The folks at Slashdot are having a field day over Anti-Leech.Org.
Anti-Leech.Org is marketing software that blocks people who use pop-up blocking software from accessing a web page. So when I visit the page above, I get a message that since I am using a browser which blocks pop-up ads (Mozilla), that I cannot view the site.
I think using such software would be a big mistake, but I don’t have any problem with it — if a site wants to make it a condition of viewing their content that I have to allow them to open up additional windows, then I’ll go somewhere else.
Where they descend into moronic hype is this paragraph on the main page,
An average of 15% of your visitors use advertising blocking tools when visiting your sites and the major part of all webmasters will try to copy the content you publish. Therefore we have engineered several ways to protect your website, read more.
The majority of all webmasters steal and republish content? I’d like to see them find support for that. In fact since it is a copyright violation to do so, only a tiny minority of people ever engage in such behavior. And the fact is that the techniques that Anti-Leech.Org is selling are circumvented rather easily by someone who knows how.
In fact the protection for their scripts is pathetic since it constitutes little more than breaking up SCRIPT tag into several separate Javscript document.write components. That’s trivial to get around for anyone paying attention (which is why they apparently beg users in the comments not to try to get around their techniques).