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The sneaky advertising industry has come up with yet another one, folks! You may sometimes find that when you shut down the Internet after a session, a browser window has been "hiding" on your computer screen. This browser will offer you "additional sites about Italy." In other words, our competition! We're a business too, so we understand that everybody has to make a living, but we assure you, we try very hard not to cheat you by cluttering up our site with pop-ups that would pay us, or by selling your email address to junk mail services, and certainly not by illegally invading other sites! If you do not appreciate this sort of intrusion into your personal computer, read on.
When a computer is subject to this kind of "hostile takeover," most likely that computer has had some "spy-ware" or Internet pop-up ad programs installed. A lot of software you download for free on the Internet (especially music sharing programs) contains these programs, which track the sites you visit and send them to a central server that gathers marketing materials out of it. It's how these free programs try to finance themselves. Some programs track which websites you go to, then pop up ads either when you first enter the site or when you leave, and very often these ads are for competitors. These ads are very tricky, and they're even worse than the normal pop-ups, which AT LEAST have been authorized by the host web sites.
Luckily, there is something you can do to protect your PC. A little program exists called Ad-Aware (http://www.lavasoftusa.com/). This free program was rated Best Software, Software Product of the Year, and Best Freeware by PC World Magazine. It removes these pop-up ad programs, spy-ware programs, and all sorts of cookies on your computer, which are used to track your usage across the Internet. Download the program and let it scan your entire system including all your hard drives, and it will tell you all the bad things on your computer. Select the ones you want to remove (or right-click on the list and select all of them!), and it will remove them for you. No more pop-up ads! You can install this on all your computers, and just periodically run it to see if any new programs might've been installed without your knowledge. Just remember that like virus scanners, you should periodically download new updates to the Ad-Aware program.
Hey, we're not trying to promote Ad-Aware (promise!) and we recognize the irony of telling you to download yet another piece of software! But you've got to protect yourself somehow, unless you're an advertising junkie - and we don't think the readers of In Italy Online fall into that category. So we offer this information, as a simple and efficient way to help you clean out your computer and concentrate on what really counts: planning the best vacation of your life!