Spammed: It has never happened to me, of course, but perhaps you have been caught in the Hard Core Porn trap

Ever wonder how they do it? Here you are, surfing the Internet. You spot a site on lobster trapping in Nova Scotia, a subject in which you are really interested. So, you hit the link and what do you see:

HARD CORE PORN

No problem you say. "I will just simply back out and proceed with my inquiry on lobster trapping."
Mami gets ready to take it all off.

So you hit the back key and what do you find - More Hard Core Porn!

You are trapped, spammed or what ever. There is no escape. Every time you try to close down NETSCAPE, you just get hit with more and more screens filled with a bevy of beautiful girls engaged in harder and harder core f------.

Worse yet, little boxes spring up on your start menu and they just keep multiplying. These hard core girls just keep reproducing themselves, as is their want. Your only hope is that your computer will run out of memory and crash. Even then, you will have to clean all those dirty pictures out of your cache.

How do they do it? Here is how:

You're clicking your way around the Web, exploring pages and following links. On one site, you click on the Back button at the top of the browser. Nothing happens. You click again and repeat until bedtime.

Most likely, the button was intentionally disabled by the Web page itself. The button may even be "grayed out" on some sites. Why does it do this? To keep you right where you are so you'll look at the content (and the advertising).

The dastardly deed is commonly performed with Javascript, a powerful programming tool used with HTML, a common programming language used for making Web pages. Programmers can use Javascript to create a loop: Each time a window closes, a new one opens. Because the window is "new," there is no Back button because the browser thinks there is no place to go back to.

Every time that window closes there's another Javascript that will do the same thing. You try to close it, and it opens up another one.

You can disable Java: most Web browsers will let the user do this in the program's preferences. However, turning off your Javascript reduces the power and interactivity of the Internet.

Have you ever called it quits after hours of surfing, closed your browser window and discovered several other open browser windows still on your screen, all neatly piled one on top of another?

That trick is also used to keep users connected to one site, even if they are looking at another. The HTML code writer can tell the browser to treat the desired link as a new window, which opens on top of the first one.

Many sites use this tactic to smack you in the eyes with advertisements, but also to display supplementary information or to lead you to a different section of the site. Sites that specialize in MP3 downloads are often guilty of this "window farming."

Some sites will open even more windows that contain paid advertisements. They get paid per view in general for these cases. So, the more they pop, the more they make."


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