Tired of Ads? Block them!
If you are like me, you hate commercials and the time wasted viewing them, 15 mins per 1-hour of show is excessive in my opinion. Now to be honest, I do not spend a copious amount of time drooling at the television, besides I rather watch material on YouTube. Oh, but you say they, they have commercials now as well!
If you have been to the movies theaters in the past few years, then you know they now run adverts in the beginning of the film. Its getting to be obnoxious! That’s one of the reasons I rather download movies now and watch on my computer.
Anyways, it has always bothered me, when I am forced to view click-thru adverts or read adverts in my browser. Yes I know, it generates revenue, but it is my computer and my internet and I can dictate what I want to look at. Yay, for the free-market!
Why Block Ads?
Increased Speed
…Web surfers weary of enduring the “pulsating, candy-colored wave of advertising that has spread across the Internet,” increasingly are turning to ad-blocking to speed up their download times. “They are a symbol of people saying, ‘I’m not going to take it anymore,’” says Jakob Nielsen, co-founder of the Nielsen-Norman Group. … Many online advertisers dismiss the trend toward ad-blocking, noting that when faster connections are available, consumers will not be so annoyed about being forced to download cumbersome advertisement files.
Unfortunately, higher internet access speeds make the problem worse, not better. As access speeds grow, the size and complexity of ads grows with it. Current ads contain animation or executable material and may even be complete programs that contain crude games. The bloat in these ads keeps the download times for pages at the ragged edge of tolerability even as access speeds increase dramatically. At the same time, the textual content that the ads supposedly support stays roughly the same, so the percentage of bandwidth used for ads climbs sharply and will approach 99% in the not-too-distant future. Indeed, as the speed of your internet access goes up, ad blocking becomes increasingly more beneficial, not less.
Enhanced Privacy
SURFER BEWARE: ADVERTISER’S ON YOUR TRAIL
Internet advertising server DoubleClick is tracking the online activity of users, recording their names, purchases, and addresses, reports USA Today. DoubleClick is combining the data it accumulates on Web user activity with a direct marketing database of 90 million households maintained by Abacus Direct, which DoubleClick acquired last year. Privacy International’s David Banisar says the move threatens online anonymity, while consumer advocates say they will complain to the FCC. Junkbusters’ Jason Catlett says, “For four years [DoubleClick] has said [the services] don’t identify you personally, and now they’re admitting they are going to identify you.” DoubleClick says the practice allows ads to target users better, improving the online experience, and the company also points out that users can opt to not have their use tracked. Banisar claims that opt out language is usually buried in a site’s privacy statement.
If you are uncomfortable with DoubleClick knowing who you are, where you live, your credit card number, what you watch on the web and what you buy, you need to opt out immediately. To further punish them (since they have been doing this surreptitiously for some time) you should block their ads to reduce their revenue.
Surfing Speed Increase: Making this configuration change will approximately double your surfing speed on many commercial sites. If you use Yahoo heavily, you will approximately triple your surfing speed. Surprisingly, this turns out to be quite noticable even if you are on a DSL or faster connection.
While your at it, try a faster browser.
How it works |
It’s possible to set up a name server as authoritative for any domain you choose, allowing you to specify the DNS records for that domain. You can also configure most computers to be sort of mini-nameservers for themselves, so that they check their own DNS records before asking a nameserver. Either way, you get to say what hostname points to what IP address. If you haven’t guessed already, the way you block ads it to provide bogus information about the domains we don’t want to see – ie, all those servers out there that dedicate their existence to spewing out banner ads.
The hosts fileProbably the most common way people block ads like this is with something called the “hosts file”. The hosts file is a simple list of hostnames and their corresponding IP addresses, which your computer looks at every time you try and contact a previously unknown hostname. If it finds an entry for the computer you’re trying to reach, it sets the IP address for that computer to be whatever’s in the hosts file. 127.0.0.1 is a special IP address which, to a computer, always means that computer. Any time a machine sends a network request to 127.0.0.1, it is talking to itself. This is very useful when it comes to blocking ads, because all we have to do is specify the IP address of any ad server to be 127.0.0.1. And to do that, all we have to do is edit the hosts file. What will happen then is something like this:
The format of the hosts file is very simple – IP address, whitespace, then a list of hostnames (except for older Macs; please see above). However, you don’t need to know anything about the format if you don’t want to as you can just view the list hosts file. Of course, that’s not the only way to use the list, but it’s probably the most simple for most people. Happy Blocking! |
Links
http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_(file)
