09:49 pm - if anybody ELSE was wondering No, those adultfriendfinder.com banners DON'T know what town you live in because of cookies or spyware or something infesting your machine. They have databases of IP addresses by geographical location. (I checked by fetching copies of their banner code from FreeBSD machines that have never even had a browser INSTALLED on them, therefore no possibility of ever being infested with anything.)
Try it yourself - I wrote a test page that fetches about ten or fifteen copies of the banner (which is currently worksafe, btw), with all possible tracking codes snipped out of the URL. Why ten or fifteen copies? To make it easy to spot that even though they're doing the creepy "look at LOCAL girls... 'cause we know where you live, homes!" thing, it isn't even real ads that the damn thing shows... it's a random selection of generic "usernames" with a random selection of "userpics". Shady bastards.
edit: AHAHAHA the skanks that come in the banner by default are fugly enough that stupidnakedpeople.com (the site I was originally seeing the banner at) apparently devised their own script to replace the images with their own, to get their click-through rate higher. At any rate, there IS a script in place at that site that DOES replace the images from the banner with a random selection from a (much larger) collection hosted at their own site. God the internet cracks me up sometimes. =)
::trots off to AdBlock 'banners.adultfriendfinder.com/*'::
