This is all too weird...

Google is my master. I am loyal to it, but the weirdest things are happening to it. Whenever I do a search, it will bring up a pop-up window, which will disappear, but then reappear, and then when the real page loads, it gives me results totally irrelevant to the search, like search engines.

Plus, I am getting pop-ups here in the forums, something that never happens here.

And now this is happening. Some TopText pop-up came up and now it will randomly underline stuff in messages! This is all too weird!!!

This is on the PC, BTW.

Get Ad-Aware and run it. Looks like you have spyware.

Can be found here:

http://www.lavasoftusa.com/

Spyware.

If Ad-Aware doesn't get rid of it (as has happened occasionally to me in the past) this little program should do the trick.

Whoo! The Flange Peddler saved the day! Thanx!

Spyware is fucking criminal and it's getting way too widespread for my liking.

Yeah, spyware creators should be hanged.

I absolutely hate how spyware just puts itself on without your consent. That is so stupid. So spyware should AT LEAST give you a prompt on whether or not you want to put it on.

A lot of the time it does, if you look hard enough. Many times there will be a paragraph in the EULA section of programs you install and such that tell you it's going to install spyware. Most people don't read that though.

Run Ad-Aware on a regular basis and you should be clean most of the time.

its called hijacking. a spyware program will eaither make a 'search homepage' or will go to that site sutomaticly even if you type in the URL to another search engine. god they fucking suck!

searchV is one of them.

*cough*. Haven't seen a pop-up in months.

Firebird/fox works just as well.

One day, those who commercialize the internet will fall off of their mountains of greed and the internet will be for the people

Right after Duke Nukem Forever is released.

insertwackynamehere said:

One day, those who commercialize the internet will fall off of their mountains of greed and the internet will be for the people

Heh, right after Millennium is released :P

Heh, repeat joke.

I have ben battling spyware for a while and still am. I use a program called spybot search and destroy, But it can't destroy everything. I have had to delete all the information out of two or three dll's that spybot wouldn't do. I feel like spyware is literally trying to take over my computer. It's like a virus.

Use *both* spybot S&D and Ad-Aware. Seems to have cleared things up for me. The thrush on the other hand...

If Google really is your master use the Google toolbar. Makes a nice little addition to IE and since I installed mine its blocked 4336 pop-ups and counting.

Kudos to the person whot thought of having the counter. Really satisfying. Of course for flash-based shit-fests you'll still need other things to remedy the situation, but it's a good start.

Dammit! This shit keeps coming back (at least the gay search engine problem)! The weird thing is, only the first page of searches is the gay stuff, when I go to a new page, it will be normal. I'm definitely getting a patch for this.

It's something in the registry. You'll need to find the problem (use all or part of the website in the search function) with regedit and remove it. I've had this problem before, and once I did this, it never returned.