[thechat] Google now sports pop-up adds

Bruce Heerssen bruce at heerssen.com
Tue Oct 9 11:31:35 CDT 2001


Cory Preus wrote:

> Bruce-
> 
>> I just went to google for the upteenth time today and a pop-up ad 
>> demanded my attention for the first time.
> 
> 
> Do you have Gator installed? If so, it installs a little "utility" called
> OfferCompanion which very well could be the problem you are dealing with.
> I've seen other utilities with different names as well. 

Well, no. Gator only runs on windows (? : too lazy to check for myself). 
In any case, I try to be very diligent about not letting spyware or 
other questionable programs to run on my computer. And I certainly 
wouldn't let something called 'OfferCompanion' run on my computer. 
Yikes, that one sounds pretty evil to me.

I think now that it was just a brain fart. I'm on a dial up connection 
and it's entirely possible that a pop-up add could start to load 
unnoticed in the background, and then when it finally finishes loading, 
it brings itself to the front. At the time, I was downloading a fairly 
large file, so other things would take a *long* time to download (except 
sites like google which I have cached). It was just coincidence that the 
pop-up finished loading just as I went to google.

It was odd though.

Regards,
-Bruce







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