NOTE: The following article is not genealogy-related. However, it describes a solution that I found useful, and I would like to share it with others.

If you use the World Wide Web very much these days, you have probably seen those annoying pop-up ads from X10. The company seems to be spending millions of dollars advertising their spycams. They do this by backdoor ads, which pop up under your browser window. X10 claims the "pop-under" ads are less intrusive than traditional pop-up ads because they don't obscure the page you're reading and only appear when you close or minimize your browser window.

Balderdash. The ads are obnoxious. One might wonder, who is gullible enough to buy products from stupid advertising like this? Apparently lots of people are that gullible as the company reports brisk online sales of their spycams.

There is an interesting twist to this, however. The good news is that X10’s Web site contains a link, which lets you banish the ads from your screen for 30 days. Unfortunately, the ban is not permanent. If you examine the URL of the link used to banish the ads, it looks like this: www.x10.com/home/optout.cgi?DAY=30&PAGE=http://www.x10.com/x10ads1.htm.

The company claims that all you have to do is visit this URL once, and the ads will disappear from your computer for 30 days (Note that you must have cookies enabled.). Notice the "DAY=30" in the above URL. Can I change to a number bigger than 30? I don’t know. But I did experiment a bit last week. I plugged the following into my Web browser: http://www.x10.com/home/optout.cgi?DAY=365&PAGE=http://www.x10.com/x10ads1.htm.

It should be interesting to see if that deletes the ads from my computer for 365 days. All I can report so far is that I haven’t seen an obnoxious X10 ad for the ten days since I tried that. You might want to try the same.

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