Blogtrek

Beware of using Weather Underground

Weather Underground is one of the best sites for obtaining weather information. It gives the weather for a wide range of locations, and has a huge amount of statistics for all of these locations. That is why I have listed it as a site on my weather page. However, they now insist on throwing ads and popup windows in your face, or on charging you something like $5 a year. The problem with that is that all these sites want to charge you (or throw ads in your face). If you subscribe to all of them, it can add up to a huge bill.

So I don't subscribe and put up with the ads. But I wish they would put them in their place. They should go inline in with the page and do nothing except sit there with the words. Above all, they should not pop up windows in your face. Fortunately, there are ways of dealing with the popups. You can download Pow! from AnalogX, or Popup Stopper from Panicware. However, these programs do not properly identify the offending popups by name, and only Pow! will allow you to tell the computer which sites to pow off the screen. Still, they keep the popup situation in check.

Now there is a new menace, so severe that perhaps one should not use Weather Underground anymore unless you take precautions. Every once in a while when you access Weather Underground something called Default Homepage Network will throw a popup window in your face. Not only that, but it will change your default page to the Default Homepage Network page, and worse of all, it will open up all your CD-ROM drives. They are clearly going too far here. This could cause damage to the computer, because one does not normally expect all one's CD drives to open up at once. If your hand happens to be anywhere near the CD drives at the time, the CD drive will be blocked and damage may occur. These people are asking for lawsuits. Fortunately I have found a way to cure the menace. Go into Tools, Internet Options in Internet Explorer, and click on Security, then click on the red Restricted Sites symbol. Click on the "Sites…" button, and type "httq://*.default-homepage-network.com" in the blank, and click "Add". Click OK. Then click on the General Tab, and where it says "Address:" in the Home Page block at the top, you will have to retype in your desired default page; Default Homepage Network probably has changed it to their page. Click OK. If you have Symantec Internet Security, you may be able to block the site there. I tried it already and when it happened tonight, it changed my home page, but it did not open up all my disc drives. I think the "restricted zone" bit did it. The red symbol appeared in the right corner. Unfortunately I don't know of any way of blocking popup or other malicious access to your home page; you just simply have to change the page back to where it was.

If any of you know of any more information on this CD-ROM pop-out phenomenon such as who is behind it or a better way of blocking it, please let me know. In the meantime, don't use Weather Underground until you have protected your CD drives from this malicious spam popup.