owflyer

Why are you linking and allowing this disruptive malware on FT? It completely hangs up Firefox in certain forums.

AllieKat

FlyerTalk has a long history of sketchy advertisements that hijack the user's browser. It's clear the owners don't really care, or they'd find better ad providers, that might (or might not) be slightly less profitable. Google Chrome Android can no longer load FlyerTalk due to the current batch of ads, so that's less hits FlyerTalk is getting... I'm not so sure they'd lose money even if the revenue per ad was a bit lower elsewhere...

owflyer

fw.adsafeprotected.com and pixel.adsafeprotected.com are the key culprits. Is Internet Brands that corrupt?

Assimilated Cajun

Yes, it's adsafeprotected.com -- when I go to one of the many forums that load information from this domain or its "fw" and "pixel" subdomains, everything slows down within seconds and soon I get a pop-up box that tells me a script from that subdomain is running slowly, but when I try to click on any of the three options -- Continue, Stop Script, or Debug -- nothing happens. Task Manager then tells me that Firefox is using 90%+ of my computer's available memory -- it increases within a minute or two from 40% to over 90% -- and I have to shut down Firefox. I really like Flyertalk, but not enough to put up with this. (Incidentally, a Google search for adsafeprotected.com leads to several pages identifying it as a malware site originating in China.)

Cloudship

Yeah, be careful of those reports. A lot of them are the actual malware - trying to get you to load their "anti-malware" solution.

I have discovered what seems ot be an issue with it. adsafeprotedted is an ad server. It uses a bad Shockwave script, well not so much bad as outdased. If you updated your Firefox recently, it may have put Shockwave Flash into Ask to Activate mode. (or, you may have done this yourself). That is what is causing the hangup.

You can fix this, by going into Add-ons (under the tools menu) and changing Shockwave Flash to Always Activate. Now, some people may not want to do that, it is a decision you have to make.

JDiver

That's interesting, Cloudship. Thanks for sharing.

N.B. I've edited the thread title for accuracy. /Moderator

cblaisd

If one is one Windows, wouldn't it still be possible to re-direct calls to these sites to localhost instead?

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/23832629-post8.html

weegraeme

I don't know if this is related or just similar.

I have 2 PCs on my home network. One is using Windows 10. The other Windows 7. The Win 7 one works fine on here. The Win 10 doesn't. I get the script errors which I think are the same as those mentioned in this thread. I also find that most of the time, I can access the main page on the site, I can sometimes access the list of forums. But when I try to go to an individual forum, I get timeout error after timeout error.

It's becoming quite annoying.

owflyer

And it continues, just caused a complete shutdown on FF.