Problem
First, web site you visited would have banners, then pages you had to click through to get to the content you wanted, and then places like GeoCities put ads in front of the page you were viewing.  But now, at it’s highest annoyance level, web page advertising has culminated in the pop-up (new browser window) and pop-under (where the page is there under the window you are viewing so you see it when you close the browser window).

Legislation
There is no regulation or law against any of this, but the newest pop-ups are appearing when you’re not even surfing the web — just because you are connected!  The spamhole, Mike Wendland talked about hiring a programmer to do just such a thing — serve you ads just for being connected to the Internet.  Talk about intrusive!

Getting Even
Originally I used Ad-Aware.  The Google toolbar does the trick nicely, but some browsers have built-in blockers.  What else to do?  Oh, and NEVER respond to these ads.