geez, I shouldnt have to!

Thanks for all the info and help on this. Now to spend a couple of days fixing all this |angry|

what is the page where only the images from the bottom half show?

check your pm

do you think when i use phpadsnew its the js call thats being blocked by nis or the folder names etc like /ads/ /.adclick etc? Or is it both?

I looked at Barron's page and noticed that the top graphics were 120x90, a standard iab unit. The ones that did display were not iab sized.

IAB set standards a while back for adunits so that publishers and advertisers would know exactly what was being referred to.
http://iab.net/standards/adunits.asp

I wonder if Symantec believes that images that meet IAB size guidelines are advertising -- regardless of the site.

And yes Natalie, urls with the word 'ads' appears to be a trigger.

Yeah thanx Sparky, I just hope I don't go to all the trouble of changing all dirs etc then find that its also the js. Js blocking isn't turned on by default is it?

Since I don't run Windows, I don't know. Urb has done a lot of research on this and could tell you. I beleive the javascript invocation still works though.

I think the thing that came up was that it blocked the referrers, it appears to block certain image sizes (which may correspond to the IAB units), and blocks things called from certain directories.

I'm sure there is some magic to the javscript, activex and other dynamic goodies that are filtered because you could easily break all mouseovers if you disabled javascript altogether. Videos wouldn't play if you broke some embedded commands, etc.

I also do not run Windows so I just go by what people tell me and sometimes using someone else's computer but I do know that all my javascript banners on my LL are blocked by anti-virus stuff under Windows.

My solution is to also have paysites listed as text links so even if someone does surf my LL with all my banners blocked I still make sales off of the paysite listings.

Cleo it may the same for you though as you use ads in your dir name, maybe it isn't the js.

As cd34 mentioned, try not to use the IAB standard banners...

Typical Sizes
468 x 60 IMU - (Full Banner)
234 x 60 IMU - (Half Banner)
88 x 31 IMU - (Micro Bar)
120 x 90 IMU - (Button)
120 x 60 IMU - (Button)
120 x 240 IMU - (Vertical Banner)
125 x 125 IMU - (Square)
250 x 250 IMU - (Square)
300 x 250 IMU - (Medium Rectangle)
240 x 400 IMU - (Vertical Rectangle)
336 x 280 IMU - (Large Rectangle)
180 x 150 IMU - (Rectangle)
728 x 90 IMU - (Leaderboard)
160 x 600 IMU - (Wide Skyscraper)
120 x 600 IMU - (Skyscraper)
300 x 600 IMU - (Half Page Ad)

Also, don't use the words "ad" or "banner" in anything (including phpadsnew). Do not actually name your banners "banner01.jpg" or "sitead.jpg"

I've tested versions of Norton and Zone Alarm with various set ups, links, settings and sizes of banner... and although the above is a good rule of thumb... the results seem to be random. As if Norton/ZoneAlarm are intentionally randomising what their rules are, so as to keep affiliate webmasters guessing.

The only sure thing for them targeting sizes is 468x60 and 120x60 which in all cases were affected by Norton and Zone Alarm.

I just installed Norton Internet Security and for some reason, ad blocking wasn't turned on by default.

But I found a list of all strings that are blocked. Let me see if I can get it out of the program.
For those of you who has it installed. Go to Internet Explorer -> On the NIS bar click the yellow sphere -> Web Contents Options -> Defaults -> "Ad Blocking" tab
There you will see a long list of html strings that are blocked.

Care to do a copy and paste for us non Windows users?

Yellow sphere sounds like NIS 2005 which doesn't seem to be blocking ads as default - which is a step in the right direction. :)

I'm trying to find the config file where the html strings are stored. I've found other lists in Google...

... ok google links are blocked here. Search for: adlink.htm banners adoptimizer

but I don't know if those are the latest settings.

Yeah, it's NIS 2005.

I couldn't find where the list was stored. But adblock.org had a list for NIS 2004

NIS Block List 2004-07-26
http://www.adblock.org/article_nis_block_list.html

Notice that Maxcash are on that list. :(

I find it hilarious that they are blocking the affiliate program that they use to sell their products.

Hey Barron, remove the width/height tags from one of your 120x90 thumbnails and see if it shows up.

I made a test and there's an easy way to by pass the width/height filter

Do not include the "width= height=" in the img tag since that's what it filters on.

cd34 and swedguy :D

You are a couple of geniuses!

I'm surprised that it doesn't filter out 468x80 banners, since that one is more common in porn than 468x60.

120x60 - blocked
125x125 - blocked
200x100 - not blocked
468x60 - blocked
468x80 - not blocked
120x90 - blocked
120x240 - blocked

EDIT: added 2 non-IAB standard sizes

Fucking bitch ass piece of shit Norton Internet Security!!!

When I uninstalled it, it uninstalled my old Norton Antivirus.

Now is the perfect oportunity to switch to AVG. Their free version does a great job, and doesn't fuck with the rest of your stuff.
http://free.grisoft.com/freeweb.php

Dell wrote me an email because I pulled their ads for non-performance a few months back. They tagged me as inactive.

I told them that when Symantec's Norton Firewall allows their banners to be displayed, I would be more than happy to put the banners back up. I think over the last 8 years I have maybe made $800 from Dell, so, I'm not a heavyweight in terms of things, but, in 8 years, I have never had Dell write me an email asking why I wasn't sending traffic for 90 days. I did pull their ads a while back for about 4 months while I did a redesign of the site.

Who knows. Maybe someone will step up to the plate.