4.0 DELI SCRUBS

Last week we had an instance of an ad here on the Scrubs Bulletin Board carrying pop-up malware. It was not harmful or dangerous, but it certainly was annoying. Many of you probably saw it. It took a full day for us and our bulletin board vendor to clean up the mess. No one's computer was infected, but that was just good luck because sometimes these innocent looking messages carry very dangerous cargo.

Our previous arrangement required us to carry certain ad servers on our board in exchange for free use of the software. The ads tended to be fairly harmless and so we just put up with them. Until last week.

By paying a very small fee and by beating the software vendor over the head about the problems last week, I have succeeded in getting rid of our obligation to carry any ads at all. As of tonight, our board is ad-free (and, we presume, will not be able to deliver any ad-carried malware). We will watch carefully to see if any of the ads come back. They should not, but it is difficult to trust internet advertising providers.