I mean, holy fuck. This is exactly what the world needs, isn’t it?
From this article:
How appalling is that? It makes me want to strangle that fuckwit Zoltan Kovacs, and whoever he hired to create this.
Generally speaking: if you’re not running a firewall by now, you’re asking for far more potent trouble than net message popups.
Please instead strangle the fuckwits who thought it appropriate to put a feature into an operating system whereby any person may cause a message to appear on the screen without any need for authentication or authorization.
The upside is, you need to be running Win 2000 or XP - that cuts down on the market right there, as some folks are running older versions of Windows, or other OS’s.
The other good thing is the messenger service is super easy to turn off, I had it turned off even before this kind of spam popped up.
To turn off the messenger service in XP:
Click on the Start button and open the control panel.
Open the Performance and Maintenance control panel and go to Administrative Tools.
Now double-click on Services, then scroll to Messenger.
Double-click Messenger and click Stop to stop the service.
Change the startup type to Disable
You’ve got a point, there.
Reminds me of the time I discovered that the default in Windows NT was to allow anyone with administrator access (on their computer) on my network to change my registry settings over the network. I love Microsoft security.
I am going to kill myself.
hello
d’oh!
Sorry, I meant to press preview but pressed submit instead.
Avant Browser (used to be IE Opera), K-Meleon and Mozilla can stop popups via a preference setting. Email me if you want the links, but I’m sure a Google search will turn them up. Kovacs technology is behind the cutting edge.
Ditto what apotheosis said, you need a firewall, there’s several free ones: Tiny, Zone Alarm and Sygate come to mind.
If you need an email cleaner Mailwasher is free.
Ah, but PhiloVance, what Kovacs has come up with is not a browser popup, nor does it have anything to do with email. In fact, you don’t have to be running a browser at all to be spammed by this technique! When (and if) you get one of these messages, you’ll see that it’s a different animal.
Thankfully, turning off the Messenger service (it’s not the same thing as MSN Messenger, BTW), and/or using a good firewall will spare one from this new misery.
Thank you Boscibo. I play a free browser based game that is funded by banners and popups. Editing my host file and useing a popup killer spared me most of the pain that could cause but untill I read your post I knew of no way to get rid of those anoying “mesenger” notices. Have a cold one on me.
Come on, this feature’s been around since NT (8+ years?) and is only now being exploited and somehow it’s Microsoft’s fault for not having the foresight to see what lengths arsehole spammers will go to? There’s plenty of stuff to blame microsoft for but this isn’t one of them.
Yes. Yes it is. Because we have always known that there is no length that is too long for hackers, spammers, et al.
Simple rule of thumb: if a service runs on your system, it should either not be on by default, or there should be some secutrity built into it. Microsoft seems to prefer the approach of “run every service whether or not you need it or want it, and maybe in a few years we’ll have a patch that partially addresses security issues”.