Last few times I have accessed Snopes, the Pop-up has been from “about:blank” a notorious spyware provider. :eek:
It won’t load on my computer all the way, likely due to Spyware blockers and such. Thus, I suppose it could be another “about:blank”. However, a caveat is warrented, I think.
I was lucky enough to discover the SDMB just about the same time I was finally fed up to here about having to close 47 popups after a fifteen minute session on Snopes.
Oh man. This is bigger than you thought. I tried to go to about:blank on IE 5.5, IE 6, Firefox 1.0.7, and Firefox 1.5 on Windows 2000 and Windows XP, and even tried Lynx 2.8.5 on Solaris 8, and EACH TIME nothing displays on the page at all.
It’s probably spyware blockers, like you said. Good thing I have Claria installed to protect me from this stuff…
Seriously, while snopes.com has some terrific information on it, their popups are the worst I’ve ever seen on a legitimate website. I use Firefox exclusively when visiting them, (which avoids the popups), but their site still somehow reliably blue-screens my otherwise quite-stable work PC. (Though their site coding is also atrocious, and may have something to do with that).
I thout you were lying until I tried going to about:blank on a supercomputer cluster running the Commodore 64 operating system. Nothing. I also tried going to about:me and about:damned:time with the same results. I swore these worked when I was surfing yesterday. I am going through the machine language code right now to see what’s going on.
When we were still running NT, this kept happening to me too. If I spent too much time at Snopes, it blue-screened, which never happened otherwise. Under XP I haven’t had any trouble, though.
My husband takes care of all the technical stuff so I’m assuming that our pop-up blocker is XP. I don’t go to Snopes that often, but I was there just the day before yesterday. Within an hour or so I got a message that said that Spyware might be damaging my computer. My husband was asleep so I just closed the computer down altogether.
Any input on what this message might have meant? The computer seems to continue to work fine.
That was almost certainly a pop-up ad from a spyware company masquerading as a windows alert box. If you do anything other “X” it to close, it will take you to their page to download their “antispyware” package, which in reality, will probably install some nasty stuff on your PC.
No harm done just shutting the PC down. If you want to avoid these pop-ups in future, try Firefox.
Everyone is just making fun of DrDeth and subsequent posters who are a bit confused about “about:blank.”
Yes, there is/was a browser hijacker that is known as “about:blank” because it keeps resetting your homepage to “about:blank,” and instead of being a blank document it would be a web-search template.
However, “about:blank” is not an URL, and nothing will load from it – “about:blank” had a life long before the name was ever attached to that particular hijacker. If you tell your browser to load “about:blank” it will render (surprise!) a blank page. That’s all.
If you’re getting blank windows on Snopes, it likely has nothing to do with Snopes. It’s possible you’ve picked up a browser hijacker elsewhere. You getting any funny search results or any other odd behaviour? Lots of porn popups? IE crashing?
It runs deeper than you think; try pulling the plug on your internet connection and you’ll find that the government can still send the about:blank from the internets to your machine without any wires. :eek:
Larry’s right. “about:blank” is not a URL. It was originally a way of setting your homepage to “blank” or nothing. However, 'about:blank" came in with malware that reset your homepage to 'about:blank"- which was no longer blank, it was a web-seach site with lots of likns to gambling, porn and other even more dangerous site. The Spyware that installed it was notoriously hard to remove (it would install in two locations, so when you deleted one, the other would re-create it, and other such fun stuff). In fact I still have some shreds of an 'about:blank" malware somewhere in my home machine- Giant and other stuff won’t completely remove it, although it has been contained and neutralized.
The “blank windows” I got on Snopes were the pop-ups themselves, identified as “about:blank”. My browser won’t open anything with spyware, it’ll just show blank. Even though I do use Firefox, Snope’s popups will still show up, even though they are blocked. Snopes doesn’t seem to care who buys their advertising, so it is completely possible that the dudes who push the 'about:blank" trojan were pushing it there. I know that some of Snope’s popups have been at the least- “ad-ware”, as Giant, etc has said so.
I had assumed that most “computer experts” here knew about the “about:blank” trojan. Either several self-proclaimed experts really know fuck-all, or they are simply trying to be smart-asses. “about:blank” is a VERY serious threat.
Umm, isn’t about:blank also a fairly typical way to do popups?? Instead of opening a new window at a predefined URL, you open a window for a blank location, (thus the about:blank,) and write content into it from the opening page, using javascript.
AFAIK there’s nothing more sinister about this than any other popup ad. Seems to me like you could be overreacting dr deth.
My contribution was a joke. The Commodore 64 was a wildly popular home computer in the early to mid 1980’s but it only had 64kb of RAM. For comparison, that amount of RAM is about 20 times smaller than what would fit on those old 3.5 inch floppy disks that are still in use as a dinosaur on some computers. It had an optional disk drive but that held about 8 times less data than those old 3.5 inch floppy disks.
However, the Commodore 64 environment has been used to build a fully functional web browser as well as a few web servers that are thousands to millions of times less powerful than the computers that access them. The Commodore 64 still has people developing software for it. There are emulators available that let people computer like it is 1983. I have one and use it fairly frequently.
You could be right. Or, you could be wrong. If you read my OP: "*Last few times I have accessed Snopes, the Pop-up has been from “about:blank” a notorious spyware provider.
It won’t load on my computer all the way, likely due to Spyware blockers and such. Thus, I suppose it could be another “about:blank”. However, a caveat is warrented, I think."*
I wasn’t “over-reacting”. I admitted it could be “mostly harmless” but that "a caveat was warrented’. Due to Snopes allowing a rather nasty pop-up provider to use their site, and that spyware has come from those ads before, my concern was justified- even if it turns out to be nothing more than the already rather nasty pop-up provider. Lots of dudes go to Snopes, and Snopes have been rather cavalier about abusing their trust, so a warning isn’t a bad thing, even if ultimately in error.
I think the riffs people were making (mine, at least) was that about:blank is not the source of this. It is not a “notorious spyware provider”. Adware.CWSIEFeatsis the notorious adware. It does what you said – sets your homepage to about:blank, and creates a .html file that takes the place of about:blank. about:blank by itself is harmless and will not give you malware.
I see you point, but whether or not it’s the same trojan, “about:blank” is the comonly accepted name of a notorious trojan. If you Google it “about:blank” trojan", you’ll get 216,000 hits, so I am not making it up. I can’t think of a good reason for a Pop-up to be named “about:blank” can you? Esp since my Spyware blocker blocks it?
In any case, Snopes has obnoxious Pop-ups, designed to get past security settings. Whether or not this current pop-up will load one of the “about:blank” trojans on one computer is besides the point.