Continued from main page...

Look at sites like Yahoo! for instance. You know Yahoo! is a safe web site. You can click on the links there and many other places with complete confidence that you will not get a virus or other malware. What about if you perform a web search? If you search for thus and so, you get a list of web sites you never heard of before. How do you know any of them are safe? You don't. This is where having layers of protection comes in. You need to use a secure web browser, not Internet Explorer. You need to use a good firewall, not the Windows firewall. You need to use active anti-virus protection which scans everything coming in to your computer. You need to perform maintenance on your computer at regular intervals including running scans for malware weekly.

About Cookies and Ads

Popular web sites, with few exceptions, need some sort of income to finance the costs of hosting and bandwidth. They serve you ads and they hope you click on them so they will make money from them and be able to keep giving you content for free. Some ads are OK in that they actually have something to offer that you actually want and need. The ads that people don't mind are relevant to the web page they are visiting and have something realistic to offer. They are text ads or at least they don't flash in your face or pop up and make you click them away. If you can. Some keep on coming back.

Even good ads and some web sites place things called cookies on your computer which track your internet activities. Cookies can be good or bad. Good cookies allow a site to remember you and your preferences. Bad cookies track your internet use and report it to everyone in the world for malicious reasons. Your internet connection right now is probably a sieve for anyone to give you things you don't want.

You don't want the bad cookies, ads, tracking and behind-the-scenes communication to bad web sites. Just because you don't see the bad web site on your computer screen doesn't mean your computer isn't talking to it. You can stop this if you follow our instructions.

Conclusion

Where to go from here? How do I protect myself? I have to protect myself from ads? Are you kidding me? Nope, it actually gets worse. There are open ports, web sites disguised as nice sites but are really virus and spyware sources, email that will infect your computer, the list goes on and on.

Grab some coffee and let's get started. Click on Nitty Gritty to get the instructions on what to do to remove the infections, ads and tracking. Learn how to keep that stuff off your computer. Oh by the way, all this stuff is FREE! Yes, it is better than what you paid 70 bucks for. Do's and Don'ts has some comments about your internet activities and computer use. Get Firefox is a link to the web browser you should be using instead of IE, plus some other great free software. Embrace the Penguin is a little something you should read that may change your life.