LuxFX / They Think They’re Newsworthy

Well this is as bad of news as my last post was good. Apparently some internet sites will, starting tomorrow, be testing full-screen, full-motion advertisements. You can read more about this in this nytimes.com article (free registration required).

An Australian Slashdot reader pointed out that some people actually pay for their internet connection by the bandwidth they use. In his case, downloading a 5MB ad would cost him about $1.00! That’s the same as what a song costs on one of the new iTunes/etc. music sites. Let’s see, do I want to buy a new song I really like, or have an ad shoved down my throat.

As if what we currently had wasn’t annoying enough! The advocates of the new method claim that it will work perfectly on any computer. Ha! That’s rich. First, it uses Windows Media to run. That’s easy enough to fix. In Internet Explorer, to to Tools->Internet Options and click on the Advanced tab. Scroll down the multimedia section and uncheck “play videos in web pages.” I’m sure most browsers have a similar feature.

But here’s what I’m going to do. (for Windows users only, although I’m positive Linux systems would have something like this, a possible Macs) In your Windows directory (probably C:\Windows) go to this subdirectory: System32\Drivers\etc. In this directory there is a file named hosts. This is a magic file! Now, stick with me, and sorry if this is too technical….

Whenever you type in a domain name, like cnn.com your browser needs to look up what the IP address is for that domain. The IP address for cnn.com is 64.236.24.20. So you can actually go to http://64.236.24.20 and it’s the same site. In fact if you go to cnn.com, your browser will first look up the IP for cnn.com and goes to 64.236.24.20 anyway, by iteself, without bothering you about it.

Web browsers normally access special servers called Domain Name servers to look up the domain names and find the corresponding IP address. BUT first, the browser looks to see if your hosts file has it. So if you had this as a line in your hosts file:

64.236.24.20 cnn.com

Then your browser wouldn’t access the domain name server when you tried to go to cnn.com. It would see that the hosts file already contains the record. Now here’s the trick. Say you go to CNN.com one day and you get a full-page ad. You view the source of the webpage and see that CNN.com is pulling the ad from unicast.com. So now you just go into your hosts file and put this as a line:

0.0.0.0 unicast.com

Viola! The 0.0.0.0 is a null IP address. Your browser won’t even try to access anything from it. So now, when CNN.com tries to pull the ad from unicast.com, your hosts file tells your browser that unicast.com isn’t available. And no ad!

Note: subdomains have to be added as well, so if an ad comes from adserver.unicast.com you have to add adserver.unicast.com to your hosts file as well.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 2004 at 9:52 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.