We have, of course, known about this for some considerable time but this BBC story seems to think that the problem is getting worse. Which sounds likely.
It’s well worth reading the readers’ comments at the end of the story.
Whilst quite innocently searching on the web for a number of female actresses’ websites, I was continually bombarded with pop-ups. Eventually my computer froze but the hard drive carried on accessing. When this had finished my home page was a junk advert that I could not remove, also whenever I tried to use a search engine a fake search engine appeared instead. I was plagued with pornographic pop-ups and had pornographic websites inserted into my favourites file which when removed reappeared the following day! All extremely annoying.
Does anyone believe that “innocently searching”?
The internet is a mess and needs to be replaced by a well managed network that does not tolerate abuse.
Like what exactly?
There are plenty more like that.
A link would be helpfuL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3528810.stm
Unfortunately you can easily be duped by some websites. You can quite easily “innocently search” for actress websites (even Buffy) and have search engines list websites that on the surface look innocent, but are purely a holding page to sucker an unsuspecting passerby.My father’s machine had the same problem, when my brother decided to use it look some actress or other (IIRC it was Emily Lloyd), and hit on several pages that were nothing to do with what he was looking for. The pages in question don’t always feature any pornographic images either, just a page full of names in blog style format. It took a bit of registry hacking to actually remove the offend links and popups. Even a dialup had mysterious appeared on his desktop.