Flame is a good place to diss banner ads. I hate 'em, not just for the immediate inconvenience and disruption, especially from those damn popup windows. But also on general principles for they way they've warped the Net beyond recognition of those who dreamed of better in the early days, and instead turned it into a strip mall.

An ad network called DoubleClick is not only responsible for the majority of the ads, it's also been implicated time and again in such sleazy practices as tracking people with cookies and selling personal information. So I was tickled to come across a simple way to block DoubleClick ads without having to install ad-blocking software. It works on all versions of Windows (Linux no doubt has the same file in /etc/ or something like that; I think Mac users are SOL, as usual).

Find this file, where [windows] is your Windows system directory:

[windows]system32\drivers\etc\hosts

(the file is named "hosts" with no extension).

Add the following line to the hosts file:

127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net

For the geeky or curious, this redirects any reference to the DoubleClick ad site in a URL to a test address that's nonfunctional. The hosts file acts like a little DNS service on your computer and maps Internet names to numeric IP addresses.

Yours in determination to drive a stake through the heart of banner ads,

--Robert