Adware and popups, popunders, banners, etc.
 

If you are like me, you are probably pretty well fed up with all the ad servers on the web. It seems almost everywhere I browse I'm faced with an array of popups, popunders, scrolling banners, and other trash trying to sell me everything from the latest south beach diet to a time share condo in florida. These ads slow down my internet connection and make pages take forever to paint.

I got fed up with it and started digging around on the net to find a way to get rid of some of the garbage. I found that modifying the hosts file will do just what I wanted!

Install this file on your computer in C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc\ and your computer will be virtually ad-free. It works on 98/ME/XP but requires special setup on Vista which you can find by a google search. Tons of nuisance, spam, advertising, and junk websites will be blocked from your computer:

[url]http://www.selectedplants.com/games/hosts.zip[/url]

It is very important to properly install the file. Unzip on your desktop, then move the hosts file from the desktop directory to the Etc directory. I renamed my existing hosts file just to be sure I could go back if I choose to do so in the future. I can't ever picture a time when I would want to but who knows. This works by intercepting the web lookup to an ad server and re-directing it to an unused address. In effect, the requested lookup can't occur because the item does not exist at the re-directed address.

Please feel free to use this but at your own risk. It is easy to do, but some users might be better off getting assistance. Special note for Firefox users with addins like Adblock, you may already be modifying your hosts file. If so, you will not benefit from this modification. The hosts file can be edited with notepad or wordpad if you so desire. Just be sure to check the filename afterwards, some editors insist on adding .txt to the filename.

I would appreciate if any more experienced users could comment if there are any problems with using this method. There is quite a bit of information on google with a search for "windows hosts". There are also some much more detailed hosts files available. This one is mostly just for ad blocking.

Darrel Jones

[quote=Fusion_power;99411]Please feel free to use this but at your own risk. It is easy to do, but some users might be better off getting assistance. Special note for Firefox users with addins like Adblock, you may already be modifying your hosts file. If so, you will not benefit from this modification. The hosts file can be edited with notepad or wordpad if you so desire. Just be sure to check the filename afterwards, some editors insist on adding .txt to the filename.[/quote]
I use Firefox 2.0.0.2 with Adblock Plus with Adblock Filterset.G Updater and my hosts file doesn't have anything related to blocking ads in there.
A hosts file solution is good if you use something besides Firefox, but if you do use Firefox, like me, I suggest using the two things I listed above.
Here's the URLs: [URL]https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1865/[/URL] [URL]https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1136/[/URL]

I use Firefox with images switched off and only allow those that I want to, like this one!. I switch off Flash by renaming the Flash "shared object" (.so on Linux) and put it back when I want to use Youtube etc. I would like to switch off Javascript too, but so many sites use it. Good web page programmers should do more testing with different browsers and settings :wink:

[url]http://flashblock.mozdev.org/[/url]

Or NoScript: [url]https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/722/[/url]

Lets you enable/disable scripts including plugins like Flash on a per-site basis.

Alex

Use FireFox with Tools -> Options -> BlockPopupWindows enabled, and JavaScript disabled (except for e.g. your online banking or other things that legitimately need it.) No see-um Popups.

Simple.

Don't take it personal ewmayer, but your method is what I have used for the last year or two. It does not stop embedded adware that the ad companies are using today.

The only viable fixes are with firefox using adblock, script block, and filterset updater as listed above and - for IE - by the fix of modifying the "hosts" file as noted in the first post.

Back in the days when the internet was brand new, and I mean only a few hosts connected by coaxial ethernet cable, folks used actual ip addresses to connect to and communicate with other hosts- they actually typed them in. This worked when there were only a few sites.

It didn't take long however for this to get tedious, so they developed the domain name system, or at least the rudimentary parts of it so they could use names for different computers instead of remembering ip addresses. They put the ip addresses and names of the hosts in the /etc/hosts file. Every connection request initiated with a name started with a check in the hosts file for the ip address associated with that name. One entry that has always been in the hosts file is the address 0.0.0.0 which is associated with the name "localhost" which is of course, the computer the hosts file is sitting on. Simple. Elegant.

It didn't take long for the DNS system to develop into a distributed system of name lookup servers that maintained the ip-to-name mapping files, then the hosts file was largely replaced with "nslookup" files which contained the addresses and names of the DNS servers. The hosts file has remained a viable and useful means of providing specialized lookup services and still, every request to connect to an outside host first starts with an attempt to lookup the address in the hosts file. If an entry is found in hosts, no attempt to connect to a DNS server is made.

The above hosts file has entries for many known ad servers all with the same redirected address, 0.0.0.0. In other words, each request by your browser to connect to an ad server starts with a check of hosts and if it finds an entry, it attempts to connect to localhost... which fails of course. This is a very difficult fix for the adware companies to overcome.

Fusion

[URL="http://www.opera.com"]Opera[/URL]

[QUOTE=Fusion_power;99463]Don't take it personal ewmayer, but your method is what I have used for the last year or two. It does not stop embedded adware that the ad companies are using today.[/QUOTE]

You wrote:

[i]"It seems almost everywhere I browse I'm faced with an array of popups, popunders, scrolling banners, and other trash"[/i]

I don't see any such stuff. But I forgot to mention - I also normally always disable image rendering. Probably too minimalist a solution for most folks, but it works great for me - only annoying on the occasional website where the image fields serve an actual necessary function (e.g. Amazon.com's use of the "continue" button image) that is negligent about use of image alt:text. In any event, it certainly speeds up page loading, especially for image-heavy pages, which are becoming increasingly common as broadband internet becomes the norm.

Anyway, why would I take it personally? My local browser-setting hacks work for me, if yours work for you, go for it.

I just got tired of trying to keep up the with latest/greatest (alleged) AdWare blockers, so whatever method avoids having to dick around with AdWare install and management is OK.

[QUOTE=Fusion_power;99463]One entry that has always been in the hosts file is the address 0.0.0.0 which is associated with the name "localhost" which is of course, the computer the hosts file is sitting on. Simple. Elegant.[/QUOTE]The actual entry for the loopback to the localhost is 127.0.0.1 not 0.0.0.0. Address 0.0.0.0 is used to indicate the default router.

I also use the host file, not to block adware but to block access to a host :-) of bad sites. My file has over 50 000 entries for a 1,5 MB size, but it is a losing battle, one should update the file every hour :-(

[quote]But I forgot to mention - I also normally always disable image rendering.[/quote]We are experimenting with turning off text rendering. We find surfing takes much less time than before which opens up a lot of free time for things like making yak cheese and practicing yodeling. And the strangest thing is, we don't feel dumber after reading some of the posts here, like we usually do.

:whistle: