Okay, so.... ...I'm at my sister's college, and I'm using their library computers right now...and I'm seeing randomly linked words. For example, under the "Notices" box at the top of the page, in the sentence "This includes Bebo, Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, Photobucket, Twitter, Tumblr or other social networking sites or blogs, phone, email, Skype, gaming ID and messenger IDs such as MSN, AIM, Yahoo etc," Skype and Photobucket are linked to their respective sites. I'm also seeing links in random posts and areas of the forums...like "MP3 Players" in the description of the Technology forums, a few words and phrases in posts, user titles and signatures (Celine Dion, English teacher, the word "dating"), and it's a little weird. Does anyone know why this is happening? I don't want to accidentally click on something and get in trouble.
I doubt that all the computers at this library have malware on them...I've been on 3 different computers. I'm noticing the word linkage on other sites now as well (and some of them aren't even forums), so I'm thinking it's something wrong with these computers now instead of EC.
It is relatively common for adware/malware to inject adverts into web pages like this. Also, library computers are pretty good breeding grounds when it comes to viruses, so I'm not surprised at all that they'd all be infected (although usually colleges are pretty good when it comes to that, or atleast mine is). The other option is that for some reason the ad injectors were installed intentionally by the library staff - but this is unlikely.
Maybe it could be that they installed a software, when it highlights a word, it is actually supposed to give an explanation, but somewhere I think settings got mixed up, that instead of showing explanations which it does to a certain extent, it links to other pages that may or may not have that key word in.
I think it's probably an add-on that they downloaded. I've had that happen to me when I downloaded an add-on to Firefox. The add-on was for something else, but it must have had some code in it to basically spam ad links at me. They disappeared when I uninstalled it.
Okay, well, I used another that I didn't use yesterday, and this one was normal...so I'm guessing those few computers I used had a virus on it or something. Thanks for the input.
