Pop-Up Advertisements

You should uninstall the program that is allowing the popup. I haven't had popups for years now, but back when I did that company was blacklisted as far as I was concerned. I never will spend a dime on any junk mail offer, junk email, or popup. If everyone did this, their solicitations would insure their demise, and the world would be a better place (well at least the internet).

Install a pop-up blocker, I use Adblock plus.

We have Adblock plus. It's enabled and working (so it says).

Yeesh! How much of this crap would a guy get if it weren't enabled?

Having the same problem when I load FireFox. I get MuSearchlinks which I refuse to have uninvited junk on my computer.

Haven't been blessed with offersFU, if you get my drift.

Oh, man... the first of December must have been an effective legal change date for something. Kramarat, I'll need you to get your teeth into this one buddy!

Within the last hour, another type of ad banner is popping up on my machine. This one is so proud of their stuff there is no easily discovered source. I'll keep after it and let you know. I have these tidbits, from the legal section:

Introduction
These Terms of Service are the full Agreement between Revizer Ltd., a limited liability corporation... Blah, blah, blah... By downloading and installing the Software and by using it and its related services you have granted your full consent to be served with the Advertising Content... WHAT? WHAT!!

Governing Law
This Agreement shall be solely governed by the Laws of the State of Israel, and any dispute arising from it shall be brought only to the competent courts of the Tel-Aviv district. Oh goodie, who woulda thunk it?

And now how about this Geektime.com article:
Revizer allows developers to effectively ad [sic] revenue streams to their free browser plugins by embedding an ad plugin code into the developer's code. Including Reviser into a developer plugin will add targeted smart hover ads and banners to browsers of user [sic] who add a Reviser enriched pugin [sic]. In an interview with Geektime, CEO Daniel Sagis explained that Revizer is an alternative to those companies who look to monetize their plugins through the use of Application Bundles and other methodologies which actually installs software on a user's computer without their knowledge. Instead, Revizer is looking to monetize for developers using smart advertisements. "There's a fine line between displaying relevant advertisements and harming a user's browsing experience," says Sagis.

Wow... so it can't be removed, and it IS about the money!

The only place I get popups is on my homepage, which is AT&T...which pisses me off, because they aren't giving me free anything.

I will get banner ads on FB after searching a certain product here on CR4.

A couple of things I've done...

I use this for all of my searches, unless I'm looking for images or maps, which I still use google for. https://duckduckgo.com/about.

I don't know if you use FB. If you do, log in each time, and log out when you're done. Don't check the "stay logged in" box.

At least once a week I clear out all cookies, search histories, etc., and run malwarebytes, and several other free cleanup utilities.

I'm still using slimbrowser. Some sites say they won't work right with it, but they always do. I guess they have a good adblocker, because I rarely see them.

We always log out of everything... habit I guess. Sounds like good advice though.

An update: During the many restarts, M$ Defender came up with a problem. We approved the repair and since then, no Nav-Links, no Offers4U, no nothing!

We'll see if it holds! Thanks everyone for the input.

I realized that my ad blocker wasn't enabled, after seeing your thread.

I guess my browser zaps them on it's own. But now that I've enabled it, I don't even get them from my ISP.

If some sites give me a problem, I can allow popups for that site only, if I need to.

I like the idea of untainted internet searching, so I forgo the profiling and use duckduckgo, too. I take it a little further though. No cookies, no history (websites read this data, to improve your browsing experience, of course), no tool bars (these are blatant offenders), and no redirects. And this is where I go off the deep end. No Windows, no Microsoft, and consequently no anti-(anything) software.

The lack of functionality of certain websites is the cross I have to bear. For example, why should I have to share detailed demographic, geographic and lifestyle information just to post this comment? Will I suffer the "Could not process form" punishment for not allowing cookies or some other equally horrendous offense?

I like CR4, but it's kinda weird that the price for participating is any and all of the information they (ajax.googleapis.com, google-analytics.com, quantserve.com) can glean from a person's computer.

Edit: I did get the "Could not process form: The system was unable to process this form."

Did you try: Download & run the uninstallation app ?

It's an pain, I know.

No, haven't tried to uninstall yet, I didn't install anything (on purpose).

I'm still in rantaboutit mode. I'll move into fixinit mode later.

[edit] Learning about this 8u11%7@t advertisement game. The Offers4u are actually called popunders, not popups.

It's time to back up your computer to an earlier version. NOW!

Hopefully you do back-ups regularly.

I back everything up to two different external hard drives every month, or sooner if events dictate.

I learned my lesson the hard way. Cost me $150.00 USD because my laptop was not backing up like I thought it was.

I stay as far away from cloud based storage as possible. There's no assurance they will be around tomorrow and no real protection against hackers.

Keep your machine simple, one browser (Firefox), one search engine (Google), absolutely positively avoid any "download our free toolbar" from any site, or using anything other than "Custom Install" when loading a new program.

Firefox has a decent pop-up blocker, Google's ad-pushing system can be turned off, "free" toolbars almost always download and install pathways to advertising mechanisms and often questionable code that you don't want and can't uninstall, using "Custom Install" allows you to control which program elements you want to install and gives you the opportunity to manually opt-out of installing the previously mentioned crap-code that does get installed if you choose the "Quick Install" button, and totally avoid download sites where they insist that you must install their own custom downloader.

If you see the little Ad-Choices right-pointing triangle then click on it and choose to opt-out and disable their service. And most importantly, always create a Restore Point before installing or downloading anything, as well as performing a backup.

I've not used custom install yet, but probably should start. When using the regular installation, you sure have to pay close, very close, attention to what the screen says. Some stuff comes pre-checked--uncheck it if you don't want it. What you want may be in small print/icons, what they want you to have is large and obvious. It amounts to Keep alert.

When downloading applications always click on advanced installation. This will allow you to choose what components you want to install. Almost 90% of the time you will find it wants to install additional software e.g. offers4u. I bet you have a butt load of tool bars installed in your browser. Your probably reading this through half a screen, because your 13 tool bars are occupying the upper half of your screen.

Now if we could come up with a pop-up blocker for broadcast television we would really have something. Right now the best thing I can do is wait for the library to get the program in and then watch it uninterrupted.

I have the popup blocker box checked on my Firefox setup with no exceptions.

I don't get pop up adds, but these "pop under" adds which, thank Your Favourite Deity, I have not yet been tormented by, sound scary. Yet another layer of management to contend with...more techno chores...groan.

What I do notice is, that on those websites where the add space is part of the page, I'm getting lots of RC model adds......which I don't open, but are a nicer bit of visual noise to distract me than say vitaminpill adds.

I've been profiled.........

I never get popups on CR4. I use Google Chrome. Some FB articles have popups. I back out, so don't read the articles. I would never buy anything from a popup. I hate them too.

Every one should be using something like addblock.

Adds are a huge security issue. Hackers add malware to the adds before they are distributed to all the sites. One infection may be seen on hundreds of sites. These adds will infect your computer as they are displayed. The only defense against them is to stop the display.

I generally agree with most comments in this thread & I block pop-ups on my PC but I also bear in mind that ads are the price we pay for 'free' software & web sites. Without the advertising revenue we would have to pay for many more things on-line.

I pay for my internet service! What percentage of that bandwidth do I owe someone trying to sell me something?

I'm confused now. I wonder why I don't feel like I owe advertisers anything.

Oh well, no worries, I'm sure "marketing" will come up with a solution for people like me.

Remember a long, long time ago...when cable TV was in it's infancy.

Didn't they tell us that it would be commercial free?

Now we pay a monthly subscription to see those commercials. Well, I don't.

Over the air digital, and netflix, is all I have.

That reminds me of the satellite antenna my girlfriend's dad built in the early 80's. We could watch everything. Well, almost everything. We had to be careful not to have the antenna aimed low when her parents came home.

Her dad could tell if we were watching the Playboy channel when he pulled in the driveway. The sound of the power-jack moving the antenna back to HBO or Cinemax as they were getting out of the car was probably a dead giveaway too.

tiger93rsl tool-bars can be un-installed from the control pannal just like any other application. These are spyware tracking where you go and what you do on the web. That is why everyone wants you to install theirs. They in turn sell your information.

Be careful, using an uninstall tool, especially if provided by the toolbar you're trying to remove, can trigger a deeper hiding of the tracking program(s) while leading you to believe that it's been removed after you use their tool. Always pass on a website that insists that you install their toolbar.

One of the best ways to block of lot of webpage crap doesn't even need a program. Instead, use a modified HOSTS file.

http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

You can use a HOSTS file to block ads, banners, 3rd party Cookies, 3rd party page counters, web bugs, and even most hijackers. Windows automatically looks for the existence of a HOSTS file and if found, checks the HOSTS file first for entries to the web page you just requested. The 127.0.0.1 is considered the location of your computer, so when an entry listed in the MVPS HOSTS file is requested on a page you are viewing, your computer thinks 127.0.0.1 is the location of the file. When this file is not located it skips onto the next file and thus the ad server is blocked from loading the undesired material.

Not a bad additional precaution.

The host file protection is good against known risks but useless against the unknown. I will implement the host file protection but will not remove addblock. I still think it provides broader protection. I can't forget a harbinger of bad times article that was published about a year ago. The author warned against a new order of malware and the inability of classical AV scanners to protect computers. The advice was to use multiple layers of protection and more layers of different kinds of protection is better. The author was blasted as a crazy reactionary by the AV industry and their allies. Now the educated know the author actually understated the risks.

It's worse than that. Lots of times its something you ordered from somewhere else at a higher price.