[PLUG] Blocking Banner Ads Cheaply

AthlonRob AthlonRob at axpr.net
Fri Dec 5 16:42:02 UTC 2003


On Fri, 2003-12-05 at 13:18, Jason Van Cleve wrote:
> So I'm on dial-up and want to block banner ads, but I don't want to do
> anything too fancy, like using squid.  I know there is a solution using
> bind, which I have on my system but am not actually running.  But it
> appears I can also do it just by adding entries in /etc/hosts.

I didn't realize squid was all that fancy.  :-)

To block ads and porn on my local network, I have squid set up with
squidGuard and transparent proxying via iptables.

You could modify a blacklist and use /etc/hosts and point to localhost,
then have an http server running on localhost serving up any request a
pretty blocked.jpg or whatnot.

http://axpr.net/blocked.jpg is what I use, if I remembered the URL
correctly.

Squid/SquidGuard was really not all that difficult to set up, IMHO.

> Which is preferable?  It would be nice to redirect ad' domains to my
> local httpd and serve myself a gif image instead of the broken image
> icon.

I should turn my red-on-white jpg into a red-on-transparent gif, now
that I think about it.....

I don't know how you'd configure a local HTTP server to answer every
request with a certain graphic, though.

> And by the way, can anyone post a list of undesirable domains, as a
> starting point?

My list is currently about 18MB in size.  I'd rather not post it to the
list (hell, Postfix would reject it locally, before it got there).  I
have a few blacklists added together which are fairly static, and then
also update nightly the http://squidguard.mesd.k12.or.us/blacklists.tgz
list.

Rob





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