Sunday, July 24, 2011

Useful Free Tool: Use OpenDNS to Block Ads

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Tired of online ads like I am? I have Firefox’s Adblock Plus and Safari AdBlock installed on my computer, but it becomes rather annoying to keep installing these applications on my multiple machines as well as every time I format them. To make ad blocking simpler I opted to use OpenDNS to block ads on the DNS level.

To make this hack work you must configure your router to use OpenDNS’s servers (trust me you will want to do this anyway – their servers are FAST!) by following the OpenDNS tutorials. Secondly you must signup for a free OpenDNS account so you can setup network filters.

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Once that is done navigate to the Domain Blocking feature under the Filtering category. Once you click on that add the following domains into the filter:

ad.doubleclick.net
adlog.com.com
adservices.google.com
googleadservices.com
googlesyndication.com
pagead2.googlesyndication.com
servedby.advertising.com
view.atdmt.com
mm.chitika.net
ctxt.tribalfusion.com
intellitxt.com

These few domains are responsible for a vast majority of the ads on the internet. For a more comprehensive list you may want to check out all the domains listed on this directory.

No, OpenDNS is not as good as dedicated AdBlocking applications but for a simple network wide fix this seems to do the trick and I hope in the future OpenDNS offers a true Adblock feature.

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