what is AOL up to? | attempts to send crap to my computer

[nostamj]

ok, on the advice of several DUers, I installed ZoneAlarm a couple of days ago.

and I'm just SICK about what I'm seeing (and what I was missing)

one bit of crap or another is being sent and blocked on the average of one a minute (!)

when I had is clear my cache, it removed over 46 THOUSAND items (!!)

now, one of the HIGH rated things is regularaly coming from:

itp.aol.com prefaced by a randome string of numners/letters

what is AOL up to?

[nostamj]

1. ahem.... cough cough....

no ideas? here??? :shrug:

[BigMcLargehuge]

2. my guess is it's content and content updates

AOL is a proprietary network so they stream all manner of ad tracking, ad placement, news items, and assorted doo-dads and junk in your computer whenever you use them. It's normal, but not as obvious as it used to be... Do you remember the popup window "please wait while AOL downloads new art..."

It's the same thing, they just rob some of your bandwidth to do it in the background now. AND if you use their fast dialup service they place more cookies and redirects to stuff they precache on the AOL servers. In many cases the caches are self clearing, i.e. it auto deletes at the end of your session, and in many cases deleting some of that stuff could cause AOL to crash.

How to stop it - change ISPs.

[LuLu550]

3. GET RID OF AOL!

They will suck the life out of you! They are evil, evil, I say!