Pop-Ups
The first thing I want to say here is that you don't need extra
software to stop web page Pop-Up ads. Pop-Up advertising is an
intrusive and malicious manner of trying to make you, the user,
interested in things you really don't want. There are three general
types of Pop-Up Ads:
JavaScript Pop-Ups:
This is the most
prevalent manner of Pop-Up. These adds appear on your screen while
online and surfing the web, they are triggered by a scripted code
within the text of an HTML document. JavaScript is a wonderful and
versatile tool to web developers, but like everything powerful it can
be abused by the wrong person. As is the case with Pop-Up
advertising. Most Pop-Ups result from the use of a single JavaScript
function "window.open()". This piece of code tells a
browser to open a new window and arguments passed within the brackets
tell it what content to use , what shape, size and position.
Sometimes Advertisers even use what is commonly referred to as
"Pop-Unders" these web pages are opened but told to be in a
position far from your actual visible screen area, thus they are
nowhere in sight. Pop-Unders can then attempt to open a steady stream
of Pop-Ups using a timed sequence. Usually a user has to frantically
try and close these windows, either manually, from the task bar or by
hitting the Alt-F4 keystroke. It is, however possible to stop them
from ever opening. This is done by simply turning off JavaScript.
This unfortunately results in many web pages that rely on JavaScript
to not function properly. Fortunately, Internet Explorer has a
wonderful system of Internet security settings that can allow you to
group pages into categories and apply different setting to those
categories. This system is found in the security section under
Internet options, which may be accessed in the Control Panel, the
tools menu of IE, or by right clicking your IE desktop icon. If you
customize the security settings of the "internet" zone so
that "Active Scripting" (near the bottom of the list) is
off, Javascript is disabled for all online web pages. Pop-Ups go
away. You will of course find some pages that you want to use that do
not function, such as hotmail.com and windowsupdate.com. In order to
allow these sites to use Active Scripting, but not others you simply
add them to you "Trusted Sites" in the security section.
The first time you do this, mind that you un-check the box at the
bottom that requires an "shttp" connection. when you enter
a site do not put the www on the front, so www.hotmail.com would
simply be hotmail.com. IE will automatically put a wildcard "*"
in front of it when you are done: *.hotmail.com. this will make sure
that any URL ending in hotmail.com will be allowed to run. In
addition some sites, like hotmail actually reroute you all over the
place in the process of verifying your user name and password, so to
use your hotmail account you will also need to add passport.com to
your trusted sites list. to use windowsupdate.com you will also need
to include microsoft.com. This may be a little confusing at first but
it virtually eliminates all Pop-Ups. Every once in a while you will
realize that a link is not taking you somewhere and if you look in
your status bar you will see that the link has a JavaScript function
and that you need to place that site in your trusted sites list.
Adware/Spyware:
These are nasty little
programs that, at some point, you installed. Either it was from a web
page or another program. These programs can generate Pop-Up ads while
you are online or offline. Even worse, they are notorious for
actually tracking what you are browsing and reporting this
information to their parent company, something that a webpage alone
could not do. Many times these programs are installed with file
sharing systems (like Kazaa) or other "Free" software.
These days there are many programs out there that can be used to
remove or detect Spyware, even some anti-virus utilities like Norton
Anti-Virus are beginning to pick up that job. My advice, however, is
to ignore any program you could buy off the shelf. Most of these are
so-so and some are even rip-offs of good free software. The two best
Spyware removers you can get are LavaSoft's Ad-Aware 6 and Spybot
Search and Destroy. I personally have had some problems in the past
with Ad-Aware, so now i only use Spybot, but they both do a good job
in general. For Ad-Aware check out: www.lavasoft.de
and for Spybot: security.kolla.de.
If you seem to have a lot of Spyware on your system start paying more
attention to what you are installing or prompts from websites to
install a piece of software. Basically if you don't know what it is,
don't hit OK.
Exploits:
Some companies have managed to make
programs that exploit network software on your computer. A long time
ago, Microsoft included a service in windows called messenger (don't
confuse this with MSN or Windows messenger the popular instant
message program). the purpose of the Messenger service was to allow
administrators to send messages to clients on a network. An innocent
and useful tool, until someone realized that they could broadcast
messages across the Internet using this system. The Messenger service
sends a text message to an IP address or group of IP addresses. You
can recognize on of these types of Pop-Ups due to the fact that it
will be a solid color window with a plain text message. these
messages have no links or graphics and cannot prompt you to do
anything, they are very harmless, as was the nature of the messenger
service, but like all Pop-Ups they are annoying. If you are not
operating on a large network where this service is used to relay real
information, you can simply turn it off. For the most part most
people would never even know its running and in windows9x it probably
isn't. In windows NT (NT4/2000/XP) you can disable the Messenger
service from the "Administrative tools" icon in the control
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