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Just block ads outright. I keep an updated hosts file of ad servers here. The whole situation with flash ads, firefox proof pop-ups, etc is getting ridiculous. Funny, I've been blocking ads for years yet I still buy stuff.

Instead of modifying the hosts file yourself, you'd be better off using one where somebody else's done all the work: http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html

Here's your anti-advertising vibe. Why shouldn't we have a bad attitude towards a business that tries to convince people to spend money they don't have on things they don't need?

http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html
Add the contents of this list to your /etc/hosts and no more adverts

This: http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html will block a lot of those ad servers before it even tries to load.

This: http://adblock.mozdev.org/dev.html is also useful :)

Did someone say.. Hosts file?

# Available at http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html
127.0.0.1 www.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net #remove this for atomfilms problems
127.0.0.1 ad.preferences.com
127.0.0.1 ads.doubleclick.com

Etc. See above URL for full file.

>Popups may be annoying, but they're hardly dishonest.

Actually, they are incredibly dishonest to the point that they would be illegal if similiar tactics would be used in a more mature industry, like in print ads or television.

Take a look at your typical pop-up. I collect ad servers for my ad blocking hosts file so I'm kinda a connoisseur of this crap. First and foremost, the current trend is to make the ads look like a windows system message. Not just any message, but mimicking the style of the security center and warning of 'unsafe computing.' There are many variations on this theme like, "you have new email," "your computer is unprotected," "click here for updates," etc.

We are way beyond the point of dishonesty, we are in the terrain of fraduelence.

As far as the 'people should learn to deal with the ads' argument goes, I'm all for it, but the first site that gives a 403 to people with adblockers will be replaced with another site that doesnt care. Welcome to the web, you have no contract with the webmasters the same way you dont have to sit down and watch TV commercials. Life is funny that way sometimes, but somehow we manage.

Take the moralist position all you like, but as long as you know the other side laughs at your "everyone place nice" attitude. Pardon me, but I got a pop-up telling me my IP address is exposed and I should buy SupersecurityMonkey 2.0 to fix this for only 39.99!

So, after using Mike's Ad-Blocker for the past year or so, I am kind of used to not seeing any ads on the web when I surf. One of the first thing I noticed right after I began surfing with the web accelerator was that all of those annoying ads were back (or at least most of them, especially the Flash ads - and I hate the flash ads...) So, after a quick experiment, the Google web accelerator is making its exit from my install of Firefox. Nice idea, but with Google acting as your proxy, you get the ads again... Oh, and I'm pretty sure that loading all the ads I'm not used to is actually slowing my web experience.

You can block ads system-wide by editing your hosts file. It doesnt matter what app I'm using, there will be no connection to doubleclick.net and a few hundred other ad servers.

>I wouldn't mind making that standard for cell phone and PDA browsing

Its not a standard, but proxies are old news. My Treo650 is on Sprint's proxy and the Blazer(the browser) requests compressed pages (gzip). Sprint's proxy compresses images too. It looks terrible if you use your treo as a wireless modem for your laptop, but looks good on the handheld.

The sidekick has a much more restrictive proxy system in which only certain elements are send to the client instead of the html of the page (text, basic tables, no css but supports colored text). It also compresses images like Sprint does, but I dont think it can handle animated gifs. Or at least it didnt when I still had one.

Netzero, AOL, Earthlink and others have this type of service for their dial-up users. They call it speed-up or somesuch.

There's also a lot you can do on the the client side. For instance, I run and ad blocking hosts file. Its just a blacklist of ad servers which get resolved to 127.0.0.1. Ta da, instant speed-boost and no more annoying ads. This kind of thing could easily be implemented on the server side too.

Also, Firefox has extentions that let you customize how plug-ins act. Like the "click here to run the flash embed" extension.

What I would like to see is some kind of bandwidth designator in the User Agent field. Something like narrow, low, medium, high, and very high. Then the site can generate the proper page, instead of the "click here for the html version of the site" half-fix.

I'm running FF, but even before with IE, I got a hosts file from http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html and put it in the proper spot on my WinXP machine and that took care of 99% of everything popup and ad-related.

Now I have a simple rule: if an advert is 100% static, no motion, no blinking, no fading, no nothing, I leave it.

Anything that blinks or moves, right-click and block images from that host. This way I am able to still view non-blinking adverts.

My theory is if everybody did this, then the ad companies would notice that their animated ads are not getting viewed as much and change to static ones.

'Course by then I'd still be blocking those servers; oh well; their bad business choice to start with!

PeachKisser

I just block ads outright and dont worry about what plugin is running what or what extensions I need to install to handle hostile advertisers.

Heh. 'Fraid not! I have ads disabled via Mike's Ad-blocking Hosts file. But I've seen something like it before.

The point's to spend less money, but thanks for the link nonetheless! ;)

I use Mike's Ad Blocking HOSTS file, available at this link. So far, it hasn't blocked any sites that I needed to access. It's regularly updated to reflect newly-discovered or newly-minted ad servers. Consider offering $5 to Mike for his efforts. (Yes, I am a Mike, but not the one who makes this hosts file. I will, however, be happy to accept $5.)

You could block *.swf, but there's a lot of valid uses of it, including site navigation. Blocking *.swf would render some sites completely unusable.

If you don't mind editing system files (who at Slashdot does?) you can always add this list to your host file:

Mike's Ad Blocking Hosts file. That'll block them for even IE.

You can modify your hosts file to point back to localhost for ad hosting sites. Mike Skallas maintains one here. There is even an installer for Windows users.

Oh, its failed for me a bunch of times. I prefer the Hosts file method of blocking ads, in fact my hosts file is mentioned in the article so I guess I'm a bit biased. There's nothing more satisfactory than getting a pop-up yet seeing the ad inside it killed because its IP lookup was set to 127.0.0.1 by the hosts file.

Think of the custom hosts option as a second line of defense. Toss in FF's adblock extension as a third-line, but I don't use adblock because its caused me some grief on some sites when using a complex definition file.

Never rely on a single ad-blocking technique. I'm a Windows user and I not only use Firefox's built-in stuff, but I filter through Proxomitron, using JD's ruleset. Plus a .hosts file. I can't remember the last time I got an unsolicited pop-up ad. I rarely even get a "Firefox blocked a pop up" message.

The ad industry could use proxies to make the ads come from the same servers as the content, as you suggest, but this would complicate the setup procedure for including ads on your site, and would not be possible for all sites (I doubt Tripod would help you set up a proxy!) More likely is that ads will be served off of many domains, or only use IP addresses, and the ad-serving code could probably even keep itself updated using some scheme along the lines of Dynamic DNS.

I'm sure that popup ads will be just as easy to quash as email spam.

Use a custom hosts file A hosts file, if present, overrides any DNS server in associating a particular URL with a particular IP address. If you have a hosts file that takes known ad server URLs (e.g., ads.doubleclick.net) and directs them to your own computer (127.0.0.1), those servers will never be contacted and, thus, you'll never see their ads. A number of sites have collected the URLs of known advertising servers and created downloadable hosts files. For example, the Mike's Ad Blocking Hosts file site provides a link to such a file and instructions for installing it (scroll down to "Linux/Unix/Mac OSX").

By God, this works. I downloaded and installed that hosts file and now the banner ads on Slashdot don't appear any more!

I'm using Firefox with popup blocking enabled and the Adblock extension and I haven't seen a single popup in longer than I can remember (unless I intentionally click a link to a popup.) I'm also using Mike's Ad-blocking Host file. Maybe that helps tip the scales my way.

>They do this because Google places higher value on pages with search terms directly in the URL.

I just hate this, because its been abused for so long and google has done nothing to stop it. I believe some blog software uses this form now either by default or as a setting. So someone blogging about "minnesota fishing sucks" with the filename minnsota_fishing_sucks.php gets a higher priority than, say, a guide to minnesota fishing with just a plain old index.html in there. The URLs are just crazy long nowadays as people try to game the system. And it works great too. That page will just fly up the rankings.

On top what you've listed its important to include:

The google toolbar is spyware. The one without pagerank isnt. On top if it, very few (if any) spyware scanners will let you know.

They do not reveal who, in fact they refuse, they are selling all their datamining stuff to. They put a non-expiring tracking cookie on everyone who uses their service to track them, preferably for life or at least the life of that computer. I wrote a little piece (with screenshots!) on how you can thwart this with firefox by removing it for good, or letting firefox only allow the cookie per session here.

That is the price to use google. Its free, like spyware funded apps are free. Its just not a biggie to many people or they accept tracking and spyware as the price of entry. That is of course your perogative.

They certainly arent as bad as MS, MarketScore, etc but they really get a pass on a lot of things they do. What helps is the perception that they are a great, awesome company which loves you. Regardless if that belief has much to do with reality.

Also, I dont think the new groups interface is that bad, its just extremely dumbed down, thus the whole "google is geeks and geek friendly" might have been true at one point, but now all their work must attract the lowest common denominator as much as they can as they are now a public company and with all this competition they have to shoot for the LCD as much as possible to get more eyes on their pages than on a9 or overture. Competition is certainly good, but usually its good only for the LCD.

>every moron in the U.S.

Most of the one's I've found are either Japanese or in the Netherlands. Some links here.

Funny.... Friends and Family are heavily infested everytime I visit. Install Firefox and Mike's Ad Blocking Host File and guess what, no more spyware. The best solution is prevention.

When my adblocker was put on the slashdot front page I ran analog and saw something like 70% using windows. Possibly more. I wish I still had the logs. I also remember taco claiming that a huge number (60 or 80 percent) were Windows users.

Of course some were people at work using windows so give em 5 percent or so, but the problem here isnt the lack of a linux client its the lack of promotion on IBMs part. First I've heard of it.

Sorry, but this isnt the linux haven you think it is. Windows first, UNIX, and then Macs. Oh and I'm sure there are at least eight guys surfing from a commodore 64.

I'm on XP right now and shifting to OSX next year. All my UNIX work is done on the server side. The linux desktop revolution hasnt happened and may never happen. There needs to be a whole lot more commercialization of linux to even compete with MS and Apple's offerings.

>So at Microsoft, either something works and isn't secure, or is secure and doesn't work.

There's always the fix all patch.

What ads?

A good filter would find messages that point at untrusted servers, and add their senders to the blacklist.

You could try using Mike's Ad-Blicking Hosts File. That would at least prevent your computer from accessing those 1px tracking images.

But I've been thinking lately -- is this going to change the Internet dramatically? How many web sites rely on advertising revenue, and won't get it anymore when everybody is filtering banners?

Graphical advertisements is the new spam - intrusive, annoying, abundant, and spread malware. I used to have the same attitude until the Internet turned into a visual wasteland. I don't mind seeing some ads, and often times I'll click on them if they're relevant, but enough is enough. Flying banners, flashing animated GIFs, porn banners, malware, advertisements that take up 80% of the screen. I've resorted to the HOSTS file. They brought it upon themselves.

By the way, I still regularly click on Google AdWords when I'm doing a search and see something potentially interesting.

/still need to get a TiVo

I rad AdAware for the first time in at least 3 months today, and didnt even come up with suspect cookies. I'm not sure why I bother with an antivirus because it's come up with one hit in a couple of years (and it's not like I use my PC for anything important).

Keep your OS updated, run Firefox (ok or opera or whatever) instead of IE, get a decent hosts file... A couple of painless steps and easy, basic maintenance like pointing your browser to windowsupdate occasionally and you'll be sitting wondering what all the fuss is about.

But above all, just use your head: if in any doubt, just delete that email or refuse that unrequested file download. Free software? Sounds pretty suspect to me, aint putting THAT near my PC without a quick spot of forum/google research - where i'm liable to be pointed to better software anyway. Plain, simple, common sense. I'm absolutely confident the vast majority of spyware infections could be prevented if the user was just a little savvy - or even just sceptical.

Ad block extension is good too or a modified hosts file. Not being hit with ads and being unable to even load spyware sites goes a long way towards usability and "uncrapping" PCs.

>it's not as if you're web browsing experience isn't overcome with advertising, anyway.

Mine isn't.

Not to mention that ad takes up some serious real estate up top thus making the display window annoying smaller. Sure, this is a quibble, but enough of one so that people don't buy the product when there are free alternatives.

Plus what kind of a name is Opera? Yeah, that's how you win over Americans, name it after an art form they despise.

user1 "Hey, you're using Opera?"

user2 "No, this is Balletmaster 2000!"

user1 "Killer! I'm thinking of switching to GayMarriage 5.0 soon!"

Do they all use non-expiring tracking cookies? And refuse to say who they are selling this info to?

Wow, now there's a losing combination. Here in Chicago Comcast is long running corporate joke. Very poor service both in their TV and Cable modem divisions and a broadband network they can't seem to keep up for very long.

I switched to DirecTV w/ Tivo long ago and will probably give that up eventually as more shows become available on bitorrent. Considering I only watch perhaps three shows regularly, its overkill. Also, Rupert-Owned DirecTV with DirecTivo does have its downsides.

Then again, never underestimate the power of bundling services.

For a quick and dirty solution you can just use an edited hosts file which redirects them back to loopback. I dont even connect to their servers. The idea of connecting them is like reaching into a filthy toilet.

dailykos has the details. The GOP doesnt like to lose.

ourvote.com has a site up and a hotline ready. See also: my earlier post on fraud and corruption in American politics.

I care who wins, but I care more about winning legally and properly. I care about every vote being counted. I wish more of my fellow countrymen felt the same way.

Here's a list of abuses from just this week alone.

>If we let these powermad tyrants have power

We did. They won a long time ago. Thanks to things like the "culture war," conservative media passing itself off as "fair and balanced," Reaganomics, the marriage of Christian fundies to the GOP, etc. The damage that has been done will take decades to fix, if not generations.

Here's the corruption from this week alone. Its not laziness at work here.

Is Jon Stewart turning into our generation's Neil Postman? Sure seems that way. It looked like Jon had an attack of conscience. It looked like he wanted to either yell or cry. Maybe he was ready for the jokes, pimping the book, etc and remembered how this show was going to play out: one guy giving out the DNC talking points, the other guy giving the RNC talking points, and Stewart making silly jokes about both. Like he said, he didn't want to be their monkey so he went into Neil Postman mode and attacked them on their newstainment bullshit. Its well deserved, not only because he attacked the newstainment format but because that show is especially bad in regards to politics. Its not right v left or any of that, its Democrat v. Republican talking points.

I mean, Carlson is the guy who said this about Edwards: "he (Edwards) was a personal-injury lawyer specializing in Jacuzzi cases." He knew full well Edwards did a class action for a pool pump which was used in both public and private pools which hurt little kids, but as a GOP operative that's what he had to say, especially when their managers are trying to out-sleeze shows like O'Reily and the other pathetic offerings from Fox News and MSNBC. It was all too fake for Stewart so he just spent this invaluable time attacking the system. Any sane person would have done the same. Perhaps. I think most people would have been good little boys and girls and pimped their books and played nice. Stewart knows he doesn't need CNN to sell his book or to get ratings for his show, so he took a very risky chance to take a moral stand. Don't expect him to be on any other shows for a long time, unless this is the straw which breaks the corporate media's back, which I doubt it is. If anything, this is more like a Lenny Bruce monologue which was groundbreaking at the time, but wasn't an agent of change in itself for a long time after.

Its almost predictable. I think too many people see the Daily Show as a fake news comedy show. It actually is satire of the highest order. Jon and his writers are doing nothing but mocking every news show, every hackneyed local evening news anchor, every news magazine format, every soft news journalist, etc.

I thought the most interesting part of this exchange was the comment about Carlson's bow-tie. Stewart wasn't mocking him for his lack of fashion sense, he was justifying what he calls "theater." Why would a young man wear such an old fashioned article of clothing like that, if not for attention? If not for a "distinctive look." If not for "personality branding." etc. Carlson was denying his show is theater while in a costume. It was very poignant observation by Stewart and showed the absurdity of the entire spectacle.

Source

>They only get installed via user consent.

No.

I spent a couple of years working with laywers and asked them to decode a couple of these spyware EULAs. They really couldn't. The language is purposely bad and misleading and written in a way to play down any privacy violations. If people knew what they were getting into they wouldnt install this stuff.

Spyware by its nature already is illegal in many jurisdictions.

Some "installers" are really just browser exploits.

>You don't outlaw mere annoyances.

Yes you can. At 3am my neighbor can't blast his stereo and keep me up all night. Its illegal to leave dog poop on the street. etc. I live in the real world not in the libertarian magical fairy forest.

Lastly, Ron Paul is richer than you and me and can easily pay someone to clean out his PC every so often. This is not an option for most users. It should be self-evident that "libertarianism" is just a fancy way to say "classism" as those with wealth can get goods, services, peace and quiet, etc that others should have access to.

See also: the cronyistic Ownership Society

Here you are chap. Consider it an early Christmas present from me.

What do I want? I wan't George Lucas's head on a stick.

Actually you can download the original trilogy in DVD format copied from the laser discs here.

Piracy my ass, these versions are dead and the community who wants them should be keeping them alive.

>Microsoft state no more development on IE

Actually IE on an XP box running SP2 is pretty different. This may not be a formal version change but MS did catch up pretty well. Sure, I don't touch IE unless I have to, but the popup blocker, activex manager, extra nag screens, etc go a long way to fighting spyware and help make the web usable. Most people will never switch browsers and SP2 is for them.

I was playing with 1.0PR last night and found the firebird developers have already mimicked IE. The "info bar" which displays when something is blocked is blatantly "stolen" from IE. Not that I care or even think its wrong, but its interesting to see the browser war heat up again.

MS is catching up to FF while FF is picking what it likes from IE. I do like FF's policy of "looking a lot like IE" because it helps with mass-adoptation and frankly IE's interface and MS's usability are actually pretty good. Its a shame the code beneath isn't so hot.

- Sound is English Dolby 2.0 Surround
- Audio Commentary
- English Subtitles (the kind burned into the image for alien speak)
- Chapters Selection (the 79 original LD markers)
- Production Notes

not only adblock is great. Custom hosts file greatly increases browsing sanity.

127.0.0.1 itxt.vibrantmedia.com

and hey presto, they disappear!

or you could always install a much larger hosts file which takes care of quite a few nasties :)

remeber to use a custom hosts file. It increases browing sanity a LOT. Much more than just using adblock and flashblock (which I use too).

Sometimes when I have to browse on someone's else computer I'm almost stunned by the number of ads that appear on sites. Yeah it's easy to get accustomed to comfort of browsing without ads.

So... don't wait any longer! install custom hosts file NOW!

BTW: I'm curious if it will soon be included into some of linux distros by default, it would be great - self maintaining and updating custom hosts file... (it works with windows too, but I doubt it will be a part of default windows install anytime ;)

Just kidding.

First, thanks Mike.

A little extreme on the politics, but the hosts file works fairly well. Should change the 127.0.0.1 to 0.0.0.0 instead, or so I've been told right here on /.

Also, Mike could use a little primer on copyright. Statement may be ok for commercial distribution, but doesn't work for private individuals.

Two problems not covered by the hosts file, at least on windows. The above file works great on Linux clients, but for Windows, using Mozilla, I still have to "block images from this server", even though the url is covered in the hosts file. Apparently, Mozilla keeps its own list. I've got quite a few urls blocked with Mozilla, but when other users are logged on and using Mozilla, they have to block the same urls I already blocked when I was logged on with my own user account.

Any way of sharing the url block list in Mozilla from one user so that all the other users benefit, instead of having to block the hundreds of urls I already did?

Also, I just ran into this problem yesterday: Some ad server urls are using ip addresses, instead of domain names. So the hosts file isn't checked, as their is no ip address translation going on. Any way of blocking ad servers by ip without resorting to using a firewall on individual clients? I can't block at the perimeter, as the perimeter is a nat device, not a computer.

Also, some sites use a redirect from their own site url for the images, or use a subdirectory within their own url for image serving. Any way of blocking, for example, a single subdirectory of images for a specific site (ie: http://nytimes.com/ads/intrusive.jpg, blocking http://nytimes.com/ads/ without blocking content from http://nytimes)?

And the redirects from above? Can't remember a specific example, but I'm sure some of you using an ad blocking hosts file have run into, and remember what I'm talking about. It's not a big deal since most sites work with the hosts file, and I don't burn too much bandwidth downloading the ads, but I ran into a few sites last week that were really unusable because of the ad layout and sheer size of the downloads required to view the ads, and this is a killer for speed, usability, and cost when using dial up (no free minutes beyond the first minute at one location, paying for every minute I'm online).

I, and my wallet, thank you in advance.

I find Mike Skallas' Ad Blocking Hosts file Site a great site for maintain a hosts file. You have the option of using an installer that will install it to the right location regardless of OS (MS OS's, that is) He also includes the hosts file in a zip file. He seems to update it every couple of months or so, so I joined his mailing list, even though it's hosted through yahoo (I have a few yahoo accounts so it wasn't a big deal to me to join the mailing list), I've only receive 1 email from them in the 4 months or so I've been signed up.