We've received a message regarding an ad that appears to have taken control of our site this morning. The ad is the one that has the picture of car keys with a banner that asks, "Are you paying too much for auto insurance?" There's a form below it asking you to enter the zip code where you park your car at night and answer a couple other questions. Incidentally, you're not paying too much for auto insurance.

Upon loading our page, the page automatically scrolls down so that that ad is displayed in the right border on center of your screen. You then have to scroll up manually to the top of the page to read the latest posts. Our reader has reproduced this behavior in Safari (Mac), Firefox (Mac and Windows), and Internet Explorer (Windows).

We have written our advertising agent asking to have the ad cancelled and we apologize for the inconvenience.

UPDATE: Good news. Our guys at iii-Interactive write: "I took down that skyscraper. We were unaware of any such programming, which violates our terms. It is such a stupid idea that I am very angry about it." We are informed that it will take an hour or so for the ad to run off our site.