Is my computer "owned" ?

[Ebere]

Ok, things I have noticed.

On the random freeze that a reboot is the only way out...

This happens when I navigate to a new website... And that website opens another, supplementary window. Sometimes just a tab, sometimes a whole new window. Sometimes obvious, but most time invisible.

This is not a supplementary window that I have given permission for, or asked for. The site does it itself.

~~~~~~~

Also, last night, I had a bunch of random smaller freezes. Finally, all of a sudden, I couldn't get onto any of the sites I regularly visit. It just sat there forever, saying it was connecting.

Then, after closing the browser, and then opening it again, I discovered I could go to the sites, but all the cookies were gone, and I had to log in again on those sites.


Last night was the clincher. I believe I know the reason behind all of this.

Googleapis javascript permission.

I believe some sites are hacking googleapis javascript.

What happened last night with the sites, the cookies, the logins... Makes me wonder if the site that I gave googleapis javascript permission to, somehow misused the javascript to harvest history, cookies, passwords, whatever. But in the process ran into trouble because it tried to tred on other noscript rules or something, and caused the glitch in my browser that way.

Lookit, I may sound stupid because I am an old man, and I can't rattle off all the technical details, like an 18 year old tech student. Or clearly explain what I think may be happening, well enough to make others actually understand what I am trying to describe. That doesn't mean that I AM stupid, or that what my gut is telling me is happening... is just paranoia.




For now, if I am going to give javascript permission to googleapis, (I have to, to even be able to post on one forum. And to be able to use the maps, etc.), then I stay on the page I am on when I give the permission. Once finished with whatever I needed to give it permission for, I revoke permission, and reload the page, before I move away from that page.

I don't know if this will work or not. But it's what I am going to try. Better than doing nothing, because I am marginalized and told I am imagining things.

[sgte5]

Hi ebere,
I to am a little paranoid having come from winxp. I ran multiple cleaning & protection programs and still had problems. In this day and age of ID theft and just plain abuse it should almost be normal for intelligent people to be paranoid!!
I run firefox and like it. I have installed multiple progs to help prevent various problems. They are as follows:

Adblock plus --- stops an unblievable number of adds and I have not noticed any problems doing whatever I want to do,
Better privacy --- controls flash cookies and seldom causes a problem. When it does it is easy to enable a flash cookie temporarily. Also can enable
flash permently in a protected folder. Sometimes banking sites need to have perment flash cookies
Donottrackme --- Haven't had this one vary long. It is supposed to stop trackers.
Ghostery --- This blocks a large number of trackers of various kinds and also cookies. Works well and I have noticed no problems.
Noscript --- This one is new and has stopped some pages from loading properly. But all you do is click the options page and allow, permenently
or temporarily, the scripts to run.

One thing I have noticed is that there are litterally thousands of sneaky little snippets of code that try to get info about a wide variety of things that we do on the computer. If we got paid for all of the attempts we would be rich!!
One idea I had was that perhaps something is trying to upload some info and gets caught in a loop thereby creating the impresion that a large upload is occuring.
I to am from the great Northwet, Longview area! Sorry I can't be of more help but I am a relative new comer myself. Try these and hopefully one or more of them will be useful to you. Take Care & Have a Good Day Sget5