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Have you tried firefox?

I have it installed on this box, along with IE. I still use IE half the time. I use mozilla on my linux boxes, but (i hate to say it) there are are certain aspects of IE that are more comfortable, or at least more familiar. Keep in mind, im an old geek, not a hobbiest. Been using Linux and GNU software for years and it is catching up very fast, but I still use the tools that make me more productive, and IE fits that bill at least half the time. The pops ups don't annoy me as bad as they used to, now that they are all blank pages.

Oh, i found that hosts file address here. I chang a few lines for my uses (travelocity.com and osdn.com for instance) because it may break a few things, like Pogo, but its a great template for a hosts file if you customize it a bit for yourself.

Thanks, Mike!

I rarely see ads in either IE or Mozilla.

Here.

Full text for the lazy:

8:30am

I checked the voltmeter and it looks like it charged up nicely overnight. I haven't worn kneepads or a helmet in ages, they make me feel kind of awkward. After waving goodbye to my wife I'm off to work which is about six miles from here. I can't wait, this thing is so cool. I feel ten years younger.

8:45am

Holy shit, where did all these kids come from? I thought the district bussed them to school. I can't ride on the street because everyone keeps yelling for me to go faster and I can barely maneuver the sidewalk with all these kids. Someone just called me "Spaceman." I thought kids loved technology. Sorry to the girl I knocked over, but in all fairness I did yell, "heads up!"

9:08am

Okay I'm officially late for work now, but I did find a bike lane. What's with this town? I thought all the granola-loving bikers forced the city to put bike lanes on every street. There's maybe a mile's worth from my place to downtown. The bikers were pretty nice. One man said to the rest, "Let the dude on the rascal get through." I don't know what a rascal is, but they did let me get through.

9:19am

Holy fuck is downtown packed and no one is letting me through. The way I tip cabs around here you'd think they would let ride on the side of the lane. The doorman at my building yelled at the crowd to let the "handicapped guy" through. I was going to correct him, but they were already letting me past. I did get to ride up the handicap ramp and park in the building. Now I need an AC outlet. This trip nearly drained the battery.

9:22am

I'm not the fittest guy in the world but they need to make these things a little lighter. You drag a 70lbs Segway up the stairs and tell me how your back feels.

12:04pm

I'm taking my Ginger, I mean my Segway, to lunch. I tried to get a co-worker to ride with me, but we fell and nearly broke our necks. I hope no one tells my wife that my hand got caught up in Jane's skirt as we were trying to get up. She didn't say anything and I think she really didn't notice. A guy on one of those old time italian scooters yelled, "yuppie" at me and disappeared into traffic. Real mature.

12:12pm

I had to ride all the way to that bike store in the Village to pick up an extra-long Kryptonite lock. Looks like the "no bikes" sign applies to the Segway as well in restaurants. I barely have enough time to stop and get a sandwich before getting back to work. I have to call my lunchmates and tell them I didn't get into an accident. If I keep yelling, "Beep, beep coming through" every block I can actually make some time. This thing really needs a horn.

5:15pm

A cop called me over from the bike lane and told me unless I have a handicap permit I'm going to have to get motorcycle plates and a city sticker for this. He let me go this time, but he said if he sees me again mucking up traffic on my "razor scooter" I'm going to get arrested. I ran over a really big guy's toes pulling into the bike lane. He was really pissed. Four more people called me "Spaceman" on the way home. At least the doorman didn't call me handicapped again.

5:55pm

I'm home and I came this close to hosing off the dog crap on the wheels before I saw the electric shock warning sticker. The first thing my wife told me as I pulled into the garage is that I look and smell like shit.

6:15pm

I just called and the Shaper Image won't take returns. Great. I gotta get some good pictures of this thing for ebay. My 14-year old is gonna use it to get to her Lacrosse practices until I can sell it. I overheard her call it an "electric ass-mover." Her friend responded by saying, "Oh, that geekmobile thingy your dad dropped three grand on?"

That's why you use a HOSTS file to stop access to known advertisement vendors (e.g. doubleclick). Or you use a real intelligent browser like Opera which allows blacklist/whitelist or full control over what filetypes run and don't run and on what web site (allowing you to block flash from say cnn.com or yahoo.com)

Hence, candidate -- and media critic -- Howard Dean reacted with humor Tuesday in Milwaukee as journalists presented him with a long-sleeve white T-shirt. It carried the motto "Establishment Media" in front, and a slogan swiped from Dean in the back: "We Have the Power, Dean Press Corps 2004."

On December 1, 2003, Howard Dean was ahead by twenty points in the polls when he appeared on Hardball with Chris Matthews and said, "We're going to break up the giant media enterprises." This pronouncement went far beyond the governor's previous public musings about possibly re-regulating the communications industry, and amounted to a declaration of war on the corporations that administer the flow of information in the United States.

It was an extraordinarily noble and dangerous thing to do: when he advocated a truly free press, Dr. Dean was provoking the corrupt media conglomerates that control what most Americans see and hear and read, and thereby control what most Americans think.

4. Allow user to select "Fewer images like this" or "More images like this" or "Less text like this" and "More text like this" and using Bayesian or other similar filters, automatically block or highlight content. For blocking advertisements, or highlighting certain key passages.

or maybe some simple managment of "blocked sites" just as I currently do with a custon hosts file

I made a .reg file for XP/2000 machines.

I have no use for autoplay and having the OS execute a binary on insertion is a ridiculous security hole.

I believe this will require a reboot for both XP and 2000.

For 2K and XP.

Enjoy

using a Hosts file.

I've seen firefox fail to block pop-ups at the NYTimes and at Popular Science on more than one occasion. Maybe it DHTML. Dunno.

I don't use adblock, I maintain a hosts file with known ad servers so the stuff never loads in the first place.

With adblock you still have to download the ads, so you're not really boycotting anyone (or saving yourself any bandwidth). With the HOSTS file you never even ping the ad server, you just skip it.

I maintain a small, fast, hosts file which targets major ad servers. The file and a windows installer are on the page. Enjoy.

If you liked this you might like my Diary of the First Segway Owner. Yes, its satire. Hopefully, this time people won't start emailing me about my non-existant segway.

I've got to agree on that. I have no spyware, no viruses, no worms, no BSOD, no regular reformat and reload from original media. It's so painless to keep Debian fully patched that I do it nearly every time I log in.

Unfortunately, MS is attempting to become the de facto regulatory body for the Internet, and only a small minority of us see it, much less the dangers that it entails. Imagine a police force that doesn't protect you from anything and occasionally comes around and replaces everyone's locks with a newer model that has no actual bolt.

Assuming that the spyware is not calling home to a hard-coded IP address, you can also make use of this approach. It can even make annoying banner ads go away. It's stunning how much faster some pages load when you aren't downloading ads from slow servers.

If its the ad-blocking hosts file you want, its here.

I'm not the maintainer, just a satisfied "customer."

-paul

i dunno, maybe that link on the side of the page that says:

Banner Ad Blocking

Free Popup Blocker:
http://www.mozilla.org/
http://toolbar.google.com (If you use IE)

Replacement HOSTS file:
http://www.everythingisnt.com/hosts.html

Tiny HTTP Server to respond to all those HOSTS entries:
http://www.pyrenean.com/edexter.php

Flash Remover:
http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flash/ts/flash7 /uninstall_flash_player.exe (Uninstaller)
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ (for Mozilla)

this is a manual post. the bot is still in progress (Perl blows anus cheese)

Posted by timothy in The Mysterious Future!
from the spy-v-spy dept.
RetroGeek writes "Falk eSolutions AG is claiming it can detect and defeat pop-up and pop-under ad blockers. The best quote is that when they detect an ad blocker they will 'replace a pop-up or pop-under ad with what are called "floating" ads, or ads that appear as transparent images over Web-site content.' As far as I am concerned they can place as many transparent images as they want. He probably meant translucent. It should be easy to defeat the detection, after all visit a web site, the pop-up blocker detects a Javascript command, then doesn't run it. Replace this with: the pop-up blocker detects the Javascript command, runs it, then places the result into a bit-bucket. Any Mozilla devs here?" WebGangsta adds "While this may ignite another round of online advertising purchasing, this news doesn't affect anybody who uses a customized HOSTS file to stop the majority of ads from appearing anyway."

Very, very simple to do and if you must use IE, just get the google toolbar for pop-up blocking.

I tell people to always shut off activeX, block pop-ups, run Ad Aware, and install an ad-blocking hosts file. Anything less and you're probably compromised in at least one way.

My solution was one step. And I didn't have to give up all my nice windows software

If these do start becoming mainstream, somebody will eventually collect all the adserver information and add it to the block list.

I've been updating this list for a few years now and it works fairly well with very little to no blocking of legitimate content. Enjoy.

Before I get flamed for "blocking ads," first off its my PC and I'll do as I please. Don't like it? Switch to a subscriber model. When Salon.com went pay I sure as heck forked over the money. I can't imagine doing that for msn.com or the other sites mentioned. If their content isn't worth it chances are they're going to subsidize their lack of worth with gimmicks like these.

Secondly, text ads are far superior, convey real information, and the google method puts them in the context of the website itself, so you don't get car ads on a site about bicycles.

Exactly. I've been running this ad blocking project for a couple years now and have no qualms about any BS moral issue. Its my PC and I can render the web as I like.

I also don't block text ads because they aren't annoying and if ad-blocking catches on it will simply mean that websites will have to move to a better advertising model. One that respects the privacy of the visitor, one that isn't all flash, one that isn't a giant waste of bandwidth, one that provides information not just CLICK HERE gimmicks, etc.

Its gotten out of hand lately. I visit friends an d their computers are covered in spyware and other junk they didn't install because someone made a convincing misleading ad. Or they have a hundred tracking cookies violating their privacy so doubleclick can data mine the world. No thanks.

Its very darwinian in a sense as ads people will tolerate will probably not be blocked in the end. Personally, I think google is doing it right with ads based on the context of the site and by going all text. Others should follow and may the days of the giant flash ads and blinking banners be behind us. It can join the Divx DVD format, the BLINK tag, and the CueCat in bin of bad ideas.

I've been doing this for years with my hosts file on both Windows and Linux. Granted, it blocks entire domains and not just the images but when would I REALLY want to go to gator.com or doubleclick.net, anyway? It also does a nice job of stopping malicious cookies and doesn't block my access to sites that support the second amendment and doesn't require product activation.

Don't know which hosts you should be blocking? Are you as lazy as I am? Download a windows installer or just use Mozilla or Firebird to right click on an image and select "Block images from ".

P.S. Would the original poster of this article please post the domain of the company he works for? I need to make sure it's in my block list. Thanks. -- Dave

If banner ads fail, more and more sites will be forced into a pay model, and the days of the "Free Internet" will be almost over.

First of all, when the internet started it was free. Advertising sleazed in years after the whole structure was in place. The internet didn't need it then, and it doesn't need it now. I know my inbox sure doesn't need any more "advertising".

Second, not everybody uses Norton Antivirus. Or even Windows for that matter. And not only Norton blocks popups. You can do that yourself with a simple hosts file.

So to sum up - no, Norton Antivirus will not destroy the internet.

Weaselmancer

There are a lot of good lists of sites to block.

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm
http://www.smartin-designs.com/ (discontinued, but links are good)
http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html
http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

From here

internetseer.com - the newest web scam/spam. Here's something a little bit interesting on the web. This company, internetseer.com, is constantly hitting my site and others ostensibly to get web uptime statistics. Seems pretty harmless, but it does tend to fill up web logs pretty quickly. I don't know why their bot is set to visit this site 20 times a day, so I ended up blocking it. Yesterday, I received an email from one of their sales reps more or less saying, "Hi, we noticed your site was down last night, for x amount of dollars we can monitor it and sell you uptime statistics!!!" Which of course can be done for free locally. This is spam, these people are spammers. May google seaches with sitecheck.internetseer.com end up here. Avoid these bandwidth wasting spammers.

This is a great ruling, because if it went the other way it could be a serious precedent against ad-blocking or rendering HTML the way you like it on YOUR computer you bought with your own money on your internet connection.

The problem, as usual, is shady companies and non-vigilant consumers. Its amazing how many tech managers still don't understand the dangers of spyware: non-trivial information being sent to third-parties. This is nothing compared to a virus, especially if you work in an industry where privacy is to be expected and legally protected like law or medicine. I'm smelling the class actions that will one day wake these clueless managers from their slumber when private information about a case or a disease makes it to the hands of doubleclick or gator.

If anything spyware itself should be under the gun through better warnings (like the big ass warning google gives you when you try to install their toolbar). That's good business and respects the consumer.

Sure its insecure, but its not going anywhere anytme soon. What to do?

From here. Apologies for the formatting mess, the hyperlink fixes that.

A few very doable fixes to stop most worms and viruses.

1. Microsoft must make their next Service Pack for both XP and 2000 set autoupdate to "install without asking." It should warn the users its doing this so advanced users can disable it.

2. Micosoft should also turn XP's firewall on by default. I believe they are planning on doing this in the near future.

3. MS could develop a "security wizard." Kind of like its Baseline Security tool but for the home user. It runs, sees if your MS networking ports are open to the world, checks to see if you're behind a firewall, etc and gives
you tips. It should auto-run every 30 days unless its deactivated.

4. Outlook/Outlook express should refuse to open any attachment that is a
true executable or script like exe, vbs, pif, etc. The user should be forced to save the file to his or her hard drive first. This will stop
accidental double clicks and give the AV software a chance to scan the file.
So instead of "Open this?" the dialog box will say "Where do you want to save this potentially dangerous file?" Also users without AV should be
warned by their OS or mailer. "Warning: I can't detect an anti-virus program on your computer!"

5. Corporate networks must block port 25 from the inside. This will keep client computers from become spam machines.

6. Residential ISPs must block all RPC and Windows networking ports. My cable modem provider blocks windows networking and its probably saved us
from collapsing more than a couple times over the years. Add ports 135, 445, etc and we'll be sitting pretty. Users can always do HTTP or FTP downloads and uploads.

The bright side of the current situation is that the worse these worms and viruses get the more incentive IT managers have to buy better protection and secure their networks. I'm sure funding to buy an SMS package, AV on the mail
server, etc is much easier to get now than it was last week. Not to mention many higher ups want to know why they got 500+ emails during lunch and why
their IT department isn't doing anything about it.

The downside is that there's a certain balance to maintain. If worms get worse before security gets better than we might just see a virus with the
penetration of SoBig but instead of attacking windowsupdate.com it will corrupt the registry on the local computer, corrupt all documents on all
drives (including networked drives), etc on a set date. So far the popular worms and viruses have been very, very benign.

As far as the 'get a Mac' comment goes. Well, the computer I'm using right now has been upgraded to the point where it can't be upgraded any further.
My next machine will probably be OSX with this and my laptop running 2K.

Most corporate systems have filtering through subject lines or if they don't the client end sure does. Here are the subject lines you need to filter. A good admin can take care of this in very little time. No need to throw out the baby with the filthy virus infected bathwater.

At least in the consumer edition of their OS's. There's someting to be said about abusing this power for marketshare, but that's best left to the courts.

I love how a MSN Messenger can't be disabled without disabling it in outlook AND in the app itself, yet autoupdate wants you to configure it before it runs. I'm sure most users go "wha?" and click cancel.

I've posted more about this here for those interested.

Rather crude, but highly effective.

>If it's in fact true that there is no real user consent to the gator-driven pop-ups, tend to think that the owners of websites defaced by the popups have a reasonable claim for damages.

What about those of us who block ads, run junkbuster, proximation, etc? Your proposal would force us to render pages as the webmaster sees fit. Err, no thanks. If you publish HTML you take your chance at how the end user renders it. Don't like it? Then publish with something else.

I run an ad blocking project here, and I would not like to be grouped with gator, et al. Obviously, the problem here has to do with stealth installs (exploiting default activex settings) and ridiculously unreadable legalese.

For the record, I have met people who run spyware and who don;t care. So even if you dragged Gator into court, you'd have a hard time pushing for some kind of punishment when there are customers who don't care about privacy as much as we do.

I think this problem could easily be solved if Antivirus companies had a "treat spyware as a virus" setting. Why isn't Norton et al putting their necks on the line for their customers?

Spyware seems ripe for the next "scare meme." It does steal information and your chances of getting it compared to a virus is something like 10000 to 1. I hope to see some enterprising anti-virus upstart bundle this service and kick Norton and McAfee out of the market.

>Nokia 5200 has a built in microwave

Still doesn't have anything on the taser phone.

Est time to find a bottle of mace at the bottom of purse: 3.2 seconds. Est time to point cell phone you're already talking on at attacker .3 seconds.

An excellent resource for this can be found here.

>They were marked (like ADV:) for easy filtering

A lot of people, including yours truly, once thought that was a good idea, but lets face it: we're people first and consumers second (if not third, fourth, fifth, etc).

This is a classic push/pull debate. If I want coupons or deals then I'll go to the damn deal sites. I don't need Kraft telling me that if I print out this email I'll get eight cents off some cheese-related product in my inbox. Imagine getting that on your answering machine. Now imagine getting that on your machine 50+ times a day.

Advertisers and marketeres are going to be forced to realize that convering every surface and every information point with ads is counter-productive and will only piss off consumers and keep creating an even larger anti-advertising backlash. They want nothing more than to make us constant buying machines and it just ain't gonna happen.

On that note I'll plug my ad blocking project (simple hosts file method with installer) just to piss off the right people.

http://www.everythingisnt.com/hosts.html

I've found this hosts file useful for blocking ads using the method you described: http://www.everythingisnt.com/hosts.html

>Most banner ads

Considering Earthlink is already on the offensive regarding pop-ups why not go one step further and provide some decent banner ad blocking. If I'm using a dial-up a simple ad-blocking hosts file turns most pages from long annoying downloads to snappy content-only page views AND I get to keep the non-ad graphics.

Earthlink has nothing to lose by creating a firewall list of ad servers and making it optional for its users. It can brand itself as the anti-AOL and really get some market-share, especially now that so many AOL old-timers are looking to switch to a real ISP or broadband.

The pricing is kind of wacky too. $30 per month for marginal increases in speed which may or may not be noticeable and it still ties up the phone line? I don't see how simple compression can be that good. This isn't a scam per se, but its more than slightly exaggerated. Not to mention $30 is near broadband pricing. Perhaps it will be a psychological effect. "Dude, I have fast dial-up, check this shit out!" IE loads up something from its cache and everyone says, "Wow!"

We all know the last mile is a bitch, but this is just not a real solution. Stick to the local $10 dial-up ISP in your neighborhood and block ads.

>including jpeg and gif images

How much more compressed can these things get?

Get a host file that associates ad servers names to 127.0.0.1 to get a connection failure. Works with most websites.

Here is an example.

Doesn't cost you anything and works on most platforms (windows, Unix ...)

If you run a webserver that binds to 127.0.0.1, just choose another non-occupied IP number.

Nice, I also maintain one here for those interested:

http://www.everythingisnt.com/hosts.html

http://www.everythingisnt.com/features/segway.html

You can get a quite extensive "ad-blocking" hosts file here.

you could try this or this for some nice huge lists.

That's what they said about the wearable ATM.

http://everythingisnt.com/2001_12_02_control_archi ve.html#7626223