how to make the internet not suck (as much)

[RawIsDan]

Saw this on 400 studios forum. It's a file (hosts) you put in your: \windows\system32\drivers\etc\ directory to help with ads and banners.

Anybody with programming knowledge know if this will work ?


http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

[3ric]

I don't see why not. The setting in the "hosts" file will override the information in the DNS name servers, meaning if the browser tries to load a banner ad the IP number is changed to "localhost" instead of going out on the Internet. Nice link, thanks.

[sterlingice]

I will make a warning about the hosts, file, tho. Make sure you know what you are doing with it. There is a way to have it autolog certain sites that harass you with and I forgot how to turn that on and off. However, I just recently figured out that this file was the cause of a lot of problems I had been having online. Any doubleclick ad will cause an error box to come up and this is pretty much as annoying as they ad.

However, the real problem is with redirects. Whenever certain pages uses a redirect address, this can give your computer all sorts of fits and it won't connect to the page: the typical IE "page not found" page or netscape will give you an error box and will just refuse to go there.

Here's a typical example:
1. I go to yahoo, wanting to look up something on the Cubs so I type in "Chicago Cubs" and I'm brought to the first page of results.
2. However, when I want to go to the 2nd page of results, I get an error page.
http://rd.yahoo.com/search/navbar/nexts/*http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=chicago+cubs&b=21&hc=2&hs=1&xargs=02u3hs9yoaKCstSjWzAFC1QsyyctTTIMFMAACtRb8F
3. Even weirder is that if I take off the rd.yahoo.com up to the *, it works perfectly and takes me to the 2nd page of results
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=chicago+cubs&b=21&hc=2&hs=1&xargs=02u3hs9yoaKCstSjWzAFC1QsyyctTTIMFMAACtRb8F
4. But if I want to go to the third page of results, the rd causes me fits again and I have to remove those links
5. Go insane after a few days of not being able to just click on link and shoot self

It can be a hassle if you don't know what you are doing. Presumably, you can just eliminate the yahoo line but I haven't had time to play with it so I just renamed "hosts" to "hosts.old" and haven't had any problems since.

I also had significant problems viewing ESPN.com because of the M$N garbage around it being blocked. Now I can see it perfectly even with Netscape 7, which was a problem before (aww.. no motion, not that I really see that as anything more than a waste of bandwidth.

So, while it's a cool and useful toy, just be aware of the pitfalls.

SI