I Was Killed By A Pop-up Ad.
WarpZone
Join Date: 2002-11-03 Member: 6264Members
Join Date: 2002-11-03 Member: 6264Members
in Tech Support
<div class="IPBDescription">I'm not even kidding!</div> Okay, I'm playing NS today, distracting the hell out of some marines during early-mid game using nothing but my parasite ability, when suddenly, something yanks me out of the game, to my overbrightened windows desktop, where a big fat pop-up window is telling me about how I can buy a fake diploma by sending money to a "prestegious" non-acredited university.
WTF is going on here? I didn't have ANY web browser windows open, and I have Popup Ad Filter running, to boot. An Ad-aware scan comes up clean, though I do need to update the res file and scan again to be sure, since I wasn't using the latest res file.
The guys I was playing with seemed inclined to think it was a hacker. My firewall DID happen to block a subseven connection attempt a little while before the pop-up window appeared, but I don't know if it's related or not.
Has anyone else had a pop-up window randomly force them out of game? Is there any possibility this could be Half-Life or NS actually doing it, as unlikely as that seems? If anyone has any suggestions, let me know. Sorry if this is marginally OT, but it really **obscenity** me off and I'm still mad about it.
WTF is going on here? I didn't have ANY web browser windows open, and I have Popup Ad Filter running, to boot. An Ad-aware scan comes up clean, though I do need to update the res file and scan again to be sure, since I wasn't using the latest res file.
The guys I was playing with seemed inclined to think it was a hacker. My firewall DID happen to block a subseven connection attempt a little while before the pop-up window appeared, but I don't know if it's related or not.
Has anyone else had a pop-up window randomly force them out of game? Is there any possibility this could be Half-Life or NS actually doing it, as unlikely as that seems? If anyone has any suggestions, let me know. Sorry if this is marginally OT, but it really **obscenity** me off and I'm still mad about it.
Comments
If you know a friend's IP address that is running 2000/XP you can open a command prompt and type:
net send <ip address> <message>
<!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' valign='absmiddle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo-->
Can anyone else confirm or deny what alyandon just told me? Or better still, point me to some information about this online? I don't want to go changing options unless I know what I'm doing.
I get those exact popups you mentioned. It is the built in messenger service in Windows XP. These people (the "university" people) apparently scan and spam a wide range of IPs or something.
Unless you regularly get important messages via the messenger service, there's no real consequence in turning it off for most people. You can always turn it back on, too.
And then again, if you don't get these pop ups often, then you can just not bother turning it off and hope it doesn't happen again.
I get one of these popups about every other night or so, however.
Get a firewall, that would stop it too. Zone Alarm is a free one.
A company called Direct Advertiser made a program that can mass sent out those messages. Their site is now down.
I've turned it off now. Thanks for the quick and helpful advice.