Hey guys, I post at another message board that has decided to put links to ads for a specific word. For example in this post message board would be changed into a link that would go to a message board service or something. I want to block the website that loads these links.
I am running Windows XP and use Firefox and ZoneAlarm for my browser and firewall. Is there anyway to easily block this website?
You can’t block the web site that is putting the link in the text because that’s the same web site that is giving you the text in the first place.
If all of the links go to the same web site, you can easily block that specific site by putting an entry for that web site in your hosts file and pointing it to 127.0.0.1. This address is called the loopback address, and will make any requests for that web site go to your own machine instead of going out on the internet.
No its a different site that is loading the links, I can see it in my Firefox toolbar.
That sounds promising. Could you dumb it down by a factor of 2 or so please?
Sygate Personal Firewall allows you to block sites by IP address. It’s free for personal use, I believe.
Here are the sites I’ve found so far, add these to the end of your hosts file located in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc or c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc
The best way to find the file is actually do do a search for “hosts”
127.0.0.1 tribal.us.intellitxt.com
127.0.0.1 toms.us.intellitxt.com
127.0.0.1 uk.intellitxt.com
127.0.0.1 firingsquad.us.intellitxt.com
127.0.0.1 itxt2.us.intellitxt.com
There may actually be a way to just filter out the intellitxt.com domain wholesale, but I’m not 100% sure about that. I guess you could just add
127.0.0.1 intellitxt.com
to the end, it can’t hurt.
I actually have a list of several hundred sites you can add to your hosts file, if somebody wants I can post them all.
Awesome guys, that fix works perfectly.
I would be interested in that list (you nailed the site I was talking about).
Here is a free hosts list of thousands of sites you might want to block (porn and ads):
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm
A caveat – on rare occasions you might find legitimate shopping sites that link to some of these and you can’t see their data. Just disable the hosts file temporarily if this happens.
What? I thought thats what the internet is for!
Another neat thing about the “hosts” file trick - it works cross platform! All major desktop platforms (Win9X/Me/NT/XP, Mac OS 9-X, and Linux) have a hosts file or equivalent. Many people use this for general ad-blocking.
The system will consult the hosts file before asking DNS for the name when resolving domain names.
The (big) downside is that this will slow down all domain-to-IP queries, by an amount proportional to the size of the hosts file. I eventually reduced my several-hundred-line hosts file to about a half a dozen because of the irritating speed hit.
But searching inside your computer is probably faster than a query and search over a network. And if the domain is found in the HOSTS file, it avoids loading additional, external data.
You might want to check those speed tests again. In my computer, which must be the world’s oldest and slowest, using a local hosts file with 4300 entries is a godsend. Now 4.3 million entries, that might be a different story…
To answer the OP directly, your firewall should have a way of specifying which IP or partial IP to block.
I use Blackice Defender, and it has a Blocked Addresses list that can be configured. Dunno how ZoneAlarm does it.