'nother novice question... popups!

These fucking pop-ups have been really bad the past week or so. Turning off my active scripting helps, but messes up my mail and some websites. When I open my browser they come up.

Most annoyingly they appear when I travel to news websites, which I do frequently being a junkie.

Any suggestions, beyond "active scripting" to solving this damned problem? Any software I can grab that won't interfere with browsing?

You guys are the greatest and very smart. I love having my problem's fixed by my Sciforums brothers.

 

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Google has a fairly decent pop up blocker in its toolbar solely of IE. I use Opera and have gotten almost no pop up ads since then. Norton Internet security has a ad trashcan built in which blocks specified ads by the user.

I know wet1 posted links to some decent ad blockers in the past...search nerd culture because there have been other threads on this with links to free softwares.

 

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yeah I use the google toolbar, seems to work great.

 

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You could Ctrl+Alt+Del to find out whats running, What I usually do is look at the name of each loaded program and do a search if I think it a bit "odd".

Sometimes it pays off, For instance I ended up with a program load on my system called IEDriver.exe, what it did was run in the background and every webpage I visited it would "randomly seed" hyperlinks to adverts on ad servers, this meant you couldn't tell which were real site links and which were the implanted ones.

I only managed to spot it because it's seeding technique involved links to the middle of words/names, making it obvious something wasn't right.

Along with IEDriver.exe was another file that generated adverts, Basically it worked like a trojan bringing adverts around the firewall and through popup blockers since it was using VB scripting from the trojanised applet it meant it could get by.

 

I know one thing to keep pop up away expensively.
Try searching a program named expoot (no pun). I've used it some times and it can block pop ups well. The problem is, expoot always messes up with 'Java-infected' sites, so I can't really suggest you to use it.

 

I suggest getting the Mozilla browser. It's free, more secure than Internet Explorer, and includes automatic popup blocking. Also, the email client is immune to all those obnoxious microsoft-targeted email viruses that go around every few months.

 

Try Ad Muncher at www.admuncher.com. You don't have to register it. Just delete the config.dat file when you can't stand the nag windows after 45 days of trail period. You will have another 45 day trail and your custom filters are still there because they are stored in different files.

Ad Muncher can block pop-up, pop-under, standard jpeg ads, floating ads, sliding ads, ads in instant messengers, ads in shockwave format, ads in iframe, ads in table, ads in scripts, etc. Almost anything you don't like on the web page you can make it disappear while keeping the rest of the content intact.

 

Another way to spot spyware when you use Ctl-Alt-Del is to look at CPU usage. Look at all of the programs you have running, then look for other programs that are taking up alot of CPU resources (both current and cumulative). I find spyware once in a while that gets past my Ad-Aware via this method.

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