Since there is no other point of contact from the scammer to you, the sender email address(es) that appear in the headers are possibly legit. The 419 scam email I get usually only has a phone number as a point of contact between the scammer and the email recipient--anything in the email headers is likely bogus.
I was in the process of archiving a mirror copy of one of my Slashdot posts elsewhere on the Net when this story came up brand-new with only 1 post. If you've read the post, you will 'see' the irony of it all...
The information in this post is the end result of many months of thought and software development. If you find the information below has merit, please, by all means take advantage of it and use it. This will be the only post of the actual information by me. All future posts of this material will consist of the URL pointer to this post. Should this post be accidentally or intentionally deleted, I will repost it in its entirety again and link to it as needed as explained above.
The information in this post, if widely used, will effectively make spam and malware infestation of computer systems running Microsoft Windows impossible.
Thank you for your consideration,
Bryan Taylor iamcf13@hotpop.com SpamByte code: 7 (see below)
What are they? A Shareware RFC821/RFC1939 compatible SMTP/POP3 server program for Microsoft(R) Windows. It was written in Microsoft(R) Visual C++. The UPX-compressed executable file containing the complete program is 130,048 bytes in size. A Freeware RFC1939 POP3 client program created in the above manner is 75,264 bytes in size.
Why were they written? To solve the twin problems of email spam and email malware.
How does CF13-SMTP(TM) / CF13-POP3(TM) work? 1) It is an all-in-one SMTP/POP3 email transport solution. 2) It is simple to use and fast. 3) It is extremely reliable when operating under nominal conditions. 4) It is hostile to spammers and computer crackers.
How does CF13-POP3(TM) work? 1) It is hostile to spammers and computer crackers. 2) It is simple to use and fast. 3) It is extremely reliable when operating under nominal conditions.
When are they available? They are available now. See next question for availability.
Where are they available? CF13-SMTP(TM) / CF13-POP3(TM) is available here. CF13-POP3(TM) is available here.
The ideas inside these two software computer programs are hereby declared patent free. These two software computer programs are publication of said ideas and thus said ideas become 'prior art' and are unpatentable either in whole or in part.
Copyright 2004 Bryan Taylor -- All Rights Reserved -- http://www.cf13.com/ Last Update: Tuesday, July 06, 2004, 11:19 Universal Coordinated Time
-- SpamByte information below is used by both programs above to identify and filter out spam and malware -- Startup banner from: http://www.cf13.com/cf13pop3.exe
CF13-POP3(TM)
Copyright 2004 Bryan Taylor -- All Rights Reserved
http://www.cf13.com/
Last Update: Tuesday, July 06, 2004, 11:19 Universal Coordinated Time
LICENSE: FREEWARE! SHARE & ENJOY!
PLEASE VIRUS CHECK THIS PROGRAM BEFORE MAKING COPIES FOR OTHERS.
DISCLAIMER: USE THIS PROGRAM SOLELY AT YOUR OWN RISK!
ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTIES WHATSOEVER!
Note: Your use of this program rewards the creators of the SMTP/POP3 protocols.
Your purchase and use of CF13-SMTP(TM) / CF13-POP3(TM) will reward the
author for making that program available for use at http://www.cf13.com/
and reduce Internet email abuse.
Software should help people, bring people together, make stuff easier to do.
-- Henrik S. Hansen
usage: cf13pop3 svr port login pw SpamByte wantspam
You forgot the world-weary, smart-mouthed young man who is a master at hand-to-hand combat.
Anyway, all you really need is Ed (and maybe the Welsh Corgi).
Tell her/show her the end results of spam on the Internet and set her loose to solve the problem.
Perhaps those guys are tracking down the great-great granddescendents of today's notorious (ex-)spammers in their era for the past 5-6 years after a rift in time and space enabled a brilliantly, modern-time post-produced audiovisual record of some of their exploits to appear on late 20th Century media outlets such as televison, videotape, DVD, theatrical movies...and yes, the Internet.
With Ed on the case, it'll be the spammers murmurring to inspired fast-tempo jazz music: "I think it's time we blow this scene. Get everybody and their stuff together...Ok, 3-2-1 let's--"
Ed (Bullhorn-style over spammer's computer speakers): FREEZE!...YOU MAKERS OF BAD AWFUL Spam-Spam!!!!
I kid you not.
Keeping the programs as simple as possible combined with input validation of all user input would solve a lot of problems involved with writing 'secure programs'.
In 1962, President Kennedy and Soviet Leader Khrushchev worked together to prevent the Cuban Missile Crisis from escalating into World War III, which would likely have turned much of the Earth's land surface into a radioactive wasteland devoid of life and civilization....
Their thanks?
Kennedy is murdered in 1963 and Khrushchev is 'kicked out' and replaced by Bhreshnev in 1964.
In 1987, President Regan challenged Soviet Leader Gorbachev to 'tear down' the Berlin Wall. In 1989, it came down--perhaps symbolically ending the Cold War at that time....
Their thanks?
Naysayers downplay the efforts of Regan (and likely Gorbachev as well) to end the Cold War, detracting somewhat from their impact on world history.
What is all the fuss about email capacity? It is intrinsically nothing more than abstract, magnetically encoded zeroes and ones stored on spinning round metal platters inside hard disks.
Contrast that to what could have happened.... What world could have existed had the nuclear arms race between the USA and the USSR not end the way it did back then due largely in part through the work of these four men?...
Nowadays, due to the increase of terrorism and nuclear poliferation, will there be a day when life imitates art?
I skimmed through the pdf file and it mentioned verifying the sender of an email message. That can be done by connecting to the sender's mailserver and issuing a VRFY command for that sender. The problem is, is that because of spammers, the VRFY command has been 'disconnected' to prevent dictionary-style attacks to guess user email addresses.
To have the best of both worlds, bring back the VRFY command to verify single email addresses AFTER waiting for some long delay (such as 50 odd seconds as Outlook Express will 'time out' after 60 seconds of inactivity). This way, spammers are thwarted and senders are verified. In an earlier post on another thread I suggested only having official, DNS-recognized mailservers talk to one another and nobody else will go a long way to cut down spam and eliminate the layer of IP address anonimity given spammers by open/Trojan-created relay mailsystems.
1 meter = 39.37 inches (& other 'tricks' I kno
on
Our Friend, The Meter
·
· Score: 1
Heres how I keep everything straight....
1 meter = 39.37 inches 1 centimeter = 2.54 inches 1 liter = 33.8 ounces (from the 16.9 ounce half liter pops I used to drink long ago) 28 grams ~= 1 ounce (actually 28.40875 grams) 454.54 grams = 1 pound 5 milliliters = 1 teaspoon 15 milliliters = 1 tablespoon 1 metric ton ~= 1 'long' ton (2200 pounds) 1 kilometer ~= 0.6 miles 37 degrees Celcius = 98.6 degrees Farenheight (human body temperature)
That is about all the conversion 'tricks' I know concerning metric-to-english-to-metric conversion
What happens when one gives a fake (but plausible) name to the cops without producing ID?
If the cops want to be (absolute) hardcases (thanks to the events of Tuesday, 2001-09-11 in the USA), they'd just arrest you and 'take you downtown' anyway so what's the point.
Imagine this situation happening to an undercover human rights worker documenting atrocities in order to expose them. If this situation happened to them they would be in serious trouble!
Now imagine if this scenario happened to somebody (wildly) famous like William Henry Gates III.... (No, I'm not counting the speeding incidents from the 1970s I've heard about).
At this rate, 'Your papers, please' is probably just around the corner unless this type of stuff can be stopped....
I suspect the Spammers / Crackers are DESPARATE enough now to see about compromising antivirus and firewall programs at the source via a crooked/disgruntled person at the company with access to the software and/or the source code to it (even 'better').
I cannot recall the exact text of the ad but it's message was clear:
The fourth most precious commodity, after food, clothing, and shelter, is this:
A person's attention.
I remember the picture used in the ad. It was a guy off in the distance looking at (I think it was) a small yellow ball on the 'floor' in the foreground of the ad.
I basically gave up on commercial TV because, basically its overal content disgusts me--it's so superficial. About all I can stomach is the TV news on regular TV nowadays....
The 'last' straw was when marketers installed advertising in public bathroms! Can't a person have a little privacy and quiet time when they are 'answering the call of nature'?
I listen to one particular public radio station on occasion.
The only advertising I here is the 'today's broadcast sponsored by' message used as a 'station break/id' BETWEEN content blocks or the lengthier pledge drive segments used in the same manner. Other than that, this kind of public radio is much better than the regular ad-ridden, DJ yapping radio stations which I'd rather not listen to because the music played on such stations do little more than break up the constant, round the clock ad delivery by DJs and commercials.
1) POP-BEFORE-SMTP and/or 2) Route ALL port 25 traffic through the ISP's mailserver.
For incoming SMTP connections to receive email:
ONLY ACCEPT CONNECTIONS FROM FELLOW DNS-IP-VERIFIED SMTP SERVERS. NO EXCEPTIONS!
Alas, as long as hosts continue use 'hidden mailservers' that are not officially on file with a DNS lookup, spam will continue to plague the Internet.
In a perfect world, directly delivering email to the recipient's mailserver should only be done by a fellow mailserver offically on file with the DNS system. When a 'non-mailserver' IP does this, the practice screams spam....
I tried 0.0.0.0 on my Windows PC which has a dialup internet connection.
The browser acts like it is dipped in molasses. Can IE be configured to reject/skip connections to 0.0.0.0 and continue loading the webpage as fast as possible?
I gave up and went back to using 127.0.0.1 to blackhole all the spamvertising. If I can use 0.0.0.0 instead, it would be greatly appreciated.
I get 4 or 5 NetSky infected e-mails every day. I wish people would quit using Windows. It's unsanitary. Kinda like using used needles for shooting up.
Windows users: Please learn Linux or buy a Mac. Thanks.
I am on Windows.
I get plenty of NetSky infected emails.
Emailed malware does not concern me as I use my own program to check my email.
Rendering malware inert by treating it as a 'text file' is sweet revenge against the crackers/pranksters/spammers.
If Linux or Macs were in the majority, they'd be under attack just like Windows is now.
This leaves one breed of ads that still annoy me, and I'm not talking about static banner ads, because tend to stay out of my way. I'm talking about the dynamic or floating banner ads, which are horrible because they cover up the content of the site I'm trying to view either for a few seconds or sometimes for an indefinite amount of time (until I find the tiny "close" button). I actually think some of these are blocked on occasion, but I know that they're what I see most these days (especially on ESPN and IGN), and I'd really like to see them go. So if anyone has any clue how to get rid of them, feel free to clue me in!
I am fascinated by these ads from a programming standpoint and try to save the html source code of such pages I encounter for later study.
Anyway, to kill them, you have vew the webpage source if possible if they didn't bar you from reading it by disabling the browser menu and the rightclick context menu. Search through the code for all occurences of '://' which are a part of URLs. You are looking for URLs that are (likely) not on the same domain as you are visiting. Once these URLs are found, examine the syntax of these URLs closely and ask yourself: 'is this URL serving me an ad?'. If you think it is, add the adserver machine name (i.e. adserver.example.com) to your machines HOSTS file with an address of 127.0.0.1
When you restart your broser instances, such devious advertising is blocked as it won't be able to be loaded by the browser per the HOSTS file.
I use NoAds and a trick that seems to kill all popups 'on sight'.
Here is how I do it with Internet Explorer:
Find a 100% non-working URL. I used to use http://www.cyberpromo.com/ for this but now somebody made this (in)famous url work again... DO NOT GO THERE! THEY WILL SEND YOU POPUPS AND ASK TO CHANGE YOUR START PAGE!
Get the URL to show up on a web page--write the page yourself if you have to and rightclick/open in a new window.
The window opens and the titlebar says (I believe by default) 'Microsoft Internet Explorer' and the page area is blank as the dead URL is 'loaded'.
Add this window to NoAds targets list. You (may) have to work fast before IE loads its 'site not found' page and it changes the window title bar.
The window disappears.
Your are DONE!
With NoAds running and enabled, anytime a popup window opens, it will be closed 'on sight' because of this trick.
However, there was one site I came across that was able to send popups to me. Apparently, they were able to change the titlebar of the popup window before handing it off to Windows/IE to open it up and thus get past NoAds. This might be how it's done as I am able to open up brand new IE instances/windows to Google (my start page) from scratch with NoAds enabled. Does anybody have actual JavaScript code to do that? I would like to see how they do that.
With my program CF13 rendering malware harmless for my inbox, I use Agnitum's Outpost Firewall to keep malware out of my system at the protocol level.
The next step down for the scammers/spammers is to compromise popular software firewall programs by any means necessary!
I urge you all now to create a 'system rescue CD-R' with the installation file of a known good copy of your favorite software firewall program and store it in a safe place in case you need it.
Those that can afford it will simply use a hardware-based firewall device.
Nobody cares about your data. They just want your money, which is easy enough to find.
I watched a TV program about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and found out the root cause of the disaster was money. Apparently, bonus money was on the line, and time was short so they disregarded public safety, and plant saftey, to run the ill-fated safety test.
The results have since become legendary.
Concerning man's preoccupation with monetary wealth, the Bible said it best:
[10] For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
[20] But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided? [21] So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.
Slashdot Mirror
This is probably why your email slipped past GMail's filters:
No money amounts mentioned (though numbers appear in the two URLs in the email).
No dollar signs.
No percent signs.
No quoted-printable content.
All (and more) detectable by:
SpamByte: Game Over, Spammers/Computer Crackers....
Since there is no other point of contact from the scammer to you, the sender email address(es) that appear in the headers are possibly legit. The 419 scam email I get usually only has a phone number as a point of contact between the scammer and the email recipient--anything in the email headers is likely bogus.
Ok, here is my contribution back to the internet community:
SpamByte: Game Over, Spammers/Computer Crackers...
I was in the process of archiving a mirror copy of one of my Slashdot posts elsewhere on the Net when this story came up brand-new with only 1 post. If you've read the post, you will 'see' the irony of it all...
--
SpamByte: Game Over, Spammers/Computer Crackers...
Full details here
The information in this post is the end result of many months of thought and software development. If you find the information below has merit, please, by all means take advantage of it and use it. This will be the only post of the actual information by me. All future posts of this material will consist of the URL pointer to this post. Should this post be accidentally or intentionally deleted, I will repost it in its entirety again and link to it as needed as explained above.
The information in this post, if widely used, will effectively make spam and malware infestation of computer systems running Microsoft Windows impossible.
Thank you for your consideration,
Bryan Taylor
iamcf13@hotpop.com
SpamByte code: 7 (see below)
------- Begin information Below -------
From http://www.cf13.com/
CF13-SMTP(TM) / CF13-POP3(TM) Slashdot-Friendly Page
What are they?
A Shareware RFC821/RFC1939 compatible SMTP/POP3 server program for Microsoft(R) Windows.
It was written in Microsoft(R) Visual C++. The UPX-compressed executable file
containing the complete program is 130,048 bytes in size. A Freeware RFC1939 POP3 client
program created in the above manner is 75,264 bytes in size.
Who wrote them? Bryan Taylor, author of the MS-DOS/TURBO PASCAL program FILE-IT.
Why were they written? To solve the twin problems of email spam and email malware.
How does CF13-SMTP(TM) / CF13-POP3(TM) work?
1) It is an all-in-one SMTP/POP3 email transport solution.
2) It is simple to use and fast.
3) It is extremely reliable when operating under nominal conditions.
4) It is hostile to spammers and computer crackers.
How does CF13-POP3(TM) work?
1) It is hostile to spammers and computer crackers.
2) It is simple to use and fast.
3) It is extremely reliable when operating under nominal conditions.
When are they available? They are available now. See next question for availability.
Where are they available?
CF13-SMTP(TM) / CF13-POP3(TM) is available here. CF13-POP3(TM) is available here.
Original site is here. Mirror site is here.
The ideas inside these two software computer programs are hereby declared patent
free. These two software computer programs are publication of said ideas and thus
said ideas become 'prior art' and are unpatentable either in whole or in part.
Copyright 2004 Bryan Taylor -- All Rights Reserved -- http://www.cf13.com/
Last Update: Tuesday, July 06, 2004, 11:19 Universal Coordinated Time
-- SpamByte information below is used by both programs above to identify and filter out spam and malware --
Startup banner from:
http://www.cf13.com/cf13pop3.exe
CF13-POP3(TM)
Copyright 2004 Bryan Taylor -- All Rights Reserved
http://www.cf13.com/
Last Update: Tuesday, July 06, 2004, 11:19 Universal Coordinated Time
LICENSE: FREEWARE! SHARE & ENJOY!
PLEASE VIRUS CHECK THIS PROGRAM BEFORE MAKING COPIES FOR OTHERS.
DISCLAIMER: USE THIS PROGRAM SOLELY AT YOUR OWN RISK!
ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTIES WHATSOEVER!
Note: Your use of this program rewards the creators of the SMTP/POP3 protocols.
Your purchase and use of CF13-SMTP(TM) / CF13-POP3(TM) will reward the
author for making that program available for use at http://www.cf13.com/
and reduce Internet email abuse.
Software should help people, bring people together, make stuff easier to do.
-- Henrik S. Hansen
usage: cf13pop3 svr port login pw SpamByte wantspam
svr - server
Snake oil.
Read why here. Get the info in Claude Shannon's own words here.
You forgot the world-weary, smart-mouthed young man who is a master at hand-to-hand combat.
Anyway, all you really need is Ed (and maybe the Welsh Corgi).
Tell her/show her the end results of spam on the Internet and set her loose to solve the problem.
Perhaps those guys are tracking down the great-great granddescendents of today's notorious (ex-)spammers in their era for the past 5-6 years after a rift in time and space enabled a brilliantly, modern-time post-produced audiovisual record of some of their exploits to appear on late 20th Century media outlets such as televison, videotape, DVD, theatrical movies...and yes, the Internet.
With Ed on the case, it'll be the spammers murmurring to inspired fast-tempo jazz music: "I think it's time we blow this scene. Get everybody and their stuff together...Ok, 3-2-1 let's--"
Ed (Bullhorn-style over spammer's computer speakers): FREEZE!...YOU MAKERS OF BAD AWFUL Spam-Spam!!!!
See you later, packet cowboy....
I kid you not. Keeping the programs as simple as possible combined with input validation of all user input would solve a lot of problems involved with writing 'secure programs'.
In 1962, President Kennedy and Soviet Leader Khrushchev worked together to prevent the Cuban Missile Crisis from escalating into World War III, which would likely have turned much of the Earth's land surface into a radioactive wasteland devoid of life and civilization....
Their thanks?
Kennedy is murdered in 1963 and Khrushchev is 'kicked out' and replaced by Bhreshnev in 1964.
In 1987, President Regan challenged Soviet Leader Gorbachev to 'tear down' the Berlin Wall. In 1989, it came down--perhaps symbolically ending the Cold War at that time....
Their thanks?
Naysayers downplay the efforts of Regan (and likely Gorbachev as well) to end the Cold War, detracting somewhat from their impact on world history.
What is all the fuss about email capacity? It is intrinsically nothing more than abstract, magnetically encoded zeroes and ones stored on spinning round metal platters inside hard disks.
Contrast that to what could have happened.... What world could have existed had the nuclear arms race between the USA and the USSR not end the way it did back then due largely in part through the work of these four men?...
Nowadays, due to the increase of terrorism and nuclear poliferation, will there be a day when life imitates art?
A kid won a contest sponsored by Mattel and got a part in Masters Of The Universe (1987)
He had NO lines.
If you blinked fast, you'd miss him when he appeared on screen.
Will this be the fate of the HHGTTG movie part winner?...
1) Keep the MX records...
2) Have *NO* hidden mailservers not on file with DNS.
3) Only allow official, on-file-with-DNS mailservers to talk to each other *ONLY*
4) Spam is cut way down and rogue mailservers are easier to identify and take action against.
I skimmed through the pdf file and it mentioned verifying the sender of an email message. That can be done by connecting to the sender's mailserver and issuing a VRFY command for that sender. The problem is, is that because of spammers, the VRFY command has been 'disconnected' to prevent dictionary-style attacks to guess user email addresses.
To have the best of both worlds, bring back the VRFY command to verify single email addresses AFTER waiting for some long delay (such as 50 odd seconds as Outlook Express will 'time out' after 60 seconds of inactivity). This way, spammers are thwarted and senders are verified. In an earlier post on another thread I suggested only having official, DNS-recognized mailservers talk to one another and nobody else will go a long way to cut down spam and eliminate the layer of IP address anonimity given spammers by open/Trojan-created relay mailsystems.
Heres how I keep everything straight....
1 meter = 39.37 inches
1 centimeter = 2.54 inches
1 liter = 33.8 ounces (from the 16.9 ounce half liter pops I used to drink long ago)
28 grams ~= 1 ounce (actually 28.40875 grams)
454.54 grams = 1 pound
5 milliliters = 1 teaspoon
15 milliliters = 1 tablespoon
1 metric ton ~= 1 'long' ton (2200 pounds)
1 kilometer ~= 0.6 miles
37 degrees Celcius = 98.6 degrees Farenheight (human body temperature)
That is about all the conversion 'tricks' I know concerning metric-to-english-to-metric conversion
What happens when one gives a fake (but plausible) name to the cops without producing ID?
If the cops want to be (absolute) hardcases (thanks to the events of Tuesday, 2001-09-11 in the USA), they'd just arrest you and 'take you downtown' anyway so what's the point.
Imagine this situation happening to an undercover human rights worker documenting atrocities in order to expose them. If this situation happened to them they would be in serious trouble!
Now imagine if this scenario happened to somebody (wildly) famous like William Henry Gates III....
(No, I'm not counting the speeding incidents from the 1970s I've heard about).
At this rate, 'Your papers, please' is probably just around the corner unless this type of stuff can be stopped....
I suspect the Spammers / Crackers are DESPARATE enough now to see about compromising antivirus and firewall programs at the source via a crooked/disgruntled person at the company with access to the software and/or the source code to it (even 'better').
You have been warned....
I cannot recall the exact text of the ad but it's message was clear:
The fourth most precious commodity, after food, clothing, and shelter, is this:
A person's attention.
I remember the picture used in the ad. It was a guy off in the distance looking at (I think it was) a small yellow ball on the 'floor' in the foreground of the ad.
I basically gave up on commercial TV because, basically its overal content disgusts me--it's so superficial. About all I can stomach is the TV news on regular TV nowadays....
The 'last' straw was when marketers installed advertising in public bathroms! Can't a person have a little privacy and quiet time when they are 'answering the call of nature'?
I listen to one particular public radio station on occasion.
The only advertising I here is the 'today's broadcast sponsored by' message used as a 'station break/id' BETWEEN content blocks or the lengthier pledge drive segments used in the same manner. Other than that, this kind of public radio is much better than the regular ad-ridden, DJ yapping radio stations which I'd rather not listen to because the music played on such stations do little more than break up the constant, round the clock ad delivery by DJs and commercials.
For outgoing SMTP connections to send email:
1) POP-BEFORE-SMTP and/or
2) Route ALL port 25 traffic through the ISP's mailserver.
For incoming SMTP connections to receive email:
ONLY ACCEPT CONNECTIONS FROM FELLOW DNS-IP-VERIFIED SMTP SERVERS. NO EXCEPTIONS!
Alas, as long as hosts continue use 'hidden mailservers' that are not officially on file with a DNS lookup, spam will continue to plague the Internet.
In a perfect world, directly delivering email to the recipient's mailserver should only be done by a fellow mailserver offically on file with the DNS system. When a 'non-mailserver' IP does this, the practice screams spam....
Try http://www.blackholes.us
They have lists of IP ranges assigned by country and ISP.
I tried 0.0.0.0 on my Windows PC which has a dialup internet connection.
The browser acts like it is dipped in molasses.
Can IE be configured to reject/skip connections to 0.0.0.0 and continue loading the webpage as fast as possible?
I gave up and went back to using 127.0.0.1 to blackhole all the spamvertising. If I can use 0.0.0.0 instead, it would be greatly appreciated.
I am on Windows.
I get plenty of NetSky infected emails.
Emailed malware does not concern me as I use my own program to check my email.
Rendering malware inert by treating it as a 'text file' is sweet revenge against the crackers/pranksters/spammers.
If Linux or Macs were in the majority, they'd be under attack just like Windows is now.
I am fascinated by these ads from a programming standpoint and try to save the html source code of such pages I encounter for later study.
Anyway, to kill them, you have vew the webpage source if possible if they didn't bar you from reading it by disabling the browser menu and the rightclick context menu. Search through the code for all occurences of '://' which are a part of URLs. You are looking for URLs that are (likely) not on the same domain as you are visiting. Once these URLs are found, examine the syntax of these URLs closely and ask yourself: 'is this URL serving me an ad?'. If you think it is, add the adserver machine name (i.e. adserver.example.com) to your machines HOSTS file with an address of 127.0.0.1
When you restart your broser instances, such devious advertising is blocked as it won't be able to be loaded by the browser per the HOSTS file.
I use NoAds and a trick that seems to kill all popups 'on sight'.
Here is how I do it with Internet Explorer:
Find a 100% non-working URL. I used to use http://www.cyberpromo.com/ for this but now somebody made this (in)famous url work again...
DO NOT GO THERE! THEY WILL SEND YOU POPUPS AND ASK TO CHANGE YOUR START PAGE!
Get the URL to show up on a web page--write the page yourself if you have to and rightclick/open in a new window.
The window opens and the titlebar says (I believe by default) 'Microsoft Internet Explorer' and the page area is blank as the dead URL is 'loaded'.
Add this window to NoAds targets list. You (may) have to work fast before IE loads its 'site not found' page and it changes the window title bar.
The window disappears.
Your are DONE!
With NoAds running and enabled, anytime a popup window opens, it will be closed 'on sight' because of this trick.
However, there was one site I came across that was able to send popups to me. Apparently, they were able to change the titlebar of the popup window before handing it off to Windows/IE to open it up and thus get past NoAds. This might be how it's done as I am able to open up brand new IE instances/windows to Google (my start page) from scratch with NoAds enabled. Does anybody have actual JavaScript code to do that? I would like to see how they do that.
...to resort to this.
With my program CF13 rendering malware harmless for my inbox, I use Agnitum's Outpost Firewall to keep malware out of my system at the protocol level.
The next step down for the scammers/spammers is to compromise popular software firewall programs by any means necessary!
I urge you all now to create a 'system rescue CD-R' with the installation file of a known good copy of your favorite software firewall program and store it in a safe place in case you need it.
Those that can afford it will simply use a hardware-based firewall device.
I watched a TV program about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and found out the root cause of the disaster was money. Apparently, bonus money was on the line, and time was short so they disregarded public safety, and plant saftey, to run the ill-fated safety test.
The results have since become legendary.
Concerning man's preoccupation with monetary wealth, the Bible said it best:
I look at things this way....
It's all His:
and you can't 'take it with you':