Sorry Stephanie, by the tone of your first couple of sentences, I thought you were implying that Obama had taken control of your computer. I didn't realize that you were referring to a real web attack.
I am fairly computer illiterate, so I asked my husband. Who is pretty much a computer nerd.
He told me that Zone Alarm has always been a great defense. But that the last update (the 2009 version) somehow had a lot of holes in it. Which is why he took it off our computers.
Basically, we were hacked. A Trojan somehow got in through some back port and went undetected by Zone Alarm. It greatly slowed down our web surfing and kept trying to change our home page.
My husband took my laptop to his office and got the tech people to clean it off. It was a pain because I had to reinstall everything, like Firefox and all my programs.
Right now, I am using the Windows XP Firewall, backed up by AVG anti-virus and Spyware Terminator (both available for free at
www.download.com ). I am not a big fan of AVG, but Spyware Terminator is pretty awesome. It prevents spyware from installing.
By the way, tinyurl is a notoriously unsecure site. That is why Zone Alarm (and many other anti-spyware sites) blocks it.
Firefox has an add-on that rates sites. I believe there are some downloads that do the same thing. We have one that won't allow me to go to a page that the site considers dangerous.