If you do much surfing on the internet, you’ll find a variety of annoying ads. Over the years I’ve been able to selectively ignore much of the banner ads that litter cyberspace. Recently, Flash ads have become a bit more difficult to ignore.

And of all these Flash-based ads, there is but one company that takes the cake for the most odd, annoying, poorly designed, cause you to lose your lunch advertisements. Meet “lowermybills.com”

I have included a screen shot as it might be familiar to you.

Everything from dancing on the roof, to weird monsters eating houses, to an unsuspecting woman dancing in her room, these ads are horrendous.

After doing some research I have successfully prevented these ads from showing themselves on my computer. Special credit to Rogers Cadenhead’s Workbench website for these instructions

If you’re on a PC and you want to rid yourself of these ads and any other ads, check out the steps below…

1. First you have to find out where the ads are hosted. This is usually easy, but can be difficult. View the source code and look for anything serving up ads.
   MSNBC.com uses a server called Ads1.msn.com and for their static ads, speed.pointroll.com.
2. Next, navigate to a file called “hosts” in C:WindowsSystem32DriversEtc

3. Open the file called “hosts” using Notepad

4. Add the lines, using MSNBC.com as an example, to the file

   127.0.0.1 speed.pointroll.com
   127.0.0.1 Ads1.msn.com

5. Select “File>Save”
   

Your computer will not display content coming from these two servers.
You can do this for a variety of “Ad servers” that provide much of the ads on webpages you view.

I realize this is a pretty “technical” blog post but there are some times when you simply can’t take it anymore. Lowermybills.com no more…

• Past Writings