In the last two days, while surfing the web, I’ve noticed random words double underlined with a black and yellow stripe. When I roll over the words, the info window in my browser identifies it as a “TopText link”. I click on it and it takes me to, guess what, an ad. For instance, if I type “TopText links are a big cluster fuck” it links the word “cluster” to an ad for some internet clustering hardware. Plus, it screws up my typing by inserting a space after the linked word.
These links are not put in by the author of the webpage, because they’re unrelated to the context of the linking web page. So where in hell do they come from? How do I disable it?
And before some wiseass comes in and says, “Just don’t click on the links, butthole”, that does not address the problem of something you put on the web being linked to an ad for something you find morally offensive. For example, say you post a web page about abortion rights only to find that every time you use the word “abortion” it’s linked to an ad for Operation Rescue. This bullshit must be stopped!
TopText is a program that you probably inadvertently installed (most likely with KaZaa) that causes links to appear for certain words. These linking words are determined by who pays TopText money to link their site to these words (a better explanation is here.
I would hope that you could uninstall it from Add/remove programs, if not, I would try LavaSoft’s AdAware.
And as tempting as it is tho just click OK, read what other crappy programs your P2P software is installing (I’m talking bout you, Gator).
You installed it. No, seriously. At some point you installed something (most likely KaZaa) that probably told you in the fine print that it was going to install it and you just clicked “Yes.”
Anyhow, to learn more and disable it, try visiting:
Gaaa! Thanks for the info, WAD. I found TopText in the eZula folder in my Program Files directory, but I still don’t know when it got installed (I’ve never installed KaZaa). There is a simple uninstall script. These TopText felchenheimers stupidly included a method for sending feedback, and I will soon be writing a strongly worded message to them.
I will certainly post the name of the software dog on which the slavering tick that is TopText rode into my computer, and notify the distributors of what is going on, but they probably already know they’re doing it.
