Tech Town, NC

I was recently visiting a few of my regular blogs when I noticed something was very different about them – The ads had all been removed. Somewhat surprised, I then took a look at my own blog and saw that MY ADS were not showing up! I knew it wasn’t a Google problem by looking at other sites (most others were fine), and I made sure my code was correct (it was, for once). Then I noticed the strange message replacing all the ads: “removed by hips fw”. Ummmm, what?

It turns out that a recent update to my CA Security Center Suite had triggered this. Specifically the Personal Firewall portion was set to “disable web bugs,” causing Firefox to edit the HTML before displaying it. This bug messed with the layout of other pages, the worst being Rotten Tomatoes.

The solution to this problem is to turn off the “disable web bug” feature by going to your CA security center control panel and the advanced options for the personal firewall. Thanks to Knight Knetwork for some pointers on this.

I realize that creating security software is incredibly complex and most companies in that industry are doing a better job than they get credit for. But can someone please make an anti-virus program that doesn’t have the symptoms of a virus?