Do not use profanity. Be very careful when discussing financial or business affairs. Avoid any mention of your private parts. Do not offer any guarantees, or refer to checks that may or may not be in the mail. | Refrain from describing anything or anybody as “free.” Abstain from the exuberant use of punctuation marks. Shun simple salutations like “Hello,” and opt instead to craft a detailed, personalized subject line. —Michelle Delio
—Spam Filters Grab Good With Bad (Wired)
Spam is evil.
The above article lists some of the new rules of e-mail. I have my e-mail spam filter set to block any message with more than two exclamation marks or the word “sex” in the subject line. (The only person who might ever want to talk to me about sex is my wife, and she doesn’t need to use e-mail to get my attention.)
I’ve stayed up into the wee hours of the morning, adding anti-spam protection to our SHU installation of MoveableType. There were scores of links to viagra, digital camera, and gambling websites tucked away in older blog entries. (The spammers want Google to find links to their sites, thus artificially raising their rankings.)
I’ve also read that we can expect to start seeing full-screen advertisements that load stealthily in the background while we are surfing a site, and that play after we click away from a website.
I have four different ad-blocking tools installed on the computer I’m using now: Webwasher (which not only blocks ads but closes up the space on the screen where the ad used to be; I sometimes have to shut off because it interferes with my webmail), Google’s Toolbar (great for stopping popups; hold down ctrl when clicking if you know you want a popup this time; or, click a button to permanently allow popups on the domain — very useful), NoFlash (which kills Macromedia Flash ads; I can easily turn it back on if I know I want the flash thingy), and a few minutes ago I just added the unimaginatively-named Mike Skallas’s Ad Blocking Host File (a list of ad-serving hosts that your browser will ignore, registering only errors where the ads are supposed to be… not pretty, but effective).
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OK, it looks like AdAware will be my next download, and I'll look into going back to Mozilla. (I stopped using Netscape years ago when I was stuck with MS-FrontPage for HTML editing, and there were what were probably deliberate incompatibilities that made FrontPage chomp all my Netscape code.)
I use Mozilla Firebird, which suppresses all popups, and its Flash click-to-play extension, the combination which lets me decide both what popups I want and what Flash I want to see. Browsing has been incomparably more pleasant since I started using Mozilla (and particularly since the switch to FB). I also use AdAware for malware, and Grisoft's AVG for virus scanning, and have found all of them very effective--I weathered every virus outbreak over the last two years without so much as a hiccup.
The IT department loaded PopUpKiller onto my machine; it only removes any webpage that I "blacklist." It is very effective at stopping pop-unders and exit-pops, but you have to tell it what to kill.
You might also want to get AdAware or Spybot to remove tracking cookies and other "malware" that is installed automatically when you visit certain websites.
Joshua Sasmor