Speaking of AOL ... yes, I still use that for my dial-up (thanks to the motherfuckers at Winstar buying up all the local Chicago ISPs and then "getting out of the dial-up and e-mail business" a couple of years ago!), and I will occasionally surf stuff (links sent to me over there, etc.) using their browser rather than Netscape 7, which is what I use 90% of the time (yay for tabs!). AOL recently added a "pop-up stopper" to their browser, and I typically have that on all the time now. One thing that I've noticed over the past couple of weeks is that some sites (like the ultimateemail.net free web mail front-end) have re-done their pop-up codes so that they launch MSIE outside of AOL and then throw the pop-up there. I really hate that ... I don't like these damn sites being able to launch programs on MY system whenever they want to!
I wish there were laws in place like the ones against "unsolicited commercial" faxes ... for EACH "spam fax" you get you can (if you go through the process of finding out who sent it and suing in small claims court) collect a $500.00 fine from the sender. I have often thought that just sending out boilerplate "we intend to sue" letters to these assholes would be a great side-business for Lawyers, since most of the fax spammers would likely rather spend a couple of hundred bucks to make the Lawyer go away than have to pay their Lawyer to handle the case! Wouldn't it be sweet if you could ding the spam/popup motherfuckers for a few hundred bucks everytime their crap showed up on your screen???