Tired of pop ups and ads?

(edited for clarity)
I hate them too, so I researched and found a guy who did something ab it.

For those who don't know how this works, I'll give you a topical explanation:

Your computer relies on entries to look up web pages. Many dont know, but it *first* looks on itself for where a site may be. It looks in a file called "hosts" that, in a win2K computer is in something like c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\. You can search for "hosts" on your computer and find it. There could be another one on your computer from the winnt install directory (if it exists), it wont do any good- I promise the one you want is close to system32. In most computers, this text file has only some explanation as to what it does and how to make it work. You can view it with notepad.

If it is blank, or has only the remedial instructions, the computer goes on out to the big ol'e world and looks for the directions to the ads or pop ups in what area called DNS servers. You have probably heard the acronym DNS tossed around- it's pretty popular. And, for the purpose of this file, it's pretty applicable.

So remember, the computer first looks to itself for where these pages might be... Well, this guy simply took all of those annoying places and made entries in his hosts file that redirect the request back to your computer! And, does YOUR computer have any pop up ads on it? Nyyyoooooo. So, the requests fail. Works like a freakin' CHAMP! I even added a couple of places that I frequent who have their own ads that annoy me. I'll bet you can guess where they are by visiting them and seeing the pop ups fail. (Hint: it's in alphabetical order and one of the entries starts with "fly")

Basically, it uses an entry named 'localhost' at IP address '127.0.0.1' which is a private IP address and by definition, does not go out to the Internet. It then takes ALL these places that advertise and points them to local host! It totally disables (most of) them!

Anyway, remember, use at your own risk, but used correctly, this file improved my browsing experience IMMENSLY!

This is fairly advanced, so be careful!

Click here to view the file and see what it does. Then, feel free to highlight it, save it as whatever you want and do you own copying and pasting into your hosts file.

Enjoy. and PM with questions.

you could always use mozilla for your browswer instead of IE or netscape. mozilla has an advanced options section for Javascript that allows you to selectively deny things like popups, popunders, resizing of windows, etc. works awesome.

www.mozilla.org

I'm with AK.

Actually, I've been playing with Phoenix on my slower machines, and it has popups disabled by default but has a popup Whitelist that you can add allowed hosts in to make certain sites' (like Citibank's Virtual Credit Card # applet) popups still work.

Remember, this not only does many of the pop ups, but disables a lot of banner adds, too. It doesn't disable *all* pop ups, so the citibank ones would still work. The only entries are in there for ads.pop, banner.blahblah, etc. If you find a pop up or banner ad you want, simply remove the entry from your hosts file.

It's also free and doesn't require you to change your browser.

Modifying the Hosts file works, but you still get the popup. It's just blank/page not found. This at least blocks any further page openings from the popup.

What a pain to edit the hosts file every time you find another thing to block, though. I like the block-everything-first approach.

That file probably contains 1% of the offending websites.

Originally posted by ff
Modifying the Hosts file works, but you still get the popup. It's just blank/page not found. This at least blocks any further page openings from the popup.

I dunno.. I went to stupidstuff.org (or com or whatever) without the file and got popups galore- with it, I got none.

(Edited to clear the code below)

Originally posted by Kaz
What a pain to edit the hosts file every time you find another thing to block, though. I like the block-everything-first approach.

Have you looked at this file? It's huge! I'm not saying it blocks everything, but it does do most of them. I've only added a few entries for sites I frequent, but it improved my browsing experience by a ton.

There is a shareware program called pop-up stopper that does disable all pop ups, but I, like you, found that a bit annoying when there were pop-ups, like my bank sign-on, that I wanted.

Originally posted by JPinTO
That file probably contains 1% of the offending websites.

And you probably only experience 2.0% of the offending websites.
Try it. I'll bet you like it.

Download Free Surfer. It's freeware, it's small and it works like a charm