[ale] Kill banners

[hirsch at mathcs.emory.edu (Michael Hirsch)]

Darshan Kadam <pncrxrn at snt.bellsouth.com> writes:

> 	I came across the following OS/2 article which talks about an easy
> 	way of getting rid of the advertisements that keep on appearing on
> 	home pages.  The article in it's entirety is at:
> 
> 	http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n7/killbanners.htm

Hmm.  This trick should work equally well under linux.
 
> 	In there, they talk about setting a variable "USE_HOSTS_FIRST" to
> 	true.  Is there something similar in Linux and if yes where would I
> 	find it.  Apparently this variable tells the OS to look into the hosts
> 	file first and then the DNS server.

That would be /etc/host.conf.  Unless you have unusual needs, it
should read:
---CUT---
order hosts, bind
multi on
---CUT---

But if you really want to do this, you should ckeck out junkbuster
(http://www.junkbuster.com/).  Junkbuster is a proxy server for http
that filters out ads (or whatever).  You can configure it to ignore
urls based on regular expressions.  So it does everything the
article's suggustiong does, and more.  It definitely speeds up web
browsing over a phone line, and I like it so well that I use it at
work, too.

Junkbuster returns the "broken gif" image for each banned graphic.  I
find that annoying, so I use the alternate version (hooray for open
source!) that returns a 1x1 transparent gif.  

Another alternative is to use a squid cache (which also speeds things
up) and use the squid controller to do similar things to junkbuster.
I've never tried that, but in principle it can work similarly.



-- 
--Michael