Whack-a-mole

Ever since Mrs. Mosley and I got back Sunday from a trip to the mountains, my laptop has been infected with popups. Even with repeated security scans and the popup blocker placed on the highest setting, they continue to appear. The final straw for me was this morning when, as Mrs. Mosely and C.C. were sleeping, a popup with audio appeared while I was in the kitchen and blared out it's loud and irritating spiel for a good fifteen seconds before I could silence it.

Fortunately, they weren't awoken by "Kevin Hoeffer", who is the make believe schmuck who appears in the ads. Actually, he's one of many make believe schmucks that are used, but the ads are virtually the same.

There are two things that I have found more irritating than the popups themselves. First, when Googling about these ads, I find all sorts of message board and blog postings talking about how these things are a scam, but absolutely none of them address how to get rid of the popups themselves. Sorry, maybe I'm a bit jaded, but if you have to be told these things are scams, you might be a little too gullible to be on the Internets in the first place.

The second thing was how the ad had a comments field like in a blog post in order to provide "testimonials" from every day folk who made big money through this process. When you scroll down to the place where a text box should be for more comments, this is what you find:


In case you can't read that, it says "Comments disabled due to spam". Yes, Kevin, ain't spam just awful?!?!?!

So what's the solution? Well, it may be what my wife decided to do earlier this year with her laptop: Uninstall Internet Explorer. I've never been of the anti-IE mindset that a lot of other people have been. It's always worked just fine for me. But after this, I may have to move to Firefox (which has not been experiencing these popups).

Boy, saying goodbye to both Internet Explorer and Geocities in the same week? The Nineties really are over.