Screening Ads

[bkelsay at comcast.net]

I think your best bet is setting up the webserver on your intranet to host a
page that says  "AD HERE" and that can go in the webpages.  Like you said,
it will keep the error messages down and the user will know they are not
really missing anything.   I've heard of companies letting external ads be
replaced by ads for the internal company, if that makes sense.  It was a way
to let everyone see the ads the company was putting out and test the ad
server.
Brian

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan Hutchins" <hutchins at opus1.com>
To: <kclug at kclug.org>
Sent: Monday, June 17, 2002 9:34 AM
Subject: Screening Ads

> For various reasons, I don't run a proxy server on my home network.  I
> prefer to have each client connect directly to the target host for web
> pages.
>
> I've tried blocking banners and pop-up ads by listing them in the DNS I
run
> on my net, and pointing it to loopback (there's no web server on that
> machine).  However, the list of domains to block keeps growing faster than
I
> maintain the list.  While Microsoft Internet Explorer handles the "Server
> not found" errors reasonably, most of the Linux compatible browsers and
> Netscape in particular on our Mac pop up error dialog boxes that have to
be
> cleared to get back to the web page we were trying to view.  This is
almost
> as annoying as ads to me, and more so to my housemates.
>
> It seems to me that the firewall is the ideal place to block this unwanted
> traffic, that blocking it at the clients really doesn't save the network
> anything, but without running a proxy server I have run out of ideas to
stop
> pop-ups, except for installing client based commercial packages.
>
> I have considered setting up a web server and pointing the evil domains at
> it.  Ideally, it would return some sort of "nevermind" response that
neither
> opens a pop-up window nor triggers an error dialog.
>
> Does anybody else have ideas about this?  How are you blocking ads, if you
> are?
>
> (Yes, I know we're discussing theft of services here, what good is a LUG
if
> we're not at least a little bit subversive.)