[conspire] Inserting Ads Into Message Postings?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Mark Weisler (mark at weisler-saratoga-ca.us):

> While looking for some information I came upon this web site discussing Linux 
> matters...
> http://forum.soft32.com/linux/gentoo-user-AMD64-Stability-ftopict333109.html
> and found (apparently) advertisements inserted into the middle of otherwise 
> informative Linux postings.
> 
> Have others seen this sort of thing? Is this a trend?

Sure.  Of course it is.  

However, my LAN's anti-ad measures are good enough that I had _no idea_
what you were talking about until I examined HTML source.  (Other people
on my LAN and using my nameserver's DNS will encounter the same outcome.
What, your nameserver doesn't declare itself authoritative for the
entire googlesyndication.com domain?  Why not?)

The copyright aspects of the situation are a slight amount murky:
People posting to the gentoo-user mailing list are implying licence to 
distribution of their postings to subscribers and to any official Web
mirrors -- but probably not to outfits like forum.soft32.com.  However,
to halt the practice would require that someone with standing (a poster)
bring, or at least credibly threaten, litigation, which isn't likely to
happen.

> But we may be entering a new age in which sites that may be
> "sponsored" will require the most careful reading to discern the
> author's opinion from the advertiser's ploy.

An installed copy of greasemonkey, and operating one's own nameserver, 
help a great deal.  Note that you don't need to be any kind of DNS
expert to do the latter:  Just set up a default BIND9 installation on
your workstation/laptop in its default recursive-resolver caching
nameserver configuration.  Then, grab my example setup from 
http://linuxmafia.com/pub/linux/network/bind9-examples-linuxmafia.tar.gz,
and borrow the anti-advertising stuff.  Last, start BIND9 and set
"nameserver 127.0.0.1" as your only "namserver" line in
/etc/resolv.conf, and do "chattr +i /etc/resolv.conf" to make sure it
doesn't get overwritten by new DHCP leases.   You're done.