Blocking the advertising popups/popins/popouts
As a person that just likes to get stuff done, I'm increasingly getting irritated by the amount of popin/popout advertising that generally the popup blockers don't catch. Recently I've been getting frustrated with a couple of somewhat prominent news websites that continue to use this kind of advertising that immediately starts playing some advert without me asking and its literally full audio/video style of thing. This means if I want to go to that site I've immediately got to be ready for it, turn down my PC audio and be ready to minimise it/dock it to the side of the screen. Well I've had enough of it and I've got several handy approaches to stop it.
1. I'm told there's a handy tool called IE7Pro that will do this for you. I haven't tried it and cant vouch for whether its safe and secure and good etc but someone recommended it to me
2. I like to block them at my router. Simply create an outgoing filter for the destination address of the IP of the site or the DNS name with destination port of 80 (obviously!). This covers all the PC’s in your house. Note that you'll need to do a network trace first with something like Wireshark before you will find out where its originating from.
3. Block it from your local PC using the outgoing firewall rule functions in Vista (unfortunately though you have to specify the IP as it doesn’t accept a DNS name) (works at work too)
4. In a corporate environment block it at your proxy server.
Of course there is a 5th alternative.... Simply avoid sites that do this kind of advertising if it really becomes too much...:)
Comments
Anonymous
June 19, 2008
I'll have to check out IE7Pro, because I really like IE7 and IE8 looks promising but really the best answer I've found to ads in general is to use FireFox + the AdBlockPlus & NoScript extensions, and for the terminally lazy, the FilterSetUpdater extension for Adblock so you don't have to block ads yourself. :) Interestingly this combination apparently works so well for blocking ads that there was something of a campaign last year to block Firefox from certain websites due to the view that Firefox users were 'stealing' from websites by not seeing/clicking ads. Pretty stale story now and the source websites seems to have gone, but here's the old slashdot link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?no_d2=1&sid=07/08/17/1359206Anonymous
June 19, 2008
Perhaps a viable alternative -- using a host file modification. Site http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm provides, in my own experience, quite a comprehensive list of ad/malicious/malware sites in its list. Essentially, it has staggering amounts of ad/spyware-related domain names in a soon-to-be host file replacement and points them to the loopback address 127.0.0.1, effectively blocking both inbound (preventative) and out going (controlling an infected computer) data to those sites.