Stop Pop-ups, Spyware

Surfing the Web used to be such as simple, enjoyable experience. Go to the web site of your choice, enjoy the page, and head somewhere else.

No longer. At times, it now seems like a sleazy carnival midway, complete with flashing lights and loud music, barkers pleading at you to venture into the sideshows, scamsters promising you big payoffs if you try three-card monte, and no-goodniks lurking in the shadows.

For that, we have pop ups, spyware, and web bugs to thank. Pop ups are ads that, as the name implies, pop up over your browser, usually in a smaller window, and frequently contain flashing messages and other kinds of obnoxious come-ons. The infamous X.10 surveillance camera pioneered this insufferable form of advertising, and now it's everywhere.

Spyware is software that piggybacks onto your hard disk on the backs of other pieces of software, reports on your activities to ad servers, and then delivers ads to you based on what sites you visit. There's typically no way to know offhand that spyware has been installed on your system, because it lurks invisibly—hence the name. Even after you uninstall the program upon which it piggybacked, it could remain on your PC, reporting on your activities.

You don't have to be victimized, though. As you'll see in the rest of this hack, there are things you can do to keep your PC from resembling a virtual midway.

Spyware

Spyware has become increasingly controversial and increasingly popular, as developers of free software struggle to find a way to support themselves. Of late, spyware has been getting increasingly intrusive; some people call these more aggressive programs scumware. Scumware may change your default home page without telling you, or may even intervene when you're making a purchase online and redirect you to a different site.

There are several ways to protect yourself against spyware:

• Be vigilant about what you download. Ad-supported programs may include spyware, though not all do. Check out the " Index of Known Spyware" page run by Gibson Research at http://grc.com/oo/spyware.htm for a list of spyware programs. The only problem with that site is that it lists only the spyware components, and it's difficult to find out their names. A better bet is http://www.spychecker.com, which lets you type in the name of a program you downloaded and then tells you whether spyware piggybacks onto it.

• Use a personal firewall like ZoneAlarm. A personal firewall will let you block any program on your system from contacting the Internet without your approval, so you can use it to block spyware. XP's Internet Connection Firewall doesn't have this capability, so you can't use it to block spyware.

• Get a spyware detector and eradicator. My favorite and the most popular is Ad-Aware, available for free from http://www.lavasoft.com. It does a thorough check of your system for spyware, finding not only program files, but also Registry entries and cookies. After it does a check, you can choose which of the spyware problems you want the program to fix, and it'll go about its work, deleting files, folders, and cookies, and fixing Registry entries. If you use file-sharing software, I highly recommend running Ad-Aware; many of these applications include spyware.

Pop ups

There are many for-pay pop-up killers, but if you don't want to spend the cash, you can get an excellent one for free: EMS Free Surfer mk II or install the Google toolbar which have inbuilt popup blocker and if Windows XP SP2 is installed then automatically installed with Windows. These blockers lets you set several levels of pop-up protection—you can block all pop ups or only those that appear to be unwanted—and you can turn it on and off with a click, and have various extra features like fill the form, search etc. You can download the Google Toolbar from here http://toolbar.google.com