Battleangel

Hmm. I’ve been wondering about these annoying links that pop up everywhere on the net these days. Finally found out what the little buggers are called - it’s IntelliTXT.

Ouch, it’s Smart Tags all over again. Only this time it is REALLY obtrusive. Just look at sites like Warp2search, Anandtech or Neowin if you’re not sure what I’m talking about. The company behind it all is called Vibrant Media and they have a couple of demos that you can watch if you just can’t get enough of the blasted tags. Or if you’re just not running IE5+ and actually are immune to them.
At least Smart Tags were supposed to be controlled by Microsoft. IntelliTXT is in fact controlled by some smart ass script and advertisers. I.e. before you know it someone will have paid to have every damn word in the the english language linked to some site selling Viagra, software or computer courses.

The solution? Block out Vibrant Media of course. The simplest way is probably to add “127.0.0.1 www.vibrantmedia.com” (and possibly itxt.vibrantmedia.com) to your windows hosts file. Or if you have an ad blocking software (like Ad Muncher) you can add http://*.vibrantmedia.com as a Linked Source / Source keyword. That did the trick for me anyway.