A lot of people I know spend a lot of time on the internet. Most of us are computer professionals and need to read a lot articles and blogs just to keep up with current trends. These people are constantly bombarded by ads. I get tired of them (the ones that take over your monitor and move, etc) and I really got feed up last week (actually week before that but I am still recovering from Thanksgiving.) Like any good soldier, I set up my game plan and prepared to attack the enemy. Before I knew it, I had not only ad blasters, but spammers, Trojan and virus writers, and Sony’s root kit on my objective list! Ok, too broad of a scope, especially since I buy all my music online at big bad Wal-Mart. So for this phase only the ad blasters.

I setup a DNS server (Bind) in cache mode and then cruised over to my favorite ad laden website, www.$%#*$%(*#.com. This was after a fresh reboot to ensure that I had no other outside influencers.

Would you be surprised to find that those ads come from not 1 but 7 sites! They are dishing out full course ad meals. No problem I says and add those IPs to my ban list. To make a long story shorter, after 1 hour, I had hundreds of sites, and was worn out. That’s when I decided to call upon the force! The force is wielded by mere mortals via a Google search box!

Low and behold, someone had stolen my bright idea about 3 years ago! Mike Skallas beat me to the punch, and his punch has some heavy wallop in it. So much so that after utilizing his hosts file, I have had a serious reduction in the amount of ads on my screen. What once were ads and ad videos, and other garbage, has turned into simple bliss on so many levels. Web surfing, checking my yahoo mail, and even my mail in Outlook, that knife cut ads deep! Not all of them are gone but about 95% or greater are.

This is a great piece of work by Mike. I have added in some German ad sites for my on benefit and few others I have found. My additions are few and far in between however. If you are interested in having piece from the ad monsters yourselves, visit Mike’s site at http://www.everythingisnt.com/hosts.html.

And one last note added a couple of weeks after this was written, a proxy server was added to this mix as well. Although the DNS did show me where the ad sites were, having to dump the cache after each site became a pain, where the proxy gave me an ordered list sorted by time.

P.S. - If you use Mike’s file, help the guy with hosting charges by making a donation. $1-$5 is cheap for the relief you will get.