The Digital Plague - Popup Windows!

The internet opened some pretty amazing doors into things we didn't have access to before, allowing us to easily access valuable information at the blink of an eye. Then right when we got comfortable with the technology and its exponential growth, some marketer saw an opportunity to make some money and everything changed.

Our own technologies were now being misused, abused, and used to trick us into seeing an ad we never asked for, don't want and that became more annoying than the planned television commercial.

What truly made this form of advertising annoying was that it infiltrated everything we did even when we were not surfing the web. They started to make popup windows pop out of nowhere, generated by programs we downloaded with the "cool calendar" or "weather" programs we thought might be useful. The most popular was the one that put the outside temperature by your clock.

It used a "Joiner" program to fuse the virus (uninvited ad server/adware program) program and the real program i.e. a screensaver into one .exe file that you thought was just one program.

These days this is detected with all antivirus programs which can tell if a program is a "binder" program shelling two programs that runs a batch program that executes (runs) both programs simultaneously.

The second program, the virus, runs completely without a GUI (graphical user interface) so you don't even know it did anything. The real program, the game or screensaver installer runs to trick you and to give you a reason that your computer just started accessing. The idea was you never knew what you installed that started all these ads popups happening. They even got cleaver and made the program wait several days before even turning itself on!

You'd download and install the program but what you didn't know was that another program was "bound" to this one that ran completely under the radar, installing the advertising engine.

It would quietly download a few bits every second of data into the program and save ads on your computer- which especially back then was bad because broadband was not in every home, and many still used dial up- and they would pop up on your screen on a timer.

You would be playing a card game that came with windows and all of a sudden ads started populating your page right in front of your game! When you'd close one three more would pop up. You could almost hear the simultaneous stomping of angry computer users everywhere when this happened.

Luckily these days windows has combated this problem as well as the major antivirus programs by creating shell programs that block popups as well as blocking a program from downloading anything without your permission.

If one of these ads servers ran, and some how got into your computer the first time it tries to use a port to download its "payload" your antivirus would be alerted because it would be watching ALL ports. Back then however their was little use for this and thus most computers were vulnerable.

It was actually because of popups that many things that protect our computers today were invented. Popup technologies got pretty sophisticated and showed a lot of vulnerabilities in windows!

Nowhere I went did I not hear people complaining about popups! It was both invasive and in many ways illegal. These programs were court ordered to put in the TOS (terms of service) agreement if their was any adware (later coined to describe this type of program) in the program.

They decided to use some covert tactics so that other people got the blame for the popups by using the same adware program but launching ads through the browser over websites. For example say you went to your yahoo page to check your email.

The program would wait for you to type a keyword, or to type in a browser location with a keyword in it then it would launch a "relevant" ad on the page as soon as it loaded making it appear to be coming from that page. This really enraged those companies being spammed over.

Sites started to sue these companies for "Bandwidth theft" and illegal copyright infringement, because they were piggy backing their popup ads over the companies "intellectual properties", which is as bad as trying to hack into that site and install your ad on their pages directly. They got penalized heavily for this and although many legitimate ad serving companies changed their ways, many underground companies continued undetected.

Any great market plan requires that their is a market for your product. People everywhere were stomping their feet at this popup problem because it was starting to make people not want to use their computer.

The market for popup blocker software was not only ripe, it was thriving if you could bring the people a solution they would not only buy your product they would recommend it to all of their friends.

Companies started to pick up on this and now the market is saturated with popup blocker software. Google was the first to launch the popup tool bar, followed my yahoo, then several others.

Microsoft launched a shell program in their SP-2 (Service pack two) upgrade to their popular Windows XP windows program that would block popups from all sources including infiltration from programs. It would even stop those programs from successfully installing AND downloading their payload if they somehow got past the guard.

Although this problem continues to plague us as hackers are getting as cleaver as the programs we have to stop popups, the problem is improving. New less invasive popups are being used now such as the scroll onto the page popup, the elective popup and the new still annoying but not interrupting your experience pop-under which pops up under your website screen so you don't see it until you close your browser.

Some great sites have been built to inform you about popup blockers as well as show you how to install, uninstall the various types of popup blockers. I would suggest you check out this one:

Popup Blocker Reviews

That site is a great information site with unbiased reviews on the various popup blocker programs and features, and more. I promise, you won't see any popups on this site! (I couldn't resist saying that).

I hope this hub has given you sufficient insight into the popup madness era that continues even today. You should arm your computer always with popup blocker software, adware blocker, spyware blocker, and virus protection. A lot of the popup blocker software comes with all of the above as you will see on the above linked page I included to give you an in-depth look at what's available.

Good luck.. Pop-in any time to check out our new hubs (sorry again I couldn't resist hehe)