Avoiding the advertisement in MSN Live messenger, and many other places (browser for instance).

I don’t know how you feel about having tons and tons of advertisements showing at the bottom of your Windows Live Messenger client (WLM), but it annoys me. But don’t worrie help is on the way! I will give you a WLM specifik fix and a description to avoid many adds in your browser and other places.

I had an error showing up today during init of WLM, and so I let the Microsoft Visual Studio debugger start up. Inside that I could locate the address – host name – of the host which deliveres the adds.

I was now ready to follow the advice from a collegue of mine given in another context. The advice was to add an entry to the hosts file on your computer which would bind the add server hostname to 127.0.0.1. By doing that you effectively makes it impossibel for the add handling software to show any adds!

So what you need to add to do is:

• Open the “C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts” file in an editor
• Add this line: 127.0.0.1 track.adform.net

The effect is that any request to “track.adform.net” will be pointing to your own computer – effectively disabling the adds!

The next step – disabling any adds inside webpages (or anywhere else) from a list of add servers.

I have at this time not gone deeper into this step, but a simpel google on “hostnames for add servers” gave me this link: Ad blocking with ad server hostnames and IP addresses. Just choose the “hosts – in host file format”. Here is a direct link to a test I made. Actually the host mentioned at the start of this post is inside the list

Happy add blocking!

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