In the nineties, Ethan Zuckerman was working for a website named Tripod. The website was displaying advertising, but the ads were getting in the way of the content and announcers were not always happy with the pages their banners ended up appearing on. When a big car manufacturer was not that keen of having their ad displaying on a page about sodomy the website was hosting, Ethan came up with a solution: a simple piece of code that would open the ad in a separate window. The invention took on, and spread far more than anyone would have wanted, becoming one of the most hated form of online advertisement, and leading browser vendors to implement pop-up blocking features. Ethan finally went public with an apology: “I’m sorry. Our intentions were good”. He believes that “advertising is the original sin of the web” and is now the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media.⁠