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It's been barely two months since Microsoft made a pop-up blocker available for its Internet Explorer browser--but Web advertisers have already found a way to slip their loathed marketing pitches past it.

Service Pack 2 (SP2), Microsoft's security update to Windows and Internet Explorer, recently armed 40 million people with tools to automatically suppress advertising windows that spring up, over or behind requested Web pages. Couple that with the millions who have downloaded free pop-up-blocking toolbars from Google, Yahoo, MSN and others, and nearly half the Web audience in the United States has voted against pop-up ads, according to several estimates from ad-serving companies.

But when there's a will, there's a way.

Some publishers, still clinging to the ad revenue from pop-ups, are exploiting a workaround in IE and other Web browsers to send pop-up ads despite blocking software. In one example, visitors to the Drudge Report Web site who use the Service Pack version of IE or Mozilla.org's Firefox browser with a pop-up blocker will nevertheless receive a pop-under ad if they click a link on the page.

"Pop-ups are a cat-and-mouse game," said Bart Decrem, a spokesman for the Mozilla Foundation, creator of Firefox. "We are continually improving our pop-up blocker, and content developers are constantly developing a way to get around the pop-up blockers."

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Source: c|net