Q: I got my cell phone number about seven years ago. The problem is that the previous owner’s name and my phone number figure prominently on a charitable organization’s website, and I have been getting calls for that organization for years. I just called all of the numbers on the site, and all are either not working, or not associated with that organization. Is there any way I can find out where the website is hosted and who to contact about getting my phone number removed?

A: That sounds like it’s a very frustrating problem, Eileen, but luckily there is something you can try: a WhoIs search. A WhoIs search is a way of retrieving the domain name contact information from the registrar, and using that to find the web host.

Image credit: Sean Birch

Now, that probably just sounded like a bunch of tech gobbledygook, so let us take a moment to explain a couple of things. A domain name is the name that serves as the website’s address (for example, “deemable.com” is the domain name for our site). A registrar is basically a company that a person would buy a domain name from. In the process of selling a domain name, the registrar would take a buyer’s contact information (including their name, business address, email address and phone number) and store it all in a publicly accessible database. A WhoIs search will allow you to search through that database.

There are a lot of websites that offer WhoIs search tools, but two of the most reliable ones are networksolutions.com/whois and whois.domaintools.com. Enter the domain name of the website you’re trying to find information for, and you’ll get a large chunk of text which includes addresses and phone numbers for the people managing that site. Then it’s time to start calling and sending emails, Eileen.

Assuming, that is, that the information from the registrar is up to date. With a small charitable organization like the one you’re talking about, you might run the risk of that info being outdated. If this is the case, you can attempt to find the web hosting company for the website (the company that keeps the website on their actual physical servers) and ask for their assistance. Sometimes the registrar and the web host for a website are the same company, but this is not always true. Unfortunately, when they are two different companies, finding the web host can be less straightforward than finding the domain name owner. This might require professional help.

If all of that wasn’t tricky enough to manage, there is no guarantee that the people who own and run the website will remove your phone number from the site when you actually get in touch with them. If they ignore you or refuse to help, you only other option may be legal action. That’s why we would recommend asking really nicely, Eileen.

It often seems like our personal information is completely out of our control on the Internet, but it’s usually possible to manage what’s out there if you stay calm and be patient.

Q: I recently started experiencing random pop-up ads on my computer even when I was on websites that don’t have popups. Downloading a malware removal program didn’t fix the problem. Eventually I had to roll back to a clean install of Windows. How did my computer get infected, and how can I avoid this in the future?

You may see warnings like this if you attempt to visit a malicious website.
Image Credit: Google

A: Getting infected with malware and pop-ups is no fun. Even though there are lots of software programs out there to clean this junk off your hard drive, these kinds of malware programs are designed to be a pain to remove.

The key is to avoid getting infected in the first place. People know that it’s not a good idea to walk down a dark street in the middle of the night, and the Internet is pretty similar. It has some bad neighborhoods, and you just need to know to avoid them.

First off, you want to be careful with what you search for. Unscrupulous spammers and hackers tend to stake out popular Google searches, and they especially love celebrities. In fact, anti-virus company McAfee published a list of 2013’s most dangerous celebrities to search for. The #1 most dangerous person to search for is Lily Collins – one in seven of the results will land you on a malicious web site! Others dangerous celeb searches include Katy Perry, Sandra Bullock, and Britney Spears.

Celebrity searches aren?t the only searches that can get you in trouble, though. There are plenty of seemingly safe, regular search terms that can yield dangerous results, including:

• “lyrics”
• “free music”
• “game cheats”
• “free ringtones”
• “solitaire”
• “make money”
• “work from home”
• “free downloads”

Now, a few different things can happen when you visit an unsafe website. The most common is that you’ll be hit with a pop-up asking you to download some “helpful” program. Never agree to this! Running strange programs from unknown sources is extremely dangerous. If a website asks you to download something and you weren’t expecting to download it, say no.

In some cases it’s possible for a website to load a malicious program onto your computer secretly. Avoid this by upgrading to the latest version of your web browser. Still running Internet Explorer 7? Go download version 10 immediately. Having the latest and greatest makes sure you’ve also got the most recent security updates.

You also need to be smart about email. It’s a bad idea to open a program or file that’s been emailed to you if you weren’t expecting it, even if it’s from someone you know. That person could be infected with a virus, many of which love to spread themselves through email attachments. If you’re not sure, email the person back and ask, “Did you mean to send this?”

Follow these steps and you’ll be pretty safe. But accidents do happen, so know that if you do get infected with malware, there’s help. Google keeps a list of safe, useful malware removal programs at google.com/goodtoknow. Just click on the “keep your device clean” link.

Q: Is there any way to completely block pop-up ads while running Chrome or Internet Explorer? I have turned on the built-in pop-up blocker on both, but that doesn’t stop them on many of the sites I visit. What is up with that? I have to wonder what the point of blocking pop-ups is when so many get through anyway, slowing down the page loading to the point that it reminds me of being on dial-up.

A: To be honest, Bill, it’s been so long since we have dealt with a pop-up that we had forgotten Chrome and Internet Explorer even had settings to block them. To turn on the pop-up blocker in Chrome, click the button at the top right of the screen that has three horizontal lines. Then click on “Settings,” and search for “pop-ups” in the search box. In Internet Explorer, click on “Tools” and then go to “Internet Options.” There you can find the setting under the “Privacy” tab. Recent versions of Firefox have this option too, and you can find it under the Firefox settings.

Ah, the good ole days! Fortunately pop-up ads are much fewer and farther between now, but how do you make them go away completely?
Image credit: Minesweeper / Wikipedia

But as you say, Bill, these settings don’t always work. Why is that? Well, you have to understand that pop-up blocking is like an arms race. Every time there’s some new advance in pop-up blocker technology, the people making the pop-up ads just get smarter.

To make things even more complicated, browser-makers can’t simply ban all pop-ups. There are lots of legitimate uses for pop-ups – in fact, half of the websites on the Internet would stop working without them.

Now, the other way to deal with pop-up ads is with what Firefox calls “extensions”. Extensions are small programs you can download which add features to your browser, including more effective pop-up blocking. Extensions also work for Chrome and Internet Explorer, where they’re known as “plug-ins” and “add-ons”, respectively.

One of the most popular ones is Ad Block Plus, which is available for both Firefox and Chrome. It’s an industrial strength pop-up killer, and we’ve found it effectively blocks most pop-ups. Another good plug-in we’ve found for Chrome is called Better Pop-Up Blocker. You can find either one of these by just searching for it in Google. Try keywords like “Chrome pop-up blocker”, and you should get some very helpful results.

Your options are more limited on Internet Explorer, but there is an add-on called Smart Pop-up Blocker that will block most pop-ups. It’s not 100%, but it’s the best that we could find.

Regardless of what your favorite browser is, if you’re getting fed-up with annoying ads on the websites you frequent, there are tools out there that can make your web-browsing experience a little smoother.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, it’s time for a friendly little PSA about pop-up blocking. Many of your favorite free websites are ad-supported, so when you visit one of those sites and you’ve got a pop-up blocker running, you may avoid seeing that annoying pop-up ad but you’ve also cost that site some ad revenue. So be sure to deploy your pop-up blocker judiciously.

This is such a big issue that the ever-popular Ad Block Plus actually has a setting called “allow non-intrusive advertising” which is on by default. As the name suggest, this allows many of the less annoying ads through. But keep in mind that the ones that it does block – the really annoying ones – may be real money makers for small, independent websites. Ad Block Plus gives you the option to allow pop-ups for certain websites to remedy this. Other pop-up blockers should, at minimum, allow you to turn them on and off.

Please pop-up block responsibly! Ads may be annoying, but they help keep the web free.

Q: I used to have a link to my email on my desktop, but somehow it got deleted. Now I search for my email on MSN. My son says I’m doing things the long way. To be honest I don’t know much about the web and I get a little bit overwhelmed every time I open Internet Explorer. Any advice?

A: Deep breaths, Kevin! It’s going to be okay. We’re here to help.

The good news is that you are definitely not alone here. We talk to people all the time who can’t figure out how to get from Point A to Point B on their browser. When you open Internet Explorer you may see up to three different fields where you can type things. You know you want to go to a specific website, but where do you type it in?

What you want to do is type the URL into the address bar. URL stands for “Uniform Resource Locator,” which is just the formal name for a web address. For example, www.google.com and deemable.com are both URLs. Either way, they usually look like “www.nameofthewebsite.com”.

Now here’s a secret: 99% of the time you can leave off the “www”. You don’t have to type “www.google.com”, you can just type “google.com” and your browser will figure out the rest.

The place you want to type it is not the search bar of the website that is your home page. That will search for any web page that references the name of the website. Granted, the web page itself will probably be the first search result, but you’re adding an extra step. You want to type the web address, or URL, into the address bar, which is above the web page. You can identify it because it will have the address of the current page, usually prefixed by “http://”/ or “https://”/ (incidentally, you don’t have to type “http://”/ either, because your browser will fill that in as well).

Telling the difference between a search box and your address bar can sometimes be a challenge, especially if you’re new to surfing the Internet.

There are a couple of things to be aware of. First, you may or may not have another field at the top of your browser that is for searching. Typing the web address into that field is just the same as if you went to Yahoo or Google or Bing and searched for the web address there. It’s for searching, not for navigating directly to a website.

The other thing to be aware of is that in newer browsers the address field can also do web searches. So if you type “facebook.com” you will be taken directly to Facebook, but if you type in “books of faces” it will search for “books of faces” on your preferred search engine.

So, Kevin, try typing the URL for your email site into the address bar and hitting enter. Once you’re there, don’t forget that you can bookmark websites that you use frequently. Look for a star icon up at the top of your browser and click that. That will add your email to a list of favorite websites. Once you do that, you won’t have to type anything – your email will always be just a click away.

A recent study conducted by the internet traffic experts at Sandvine Inc. revealed that peer-to-peer file sharing networks have just been surpassed in North American bandwidth usage by Netflix, which may be the first time in the history of the internet that the largest percentage of internet traffic is from content that is actually paid for. Peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent have long held the top spot of U.S. broadband traffic, with a large percentage of usage coming from the sharing of copyrighted files. According to the report though, Netflix, the popular online service which streams movie and television shows, is now the “unquestioned king of North America’s fixed access networks.”

When measuring total web traffic and averages over a 24-hour period, Netflix accounts for 22.2% of North American web traffic as opposed to BitTorrent’s 21.6% share. During the peak prime time hours between 8 and 10 PM, Netflix even hits 29.7% of all wired network traffic – signifying the rapid growth of Video-on-Demand and Real-Time Entertainment services.

The growth of Netflix and similar online alternatives certainly benefit the consumer, with monthly subscriptions costing only $7.99 for Netflix’s all-you-can-watch, streaming-only service. Traditional TV networks, however, are not too pleased with the online competition threatening their business model. Also, the enormous amount of bandwidth that Netflix takes up decreases internet speeds for other users, which is one of the main arguments against Network Neutrality. While Netflix is currently only available in Canada and the United States, CEO Reed Hastings sees Netflix expanding in the future into “all the markets where people have broadband and like TV.”

Who knows what will happen, but maybe, just maybe… the traditional television/boob tube/idiot box will disappear altogether one day – from a simple $3 billion idea that was launched after Hastings was charged late fees for returning a copy of Apollo 13 after the due date.

Photo by Jay Yarow via BusinessInsider

Hate to be the bearer of bad news for AT&T Broadband users, but on Sunday the 2nd, AT&T began implementing the usage of data caps for their terrestrial broadband services. After being tested in portions of Texas and Nevada, the data caps are now in nationwide effect for the 16 million users of AT&T’s Broadband DSL and U-Verse services. Comcast, the largest broadband service provider in the United States, already has a 250 GB data cap that has existed since October of 2008.

It is estimated that only 2% of the 16 million AT&T Broadband users will be affected by the data caps, set at 150 gigabytes of uploads and downloads per month for regular AT&T DSL customers and 250 gigabytes of monthly broadband usage for subscribers of U-Verse, AT&T’s high-speed fiber communications network. Customers will be notified once usage hits 65%, 90%, and 100% of total usage, and for customers who exceed the monthly data caps three times, they will be charged $10 for every 50GB above their allowed usage. On average, AT&T DSL customers only use 18 GB per month.

With Cable TV services being dropped in favor of video on-demand streaming services like Netflix and Hulu, cable companies are trying to make up for the lost revenue by increasing prices on their internet-access services. AT&T says that the restrictions are a necessity because the top 2% of highest-traffic subscribers use up 20% of network bandwidth, which slows network speeds for other users.

DSLReports.com offers several interesting arguments against the AT&T data caps:

“There was already no economic justification for imposing such limits on wired broadband users given the fact that flat-rate pricing is perfectly profitable, and most ISP costs for providing bandwidth are fixed or dropping… There’s also concerns that AT&T won’t be capable of metering consumer usage accurately. We’ve cited time and time again how ISPs are so eager to impose these new limits they can’t be bothered to ensure their meters work properly, and there’s no regulatory oversight of these limits. AT&T is no exception, our users already noting problems with AT&T meter accuracy, which AT&T tells us they’re working on.”

Consumers and public interest groups are already issuing complaints to the government, asking federal regulators Friday to “take a close look at AT&T’s new limits on their broadband customer’s internet usage, saying the caps could undermine the national broadband plan.”

For now, AT&T Broadband users can access their usage meters on Myusage.att.com after signing into their account to see if you should be expecting any overage charges.

Photo by Jeff Bertolucci via PCWorld

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know by now that the world’s most wanted international terrorist, Osama bin Laden, was killed in his million-dollar compound in Pakistan on the 1st of May. Suspected as the mastermind behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, news of bin Laden’s death signaled a time for Americans to rejoice and to celebrate what we have been longing for – justice.

The military’s elite special forces group who killed bin Laden, unofficially called SEAL Team 6, deserves all the credit that they have received for executing their mission to perfection. Upon confirming bin Laden’s death, the black ops kill team even grabbed all the electronic material they could find as they hurriedly exited the Abbottabad compound, including dozens of computers, flash drives, and disks. This electronic material was given to a special team of military intelligence operatives and members of the CIA to be analyzed as quickly as possible so that any information can be used while it remains pertinent. SEAL Team 6 and all of the troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq must be praised, whether you agree or disagree with our country’s military actions, but none of this would have been remotely possible without the use of technology.

From the tapped phone call of Osama’s courier that led the US military directly to the front steps of his compound, to the use of satellites in order to map the operation, to the live video feed of the mission sent over 7,000 miles to the President and his advisors, and from the use of sophisticated biometric tools used to identify the body, there have been remarkable advancements in technology since the tragedy that occurred nearly 10 years ago.

Not only has technology helped locate and identify America’s (former) Most Wanted, it helped spread the news of Osama bin Laden’s death like wildfire. Many of you found out through popular social media outlets or by mobile device long before President Obama delivered his address to the nation. News of bin Laden’s death even set a Twitter record for the highest sustained rate of tweets ever, with an average of 3,440 Tweets per second from 10:45PM-12:30AM. As for myself, I found out through a friend harmlessly checking his cell phone during a break in a late night session of doubles tennis. The Internet, however, has its downsides as well: It seems like every mistake you make could be put out there for the world to see… just ask Fox40 News.

Photo by landerinn via deviantART

The internet was designed to be an open and freely flowing network of communication. Sure, there are some sites that are blocked due to their content, but for the most part, you can access what you want whenever you feel the need. However, this could all change within the next few years depending on one heavily debated issue: Network Neutrality.

In December of 2010, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted three-to-two to adopt an open-internet neutrality plan, often referred to as Network Neutrality. Simply put, the basic principle of Net Neutrality is that high-speed internet providers should offer everyone equal access to the web, regardless of the content, data, applications, software, and platforms used while connected to broadband internet service. Therefore, Network Neutrality would continue to maintain the current status quo of internet access – do what thou wilt.

Last Friday, however, the House of Representatives approved House Joint Resolution 37, which repealed the Federal Communications Commission’s order of Net Neutrality. Opponents of Net Neutrality point to the need for stricter regulation due to the substantial amount of bandwidth consumed by the accelerated growth of online video and file sharing in recent years. Critics also argue that the government has no right to meddle in the affairs of business practices online and that some forms of data discrimination is actually desirable.

Without Network Neutrality though, broadband companies who own content providers, like Comcast who owns NBC, would be able to block the Web sites of their competitors and violate our freedom to information. Internet service providers would also begin to offer a tiered service model, where those who pay to be in the top tier gain the highest quality of service, speed, and access to Web content, while those in the lower tiers will get the short end of the stick.

Although the legislation must pass through the Senate first, President Obama, who is a staunch supporter of open internet rules, has already stated that he will veto any such legislation to overturn the FCC’s ruling. While the subject of Net Neutrality already has hit major, headache-inducing complications, this is an important issue to watch closely for the sake of our God-given right to YouTube as we please.

Photo by Steven Hodson via TheInquisitr