There’s a patch I got one time, and now can’t find, that makes all “infinite-loop” animated gifs into non-animated.
The way it worked was to search for and change the browser’s recognition of the gif’s version number. Blinking gifs are version 2.0, I think, so if you can find the reference in the code and change it to, say, 3.0, none of the gif ads will test as blinkable.
Personally, I just switch off “Play animations” in IE. There’s nothing animated I particularly want to see on the internet anyway.
Hey Bob try using Internet Junkbusters. It is a proxy program in which you define what URLs and file types get downloaded and what doesn’t. you can use it to block doubleclick ads. It also rejects cookies except the ones you want. If you configure it right, it can also perform as a filter. It is probably the best program for the internet, other than your favorite browser.
Thanks. I’ll give both ideas a try.
Junkbuster is nice, but by default it doesn’t block any ads, blocks all cookies, and tells web servers that you’re on a Macintosh running Netscape 3. If you know how proxies work and are willing to go through the documentation to change all this then go for it. Or go the easy way and edit your c:\windows\hosts file to block out ad servers.
You can download my hosts file here and just put it in your c:\windows directory here:
http://www.21stcentury.com/~flan/HOSTS
When you save your hosts file, do not save it with any extension like .txt. The file needs to be named ‘hosts’
It blocks out most ads for me but its not as exhaustive as some junkbuster block files, maybe someone will write a little program to that’ll take a junkbuster block file and turn it into a hosts blocking file. If you’re on a dial-up you’ll really enjoy how fast pages load when you’re not waiting for ad graphics and animations to come up.
I got your file, and it looks great.
Will definately try it, but could you fill me in on what it’s a list of exactly?
I guess the names on the list are the major ad sites?
And somehow you’re mapping them to … What? A null site of some sort?
And where do the site names come from? The “Temporary Internet Files” directory, perhaps?
Sounds like it might be just what I need. I hate to give up all animated graphics just to lose the banners.
This is how it works: Windows offers a permanent way to store IP numerical addresses, so if you goto the same site often you can say, “Hey quit doing a DNS search for this.”
Each ad server is mapped to 127.0.0.1 (localhost) which always the computer you are on. So when an ad’s http address is presented in the HTML of a website, windows checks the localhost and gives an error because you don’t have that file on your system.
The list is a small collection of ad servers I copy and pasted from a couple different sources, you might want to remove rd.yahoo.com from there, it blocks some mapping features at maps.yahoo.com.
You can always find an ad’s source by right clicking on it and checking properties, if it looks like some generic ad server like ads.doubleclick.com just add
127.0.0.1 ads.doubleclick.com
to the bottom of the list.
It works and the localhost trick is really fast, some people say Junkbuster slows down broadband connections not to mention its a snap to install.