Swipe away that pop-up clutter
Q: I have an iPad, and my Safari browser has been seized by a warning of an Apple Security Breach — saying I must call 809-5709239 to get it fixed. I believe this is a scam. How can I correct this?
A: Just like any other computing device, ipads and iphones are subject to intrusive pop-up advertisements and scams. One of the truly aggravating things about the more malicious pop-ups is the scammers, and spammers seem to have found a way to make the advertisement difficult to remove, which makes it seem more likely that your device has been compromised or infected with a virus.
Usually this is not the case. Viruses and hacks for the iPhone and the iPad are exceedingly rare.
If you encounter a persistent pop-up like this, the first thing you should do is double-tap the Home button rapidly to bring up the multitasking manager. When you do this, you will see all of your recent applications, along with the application you currently have open. If you then swipe the application upward, it will close it out. This applies to pop-ups like the one you are seeing.
If you can’t get rid of it this way, you can always just power down and restart the iPhone by holding the power button on the top or the side for a few seconds until the Slide To Power Off option appears on the screen.
Once you’ve swiped away Safari and/or rebooted, you will want to tap on Settings, then Clear History and Website Data and then click on Clear History and Data.
While you are in the Safari settings, you should also make sure you have Block Pop-ups enabled.
And a side note, you don’t have to use Safari on your iPhone and iPad. Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox are available in the App Store and might be a better browsing experience for you.
Q: Have you seen Xtra-PC advertised on TV? It is a USB device that you use with your old computer, and it is supposed to speed it up like it was when new. Is it worth looking into?
A: Products like Xtra PC are simply boot devices that contain free and open source operating systems and utilities and are designed to bypass your computer operating system with the software on the USB drive. Usually this is a version of Linux and a copy of something like Open Office so that you have something to manage your documents and other files.
These things tend to be cheap, but they do present challenges. For example, you won’t have access to any of your originally installed software applications or your original Windows interface. While the interface is somewhat like Windows, it’s really not quite the same.
In my opinion, you would be better off finding the recovery disks for your computer and reloading the original operating system.
It is also worth noting that you can make your own bootable disk like this, on a USB drive or a DVD drive. There’s a great Popular Science article at tinyurl.com/ help line portable that describes how to do this.