Be My Guest (Adbusters)

Member Name: tagheur

Product:	Adbusters
Date:	31/08/02 (87 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: No more Ads

Disadvantages: I miss 'em (sob)

An old acquaintance of mine used to reckon that there are two kinds of people in the world; natural hosts and natural guests. He would liken the whole world to a set of partygoers. Among them would be the "takers" or guests and the "servers" or hosts. Over the years it has served as a reasonable yardstick. Mind you, my old man used to figure it a different way. He asserted that there were actually three groups; those who make things happen, those who watch what happens and those who wonder what the fuck happened!

But I digress, for my little missive today I would like to talk about hosts and guests, more specifically the latter, and in particular those who arrive uninvited. I am talking about unsolicited Internet advertising. Over time my PC just seems to clog up with little java program stubs and all sorts of other uninvited parasitic little programs whose sole raison d'etre is to make my use of the Internet an increasingly frustrating and miserable experience.

Here's me happily fraternising with the mighty INTERNET; the single greatest achievement of the twentieth century, and some twat is attempting to sell me ookiegookies or some similar ambrosia. Well it's not bloody good enough. In the words of the great whatsisname, "Up with this, I will not put!" Er, but I don't want to pay any money to fix it either.

Time to get the books out in an attempt to restore this Englishman to his castle (stirring muzak, fades out). Well, it turns out that there are actually two kinds of hosts. There's the first kind, they tend to smile and bring you a drink. and then there's the second kind, they tend to smile and punch your lights out if you misbehave. The second kind are usually known as bouncers. What we need is a bouncer for those pesky Internet adverts. That's what we need.

It turns out that the installation of an Internet bouncer is childishly simple, however in my us

ual fashion, rather than just tell you what to do I will attempt to explain how it works as well. You can skip the next few Paragraphs if you just want to know how to fit it...

What do you know about IP addresses? Bet you've heard of them though haven't you? No? Oh dear.

Every 'node', or computer, on the Internet has to have a unique identifier associated with it before it can send and receive messages. This unique identifier is known as an IP Address and every computer on the Internet has one. An IP Address is made up of 4 bytes, or 4 binary numbers (if you don't know about bits and bytes you might want to check out an article entitled 'Hi ho Silver. Who killed the Pony Express?' in 'Software Tips and Advice' on DooYoo).

A typical IP Address looks like this;

213.162.100.1.

Each of the four numbers can have a value of between 0 and 255. If you think about it, this implies that the maximum number of computers that there can ever be on the Internet is 256 x 256 x 256 x 256, which comes to about 4.2 billion.
Now, while this is a lot, it clearly isn't enough. For example, there are over 7 billion people in the world so we couldn't all be simultaneously connected to the Internet because we would run out of addresses. Actually, it isn't quite as bad as it seems. It turns out that you only have to have a unique Internet IP address while you are actually connected. Most of the time, most computers aren't. So, we can share IP addresses among multiple computers.

Here's how it works - Supposing I keep a pool of addresses (assuming that I am your Internet Service Provider) then as long as I have enough addresses to support all of the computers that want to login at peak, I can 'lend' IP Addresses to computers while they are using the Internet and then lend them to someone else later. The jargon for this lending process is known as 'leasing
9;.

Even with leasing, one day we will eventually run out of internet IP addresses, just like we run out of phone numbers from time to time, and then they will have to figure out a new Internet addressing scheme. Actually, they already have, it's called IPV6 (Internet Protocol Version 6) and instead of using 4 numbers it uses 32! A medium sized Galaxy wouldn't run out of numbers with IPV6!

So what's your IP Address? Well if you go to this web page; www.whatismyipaddress.com, it will tell you. Now, if you log-on tomorrow and go and consult the page again, you may find that your IP address is different. This will be because your Internet Service Provider has 'leased' you a different IP address for this session. Now, clever bit coming!! Because your IP address can change, they came up with a "shorthand" way of referring to your own IP address without actually having to know it. It's called "localhost" and it always has a number of 127.0.0.1 (actually, 0.0.0.0 will also work, but the convention is 127.0.0.1).

Some of the more astute among you will already be puzzled. Here I am banging on about these funny numbers called IP addresses and yet, to get around the Internet we use names not numbers. Stuff like www.google.com and so on. So what's all that about then?

When they put the Internet together it originally worked purely on IP addresses. However it soon became apparent that humans are far better at remembering names than they are numbers. In 1984 a guy called Paul Mockapetris (don't blame me - I only write this stuff) came up with the idea of DNS (Domain Name Space), a system to translate meaningful names into IP Addresses. Don't believe me? Go onto the Internet and type the following into the URL - //194.162.232.129/

What did you get? Yup, Dooyoo. 194.162.232.129 is Dooyoo's IP address. Cool huh?
How does it work? Well there are a ser
ies o
f special computers on the Internet called 'DNS Servers'. A DNS server translates URL names to IP addresses. When you first log on to the Internet, although you don't see it happen, your computer sends out a request to all nearby servers asking if any of them is a DNS server. When one replies that it is then that is the server that your computer will use to determine IP addresses.

Clever bit coming up!! Get ready - Here it comes!

It takes time to go across the Internet to do a DNS lookup so there is a shortcut you can use if you go to the same place a lot. You can elect to do the DNS translation yourself. Microsoft provides a special file called HOSTS that allows you accomplish this. All HOSTS consists of is a series of entries containing an IP address and a URL. For example if you wanted to include Dooyoo in your list you would simply add an entry to your HOSTS file like this;-

194.162.232.129 www.dooyoo.co.uk

That's it! All done. References to Dooyoo will now run faster. Why? Because your computer will not have to go across the Internet to a DNS server to get Dooyoo's IP address, it will get it directly from the HOSTS file. The rule is that your computer always looks in the HOSTS file first and if it finds what it is looking for it doesn't go to the DNS server.

Now what if I told a lie in my hosts file? What if I put a different IP address against the Dooyoo entry? MY COMPUTER WOULD GO TO THE WRONG PAGE!!

Did you get that?

What if I put my OWN IP address alongside the Dooyoo entry?

Every time I tried to go to Dooyoo I would just come back to myself! Another way to think of it is that it appears to my computer a bit like a telephone 'engaged' tone. What this means is that I can BLOCK sites that I don't want to visit by putting an entry into my HOSTS file that points back to me. Here's how it would look
if I wanted to
block acc
ess to Dooyoo: -

127.0.0.1 www.dooyoo.co.uk

Remember 127.0.0.1 is a special IP address, it is the LOCALHOST - it is me!

I can block any site I like with this. It's great for stopping the kids from getting on to sites that they shouldn't. However, can you see where we're going with this yet? How do the pop-up advertisements arrive at your screen? Program applets on your computer send out URL requests on to the Internet to get them.. Now, if you know what the URLs are then you can fool the applet in the same way as we just fooled Dooyoo above. All you need is a list of URL's that you never want to see on your computer and you simply point every single one of them at 127.0.0.1 in your HOSTS file. This means that every time one of these program applets attempts to fetch an advert page to your screen it will just loop back on itself and nothing will happen. Clever huh? The ultimate bouncer!

"But it would take forever to gather all of the URL's for the sites that I don't want to see!" You're right, but there are a few kind souls out there in Web land who have already done the hard work for you. You can pick up a list that has already been built. You just have to save it into your WINDOWS directory as HOSTS (no extension) and the job is done. If you go to "Gorilla" at www.accs-net.com/hosts/ you can download a HOSTS file with most of the nuisance URL's already in it.

What will happen when you fit it and fire up the web? Well, you will notice that it seems to run a lot faster. This is because it does not have to trundle up and down to the DNS server for the advert page addresses and it doesn't have to wait for the actual pages themselves to download. You will also notice quite a few empty areas on your web pages. Usually these blank areas will contain a message along the lines of, "Action Cancelled". These are spaces where advert
s would have appeared without your new HOSTS file stopping them.

You can turn the facility on and off to your heart's content simply by renaming the HOSTS file to something else (e.g. HOSTSOFF) and restarting your computer. You can also add any new URL's which you come across which are bugging you. Easy peasy lemon squeezy! .

And that's that. Got rid of the baddies and saved England, all in time for tea! Got any dragons you want me to slay? Maidens to rescue? No? Ah well, never mind...

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