I have been spending the last week starting my spring cleaning routine throughout my house. This weekend was extremely nice outside, so while my husband did some yard work, I took spring cleaning to our vehicles, as well as my Mom’s. The cars needed cleaned out, washed and freshened up. A new part of our car spring cleaning routine includes changing the cabin air filter.
I love having friends and family over and take any chance I get to host a party that involves food. One of my favorite times to do so is during football season. Normally when I want to have a big party, I like to go all out. I spend hours in the kitchen making lots of food, decorating an awesome cake, and setting everything up for the party. Which can sometimes leave me exhausted and allow for less time enjoying the company. I decided the next big football party we host (in a few weeks), I am going to spend less time in the kitchen. Right away, I knew my one-stop shop to make this happen: Sam’s Club.
In this technology-driven world, but sons have managed to easily learn how to use a tablet and smartphones. It didn’t take long before Ethan was downloading new games and apps and teaching himself how to play them. One day I was looking at our Samsung Galaxy Tablet powered by Android and noticed some new shortcuts for ‘Free Apps’ and ‘Free Job Search’ and a bunch of similar notification in the notification bar. I deleted the shortcuts and cleared the notifications, but had no idea where they came from. The only thing I knew to do was delete most of the apps on the tablet (which my son was not very happy about).
I recently learned about Madware and it has shed some light on these annoying new shortcuts and notifications. Madware is aggressive mobile adware that affects Android devices. It uses aggressive techniques to place advertising in photo albums, calendar entries and push messages to your notification bar. Madware can even go so far as to replace ringtones with an ad. After I learned about Madware, I looked at the tablet’s photo gallery and found 5 new photo folders with pictures that were ads. Seriously? That is insane! Most apps, especially free ones, have some form of ads and Madware is becoming more and more frequent. No only do you have to deal with all those ads while using the app, but now ads are being placed all over your device that you will see when you are not using the app. Less popular apps are 135% more likely to contain the worse forms of Madware than popular apps.