From: Michael Fisher 
@Date: Sat, 08 Mar 2003 10:34:03 -0800
@Sender: semware-owner{at}sawasdi.apana.org.au



From  Terry Betteridge 
Date  Fri, 7 Mar 2003 22:01:20 -0000
>Just to say, thank you very much for this tip, which I have
>found very useful.

Glad to have been of service.

This method is far less sophisticated than using a proxy server,
but still can be quite effective. E.g. with entries in HOSTS like

127.0.0.1 ads.guardian.co.uk   ads.guardianunlimited.co.uk

you can read articles in the Guardian online, and find all
advert banners reduced to inoffensive gray rectangles.

However, the advertising companies know about this, and keep
changing their servernames to escape filtering, so you have to
play catch-up with them constantly.  Here are examples of a
particulary creative advertiser:

eur.news1.yimg.com  eur.yimg.com  us.a1.yimg.com  
us.i1.yimg.com

If you have a reasonably fast PC (Pentium >=200 MHz),
such name games can be very effectively countered with a small
and simple web proxy named "Junkbuster".

It uses regular expressions to match domain names, comes free with 
full C source code, and many pre-compiled block files are available on 
the net. More at the following web site:

http://www.junkbusters.com/

I used it myself for a while, but it slows down browsing with my old 
486 too much. That is how I found out about the neat Hosts file 
"loopback" trick.

Take care,
          Michael


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