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corralling the underlying url and redirection history (blocking google spam ads)

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Steven Avery:
Hi Folks,

  I'm involved in a little project to see to what extent scamware google ads "clean your registry now, or your vegetable soup will boil over" can be blocked.  mozillaZine has an interest in that and one of the Firefox extension folks who carries the ads is helping.  Remember overseas the ads are different and apparently ad-carrying folks have Google TOS that limit how aggressively they can review and initiate actions, thus they rely on outside assistance (please block A,B,C). However they can block resulting domains, theoretically, on a block list. (Perhaps this was first set up so a person did not have to see a competitors ads on their page, it can be used for all-purpose integrity reasons.)  Once a solid list is set up, it is easy to pass it around or even post it on a web-page. 

   For legal niceties you might want to be a bit less aggressive in the wording of a public page (that excellent rogueware spyware site http://www.spywarewarrior.com/rogue_anti-spyware.htm had to tiptoe at times) however there should be no difficulties simply setting up a list saying "we find these ads dubious".

   Incidentally using WOT (web of trust) which has a Firefox extension is of some corroborative help -- they miss a lot, however in this type of software sale site false positives seem to be very few.  (Perhaps some freeware/shareware sites get blocked that are actually reasonable, but vendor-sale ad sites that are blocked seem to always be real scamware, shamware, rogueware.  I don't use them as a primary source, that is always my own checking .. there are families of sham and scam products ..  but as occasional corroboration.  To be clear though I have not seen any Snapfiles or FreewareGenius types of sites given WOT disapproval).

   Most companies fall pretty clearly on one side of the good/bad equation but of course there are a few exceptions, and you have to wonder if you should be concerned much outside software shams.

  Now, the issue.

  There seems to be a few that get around the block, perhaps by a redirection scheme, or there could be other reasons. So the first thought I had was to look more closely at the long googleclick URL that is directly on the page, also perhaps the resulting redirections. 

  For the first, what is the best method to get that underlying URL to the clipboard (simplest to use). Or if there is any difficulty there, it would show up in the other attempt .. following the full redirection history after the click with some sort of logging history file created by a monitor program.

  Any tool recommendations ?

Shalom,
Steven Avery

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