There are all kinds of methods for blocking banner ads. However, I feel guilty about blocking ads from the smaller sites that depend on the advertising income to stay afloat. I'm getting the benefit of the site, but the sponsors don't see any hits on their ads, so the site operator gets short-changed by my filter.

I've used Perl to rectify this. I have set up Apache on my local machine, and enabled mod_rewrite with a rule like this in my httpd.conf: 

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule     ^/.*$   /blank.cgi

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Now, in /etc/hosts, I have a list of servers who only serve ad content, similar to this: 
127.0.0.1 adfu.blockstackers.com
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 m.doubleclick.net

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Now, when a request for any URL at one of the above servers is made by my browser, it is diverted to my local http server, and my custom CGI script. The CGI script makes a connection to the ad server, figures out whether the content is supposed to be text or an image, and then generates a blank page or transparent gif for my browser to use in place of the ad. It closes the connection before actually downloading the ad.

The net result: I don't have to waste bandwidth on banner ads, and the site operator still has a "GET" request for the ad in their logs, so they still get paid (assuming they get paid for page views instead of click-throughs)

I am posting the code as a reply to this message.

In reply to Benevolent Ad Filter by httptech

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