Bob, as Ecke and Mark point out, you can poison hostname lookups to
doubleclick.net (and any other ad-domain hostname you please) right on
your local workstation by adding entries to the HOSTS file. That's
/etc/hosts on UNIX offspring (Linux, *BSD, and Mac OS X). It's
C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts on recent Windows variants;
elsewhere on older Windows. This method works because when the browser
tries to fetch a doubleclick.net resource (URL) it will be told to get
it from the workstation itself (127.0.0.1 is the "loopback" address that
always means *this* host). That will invariably fail and the browser
will substitute some default image where the ad would have been.
Trouble is it can fail in various ways depending on how the workstation
is setup. What may happen is some delay opening the web page as each of
these ad fetches tries, fails, possibly retries, and eventually times-out.
What I did was to poison the hostname lookups that occur as they pass
through my internet router. That way, all lookups for doubleclick that
come from Windows PCs, Macs, iPads and iPod Touch's in the house will
all return the DNS code NXDOMAIN, meaning "no such host" (Non-eXistent
domain). The nice thing about that is the browser will not retry but
fail immediately and usually "nicely". Safari, Firefox and Chrome all
substitute whitespace of the appropriate size. I think IE does that too,
but at worst shows a small missing-object icon.
As to how one accomplishes this, that depends on what you've got. Being
a networking guy (and FreeBSD hacker) with a tinkering bent, I've got a
homebrew router setup that consists of an old PC running free software
called pfSense [ http://pfsense.com/ ]. I installed the optional DNS
forwarder/proxy package dnsmasq, and manually configured options for it
in /usr/local/etc/dnsmasq.conf . In that file I put one line:
local=/doubleclick.net/
That has the effect of catching all attempts to lookup anything in the
doubleclick.net domain (ie all subdomains like ads.doubleclick.net) and
returning NXDOMAIN to the inquirer.
If you have one of the many consumer WiFi routers like a Linksys/Cisco
WRT54G there may be menus for adding in custom hostname entries. Or if
you're brave you can replace the firmware in it with Tomato ...
http://lifehacker.com/344765/turn-your-60-router-into-a-user+friendly-super+router-with-tomato
Then follow these instructions ...
http://lifehacker.com/5060053/set-up-universal-ad-blocking-through-your-router
This probably more intricate than you wanted ... :-)
-bmw
On 11-06-28 9:06 PM, Bob Sullivan wrote:
Bruce,
Oh you gotta give us more details on that!
Regards, Bob S.
On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 7:07 PM, Bruce Walker<[email protected]> wrote:
On 11-06-27 1:09 PM, Tim Bray wrote:
I just clicked on a PESO hosted on photo.net. It popped up an
interstitial ad that I had to view or dismiss before I could see the
picture. [...]
I'm no fan of photo.net, but I've never seen these popups and I see very few
of the banner ads, so I've been a bit puzzled about all the fuss.
So while looking at Dave Brooks' latest shots I investigated to see what was
happening -- of course! Years ago I configured my DSL router (pfSense) to
return "host not found" replies to all domain-name lookups for
doubleclick.net, which happens to cover the majority of ads at photo.net.
So no popups, and empty whitespace where the banner ads usually go for all
the computers in the house. DNS proxies are a wonderful thing. ;-)
-bmw
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