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Useful Free Tool: Use OpenDNS to Block Ads

Posted in Geeky, Privacy by Dan at 11:29 am

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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.

6 Comments, Comment or Trackback

  1. TheOtherFoot

    While you’re at it, don’t forget to add the following to your Firefox Adblock list:
    http://uneasysilence.com/sponsors/*
    http://uneasysilence.com/wp-content/plugins/adicons/*

    Feb 11th, 2008

  2. Steve

    You can also use an ad-blocking HOSTS file to block ads. There are some really good ones out there you can download, and once you’ve installed them you don’t have any extra work to do!

    This one pretty much eliminated all ads for me, and it installs itself!
    http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html

    Feb 11th, 2008

  3. Kill-Puppies.blogspot.com

    There isn’t sufficient capacity in the form to use any popular HOSTs blockfile with OpenDNS.

    If you were really geek you would run your own DNS server locally *and* import a popular HOSTs blockfile

    If you were lazier or your compy were underpowered you’d run Ad Muncher or proxomitron

    … or Squid

    Feb 12th, 2008

  4. Marc

    I just plugged these in, and amazingly enough, the blocked sections display the OpenDNS search page which (duh) contains ads. The only benefit I see to this is that the OpenDNS site will hopefully respond faster than the sometimes slow ad-serving pages. Other than that, it looks like swapping one set of ads for another.

    Feb 13th, 2008

  5. Kavi

    That txt file with all the ad domains is off the server. Would anyone please mind re-upping it?

    Feb 25th, 2008

  6. rtaggart

    I have added a new category to OpenDNS called ADVERTISEMENTS. Please verify the domains in domain tagging so we can get this category approved and make it easier for others to block unwanted ads.

    Mar 3rd, 2008

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