"What You Need, When You Need It"

Have you ever been surfing the Internet and stumbled across a website that looked like the picture above? Is the motto in my title familiar to you? If so, you've run afoul of the cybersquatter. Cybersquatters are lowlifes who profit off of foolish or ignorant web users and sometimes the hard work of others.

In order to make an independent website, one needs a "domain name" - the URL. Many websites, like the blog you're reading now, have domains provided by a parent ocmpany - Google - for free. If you want your very own domain with no ties to other companies, though, you have to pay for it.

What cybersquatters like to do is get good URLs before a legitimate business or person can. They then turn the website into a cesspool of advertising, but add a few things to try and trick people who aren't paying attention into thinking that the site is a legitimate resource for information or media. They'll also offer to sell the address to anyone who wants it - at a very high price so they can buy more domains to squat on. I sometimes fell prey to these sites when I was younger. If you click on any of their links or make any searches on their search bar, the cybersquatters make money.

One example of a cybersquatter is "Goggle.com", a seething mass of ads that seeks to trap people who accidentally misspell "Google" when typing in their address bar. A rumor made the rounds back in 2006 that Goggle would infect your computer with unstoppable viruses if you visited it. While not true, Goggle is not a website you should visit, as its owners are obviously profiting off of barely legal means and they know it.

Here's how to avoid giving these jerks money:

* Avoid typing addresses directly into the URL bar. Use bookmarks and search engines instead.
* If you see a website that looks like the one above (especially if it has the motto "What you need, when you need it"), immediately hit the Back button and do not visit that site again.
* Use a little common sense. If you find a website called, for instance, "cats.com" and it has pet care links but also links to movie downloads and sports news on the same page, it's a cybersquatter. (I tried cats.com to see if it was a cybersquatter, and although it doesn't have the unrelated links it is still very suspicious looking and I am certain it is not a real site. Do not ever visit cats.com.)
* Adblock and Noscript will protect you if you accidentally visit a cybersquatter.
* You can avoid "Goggle" by making Google your homepage. Then you never need to type Google into the URL bar.

Here's a great article about cybersquatters:
http://thecoffeedesk.com/news/index.php/2009/06/23/what-you-need-when-you-need-it/

How to Avoid Advance Fee Fraud

It used to be a frequent thing to see news stories about people who were scammed out of hundreds or thousands of dollars by online fraudsters who promised huge amounts of money. Most often called the "Nigerian banker scam", these dirty tricks affected hundreds of people every year, and undoubtedly even more went unreported due to the victims feeling ashamed that they fell for it. If you can believe it, these scams are still ongoing even today, and people are still taking the bait. Here's what I know about Nigerian banker scams - or, their proper name, "advance fee fraud".

The basic idea behind advance fee fraud is to promise a massive reward in exchange for just a small amount of money up front. Obviously, there is no reward, and the scammer cuts and runs after milking the victim. The scam is called the "Nigerian banker" scam because the most famous version of advance fee fraud is a claim that a rich man in Nigeria has died and his massive wealth is supposed to be split between the writer (scammer) and the helper (victim). The victim is supposedly needed because the scammer needs to move the money from one account to another, or some other nebulous reason. As for the "Nigerian" part being so frequent? The majority of advance fee fraud cases come from Nigeria. The country is a hotbed of crime, online and off.

So how does it work? First the scammer trawls the Internet for email addresses. Comments pages and message boards are common methods of getting emails. He then sends all of the addresses a form letter that lays out the details of how the victim can get a whole lot of money for very little work. If they reply and seem hooked, the scammer will start asking for money. For whatever reason, there are suddenly all sorts of fees that can't be paid with the huge stockpile of cash, or can't wait until after the money is free. Sometimes the scammer claims to be very poor and needs some money to stay safe. Other times the money is locked behind deposit fees or customs charges. The scammer hopes the victim will consider it an easy choice to pay a little money now to get a big pile of money later. But since there's no big pile of money, the scammer just strings the victim along until they catch on or go bankrupt. There are cases of victims borrowing from friends and selling possessions in desperation, constantly thinking that the prize is just around the corner. There are even cases of people actually flying to Nigeria to collect the money, and getting robbed or even murdered once there by the very person they were communicating with via email.

There are other, similar scams, too. Some scammers use fake websites that look like popular online stores to get people to enter their credit card numbers or passwords. Others pretend to be charities, soliciting money from generous people who think they're helping the poor when they're only lining the pockets of a crook.

Fortunately, if you have any idea what you're doing, you can easily avoid advance fee fraud. Here's a simple list of tips on what to look for.

1: Is the email from Nigeria? While not all scams are Nigerian, many are, and it's likely you wouldn't be contacted legitimately by Nigeria.

2: Is the email in ALL-CAPS, or does it use lots and lots of caps for emphasis? Professional people do not use all caps when trying to negotiate major business deals. It looks silly and is hard to read.

3: Are you being promised something for nothing, or a huge reward for very little work? If so, you're basically guaranteed to be looking at a scam.

4: If you reply to such an offer and are asked to give money or personal information, IMMEDIATELY stop contact and do not provide anything.

5: Be wary if the email throws around lots of religious phrases like "Greetings in Christ" and "May God be with you". Scammers will frequently pretend to be deeply religious to try and convince victims that they are legit. A victim may believe that someone so pious must be telling the truth. However, religion is very easily faked over the Internet. These people do not have the values they claim to. Stay away.

6: Scammers can't even send you an email if you don't post your address anywhere. A good piece of advice is to have two email accounts. Give one to only friends, and use the other whenever a website needs it. This will keep your personal address from getting any spam at all, not just scams. The other can use the Junk feature of most email services to keep suspicious mail quarantined.

7: Oh, and by the way: If somebody wants to give somebody else millions of dollars, they're not going to pick email addresses at random. That's stupid.

Why I Use AdBlock

My Internet browser of choice is Mozilla Firefox. This browser allows downloading of "add-ons", special applications that add new functions and features to the browser. The most popular of these is AdBlock, a program that automatically removes and disables advertising on the Internet. Even the commercials played before some YouTube videos are taken out. Thanks to this, I have seen virtually no advertisements online for about three years now. Why did I do this? I have three reasons.

The first issue is a fairly personal one: I have been resistant to advertising since childhood. Through a few stumbling blocks in my early years where a toy seen on TV turns out to be not as fun in reality, I grew hardened against advertising claims, and began to treat ads as always lying and exaggerating in order to secure my money or my parents' money. For years now I have only trusted advertising to mean one thing: "This product exists". While sometimes impressed by given statistics, I prefer to research the product first to see if their claims are true. Since ads use fine print and exaggerated hype on every topic from usefulness to effectiveness to features to pricing, I can't trust them for anything except "this product exists".

While advertising may not work on me, that seemed like all the better reason to keep it around. It helped pay for the websites I visited, and some of them need the help. So why did I turn off the ads? There were two important things that made me use AdBlock. The first reason was that advertisers were trying too hard. Much of the advertising on the internet isn’t alluring, just annoying. Pop-up windows that take up most of the screen get in the way of your content. Pop-under windows make your taskbar flash with a new window alert, and require closing. Commercials interrupt your video experience and cause more loading and buffering. Flashing animated images can hurt your eyes and distract you from the website’s text. But worst of all, my absolute least favorite type of ad, is the ad with sound. Frequently I would be browsing a page, listening to music in another window, when my experience is ruined by a voice at high volume prattling on. "Congratulations! You've won a free Macbook Air." I knew darn well that I didn’t win anything and that the "free" Macbook was probably buried under a pile of nonsense "offer forms" and paying for shipping and handling, so in addition to interrupting my browsing and drowning out my music the ad was also insulting my intelligence. These ads frequently made me consider AdBlock, but I was always hesitant to finally pull the trigger.

The last straw was the proliferation of what are essentially cybercriminals in advertising. These are the ads that cause viruses to be downloaded onto your computer. Normally, they weren’t a problem, because all I needed to do was not click the advertisement. However, when browsing one of my regular web destinations, I noticed a news post where the administrators were apologizing for an ad their advertising service provided that could cause viruses to download to a user's computer just by them loading the ad, not even clicking it. With my computer at risk, that was the final straw, and I immediately got off the site and did not return until I had downloaded and tested AdBlock.

Through harassment, unwanted pitches, loud interruptions, and cybercrime, I was left with no option but to use AdBlock, preventing any website from ever getting advertising dollars from my visits. This is what happens when an industry seems to be built on frustrating and hurting its consumer base: The smart ones tune out entirely.

Internet Advertising - The Hilarity of Evony

Back in 2009 a series of ads began to make their way across the Internet advertising something called "Evony". Evony is an online video game where you are placed in charge of a medieval village and are tasked with building it into a robust community that can then wage war on other players' towns. But Evony's reputation is not for its gameplay, but rather its advertisements, which are among the most ridiculous attempts to get people (specifically men) to click an ad that I have ever seen.

Evony's ads were originally fairly up-front, depicting a medieval landscape and a knight in armor. The implications were clear - Evony was a medieval fantasy game appealing to people who like that sort of setting. But then, things got strange. Evony's next advertisements featured a girl in medieval dress with the message "Save the Queen!". As it turns out, "the Queen" was wearing a fairly revealing dress. From this point on the ads began sliding into increasingly false and tasteless territory, depicting women that were more and more scantily clad and eventually ditching the medieval theme altogether. Most of the later ads come off as being for a dating site, and certainly not a strategy game. A common phrase (and one the Internet mocked mercilessly) was "Play now, My Lord", which appeared on many of the ads. Further adding to the saucy implications of the ads is the claim that you can "play discreetly". The ads reached their nadir with a banner that consisted of nothing but a closeup of a woman's breasts, covered only by lingerie. It's one of the most ridiculous cases of false advertising I've ever seen, and the resulting widespread mockery they received in the gaming community was fully deserved.

Oh, and to add insult to injury? If you actually play Evony, your computer gets tracked and spied on. Lovely.

Here's a link to a progression of Evony's ads. (contains scantily clad women - think magazine covers)
http://www.lazygamer.net/general-news/a-history-of-evony-ads-the-insanity-continues/

Another Day, Another Petition

Here we go again.

http://wh.gov/KxA

I'll have a "real" post up later today.

Two Articles About Technology

I have two worthwhile articles I found today that I'd like to share.

http://pandodaily.com/2012/01/17/confessions-of-a-publisher-were-in-amazons-sights-and-theyre-going-to-kill-us/

The printed book is in trouble. It has been for a while, but I expect things to speed up in the next few years. I posted yesterday about how technology marches on, and that's happening in the world of books right now. Above is a link to an article that includes an email from an anonymous insider in the publishing industry. Their failure to innovate or adapt to new technology has cost them big time, and the company set to steamroll the industry is none other than Amazon, the most popular shopping website in existence.

http://torrentfreak.com/white-house-petitioned-to-investigate-mpaa-bribery-120122/

Some of you may be sick and tired of all the posts I've been making about internet censorship and I apologize if I sound like a broken record, but it's been a very hot topic this week and it's one near and dear to me. If you read the above article you'll find a link to the very cool White House petition site, We The People. One of Barack Obama's neatest ideas, We The People allows users to make petitions that are reviewed directly by White House staff and given public responses. It's a great way to bring issues to national attention, and it played a big part in the fight against SOPA and PIPA. This petition seeks to strike back at Hollywood by getting the MPAA looked into for bribery charges. With the Internet blackout still fresh, it's a good time to get the pendulum swinging the other way and seeing if the Internet can pull off a counterattack. I signed the petition (this whole SOPA mess made me a bit of an advocate, as you may have noticed), and they need just 548 more signatures to meet the minimum 25,000 required to force a response from the White House. The more signatures, the more power the petition has, so feel free to join in!

Technology Marches On

When I was in elementary school, I remember there were a few years where the school "advertised", for lack of a better word, a special event kids were encouraged to take part in. This event consisted of going an entire week without watching television. Looking it up, I've found that it's still being practiced - it's a week in April called "TV Turnoff Week".

The idea behind TV Turnoff Week is simple: If kids don't have television, they'll be more active, or play together, or read, or something else conceived as better than television. But the problem with technology is that it's always changing, and television does not have anywhere near the pull now it did in the nineties - and so, turning it off for a week makes far less of an impact.

As a child, my thoughts of TV Turnoff Week were simple: I felt it was extreme, and believed it unnecessary. I never participated. I was a pretty well-rounded kid (albeit solitary aside from my brother) - sure, I watched Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and occasionally the Disney Channel, but I had other pursuits. I played outside. I doodled. I was an avid reader. Toys and video games and coloring books all occupied niches of my time. I didn't feel that television dominated my life enough to be a horrible problem I had to evict - and at the same time, I dearly enjoyed my regular shows and didn't want to miss out on them.

Flash-forward to today. As it turns out, I've been participating in TV Turnoff Week for at least two years now. Back in 2009, after going back and forth between several cable plans, my family made the decision to drop all television. Although we still have four televisions in the house, not a single one is used for actually watching television shows. Two of them have VCRs hooked up to them. All four have a video game system connected. None receive any cable or over-the-air channels. This is what we use television sets for now, and I couldn't be happier with it. In the past, we had the television on for most of the day as background noise, and as I grew older and found fewer and fewer shows I cared about watching, I didn't enjoy it. But now? No commercials, no blaring news or reality shows, and no having to listen to dramatic weigh-in scenes on The Biggest Loser or studio applause on Wheel of Fortune when I'm trying to sleep.

So what happened? We had VCRs and video games in the nineties, and I loved TV then. Why do I no longer care about it? The answer's right in front of you. The Internet absolutely destroys television in terms of user enjoyment, real-world application, practicality, and entertainment value. It's "on-demand" - I don't have to wait till 8 PM to access my favorite websites. They (generally) aren't interrupted by loud, unwanted ads. And if you must have something to watch, there's plenty for free thanks to places like YouTube and Crackle. As a result, the Internet has completely replaced television as one of my entertainment sources, and does things TV could never do. This is why I was so enthusiastic when joining this week's protests against Internet censorship - we can't afford to lose something this valuable.

And don't expect an "Internet Turnoff Week", either - thanks to online schooling, e-textbooks, scholarly articles, social networking and Wikipedia, the Internet and computers in general have proven to be useful in academia as well. Technology marches on, and I'm always interested to see how it develops and changes the world next.

SOPA and PIPA both KOed (For Now)

Splendid news today from the front lines of the Internet - both SOPA and PIPA have been knocked off the current Congress schedule. Both bills have been tabled indefinitely. The Internet has won.

I will most definitely post additional updates on this very important topic should the need rise again - and because the entertainment industry is likely to try some other way in the future of stifling new technology, this is a good possibility.

Here is part of an email I received from Fight For The Future, one of the sites whose petitions I signed on Wednesday. Tiffiniy Cheng, you have the floor...

---------

Hi everyone!

A big hurrah to you!!!!! We’ve won for now -- SOPA and PIPA were dropped by Congress today -- the votes we’ve been scrambling to mobilize against have been cancelled.

The largest online protest in history has fundamentally changed the game. You were heard.

On January 18th, 13 million of us took the time to tell Congress to protect free speech rights on the internet. Hundreds of millions, maybe a billion, people all around the world saw what we did on Wednesday. See the amazing numbers here and tell everyone what you did.

This was unprecedented. Your activism may have changed the way people fight for the public interest and basic rights forever.

The MPAA (the lobby for big movie studios which created these terrible bills) was shocked and seemingly humbled. “‘This was a whole new different game all of a sudden,’ MPAA Chairman and former Senator Chris Dodd told the New York Times. ‘[PIPA and SOPA were] considered by many to be a slam dunk.’”

“'This is altogether a new effect,' Mr. Dodd said, comparing the online movement to the Arab Spring. He could not remember seeing 'an effort that was moving with this degree of support change this dramatically' in the last four decades, he added." We're indebted to everyone who helped in the beginning of this movement -- you, and all the sites that went out on a limb to protest in November -- Boing Boing and Mozilla Foundation (and thank you Tumblr, 4chan)! And the grassroots groups -- Public Knowledge, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Demand Progress, CDT, and many more.

SOPA and PIPA will likely return in some form.  But when they do, we'll be ready. We changed the game this fall, and we're not gonna stop.

P.S. China's internet censorship system reminds us why the fight for democratic principles is so important:

"Fittingly, perhaps, the discussion has unfolded on Weibo, the Twitter-like micro-blogging site that has a team of censors on staff to trim posts with sensitive political content. That is the arrangement that opponents of the bill have suggested would be required of American sites if they are compelled to police their users’ content for copyright violations. On Weibo, joking about SOPA’s similarities to Chinese censorship was sensitive enough that some posts on the subject were almost certainly deleted (though it can be hard to know)."

After Chinese Web users got over the strangeness of hearing Americans debate the merits of screening the Web for objectionable content, they marveled at the American response. Commentator Liu Qingyan wrote:

‘We should learn something from the way these American Internet companies protested against SOPA and PIPA. A free and democratic society depends on every one of us caring about politics and fighting for our rights. We will not achieve it by avoiding talk about politics.’"

 ---------

Again, my thanks to anyone who helped out these last few days, and I hope that we can repeat the performance if needed somewhere down the line. This is what freedom is all about.

All right, enough talk about Internet freedom for now - next post I make is the story of how I found my pet snake!

Update on the Internet Censorship Bills

Yesterday I joined millions of people in the biggest Internet protest in the history of the world. I hope you did too. By working together, we managed to take what seemed to be a sure-to-pass bill and severely crippled it. Over 4.5 million people signed the petition Google offered yesterday, and millions more signatures came in from Avaaz, PopVox, and other sites. Thanks to the blackouts of sites like Wikipedia, this movement finally hit the mainstream. The situation is clear: The American people overwhelmingly reject the censorship of the Internet, and the entertainment industry is going to have to try something else if they want to rake in more cash.

And Congress is listening. At least 18 politicians have done an about-face on their opinion of the bills, including several who co-sponsored PIPA. And while Lamar Smith of Texas is still standing by SOPA, Patrick Leahy of Vermont is getting wary of his bill, PIPA. And most importantly, just before the protests, an official statement from the White House made it clear that Barack Obama would not support Internet censorship.

If you haven't yet done your part to help, or if you'd like to do more, it's not too late! PIPA is scheduled for a vote on January 24, while SOPA is due for some additional reworking in February. If you haven't yet, please contact your congressmen and let them know that you prefer a free and open Internet.

Here's an article on the effects of the protest.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/71562.html

This website shows who stands where on the SOPA and PIPA bills. If your congressman is still supporting this dangerous legislation (or is undecided), it's not too late to contact them and voice your disapproval!
http://projects.propublica.org/sopa/

Help Stop Internet Censorship!

Did you want to look up something on Wikipedia today and notice you couldn't?

Did you notice that Google's logo has been censored by a big black box?

Across the Internet, dozens of websites are going offline or changing their front pages today to spread the word about two controversial bills in Congress. The first is SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. The second is PIPA, the Protect IP Act. Both of these bills are supposed to fight Internet piracy, but in reality they wouldn't be able to stop piracy and would only harm law-abiding citizens by censoring websites and content and placing the power of what can stay on the Internet to giant corporations.

Fortunately, the big names of the Internet are aware of how dangerous these bills would be if they passed, and are staging a protest today to fight it. If you care about the Internet you're using right now, please take a moment to sign a few petitions and shoot an email to your state representatives and senators. These bills cannot be allowed to pass, and the message that the Internet will not tolerate censorship must be made clear.

A partial list of today's protestors includes the following websites:

Google - The search engine giant has censored its logo and put up a petition you can sign. As the most popular website in the world, Google will undoubtedly be a huge help in spreading the word of these bills.
Wikipedia - Wikipedia has shut down its entire English-language website today. Wikipedia is by far the largest site to shut down entirely in protest, and some consider it the "leader" of today's fight.
Imgur - This online picture-hosting service has an anti-SOPA message on its front page.
Reddit - A social news website, Reddit has been vocally anti-SOPA and anti-PIPA for quite some time. It's offline until this evening.
Fark - An irreverent site that spreads around links to the latest news, Fark simultaneously parodies and joins the movement by claiming they support SOPA because if it passed they'd get shut down and they wouldn't have to do any more work.
Cheezburger Network - This collection of humor sites is the official site for "LOLCats" - the captioned cat photos that have spread across the Internet. A number of other comedy websites are hosted here as well, including "Oh Internet" and "LOLCelebs".
Mozilla - The official website of the creators of Firefox has gotten in on the act.
Tumblr - This blog network allows every individual blogger to decide for themselves if they'd like to censor their blog today.
Twitpic - Twitpic, which is a special picture-hosting service for Twitter, is against the bills as well.
MoveOn - Of course an advocacy website would join in.
Dozens of other websites - WordPress, Miro, TV Tropes, Newgrounds, Good.is, XKCD, DeviantArt, Destructoid, and more.

And although they aren't joining today's protest, Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, Yahoo, and Twitter have also spoken out against the bill, meaning that all five of the most popular English-language websites (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube, and Wikipedia) are vocally against the bill.

Visit Google for more information and a petition. Keep the Internet free!

List of petitions to sign:
Google
Avaaz
PopVox

This petition on We the People has already finished with an official response from the White House:
We the People

About Social Networking

I understand why social networking is so popular. It can be a great way to connect with friends, relatives, and co-workers, meet new people, and catch up with old acquaintances. It's brought families together, reunited long-lost pals, solved crimes, and allowed for organized protest. Facebook and Twitter aren't two of the most popular sites in the world for nothing. But social networking isn't for everyone, and I'm proof of that.

I am a very private person. When I was a child, I learned a classic lesson: Don't talk to strangers. In elementary school, I got acquainted with computers and the Internet at around the same time they started becoming relevant to the public - the late nineties. There, a variation of stranger danger was made clear: Don't share personal information online. If you give away details about yourself, people can find you. You could get stalked or mugged or have your identity stolen. And that lesson stuck - to this day I am very cautious when it comes to giving personal information of myself away. Only online stores get my address (and I always prefer to give my PO Box). I keep my "real" life and "Internet" life firmly separate. Until I made this account, I never used my real name for a website (with one exception - I had the username "Bryan" on Rate My Kitten, a cat photos website I joined when I was around 11 years old). And I absolutely refuse to post a photo of myself on the Internet, and I will probably never allow it. It's a sticking point for me. I don't like putting myself out there.

Because of my cautiousness and love of privacy, I have managed to avoid a lot of the issues other people may have with social media. I'm not going to be persecuted for voicing a volatile opinion on Twitter. I'm not going to have my personal information stolen by a Facebook hacker. And I won't have my photo get ripped from a personal page and used somewhere else - most likely in an unflattering situation - without my permission.

I don't have a Facebook or a Twitter or a MySpace account, and I only joined Google+ because I accidentally created this account on Google instead of Blogger (Google owns Blogger, for those who don't know). My Google+ page is blank - and blank it shall remain. I have a YouTube account, but I don't mention my name and I certainly don't put up videos of myself. I'm far from the only person who isn't interested in the Internet 2.0 invasion of privacy. It's just not for me.

Here are 13 cases where Facebook made people lose their jobs.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/26/fired-over-facebook-posts_n_659170.html#s115707&title=Swiss_Woman_Caught

Keep Your Computer Safe: RelevantKnowledge

Yesterday afternoon I noticed my computer was running slowly, particularly the Internet, which had slowed to an absolute crawl. Dial-up would have been faster than the speed I was getting. The first step I like to take when it appears something is wrong with my computer is to restart it. After rebooting, I noticed that among the usual programs that appeared on startup was an Internet Explorer window labeled "RelevantKnowledge".

RelevantKnowledge presents itself as a survey, with the goal of helping to improve online shopping experiences by including the thoughts of anonymous survey-takers. In truth, however, agreeing to the survey will allow RelevantKnowledge to get its hooks into your computer. All further Internet browsing you do will go through RK's servers (which is why everything was so slow). In addition, your web history is tracked by RK, as are the details of anything you purchase online.

Fortunately, I knew that something was wrong, and instead of letting RelevantKnowledge work its magic, I quickly looked up how to get rid of it on my iPod Touch (to avoid the slow connection). It turns out that although RelevantKnowledge is difficult for virus scanners to detect, it is fairly easy to wipe out if you can find it. I was able to delete it from the Control Panel with minimal fuss. After restarting again, RelevantKnowledge was gone and my Internet speed back to normal.

How did this program get on my computer in the first place, anyway? It turns out that RK likes to come along for the ride with some free downloadable programs, even safe and trusted ones. There is a very good chance that you will run into a virus like RelevantKnowledge as you use your home computer. Just follow these simple (and no-cost) steps and your computer will be safer.

To prevent from getting viruses in the first place:
-Make sure Windows Defender is on by checking your Control Panel.
-Do not click on suspicious advertisements or check "I Agree" to programs you don't trust.
-Use Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome to browse the Internet.
-If you have Firefox or Chrome, download the AdBlock addon. This feature disables most advertisements, allowing for safer and less obtrusive browsing.
-If a website, download, or program name looks suspicious or shady, do some research on your favorite search engine and find out more about the questionable item.
-Be very careful on Facebook - this website's very high popularity makes it a great place for hackers to spread their infections. Do not believe claims of things like a "downloadable Dislike button".
-You must be extremely cautious when dealing with websites that require personal information, especially things like your Social Security Number. Don't give away your credit card numbers either unless you are absolutely certain you're on a secure website such as Amazon.

To stop a virus that has already gotten onto your computer:
-If there is another Internet-capable machine in your house (another computer, an iPhone, a 3DS, etc), use that machine to look up instructions to help your computer.
-Try deleting the offending program from the Control Panel or by just browsing through your program list. Most viruses are too smart for this to work, however.
-Restart your computer in Safe Mode. The method of turning on Safe Mode may vary depending on your operating system. In Vista, for example, you access Safe Mode by repeatedly pressing F8 right after turning your computer on, then selecting "Safe Mode" from the list of options. Check and see if the virus is still being an issue in Safe Mode.
-Within Safe Mode, you can do a System Restore. System Restore is one of the easiest and best ways to stop a virus or other significant issue. It basically resets your computer to a time several days earlier - hopefully a time when there was no virus.
-If nothing is working and the Internet cannot provide any further assistance, you may need to take your computer to a professional or even buy a new computer entirely.

http://www.spywareremove.com/removerelevantknowledge.html

http://bertk.mvps.org/html/safemodevista.html