Yes, Web sites are suffering from an advertising slowdown, and yes, ever-more ingenious Web programmers are trying to invent advertising you can't escape from in order to sell ads. But the latest gimmick takes over your Web pages just like Microsoft's Smart Tags threaten to...

Read all about it at PC World.com, or maybe you've already seen it in action. It's not clear to us from the article whether "Toptext" only afflicts Windows users, but the link-inserting scam does require Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher. A company called Ezula, which cavalierly dismisses objections to the intrusive technology with "There is always someone who is going to complain," invented the odious app that is currently bundled with a number of other programs and may be installed on your friends' PCs without their even knowing.

Here's what it does:

With Toptext installed, when visiting any Web page with IE 4.0 and above, any of the 7,000 keywords to which Ezula has already sold the "rights" appear as highlighted links which lead to advertiser sites. In other words, even as we type these words, your very own innocently-created Web pages (and Applelinks pages!) are being loaded with links you never intended. What's more, neither you nor Applelinks gets a cut of the action, either. This is akin to having advertising stickers slapped on your backside as you walk down the street.

Unfortunately, Toptext is only the latest such chicanery to visit the Web. SurfPlus and AdPointer also work in similar fashion. And more and more companies are popping up that sell "rights" to keywords, perfectly ordinary words that everyone uses every day. We are having great difficulty understanding why this isn't the subject of LOUD, POINTED, ORGANIZED protests...

If anyone reading this knows of a way Web designers can block these technologies from rewriting their HTML, please let us know!