I have been noticing for the past few days that my blogs were showing a weird class=”vglnk” on parts of my blog that hosted code, enclosed in code blocks. That isnt supposed to happen, especially not in code blocks. Checking the enabled plugins on WordPress showed nothing amiss. I ran a recursive grep in the entire virtualserver directory. Nada. Not even in an sql search across the database. I checked Chrome extensions-nothing. That’s when it hit me to check Adblock Plus. Sure enough. It had a setting labelled “Allow some non instrusive ads”. On checking the list that they were kind to include, I found this on https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/exceptionrules.txt:
@@||viglink.com/api/vglnk.js$third-party
I disabled the allow non intrusive ads stuff, and the stupid links went away.
So Adblock plus which one installs to remove ads was actually inserting ads by itself to make itself money. There’s irony for you.
Joel G Mathew, known in tech circles by the pseudonym Droidzone, is an opensource and programming enthusiast.
He is a full stack developer, whose favorite languages are currently Python and Vue.js. He is also fluent in Javascript, Flutter/Dart, Perl, PHP, SQL, C and bash shell scripting. He loves Linux, and can often be found tinkering with linux kernel code, and source code for GNU applications. He used to be an active developer on XDA forums, and his tinkered ROMS used to be very popular in the early 2000s.
His favorite pastime is grappling with GNU compilers, discovering newer Linux secrets, writing scripts, hacking roms, and programs (nothing illegal), reading, blogging. and testing out the latest gadgets.
When away from the tech world, Dr Joel G. Mathew is a practising ENT Surgeon, busy with surgeries and clinical practise.