USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20011126.0633 (On Screen): One of the stranger aspects of running this site is that I seem to have gotten the reputation for knowing all the answers. Every once in a while, out of the blue, I'll receive a letter asking me some question, from some person I've never heard of. I respond as best I can. About two weeks ago I received this one:

so...in simple english, not in "geek speak," what the hell do I do to stop the pop up ads?

He wanted a short, simple answer, so I gave him one: Purchase and install AdSubtract Pro. I started using this a few months ago after I got fed up with Norton Internet Security blue-screening Win 2K all the time. AdSubtract Pro (and ZoneAlarm Pro) are much more reliable products, and I think they work better, too (although in some ways they're not quite as flexible).

Some of the web sites out there have gotten crafty. CNN has started running Flash ads on their pages, for example. My usual solution to that is to set up a rule for the site which prevents it from retrieving ".swf" -- but that didn't work there. So I had to dig into the page source and loading logs a bit. Turns out that they're loading javascripts from another site. The solution turned out to be to set up a rule for a site called "ar.atwola.com" to prevent it from loading ".js". As soon as I did that, obnoxious flash ads at CNN vanished forever (or until they find another way to slip them through).

In the mean time, I'd like to reassure people that I will answer all questions to the best of my ability, but that sometimes the answer will be "I don't know." (discuss)