Slashdot Mirror

Or, just update your computer or firewall's hosts file

Here's a good one: http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

Another way... Flashblock http://flashblock.mozdev.org/

Also I use MVP Hosts to take care of the "bad" (like Double Click) IP's out there. http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

These two simple things alone, make browsing faster and safer.

all the more reason to set up a host file

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

Excellent suggestion and I hope you get modded informative.

There is a blacklist website that had the www.nice8.org site listed a while back (I serched in mine before entering it) but the we268 site wasn't in there and still isn't.

The URL to the hosts blacklist file: http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm This really speeds up browsing too as a lot of the tracking sites get blocked.

Pass it on...

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

I'm more of an /etc/hosts kind of guy, myself.

Someone posted this link to Slashdot recently so I checked it out, I found it's very good at blocking ads for what it is, just a hosts file.
Using the hosts file they provide I don't see external adverts on eBay anymore, just this in place of where the advert would be displayed:

Action canceled
Internet Explorer was unable to link to the Web page you

Riiight.. Remote desktop? Piece of cake! Howabout hacking the non-Server termsrv.dll? Terminal Server? For what? Office? Have 10MB of RAM per user ready. Ouch. Virtual Server? Not ready for production.

  And none of this addresses my original point: Out of the box, users get a small bit of handholding to guide them through XP's detailed permissions. Either it's the dumb-down interface or the whole kaboodle. XP is a solid OS for stability.

  Look, I'm coding up a large office Automation server and get to enjoy their help files like this. No office app designed for multi-user, server-based hosting. Nice. The MVC pattern is what, 15 years old now?

  As to the rest of my rant, I see your retort explains everything. Perhaps you like XP's GDI, Win32. Funny sense of design, you. Vista is a necessary upgrade - it was simply done wrong.

There are ads on Slashdot?

Forget about using ad blocking software, instead use a Host file. Here's a good article on using one for Blocking Unwanted Parasites with a Hosts File. Google has some links where you can download a Hosts file, all one is is a text file listing IP addies you want blocked.

It just wasted a post instead.

It's dead on two points...

1 hosts file blocks it
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

2 DNS blocks it. DNS 1 67.138.54.100 DNS 2 207.225.209.66
http://www.scrubit.com/

This makes many of the troll posts safe for work.

see
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt

Obviously you are not the only one. http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt has a lot servers. I just do an update each month. If you have a webserver, you can configure it in such a way that it gives a nice warning or whatever you desire. Comes in handy with embedded frames.

If you're interested in populating your hosts file, check out http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm. There's a downloadable hosts file that's 406k, and was updated on July 31st, 2007. If you're running 2000/XP/Vista, be sure to read the Editor's Note about steps you must take to use a large hosts file.

Me likey ABP but one can achieve the same effect via the HOSTS file:

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

I noticed a major improvement in site load times upon using the MVPS file.

Cheers.

I've been using a hosts file that I downloaded from http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm and it works like a charm. Anytime I see an ad (which is exceedingly rare), I add it to my hosts file and I never see ads from that ad server again.

One time, I was trying to do something with google ads and I realized it wasn't working, so I removed the google entries from hosts and everything worked fine.

Anyway, it's been an awesome solution for me.

So let's say you go ahead and use IE, Opera, etc... just go over to this website and get a set of host file entries that just redirect this nonsense to your localhost. Works great, you can even use the entries on your IPCop box or the like and protect your whole setup. Just a thought!

no you silly boy. keep the internet goodies, and fence off the baddies with a good proxy and HOSTS file.

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

No need for a popup blocker when the ad site host name goes into the bit bucket.

I wasn't aware of any advertising on the page.

Have you considred using a HOSTS file?

We do not want to see pages full of advertisement. Especially not when they move around. This was already clear with the tag.

I even hate it when movies I want to see start playing before I pressed start.

I myself use several different methods to avoid seeing spam.
1) http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm (Update the hosts file once per month with a cron job)
2) Adblock
3) http://www.privoxy.org/
4) Adblock

and for some sites that I want to see without the stoopid ads all over or where I do not like the standard layout (like slashdot or Toms hardware) I use http://userstyles.org/

OK, perhaps I am overactive, but I am now unable to watch the internet on an other computer, because of all the ads that are trown to me.

All this should be a hint to companies that people do niot want this. Ebay should look at who its base customers are and serve them. Ignore the extra money you can make. It pisses people off.

But as it is a company, the management will be only there for three years, or so, so as long as they can milk it, who cares, right?

A custom ad-blocking hosts file (/etc/hosts in Linux and OS X; locations vary in Windows) will block most ads and spyware-hosting sites. And it's system-wide, making all browsers largely ad-free.

This is a good alternative to IE ad blocking, not to mention other nasty URLs. In conjunction with Adblock, it makes the Internet a bit closer to that old fashioned "Information Superhighway" utopia they threw around back in the 90's.

They do have a hosts file that they can use. One that is pretty up to date is http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt
I update my hostsfile with it every week and I don't even run Windows.

Most consumers won't buy Vista boxes until their old box breaks.

That can be arranged

Nothing like a hosts file to fuck that up.

Slap on the wrist? There should be so much justice.

My solution is to use a custom hosts file. http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm publishes a nice one. Whenever I click on a lick in a web search list and I immediately get a "link not found" then I can pretty sure I didn't really want to go there in the first place. A lot of advertisements show up as "404's" as well.

Sorry, those secretaries can hope all they want, but barring a major reengineering of the Word format, Reveal Codes will never happen in Word, ever. The best explanation of why is here; in summary, WordPerfect uses inline marking (think HTML), where Word uses nested containers with formatting info in binary blobs at beginning and end of the document. So Reveal Codes implemented literally in Word would just mark off the containers and parse the leading and trailing data for you; you'd still have to mentally map formatting info to the container it applied to. Word does have Reveal Formatting, but that's not nearly the same thing.

One of the best downloads I have ever made is the MVPs HOSTS file. This is a free hosts file which includes all spammers, spyware, parasites, and adware URLs. The version I am using has over 11,000 entries. Good stuff.

One nice fringe benefit of this file is that ads will no longer appear in web pages or applications which host ads, like MSN Messenger.

That sounds great but I really don't mind ads as long as they aren't pop ups. With the popup blocker in Opera enabled and the hosts file from http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm I almost never see ads at all and it is pretty much "automatic". Also, using *'s in the hosts file really does a nice job and almost makes using regexes unneeded.

I recently reset my hosts file because I figure the websites I like need to make money somehow and while I don't buy anything I do click on the ads at the sites I frequent quite often. Without revenue from ads many sites would not be able to exist so as long as they are not intrusive I really could care less to see them on the page.

If just seeing ads bothers you so much then I can see why you would want to use filterset.g. For me as long as the ads don't cover a page or popup I don't mind them. I am glad that there are choices out there for us all, to each there own.

For this we have OpenDNS, couple it with a good HOSTS file and that's most of your potential problems sorted.

I've been slowly implimenting both across all windows machines that I privately maintain (family/friends) and the decrease in support calls is apparent - considering the 30 seconds of effort required, it's a damn good return on investment. Using either/both on Linux/BSD isn't hard either - you're icing the cake of ingrained security...

No, what is being discussed here is links, e.g., creating an additional filename referencing an inode.

http://win32.mvps.org/ntfs/lnw.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=34 1355

NTFS does support links, but as usual from Microsoft, it's half-baked and only the bare minimum required for POSIX compliance was implemented. From sysinternals (now a Microsoft site) you can download a utility for manipulating NTFS links, or you can install the free Services for Unix (again, from Microsoft's web site) to get the M$ version of ln.

MS products are great for building cut-and-paste business applications. They're business tools. They make for bad hacking tools. Right now, I'm trying to figure out how the CLR handles threading, specifically when calling a control that uses asynchronous method calls. Guess what, the documentation is incredibly vague, the newsgroup postings are worthless, and I'm having to take a best guess and hope for the best. Another question I had is how C++ .NET mixes managed and unmanaged code. What if I created a multithreaded C++ .NET application? How would it behave? For whatever reason, most hackers avoid MS products like the plague. When I search the web, I can find discussions about the most pedantic pieces of Perl, but the average C# discussion is about 'synergizing your GUI' or playing 'cool tricks with delegates'. The most prolific MS programmers seem to be architects who muck with design patterns. In short, .NET it's a business tool, not an engineering or hacking tool.

I've given a couple suggestions of good MS programmers. This list is by no means exhaustive. Frankly, outside of book authors, I don't know of any great MS programmers. There aren't many OSS projects for Windows and I don't have the foggiest idea who does what at Redmond. Some potential great programmers are:

Jeffrey Richter
He wrote 'Advanced Windows Programming' (the closest thing to a Steven's like opus on the NT kernel I've seen, and Richter still falls short).

Ken Henderson
He's a SQL Server guru. His book 'The Guru's Guide to SQL Server Architecture and Internals' is the closest thing I've seen to a documented reverse engineering of any MS product.

Bruce McKinney
He's the author of 'Hardcore Visual Basic'. Did I mention he hates VB.NET?

Michael Abrash
He's obviously a ringer, but still... He wrote the 'Zen of Assembly Language', the 'Graphics Programming Black Book', but he also worked on the XBox, DirectX, MS Word (IIRC), and Quake. When John Carmack bows before your graphics programming voodoo, that says something.

Honorable Mention:
Charles Petzold

It's also worth noting that 3 of these men are known for trying to pick apart a black box of a MS product. I'm sure there are some real programming luminaries at the Redmond campus, I just don't know who they are.

I honestly don't remember, but this looks familiar. Actually, someone on Slashdot told me, so if that's not it, you can look through my comments and try to find the reply... But it's a LOT of comments.

I couldn't find active links for one or two of them myself, but here's an updated list -- in some cases these aren't the original sites, which have disappeared, so obviously it's worth being extra careful with antivirus software... apologies for the mess of links; the filter doesn't like short lines...

1by1 (play MP3s), AriskKey (recover passwords), AutoRuns (enumerate startup tasks), BurnCDCC (burn ISO images), CD (basic CD player), CDex (rip CDs + convert MP3/WAV), Copier [0X Copy Machine] (scan + print), CWShredder (clean spyware), DComBob (tame DCOM), DirLister (make quick file lists), Discover (force windows onscreen), DupeLocater (find and clean), FileRecovery [PC Inspector] (undelete), Folder2ISO (use with BurnCDCC), FoxitReader (read PDFs), GUIPDFTK (split/join PDFs), HijackThis (find spyware), HJSplit (split/join files), Identify_Boards (identify hardware), KatMouse installer (due to MS drivers), LCISOCreator (make ISO image from CD), Leaktest (test firewall), Microsoft keygen (people lose things), MultiRes (change res + force refresh), Multi Timer (stopwatch), NoteTab Light (text editor), NTest (test monitor setup), OnTop (pin windows to foreground), Process Explorer (task manager), ProduKey (recover passwords), Registry Commander (virus cleanup), ResHacker (examine executables), Rootkit Revealer (just in case) ShootTheMessenger (turn service off), Shred by AnalogX (simple filer shredder), TedNPad (unicode text editor), TFT (dead pixel locator), UNPnP (tame SSDP), UPX (compress executables), UnitConverter (what it says), utorrent (basic torrent app), VCdControlTool (mount ISO images),

Once again I'll suggest the easiest solution I have come across. And it really does work. Visit http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm and download the hosts file. Set it up (takes about 2 minutes) and then make it read only. Once a month or so - whenever you visit, update the hosts file. The file on this site is updated regularly. The last update is from yesterday. This file is released under the Creative Commons license and prevents 'bad' pages or sites from loading. Obviously, spyware from unknown sites is not stopped by this but it prevents such a high percentage of unwanted crap that it has resulted in NO calls from friends or family members to fix spyware related problems on their pc's.

you mean this list?

1. Use Mozilla Firefox.
2. Uninstall Flash, you don't need that proprietary junk, 99% of all flash animations are ads/banners anyways.
3. Maybe you want to "block loading of images from third-party sites".
4. Use the Adblock extension for Firefox, you can get it at http://adblock.mozdev.org/ and get some rules for it.
5. Use a more secure operating system

1. Use Mozilla Firefox.
2. Uninstall Flash, you don't need that proprietary junk, 99% of all flash animations are ads/banners anyways.
3. Maybe you want to "block loading of images from third-party sites".
4. Use the Adblock extension for Firefox, you can get it at http://adblock.mozdev.org/ and get some rules for it.
5. Use a more secure operating system

Cripple IE (what I did)

Turn off ActiveX, paste operations via script, IFRAME support

Use a 'dumb' browser to browse 'media rich' sites like Slashdot

Good, but 'dumb' browsers

Lynx - Text mode only

Off By One - No javascript/activex support (no driveby downloads!)
I use this to browse Slashdot. Slashdot looks like crap now in IE5 which came with Windows 2000... :P

This will help keep spyware out of your PC or you can use a Mac like all the Apple snobs say to do... :P So now rouge IPs have to have your IP address and some security hole in Windows to get in...

PS: Turn off the Messenger service so you won't get 'IPspam' that way.

PS: Use a good hosts file to block the adware/spyware IPs such as

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

OK - so it doesn't update automatically, but this will do the job.... http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

Yes, that's all very well, but will it play my OGG files?

I know you're joking but the answer is actually "sort-of".

It is my understanding that as part of MTP (the transfer protocol), the device will broadcast it's capabilities to a MTP compliant player (eg. Windows Media Player 11). If there is a format in the music library that the device cannot use, then WMP11 will transcode it to WMA before putting it onto the device.

As such, OGG can be supported provided there is a codec installed on the PC (here) and a helper application which will allow WMP11 to read the meta-data from within the file.

Unfortunately I don't know whether the latter is available - but you're 50% there. Granted it isn't as good as native support on the player and the device, but it's better than no support at all.

Have you tried either of the following suggestions?

This sort of junk is EXACTLY why I started using ad blocking. After getting hit 3 times by something like that. It was time to do something about it. 0 adware 0 spyware 0 viri in the last 18 months. My *windows* exp is actually nice. No crashes, no slowdowns. Its amazing.

Try this one to start with
http://www.schooner.com/~loverso/no-ads/
then combine it with (i put all the hosts into the pac file as a big hosts file is a bad idea and slow)
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm
plus
http://adblockplus.mozdev.org/
plus
http://www.pierceive.com/

plus staying up to date on all patches.

and you have a truely AWSOME experiance.
Surprisingly this actually works semi well as 'advertisers' are cheap. So they tend to use the same web sites over and over to feed the data. Never mind most of the advert servers are *SLOW*. If you look most of the time its waiting on those servers to finish rendering the page.

I use the pac thing because I still use IE quite a bit for different things. Plus it gets a lot of things the other one does not. I could update Adblockk plus to just do it all but this gives me IE blocking as well.

There are times when, after the fact, I want to find out what communications with the internet took place around a certain time. Like when I get called in to remove malware from a friend's PC. I can tell from the install date/time on the malware's directory, etc. when it came in. I'd like to be able to work from that to find out what was going on around that time to see what got it started.

Is there a program that logs all accesses to the internet FROM MY PC? A web server typically logs all requests that come into it. I'm looking for something that provides a similar log for my PC.

• - Date and Time (e.g. 20060607_212955)
• - DNS Name (e.g. slashdot.org)
• - IP Addr (e.g. [66.35.250.150])
• - Port (e.g. 80)
• - Status Code (e.g. 200, 404, ?????)
• - Application path (e.g. "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe")
• - etc.

The reason for the DNS Name and IP Address is that I have a slew of entries in my HOSTS file to redirect "Bad" sites to home. See: http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.zip. This log would allow me to track when attempts to these blocked addresses were attempted. A log with a gazillion 127.0.0.1 entries isn't much help; logging the domain name that got looked up and which resulted in the 127.0.0.1 would be much more help.

I suppose I could launch Ethereal Network Protocol Analyzer but it seems to put quite a load onto my system and I am concerned the overhead may cause it to drop packets. Maybe I'm not configuring it right (any suggestions for a lightweight install?). Or, is there a smaller, less resource-intensive application which can do this for me?

If such a simple thing existed, and were widely implemented, I suspect applications phoning home would be detected much sooner.

When I used to use Windows, I never used to use antivirus. Or even anti-spyware software.

I believe with a good firewall, a good HOSTS file and some common sense, you should be fine. And the vast majority of Slashdot readers have plenty of common sense. I use ubuntu these days.

You'll need IETab or (gasp) IE5+, but this comes to mind:

http://omar.mvps.org/

I can't decide whether he's clever or just insane...

Maybe this and other articles here might help.

MS has just so totally fucked up its implementation of styles. I do DTP, and get files from all kinds of people. Not a single one in the last 10 years has been set up using styles in any sensible way. I always have to spend at least an hour trying to rationalise the styles of headings, lists, extracts, and, shudder, tables, before I can get to work on the text. You're right, it was much simpler and easier to produce good documents in Word 5.

I couldn't agree more. I use a set of Adblock expressions that I built up myself over a few months of browsing, in addition to a robust HOSTS file for ad and malware blocking. I haven't seen an advert in months, including google Adwords ads.

It's wonderful.

127.0.0.1 doubleclick.net #[McAfee.Cookie-Doubleclick]
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net #[MVPS.Criteria]
127.0.0.1 ad2.doubleclick.net #[Panda.Spyware:Cookie/Doubleclick]
127.0.0.1 ad.3ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.3au.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.ar.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.au.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.be.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.br.doubleclick.net #[SunBelt.DoubleClick]
127.0.0.1 ad.ca.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.ch.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.cl.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.cn.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.de.doubleclick.net #[Tenebril.Tracking Cookie]
127.0.0.1 ad.dk.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.es.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.fi.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.fr.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.hu.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.jp.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.kr.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.it.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.nl.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.no.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.nz.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.pl.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.pt.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.ru.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.se.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.sg.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.terra.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.tw.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.uk.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.us.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.za.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.n2434.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 creatives.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 dfp.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ir.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 iv.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ln.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 m.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 m2.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 m3.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 mi.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 m.us.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 n3285ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 n3349ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 n479ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 n609ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 optout.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 optimize.3optimization.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 rd.intl.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 se1.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 doubleclick.ne.jp
127.0.0.1 www3.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 www.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 doubleclick.com
127.0.0.1 www2.doubleclick.com
127.0.0.1 www3.doubleclick.com
127.0.0.1 www.doubleclick.com

ref: http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

you're welcome

The URL "www.accoona.com" is listed as a spyware site by both Spybot Search and Destroy and by MVPS. Both of these modify the /etc/hosts file to map "www.accoona.com" to 127.0.0.1.