Pop-Up Ads Inventor Apologizes

Let’s face it, if there was a list of the most annoying things to happen to you whenever you are online, it would be advertising. To make matters worse, pop up advertising irritates users to no end, but the question is this – who is the ‘genius’ behind pop up ads? Apparently, Ethan Zuckerman was the one behind this “invention”, having thought of it in the mid-1990s. Ethan claims that pop up ads were created with good intentions back in the day, but hey, isn’t it proven true once again that the road to hell is paved with good intentions?

Ethan strongly believes that so long as the internet continues to rely on advertising in order to keep it going, ordinary folks’ privacy will continue to be invaded. Being a computer scientist himself, he touts that the existing model is ‘bad, broken, and corrosive’, and hopes that there is a new model somewhere, still undiscovered, which could be adopted – should folks want to pay for web content, of course. Still, it would be quite a massive paradigm shift if the whole world were to make such a quantum leap after using the internet for “free” all this while, don’t you think so? Other than pop up windows, what are some of the other computer related “inventions” that you wish never came into existence?

Edwin Kee
Categories: Computers
Tags: ads