Windows XP Hacks

Stop Pop Ups, Spyware, and Web Bugs

You don’t have to be victimized by obnoxious applications and behavior on the Internet. Fight back with these tips and tools.

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.

Web bugs are invisible bits of data, frequently a single pixel in size (sometimes called “clear GIFs”), that can track all your activities on a web site and report them back to a server. 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, ...