supersix2

The last straw for pop up ads came today. Normally I find pop ups a minor annoyance because they usually only show up once and they are easy to close. However, today pop up advertisers have gone one step too far.
So earlier today I open up Kazaa to listen to some of my music and find some new songs. I get a few ad pop ups and I close them. I get everything squared away with Kazaa. Then, I open up internet explorer to play some online backgammon while I wait for my songs to download. My normal homepage is msn.com. This time, however, when I opened up internet explorer something went seriously wrong. I am not greeted with the news blurbs on msn.com, instead I am bombarded with 4 pop ups, one of which is impossible to close without ctrl alt delete because it takes up the WHOLE screen inlcuding the task bar. It was a beige colored window and thats it, it had no other purpose. The worst part is yet to come. As soon as I get hit with the pop ups both of my CD Rom doors open up and a notepad file opens up explaining to me the dangers of adware and how if I'm reading that notepad file and my cd roms are open I should click on the thier spyware removeal add. Now I am PISSED to say the least. All I wanted to do was play backgammon and instead I feel like my computer is getting hacked. I think that the second ads start messing with your computer thats when they've gone too far. I mean what the hell is that? I've never felt so violated in my life. I'm not paranoid about spyware, I'm just pissed off that some asshole at some web design company came up with this idea of actually messing with people's computers to get them to use thier product. That should be illegal. Its like drug companies releasing a disease into the population just so they can sell the cure. I mean serioiusly whats next? McAfee purposely putting a virus on your computer so you have to buy thier new program? I really think something should be done about the bombardment of pop ups. Especially when the put stuff on your hard drive. It used to be that only porn sites used pop up ads. Now, porn sites actually have LESS pop up ads than any other sites on the net. The whole situation has gotten out of hand.
Am I being ridiculous here? Or does anyone else want to beat the person who came up with pop up advertising within inches of his/her life?

Johnny Rotten

I use Mozilla and Firebird as my browsers, and scan for spyware regularly. Haven't had any problems.

This is a good free popup blocker for IE users:

http://www.panicware.com/product_psfree.html

You can also press ALT+F4 to close a window.

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Chingal0

google also has a pretty damn good popup stopper.. called google toolbar. .. lemme find teh link..

http://toolbar.google.com/

there you go, works well for me

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Fremen

I use AOL pop-up stopper.

DON'T PITY ME!!

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ForgottenKnight

I agree. They have no right to hack into your cpu and tell it to do things just so that you will use their product. That company has gone too far, and the guy who thought of doing that needs to be dragged out into the middle of the street and shot in the nuts (or equivalent if it was a woman).

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thenewguy

Women have nuts.

paddyjoe

Women ARE nuts

Hey Johnny Rotten, thanks for alt+F4

Reese

Run spybot search and destroy and adaware regularly and popups on normal pages will be gone. Couple that with mozilla and you'll hardly ever see a popup again.

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Batman976

I'm surprised more people don't know about alt+F4 closing windows. Back in my IRC days, people used to always try to trick people into pressing it.

I feel your pain though. Once in a while I load up my browser and find my homepage has been changed to some page I would never use. It's been a while for this one, but I used to find new sites added to my favorites folder. It became very frustrating.

I now use the Google toolbar and it works most of the time. Sometimes a popup will slip through, though. Does anyone know if there's a way to stop the ads that show up in the same window covering up the page? I don't know if there's a name for them, but they irritate me.

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Averett

I've never heard of alt + F4...

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taliendo

I too am sick of popup ads. thanks for the advice about the google toolbar, as I use google all the time anyway, i think i will try it.

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Fremen

Speaking of that, WhoaitsZ tricked me the other night on chat in just that way.

He's a tricky Z, I tells ya.

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