www.asprey.net

A long time ago, one of my students gave me a file with a list of the most common adservers on the internet, the ones that  put  the annoying banner ads on websites you visit.  I added many more to the list and created a hosts file which maps all these server addresses to a place where there are no ads, the TCP loopback port on your own computer!

To see less visual clutter, all you have to do is copy this file into your c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\ directory, or if you're not on Windows XP or 2K, then copy it into whatever directory contains your hosts file.  This works on Macs, Unix, Linux, and Windows machines of all flavors.  You may want to see if there are addresses in your hosts file already, if there are, simply copy them into my hosts file at the end, then use my hosts file instead of yours.

You will instantly find that where there used to be ads on pages, there is now clean, white space.  I have blocked all graphics from Yahoo since they use their yimg server to send really annoying ads.  You can change this by editing the hosts file and removing any line containing yahoo.  If you find you can't visit a site (like www.doubleclick.com) then it may be because it's blocked in the hosts file.  If, for some ungodly reason you should actually want to go there, you would have to remove the doubleclick line from your hosts file.

Best of luck!  I offer no support for this, as it is using a built in feature of TCPIP. 

I'm doing this because I believe advertisers have crossed the line from informative advertising into manipulative advertising, and I think the world is a less polluted place when we have fewer ads.  See www.adbusters.org for more thoughts about this.  (I'm no flaming radical, I just hate ads!)