seriously, what is going on here?
http://home.comcast.net/~jz78817/stuff/ads.png
totally breaks the ability to use the back button.
That address looks like an ad broker. Presumably, one of The Dope’s approved ad sources.
I’ve noticed that effect too, mostly on my Android phone browers. For some reason, the rolling advertisement updates stack up in the history, which I presume it’s not really supposed to do.
Historically, periodic reports of this behavior typically haven’t gotten resolved, though, because it seems to occur in an extreme minority of Dopers with non-standard setups (like smartphones with advertising blocking, in my case).
Every time I notice a site serving ads to my machine, or read of one like in this thread, I just add a line to my hosts file like this:
127.0.0.1 xxxxx.yyyyy.com (or whatever the site is) (omitting the rest of the URL).
Then, you’ll never see or hear of that site on your machine again. (Depending on your system, this might only take effect after the next reboot. On my machine (Linux) it seems to take effect immediately.)
ETA: Unix, Linux, and Winders systems have this file. So do Macs, since that is a Linux or Unix system behind the scenes. I have no idea how this is set up on a phone or tablet device, nor how you could get into the relevant host file (although there probably is one).
Can you describe in *very *lay terms precisely how to “add a line” to the “hosts file”?
It sounds like you’re just the person to assist us computer illiterates. We don’t even know what or where that is.
Yeah. You might as well have said you reversed the polarity for all the good it does me.
Open up notepad. Note that on Windows 7 and later you will have to open it using run as administrator otherwise you won’t have the appropriate permissions to edit the hosts file.
Using notepad, open c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
In the hosts file, each line has an IP address followed by one or more host names. Any line with a # at the front of it is a comment.
If you want to block a web site called abc123.com add a line like this:
127.0.0.1 abc123.com
Save and close notepad.
This is how it works. When you give a computer an address like abc123.com (or boards.straightdope.com or any other name) the name is meaningless to a computer. It has to convert that into numbers that it can use. The first place it looks is in your local hosts file. Most folks don’t have anything there so it skips that and moves on and sends a request to your DNS server. However, in this case, because you have added an entry for it in your hosts file, it uses whatever IP address you’ve given it, which in this case is 127.0.0.1. This IP address is special. It means the “loopback” address and it always points to your own computer. Therefore, instead of sending a message out to the internet, your browser will send the request to your own computer. Since your computer isn’t set up as a web server with the URL specified, it returns “not found” and the advertisement (or whatever you are trying to block) fails.
Note that ethically speaking, if you are a guest here, using your hosts file to block ads is depriving the SDMB of income from advertisements which pays for your access here.
Actually, I use that trick to block advertising from most other sites. But without even doing that, I also run my browser with JavaScript disabled (as I’ve mentioned many times). That alone blocks a tremendous amount of advertising and other obnoxious shit, including pretty much all the ads here on SDMB. Does that seem unethical?
How does SDMB get paid for the advertising they run anyway? Is it some flat fee?
Or does SDMB get paid for every ad displayed? (This is the only case I can see where it would cost SDMB money.)
Or does SDMB get paid for every ad that any user actually clicks on? In that case, any user who blocks ads is a user who was probably never going to click on an ad anyway.
So am I stiffing SDMB or not?
BTW: The hosts file typically does come pre-installed with a few lines in it that you can use as examples of what a line should look like. You can edit it with notepad, or any plain-text editor that you are comfortable with. If you have any kind of Unix/Linux system, it’s /etc/hosts (I assume this would include any Apple system, since those are Unix behind the scenes).
There’s a pre-filled hosts file on-line somewhere that contains a list of thousands of known junk sites. If you simply get that and append it to your own hosts file, that should block a lot of crap. But I wonder if there’s a performance hit for having so many entries in your local hosts file.
Hang tight, I’ll find the link for it . . .
The huge pre-filled hosts file I mentioned above can be obtained from:
This link takes you to a page of explanation. Somewhere on the page (down towards the bottom I think) is a link to download it. You can get it as a zip file (about 147K) which unzips to a full file of about 600K, containing about 16000 lines of 127.0.0.1 site blocks.
Every hosts file need to contain at least this line:
127.0.0.1 localhost
The downloaded file contains that.
ETA: Reversing the polarity probably works too.
As do smartphones. In my very specific (Android smartphone) case, running an app called AdFree, which actually retrieves an updated hosts file from a server that’s collecting advertising host information.
All of that said, this doesn’t prevent the “back button” history of the browser from getting clogged with a raft of ineffective advertisement retrieval attempts. (Ineffective in the sense that the actual advertising content was short-circuited by redirecting the server address to 127.0.0.1–“localhost”, in the parlance) If nothing else, it may clog the history faster – it seems that if the framework fails retrieving one set of advertising content, it immediately tries to fetch another. Spamming my history buffer.
I don’t see the advertising content, but the stupid javascript framework is still trying to retrieve the ads, so pollution of the history stack continues unabated. At least on my smartphone.
ETA: apropos of the original comment about the presence of the “hosts” file on smartphones, Android uses a Linux kernel and operating system core, including a very Linux-style “hosts” file in the same place you’d find it in a Linux system.