Magazines, newspapers, daily columnists, some personal journals (as well as manufacturers and retailers of physical products) have made the transition of some if not all of their customer-facing activities to the web over the last decade. For traditional publishers of content the change wasn’t all bad - if your product is text, it’s not all that hard to have it appear in two places - especially since the boon of word processing and desktop publishing software has made sure your product is digital already anyway. Creating content does have a cost, and many content creators have attempted to offset any perceived loss of revenue due to sagging print readership (blamed on the shift of eyeballs to the web) by charging for advertising space on their websites. Running a website is a relatively cheap advertising mechanism compared to print, but this is at odds with what has traditionally been a FREE medium for the open exchange of ideas, and not an advertising platform. Some web old-timers refuse to accept these advertisements, and happily view most web content without them. Here’s how to do it…It is possible to use a specially crafted hosts file to block ads which will work in any browser, this will be mentioned below.

The kind of selective ad blocking I will discuss first is not possible using Internet Explorer, so if you are still using that antiquated, non-standards conforming POS, you are SOL. (Yes, IE7RC1 seems to offer a lot more features, but mainly because they copied features from Mozilla Firefox and Opera - and I don’t see anything like this coming). When I use the word AD, I don’t mean the predatory ads termed ‘POP-UP’ ads (or ‘POP-UNDER’) which are the bane of all Internet Explorer users - ads that open a new (unrequested) window to display an advertisement for something vaugely related to the content you were viewing. This discussion is about those ads in the body of the text of the story, usually almost a third of the page in dimension so that you can’t miss it while reading the content, or possibly positioned in the left or right margins - sometimes with distracting moving images, or flashing banners. You don’t have to be a prude to find some of the ads repugnant, even vile depending on the site you’re viewing, but even when not - they are distracting. Commercials on television can at least be muted if you push a MUTE button on your TV remote - can’t we do even better using this incredible super computer? The answer is a resounding YES!

The first thing to do is to install Mozilla Firefox. It won’t hurt your computer, it doesn’t come with any ads or spyware, and Internet Explorer will still work fine (you will still need IE if you want to visit non-standards conforming sites like: microsoft.com). You can always uninstall Firefox it if you don’t like it, which I think unlikely. I won’t go into the various features that make Firefox nicer to use than IE: hotkey to increase font size, tabbed browsing, extensions and plugins to add features you might want that other folks might not, themes, built in configurable search field, CSS standards conformance, built in RSS feed reader, NO active X to protect you while browsing.

The default configuration will block pop-up ads and the like, and has a setting to block inline images but we want more control!

Once you’re up with Firefox, navigate to the Adblock development page, click on Install, then devlopment builds, or go directly there. Then just click on the link for the latest build (currently Adblock 0.5 d3 nightly 42), and click INSTALL. You’ll have to restart Firefox (certainly not as painful as restarting Windows!)

Once you’re running an Adblock enabled Firefox, you can start visiting pages you frequent and begin blocking away. You can right click on most images and choose (from the Adblock submenu) block image. If the image is flashing and moving, it might be a Macromedia flash image - you need to deal with these differently. Choose Tools | Adblock | Overlay flash for left click. This changes all flash images to a line of text which you can click on to block. Sometimes the images just go away entirely, sometimes you need to click again and block the i-frame that contains them as well. Once you have visited a site enough times to get force fed their entire range of annoying ads, and blocked them in this way, you won’t be bothered with them again (until they change their site or figure out some way around Adblock). Since the majority of folks on the web are using IE though, they probably don’t care much (yet) about the fact that you, specifically, aren’t seeing that particular ad.

An alternate method which provides almost the same function, though not as easily configurable as Adblock’s nifty graphical interface, is a modified hosts file. I originally learned this trick from a tip on the mvps.org website which, incidentally, is *not* where I stole my site’s 2006 tag line from - I had originally found that in a sig on slashdot (though I can’t swear it wasn’t the same folks). If you intend to use this kind of solution, it is helpful to have some understanding of what you’re doing so that you can remove the blocks later on if you choose. When you’re ’surfing the web’, you request information from remote computers be displayed in the browser you’re running by name. These names are easy to remember, like Google.com. It’s not so easy to remember a site’s *real* name, which is an IP (a set of numbers): 64.233.187.99 in Google’s case. To translate your request for Google into that number, your computer sends out a request to a DNS server which responds with the correct ‘IP’ and you’re off! A hosts file is a way of over-riding that process. It’s actually a really old system that was used before DNS, but it now provides a way to over-ride DNS for our nefarious purposes. The file is just a text file that you populate as: IP name.com. The trick lies in the fact that all computers have a number that means *home* (or *this machine*: 127.0.0.1 (hence, the joke ‘There’s no place like 127.0.0.1′). If you populate your host file with all the bad websites that serve up these ads (doubleclick is one of these) and set their IP to 127.0.0.1, then everytime your computer requests an ad (because you hit a webpage with that ad on it), then it looks for it on your own computer. It doesn’t find it, and displays an error instead. The error can be easier on the eyes than the ad, and your pages will load faster. You can grab a modified hosts file from the above linked page, but there’s one caveat: if you use Windows, you will have to stop the DNS client service or you *will* have problems. You don’t need the DNS Client service - I know, I do this all the time at work - so don’t worry about disabling it, but Windows can’t deal with a big hosts file if that service is running and will barf.