Hal Pomeranz, Deer Run Associates Anybody who uses the Web these days has probably developed extremely good "mental filters" which allow them to ignore the blizzard of banner ads, pop-ups, and other chaff which seem to make up the majority of the content on many major Web sites. But one day all the flashing, moving, jumping, singing, whiz-bangy-ness of it all just got to me and I decided to do something to reduce the amount of this visual noise I had to deal with when surfing the Web. The bonus was that once I was able to eliminate 90% of the advertising from the sites I was visiting, my Web browsing sped up enormously.
Let me preface my solution by stating that it requires that you run your own local DNS servers, as I do on my home-office network. If you use DNS servers provided by your ISP, or some other IT organization within your company, you're probably out of luck. You do have the option of running a "caching-only" name server on your local machine (assuming it's a Unix box), but many IT organizations frown on users setting up "unauthorized" name servers. If you don't know how to set up a caching-only name server, there are a number of how-to type documents on the Web (try Google-ing for "caching only name server"), or the O'Reilly DNS and BIND book by Albitz and Liu can help.
