Lady - go to this site and download and run AdAware. You probably have some sort of resident adware which managed to install itself on your machine and is causing these pop-ups.
After you take AndrewL’s advice, go and download a little program called The Proxomitron from Here.
Best ad filter I have come across.
After you take AndrewL’s advice, go and download a little program called The Proxomitron from Here.
Best ad filter I have come across.
For some reason, when I’m using the computers at school, it takes aeons to select a Hotmail message for deletion. I’m talking, I click on the check box and the script or whatever it is takes like twenty seconds to finally get around to selecting the fucker. Everything else works on normal speed, however - which means it’s actually faster to simply view each spam message and delete them all one by one than to select them all and delete them.
Of course, most of these spam messages have brilliant full colour pictures of Ample Breastesses, a.k.a. Bodacious Ta-Tas, which are then displayed, in all their mammarian grandeur, across the computer lab with signs prominently displayed saying Display of Sexually Explicit Material Contravenes the McGill Terms of Service.
(Here comes the practical part!) I have learned in a rather Pavlovian fashion to shrink my window so that only the header and delete button of the message displays, so the aforesaid Abundant Boobage is not actually displayed. Of course, if they’re going to get pissy about me unintentionally viewing sexually explicit spam while deleting it, they’re probably not going to care whether I actually saw the said Curvaceous Bosoms in question or not.
Those are for me - could you forward them?
Regards,
Shodan
I’ve been using Mozilla as my primary browser at home for a few months now. It has built in pop-up blocking features and I get virtually no popups with it. I almost forget they exist, but then I go to work where we only have IE and have to fight them. Alas, we’re not supposed to install software on our machines at work (only the LAN folks are precious enough to do that) so I’m stuck with IE there.
Mozilla’s mail program won’t run attachments the way Outlook will, so as an added bonus I get a little extra virus protection insurance.
This is quite a hijack, but I hereby nominate Lady of the Lake for the Cool Newbie[sup]TM[/sup] award. Witness these gems:
“or heck maybe even give me food, how was I to know?”
“NAKED WOMEN, sticking their breasts at me, opening their legs for me, and trying to draw my attention to a phone number. With blinky lights surrounding them.”
“I admit that, at home, I once visited an internet sex toy shop, and after that I did notice my hotmail account getting a lot of Spam for a balding older man needing a penis enlargement who likes women who like horses in the wrong way.”
“How may I discover who’s sending this to me so I may hunt them down and pound my ‘letter opener of death’ into their sweaty, losery foreheads?”
“but that’s like asking a rabbit to stop trying to dig through the carpet…”
Plus, there’s the blinking thing. Mucho coolness. 
And yes, I realize that she’s been registered for six months, but with less than 40 posts to her name, she still qualifies as a newbie.
Post more, oh my Lady! 
Yep… spyware… evil, evil spyware.
I remember once being invited to start visiting a private postboard run by a fan of a particular music group. It was all totally innocuous.
The woman’s postboard was hosted by the EZ-Board people - and her postboard had not been ‘upgraded’ to Gold Member status - as a result there were pop up ads bloody well every page you visited within her postboard.
(Slight hijack here, but as matter of priniciple now I refuse to visit a website - any website - which has pop up ads. It just plain out and out offends me.)
Anyway, I left my machine unattended for an hour while I went off and did some other work in the office. Please note, I own a software business which makes databases for corporate clients to work over the web so I’m kinda familiar with all this shit and it also explains why it’s my PRIVILEGE to visit any website I want during the working day (heh heh heh).
The machine I was working on at the time was a Windows 2000 Advanced Server donk with pretty significant security features enabled.
When I came back to this machine after an hour, 4 separate software systems had managed to load themselves onto the hard disk AND into the registry settings.
Of course, I was enraged.
To be totally safe, I listed EVERY single file on this machine in descending chronological order, and deleted every directory and file which had been created in the preceding hour and THEN I reloaded a previous backup of the registry settings.
This made the popups go away, and since then, our other kind posters here have mentioned products which ALSO have come to my attention like Zone ALert and Ad Aware.
But yes, in short… look in your C:\PROGRAM FILES\ directory and list the data in descending date order (by clicking on the Timestmap column header) and you’ll find the spyware directories.
It really sucks if you ask me.
The poster earlier who mentioned Mozilla made some very valid points. It’s the supposed ‘user benefits’ in Internet Explorer which are ALSO the security holes you see.
Regards, Boo Boo
Oh, I concur, Lady of the Lake writes a great post.
Update:
I am not able to open ‘Ad Aware’, as well as ‘Zonealarm/alert’ perhaps blocked by our firewall? (Yet the porn is just fine, I guess we know what kind of company I work for) 
I have downloaded Proxomitron, and am hoping that will help. I searched for Gator, SVA etc…and found only something on SVA, but as it’s in the C drive under ‘I386’ then ‘Compdata’, so I’ll ask IS what it is and if it should be there. (I learned my lesson long ago about deleting essential computer functions).
Zette,
Ah, no you are right. I thought ‘yahoogreetings is safe’, but clearly I was wrong because they tricked me. Usually the spam is titled something like ‘What we talked about last night…wink’, or ‘Do you like your girls wet?’ which gives me the hint that this is not from someone I know. The few times I fell for the ‘last night’ bit, it’s usually a picture of a girl who’s having troubles keeping her skin-tight lace up leather shorts on, though you’d think the skin tight part of that would keep those babies up. And, you know, even when I squint, it still doesn’t look like my friend.
But, you are right and I’ve been rather stupid about this. (‘Course if we compare me to the evil people who made these porn pop-ups, I look like a saint.)
Myrr21,
Another rabbit owner? I tend to throw in rabbit humor because I have so many hilarious stories with mine
Okay, I’ve had my best luck with a squirt bottle and feather duster. Also, not letting them get under beds/hidden places is always good, I seriously HAD A bunny burrow in my old house because I thought they were just ‘playing’ there for hours, but no, they had the honeymoon suite all set up.
By the way, ‘Diffing’ means chewing, right? I’ve looked it up but there’s not match at the online dictionary. I’m a Minnesota gal, we have a small vocabulary and within that small sphere we have our few favorite words that make up a good 50% of the discussion. After all, you can’t go wrong with ‘That’s different’and ‘Whatever’.
As this is getting rather long, I’ll finish up in the next post.
ShibbOleth,
The wisdom in your post has reached me. Though he is married and thirty years older than I am, some of his phrases might have a hidden penthouse meaning. For example: ‘Heather-poo’ must be code for something, as otherwise (the way he says it at least) it’s just scary.
In response, I will step up my ‘Don’t call me that’ and ‘How is the wife?’ campaign and all shall be well. (After explaining that I really wasn’t looking at porn, his glasses confused the image of umm…’rare, endangered pink seals with odd breast-like bulges’. It’s umm…a cause I fight for.) cough
Matt,
Pulls her Internet explorer so that only the top bar is highlighted. Notices that it is good.
This will actually work as a good Band-Aid solution as it will stump my co-workers. After all, I’m the one who showed them the delete key and how it pertains to deleting documents. (I’m serious here).
Shodan,
But, if I email them to forward to you…won’t they know I exist and simply speed up the rate in which I get them? I’ve been assuming they don’t really care who or what I am, the number of spam they send is a calculated attack to wear down my defenses. Thus, finally, at the peak of denial and desperation, I’ll click and buy a penis puller-enhancer-2002 with the hope that it will go away. It won’t, it will simply speed up the process and eventually, I’ll spend my days in a ‘Sanity Challenged Emporium’ hiding under my bed while the penis enhancer taunts me from across the room.
LindyHopper,
Awe, shucks, and thanks, and shucks. Blushing deeply
I still very much feel a newbie here, though I lurk daily. I’ve picked up much wisdom in my strolls here, first to the ‘Cafe’ to see if there are any Buffy threads up, then to ‘The Pit’ to catch up on those religious debates with H4E, and if I’ve enough time ‘Great Debates’ to learn a little more about the way people think (I’ve even saved a page on debating from Mtgman, so impressed was I).
Boo Boo Foo,
I’ve been to C/Program Files and the last few are folders that I’ve installed months ago and the newly installed Proxomitron. Can something like this be hidden, or perhaps the problem has been resolved? There hasn’t been an attack of the naked women yet today, so I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
And specials thanks to all who’ve given advice here, though I’ve not replied to everyone, I’ve read and appreciated.
We had a problem like this at work awhile back. There was a Trojan going around that would make tons of pop up’s appear on a user’s computer at random times when they had IE open. Even after we got rid of the Trojan using updated .dat files from McAfee, the pop up’s kept showing up (I think they actually changed some of the java code in IE).
We found the easiest solution was to reinstall (or upgrade) Internet Explorer with a custom install and specify that it redo the java virtual machine. This worked for us, so if you keep getting these things you might want to get your IT guys to try it.
And if you do manage to find whoever sends these out, give them a few smacks for me too.
You think you have it bad? A friend of mine left the computer programming biz to join (of all things) the FBI. So one day he was sitting in a huge lecture hall where each student had a computer, and he was bored by the class, so he decided to check in on what was happening with the Lewinsky hearings (which were going on at the time). So he browses on over to whitehouse.com. By which he meant whitehouse.gov. Oops. And there he is, in FBI frickin’ headquarters…
(btw: you’re from Minnesota? So which is it… Duck Duck Goose or Duck Duck Gray Duck?)
BeerDog,
You’ve got it.
Max,
Goose? What is this goose thing? Gray Duck of course.
Jeez, you Buffy fans. You and my bestest bud bobkitty should get along fine. Although I did see my first-ever Buffy episode all the way through on Saturday night.
Ummm…Can IT get me into that one?
Are you a convert yet? Sometimes you only need to do it the one time to be hooked. 
Just wait until you roommate tries to change the channel to baseball while you’re watching Buffy…you’ll threaten her with a few Buffy-ninja moves unless she desists in her evil act…she’ll laugh hysterically thus leaving the remote open for your stealthy grab. ahem Not that I ever do that or anything.
And, besides, she was laughing in fear, I could tell.
Okay, so I’m working on this pop-up porn problem, which is still active because they just offered me the ‘youngest girls on the net’
I have made significant progress, thanks to the advice here.
- Following the above advice to search for things loaded onto my computer during a certain time period, I’ve found something on my computer finally.
- They have stored a file in ‘Cookies’ entitled ‘CS’. All the other cookies are text files, this ‘CS’ file is ‘unknown’. I know this is a bad file because I’ve opened it in explorer and learned that ‘CS’ stands for ‘cyber sex’, along with a listing of web sites and URL’s and codes. I think this may be what is causing the naked women infestation here.
- When I delete this file it comes back, yes like the five pounds you took off for Christmas that reattached themselves by the 27th, it always comes back. The trigger on this file reappearing seems to be re- logging into ‘Internet explorer’.
- The people who sent me the file are not yahoo, and now I know WHO THEY ARE; they are ‘Cytron Communications’. Their web page is a black background with a nice address and phone number, and yet…all the other search findings for Cytron are…porn pages…hmmm…
Armed with these findings, I excitedly called IS. My usual IS guy, IS guy #1, was not there, he was the person who helped me yesterday by running Virus Scan and restarting my computer and telling me that he wasn’t touching the email with a ten foot pole because ‘he knows where I’ve been in cyber space’.
So, IS guy #2, let’s call him ‘Innocent Victim #1’ (so far there’s only one, but It stands to reason that there will be more) came up to help me. He laughed so hard when I showed him the email, the CS in my cookies, what the CS stands for when opened, the Cytron web site, and at each mention of the ‘bad, bad, evil pop-ups’, that I wasn’t sure if he understood the problem. Oddly enough this laughing thing happens a lot when people help me with computer problems, it must be my sparkling wit, not the pathetic nature of my appeals.
‘Innocent Victim #1’ was an optimistic sort and asked me to send him the email so he could investigate. I did, with it entitled ‘Very bad, do not download, you have been warned’.
A few minutes later I got a call.
I V: Well, Heather, I’ve checked it out and it’s not doing the same thing to me.
Me: What? You downloaded it? Did you see that it’s actually from those Cytron people?
I V: Yep and no pop-ups.
Me: Check your cookies.
I V: What? Okay.
Oh, now I have this ‘CS’ in my cookies, but I haven’t seen anything…
Me: You will.
Worried sigh You know, I DID warn you.
I V: Well, you can’t just go around warning people not to download, it’s like a challenge.
Me: incoherent sounds of laughter mixed with frustration while I think bad thoughts about the creators of this program
Yes, that’s right.
** I have infected our IS department. **
Cytron Communications should probably begin paying me. In my efforts to get them off my computer I’m spreading the evil.
I can’t wait until IS guy #1 gets back to 1) yell at me 2) have a good laugh with the entire IS department now that they probably all know of my little ‘problem’.
As someone or another once said, if you are female with your external parts mostly in the correct places and can complete a sentence, every straight male you know has masturbated to the thought of you at some point.
That wasn’t exactly helpful, though, huh?
It’s a pretty good bet it’s your sparkling wit. I know I’m enjoying this thread, at least.
Well, I don’t actively seek it out, but I’d watch it again if I happened upon it some evening. Besides, the episode I watched was a part one of two…I hate it when that happens.
I admit it, I’m PC-illiterate. I have Comet Cursor installed on my work machine. What’s it doing?