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What Can Be Done About Those Annoying Pop-Ups?
If you believe the e-mail we receive here,
pop-ups, those intrusive additional windows you
have to close en-masse after you finish an
intensive browsing session, are a real irritant.
Even more annoying are the ones that pop up
unbidden when you’re not even using the
Internet. To help with some of the confusion and
irritation, here’s a little guide to pop-up ads
and what, if anything, you can do about them.
Plain
old pop-ups.
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It's not too difficult to accumulate a
screen full of pop-up ads.
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Clicking around the web, you’ll soon notice
that some links open more than one window. A
little window often contains a pop-up ad.
Sometimes they’ll pop-up over the content you
want, other times they’ll appear underneath for
you to find after you close what you’re looking
at. Sometimes they’ll appear when you enter a
new site, other times when you leave a site. In
some seamier zones of the Web, trying to close the
pop-up will lead to even more pop-ups.
Putting a pop-up window in a web site is
extraordinarily easy for a web designer to do. We
use windows here at aroundmaine.com sometimes to
present content in a special window of fixed size,
outside of our normal design. We never use pop-ups
for advertising, though. If you think you’re
seeing pop-up advertising from aroundmaine.com,
you may have another problem, which we’ll get to
in a little bit.
A number of people have written software to
suppress pop-up advertisements. The one I use most
is EMS FreeSurfer: http://www.webattack.com/download/dlfreesurfer.shtml
EMS
Freesurfer is freeware, so anyone can use it
at no cost. If you try it and like it, you might
send a few bucks to the folks who made it. That
might encourage them to make another version. It
has options that allow you to just stop ads, or to
make sure you have only one browser window open at
all times. You can lock your home page, so that
those pesky sites that are always trying to change
yours can’t do that. There’s even a panic
button, so if you’re in pop-up window hell,
where every window you close opens three more, one
click will close everything. I’ve been using
this for a few weeks, it has worked great and I
can’t really say I’ve missed that X-10 camera
ad a whole lot.
Adware – Spyware
Just this week I’ve received a couple of
e-mails like this: “Why do you have all those
pop-ups ads on your site?” In fact there are NO
pop-up ads on my site, but that doesn’t mean
this person wasn’t seeing some. They might have
been the victim of spyware or adware.
Spyware or adware are little programs that
either send additional ads to your computer or
collect information on the sites you visit or
both. They often come from downloaded programs.
Some commonly downloaded programs, like file
sharing applications, come bundled with these
things. Other times web sites are programmed to
install them into your computer. How many times
have you been asked to download something called,
“Gator” or “Comet Cursor?”
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| It's also easy to
just click "yes" without reading
the box, but doing so could invite even
more pop-up ads |
What you might not know about these
applications is they can collect information on
the sites you visit and send that information back
to persons unknown on the Internet. Also, by
taking up processing time on your computer and
requesting unnecessary advertising from their
servers, both the Internet and your computer
system can really slow down.
Sometimes these programs are touted as
“Browser enhancements”, but what they really
do is provide more pop-up ads, even to sites that
don’t normally feature pup-up ads.
The solution to this problem is another
download. The one I recommend most frequently is Ad-Aware;
another freeware application.
Ad-Aware will scan your system for known
spyware and adware applications as well as
ad-tracking cookie files, deposited by companies
that track ads across sites. It then displays a
list of those files it found on your computer and,
if you give the go-ahead, expunges them from your
system. It is possible that deleting adware
located by a program like Ad-Aware can disable the
functionality of some other programs, like your
file-sharing program. However, if you're willing
to put up with the additional ads to run the
program, you can just re-download it.
Another popular free spyware remover is Spybot
Search and Destroy from PepinMK software. It
has more features than Ad-Aware, but is a little
more complicated to use.
Messenger Service Spam
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Messenger Service
Spam: You don't even have to be surfing to
get this one on Windows NT, 2000, or XP |
Finally the last kind of pop-up is the kind
that doesn’t care if you have a web browser open
at all. It’s that little gray box with an
“OK” button on it that can come up anytime
your computer is connected to the Internet, no
matter what you’re doing. It’s not a virus and
your system isn’t being hacked and above all
it’s not coming from Road Runner or Time Warner
Cable. Microsoft put the messenger capability into
Windows 2000 to allow network administrators to
widely broadcast their messages to their users. It
is unrelated to the “MSN Messenger” or “AOL
Instant Messenger” you might use.
It wasn’t long before the spammers figured
out this was another way to get their message out,
and started sending unwanted commercial messages.
This problem only affects Windows 2000, or Windows
XP machines, so if you recently upgraded from
Win98 these might be new to you.
 Stopping
them is as simple as changing a check mark deep in
the guts of your control panel. Here’s the
procedure for Windows XP:
1. Right-click My Computer and choose Manage.
2. Go to Service and Applications and choose
Services.
3. Double-click the Messenger entry.
4. Choose Disable as the Startup type.
5. Click Stop and Apply.
Our friends at TechTV have an excellent article
on this stuff and where it comes from: http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/answerstips/story/0,24330,3374542,00.html
With a couple of downloads, and a tweak in
configurations, you should be able to take care of
most of the unwanted pop-ups that plague you. Now
if dealing with Spam email were just as easy…..
by Chad
Gilley
aroundmaine.com
July 14, 2003
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