Computer Hassles

[ralphmelton]

Two hassles with our home computer setup:

- There's something lurking about putting up pornographic popup ads from time to time. Lori sees these more often than I do, but I see them occasionally. It seems to be independent of site visits; we've both seen these ads when following links in LiveJournal.

I downloaded and ran AdAware, and it says the system is clean, and I've deleted my cookies. Yet it persists. :-(

- The wireless access point is losing its connection to the network multiple times per day. I am overdue for a call to SMC tech support.

Comments

It's raining porn

[beegle.livejournal.com]

I'm in a very speculative mood at the moment. Excuse me.

There's something lurking about putting up pornographic popup ads from time to time. Lori sees these more often than I do, but I see them occasionally. It seems to be independent of site visits; we've both seen these ads when following links in LiveJournal.

First, be sure that you're running the latest patches on your machines (or they're behind a firewall) and that you've run antivirus software recently. Some of the porn sites have resorted to devious tricks like exploiting Windows holes to pop up browsers on machines that aren't even doing anything.

Why in Livejournal links? Once upon a time, it was good etiquette to always link to an original image instead of copying it to your server. This way, things like proxies could cache the image effectively. Nowadays, people get really pissed if you do that because you're eating up their bandwidth. So if you notice that your server's seeing a heavy load because people are linking to a particular image, it's a common "prank" (I'm really not sure that that's the right word) to replace that image with a pornographic one for a bit. I was bitten by this one myself a few days ago (and felt extra-stupid, because I really should have known better).

There's also spelling. A surprisingly small number of people know how to cut and paste a URL, and if you retype it and don't check your journal entry carefully after you post it, you might transpose some letters, directing all of your readers to a site other than the one you intended. livejounal.com used to be a porn site (and was alphabetically first, fooling the auto-complete).

You might want to keep the process manager running so that you can find out the name of any processes that are running when the porn appears.

Re: It's raining porn

[ralphmelton.livejournal.com]

I've checked that I'm running latest patches, and the wireless access point works as a firewall now.

We've been seeing these pornographic popunders (there's something special about that phrase, isn't there?) even when following LJ-generated links between LJ pages. This makes me think that it's not people replacing images with porn ones or mispasting URLs, because I'm not seeing these problems with LJ-surfing on other computers.

I should watch the process manager, I agree. There are too many executables running whose purposes I don't know.