Attack of the x10 Camera or Best Check the Bathroom Tiles for Holes Before You Undress
By: Mike Gries
Netscape, you’re losing badly to IE. It’s embarrassing really. If you want back in the race, just make it extremely easy to set settings to reject auto-pops and pop-unders in the next version of your browser. If you do, we, erstwhile end-users, will come back to you. We’ll say we’re sorry. We’ll tell you that we missed you. Just make this one little change for us.
The Auto-pop used to be a phenomenon restricted almost exclusively to porn sites. Once again, they were at the vanguard of the technical world. Their tradition comes by dint of the stigma attached to their product. Few people want to go to a creepy movie theater on the wrong end of town to see a porno, and because of this fact, we now have the proliferation of VCR’s in the American home. It’s not Disney who’s given us the $60 VCR, and its not JCREW that has given us safe, reliable on-line shopping. So at Christmas time when you are ordering your kids fleeces from LL Bean while a video of It’s a Wonderful Life plays in the family room, stop a moment and thank the slimy individuals from areas outside of LA who are keeping you out of the malls.
Unfortunately, now porno has given us something we don’t want. Taking their queue, the legitimate Internet world has embraced what amounts to an insidious grab at the end-users attention. In effect, the browsing experience is now fraught with numerous hijacking opportunities. They’ve turned the web into a hostile environment and its time for the browser providers to clean up this mess. For a user on a Pentium III or IV with a T1 or a cable modem the pop-up is merely an annoyance. For the legions of us out there slogging away on Pentium 1’s operating at 133mHz connecting with a 56k, the multiple pop’s can be terminal to our terminals. After all, a crappy computer grunts like an animal for the better half of a minute when it’s asked to save a word document. At the best of times, surfing on an old 133/56K is less than ideal. Add in 3 pop ups, the time it takes for them to load, and the time it takes to x them out, and your talking about an addition 3 to 5 minutes of annoyance before one’s back on track. That is if the computer doesn’t just freeze up or perform an illegal operation. All this would be frustrating enough if pop ups where tripped every now and again, but they’re pervasive now. Even Yahoo throws them at you now.
In this sea of pop-up, pop-unders, and delayed pops, there is one ad that stands above the rest. It sticks out because it appears more than any other, but it also sticks out because it is a perfect metaphor for this new form of aggressive advertising. It is at once both pornographic and legitimate, and it is an intrusion advertising for intruding. It is the hidden wireless camera. Ads for these cameras are ubiquitous, so they must be selling very well. This means that there are many thousands, if not millions of hidden cameras in private, or what used to be private places. Generally, advertisements for these pinhole cameras suggest that their primary use should be for security, which is of course the same as suggesting that a bong is “for tobacco use only.” Barring an end user being clever enough to figure out what other uses the camera might offer, the adds usually suggest where you might place them: “Kitchen, Nursery, Porch, Pool, Wherever”, with the heaviest of accents on “Wherever.” There is also almost always a corresponding picture in the ads of a very attractive girl. These cameras used to be called nanny cams because they could be used to insure the nanny wasn’t beating the tar out of your kid, but the girl in the ad sure doesn’t look like a viscous nanny. She looks more like an au pair, not a real au pair of course, but the fantasy kind. In that spaghetti-strap dress, she certainly doesn’t appear to be an intruder that you would be monitoring on the porch.
The only intruder here is the advertiser. So help us out Netscape. Help us out Microsoft. In the mean time we’ll try to help ourselves by being alert. After all, these ads are good for one thing. We now know Big Perv is watching.