[ale] Yahoo Groups: perils?

[Steve Brown]

2008/2/27 Charles Shapiro <hooterpincher at gmail.com>:

> As a member of the Vast Corporate Fat Conspiracy who spends his days
> figuring out how to abuse users to the maximal extent, I can tell  you one
> concrete step you can take to keep the noise to a minimum.  On my home
> machines, I have a modified /etc/hosts file which points most advertising
> sites to /dev/null. You can find a copy just by goin' a googlin' on the
> Mighty Internet  for "hosts files advertising block". Here's (
> http://everythingisnt.com/hosts ) one example.  Naturally I don't use such
> a thing at work, where I'm _paid_ to deal with advertisements.  And of
> course this won't really help if you choose to actually visit yahoo,
> aol.com, or some other evil site.


I implemented something similar on my WRT54G with the Tomato firmware using
dnsmasq[1]. The problem with this I found was that you either get a page not
found error instead of the advert or you can forward the request to a blank
page. Either way, it's still distracting. I found a few firefox addons that
most of you are prob familiar with (adblock, flashblock, noscript). But a
few weeks ago I found a real gem called Remove it Permanently (RIP) [2]. It
allows you to right-click on any element of a webpage and make it so you
never see it again, even when you come back and revisit the site and with NO
ugly blank space remaining. *maniacal laugh*

-Steve Brown

1)http://www.linksysinfo.org/forums/showthread.php?t=53904&page=3
2)https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/521
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