f13.net

I just asked to delete a previous thread, because I thought it wasn't F13. I think it is now though.


Anyone else getting this? I rebooted my machine, and it's still showing up. Only at this site.

Ya know. I got that once and then it never came back. Thought it was a fluke.

I'm so torn!

See what happens!

Pretend it is a game, and if you lose, you get pwned by spyware.

Do you get it every page or only on certain ones?  I know on a site I helped admin certain ads set off a virus/shareware thing that caused some people problems.

That is not to say that whatever is causing it in this case is bad, just that it could be external.  Pictures in a thread after installing QT maybe?

I get the popup on every page here.

Haven't installed or updated QT in months.

I guess I have to play. I tried just closing it out, but it still pops up. Weird.

I've looked through the source on three different browsers and I don't see it and I've never seen that message though of course I have popups turned off (yeah me). "View source" on the popup window and this page, save them to disc, ZIP them up and send them to me at trippy@f13.net.
 

Sent.

Also, I guess it's worth mentioning that everything was working fine until I clicked that Entropia link in Useless News. Not sure why. Just saying.

It's coming from the Google ad code. I believe they are trying to check who has QuickTime installed but the popup seems to be related to changes in IE 7 -- e.g. it doesn't happen in IE 6 either cause IE 6 blindly lets the ActiveX object install itself (though I don't see it on the list of installed plug-ins) or the Google JavaScript code doesn't run/work under IE 6.

Google ads are trying to install and run an unsigned ActiveX plugin? WTF?

Sounds fishy to me. Might want to contact the Goog about it, I don't think they're supposed to do that.

ActiveX/IDispatch scriptable objects are the devil, by the way.

Cool, that helps. Thanks.

I'll just use Mozilla for now.

It's not "unsigned" (well it might be but you would have to start the install process to check) it's "unverified". Lots of ActiveX plugins from big companies such as, say Google, Yahoo, Sun and Apple (the regular QuickTime plugin) are "unverified" according to IE.

I believe that (unverified) means that it doesn't have the Microsoft Authenticode signing on it, but I could be wrong. Been a few months since I read up on it.

If that's the case what's the point if everybody including Microsoft (the Office Update Installation Engine is unverified) is just going to not bother signing things?

Don't look at me. Those are the sort of questions I ask every day.

Other people are starting to report the same behaviour so apparently this a new thing. AdSense does support video ads now (if you allow image ads) so presumably this is just code to figure out what video formats you support. Not sure why there's a difference between IE 7 Beta and IE 6 though.

It wouldn't be Microsoft if they didn't change how everything worked in the new version, now would it? :P

Apparently it was a bug (http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help-troubleshooting/browse_thread/thread/d0f6e0e2bea52188/35dbc72abfa609c7?lnk=gst&q=quicktime&rnum=1#35dbc72abfa609c7).