200 OK

Bit if a quick blog post really but its quite useful.

Right so as some folks know I have just reinstalled my PC with Windows 7. Everything is great but I have noticed something online I was not seeing before on crappy Vista, adverts! lots and lots of flashing banner scummy adverts!

Then I remembered that on Vista I had modified one of my files to block those pesky swines.

Here is a guide on how to do it, If you are not at least 45% technical then maybe don’t bother with doing this as you might mess it up:

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

Before and After

So here is a print screen of the radio times website before changing a file (was worse online both the banner ad’s flashed like a fucking fireworks display):

And here is it after, No advets, looks great:

The Tech Bit

The link in the intro basically provides you with a list of domain names which websites use to embed adverts on their pages (kinda like a webpage inside a webpage). You add this list of domains to a file called hosts which is part of Windows. Each line looks something like this:

127.0.0.1  fr.a2dfp.net

Basically what this does is bypass how your computer normally tries to find a website and instead it redirects to 127.0.0.1 which is the address of your own machine! So basically you are tricking your PC to go to it’s self when ever your computer tries to access ‘fr.a2dfp.net’ and therefore the advert does not show! Simple yet genius. There are hundreds of these lines in the guide above which basically account for most of the ad servers on the Internet.

The Moral Bit

Some might argue that it is a bit rude to do this. These sites need adverts to stay running right?, fair enough. The truth is most people will get confused as to how to do this or are simply not Geeky enough to bother. These are the same people that probably click on these adverts in the first place, get infected by viruses and fall pray to email scams from Nigerian morons.

These people are the sheep of the Internet and like sheep they outnumber the badass Wolves. Sheep are simple and get fucked but they don’t cause trouble, Wolves eat sheep and don’t play by the rules but there will always be more sheep. What i’m basically saying is unless a sudden burst of intelligence sweeps the general Internet population these sites will lose no ad revenue, so fuckem.