Thursday, May 22, 2014

Sociable Unsociable

The other day I started to think about writing a blog again, so I went to my blog site and was rudely redirected to another website wanting me to download Flash Player.  Well, most of us know that Flash Player can  be bad news especially when you're randomly getting redirected to it, so I was kind of concerned.  So I tried again, and tried on other web browsers.  It did the same thing on Chrome, IE, Firefox, Opera and Seamonkey, and I noticed every time the web page address was different.  So I did some research on these redirects and it looked like a backdoor trojan or some other type of virus, so I tried scan after scan, and went to my favorite site when such troubles happen, bleepingcomputer.com, and by the time I was done trying to remove the thing that no program seemed to find, I had used at least 9 programs (6 of them being new downloads) to no avail.  So I started researching again, after a couple sleepless nights, and I found a ray of hope that said the Sociable gadget was hijacking blogs.  So I went back to the blog and clicked stop about 50 times as the web browser tried to load another page and I finally gave up and it loaded a page with the Google Chrome logo saying it prevented me from going to a suspicious site on "the next page" and it conveniently provided a link I could click on to avoid going to the site.  How generous!  The Google Chrome warning by the way was from another website address.  So after I figured out how to edit the blog without being redirected I finally removed the gadget and the problem was fixed!

You've got to wonder why such a screwed up gadget wouldn't be removed by blogger.com.  I am glad to finally know it wasn't my computer that had the problem, though if I had ever clicked on any of the links or redirected pages I probably would have a bad virus.  Hopefully if there's anyone else out there with the problem this blog points you in the right direction.  But if not, at least I've finally written another blog, and hopefully I will finally get some sleep!

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