OK, I confess to having made a mistake. I downloaded a program I thought was going to help me with a process, and got a whole barrage of five or six messages, each asking me to click to show that I accepted the "User Agreement."
Each of these, of course, represented an attempt to install bloatware (at best) or malware on my computer. But I must have accidentally clicked on one of them...
Within minutes, I found my web-browser screen looked different. Suddenly, ads were popping up all over, many of them without an obvious way to close them. When I did find a way to close them, another ad would pop up immediately. Worse, the upper right corner had a tricky little rollback thing, made to look like a page turning. The corner of it had an "x" on it, suggesting you could cancel it. But as your cursor approached that "x" it would slide away, and open the ad lurking behind! There literally was no way to click on that x!
The name of this colossal invasion is "Enterprise 1.1," a program that installs itself just like your legitimate software, under "Programs" in Windows. And like other programs, it wasn't too hard to uninstall (I think).
We're all familiar with the way aggressive and unscrupulous use of communications media has made one after another of those media effectively obsolete. E-mail was exploited to the degree that we all had to find add-on programs to control it before we drowned in it. Most of us learned a decade or more ago just not to answer the telephone - especially not around 6:00 pm! - and in doing so, we condemned that once-essential instrument - or the land line at least - to a slow death. Print was never quite as bad, because the ads in a newspaper were fairly easily ignored. But it's still interesting to speculate whether the Egyptians had this problem with their papyrus scrolls.
What's puzzling is that there could be anyone so stupid as to hope to build a business on selling ads on such an obnoxious platform. An occasional ad on the margin, which still would allow me to read the page I was on? Not so bad. I might not have even given it much thought. But a constant barrage of ads jumping up every 30 seconds, and standing in the way of the content ? Well now, that was noticeable, and of course I did something about it immediately. So what can "Enterprise 1.1" and its advertisers possibly have gained?
In fact, I'd think that advertisers - if they realize how these ads are being presented -- would prefer NOT to pay Enterprise for this kind of sleazy, intrusive advertising. Not to name any names, but for example, Kohl's, and Ebay, both of which popped up about 100 times each.
So, yes, avoid Enterprise 1.1 if you can, be very careful downloading freeware, and choose to boycott eBay or Kohl's if you wish -- but above all, reflect with amazement on the idiocy of marketers.
P.S. - That downloaded program? It didn't work as advertised.