remobann.htm: Fravia's pages of reverse engineering, remobann.htm

R E M O V E	fravia's anti advertisement lab Fravia's Nofrill Web design ('98 ~ '99)		Updated July 1999	How to remove ugly advertisement banners There are 600 million sites out there, doubling every four months... and many of them carry absolutely useless banners and ads. Of course you are using a good browser, like Opera, that allows you to shut off all images whenever you want, in order to access quickly the contents you are searching. But at times you are yourself forced to use a "free" space provider, that will impose on your pages its ugly banners. This section of my site is dedicated to the methods that we can use to get rid of them. As you'll see there are many possible options, and almost all of them involve some html or javascript tricks.

In this section you'll find contributions and essays by the following reversers:
[+Greythorne] ~ [rocksteady] ~ [Fluril] ~ [Eternal Bliss] ~ [Gordon]
[Jeff's special "removing banners" page] (an ongoing project)
[TeRR0RNauT's more banner removing]
[Gordon's mighty HOSTS trick and file]
[ +tsehp's Tool for removing banners and pop ups]
[ [blue]'s Perl@usa.net ~ How to reverse a "free" service]

The bastard advertisers argue that Netizens enter into an implicit agreement with Web companies to accept their ads in exchange for free information, similar to television viewers forced to slurp commercials in exchange for free programming. But there are no explicit agreements, and many users want to rid their surfing experiences of large banner ads that can take minutes to load, so, let's proceed...

First of all IMO may have to find the EARLY copies of some interesting software solutions, as you'll see below, most of them have been subsequently censured or volontarly crippled :-(

James Howard, created Internet Fast Forward, one of the first programs designed to filter out banner ads.

The software he produced was discontinued due to liability problems after he sold his company, PrivNet, to Pretty Good Privacy in November 1996. Howard said Internet companies had threatened to sue, accusing his company of violating their copyrights and modifying their pages. Howard had countered that users were the ones who controlled the content, not the software producers.

PGP decided the risk of lawsuits was too great and stopped production of the ad filtering program.

Solid Oak, the Internet filtering company that produces the Web filtering software Cybersitter, introduced tools to screen out banner ads.

Brian Milburn, president of Solid Oak, said he introduced the filtering technology in response to requests from some of Cybersitter's 1.2 million customers, many of whom use older computers with slow Internet connections that make viewing banner ads a time-intensive task.

One day later the company rescinded the tool that screens out ads in free email services, because users sign contracts saying they will accept ads in exchange for free email, Milburn said.

And now let's begin with some interesting approaches... :-)

+Greythorne wrote (long ago) a bautiful javascript banner killer, that you'll find here. Here is what Wizard +Greythorne writes about it: "Note: this proggy uses popup windows to capture popup windows (kind of like fighting fire with fire) if your browser doesnt display popup windows, then why are you trying to run this? you are ALREADY immune to the silly banner popups!

This one is pre-programmed to kill the prohosting.com banners, the tripod.com banners, and the geocities.com banners."

you sure know about the listen.to; come.to; fly.to; etc. redirection service.

if you'd like to use it, you have to include a little javascript-code on your page. 'they' say a bot will have a look on your page every 2 weeks to check if the script is installed. if not the redirector stops.

workaround::

this script is between two html-comment tags like the following:

code...


on this way the banner can be seen and the bot is satisfied cause the code is there.

but

if you change only one little thing, if you let the first comment open:


the code is cloaked, can't be seen, and the bot's satisfied.
(worked for some months till today)

happy days

rocksteady


On many free host, you have a banner added automaticaly on index.html.

If your user has JavaScript enabled, here his a trick, insert 





<script language="Javascript">



<!--



location.href="main.html"



//-->



</script>





between header and body.

It will be read before everything and the user even doesn't see (s)he has changed of page. 



Fluril


Hi, I somehow managed to remove the popups for virtual avenue by adding this codes before the

<html> of every page.



//to avoid Javascript error notice

<script>

function NoError() {

return(true);

} 

onerror=NoError; 

</script>



//to prevent the pop-up

<script> 

va_rvjr137y=window.open; 

function OpenNullWin() {

this.window;

} 

function FakeOpen(url,nam,atr) {

return(new OpenNullWin());

} 

window.open=FakeOpen;

</script>





Looking at the codes added by the server, va_rvjr137y seems to be the "window handle". By modifying the codes produced by Proxomitron, I was able to add this codes in to counter the popups. Just tested without the codes, the popup is seen. When I add in the codes, the pop-up disappeared.





For Xoom website, they will automatically add in an extra frame. To counter that, add in _XOOM into your links eg

http://members.xoom.com/Ryanosis/files.html

into

http://members.xoom.com/_XOOM/Ryanosis/files.html



But in this case, you will need a website director.



Another way is to add the codes

<script language="JavaScript">



<!--

if (top.location.href != location.href)

top.location.href = location.href;

// -->



</script>



Regards





Eternal Bliss

On services that stick their banner code at the very end of your page, the simplest way to eliminate the popups is to stick a "NOEMBED" tag after your closing "/HTML". This works fine for me in Opera 3.60 and all versions of Netscape and MSIE tested. I figure why use javascript against itself when you can use html against javascript and be more compatible (or is it incompatible?) with more banners.

Gordon

Jeff's special page for removing banners
June 1999
It's an 'ongoing' project that you will find on this special page

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