KDE Konqueror - AdBlock Howto

[Tommy Trussell]

I'm not the original poster but I'll jump in anyway...

On 5/22/05, Ed Cogburn <edcogburn at hotpop.com> wrote:
> lotusleaf wrote:
> > (http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=182074#post182074) for a
> > solution which uses the hosts file and works regardless of the web
> > browser you're using to eliminate ads.
>  
> Interesting!  Does this work for just parts of a site though?  Like, using
> the cnn.com example prior to your post in that thread,
> 'www.cnn.com/ads/adv*' instead of blocking the whole site 'www.cnn.com'?

Most ad-supported sites serve ads and other content from ANOTHER site,
such as doubleclick. Going to another company's servers serves as an
independent check on how many "eyeballs" (visitors) and
"click-throughs" (people who click the ad) occur. The paying
advertisers insist on this sort of validation because otherwise they
would have to trust the site owner's numbers.

When you look at the source of the page (or right-click on an item and
get information about it), notice that even in the few situations
where the ad comes from the same domain, it may come from a different
host or a different subdomain, which would have a different address.
So for example www.cnn.com and www.cnn.com/content/content/page.html
would resolve to a certain address, but ads.cnn.com (and anything
"below" that) could resolve to a different address.

It can get a lot more complicated than that, and in fact if most web
surfers start blocking doubleclick and other advertising companies,
they would come up with a different method of serving and counting
ads. This is, after all, the way pay for their expensive web sites.

> Also, what is the 'mvps hosts file' you refer to in your post on that other
> thread?

He was recommending that you go to the site
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm and download the zipped
hosts file, unzip it, and copy its contents into your system's hosts
file. Every month or two you could download and update the file on
your system to catch any new or changed servers.

This isn't the only such file available on the Internet, so you could
look around for a hosts file that someone else maintains that blocks
some particular type of server that you want to block. The mvps hosts
file, for example, says it also blocks "unwanted parasites," most of
which would have no effect on a linux system, so you might find a
hosts file that blocks links to some kind of site you find
particularly offensive.

Or of course you can generate your own hosts file! You can get the
links to the ads that bother you and add each URL to your hosts file
yourself, following the same syntax. If you accidentally block
something you do want to see, it's easy enough to remove it.

It's your system and you can control it!