Since January 1st I've been playing an unintentional game of hide-and-seek with various elements on my nine blogs, here at Blogger, and I think I owe people an explanation. For the past month or so (actually I started last fall, here and there) elements like Popular Posts and certain sidebar elements, like image links to my Amazon pages, image ads that earn me a few cents and search boxes for my own blogs, and things like that, have been coming and going like malicious spooks in the middle of the night. Actually, I'm the "spook" and what I've been doing is re-tuning my blogs because of really horrible viewing problems that I've been experiencing since way back in August 2010.When you can't look at your own blogs without having your browser slow down to a crawl and then freeze up, you're no good to anyone as a blogger. Maybe other people's computers are just ducky and have no problems at all running my Junk TV videos or my cheesy, homemade flash ads but I couldn't see squat without some browser problem. This went on for months, despite my having one of the best anti-spyware/anti-malware programs around working for me (no I'm not going to tell you what I use because there wouldn't be enough wood in the world for me to knock on after that).
So, like the aging, baby-boomer, hick, indie author that I am, I began a lengthy, systematic investigation of the problems, often relying on trial-and-error at times, until I finally rooted out the last bug from my little DELL B110 desktop. Most of it was malicious malware from the major search engines (yep, the infamous Google Redirect Virus), infectious IE pop-ups, downloader trojans, voices from nowhere (no, I'm not kidding: screaming, taunting, high-pitched, banshee-like laughter from nowhere, with no visual displays), and the whole gamut of nasty cyber bugs that are lovingly bred in hacker labs all over the globe by greedy, sick, human-hating scum, and unleashed upon the world everyday for fun, profit, hate and more fun.
There ought to be an international law against willfully infesting millions of computers with browser-jacking trojans and junk ad popups and whatnot. Even a clean surfer like me who only visits trusted sites for business (like Amazon, Lulu, iGoogle, FeedBurner and Blogger) and finding news and current events, can pick up a nasty bug that used to be a disease that only bad-asses caught when they scoured the underground Web for sites containing hate, porn, crime, terrorism, dark religion, and so on. Wow, has that scenario ever changed. Now you're not even safe when you use Google Search to look up "opossum" on Wikipedia to see what they eat. You might find yourself being watched and your key strokes recorded by cyber snoops, terrorists or even good ol' Uncle Sam. It's no way to run a world.
But, I'm back now and my advice to the rest of the web world is this: forget Google Search, Yahoo Search and Bing. They're paths to your destruction. And when you get redirected (should be mis-directed, actually), bookmark that page and put these websites on your shit list. These bastards know what they're doing and don't let the little pricks tell you it's not their fault that you got their stupid website or their pathetic, struggling search engine when you searched Google, Yahoo or Bing.
The webmasters and/or owners of the sites you get when you're redirected are paying unethical creeps to run their SEM (Search Engine Management) and to increase their SEO (Search Engine Optimization). These are "hackers" who write malware programs that piggyback on the data from other websites and search engines in order to misdirect surfers to their clients' websites. If anyone bothered to look hard enough into this unethical practice they'd also find out that it's criminal, as well, and borders on cyber terrorism. Incidentally, Bing is nothing but another malicious spy toy for Bill Gates and Microsoft, the biggest criminal organization on the Internet today.
While you're at it, you might want to minimize your use of YouTube, Facebook and yep, Amazon, unless your'e willing to make your anti-spyware/anti-virus programs work overtime. Once you land there, they get their hooks into you and your IP address, and then they own you. Plus, they unleash all those goddamn tracking cookies that vie with the unavoidable build-up of temporary Internet files and, together, they swamp your computer's virtual memory until it slows, freezes and crashes. And, if you're allowing third-party cookies you might as well jump head-first into a malware and trojan cesspool. OK, you've been warned. If you want to play hard, you're going to pay dearly.
Trust me. I wouldn't lie to you even if there was a fortune in gold in it. I'd rather tell the truth and struggle to eat and keep warm. Don't ask me why because I'm pretty sure that most of you aren't worth the bother. I blog for the few of you who might be.
A lot of people have a hobby to take their minds off the daily grind. What people do to escape from the everyday world can no longer be predicted or conveniently labeled these days, even though stereotypes still abound. Doctors still play golf. Barbers still go fishing. Grandmothers still play bingo. Those are nice, clean, safe, normal activities that I'd love to have as hobbies.
