Friday, October 14, 2011
QUESTION
All of a sudden, things I read on the web, including now comments to this blog, have certain seemingly random words underlined twice in color, and when I run my curser over them, I get a popup I don't want. Also, I seem to be afflicted now with many more unwanted popups in the various news and comment blogs I visit, even though I have turned my pop-up blocker on in Internet Explorer. Does anyone know what is going on?
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7 comments:
Sounds like bad spyware got installed somehow on your computer. I'd suggest Malwarebytes:
http://download.cnet.com/Malwarebytes-Anti-Malware/3000-8022_4-10804572.html
*I'd suggest using Malwarebytes to remove it.
Yes, the pop-up blocker will only catch a certain (omnipresent) type of webpage advertisement. What you have sounds like a piece of software that blasts advertising at you has sneaked its way into your web-browser itself, making itself cozy next to the spell-check and other such components.
Dont overreact, it's not a virus. These underlined links are a legitimate function of HTML5, the formatting code for web pages. They are "sponsored links" but they are essentially like any other link within a web page -- they are designed to take you somewhere, if you click them. Any website can sell its space to advertisers, so that any use of a word (for example "automobiles") can be formatted to display a link. The irritating aspect is, an advertiser can specify ANY word -- even a totally ungermane word -- for markup. So you'll see underlined and in color "typewriter" and you might get a display (pop-over on hover) for a cookbook. Originally this feature was designed to allow, for example, unfamiliar technical terms in an article to be flagged, whereupon a hover with the mouse would "pop" a definition -- a very useful feature, analagous to a footnote (a bit of detail available without interrupting the flow of the main text). But of course the feature has been hijacked and usually gets leveraged for commercials.
You do need to be careful about actually clicking these pop-overs, as it's easy to make a legitimate looking car ad link to a totally irrelevant (and dangerous) site where you really COULD get a virus. But the feature itself is harmless.
Advice: don't hover, don't click. They're useless.
Please expand a little on what kinds of things are in the pop-ups. Are they links to products/services or something else?
What pops up all over the place is something called Living Play Entertainment. Any suggestions?
Check the following link to a tech support site. They suggest how you can get rid of a problem that sounds like yours.
http://www.techsupportforum.com/forums/f139/solved-how-can-i-removing-excessive-ads-from-living-play-entertainment-583891.html
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