Short post this time …
Just been looking up something Warcrafty and was cursing the site I was peeking at due to them being infested with popup ads. I hate these, they’re intrusive, they tend to resize a browser window that I’m happy with and they also carry the risk of infection by trojans.
The advertising people have figured out a way of getting around the popup blockers built into Internet Explorer and Firefox, which is where more extreme measures come in. I use two :
Flashblock – this stops Flash windows from loading until you say they can load.
AdBlock Plus – this one just stops adverts loading. Any advert … any suspicious website, it’ll block it totally. And you can add undesirable sites to the list too.
That’s Adblock Plus by the way, there is an “Adblock” out there which does half the job. I’ve just switched this machine over to Adblock Plus, because “Adblock” wasn’t doing the job.
There’s all sorts of nasties that can come from uncontrolled adverts, including keylogger trojans and other malware. Best way to protect yourself is by blocking them at source, which means having software like Adblock Plus and Flashblocker active to have a better chance of keeping the unwanted stuff away from your browser. Anti-virus protects a little but the various people I’ve known to have account information stolen have been running competent anti-virus products. Seems like AV is not as good a defense as the people selling that would like you to believe.
The two mods I’ve mentioned above require the Firefox browser, which is well worth a peek anyway as a replacement to Internet Explorer – even if you don’t intend to use the features that Geekdom raves about.