Spon Unlock Autor: Martin

Spon is the common abbreviation for Spiegel Online, the online presence of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, found under the URL https://www.spiegel.de/.

Spiegel Online operates an aggressive strategy to prevent users from using ad blockers. If ads are blocked, the user is nagged by a full-screen popup every other second. Now, one could argue that it is fair enough for an ad-funded news service to push ads to the user. However, in this case the site is not satisfied with a simple ad blocker exception but requires the user to configure the browser in an insecure way. This is not acceptable.

Spon Unlock comes to the rescue. This Firefox add-on disables the anti ad blocker mechanism.

We can expect a cat and mouse game, of Spon changing the anti ad blocker mechanism and Spon Unlock reacting to it.

Additional sites may be added to Spon Unlock as time goes by.