Creepy ads

[Enzo]

I am helping a local individual get a line out from a little Vox amp, and I suggested a speaker level direct box, rather than tapping into this largely digital amp and installing a line out. Especially so since the power amp has a "tube reactor" stage and we want to include that. I had suggested the Peavey speaker direct boxes to look at. The guy went looking at guitar center and found 123 direct boxes, but not the speaker type. SO I went to Sweetwater and looked for a speaker direct box, and the ProCo DB1 popped up. Terrific.

Now I come over here, and the google banner ad across the top is now chasing me around the forum with ads for Sweetwater and the darned DB1. It creeps me out.

[DrGonz78]

That is because you allowed google to track your ip address... If you don't want that to happen then try to use google against itself...

https://startpage.com/

This is google but it is not google since it does not track your ip address. Try a search and then come here and see if it does the same thing, I would bet the ad wizards won't know where you just visited.

[tedmich]

big brother is really quite dumb currently, I have the Google news app on my iPhone and if I allow it to use my location (which is pretty much around Portland OR) it begins to give me nothing but UK news, I get nothing but cricket and premier league soccer... whatever that is...

But on he search engine front its a pretty big pain as I get banners of nothing but what I searched/purchased a week ago

[52 Bill]

I am so far behind the technology, I was always amazed that the ads on these pages always seemed to know what I'm looking for. I search for a water filter and then magically there are water filter ads. I look for a tuner pedal and there are the ads for Musician's Friend and Guitar Center. It got to be too much of a coincidence, so I asked and found out about the hidden trail of location and searches, etc.

It's pretty scary to think that everything you do on line is tracked and followed.

[Jazz P Bass]

Yeah, I saw an ad the other day for a local car dealership.
Creepy.

[Enzo]

Perhaps this explains all the ads I see for escort services and nude cheerleader clubs.

[J M Fahey]

I have just killed those pesky ads.
Up to 10 days ago, I used the very effective Firefox extension called Ad Blocker
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...on/ad-blocker/
Worked like a charm.
But I upgraded to Firefox 11 and it does not (yet) work with it.
So I was enjoying my long forgotten ads
Now that I read your post, I googled a little, found a method that is not "automatic", requires a little tweaking but is not NASA complex either.
Works like a charm too, and does not care what Browser I'm using, since it works straight on how Windows works.
How to Remove Google Text Ads
Only thing that made me think a little, was that the "hosts" file I had to edit has no extension, but when asked I chose to use notepad, pasted at the end (below "127.0.0.1 localhost" the two lines
"127.0.0.1 pagead.googlesyndication.com
127.0.0.1 pagead2.googlesyndication.com" ,
saved the file and reloaded my MEF page.
Voila !!! No pesky pageads !!!
Mind you, Big Brother *keeps* spying us, but does not place its dirty ads in the page we are reading.
Something is better than nothing.
Good luck.

[Enzo]

Oh, I thoroughly expect this behavior from google et al, I just find it creepy when it is in front of me.


I am sure there are boocoo ways to squash it, but all of them require fucking around with the computer. I hate computers. I look at the computer like I look at the phone or the cable TV - it is a communicatiuons terminal. It ain;t a hobby, not for me.

I want my tools to work for me, I don;t want to work for them. I get in my car, turn the key, and drive down the road. SOme guy down the road might like to spend his weekends installing headers and tuned pipes, putting in a hotter cam, etc etc. Not me.

I have friends into it, I constantly hear discussions... I installed unix-clone ubunga or ubtuna or something, and it works great except I have to reboot to configure the blah blah blah. My eyes glaze over. They eternally have various issues of reconfiguring something so their email will retain addresses or some such, then install wireless routers around their apartments so they can wireless network their 17 lap tops. But of course certain ones won;t work in certain rooms, or we just can't get to the printer from the Macbook or whatever. It is like a model railroad - constant putzing.

And installing all the browsers. Don't get me wrong, more power to you if you are into it. I just want to turn away when someone starts out, "No,man, all you have to do it open..." No joy in it for me.

[J M Fahey]

I'm not into having "the latest of" either.
It's just that this f*ck*ng Firefox *INSISTED* on self-upgrading and I foolishly clicked "yes".
My fault.
The ad killer I referred to was great, did all the "under the hood" work for me: whenever *any* ad appears which pisses me off (which means most of them) , I just right clicked on it and "add to blocked list"
No more interference from that address.
I'm trying to "downgrade" back to my earlier Firefox, but it refuses to.
Some boring rainy night (of which I have many ahead, since we are entering Autumn) maybe I'll just erase it and make a fresh NOS install.
I have the old installer saved somewhere.
Oh well.

[Jazz P Bass]

That automatic upgrade reminds me of Adobe Reader X.
What a piece of crap reader.
I went back to Version 9.

[Steve Conner]

Well, I hate computers too. Programming the things for a living gets old quick.

But I think the kind of person who hates computers is exactly the kind of person who should have everything set to automatic updates, and just let the thing take care of itself. And be running a newish computer with XP SP3 or Win7. Or even a Mac.

Downgrading to old versions of software is kind of pointless at best, and a major security risk at worst. You just get left further and further behind, and more and more things get incompatible.

As for Firefox, I've been using FF11 with Adblock Plus. That blocks all ads by default.

[Sowhat]

Aside from music electronics I have spent maybe 3 decades as a software engineer. I feel guilty about what has happened to the internet which I though was going to solve all our problems at first. I developed early crawler robots and advertising generating and tracking systems which at first were used quite innocently, but now that the next generations have hold of it, things seem to be spiraling out of control... what nightmares will the future bring? I can't keep up with the insanity anymore and I'm sorry for what others and myself have unleashed on the unsuspecting public so many years ago. It reminds me of an interview with the guy who invented the seat belt. He said we would have been better served if he had invented a sharp spike coming out of the steering wheel hub instead.

[J M Fahey]

Oooops !!! Real hard solution, although it would probably get streets rid of reckless drivers in no time.
*Maybe* a tradeoff solution might be to have *everybody* in a car use a seatbelt ... except the driver.
*Maybe* he would drive more carefully after that.

[Enzo]

I just bought a new computer. My old one worked OK, but lacked SP3. I went to install TurboTax for this season, and it wouldn;t load without SP3. Tried to download and install SP3 and my system wouldn;t let me. It always got stuck at the same spot. It would sit there for hours "processing" something. I left it going and went to lunch, no advance when i returned.

But I needed to get my taxes done, and there were enough other issues with the old system, I went for a new one. I now have whatever the latest WIndows is that they sell preloaded. Seems to work, but like anything new, doesn;t want to look like my old XP.

MY old tower came with tons of stickers all over it proclaiming memory in the HDD and RAM, as well as cache, and DVD x40 or something. Whole bunch of stuff. I left it all on there. Like the people who leave teh sticker in their car window. As I look at the new one, it is black. It says "ASUS" on it. That's it. The top is flat, so I can set my photos on it like the old one. FOr a while there, all the computers seemed to come out with domes tops, making them useless. I saw a couple models at the store with a sort of depression in the top with a few USB or similar port connectors. I guess you could park some peripheral in the little space. SO I can;t tell you the numbers for this thing. The old system had 500Meg of RAM, from back when that was a goodly amount. Now that is nothing. There were signs at the store, but they all were similar. Close to a terabyte of HDD, several gigs of RAM, DVD/CDROM/++/XYZ/X16/X40 something or other drive - the thing with the drawer that slides out. I must say it is fast. Wake it up and a few seconds later there we are. CLick internet, and one-two-thr... there it is.

I went to Best Buy, might as well go there until they go out of business. I noted that since my last visit, the computer department has become a sea of lap top models, with a little aisle of desk tops off to the side. As lacking as savvy as I am, I did note that I could not see any CD-ROM/DVD drives on the lap tops. I guess there isn;t room for them if you intend they never be more than a quarter inch thick. I had a fleeting thought of getting a lapper, but I still need the DVD drive. That and they cost two to three times what a desk top does.

Now as I sit here on my new system, taxes done and e-filed, I have all my schematics and other files in the old system. I did think to stick my back tax files on a flash drive, because Turbo Tax looks to last years retun and transfers data. Didn;t want to do that by hand. But never took the time to copy all those files. SO today, smart guy that I am, I went out and bought a monitor switch. I had considered making one. Three 15 pin connectors, a switch, put them in a box - voila, monitor switch. But considering the time and effort to get the parts and construct it, I dropped into a neighborhood computer service place, and for $35 got a KVM switch. It INCLUDES the monitor cables. I usually tos the keyboard on top of the tower when I am nopt using it, so I had thought to leave two keyboards, but this thing is a KVM that accepts USB, even switches audio to my speakers.

SO I expect that to make my life easier, and it certainly fulfills any latent desire to screw with my computer. I want to screw with my computer about as much as my mom wanted to screw around under the hood of her car.

[DrGonz78]

Furthermore, if you need to reinstall winXP or something like that, you need at least keep service pack 2 & 3 on a disk somewhere. So, then Microsoft stops their support for XP prior to SP4 and your left finding downloads of the service pack from 2nd & 3rd party websites. I have downloaded those files but did not actually install them. The download actually has errors on the file and probably creates more security risks. So, my question...>>> Is Microsoft trying to let their older systems become so unstable that you have to upgrade to newer versions of windows? Not that they are that stable in the first place, but I have had great luck for my system. That is not always the case for most users, and yes there are things that just suck about every operating system.

I love Knoppix the most. I mean that I love the Unix kernals. When a computer fails to boot up and you cannot get your files, well then running Knoppix from your cd/dvd/usb drive opens up the door. I have saved many computer user's files w/ Knoppix and it is a free OS. Same w/ Ubuntu!! When Knoppix did not find files on a corrupted system drive Ubuntu could save the files. My advice to all is to save your data to a secondary hard drive that can be moved to a new system. Do not save all your files to the C:\ drive. That is asking for disaster. Oh and have a back up of that secondary drive just in case.